Islamic Horizons July/August 2015

JULY/AUGUST 2015/1436 | $4.00 | WWW.ISNA.NET

RECLAIMING THE SEERAH | PLURALISM IN ISLAM | ISLAMOPHOBIA IN INDIA

IS OUR ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY BEING MET?

Are Muslims realizing their potential as stewards of the planet?

CONTENTS

VOL. 44 NO. 4 JULY/AUGUST 2015 visit isna online at: WWW.ISNA.NET

COVER STORY 30 Is Our Environmental Responsibility Being Met? 32 A Muslim Initiative 33 Going Green For Ramadan?

35 The Green House of God

30 MUSLIM PILGRIMAGE

23 The First Time I Saw the Kaaba 24 A Quick and Handy Hajj Guide

ISLAM IN AMERICA

26 Reclaiming the Seerah

MUSLIMS IN ACTION

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36 Inspiring Muslim Mompreneurs

POLITICS AND SOCIETY

40 Pluralism in Islam — Between Scripture and Praxis 43 Muslims and the American Story 45 Interfaith Engagement 47 49 54 56 57

MUSLIMS ABROAD

The Challenged Minority Empowering Muslim Indians Muslims in India Since Early Years of Islam Islamophobia in India They are humans. Period.

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OBITUARIES

10 Mohammed Ali al-Hanooti 55 Syed Shamshad Husain

6 8 12 59 60

50 ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

DEPARTMENTS Editorial ISNA Matters Community Matters New Releases Food for the Spirit

DESIGN & LAYOUT BY: Gamal Abdelaziz, A-Ztype Copyeditor: Madihah Krishnamurthy. The views expressed in Islamic Horizons are not necessarily the views of its editors nor of the Islamic Society of North America.

Islamic Horizons does not accept unsolicitated articles or submissions. All references to the Quran made are from The Holy Quran: Text, Translation and Commentary, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Amana, Brentwood, MD.

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EDITORIAL

Taking Note of Our Heritage

T

he title of a 1966 comedy film, “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?,” often loosely used in conversations, aptly applies to humanity’s struggle to reclaim the world: what have we done to make the world as green again as the Creator gave it to us.

It is heartening to note that many are trying to do their bit. On assigned days of the week, one can see recycling containers outsides homes, and places of worship. Islamic centers are adding to the movement by not only acting themselves, but also educating their congregations and communities.

This year, Earth Day, observed on April 22, was part of a week of organized observances and activities globally known as Earth Week. Earth Day is a formal recognition, reaffirmation, and celebration of our role as human beings as khalifatul ardh — caretakers of the earth. This also emphasizes our natural role in the universe is to take responsibility for the rest of creation by fulfilling God’s will.

Earth Day usually is celebrated with outdoor performances, where individuals or groups perform acts of service to earth, such as planting trees, picking up roadside trash, conducting various programs for recycling and conservation, and using recyclable containers for snacks and lunches. Some people are encouraged to sign petitions calling for stronger or immediate action by governments to stop global warming and to reverse environmental destruction. Television stations frequently air programs dealing with environmental issues.

First Lady Michelle Obama has encouraged home gardening to help reduce the stress caused by corporate farming. Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) said: “Never does a Muslim plant a tree, but that they earn the reward of charity (sadaqah) because what is eaten from it; and

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likewise what is stolen from it, what the wild beasts eat out of it, what the birds eat out of it, and what people take from it (including its shade) is charity (sadaqah) for them” (Sahîh Muslim).

However, is consuming organically grown foods and recycling all we need?

The fact is we live in a universe and we share this universe with all: the quality of air in uranium-bombed Gaza cannot help but affect the quality of air being breathed elsewhere..

Muslim Americans are taking greater interest in their civic responsibilities, not just by registering to vote, but also voting, and wherever possible, running for public office. But much more needs to be done. It is not enough to quickly check the preferred candidates’ names, but also important to scroll down and check the votes on various issues, such as investing in war-related bonds, building drains, or allowing a gambling or liquor license. Numbers do not matter.

Muslim Americans must go on record to support what is right and oppose what is wrong.

All of us have a responsibility to ourselves and to our future generations — and not all of us were born or raised somewhere else where we can return.

