Shaikh Ja`far Idris: Unity Among Western Muslim Communities
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Innal hamdalillaahi nahmaduhu wa nasta`eenuhu wa nastaghfiruh,
wa na`oodhubillaahi min shuroori anfusinaa wa sayyi'aati
a`maalinaa, wa may yahdi llaahu fa huwal muhtad, wa may yudhlil
fa lan tajida lahu waliyyan murshidaa, thumma ammaa ba`d:
I think I better start by giving you the characteristics of the
ideal Muslim community, as far as unity is concerned. And the
ideal Muslim community is, of course, that of the Companions of
the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam. So if we aspire to
be united we should have that ideal in our mind. We might never
attain to that high level, but we should at least keep it as a
goal, and as a criterion by which we judge how far towards the
unity we have gone. The community of the Companions of the
Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam was united.
The characteristics of that community are:
First, `aqeedah. And I don't need to go in the details of that,
you are experts in this, being the Salafis. You have one of the
Shaikhs of the Salafis here, so...And I like, in fact, when
speaking about Muslims, I like to use the word eemaan instead of
`aqeedah, because this is the word that is used in the Qur'aan
and in the Sunnah of the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam.
The word `aqeedah was introduced later on when the Muslims felt
that they need to study beliefs of others, of non-Muslims, and
compare these beliefs with those of the Muslims. So they looked
for a word which is more general than eemaan. They confined the
word eemaan to the Muslims. So, we can say the first
characteristic is that of eemaan, eemaan that is according to
the Qur'aan and the Sunnah of the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa
sallam, no deviation at all.
This eemaan had as its natural result brotherhood. Because, as
Allaah subhaanahu wa ta`aalaa told the Prophet sallallaahu
`alaihi wa sallam, "Lau anfaqta maa fil arDi jamee`an maa
allafat bayna quloobihim wa laakinna-llaaha allafa baynahum"
[8:63]. Had you spent all the wealth on the earth, you would
not have been able to bring their hearts together, to make them
brothers, but it was Allaah who made them brothers and Allaah
made them brothers by showing them how to believe in Him as the
Creator and how to worship Him. Once this belief enters the
heart, then those people in whose heart faith has entered, they
become brothers. They don't have to make any effort to become
brothers. This is not something that you do by lectures or by
organizations, this is something that comes naturally as a
result of eemaan entering your heart.
Secondly, `ibaadah. Their `ibaadah was also according to what
the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam told them, what they
found in the Qur'aan. No bid`ah, they didn't add or deduct
anything from what the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam
said. And `ibaadah is important for eemaan, it nourishes
eemaan. Eemaan is not something you can have once, and say, if
I am a mu'min today, I will be a mu'min forever. You can't say
that. You can't be sure. You might be a mu'min today and
become a kaafir tomorrow. One way of preserving your eemaan is
`ibaadah and especially salaah. "Wa la-dhikrullaahi akbar"
[29:45].
Third is akhlaaq, moral behavior, and this is the fruit of
eemaan and `ibaadah. That is why the Prophet sallallaahu
`alaihi wa sallam said, "akmalul mu'mineena eemaanan ahsanuhum
khuluqan" [at-Tirmidhee.] The best of the mu'mins in eemaan is
the best of them in moral behavior. In Arabic, akhlaaq is
confined to the way of treating people. Some brothers disputed
with me on that issue, but that will not make them non-Salafis,
eh [laughs]? Neither it will make me non-Salafi if I'm proven
to be wrong. I think that the word khuluq is not equivalent to
morality. Because akhlaaq is confined only to the way of
treating people. Morality is more general than this. So,
"akmalul mu'mineena eemaanan ahsanuhum khuluqan." The best of
the mu'mins in eemaan is the best of them in treating people".
And the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam also said,
"Khayrukum, khayrukum li ahlih" [at-Tirmidhee, ad-Daarimee], and
the best of you are the best to their wives. This again is how
to treat people. So this is one main fruit of eemaan and
`ibaadah. And the Prophet, in fact, made it the sign, the
proof. You say in English the tree is by its fruit, so this is
the fruit. If you don't see a person in treating people, and
especially his wife, treating them in a good way, that means
there is something wrong with this eemaan and with his
`ibaadah.
