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‘Crucible for Islam’
As American Muslims meld cultural influences, a ‘pure essence’ of
religion is emerging
Bill Tammeus
The Kansas City Star
Reproduced with permission of The Kansas City Star. ©Copyright 2004 The
Kansas City Star.
FALLS CHURCH, Virginia - The Islam that American Muslims are fashioning can be seen at daily noon prayers here at Dar al-Hijra, the largest mosque in the Washington, D.C. area. It’s a remarkable and hopeful sign.
A crowd of nearly 100 men (women were in a balcony area half a floor above) gathered one recent Thursday. A young California native with Sudanese roots knelt near a man born in Chicago of Palestinian parents. In turn, that man was close to an older man who had moved to the United States from Egypt. They and the others were led by Mufti Mohammed Alhanooti, who came to the United States from Iraq. (For regular Friday services, the mosque usually attracts 3,000 people of similarly diverse backgrounds.)
“America has become the crucible for Islam,” says Johari Abdul-Malik, an imam (leader) at this mosque. “The crucible is a thing into which you put some elements and then you place it in the fire so you remove all of the impurities, leaving just the pure essence.”
When Pakistani, Saudi, Egyptian or Indonesian Muslims come to America, Abdul-Malik says, they bring with them habits and practices – such as dress, food and family dynamics – that are cultural but not necessarily Islamic. In the United States, as Muslims from some 80 countries literally rub shoulders at daily prayer, many of those cultural add-ons get discarded.
“If people are looking for the Islamic reformation,” Abdul-Malik says, “it’s happening in America, but we’re living through it” and are too involved to see the big picture.
That is the fascinating context in which American Muslims find themselves as they become the subject of growing interest – and, in some cases, worry – to non-Muslim citizens after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Muslims in America are still struggling to cope with the awkward, often uncomfortable, experience of feeling called to defend their ancient religion because it was the faith the terrorists cited to justify their evil actions. Since then, American Muslims have experienced an odd mixture of prejudice and friendship, ethnic profiling and healthy curiosity.
Even today, says Emily Smith, who converted to Islam 20 years ago and worships at Dar al-Hijra, American Muslims “feel very insecure.”
“Sept. 11 has made it clear for Muslim Americans,” says Sulayman S. Nyang, chairman of African studies at Howard University in Washington, “that they can’t give up their American identity for Islamic solidarity.”
Still, Abdul-Malik, who serves as Muslim chaplain at Howard, makes a strong case that the experience of Muslims here is helping rejuvenate and reinvigorate Islam. This is happening as Muslims seek common religious ground and modify cultural practices specific to their native countries.
“What you see Muslims doing often has very little relevance to Islam,” says Sharifa Alkhateeb, founder and interim president of the North American Council for Muslim Women. “A majority of Muslims have no idea whether what they do is in harmony with the Qur’an because they don’t take time to study the Qur’an.”
There are some clear divisions among American Muslims, but their broad diversity is, with one annual exception, unique in the Islamic world.
“The only place where Islam has the same diversity as in American,” Abdul-Malik says, “would be at Mecca during the time of hajj (or annual pilgrimage),” as Muslims from around the world gather there.
Abdul-Malik and others think that if American Muslims can help mold this purified, deculturized, more open version of Islam, they can, in turn, introduce it to Muslim-majority nations, including those in which Islamic militants have gained considerable popular support. The result, he says, could be a “new era, not only for America but for the world.”
That would be an enticing goal. In such an era, Muslims would live according to Islamic teachings but maintain peaceful relations with people of other – or no – faiths.
Evidence that this “pure essence” Islam is emerging in America, says Abdul-Malik, is that Muslims around the world now “are seeing a body of (Islamic) scholarship coming out of America that is challenging cultural norms.”
Nyang says Muslims in America “have come to recognize that in the United States pluralism is a reality. And if they are going to live in this society they have to negotiate with American cultural pluralism.” Indeed, many already are doing this well.
Islam’s presence on this continent can be traced back to the early 1300’s, according to author, Amir Nashia Ali Muhammad in his book, Muslims in America: Seven Centuries of History. He and some other historians say evidence suggests a few African Muslims arrived in the Gulf of Mexico then to explore the interior of what is now the United States.
Later, slavery dragged African Muslims to this country, and some managed to keep their religion. But most of today’s American Muslim population has a much shorter history here.
“The Muslim community is very young in America, very young,” Nyang says. And, Emily Smith adds, it is “very diverse, multiethnic, very complicated.”
Muslims in America continue to emerge from four streams. Agha Saeed, who teaches communications at California State University at Hayward and is founder and national chairman of the American Muslim Alliance, describes them this way: African-Americans, most of whom are converts; immigrants from the Middle East, mostly Arabs (though most Arab-Americans are Christian, not Muslim); immigrants from such south Asian countries as India and Pakistan; and “everybody else.”
“These streams are coming together to crystallize and coalesce into a new identity,” says Saeed, buttressing Abdul-Malik’s belief that America is a crucible for Islam.
It is impossible to offer reliable numbers (geographic) but most estimates say African-Americans make up from one-third to nearly half of all Muslims in America. Many trace their spiritual journey through the Nation of Islam movement that Elijah Muhammad led from the mid-1930s until the mid-1970s. It had Islamic elements but was not recognized as authentically Muslim.
In 1975, his son, W.D. Mohammed, decided to divorce the movement from his father’s controversial black separatist teachings and join mainstream Sunni Islam. Mohammed continues to lead what is called the Muslim American Society, though Louis Farrakhan leads a small splinter group, not recognized as fully Islamic, that still calls itself the Nation of Islam.
Most Muslims who worship at Dar al-Hijra in suburban Falls Church have recent immigration roots. By contrast, Muslims attached to Masjid (mosque) Muhammad on Fourth Street Northwest, in Washington are predominantly African-American. Indeed, that mosque was a nation of Islam center for many years.
Imam Earl Abdulmalik Mohammed of Masjid Muhammad acknowledges that the relationship between African-American and immigrant Muslims “is not where it should be.” But, he says, “there are signs of progress.”
As Muslims in America sort through these and other divisions, they appear to be shaping a version of Islam that, because of its open, tolerant character, can serve as a rebuke and alternative to the militant extremists who have shaken the Islam world to its core and caused Muslims and non-Muslims alike unimaginable grief. It’s a development all of us should cheer.