We cannot absolve ourselves of our responsibility. Simply taking care to eat organic kale or organic poultry alone cannot protect and save the earth. Apart from the the many genuine reasons, there is also need to take a positive stand against all violence because effluence from bombs doesn’t need a visa to travel.

It affects all inhabitants of our world, including our organic vegetables.

On the authority of Abu Sa’id alKhudri, it is reported that Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) said, “This world is green and sweet. God has put you in charge of it (as His khalifa [vicegerent]) so be careful how you behave and treat it…”

(Sahîh Muslim).

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

PUBLISHER The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) PRE SID ENT Azhar Azeez SECRE TA RY GENER A L Hazem Bata EDITO R Omer Bin Abdullah EDITO RIA L A S SISTA NT Aisha Kishta EDITO RIA L BOA RD Sohaib Sultan (Chair), Julie Belz, Iqbal Unus, Ingrid Mattson, Hazem Bata, Edgar Hopida.

ISL A MIC H O RIZO NS is a bimonthly publication of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) P.O. Box 38 • Plainfield, IN 46168‑0038 Copyright @2015 All rights reserved Reproduction, in whole or in part, of this material in mechanical or electronic form without written permission is strictly prohibited.

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ISNA MATTERS SHARIA GUARANTEES HUMAN RIGHTS ISNA joined the Fiqh Council of North America, the Islamic Center of Passaic County (ICPC), New Jersey, and the New Brunswick Islamic Center in hosting the seminar on “Understanding Sharia: Sacred Principles for Human Development” May 2 at ICPC, which focused on sharia objectives, and how they empower individuals and societies in realizing their potential.

Sharia guarantees human rights and freedom by preserving life, religious freedom, family, property and human intellect. These inalienable, God-given rights that no one can usurp or curtail are to be utilized to achieve constant and continuous human progress.

The developmental process, which begins at the family level, permeates society at large as the familial practices of mutual love, compassion, respect, caring and sharing are projected onto the greater human family, the creatures of the One and Only God. In letter and spirit, the sharia is geared toward realizing human, material, and spiritual welfare. In Islam, every act can be sacred, if done with proper perspective and in conformity with established guidelines.

Sharia, which is flexible, has constants and variables. Its constants include the overarching principles: divine Unity, human equality, fairness, morality. But the variables do change with

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changing circumstances and situations. The greater part of the sharia is variable and responds to change and progress. The Islamic tradition has established methodologies and institutions to regulate change and guarantee continuity and homogeneity.

The speakers dealt with modern issues, such as status of marriage and divorce through the American civil courts, women sitting on or leading mosque governing boards, religious extremism, radical atheism, religious intolerance, Islamophobia, gay marriages and homosexuality. They emphasized the need for credible individuals and institutions to steer the progress without compromising the faith’s essence. The interactive seminar offered opportunities to ask questions and interact with ISNA and Fiqh Council leadership. The seminar dispelled stereotypes that Islamic sharia is static and not relevant to modern times.

Ebrahim Moosa, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Kroc Institute for International Studies, delivered the keynote speech on “The Ethical Meanings of Sharia Today.” Other speakers included, ISNA President Azhar Azeez, ICPC President Omar Awad, former ISNA president and Fiqh Council Chairman Muzammil Siddiqi, Fiqh Council member Zainab Alwani, Ihsan Bagby of the ISNA Green Masjid Project, Saffet Abid Catovic,co-founder of Green Muslims of New Jersey and GreenFaith Fellow, Sufia Azmat, Dalia Fahmy, Zulfiqar Ali Shah, Fatima Hozien, Asad Ba-Yunus, and Sami Catovic.

Mohammad Qatanani, resident imam of ICPC and Fiqh Council member, was presented with an award.

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ISNA-CANADA PRESIDENT HONORED

SAYYID M. SYEED AMONG 15 PROGRESSIVE FAITH LEADERS

ISNA-Canada president and ISNA Majlis Shura member Syed Imtiaz Ahmad was presented with an award for outstanding service, recognizing him as someone who most impacted the Computer Information Systems department and its students at the Eastern Michigan University (EMU) College of Business’ 50th anniversary celebration banquet April 10.