The fourth point is jihaad, and by jihaad here I mean two
things. First, jihaad of how to bring about an Islamic
society. The Muslims were with the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi
wa sallam in Makkah. When they were there, they were in a
minority, they were weak. At that stage they were told to
restrain their hands, not to fight, and then they were ordered
to make hijraa, and then they were ordered to fight. That is,
they were given permission to fight, then they were ordered to
fight. And they continued doing jihaad in the two senses,
jihaad by the word of mouth and jihaad by the sword.
The last point is that of political unity. The Muslims are
supposed to be very distinct from other communities, even in
their political organization. And that is why our `ulamaa used
to say that jamaa`ah, jamaa`at ul-muslimeen, one of the
characteristics, one of the conditions of having a real
jamaa`ah, is that it must be ruled by a ruler who follows the
Sharee`ah, and it must have `ulamaa who know the Qur`aan and the
Sunnah of the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam. Allaah
subhaanahu wa ta`aalaa said: "Wa atee`oo llaaha wa atee`oor
rasoola wa ulil-amri minkum" [4:59]. "Obey Allaah, obey His
Prophet and those who are in authority." And those who are in
authority are, as they say in Arabic, al umaraa' wal `ulamaa',
the rulers and the learned people.
Does this mean that there was no difference at all among these
Companions of the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam? There
were differences, but - and this is a big but, as they say - the
differences were individual differences. They were not group
differences, this happened later on. Aboo Bakr said something,
another person disagrees with him, he says no, then the other
person tells him that the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam
said so and so, Aboo Bakr says, "OK, I 'm mistaken." He
agrees. `Umar says something, Aboo Bakr differs with him.
`Uthmaan says something, `Alee differs with him. And they might
make ijtihaad also and they differ in their ijtihaad. But today
I am with him on one point, tomorrow I differ with him, then the
next day, we both agree and we differ with another brother and
so on. So, differences are on the individual level, there were
no group differences. This is the ideal thing.
What can we do in our situation? I think it is very important
for Muslims living in the West - let us just confine ourselves
to the United States - it is very important for Muslims living
in the West to be united, because, as I said, I think yesterday,
whether we like it or not, we are all considered as Muslims.
There is only one label, and sometimes even fundamentalist
Muslims. And even those who don't go to the mosque, since they
are Muslims they will be called fundamentalists. And someone
said all Muslims are by definition fundamentalists. So there is
no way of running away from this, we are all Muslims, we are all
fundamentalists, according to some people, and we will be
treated as such, so it is better for us to be united. The ideal
thing is for all the Muslims, all over the United States, to
have one organization, one leadership. And that organization
will include all Muslims, whether they are Salafis, or people
who have some deviation from the Sunnah, because the Prophet
sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam said that this Ummah will be
divided - you know the hadeeth of the Prophet - that they will
be divided, but all those divisions are divisions of Muslims.
They are Muslims. They are divided, but they are Muslims.
One group, one of them, the best one, it's called al firqatun
naajiyah, the one that is saved, that will go to Paradise, in
shaa' Allaah, follows the way of the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi
wa sallam and the way of the Companions of the Prophet
sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam.
The others have deviations, even in matters of `aqeedah, but the
deviations are not so great as to take them out of the fold of
Islaam. They will still be Muslims. And if there is an Islamic
government, they will give allegiance to that government and
they will be treated as Muslims, they will not be prevented from
going and making jihaad with the Muslims, they will not be
excused from giving zakaah, they will not be asked to give
jizyah. They will be treated as Muslims. And the same applies
to Muslims who might be Sunni and Salafi, but who drink wine.
You might wonder how can a person be Salafi and drink wine.
Yes, he might do this because he might be Salafi in his
`aqeedah, he has no deviations in his `aqeedah, but he is weak,
sometimes he drinks wine, sometimes he might be tempted, or she
might be tempted and commit zinaa or so, but still they are
Muslims. They will not be expelled from the Muslim community.
