The Muslim mainstream
Islam is growing fast in America, and its members defy stereotypes
BY JONAH BLANK
In the polished wooden pews of a white-steepled New England church, the weekend congregants sit with heads reverently bowed. The town of Chelmsford, Mass., is Yankee to the core, and so are most of its inhabitants. Like the sober, strait-laced Pilgrims 300 years before them, the worshipers here shun liquor, dress modestly, and feel uplifted when they call out, "God is great!" Unlike their Puritan predecessors, however, those gathered here address their Maker in Arabic: "Allah-u Akhbar!" they chant, in a call offered five times each day by Muslims from Maine to Alaska.
Five to 6 million strong, Muslims in America already outnumber Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Mormons, and they are more numerous than Quakers, Unitarians, Seventh-day Adventists, Mennonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Scientists, combined. Many demographers say Islam has overtaken Judaism as the country's second-most commonly practiced religion; others say it is in the passing lane.
Yet while Muslims make up one of the fastest-growing religious groups, largely because of immigration, they are among those least understood by their neighbors. Over half the respondents to a recent Roper poll described Islam as inherently anti-American, anti-Western, or supportive of terrorism--though only 5 percent of those surveyed said they'd had much contact with Muslims personally. And according to a draft report scheduled to be released this week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, although the incidence of violence and harassment directed at Muslims declined 58 percent last year, discrimination reports increased 60 percent.
In part, such statistics reflect attitudes shaped by Muslims who live across the globe rather than those who live across the street. Militant fundamentalists such as the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran (and a tiny minority of American Muslims) come from an extreme wing, rather than the more moderate center of the world's 1 billion Muslims. But TV cameras and international showdowns raise the militants' public profile. They overshadow the mass of American Muslims, who tend to vote Democratic on issues like immigration and affirmative action, veer Republican on "traditional family values," including such topics as abortion and sex education, and live comfortably within the mainstream of society.
The statistics also suggest that the United States must wrestle with a question that has challenged France, Germany, and other European nations as their Muslim populations have grown: Is America a nation based on Judeo-Christian values or on something more universal? Do we value cultural diversity, or merely tolerate it? As the country begins thinking about how the expanding Muslim population might change the nation's sense of itself, the challenge will be to see Islam as it really is, rather than as people wish or fear.
One of the most widespread misconceptions about Muslims here or abroad is that they are primarily Middle Eastern. Fewer than 1 out of 8 American Muslims (12.4 percent) are of Arab descent; other Middle Eastern groups like Iranians and Turks account for only a few additional percentage points each. On a global basis, there are about 100 million more Muslims on the Indian subcontinent alone than in all Arab countries combined. The two largest Muslim groups in the United States are native-born African-Americans (42 percent) and immigrants from South Asia (24 percent).
America's polyglot neighborhoods are home to Muslims of every conceivable background: Malays from Southeast Asia and Bosnians from southeast Europe, Songhai from the Sahara desert and Uighars from the Taklimakan desert. America is seldom so truly a melting pot as in her mosques. There is even a mosque on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico: Islam has a small but long-standing presence among Native American communities from the Plains to the pueblos.
Islam, which stresses egalitarianism, has a special appeal for the marginalized, but the faith draws many converts from the white middle class: More than 80,000 of America's Muslims are of West European background. When Mariam Agah (nee Mary Froelich) started questioning the faith of her birth, she was not only white and middle class--she was a Roman Catholic nun. At the age of 25, after seven years as Sister Frederick, she gave up her habit: "I was not convinced that Jesus was divine," she says, "and that's when I realized that I needed to leave."
That was 28 years ago. Agah got a job at an elementary school, and for a long time she taught and she thought. She read her way through many bookshelves of philosophy, and two works stood out: the Koran and the Autobiography of Malcolm X. "I continued my spiritual journey," she says, "and it led me to Islam."
Jim Bates is another unlikely convert. In 1990, after four terms as a Democratic congressman from San Diego, he lost an election--and also lost his marriage, his home, and his sense of direction. Born and baptized a Catholic, raised Protestant in a series of orphanages and foster homes, then a loose follower of Unitarianism for most of his adult life, at age 50 Bates found himself searching, he says, for a truth that would never slip away. He found it through the faith of Pakistani-American friends he'd made during his tenure in Congress. Now Bates spends much of his time consulting, and the rest farming hay and raising quarter horses on a ranch in Idaho.
Minister Louis Farrakhan, with his inflammatory racial comments, may be the Muslim leader most familiar to Americans. But he commands the allegiance of only a fraction even of African-American Muslims. His Nation of Islam today boasts only 20,000 to 50,000 members, says Prof. Sulayman Nyang of Howard University. The charismatic Farrakhan can attract huge crowds, as the Million Man March demonstrated, but few of those in attendance actually convert.
Instead, the man who attracts the greatest following among American Muslims--black, white, or Asian--is a moderate who has left behind the divisive doctrines Farrakhan upholds. Warith Deen Mohammed, an imam--leader of prayer--and the son and successor of the black separatist Elijah Muhammad, has up to half a million solid supporters, and perhaps 1.5 million followers more loosely affiliated. He has championed unity among Muslims of different races and made significant headway, though desegregation is still a work in progress. Two decades ago, he led most of his father's radical Black Muslim flock into the mainstream of moderate Islam, and into the mainstream of everyday American life. "I've become almost a fanatical supporter of the United States government," he told U.S. News. "To me, the vision of the Founding Fathers is the vision that we have in Islam."
Shedding the past. Only a few months after the death of his father in 1975, Imam Warith shocked the faithful by renouncing many of the key tenets preached by Elijah Muhammad. Racially exclusionary rhetoric was jettisoned, as was the proposition that whites were "blue-eyed devils" created by an evil scientist named Yacub as a laboratory experiment. Imam Warith tossed out core Nation of Islam doctrines that are viewed as heresy by the rest of the Muslim world: for example, the belief that movement founder Wallace Fard was a manifestation of God and that Elijah Muhammad was his prophet. "He was like Dr. Frankenstein," Imam Warith (born Wallace) says of his namesake. "He picked up some dead pieces here and some dead pieces there, put them all together, and breathed life into the creature."
In 1985 Imam Warith disbanded the Nation of Islam altogether, urging his supporters to attend any mosque they wished without regard to the race of the other congregants. Several splinter factions had already broken away: One was led by Farrakhan, who re-established the old Nation and resurrected almost all of Elijah Muhammad's doctrines.
Wali Mutazammil, who had served as the Nation of Islam's minister for public relations in Kansas City, Mo., remembers setting aside his initial reluctance and rejoining American society. A boxer who'd been the Marine Corps champion featherweight of 1970, Mutazammil had been drawn to the old Nation of Islam partly by the example of boxing legend (and Nation spokesman) Muhammad Ali. In 1976 Mutazammil and the rest of his Missouri congregation followed Imam Warith's invitation to enter the mainstream Muslim fold. Having already studied some of the texts of orthodox Islam, he says, he was glad to be part of a worldwide community. Now Mutazammil runs a management consultant firm with business stretching from East Asia to West Africa. Three-time world heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali also renounced the old Nation theology in the late 1970s.
Westerners tend to regard Muslim attitudes toward women as inherently discriminatory, but reality often differs from the stereotype here as well. "In the name of Islam, cultural habits have developed that suppress women," notes Laila Al-Marayati, "and this needs to be dealt with head-on." Born, raised, and still living in Los Angeles, Al-Marayati is a physician and past president of the Muslim Women's League. Throughout the Muslim world, she notes, women are denied equal rights of marriage, divorce, and property. But such discrimination, she and many other Muslims argue, is a betrayal rather than a reflection of the true spirit of the faith: "The challenge is to let Islam become a tool for elevating women rather than for oppressing them." The Dawoodi Bohras, a group of 1 million Shiite Muslims spread throughout the world, seem to meet this challenge. "It's a very matriarchal community," says Shamim Dahod, an Andover, Mass., physician. She notes that every Bohra family in her New England congregation is a dual-career household and says she has experienced much greater sexism in her last hospital posting than she has in any mosque.
Harsh image. Perhaps the most persistent negative stereotype of Islam is that it is a faith of violent extremists, represented by a masked militant rather than the doctor or computer software designer living next door. It is a stereotype that stings: Muslims in America say they are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators. In a sense, American Muslims (many of them refugees from the regimes with which they are associated in the public mind) are held hostage to the behavior of Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah: Anti-Muslim violence in the United States rises sharply when tensions peak in the Middle East.
Sgt. George Curtis feels a special pride in having defended the holy sites of Mecca and Medina from the forces of Iraq. He is the commander of an M1A1 Abrams tank at Fort Carson, Colo., a veteran of the gulf war, and also one of the 10,000 Muslims serving in the U.S. military. He sees no contradiction in his roles, noting that the Army has provided special "halal" meals for him and has relieved him of daily physical training requirements during the fast of Ramadan. "Whether it's Iraq or anywhere else in the world," he says, "my first duty is to defend my country."