Ahmad is emeritus professor at EMU, and chairman of the operations management committee, known as the governing board, at the Jahangirabad Institute Technology, India.

Ahmad, who has a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa in Canada, has held several professional positions as head of the electrical engineering department, computer division at the University of Engineering & Technology in Pakistan, professor and head of the department of computer science at the University of Windsor in Canada, dean of engineering at the International Islamic University of Malaysia, and head of the department of computer

Sayyid M. Syeed, national director of the ISNA Office of Interfaith & Community Alliances, was named one of 15 progressive faith leaders and groups to watch in 2015 by the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative (FPPI).

“Syeed’s leadership has been crucial to increasing public awareness and understanding of Islam and Muslim Americans,” FPPI noted. “He has built strong coalitions with interfaith partners to advocate on a range of justice issues, such as ending torture and protecting religious minorities in Arab countries. A naturalized American citizen, Syeed gives a public face to his organization’s vision ‘to be an exemplary and unifying Islamic organization in North America that contributes to the betterment of the Muslim community and society at large.’ Syeed’s visibility, especially his work on interfaith dialogue and multi-faith movements for peace, is needed now more than ever to safeguard religious liberty, tolerance, and acceptance for all Americans.”

Syed Imtiaz Ahmad, left, Eastern Michigan University president Susan Martin, center, and College of Business Dean Michael Tidwell.

information systems at EMU. He has served as ISNA vice president and president, ISNA-Canada vice president and president, and president of the Computer Science Association of Canada, president of the Association of Pakistani Scientists and Engineers, USA, president of Pakistan Canada Association, president of the Windsor Islamic Association, and chairman of ISNA-Canada school board.

He has authored several books, published numerous professional papers and articles on topics in Islam.

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

ISNA GATHERS INTERFAITH & GOVERNMENT LEADERS ISNA Office for Interfaith & Community Alliances hosted the ISNA National Interfaith and Government Forum May 31 in Washington, D.C., bringing together national interfaith leaders, government representatives, and ISNA and Muslim community leaders.

Speakers included ISNA President Azhar Azeez, ISNA Vice President Altaf Hussain, His Eminence Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, archbishop emeritus of Washington (Roman Catholic Church), Rizwan Jaka, ISNA board member, chairman of the Interfaith/Government Committee and board chairman of ADAMS, Osama Idlibi, ISNA East Zone representative, Bob Marro, ADAMS board member and government relations chairman.

The Interfaith Collaborative panel heard from Rabbi Gerry Serotta, executive director of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, Nanak Lahori, secretary of the Association of United Hindu Jain Temples, Imam Mohamed Magid, ADAMS executive religious director and a former ISNA president, ISNA Secretary General Hazem Bata, Sayyid M. Syeed, national director of the ISNA Office for Interfaith & Community Alliances, Rabbi Batya Steinlauf of the Jewish Community Relations Council and chair of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington.

Bata moderated the session.

The Government Initiatives, moderated

by Nadia Hassan, Government and Interfaith Relations coordinator at ISNA Office for Inter-

ISNA joined faith leaders in calling upon President Barack Obama May 15 to urge a halt to lethal drone strikes, accountability for past strikes, and a negotiated agreement holding the international community to the same standards.

“The U.S. practice of utilizing unmanned aircraft for targeted killings is contrary to shared values, which guide us, our faith communities, and most Americans,” per a letter signed by Sayyid M. Syeed, national director of the ISNA Office for Interfaith & Community Alliances, Christian denominations, and Jewish and Sikh faith leaders, copied to members of the House and Senate.

The letter continued, “Our concerns center first on the thousands of deaths, both intended and unintended, that have resulted from lethal drones technology. Despite the prevailing notion that drones are precise, the recent tragedy involving the death of a U.S. citizen demonstrates this is not the case. Indeed, such tragedies seem to happen frequently. Because the U.S. government rarely acknowledges its drone strikes or reports the intended and unintended deaths, our best knowledge of victims come from non-governmental organizations and journalists. The estimates of widespread casualties are devastating and morally unacceptable to us.

“Additionally, the deprivation of due process to citizen targets and the Administration’s unaccountable creation and control of a secret ‘kill list’ are alarming to us, and counter to our notions of human dignity, participatory processes, and rule of law,” the faith leaders wrote.

