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How Islam, Muslims Fare in US
George W. Bush, former president of the United States, gave a speech six days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks where he spoke against harassment of Arabs and Muslims in the US, and about the need for his fellow-Americans to respect Islam. He even quoted from the Qur’an when he referred to the fate that awaited the terrorists who had sponsored the carnage. “Evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil,” he said.
All well and good, except he added — in an unscripted aside, one imagines — that the United States would “conduct a crusade” against those terrorists. That was clearly an unfortunate comment to make, not only because the term “crusade” has a profoundly negative connotion in the Arab people’s historical consciousness, but because he was giving his speech at the Islamic Center and Mosque in Washington, one of the oldest and most honored Muslim houses of worship in the country, where almost 6,000 people pray every Friday.
Since its appearance in the city, the center has had a few rollicking bumps, including an encounter in 1977 with hostage-taking gunmen who occupied it and threatened the lives of worshippers who just happened to be on its premises at the time, and in 1980 with picketers outside its doors determined to have their choice of nominees for the mosque’s board of directors appointed forthwith.
First, a word about Islam in the United States. The initial wave of Muslims to arrive in the US arrived from Africa on slave ships, representing roughly 15 percent of the entire slave population who worked the plantations in antebellum America. Plantation owners — effectively slave masters who “owned” their slaves and could trade them as a rancher would trade his cattle — not only made it impossible for the Muslim slaves to practice Islam, wear traditional Muslim attire or keep their Muslim names, but they made sure that these slaves were forcibly converted to Christianity. Still, incredibly, a small enclave of blacks on the Georgia coast managed, albeit secretly, to “keep the faith” until the early part of the 20th century.
Then came the Great Migration of roughly six million black folk from the rural south to the urban northeast, roughly between 1810 and 1970, where, “free at last,” many rediscovered Islam — and thus emerged the movement that later came to be known as the Black Nation of Islam, the overwhelming majority of whose members went on in later years to embrace mainstream Islam, from Malcolm X to Muhammad Ali, and from Karim Abdul Jabbar to Keith Allison (member of the US House of Representatives). By reverting back to their religious roots, African American Muslims thus restored the archetypal culture destroyed during the era of slavery. The revival, however, is still, in a way, a work-in-progress. The first wave of Muslim immigrants to arrive in the US from Arab countries, between the late 1870s and the mid-1920s, came from the Levant, or modern-day Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, followed in the 1950’s and beyond by yet another wave, ongoing as we speak, from Africa, South Asia, Egypt and the Far East. Estimates as to how many Muslims live in the US vary, but according to the non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies, the figure is between three and four million. Other expert sources put the figure at between four and seven. (It’s a mystery as to why no one in the US, the nation that invented the discipline of demographics, seems to agree on the exact size of the Muslim population in the country.)
Whatever the exact figure may be, Muslim Americans — irrespective of their race, for in Islam the color of your skin is irrelevant — have already etched their presence on society. There are today well over 2,000 Islamic centers around the country. The state of New York alone, for example, has 257 mosques. The first mosque ever built on US soil was in 1930, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
But by far the most elaborate mosque ever built in America is the Islamic Center in the nation’s capital, located on Massachusetts Avenue (known engagingly by Washingtonians as Mass Av), the city’s premier address, where embassies and diplomatic missions, along with think tanks and social clubs, proliferate.
How the Islamic Center, which is a mosque and a cultural redoubt, was conceived goes back to 1944, when Muhammed Abu Al-Hawa, a Muslim from a long-established Palestinian American family, approached Muslim diplomats in Washington about establishing a foundation that would solicit funds to “to build the first mosque in the American capital.”
Two years later, ground was broken on the project. The mosque was completed in 1954, and dedicated by President Eisenhower on June 28, 1957 — and went on to establish its reputation as the most esteemed Islamic house of worship not just in America but in the entire Western Hemisphere.
And maybe that is why its seizure in 1977 by 12 heavily armed African American gunmen was all the more shocking. The gunmen, who identified themselves as Hanafi Muslims, were led by a man who called himself Hamas Abdul Khalis.
The seizure was part of a three-point assault on three buildings that, along with the Islamic Center, included the Jewish community’s B’nai B’rith International Center and the District Building, which housed the chambers of the mayor and the City Council. Though the siege may not have been as dreadful as the that of the Grand Mosque in Makkah in December 1979, it was quite horrible, for it resulted, in addition to paralyzing the city for three days, in the killing of a young African American reporter (an intern for a local radio station) and the injury of dozens, among whom was DC Council member, and later mayor of Washington, Marion Barry.
There were more travails to come the center’s way. In 1980, Iranian Americans, still fired up by the revolutionary zeal playing out in the old country, for days on end picketed the mosque, protesting that their favored nominees for the board of directors were “deliberately” excluded. That, in effect, shut down the center — and there was nothing the authorities could do about it. The Iranians were exercising their First Amendment right of free assembly and free speech.
If you were a columnist then, and you had gone to Mass Av to look for material for a column, but couldn’t take all the vociferous sloganeering from the picketers, then you would’ve walked away, a few blocks east of the Av, to sit on a bench in the Khalil Jubran Memorial Garden (at times referred to as The Khalil Jubran Meditation Garden) under a sculpture of the most influential Arab American in the US, whose work, suffused with the values of the West and the romance of the East, has inspired millions over the years. You would’ve sat next to that bronze dove, depicting a bird just about to fly from a water sprout. And imagine what would come a generation, maybe two or three generations, from now. Yes, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans are here to stay. They live in a country that calls itself a nation of nations. And these folks have a significant role to play in that nation’s future.
Jamal Doumani
Arab News