At a mall in Chantilly, Va., last January, all sides of American Islam were on display. It was Eid-ul Fitr, the festival that ends the fasting month of Ramadan, and the crowd in attendance was as multifaceted as any other mass of 15,000 people one could find. The prayer leader delivered his sermon in English--the only language virtually everyone present could understand. Somali immigrants in white robes and loosely coiled turbans rubbed shoulders with Philadelphia B-boyz in Kangol hats, Lugz jackets, and hip-sagging Tommy Hilfiger jeans. Chador-clad mothers bought their kids pink cotton candy and tried not to worry about the competence of the carnies wearily operating the miniature merry-go-round and the ferris wheel. The longest lines were for a gyroscope ride: Teenagers with scraggly beards and decorous skullcaps were strapped in place, and they grinned wildly as their world spun around and around. For these kids and their friends and classmates, it was just another all-American day at the mall.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Muslim Schools in U.S. a Voice for Identity
New York Times - November 10, 1998
Muslim Schools in U.S. a Voice for Identity
By SUSAN SACHS
The school year is already in full swing and still the parents come, crowding into the principal's office at Al Noor School in Brooklyn, painstakingly filling in forms, proffering checks and pleading in Arabic and English for a chance to enroll their children in the New York area's biggest Islamic private school.
"We turned down 400 kids because we don't have space," said Nidal Abuasi, the principal, whose resources are already stretched to accommodate Al Noor's 600 students. "We have people who come hoping we have space even if their child has to be demoted to a lower grade. There is a huge demand."
Across the country, Islamic schools like Al Noor that offer religion and Arabic classes along with a standard academic curriculum are expanding and flourishing, with many becoming oversubscribed so quickly that principals are scrambling for money to build more.
The reasons for the surge are as diverse as the American Muslim population itself, which embraces American-born converts and a swelling immigrant population from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
But the educational structure these schools have forged -- prayer, discipline and American-style teaching -- has an appeal that cuts across lines of national origin and background.
The playground at Al Noor School in Brooklyn. The principal said 400 students were turned away for lack of space at the 600-student school.
At Al Iman elementary and high school in Queens, as at the 23 other Islamic schools in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey, the day begins with prayer: rows of children, separated by sex, reciting in Arabic the ancient words of submission to Allah.
Posters of Islam's most famous mosques and the sayings of the prophet Mohammed hang in every classroom. Children must wear uniforms: long shapeless robes and head scarves for the older girls and neat blue sweaters and gray trousers for the boys. Besides their regular studies, students take two classes a week in Islamic studies and three a week in Arabic, the language of the Koran.
A glance at Al Iman's handbook for students and parents further underlines the differences from public schools. The rules are strict: three demerits for taking toys, comics, cosmetics, jewelry or other unauthorized materials to school, one for wearing nail polish, five for disrespectful behavior to teachers or for "pursuing acts of romanticism" like flirting with a schoolmate. The punishment for five demerits is detention during lunch for three days. After 30 demerits, a child is suspended for a week, and after 40, expelled.
For students who transfer from public school, the transition can be difficult.
"My parents insisted I come here and I didn't really argue with them," said Amel Ahmed, 17, whose parents emigrated from Yemen in 1980. She admitted she had picked up some bad habits in public school, but said the individual attention and strictly enforced regulations at Al Iman had set her straight.
"I wasn't on the right track there, maybe because you get influenced by your friends," Amel said. "Here they don't only teach you. They guide you."
Until recently, a full-time academic course load combined with Islamic teaching was available mainly through the national network of Sister Clara Muhammad schools, named for the wife of the Nation of Islam's founder, Elijah Muhammad, mainly serving African-American students. Two in New York City have been operating since the early 1970's, although they are no longer associated with the Nation of Islam. Now a new type of school serving a broader group of Muslims has emerged. In a sudden growth spurt, the number of Islamic schools nationwide has jumped to at least 200, according to the Council of Islamic Schools in North America, an informal body that sponsors workshops for Muslim educators. But neither the council nor any other group keeps official track of school openings, and American Muslims say they believe that the national figures are even higher.
Al Noor School in Brooklyn and other Islamic schools offer religion and Arabic classes with a standard academic curriculum and use a formula of piety and penalties.
As recently as three years ago, fewer than 200 children in New York City and Long Island attended private Islamic schools. Today, with two full-time high schools in Queens and plans to build three more in Brooklyn and Manhattan, total enrollment is 2,400 spread among 13 schools, with the majority of students from immigrant families. In New Jersey there are now at least 10 private Islamic schools, not only in big cities, with their notoriously troubled public schools, but also in small towns with respected school districts.
Private school enrollment is up in general, and many of the attractions are the same for all parents, Muslim or not, who view public schools as too permissive, rowdy and crowded.
But a more subtle dynamic is at work in the national surge in Islamic private schools. It represents a coming of age, in the view of many Muslim leaders, for a community striving to define itself as a cohesive religious minority in the secular American society.
Long a community of distinct and often introverted parts, Muslims have begun a process familiar to many immigrant and ethnic groups. They are trying to reach beyond their internal demarcations of national origin and find a unified voice to defend and promote their interests in a multicultural society.
Convinced that many Americans have a distorted view of Muslims and their Islamic religion, compounded by images in the movies and the media, they have created national organizations, lobbying groups, voter-registration campaigns and outreach programs to explain Islam to their neighbors.
Those who help to create a school system see themselves as an integral part of this communal effort to define, for themselves and for others, what it means to be a Muslim in the United States.
"My father's family survived in Bosnian society as a minority for centuries," said Saffiya Turan, a founder of Noor al Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J., whose father emigrated more than 30 years ago from Yugoslavia. "To survive, you have to know who you are."
The challenge for Islamic educators is to create a spiritual educational experience for young Muslims that is also relevant to their lives in a secular society. It has been a process of trial and error, ad-libbing and self-discovery.
Many schools cobble together teaching materials from other countries. Abuasi, who is Palestinian-American, said he experimented with books from Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere before settling on Arabic texts from Jordan to teach the Koran, which Muslims believe is God's word as transmitted to the prophet Mohammed.
At Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, one teacher, Abir Catovic, decided it made more sense for American schools to write their own texts.
"Overseas, you aren't taught to ask why," said Mrs. Catovic, 31, who grew up in New Jersey after her family emigrated from Egypt. "Here you've got students who ask why, and you'd better be prepared to answer more than just, 'Because it says so.' "
Religious schools for American Muslims also have to contend with a widely diverse student body. At Al Iman in Queens, for example, any one class might have children from Egyptian, Yemeni, Pakistani, Indian and African-American backgrounds. For Souhair Ayach, who teaches Islamic studies, having that mix of cultures requires her constantly to stress the difference between old country traditions and religion.
One recent day, Ms. Ayach's class strayed from a discussion of the divine source of human genius to a more worldly topic that was on the minds of her 11th- and 12th-grade students: arranged marriages.
"Is there something in Islam that, like, says a girl should get married at a young age, or is it just tradition?" asked a teen-age girl who gave her name only as Sabih, whose parents came from Pakistan but whose accent announced her New York City upbringing.
Ms. Ayach, herself a recent immigrant from Lebanon, steered a cautious course. "In the past, people had everything they needed to live," she said. "They were shepherds. They were merchants. They had castles. They didn't have all these expenses of life.
"Here," she continued, "you have to have education because you need a good job, a respectable job, to make your living. So it's better if you marry early, but under some circumstances it's better to develop your life first."
Private schooling still touches only a small portion of American Muslims, whose numbers are growing. There are no official national figures, but a 1992 study commissioned by the American Muslim Council, a lobbying group in Washington, estimated the Muslim population in New York State at 800,000 and in New Jersey at 200,000. A more recent study by demographers at the State University of New York at Cortlandt concluded that 450,000 Muslims live in the New York metropolitan area alone.
Islamic schools are still small players in the private-education business. In New York State, 480,000 students, 1 in 5 of school age children, attend one of 2,400 registered nonpublic schools, most of them Roman Catholic schools or Jewish day schools and yeshivas.
But Muslim educators say the numbers of full-time Muslim students do not tell the complete story. Many of their schools have only now reached a point of critical mass at which they can attract more students because they offer advanced grade levels and have a demonstrable academic track record.
Still, it is difficult to gauge the real demand for Islamic schools, most of which charge up to $3,000 a year in tuition. But school administrators say that in an area that already supports 450 mosques in New York City and Long Island, there is a vast untapped pool of families willing to pay for an alternative to the secular public schools.
"This year we added 140 students from the public schools, all coming with the behavioral and academic problems they inherited: name calling, taunting with labels and names, casual profanity," said Abuasi at Al Noor. "Here they have to watch the way they walk, watch the way they talk and watch what comes out of their mouths."