So, the ideal thing, and I don't know whether there is a chance
for it to be implemented in reality, is for all the Muslims to
have this organization. Now, if we cannot have that ideal, then
the second best, there should be coordination among us. If you
have, say, 20-30 organizations, we should have one umbrella
organization where representatives of people belonging to all
these different groups come and discuss things and agree on
certain policies which they deem to be necessary for all of us.
For example, it should not be left to just one group to decide
whether to take part in politics or not. Because if it is only
one group, then it will not have a great effect on the political
situation in this country, but if Muslims have this group that
coordinates all of them, they can give their vote to this or
that person and they can have an effect on the policy of this
country.
If we cannot have even this, then there is something which we
can do, at least we who are here. All people who follow the way
of the Prophet and who are sometimes called Salafis, even if
they have different organizations, they should cooperate. At
least these people. They should treat each other as brothers,
they should not exaggerate the differences among them because
the differences might be just organizational, or differences in
certain political issues, or differences among leaders and so
on. These are very minor differences, so we as people who
follow the way of the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam
should do our best to act according to these principles that I
have just explained.
We should treat other people as Muslims, even if they have
deviations, whether deviations in `aqeedah or deviations in
conduct. And we should treat them as Muslims, we should
cooperate with them in matters in which there is an agreement,
we should not alienate them, especially in a country like this.
We should do our best to unite the Muslims and this is something
that we can do as a group. We can do [that], in shaa' Allaah.
And here I would like to mention that there are different kinds
of organizations and this applies to Muslims and non Muslims.
There are people who believe in certain principles, you can call
them "principle people", but they are so rigid that they cannot
cooperate with anyone who does not believe in all their
principles. Usually these people do not have much influence on
the society, they will just be pleased with themselves. They
meet, they say nice words to each other, and they feel that they
are the best people, but they do not have any effect on the
society, because they are so rigid. They cannot cooperate with
others. Now, there is the other extreme, people who have no
principles at all and whose main objective is, say, to gain
power or so. These people unfortunately can have great
influence on the society, but one day they are with this group,
another day they are with another group, one day they say
something, another day they say something different, depending
on experience. Whatever furthers worldly objectives, they will
follow that.
Now, there is something in between and these are the people who
can make a good influence on the society, in shaa' Allaah. I
hope you will be among them, people who believe in the truth,
who follow the Qur'aan and Sunnah of the Prophet sallallaahu
`alaihi wa sallam, but who are also flexible. They say this is
the truth, this is the ideal thing, we abide by this, but this
group, judging by this criterion is the nearest one to us, so we
cooperate with them. That group is the second nearest to us and
so on. And they will be ready to cooperate even with non
Muslims, on issues which, judging by our Islamic criteria, are
good things. We cooperate with them. There is a statement by
Ibn ul Qayyim in Zaad ul Ma`aad - I wish I could have it with me
- he says that anyone who asks to be helped - something like
this - anyone who asks to be helped on something which we deem
to be good and with which Allaah will be pleased, if a person
asks to be helped, on an issue like this, then he should be
helped, irrespective of whether he is kaafir, or faasiq, or
mubtadi` or whatever. And I liken this to a person who is
making a building and someone comes and says I will help you, I
will provide you with some bricks. You will not say, "you are a
kaafir, I don't accept your bricks," because I want to build and
he is helping me to build the house. I am building the house of
Islaam, so whoever likes to cooperate in this can. If some
people want to wage a kind of war against drugs and they ask me
to cooperate with them, and it is in my capacity to help, then I
do that. And all the vices that are in the society, because the
further the people go from these vices, the more likely they are
to accept the truth of Islaam.
The person who is always drunk, the person who indulges in zinaa
all the time, is further from the truth than the one who is
sober, who is morally upright, even if he is a kaafir. He is
nearer to fitra, nearer to his true human nature and therefore
he is more likely to accept Islaam than a person who indulges in
these vices.