Another cause of concern “is the secrecy and lack of accountability that surrounds these targeted drone strikes. The power to decide who will live and who will die has become lodged squarely in the Administration’s hands with the wide-ranging 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. With that

unchecked power, the Administration has secretly selected targets and conducted strikes without publicly disclosing these activities, explaining their basis of legality, reporting who was killed, or if unintended victims were compensated. This unaccountability prevents the public and their elected representatives from having the ability to meaningfully oppose the policies or fully understand what is being done in our name.”

Their final concern is “our firm belief that drone strikes do not make us safer, but instead lead to perpetual destructive conflict and extremism. Rather than simply taking the place of human bodies in a conflict, drones actually expand conflict by taking us into combat where we otherwise would not go. They enable reliance on warfare as the first resort.

“This ever-growing warfare has increased fear in communities, aided recruitment of extremist groups and failed to eradicate terror or bring about security. Effectively combatting extremism requires nonviolent, creative strategies, including sustainable humanitarian and development assistance, and policies and programs that address the political, economic and social exclusion that fuel radicalization.

Several organizations, many of them religious, are pursuing such strategies around the world.

These efforts deserve more attention and support, but resources instead are consumed by the endless drones war.”

Sayyid M. Syeed, national director of the ISNA Office for Interfaith & Community Alliances, addressed a media call with faithbased leaders and World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim in Washington D.C., April 9.

“The Quran tells us very clearly that God invested human beings with a sensibility, and our Prophet warned and said, this dignity could be lost, human beings could lose that kind of self-respect and that kind of divine spark,

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

faith & Community Alliances, heard from Julie Belz, ISNA board member, Rabbi Jack Moline, executive director of Interfaith Alliance, the Rev. Jim Winkler, president of the National Council of Churches, Mythili Lee Bachu, chairwoman of the Council of Hindu Temples of North America, and Muhammad Abdul Rahim of Masjid Muhammad.

The Government Session was addressed

by Rumana Ahmed, advisor to the assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor, Jonathan Smith, senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Arsalan Suleman, acting U.S. envoy to OIC, Ken Bedell, senior advisor for Faith-Based & Neighborhood Partnerships Center, and Rashad Hussain, U.S. special envoy and coordinator for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications.

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if they are inflicted with poverty. That’s why poverty is an enemy of religion, spirituality and human sanity,” Syeed said.

Syeed is on the executive committee of the World’s Religion for Peace.

“So, we believe it is critical for us to explore all the possibilities and the potential. God has given us a potential today that we can eradicate poverty. It is possible. And when that has risen, the realm of (the) possible, then we want to mobilize people of all faith, people of all backgrounds, and help them to play a historical role in implementing this agenda that we have created, that The World Bank has created,” he said. ISNA also endorsed this statement.

Nadia Hassan, government and interfaith relations coordinator at ISNA Office for Interfaith & Community Alliances, spoke on the “Preserving Religious Freedom in the U.S. and Beyond” panel April 21, sponsored by the University of Maryland Office of Multicultural Involvement & Community Advocacy, Memorial Chapel, Catholic Student Center and the Hoff Grant.

Hoff Grant serves University of Maryland registered student organizations, administrative and academic departments coordinating events and programs specifically held in the Hoff Theater.

“Our forefathers were able to witness and observe what didn’t work in Europe,”she said.

“And they came here and were able to develop laws that worked to benefit of everyone.

“I’m proud to call myself an American, to be a citizen of a country that awards all of its citizens the freedom to practice their faith and the freedom to not practice any faith. Many other people in different parts of the world don’t have those freedoms,” said Hassan, who shared the stage with Virginia Loo Faris, the foreign policy advisor for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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ISNA MATTERS

NORTH TEXAS CELEBRATES ISNA

More than 350 people attended a May 9 ISNA banquet in Dallas. For the past 14 years, the Dallas-Fort Worth Muslim community has been hosting ISNA regional conferences and banquets.

This year, ISNA held two specialized events, including a matrimonial luncheon attended by more than 125 people.

