MUSLIMS: THEY LIVE IN BOULDER, CO!

There isn't much to research.......





Oldcatman
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****CU-Boulder Team To Research Rocky Mtn. Muslims.
(Professor Researches Muslim Life In Corner Region.)

DENVER -- Assistant journalism professor Nabil Echchaibi knew he was a pioneering researcher, but he said he didn't realize just how virgin the territory was until he and a team of University of Colorado at Boulder students began exploring Rocky Mountain Muslim communities.

Echchaibi, associate director of CU-Boulder's Center for Media, Religion and Culture -- which began the project more than a year ago -- aspires to write a cultural history for the region's Muslims.

"We want the local story," Echchaibi said. "Our research is part of that new consciousness that Islam is also an American story."

Echchaibi's team of four will be working for several years to come. But their documentary, "Muslims in the Rockies," based on interviews with communities in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho and Arizona, likely will be finished this spring, he said.

"When we began, we thought there must be some kind of historical overview of Muslims in the region, but we were surprised and frustrated that there was almost nothing," Echchaibi said. "We found only the occasional thesis or a history of a mosque."

What they uncovered with a great deal of legwork was a surprising, colorful array of Muslim life -- from Somali meat-industry workers in Greeley to Denver taxi drivers, from Palestinian refugees working and marrying among the Navajos in Gallup, N.M., to a community re-creating elements of seventh-century Mecca at Dar al Islam in Abiquiu, N.M.

"We'd go to these places and ask people, 'Show us your photo album,'" Echchaibi said.

One big question mark is the total size of the region's Muslim population.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released a report Thursday estimating the U.S. Muslim population at 2.6 million. Researchers there project the number of American Muslims will increase to 6.2 million by 2030, mostly because of immigration and relatively high birth rates.

Other national estimates differ widely from these figures. The Council on American-Islamic Relations estimates the number of American Muslims at 3 million to 7 million. CAIR said the numbers most often cited by its sources are 6 million and 7 million.

Echchaibi said national polling data historically has relied heavily on sampling from the Northeast, the West Coast and Illinois, where U.S. Muslim populations are heavily concentrated. Pew staff acknowledged to him, he said, that little surveying has been done in the Intermountain West.

It is more of a guessing game for this region, based on generalizations, trends and assumptions, Echchaibi said.

"We don't really have any detailed information about the mountain states," he said.

Commonly used estimates of Muslims in metro Denver, for example, range from 15,000 to 30,000.

Based on 2008 Pew data, Colorado Muslims account for less than 0.5 percent of the state's population, or fewer than 25,000.

Citing mosque attendance isn't the answer, either, Echchaibi said, because it is probable that a third of American Muslims never go to a mosque.

A better understanding of regional demographics, trends and culture is the hoped-for result of CU's groundbreaking research, a joint project of the university's centers for Media, Religion and Culture and for Asian Studies.

The New York City-based Social Science Research Council is funding the project.

Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press.