Also, one thing we should avoid, and I'm telling you here from
experience, and I heard brother Zarabozo saying this, I came
only in the last fifteen minutes... Don't be partisan. There is
a difference between working in a group and making a political
party. Especially in your situation, especially at this stage,
especially in this country, don't change your Islamic
organizations into political parties. In fact one of the
complaints that I had against our Islamic organizations in the
Muslim world was that they were changed into political parties
and in fact the worst of the political parties. Not the parties
in the democratic countries, but the parties in the communist
countries. Perhaps many of you might not know, but in a
communist party if the leaders agree on something... there is
what they call the central democracy... 20 or 30 people would
come to discuss - they are free to discuss - then they vote and
whatever opinion is accepted by the party by counting votes, say
by 12 to 8, then that becomes part of the ideology of the
communist party. If you oppose the decision of this committee,
then you will be opposing communism and therefore you will not
be tolerated. If you are fortunate you will be expelled,
otherwise something else will happen to you.
Many Islamic organizations adopted the same thing, the leaders
would come and discuss and make a standpoint, issue a statement
on a certain political issue. All members who belong to that
Islamic organization will be bound by that statement and they
would be expected to defend whatever is written in that
statement irrespective of whether they agree or not.
I told many leaders whom I met that this is not Islamic. In
Islaam you should not defend something in which you don't
believe. And I used to tell my brothers in the Sudan that the
most I can do is just to keep silent, but I cannot go and say "I
believe in so and so", and my heart tells me "you are a liar,
you are a liar, you are a liar." I cannot do this, because
this religion is based on honesty, you cannot tell me to be
Islamic and dishonest at the same time. So you should avoid
this. And it is because of this that differences instead of
becoming individual differences became group differences.
Suppose that there are two Islamic political parties. This is a
party and this is a party and there is an issue they want to do
discuss. The leaders of this group meet and they say our
decision is X. And suppose that they allowed all the people to
vote and the voting was, say, 60 to 40. So you adopt this
position X. These other people adopted the other position,
again by 60 to 40, position Y. Now, this whole group will be
against this group, but if you left it to the individuals, then
the 40 here would be with the 60 here and the 40 here would be
with the 60 here and the difference would not be one group
against another group, but some individuals against other
individuals. So you should avoid this. And that does not apply
to political matters only, even in matters of ijtihaad, minor
matters of `ibaadah - and when I say minor I don't want to say
unimportant or, as some people say, trivial. No, there is
nothing trivial in the religion, Allaah does not send his
Prophet to busy himself with trivial things. Even the cutting
of nails is not a trivial thing. But, of course, it is minor,
compared with salaah, or siyaam or other matters. So we should
not, especially in matters of ijtihaad, we should not quarrel,
we should give room to brothers to express their opinions, to
differ. We agree only on the main principles.
If we know a brother always violates these principles, he always
goes against something which he knows to be in the Sunnah of the
Prophet and this has been explained to him very clearly several
times and he goes against this and on another occasion he goes
against another hadeeth, then we say you are not one of us, you
do not belong to our group, because you have now violated a
principle. But if he makes a mistake and he follows an `aalim
in his wrong ijtihaad in any matter, we don't expel him from our
community, we do not say, "you are not Salafi". We should have
as an ideal, as I said, the community of the Companions of the
Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
American Muslims find strength, comfort in unity at conference
American Muslims find strength, comfort in unity at conference
By James Janega and Jennifer Vigil
Tribune Staff Writers
September 5, 1999
Thousands of the Islamic faithful--clerics, scholars, celebrities and ordinary individuals who crossed continents and oceans to heed calls to prayer and community--met at McCormick Place on Saturday for the annual conference of the Islamic Society of North America.
"This is a great context for us to get together for Allah's sake," said Yusuf Islam, the former British pop singer Cat Stevens, who converted to Islam in 1977, changed his name and left show business.
Aside from calls to prayer, Yusuf Islam's comments, which came during a program titled "One God, One Humanity," commanded the largest audience of the day Saturday.
As an imam softly intoned passages from the Koran, hundreds of Muslims at a time filed silently into the room, the verses echoing and tumbling around them in the cavernous exhibition hall at the lakefront convention center.
Outside the hall, hundreds more stood in small groups, speaking languages native to parts of Africa, the Arabian peninsula, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Children chased each other around registration booths as old acquaintances rekindled friendships and young people introduced themselves.
As many as 30,000 people were expected to attend the four-day event, which runs through Monday.