The formula of piety and penalties at schools like Al Noor seems to have whetted the appetite of Muslim parents. Al Noor opened only three years ago, with an initial enrollment of 350 students in six grades. It now has 600 children from prekindergarten through ninth grade and is raising money from Arabic and Muslim businesses in the area to build a $4 million addition to the school.
To meet expected demand in Manhattan, the Kuwaiti-financed Islamic Cultural Center of New York is building a $10 million, five-story school for 1,000 students, next to its complex at Third Avenue and 96th Street.
Al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, one of the busiest in the city, is soliciting donations to convert its top four floors into an Islamic junior high and high school for girls.
Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed, the imam at the mosque, said the need for a girls' school is particularly acute in his neighborhood of immigrants. Families from conservative Arab countries abhor the mixing of boys and girls in public schools, he said, and panic when their daughters become teen-agers.
"Many are thinking of sending them back home," Mohamed said. "We tell them that's not a solution. If you take them back, you have to go back with them."
Like new immigrants, more established Muslim families worry that their children may lose their religious identity or do poorly in public schools where their dress, holidays and religious taboos can make them curiosities.
Dawn El Mezyen, a convert to Islam, tried to help her son fit in at a conventional kindergarten, at one point acceding to his pleas to join in exchanging Valentine's Day cards with his schoolmates. It took hours, she said, to sort through piles of store-bought cards and toss those with romantic messages she believed were inappropriate for a Muslim boy to give.
Then she transferred him to the Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J. "I needed him to be around other Muslim kids," Mrs. El Mezyen said. "I wanted it to be a day to day thing. I didn't want him to be the sore thumb that sticks out. Here we all celebrate a holiday together."
Muslim Schools in U.S. a Voice for Identity
By SUSAN SACHS
The school year is already in full swing and still the parents come, crowding into the principal's office at Al Noor School in Brooklyn, painstakingly filling in forms, proffering checks and pleading in Arabic and English for a chance to enroll their children in the New York area's biggest Islamic private school.
"We turned down 400 kids because we don't have space," said Nidal Abuasi, the principal, whose resources are already stretched to accommodate Al Noor's 600 students. "We have people who come hoping we have space even if their child has to be demoted to a lower grade. There is a huge demand."
Across the country, Islamic schools like Al Noor that offer religion and Arabic classes along with a standard academic curriculum are expanding and flourishing, with many becoming oversubscribed so quickly that principals are scrambling for money to build more.
The reasons for the surge are as diverse as the American Muslim population itself, which embraces American-born converts and a swelling immigrant population from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
But the educational structure these schools have forged -- prayer, discipline and American-style teaching -- has an appeal that cuts across lines of national origin and background.
The playground at Al Noor School in Brooklyn. The principal said 400 students were turned away for lack of space at the 600-student school.
At Al Iman elementary and high school in Queens, as at the 23 other Islamic schools in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey, the day begins with prayer: rows of children, separated by sex, reciting in Arabic the ancient words of submission to Allah.
Posters of Islam's most famous mosques and the sayings of the prophet Mohammed hang in every classroom. Children must wear uniforms: long shapeless robes and head scarves for the older girls and neat blue sweaters and gray trousers for the boys. Besides their regular studies, students take two classes a week in Islamic studies and three a week in Arabic, the language of the Koran.
A glance at Al Iman's handbook for students and parents further underlines the differences from public schools. The rules are strict: three demerits for taking toys, comics, cosmetics, jewelry or other unauthorized materials to school, one for wearing nail polish, five for disrespectful behavior to teachers or for "pursuing acts of romanticism" like flirting with a schoolmate. The punishment for five demerits is detention during lunch for three days. After 30 demerits, a child is suspended for a week, and after 40, expelled.
For students who transfer from public school, the transition can be difficult.
"My parents insisted I come here and I didn't really argue with them," said Amel Ahmed, 17, whose parents emigrated from Yemen in 1980. She admitted she had picked up some bad habits in public school, but said the individual attention and strictly enforced regulations at Al Iman had set her straight.
"I wasn't on the right track there, maybe because you get influenced by your friends," Amel said. "Here they don't only teach you. They guide you."
Until recently, a full-time academic course load combined with Islamic teaching was available mainly through the national network of Sister Clara Muhammad schools, named for the wife of the Nation of Islam's founder, Elijah Muhammad, mainly serving African-American students. Two in New York City have been operating since the early 1970's, although they are no longer associated with the Nation of Islam. Now a new type of school serving a broader group of Muslims has emerged. In a sudden growth spurt, the number of Islamic schools nationwide has jumped to at least 200, according to the Council of Islamic Schools in North America, an informal body that sponsors workshops for Muslim educators. But neither the council nor any other group keeps official track of school openings, and American Muslims say they believe that the national figures are even higher.
Al Noor School in Brooklyn and other Islamic schools offer religion and Arabic classes with a standard academic curriculum and use a formula of piety and penalties.
As recently as three years ago, fewer than 200 children in New York City and Long Island attended private Islamic schools. Today, with two full-time high schools in Queens and plans to build three more in Brooklyn and Manhattan, total enrollment is 2,400 spread among 13 schools, with the majority of students from immigrant families. In New Jersey there are now at least 10 private Islamic schools, not only in big cities, with their notoriously troubled public schools, but also in small towns with respected school districts.
Private school enrollment is up in general, and many of the attractions are the same for all parents, Muslim or not, who view public schools as too permissive, rowdy and crowded.
But a more subtle dynamic is at work in the national surge in Islamic private schools. It represents a coming of age, in the view of many Muslim leaders, for a community striving to define itself as a cohesive religious minority in the secular American society.
Long a community of distinct and often introverted parts, Muslims have begun a process familiar to many immigrant and ethnic groups. They are trying to reach beyond their internal demarcations of national origin and find a unified voice to defend and promote their interests in a multicultural society.
Convinced that many Americans have a distorted view of Muslims and their Islamic religion, compounded by images in the movies and the media, they have created national organizations, lobbying groups, voter-registration campaigns and outreach programs to explain Islam to their neighbors.
Those who help to create a school system see themselves as an integral part of this communal effort to define, for themselves and for others, what it means to be a Muslim in the United States.
"My father's family survived in Bosnian society as a minority for centuries," said Saffiya Turan, a founder of Noor al Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J., whose father emigrated more than 30 years ago from Yugoslavia. "To survive, you have to know who you are."
The challenge for Islamic educators is to create a spiritual educational experience for young Muslims that is also relevant to their lives in a secular society. It has been a process of trial and error, ad-libbing and self-discovery.
Many schools cobble together teaching materials from other countries. Abuasi, who is Palestinian-American, said he experimented with books from Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere before settling on Arabic texts from Jordan to teach the Koran, which Muslims believe is God's word as transmitted to the prophet Mohammed.
At Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, one teacher, Abir Catovic, decided it made more sense for American schools to write their own texts.
"Overseas, you aren't taught to ask why," said Mrs. Catovic, 31, who grew up in New Jersey after her family emigrated from Egypt. "Here you've got students who ask why, and you'd better be prepared to answer more than just, 'Because it says so.' "
Religious schools for American Muslims also have to contend with a widely diverse student body. At Al Iman in Queens, for example, any one class might have children from Egyptian, Yemeni, Pakistani, Indian and African-American backgrounds. For Souhair Ayach, who teaches Islamic studies, having that mix of cultures requires her constantly to stress the difference between old country traditions and religion.
One recent day, Ms. Ayach's class strayed from a discussion of the divine source of human genius to a more worldly topic that was on the minds of her 11th- and 12th-grade students: arranged marriages.
"Is there something in Islam that, like, says a girl should get married at a young age, or is it just tradition?" asked a teen-age girl who gave her name only as Sabih, whose parents came from Pakistan but whose accent announced her New York City upbringing.
Ms. Ayach, herself a recent immigrant from Lebanon, steered a cautious course. "In the past, people had everything they needed to live," she said. "They were shepherds. They were merchants. They had castles. They didn't have all these expenses of life.
"Here," she continued, "you have to have education because you need a good job, a respectable job, to make your living. So it's better if you marry early, but under some circumstances it's better to develop your life first."
Private schooling still touches only a small portion of American Muslims, whose numbers are growing. There are no official national figures, but a 1992 study commissioned by the American Muslim Council, a lobbying group in Washington, estimated the Muslim population in New York State at 800,000 and in New Jersey at 200,000. A more recent study by demographers at the State University of New York at Cortlandt concluded that 450,000 Muslims live in the New York metropolitan area alone.
Islamic schools are still small players in the private-education business. In New York State, 480,000 students, 1 in 5 of school age children, attend one of 2,400 registered nonpublic schools, most of them Roman Catholic schools or Jewish day schools and yeshivas.
But Muslim educators say the numbers of full-time Muslim students do not tell the complete story. Many of their schools have only now reached a point of critical mass at which they can attract more students because they offer advanced grade levels and have a demonstrable academic track record.