ISNA Majlis ash-Shura member Zia ul Haq, imam at the Islamic Center of Irving, gave a spiritual talk at the luncheon. He is a founding member and board member of the North Texas Islamic Council, an umbrella organization representing Islamic organizations in North Texas, and also an instructor at Bayyinah Academy in Irving, Texas.

The celebration banquet was held later that evening under the theme, “American Muslims: Civic Responsibility and Active Engagement.”

Renowned Qari Mohammed Abdullah Khan began the event with recitation of the Quran followed by the Pledge of Allegiance led by 9-year-old Rania Azeez.

Speakers included Imam Siraj Wahaj and Jamal Badawi, former professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who gave the keynote address.

ISNA President Azhar Azeez, a long-time resident of the Dallas Muslim community, encouraged the audience to invest in ISNA. The highlight of the evening was the community service recognition award given to Moujahed Bakach, a long-time spiritual, community and interfaith leader. A special video was shown highlighting his lifelong accomplishments. Currently director of the Mediation Institute of North Texas, Bakach has served as imam of the Islamic Association of Tarrant County, and was founder of al-Hedayah Academy school, Fort Worth (1992). Nasheed artist Raef Hagag gave a performance at both events.

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ISNA SUPPORTS HUMANITARIAN AID ADVOCACY ISNA participated in a CEO advocacy day on humanitarian and poverty-focused foreign assistance on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., March 25. This was a crucial time for budget and appropriations decisions, especially about the amount of funds the State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee will have for its accounts, including the accounts prioritized by the Interfaith Working Group on Foreign Assistance.

Participants included Sayyid M. Syeed, national director of the ISNA Office for Interfaith & Community Alliances, the Rev. John L. McCullough, president and CEO of Church World Service, the Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, Bishop Peter Weaver, executive secretary of the Council of Bishops, United Methodist Church, Martin Shupack, Church World Service, on behalf of the Interfaith Working Group on Foreign Assistance, and Garrett Grigsby, executive director of the Christian Connections for International Health.

Faith leaders argued the total portion of U.S. aid, in terms of food and health care given to the world, is less than one percent of our annual budget and attempts to reduce it further will have negative repercussions for the country. They did not single out any particular amendment, however, Kentucky Republican Senator Ron Paul’s amendment was not approved.

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OBITUARY

Mohammed Ali al-Hanooti A Scholar of Islam 1937 – 2015

M

ohammed al-Hanooti, who was born in Haifa, Palestine, during the British occupation, learned sharia from his father, Sheikh Ali Hanooti, and at AlAzhar, he studied hadith with Sheikh Muhammad Said Azzawi from 1953-58.

Al-Hanooti, who obtained a master’s degree in Islamic law from Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, was affiliated with several prominent Islamic organizations in the United States and in the Middle East. He acted as a mufti and legal advisor in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, and also held the following positions: 2001-02, imam of Islamic Center of Capital District, Albany, New York; 19992001, mufti and fiqh scholar, research and counseling, Islam on Line; 1995-99, imam of Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center of Northern Virginia; 1990-95, imam of Islamic Center of Passaic; and 1978-90, director of Islamic Center of Jersey City, New Jersey.

In 1978, he became a member of the ISNA Fiqh Committee; 1965-78, he served as imam of Friday prayer in Kuwait; 1962-65, he was a member of Sharia Scholars of Baghdad, Iraq. After the occupation of Palestine, al-Hanooti’s family was forced into exile. They immigrated to Iraq in 1948. Eventually, he settled in Kuwait, where he worked as an English teacher and an Islamic preacher. He moved to the United States in 1978.

Al-Hanooti served for two years as the first president of the Islamic Association for Palestine. He had decades of experience in marriage and family counseling. He also conducted the “Ask the Mutfi” sessions at Darul Hijra. He continued to serve the community, deliver sermons, and teach his weekly lessons to the end. In 2005, he issued a fatwa against terrorism, and against the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“The people who attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and hijacked the fourth plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, are criminals who deserve the severest punishment the Quran elaborates.

They are murderers and terrorists,” he wrote.

In his “The Ruling on Apostasy,” al-Hanooti wrote: “In conclusion, the Quran is the definitive, clear authority for protecting the rights of an individual in expressing himself in faith and supersedes any of the distorted interpretations of the hadiths in question. Executing a person because of conversion to another faith contradicts the Quran, the ultimate source of sharia.”