"Everybody comes here for their own reasons, but mainly for the unity of it all," said 19-year-old Ahsan, a computer science major at the University of California at Berkeley.
Members of an egalitarian religion unlike many Christian sects in that it has no institutional hierarchy, the North American Muslims had a unique opportunity to listen to and learn from Islamic scholars. Interpretations and modern-day applications of various verses in the Koran could be found in dozens of lectures and among scores of videotapes in nearby meeting rooms and exhibition halls.
But the most common reason for attending appeared to be the camaraderie of being among fellow Muslims.
"Because you're living as a minority in a community, this acts as a focal point," said Ausaf Faruqi, 43, a resident of London and managing editor of the Muslim news magazine Impact International. "Together, there is a sense of belonging, a faith system, a value system."
That theme of inclusion also was extended Saturday to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
At a news conference Saturday afternoon, ISNA President Muzammil Siddiqui said the theology of mainstream Islam "is to have good relations with all humanity, regardless of religion, color or gender."
Yet in the past, the Nation of Islam's teachings have equated being white with being evil, a stance some critics have called racist.
But recently, there have been signs Farrakhan is positioning the Nation of Islam to become more acceptable to the larger Islamic community, ISNA Secretary General Sayyid M. Syeed said.
Some of those changes, Syeed said, include observing Ramadan, a monthlong period of worship and fasting, at the same time as other Muslims, and including a Friday day of prayer in the doctrine.
Delegates from the Nation of Islam and other Islamic groups have been meeting recently, Syeed said. Farrakhan, he added, has assured the delegates that "he will make transitions in his beliefs that will be more complementary to traditional Islamic teaching."
Leaders of the weekend conference also were mindful that many Americans' only exposure to Islam is through media reports on Farrakhan's organization or on tensions in the Mideast and Eastern Europe.
They expressed hope that through the conference and other, similar meetings, they would reach non-Muslims and make Islamic holidays as familiar to the general public as such Christian and Jewish holy days as Easter and Yom Kippur.
"We believe the time will come very soon, with the beginning of the new millennium, when news readers will be saying, `Today is Ramadan, Day One,' " Syeed said. "This is the kind of discipline we need in America."
But another kind of discipline is demanded for Muslim youth, said professional basketball player Tariq Abdul-Wahad of the Orlando Magic, who attended the conference to coach children's sports camps. Abdul-Wahad began attending the event a year ago, two years after he converted to Islam in college.
"Now, today, we are dealing with American Muslims," said Abdul-Wahad, 23. "The Muslim youth of America went to American schools, and they're the ones who are going to take Islam to the next level."
But to do so, young people must resist the temptations of a society in which there are what Yusuf Islam called "uncontrollable freedoms." This anything-goes mentality stands in stark contrast to Islamic rules and laws, he said.
Young people could be seen striding through the convention center Saturday, wearing black T-shirts that read "Taking it to the Streets" over street clothes and ethnic garb.
One teenage girl wore a hijaab--a floral-printed scarf of the type worn by most Muslim women--that did not quite cover the logo of her designer-name T-shirt. Other teens wore overcoats or formless dresses called jilbaabs to completely hide their forms.
In a shopping area reminiscent of a Middle Eastern souq, videotaped lectures titled "Debate: Is There Fun in Islam?" and "Strict vs. Moderate" hinted at the diversity among the convention's participants.
Islamic businessmen said the convention offered an unusual opportunity to market their wares to what is typically a disparate population.
Among those doing a brisk business were bookstores, gold and carpet merchants, and even a company catering to Muslim insurance needs.
Tribune religion writer Steve Kloehn contributed to this report.
By James Janega and Jennifer Vigil
Tribune Staff Writers
September 5, 1999
Thousands of the Islamic faithful--clerics, scholars, celebrities and ordinary individuals who crossed continents and oceans to heed calls to prayer and community--met at McCormick Place on Saturday for the annual conference of the Islamic Society of North America.
"This is a great context for us to get together for Allah's sake," said Yusuf Islam, the former British pop singer Cat Stevens, who converted to Islam in 1977, changed his name and left show business.
Aside from calls to prayer, Yusuf Islam's comments, which came during a program titled "One God, One Humanity," commanded the largest audience of the day Saturday.