Still, it is difficult to gauge the real demand for Islamic schools, most of which charge up to $3,000 a year in tuition. But school administrators say that in an area that already supports 450 mosques in New York City and Long Island, there is a vast untapped pool of families willing to pay for an alternative to the secular public schools.
"This year we added 140 students from the public schools, all coming with the behavioral and academic problems they inherited: name calling, taunting with labels and names, casual profanity," said Abuasi at Al Noor. "Here they have to watch the way they walk, watch the way they talk and watch what comes out of their mouths."
The formula of piety and penalties at schools like Al Noor seems to have whetted the appetite of Muslim parents. Al Noor opened only three years ago, with an initial enrollment of 350 students in six grades. It now has 600 children from prekindergarten through ninth grade and is raising money from Arabic and Muslim businesses in the area to build a $4 million addition to the school.
To meet expected demand in Manhattan, the Kuwaiti-financed Islamic Cultural Center of New York is building a $10 million, five-story school for 1,000 students, next to its complex at Third Avenue and 96th Street.
Al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, one of the busiest in the city, is soliciting donations to convert its top four floors into an Islamic junior high and high school for girls.
Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed, the imam at the mosque, said the need for a girls' school is particularly acute in his neighborhood of immigrants. Families from conservative Arab countries abhor the mixing of boys and girls in public schools, he said, and panic when their daughters become teen-agers.
"Many are thinking of sending them back home," Mohamed said. "We tell them that's not a solution. If you take them back, you have to go back with them."
Like new immigrants, more established Muslim families worry that their children may lose their religious identity or do poorly in public schools where their dress, holidays and religious taboos can make them curiosities.
Dawn El Mezyen, a convert to Islam, tried to help her son fit in at a conventional kindergarten, at one point acceding to his pleas to join in exchanging Valentine's Day cards with his schoolmates. It took hours, she said, to sort through piles of store-bought cards and toss those with romantic messages she believed were inappropriate for a Muslim boy to give.
Then she transferred him to the Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J. "I needed him to be around other Muslim kids," Mrs. El Mezyen said. "I wanted it to be a day to day thing. I didn't want him to be the sore thumb that sticks out. Here we all celebrate a holiday together."
Islam Rising Tide in America
Islam Rising Tide in America
"Islam is a peaceful religion. Some would try to connect terrorism to Islam, which is wrong."
—Hassan Qacwini, Imam in Detroit
Muslim men bow in prayer on Madison Avenue in New York at the start of the United Muslim Day Parade. Experts agree Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in America. (Emile Wamsteker / AP Photo)
The American Muslim birthrate is about 4.5 children per couple, versus the 1.9 child per couple national average.
Some sociologists predict that with 15 years, there will be more Muslims than Jews in America
By Barr Seitz
ABCNEWS.com
Aaron Cambel was an American kid who used to hang out with friends cruising the local mall, picking up girls, checking out the latest fashions and getting in trouble.
"I was realized if I took the same path, I would have ended up the way they did, wasting my life away," says Cambel, who lives in Washington.
So he converted to Islam.
"It was the most simple and direct to understand of the religions I looked into," says Cambel, who converted four years ago. "It taught about moral character, and ethics and the way people should be treated."
Islam Liberates Black Americans
Cambel, 23, has joined one of the fastest growing religions in the United States. Experts agree Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in America. As many as five million Muslims live in the United States and in the last five years, the number of mosques in this country has increased from 843 to about 1,300.
"I think Muslims in the U.S. find greater opportunities to practice their faiths than most Islamic countries. It’s an open society where religious freedom is protected by law and the constitution. "
—Hassan Qacwini in Detroit
Most of the growth has come from immigration, but much of it is home-grown.
For many black Americans, Islam has become the religion of choice and some one million—mostly men—have converted.
"It is an American phenomenon, which started in the ghettoes of the north," says Yvonne Haedad, a professor of history of Islam and of Christian-Muslim Relations at Georgetown University. "It is a response to racism…it is seen as the religion of liberation."
Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam has become the most prominent black Islamic group in the United States. Black men in bow ties and dark suits emphasize the strict discipline of the order, which emphasizes empowerment, a key theme of the Million Man March on Washington in 1995.
But Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic remarks—calling Jews "bloodsuckers" who took from the community to build their own—have brought controversy and publicity to the group.
"It’s very visible, because Farrakhan is very visible," says Fahhim Abdulhadi, spokesman for the American Muslim Council. "Muslims in mainstream have lots of problems with Farrakhan."
Muslims Battle Prejudices
Many mainstream Muslims also have a problem with the tide of misunderstanding in the United States.
"We always need to explain so many issues, " says Hassan Qacwini, Imam of the Islamic Center of America in Detroit.
The most common misunderstanding, according to Qacwini, is that Islam fosters violence, a perception reconfirmed whenever extremist groups set off suicide bombs or massacre tourists in the Middle East.
"Islam is a peaceful religion," says Qacwini. "Some would try to connect terrorism to Islam, which is wrong."
Many Americans looked for a Muslim scapegoat when the Alfred P. Murrah building blew up in 1995.
"After the Oklahoma City bombing, people said it was Middle East terrorists," says Abdulhadi.
Several Middle Eastern men were briefly detained, and there were reports of harassment against Muslims, including beatings and a mosque burning.
Some Muslims point out that when Timothy McVeigh was arrested, no one accused him of bombing the federal building for religious reasons. "Nobody talks about McVeigh as a Christian terrorist," says Haedad.
Hostility Breeds Assertion
The role of women is another area of misunderstanding. For example, while some non-Muslims see the veil as a tool of oppression, many Muslim women see it as a reinforcement of their identity in a culture that is hostile to Islam.
"It’s empowerment," says Haedad. "Women say ‘I’m going to wear it and you’d better to put up with it.’"
While many Muslims assert their identity in a society they perceive as hostile, most have followed the pattern of practically every other ethnic and religious group in America: blending and assimilating.
"Most Muslims, you wouldn’t pick them out," says Abdulhadi. "They’re just going to work and getting along."
"Islam is a peaceful religion. Some would try to connect terrorism to Islam, which is wrong."
—Hassan Qacwini, Imam in Detroit
Muslim men bow in prayer on Madison Avenue in New York at the start of the United Muslim Day Parade. Experts agree Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in America. (Emile Wamsteker / AP Photo)
The American Muslim birthrate is about 4.5 children per couple, versus the 1.9 child per couple national average.
Some sociologists predict that with 15 years, there will be more Muslims than Jews in America
By Barr Seitz
ABCNEWS.com
Aaron Cambel was an American kid who used to hang out with friends cruising the local mall, picking up girls, checking out the latest fashions and getting in trouble.
"I was realized if I took the same path, I would have ended up the way they did, wasting my life away," says Cambel, who lives in Washington.
So he converted to Islam.
"It was the most simple and direct to understand of the religions I looked into," says Cambel, who converted four years ago. "It taught about moral character, and ethics and the way people should be treated."
Islam Liberates Black Americans
Cambel, 23, has joined one of the fastest growing religions in the United States. Experts agree Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in America. As many as five million Muslims live in the United States and in the last five years, the number of mosques in this country has increased from 843 to about 1,300.
"I think Muslims in the U.S. find greater opportunities to practice their faiths than most Islamic countries. It’s an open society where religious freedom is protected by law and the constitution. "
—Hassan Qacwini in Detroit
Most of the growth has come from immigration, but much of it is home-grown.
For many black Americans, Islam has become the religion of choice and some one million—mostly men—have converted.
"It is an American phenomenon, which started in the ghettoes of the north," says Yvonne Haedad, a professor of history of Islam and of Christian-Muslim Relations at Georgetown University. "It is a response to racism…it is seen as the religion of liberation."
Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam has become the most prominent black Islamic group in the United States. Black men in bow ties and dark suits emphasize the strict discipline of the order, which emphasizes empowerment, a key theme of the Million Man March on Washington in 1995.
But Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic remarks—calling Jews "bloodsuckers" who took from the community to build their own—have brought controversy and publicity to the group.
"It’s very visible, because Farrakhan is very visible," says Fahhim Abdulhadi, spokesman for the American Muslim Council. "Muslims in mainstream have lots of problems with Farrakhan."
Muslims Battle Prejudices
Many mainstream Muslims also have a problem with the tide of misunderstanding in the United States.
"We always need to explain so many issues, " says Hassan Qacwini, Imam of the Islamic Center of America in Detroit.
The most common misunderstanding, according to Qacwini, is that Islam fosters violence, a perception reconfirmed whenever extremist groups set off suicide bombs or massacre tourists in the Middle East.
"Islam is a peaceful religion," says Qacwini. "Some would try to connect terrorism to Islam, which is wrong."
Many Americans looked for a Muslim scapegoat when the Alfred P. Murrah building blew up in 1995.
"After the Oklahoma City bombing, people said it was Middle East terrorists," says Abdulhadi.
