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In the United States, Islam is becoming today a 'public religion'. The first Muslim organizations established in North America have been influenced by the ideologies of political Islam, but have in the 1980s opened up to the idea of their political participation in the American system. In the 1990s, the Federal State initiated a symbolic recognition of American Islam at a time when foreign Islamic groups started to become the 'enemy'. Torn between these two representations of Islam, American Muslims have had to reinvent their discourse in order to fit within American definitions of pluralism. Malika Zeghal is Researcher in Political Science and teaches at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and at the Chicago University.