As an imam softly intoned passages from the Koran, hundreds of Muslims at a time filed silently into the room, the verses echoing and tumbling around them in the cavernous exhibition hall at the lakefront convention center.
Outside the hall, hundreds more stood in small groups, speaking languages native to parts of Africa, the Arabian peninsula, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Children chased each other around registration booths as old acquaintances rekindled friendships and young people introduced themselves.
As many as 30,000 people were expected to attend the four-day event, which runs through Monday.
"Everybody comes here for their own reasons, but mainly for the unity of it all," said 19-year-old Ahsan, a computer science major at the University of California at Berkeley.
Members of an egalitarian religion unlike many Christian sects in that it has no institutional hierarchy, the North American Muslims had a unique opportunity to listen to and learn from Islamic scholars. Interpretations and modern-day applications of various verses in the Koran could be found in dozens of lectures and among scores of videotapes in nearby meeting rooms and exhibition halls.
But the most common reason for attending appeared to be the camaraderie of being among fellow Muslims.
"Because you're living as a minority in a community, this acts as a focal point," said Ausaf Faruqi, 43, a resident of London and managing editor of the Muslim news magazine Impact International. "Together, there is a sense of belonging, a faith system, a value system."
That theme of inclusion also was extended Saturday to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
At a news conference Saturday afternoon, ISNA President Muzammil Siddiqui said the theology of mainstream Islam "is to have good relations with all humanity, regardless of religion, color or gender."
Yet in the past, the Nation of Islam's teachings have equated being white with being evil, a stance some critics have called racist.
But recently, there have been signs Farrakhan is positioning the Nation of Islam to become more acceptable to the larger Islamic community, ISNA Secretary General Sayyid M. Syeed said.
Some of those changes, Syeed said, include observing Ramadan, a monthlong period of worship and fasting, at the same time as other Muslims, and including a Friday day of prayer in the doctrine.
Delegates from the Nation of Islam and other Islamic groups have been meeting recently, Syeed said. Farrakhan, he added, has assured the delegates that "he will make transitions in his beliefs that will be more complementary to traditional Islamic teaching."
Leaders of the weekend conference also were mindful that many Americans' only exposure to Islam is through media reports on Farrakhan's organization or on tensions in the Mideast and Eastern Europe.
They expressed hope that through the conference and other, similar meetings, they would reach non-Muslims and make Islamic holidays as familiar to the general public as such Christian and Jewish holy days as Easter and Yom Kippur.
"We believe the time will come very soon, with the beginning of the new millennium, when news readers will be saying, `Today is Ramadan, Day One,' " Syeed said. "This is the kind of discipline we need in America."
But another kind of discipline is demanded for Muslim youth, said professional basketball player Tariq Abdul-Wahad of the Orlando Magic, who attended the conference to coach children's sports camps. Abdul-Wahad began attending the event a year ago, two years after he converted to Islam in college.
"Now, today, we are dealing with American Muslims," said Abdul-Wahad, 23. "The Muslim youth of America went to American schools, and they're the ones who are going to take Islam to the next level."
But to do so, young people must resist the temptations of a society in which there are what Yusuf Islam called "uncontrollable freedoms." This anything-goes mentality stands in stark contrast to Islamic rules and laws, he said.
Young people could be seen striding through the convention center Saturday, wearing black T-shirts that read "Taking it to the Streets" over street clothes and ethnic garb.
One teenage girl wore a hijaab--a floral-printed scarf of the type worn by most Muslim women--that did not quite cover the logo of her designer-name T-shirt. Other teens wore overcoats or formless dresses called jilbaabs to completely hide their forms.
In a shopping area reminiscent of a Middle Eastern souq, videotaped lectures titled "Debate: Is There Fun in Islam?" and "Strict vs. Moderate" hinted at the diversity among the convention's participants.
Islamic businessmen said the convention offered an unusual opportunity to market their wares to what is typically a disparate population.
Among those doing a brisk business were bookstores, gold and carpet merchants, and even a company catering to Muslim insurance needs.
Tribune religion writer Steve Kloehn contributed to this report.
The Muslim mainstream
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.
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.
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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