Several Middle Eastern men were briefly detained, and there were reports of harassment against Muslims, including beatings and a mosque burning.
Some Muslims point out that when Timothy McVeigh was arrested, no one accused him of bombing the federal building for religious reasons. "Nobody talks about McVeigh as a Christian terrorist," says Haedad.
Hostility Breeds Assertion
The role of women is another area of misunderstanding. For example, while some non-Muslims see the veil as a tool of oppression, many Muslim women see it as a reinforcement of their identity in a culture that is hostile to Islam.
"It’s empowerment," says Haedad. "Women say ‘I’m going to wear it and you’d better to put up with it.’"
While many Muslims assert their identity in a society they perceive as hostile, most have followed the pattern of practically every other ethnic and religious group in America: blending and assimilating.
"Most Muslims, you wouldn’t pick them out," says Abdulhadi. "They’re just going to work and getting along."
Newsweek: article on the next generation of Muslims in the U.S.
[I do not agree with everything in this article ie such as her comment about "the veils" contrary to her opinion it is fard, but it is interesting sometimes to read what others are writing about us]
The children of Muslim immigrants who came to America in the '60s are coming of age. Both pious and modern, they are the future of the faith.
By Carla Power
In El Cerrito, Calif., Shahed Amanullah knows it's time to pray, not by a muezzin's call from a mosque minaret, but because his PowerMac has chimed. A verse from the Koran hangs by his futon. Near the bookcases--lined with copies of Wired magazine and Jack Kerouac novels--lies a red Arabian prayer rug. There's a plastic compass sewn into the carpet, its needle pointing toward Mecca. At the programmed call, Amanullah begins his prayers, the same as those recited across the globe--from the Gaza Strip to Samarkand.
In his goatee and beret, 30-year-old Amanullah wouldn't remind anyone of Saddam Hussein or a member of Hizbullah, the sort of Muslims who make headlines. He has never built a biological weapon, issued a fatwa or burned Uncle Sam in effigy. "You think Muslim, you think Saddam Hussein, you think ayatollah," says one Muslim-American twenty-something.
Not after meeting Amanullah. A native Californian, Amanullah grew up running track, listening to Nirvana and reading the Koran. He is a member of a burgeoning subculture: young Islamic America. The children of the prosperous Muslim immigrants of the '60s and '70s are coming of age, and with them arrives a new culture that is a blend of Muslim and American institutions.
Online and on campus, in suburban mosques and summer camps, young American Muslims are challenging their neighbors' perceptions of Islam as a foreign faith and of Muslims as fiery fundamentalists or bomb-lobbing terrorists. That image problem may be this generation's biggest challenge in the New World. Within hours of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Muslims were prime suspects. "You'll die," was one of the printable messages left on mosque answering machines around the country.
America's Muslims are not only taking on stereotypes, they're taking on the status quo. As it was for Christians and Jews before them, America is a laboratory for a re-examination of their faith. America's Muslim community is a quilt of cultures: about 25 percent are of South Asian descent, Arabs represent another 12 percent and nearly half are converts, primarily African-Americans. U.S. society allows them to strip away the cultural influences and superstitions that have crept into Islam during the past 1,400 years. By going back to the basic texts, they're rediscovering an Islam founded on tolerance, social justice and human rights. Some 6 million strong, America's Muslim population is set to outstrip its Jewish one by 2010, making it the nation's second-largest faith after Christianity. Richer than most Muslim communities, literate and natives of the world's sole superpower, America's Muslims are intent on exporting their modern Islam. From the Mideast to central Asia, they'd like to influence debate on everything from free trade to gender politics.
At home, it is a generation committed to maintaining its Islamic heritage while finding a niche in the New World. America's 1,500-odd mosques are spread from Alaska to Florida. Muslims pray daily in State Department hallways, in white-shoe corporate law firms and in empty boardrooms at Silicon Valley companies like Oracle and Adaptec. Last year Muslim organizations made life miserable for Nike when the company marketed a shoe with a design resembling the name of Allah in Arabic. After protests, Nike discontinued the style and started sensitivity training for employees. In Washington, the American Muslim Council lobbies on issues from school prayer to the Mideast peace process. "We're learning to use our clout," says Farhan Memon, a Muslim and 27-year-old partner in Yack!, a multimillion-dollar Internet publishing business.
Clout doesn't come without confidence, says Manal Omar, a Muslim woman raised in South Carolina. Tall and leather-jacketed, with a trace of Southern drawl, she explodes any stock image of the crushed and silent Muslim woman. In high school, she played basketball in hijab--the Muslim woman's head covering ("my coach nearly freaked"); at college, she won national public-speaking prizes. Friends thought she should become a stand-up comic. Instead, Omar went into refugee relief. In her off hours, she's working on a series of books for Muslim-American teenagers--"a sort of Islamic 'Sweet Valley High'," she says.
If fighting stereotypes is American Muslims' biggest battle, it is women who are on the front line. Raised playing touch football and reading Seventeen magazine, women are returning to the Koran to discover whether Islam sanctions the veils, seclusion and silence that many Muslim women endure. (Short answer: no.) In Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, wearing a veil is the law. In Savannah, Ga., or Topeka, Kans., it's a statement. "For some young women, the veil in America works a bit like the Afro during the blackpower era," says Mohja Kahf, a professor at the University of Arkansas. Amira Al-Sarraf, 34, a teacher at an Islamic school in Los Angeles, explains: "I don't have men flirting with me. I enjoy the respect I get."
At her wedding four years ago, Amanny Khattab wore an Islamic veil under her translucent lace tulle one. She remembers the "living hell" of her freshman year at Farmingdale High School on New York's Long Island. "The week before school started, I bought all the cool stuff--Reebok sneakers, Guess! jeans," recalls Khattab. "I wanted to look just like everybody else, but with the scarf." It didn't work. But enduring all the cracks--"towel-head," "rag-head"--made her tough. "Non-Muslim women think I'm oppressed because I wear too much?" says Khattab. "Well, I think they're oppressed because they wear too little."
In Pakistan, tradition dictates that women pray at home rather than at the mosque. In America, women not only go to the mosque--they're on the mosque's board of directors. Saudi Arabian clerics have ruled that it's un-Islamic for women to drive. But try telling a 16-year-old from Toledo, Ohio, who's just gotten her driver's license that the Koran prohibits her from hitting the road. She'll probably retort that the Prophet's favorite wife, Aisha, once directed troops in battle from the back of a camel.
That willingness to challenge convention is revitalizing a religion that many think has stagnated since the Middle Ages. Today a reformation is afoot. Muslims worldwide are working to square a faith founded in Arabia with modernity. Debates rage: Is Islam compatible with Western-style democracy? With modern science? With feminism? American Muslims, wealthy, wired and standing on the fault line between cultures, are well positioned to bring a 13-century-old faith into the next millennium.
The United States is arguably the best place on earth to be Muslim. Multicultural democracy, with its guarantees of religious freedom and speech, makes life easier for Muslims than in many Islamic states in the
Middle East. It's an idea they'd like to export. U.S. Muslim social organizations send money and medicine to beleaguered Kashmiris and Bosnians. The Web site of the Minaret of Freedom Institute, an organization devoted to "promoting the establishment of free trade and justice," has links to the Islamic University of Gaza. "The U.S. Constitution describes the perfect Islamic state," says Muhammed Muqtader Khan, who teaches American politics to Muslims. "It protects life, liberty and property."
Growing Muslim-American political consciousness may be the surest sign of assimilation. While their parents may have been happy to sit on the sidelines and pine for the Old World, the new generation realizes that to protect its rights as Americans--and Muslims--it has to speak out. Some mosques educate their communities to be more politically assertive, registering voters and holding programs on how to be an active PTA parent. Freshly minted Muslim lawyers are joining other ambitious young politicos in Washington. "When people say we'll never have elected Muslim-American officials, I say, 'Hey, those are the same things they said about a Catholic named Kennedy running for president'," says Suhail
Khan, a 28-year-old congressional staffer. Muslim and Arab groups have protested against airport-security profiling, which they say unfairly targets them as potential terrorists. Last month the American Muslim Council organized a fax-and-phone campaign against bombing Iraq. The No. 1 foreign-policy concern is the Arab-Israeli peace process. Recently, the Arab American Institute--which involves both Muslims and Christians--took a congressional delegation to Syria for a 3 1/2-hour meeting with President Hafez Assad to discuss the issue.
In the 1996 election, three times as many Muslims supported Bill Clinton as Bob Dole. The White House has not forgotten. Last month the First Lady threw a Ramadan party in the marble-and-gilt Indian Treaty Room in the West Wing. Hillary Clinton's talk--which touched on everything from peace to democracy to the trials of being a beleaguered minority--drew fervent applause. Long after the First Lady left, guests loitered, munched baklava and hummus and took snapshots of one another. Having made it to the White House, it seemed, they didn't want to leave.
