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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette - August 15, 2005
Little Rock imam:
American Muslims can be a moderating
force in the wider Muslim world
BY HEATHER WECSLER
Out of the more than 6,000 verses in the Koran, only seven or eight mention fighting, said a Muslim spiritual leader.
Aquil Hamidullah, the imam of Little Rock’s Islamic Center for Human Excellence, believes American Muslims can play a role in ending the religious extremism that led to last month’s bombings in London and Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt. "Some clerics put all their emphasis on those passages, as if the Koran were a manual for war," he said.
Most of the Muslim holy book urges charity and faith. Those are the verses American Muslims can embody, Hamidullah said, and the ones Islamist militants ignore all too often. His mosque is affiliated with the ministry of W. Deen Mohammed, a wholly American Muslim movement that broke away from the Nation of Islam in the 1970s to embrace traditional Islam and its teachings of racial equality.
Hamidullah isn’t alone in his optimism. On July 28, the Fiqh Council of North America, an advisory committee on Islamic law, issued an edict — or fatwa — against terrorism and religious extremism. Since then, more than 170 North American Muslim organizations and mosques have endorsed the statement, including W. Deen Mohammed’s ministry and another Arkansas mosque, the Islamic Center of Little Rock.
Many American Muslim groups and mosques individually condemned terrorism after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. But this recent edict presents a united front to counter the perception that most Muslims condone terrorism. "Some will probably see this and just say we’re the infidels in America," Hamidullah said. "But one day, one of the old muftis [interpreters of Islamic law] will see we’re right, and the next time he makes a statement, it will have shades of this."
The edict says Islam forbids "all acts of terrorism targeting civilians." It also exhorts Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement authorities to protect civilians’ lives. The edict cites Koran verses that condemn violence, such as verse 5:32: "Whoever kills a person [unjustly]... it is as though he has killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind."
Islam Mossaad, the imam of the Islamic Center of Little Rock, hopes the edict will help bolster international dialogue between the United States and Muslims abroad seeking greater political participation. "There are plenty of dictators in the Muslim world who oppress people and bring out extreme feelings," he said. "Obviously, you can’t have a dialogue with someone who’s going to blow himself up. But you can have dialogue with someone who has legitimate concerns."
A first-generation American who grew up in Texas, Mossaad believes American Muslims can be a moderating force in the wider Muslim world. Many of those who attend his mosque are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and they often visit relatives abroad.
When he visits family in Egypt, Mossaad said he challenges negative stereotypes of his homeland. "I’m able to tell people Jerry Springer is not America," he said. Many Muslims in the United States see no contradiction between being true to their country and their faith. After all, some of their families have lived in this country for generations.
Historians believe Muslims likely first arrived on North American shores in the 1600s as slaves from West Africa, and many of today’s black Muslims, including Aquil Hamidullah, can claim Muslim slaves as ancestors.
Also about 77,000 Muslims freely immigrated to the United States between 1820 and 1965, said researcher and author Mohamed Nimer. The oldest uninterrupted communal presence of Muslims in the United States is a mosque in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, established by a Lebanese family in 1925.
Nimer charted Muslim immigration trends in his book The North American Muslim Resource Guide: Muslim Community Life in the United States and Canada (Routledge, 2002). He is also research director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group based in Washington, D. C.
After the United States expanded its immigration policy in 1965, the number of Muslim immigrants grew exponentially. Most came from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — not the Middle East.
Today, there are about 1,500 mosques in the United States. But because mosques don’t keep membership rolls and Muslim women can opt to worship exclusively at home, no one can say exactly how many Muslims live in the United States. Nimer and other researchers estimate that American Muslims number between 5 and 6 million, including immigrants and native-born believers. "Observing the faith does not carry with it a particular set of political opinions," Nimer said. "A lot of people believe if you observe the faith, you are a fundamentalist and in sympathy with fundamentalists. But there is a lot of diversity in political views."
Still, he added, the vast majority of American Muslims — regardless of their views on U.S. foreign policy or American pop culture — don’t see terrorists as part of their community…….
http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg&storyid=125002
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