With Nadine Joseph in San Francisco and Steve Rhodes in Chicago
Newsweek 3/16/98 International/Religion: The New Islam
The children of Muslim immigrants who came to America in the '60s are coming of age. Both pious and modern, they are the future of the faith.
By Carla Power
In El Cerrito, Calif., Shahed Amanullah knows it's time to pray, not by a muezzin's call from a mosque minaret, but because his PowerMac has chimed. A verse from the Koran hangs by his futon. Near the bookcases--lined with copies of Wired magazine and Jack Kerouac novels--lies a red Arabian prayer rug. There's a plastic compass sewn into the carpet, its needle pointing toward Mecca. At the programmed call, Amanullah begins his prayers, the same as those recited across the globe--from the Gaza Strip to Samarkand.
In his goatee and beret, 30-year-old Amanullah wouldn't remind anyone of Saddam Hussein or a member of Hizbullah, the sort of Muslims who make headlines. He has never built a biological weapon, issued a fatwa or burned Uncle Sam in effigy. "You think Muslim, you think Saddam Hussein, you think ayatollah," says one Muslim-American twenty-something.
Not after meeting Amanullah. A native Californian, Amanullah grew up running track, listening to Nirvana and reading the Koran. He is a member of a burgeoning subculture: young Islamic America. The children of the prosperous Muslim immigrants of the '60s and '70s are coming of age, and with them arrives a new culture that is a blend of Muslim and American institutions.
Online and on campus, in suburban mosques and summer camps, young American Muslims are challenging their neighbors' perceptions of Islam as a foreign faith and of Muslims as fiery fundamentalists or bomb-lobbing terrorists. That image problem may be this generation's biggest challenge in the New World. Within hours of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Muslims were prime suspects. "You'll die," was one of the printable messages left on mosque answering machines around the country.
America's Muslims are not only taking on stereotypes, they're taking on the status quo. As it was for Christians and Jews before them, America is a laboratory for a re-examination of their faith. America's Muslim community is a quilt of cultures: about 25 percent are of South Asian descent, Arabs represent another 12 percent and nearly half are converts, primarily African-Americans. U.S. society allows them to strip away the cultural influences and superstitions that have crept into Islam during the past 1,400 years. By going back to the basic texts, they're rediscovering an Islam founded on tolerance, social justice and human rights. Some 6 million strong, America's Muslim population is set to outstrip its Jewish one by 2010, making it the nation's second-largest faith after Christianity. Richer than most Muslim communities, literate and natives of the world's sole superpower, America's Muslims are intent on exporting their modern Islam. From the Mideast to central Asia, they'd like to influence debate on everything from free trade to gender politics.
At home, it is a generation committed to maintaining its Islamic heritage while finding a niche in the New World. America's 1,500-odd mosques are spread from Alaska to Florida. Muslims pray daily in State Department hallways, in white-shoe corporate law firms and in empty boardrooms at Silicon Valley companies like Oracle and Adaptec. Last year Muslim organizations made life miserable for Nike when the company marketed a shoe with a design resembling the name of Allah in Arabic. After protests, Nike discontinued the style and started sensitivity training for employees. In Washington, the American Muslim Council lobbies on issues from school prayer to the Mideast peace process. "We're learning to use our clout," says Farhan Memon, a Muslim and 27-year-old partner in Yack!, a multimillion-dollar Internet publishing business.
Clout doesn't come without confidence, says Manal Omar, a Muslim woman raised in South Carolina. Tall and leather-jacketed, with a trace of Southern drawl, she explodes any stock image of the crushed and silent Muslim woman. In high school, she played basketball in hijab--the Muslim woman's head covering ("my coach nearly freaked"); at college, she won national public-speaking prizes. Friends thought she should become a stand-up comic. Instead, Omar went into refugee relief. In her off hours, she's working on a series of books for Muslim-American teenagers--"a sort of Islamic 'Sweet Valley High'," she says.
If fighting stereotypes is American Muslims' biggest battle, it is women who are on the front line. Raised playing touch football and reading Seventeen magazine, women are returning to the Koran to discover whether Islam sanctions the veils, seclusion and silence that many Muslim women endure. (Short answer: no.) In Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, wearing a veil is the law. In Savannah, Ga., or Topeka, Kans., it's a statement. "For some young women, the veil in America works a bit like the Afro during the blackpower era," says Mohja Kahf, a professor at the University of Arkansas. Amira Al-Sarraf, 34, a teacher at an Islamic school in Los Angeles, explains: "I don't have men flirting with me. I enjoy the respect I get."
At her wedding four years ago, Amanny Khattab wore an Islamic veil under her translucent lace tulle one. She remembers the "living hell" of her freshman year at Farmingdale High School on New York's Long Island. "The week before school started, I bought all the cool stuff--Reebok sneakers, Guess! jeans," recalls Khattab. "I wanted to look just like everybody else, but with the scarf." It didn't work. But enduring all the cracks--"towel-head," "rag-head"--made her tough. "Non-Muslim women think I'm oppressed because I wear too much?" says Khattab. "Well, I think they're oppressed because they wear too little."
In Pakistan, tradition dictates that women pray at home rather than at the mosque. In America, women not only go to the mosque--they're on the mosque's board of directors. Saudi Arabian clerics have ruled that it's un-Islamic for women to drive. But try telling a 16-year-old from Toledo, Ohio, who's just gotten her driver's license that the Koran prohibits her from hitting the road. She'll probably retort that the Prophet's favorite wife, Aisha, once directed troops in battle from the back of a camel.
That willingness to challenge convention is revitalizing a religion that many think has stagnated since the Middle Ages. Today a reformation is afoot. Muslims worldwide are working to square a faith founded in Arabia with modernity. Debates rage: Is Islam compatible with Western-style democracy? With modern science? With feminism? American Muslims, wealthy, wired and standing on the fault line between cultures, are well positioned to bring a 13-century-old faith into the next millennium.
The United States is arguably the best place on earth to be Muslim. Multicultural democracy, with its guarantees of religious freedom and speech, makes life easier for Muslims than in many Islamic states in the
Middle East. It's an idea they'd like to export. U.S. Muslim social organizations send money and medicine to beleaguered Kashmiris and Bosnians. The Web site of the Minaret of Freedom Institute, an organization devoted to "promoting the establishment of free trade and justice," has links to the Islamic University of Gaza. "The U.S. Constitution describes the perfect Islamic state," says Muhammed Muqtader Khan, who teaches American politics to Muslims. "It protects life, liberty and property."
Growing Muslim-American political consciousness may be the surest sign of assimilation. While their parents may have been happy to sit on the sidelines and pine for the Old World, the new generation realizes that to protect its rights as Americans--and Muslims--it has to speak out. Some mosques educate their communities to be more politically assertive, registering voters and holding programs on how to be an active PTA parent. Freshly minted Muslim lawyers are joining other ambitious young politicos in Washington. "When people say we'll never have elected Muslim-American officials, I say, 'Hey, those are the same things they said about a Catholic named Kennedy running for president'," says Suhail
Khan, a 28-year-old congressional staffer. Muslim and Arab groups have protested against airport-security profiling, which they say unfairly targets them as potential terrorists. Last month the American Muslim Council organized a fax-and-phone campaign against bombing Iraq. The No. 1 foreign-policy concern is the Arab-Israeli peace process. Recently, the Arab American Institute--which involves both Muslims and Christians--took a congressional delegation to Syria for a 3 1/2-hour meeting with President Hafez Assad to discuss the issue.
In the 1996 election, three times as many Muslims supported Bill Clinton as Bob Dole. The White House has not forgotten. Last month the First Lady threw a Ramadan party in the marble-and-gilt Indian Treaty Room in the West Wing. Hillary Clinton's talk--which touched on everything from peace to democracy to the trials of being a beleaguered minority--drew fervent applause. Long after the First Lady left, guests loitered, munched baklava and hummus and took snapshots of one another. Having made it to the White House, it seemed, they didn't want to leave.
With Nadine Joseph in San Francisco and Steve Rhodes in Chicago
Newsweek 3/16/98 International/Religion: The New Islam
Friday, March 4, 2011
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Sunday, February 6, 2011
Muslim Women, Marriage & Family Life
Nikah MArriage Muslim Marriage Shaadi
And among His Signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves that you may dwell in tranquillity with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts); verily in that are signs for those who reflect. [ Quran 30:21 ]
Islam brought women from the position of chattel in marriage to that of equal partners. In the matter of divorce, she changed from a completely impotent bystander, to one who could initiate divorce proceedings and claim her rights of dowry and inheritance. From a position of legal nonetity, she became a legal personality in the full sense of the term, able to hold property, entitled to a just share of her husband's and family's inhereitance property. Socially, with education equally required of her as well as of every man by Islam, she rose to a position of social and cultural influences and service. Even in religio-cultic practices and duties, woman was asked and expected to play a role equal to that of man, insofar as her special physical characteristics and maternal duties allowed. -- Lois Lamya Al-Faruqi Women, Muslim Society and Islam
Marriage in Islam:
Marriage in Islam
Islam, marriage, women-SRI faq
Wedding in Islam
Book on the Etiquette of Marriage - Ghazali - PDF 9M
Questions and Answers on Marriage (from Western perspective)
Tips to a Better Marriage
How to make your Husband Happy
How to make your Wife Happy
Intimate relationship and mutual rights and obligations
Relations between husband and wife
Who practices Polygamy?
The Prophet's (PBUH) Marriage to Khadija
Some marriage examples from the Prophet (SAW)
Julaybib's story- why we should marry for reasons beyond looks
Getting Married:
Marriage: Parental Conflicts
Marriage in Akfa? (within tribes)
Marriage between Muslims and Non Muslims
Issues on Inter-Marriages
How to Make Istakhara Prayer
Pointers on Choosing Marriage Partners
Questions to Ask a Prospective Husband
How to choose the Desired Wife (for brothers!!)
Family Life:
Role of the family in the spread of Islam by Prof. Ismail Faruqi
Is Family Planning allowed in Islam?
Wife beating? an answer from Dr. Jamal Badawi
Wife Abuse in the Muslim Community
A Scientist's Interpretation of References to Embryology in the Qur'an
Quality Time with Dad - for fathers!!
The meaning of some arabic names
Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, sisters and friends whose footsteps etch soft, figure eights around the eyes. These are my women. My mothers through the ages who carry love like a shield as they march through centuries and shatter panes of gravity with their naked fists. -- Reshma Baig, The Memory of Hands
And among His Signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves that you may dwell in tranquillity with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts); verily in that are signs for those who reflect. [ Quran 30:21 ]
Islam brought women from the position of chattel in marriage to that of equal partners. In the matter of divorce, she changed from a completely impotent bystander, to one who could initiate divorce proceedings and claim her rights of dowry and inheritance. From a position of legal nonetity, she became a legal personality in the full sense of the term, able to hold property, entitled to a just share of her husband's and family's inhereitance property. Socially, with education equally required of her as well as of every man by Islam, she rose to a position of social and cultural influences and service. Even in religio-cultic practices and duties, woman was asked and expected to play a role equal to that of man, insofar as her special physical characteristics and maternal duties allowed. -- Lois Lamya Al-Faruqi Women, Muslim Society and Islam
Marriage in Islam:
Marriage in Islam
Islam, marriage, women-SRI faq
Wedding in Islam
Book on the Etiquette of Marriage - Ghazali - PDF 9M
Questions and Answers on Marriage (from Western perspective)
Tips to a Better Marriage
How to make your Husband Happy
How to make your Wife Happy
Intimate relationship and mutual rights and obligations
Relations between husband and wife
Who practices Polygamy?
The Prophet's (PBUH) Marriage to Khadija
Some marriage examples from the Prophet (SAW)
Julaybib's story- why we should marry for reasons beyond looks
Getting Married:
Marriage: Parental Conflicts
Marriage in Akfa? (within tribes)
Marriage between Muslims and Non Muslims
Issues on Inter-Marriages
How to Make Istakhara Prayer
Pointers on Choosing Marriage Partners
Questions to Ask a Prospective Husband
How to choose the Desired Wife (for brothers!!)
Family Life:
Role of the family in the spread of Islam by Prof. Ismail Faruqi
Is Family Planning allowed in Islam?
Wife beating? an answer from Dr. Jamal Badawi
Wife Abuse in the Muslim Community
A Scientist's Interpretation of References to Embryology in the Qur'an
Quality Time with Dad - for fathers!!
The meaning of some arabic names
Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, sisters and friends whose footsteps etch soft, figure eights around the eyes. These are my women. My mothers through the ages who carry love like a shield as they march through centuries and shatter panes of gravity with their naked fists. -- Reshma Baig, The Memory of Hands
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Marriage to a Past
Marriage to a Past
By Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood
Reprinted from Islamic Horizons Magazine
Parents Should Not Reject a Proposal Without Good Reason - and Being a Revert with a Past is Not an Acceptable One
Should a Muslim marry or even consider marriage to a revert to Islam, since he or she would have a past that include premarital sex? Should a married revert divorce a spouse that does not revert?
Many parents become upset if their children wish to marry outside their culture, although Islam allows and even encourages this, as long as both parties are Muslim. For example, parents worry about differences in schools of thought, nationalities, and non-extended family members. Since Muslims tend to gravitate toward others of a similar type, one would imagine that a marriage between, say, a Sufi and a Salafi stands little chance of success.
About a "Past"
When he married, the Prophet (salla Allahu 'alayhi wa sallam) did not seek young virgins, women with no previous sexual experience, or members of his family. Since neither he nor Khadijah were Muslims at the time they married, the question of being Muslim did not arise.
(Zawaj.com Editor's Note: while the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) before the appointment of the Prophethood was not a "Muslim" in the sense we understand it today, he was a Haneef - a follower of the pure way of Ibraheem (alayhis-salaam). He rejected idol worship, and he meditated and prayed deeply, trying to learn and know the manner in which he should worship Allah. In addition, he rejected all the corrupt practices of Arab society at the time, such as fornication, drinking, gambling, etc. So in the broader sense he was definitely a Muslim and a true seeker of truth.)
Muhammad's (pbuh) first choice was a twice-married 40-year-old lady with at least 4 children. Marrying when he was 25, he remained monogamous until her death 25 years later. He never considered taking another wife, although all his friends, uncles, and peers were polygamous.
After Khadijah's death, when he was 50, he took at least 12 more wives. Only 2 were virgins: 'A'isha and Maryam (a Coptic Christian from Egypt).
Only his sixth and seventh wives (Umm Salamah and Zaynab, respectively) were his direct cousins whom he had known since their childhood. Umm Salamah was a widow with three children and a fourth born almost immediately after their marriage, and Zaynab came as a divorcee after a failed marriage to his adopted son Zayd.
Upon Becoming Muslim
Should a person, upon accepting Islam, divorce his or her non-Muslim spouse? Many famous early male Companions adopted Islam long after their wives. For example, 'Umar's wife Zaynab was the sister of 'Uthman bin Maz'un. Both of them were Muslims. Hamzah's wife was Salmah, and 'Abbas' wife was Lubabah (Umm Fadl), daughters of Hind bint Awf by different husbands. In 'Abbas' case, Umm Fadl claimed to be the second woman to revert to Islam, the same day as her close friend Khadijah. Officially, 'Abbas accepted Islam just before the fall of Makkah 20 years later!
The Prophet did not ask them to divorce their non-Muslim husbands. In fact, they gradually entered Islam by being convinced of its truth. Incidentally, not only wives brought their husbands into Islam: Fatimah brought her brother 'Umar, Umm Habibah brought her father Abu Sufyan, and the Prophet's daughter Zaynab brought Abu al-'As. There are many similar cases.
At the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, Umm Kulthum, daughter of the Prophet's enemy 'Uqbah bin Abu Mu'ayt, sought asylum with the Muslims when she learned that a revelation had said that women seeking the Prophet did not, like male escapees, have to be returned to their families and men. Their marriages could simply be voided.
In Qur'an 60:7-12, verse 10 is cited on the issue of divorcing non-believing spouses: "If you ascertain that they are believers, do not send them back to the unbelievers. They are not lawful for the unbelievers, not are the (unbelievers) lawful (husbands) for them."
However, the rest of the section discusses this subject with great tact and gentleness, and rather alters the perspective. Verse 7 states: "It may well be that Allah will grant love between you and those whom you (now) hold as enemies, for Allah has power over all things, and is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. Allah forbids you not, with regard to those who do not (actually) fight you for (your faith) nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them; for Allah loves those who are just. Allah only forbids you with regard to those who fight against you for (your) faith, and drive you out of your homes, and support (others) in driving you out, from turning to them (for friendship and love). It is such as turn to these (in these circumstances) who do wrong."
A revert is a revert, and following the teaching given to Khalid bin Walid (the legendary general who had slaughtered so many Muslims before his reversion), that on entering Islam one's entire past is obliterated. The slate is wiped clean. That day becomes Day One of the rest of your life. So there is no baggage of "the past" for a revert. This is not to say, of course, that reverts have not been affected and influenced by their past, or that they can simply forget it.
And so anxious parents worry about their children marrying such people. Many in the older age group have failed marriages and divorces behind them, with all their traumas, and widows or widowers marry with all of their memories. It is never simple to marry someone with a "past." But what's simple in life? Moreover, is that really worth cutting everything else out for? Take the challenge on the chin, but do it with your eyes open.
The Prophet said that if an honorable person, one with nothing ostensibly wrong about him, sought a girl in marriage, he should not be turned away hurtfully by her guardian. This should be taken alongside the rule that no one should be coerced into marriage. The girl's wishes are final. Parents should not reject a proposal without good reason - and being a revert with a past is not an acceptable one. Allah has already forgiven that past.
Most scholars agree that alcohol was prohibited in the same year as Hudaybiyyah (628 CE). First, Muslims were told they should not come to prayer while intoxicated (4:43). When 'Umar prayed for clearer guidance, the Prophet recieved verses 5:90-91, saying that alcohol was an abomination and Satan's handiwork.
Upon hearing that, all Muslims threw away their alcohol. But some asked: "Can alcohol really be an abomination, for some of the martyrs of Badr and Uhud consumed it?" In response came: "Those who believed and did good may not be blamed for what they consumed (in the past), inasmuch as they feared Allah, believed and did good works. Allah loves the viruous" (5:93). The analogy applies to revert suitors-they should not be blamed for "what they consumed in the past," premarital sex included.
Should a revert spouse divorce or leave the non-revert one? This issue requires great compassion. When the Prophet abandoned Makkah for Madinah, his daughter Zaynab could not bear to leave her non-Muslim husband Abu al-'As, and was not required to do so until years later under other circumstances. The Prophet did not automatically divorce them. This is an important Sunnah, since it involves his own children.
Such a spouse should be considered a potential revert, and the revert should do his or her absolute best to embody Islam's manners, effort, charity, and so on. Do not ram your theology down his or her throat, or as Prophet Jesus ('alayhi al-salaam) (is reported in the Bible - Ed.) to have said: "Don't cast your pearls before swine." The best way is to give the best example, especially of love and compassion. Then, if the non-Muslim becomes a Muslim, what a wonderful reward that will be! If it does not work out, and life with that spouse becomes increasingly difficult, then no doubt divorce would follow on the grounds that one spouse would probably consider the other's behavior unreasonable, leading to the marriage's breakdown. Certainly, give it every chance first-especially if children are involved.
Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood is the author of the Muslim Marriage Guide.
British public and Islamic schools use several of her textbooks.
Articles
By Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood
Reprinted from Islamic Horizons Magazine
Parents Should Not Reject a Proposal Without Good Reason - and Being a Revert with a Past is Not an Acceptable One
Should a Muslim marry or even consider marriage to a revert to Islam, since he or she would have a past that include premarital sex? Should a married revert divorce a spouse that does not revert?
Many parents become upset if their children wish to marry outside their culture, although Islam allows and even encourages this, as long as both parties are Muslim. For example, parents worry about differences in schools of thought, nationalities, and non-extended family members. Since Muslims tend to gravitate toward others of a similar type, one would imagine that a marriage between, say, a Sufi and a Salafi stands little chance of success.
About a "Past"
When he married, the Prophet (salla Allahu 'alayhi wa sallam) did not seek young virgins, women with no previous sexual experience, or members of his family. Since neither he nor Khadijah were Muslims at the time they married, the question of being Muslim did not arise.
(Zawaj.com Editor's Note: while the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) before the appointment of the Prophethood was not a "Muslim" in the sense we understand it today, he was a Haneef - a follower of the pure way of Ibraheem (alayhis-salaam). He rejected idol worship, and he meditated and prayed deeply, trying to learn and know the manner in which he should worship Allah. In addition, he rejected all the corrupt practices of Arab society at the time, such as fornication, drinking, gambling, etc. So in the broader sense he was definitely a Muslim and a true seeker of truth.)
Muhammad's (pbuh) first choice was a twice-married 40-year-old lady with at least 4 children. Marrying when he was 25, he remained monogamous until her death 25 years later. He never considered taking another wife, although all his friends, uncles, and peers were polygamous.
After Khadijah's death, when he was 50, he took at least 12 more wives. Only 2 were virgins: 'A'isha and Maryam (a Coptic Christian from Egypt).
Only his sixth and seventh wives (Umm Salamah and Zaynab, respectively) were his direct cousins whom he had known since their childhood. Umm Salamah was a widow with three children and a fourth born almost immediately after their marriage, and Zaynab came as a divorcee after a failed marriage to his adopted son Zayd.
Upon Becoming Muslim
Should a person, upon accepting Islam, divorce his or her non-Muslim spouse? Many famous early male Companions adopted Islam long after their wives. For example, 'Umar's wife Zaynab was the sister of 'Uthman bin Maz'un. Both of them were Muslims. Hamzah's wife was Salmah, and 'Abbas' wife was Lubabah (Umm Fadl), daughters of Hind bint Awf by different husbands. In 'Abbas' case, Umm Fadl claimed to be the second woman to revert to Islam, the same day as her close friend Khadijah. Officially, 'Abbas accepted Islam just before the fall of Makkah 20 years later!
The Prophet did not ask them to divorce their non-Muslim husbands. In fact, they gradually entered Islam by being convinced of its truth. Incidentally, not only wives brought their husbands into Islam: Fatimah brought her brother 'Umar, Umm Habibah brought her father Abu Sufyan, and the Prophet's daughter Zaynab brought Abu al-'As. There are many similar cases.
At the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, Umm Kulthum, daughter of the Prophet's enemy 'Uqbah bin Abu Mu'ayt, sought asylum with the Muslims when she learned that a revelation had said that women seeking the Prophet did not, like male escapees, have to be returned to their families and men. Their marriages could simply be voided.
In Qur'an 60:7-12, verse 10 is cited on the issue of divorcing non-believing spouses: "If you ascertain that they are believers, do not send them back to the unbelievers. They are not lawful for the unbelievers, not are the (unbelievers) lawful (husbands) for them."
However, the rest of the section discusses this subject with great tact and gentleness, and rather alters the perspective. Verse 7 states: "It may well be that Allah will grant love between you and those whom you (now) hold as enemies, for Allah has power over all things, and is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. Allah forbids you not, with regard to those who do not (actually) fight you for (your faith) nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them; for Allah loves those who are just. Allah only forbids you with regard to those who fight against you for (your) faith, and drive you out of your homes, and support (others) in driving you out, from turning to them (for friendship and love). It is such as turn to these (in these circumstances) who do wrong."
A revert is a revert, and following the teaching given to Khalid bin Walid (the legendary general who had slaughtered so many Muslims before his reversion), that on entering Islam one's entire past is obliterated. The slate is wiped clean. That day becomes Day One of the rest of your life. So there is no baggage of "the past" for a revert. This is not to say, of course, that reverts have not been affected and influenced by their past, or that they can simply forget it.
And so anxious parents worry about their children marrying such people. Many in the older age group have failed marriages and divorces behind them, with all their traumas, and widows or widowers marry with all of their memories. It is never simple to marry someone with a "past." But what's simple in life? Moreover, is that really worth cutting everything else out for? Take the challenge on the chin, but do it with your eyes open.
The Prophet said that if an honorable person, one with nothing ostensibly wrong about him, sought a girl in marriage, he should not be turned away hurtfully by her guardian. This should be taken alongside the rule that no one should be coerced into marriage. The girl's wishes are final. Parents should not reject a proposal without good reason - and being a revert with a past is not an acceptable one. Allah has already forgiven that past.
Most scholars agree that alcohol was prohibited in the same year as Hudaybiyyah (628 CE). First, Muslims were told they should not come to prayer while intoxicated (4:43). When 'Umar prayed for clearer guidance, the Prophet recieved verses 5:90-91, saying that alcohol was an abomination and Satan's handiwork.
Upon hearing that, all Muslims threw away their alcohol. But some asked: "Can alcohol really be an abomination, for some of the martyrs of Badr and Uhud consumed it?" In response came: "Those who believed and did good may not be blamed for what they consumed (in the past), inasmuch as they feared Allah, believed and did good works. Allah loves the viruous" (5:93). The analogy applies to revert suitors-they should not be blamed for "what they consumed in the past," premarital sex included.
Should a revert spouse divorce or leave the non-revert one? This issue requires great compassion. When the Prophet abandoned Makkah for Madinah, his daughter Zaynab could not bear to leave her non-Muslim husband Abu al-'As, and was not required to do so until years later under other circumstances. The Prophet did not automatically divorce them. This is an important Sunnah, since it involves his own children.
Such a spouse should be considered a potential revert, and the revert should do his or her absolute best to embody Islam's manners, effort, charity, and so on. Do not ram your theology down his or her throat, or as Prophet Jesus ('alayhi al-salaam) (is reported in the Bible - Ed.) to have said: "Don't cast your pearls before swine." The best way is to give the best example, especially of love and compassion. Then, if the non-Muslim becomes a Muslim, what a wonderful reward that will be! If it does not work out, and life with that spouse becomes increasingly difficult, then no doubt divorce would follow on the grounds that one spouse would probably consider the other's behavior unreasonable, leading to the marriage's breakdown. Certainly, give it every chance first-especially if children are involved.
Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood is the author of the Muslim Marriage Guide.
British public and Islamic schools use several of her textbooks.
Articles
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