Council on American-Islamic Relations National Executive Director Nihad Awad said al-Hanooti “was a mentor to many leaders in our community.”

Imam Mohamed Magid of All-Dulles Area Muslim Society and a former ISNA president, described al-Hanooti a father figure to many imams.

Al-Hanooti is survived by his wife, Iman, sons, Muthanna, Tariq, Ziad, Ali, Isa; daughters, Bushra, Suhaila, Tasneem and Shaimaa.

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

COMMUNITY MATTERS The University of California Los Angeles Anderson School of Management recognized its aluma Lonnie Ali (MBA 1986), vice chairman of The Muhammad Ali Center Board, with its 2015 John E. Anderson Distinguished Alumni Award.

After her marriage in 1986, Ali assumed responsibility for the coordination and eventual management of Muhammad Ali’s business affairs. In 1992, she incorporated Greatest of All Time, Inc., (G.O.A.T. Inc.) to commercially license his intellectual properties. She served as its vice president and treasurer until the company’s sale in 2006.

Ali partnered with her husband on many humanitarian initiatives worldwide, and

has supported, accompanied and spoken on his behalf at numerous events for charitable organizations, including UNICEF and Special Olympics.

In 2006, the Alis partnered with Scholastic to develop the Muhammad Ali: GO THE DISTANCE reading program. In 1997, they helped launch the Muhammad Ali Parkinson’s Center (MAPC) in Phoenix.

MAPC is dedicated to the comprehensive care and support of Parkinson patients and their families regardless of their ability to afford treatment or other resources. In 2009, the Muhammad and Lonnie Ali Pavilion was unveiled housing Muhammad Ali Parkinson’s Center at Barrow Neurological Institute. The couple serve as lifetime directors of the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville,

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Peace Award Honors Gülen

NAIT Welcomes New Executives Salah Obeidallah has taken the helm as executive director of the North American Islamic Trust, Inc. (NAIT), succeeding Mujeeb Cheema, a member of the NAIT board of trustees. Obeidallah, among the founders of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, New Jersey, served as its president for 10 years. Obeidallah, who held corporate managerial positions in the engineering and manufacturing sector, also served as the executive director of the Islamic Education Foundation of New Jersey that oversees three Islamic schools.

Azam Nizamuddin, NAIT’s new general counsel and deputy executive director, is a Chicago attorney with 15 years experience in the areas of commercial litigation, employment, not-for-profit and family law. He serves on the Illinois State Bar Association’s Attorney Disciplinary Committee and the editorial board of the DuPage County Bar Association Journal. He also has been serving as president of the Muslim Bar Association of Illinois, and leads interfaith efforts for the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, the Niagara Foundation, and the Islamic Foundation.

Both officials have a long history of community work and leadership roles in local mosques, Islamic schools, and civic organizations.

Cheema, who served as NAIT’s executive director since 2003, also was chairman of NAIT’s board during 2005-06, and its secretary since 2007. Since 2003, Cheema also has been secretary of Iman Fund, a mutual fund that meets Islamic principles. Previously, he held various positions with Hawkins group of energy-related companies in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from 1980 to 2003.

NAIT is a waqf, the historical Islamic equivalent of an American trust or endowment, serving Muslims in the United States and their institutions since 1973. As a waqf, NAIT holds titles to real estate assets of Islamic centers and schools in more than 40 states.

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Kentucky, which they opened in November 2005 and The Ali Center, a multicultural center with an award-winning museum dedicated to Muhammad Ali’s life and legacy.

Her charitable causes include being an advocate for children’s rights and Parkinson’s disease research. She served on the board of directors of the Michael J. Fox Foundation and has been a frequent guest speaker at Parkinson’s disease support groups and research gatherings. From 2010 to 2013, Lonnie served on the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and continues to serve on the Michael J. Fox Foundation Founder’s Council and the Emory Neurosciences Community Advisory Board.

A proud mother and stepmother, she has received numerous awards and recognition for her work.

PHOTO (C) BAYBARS BAKAY

Lonnie Ali Honored

The Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, honored Turkish scholar Fethullah Gülen with its 2015 Gandhi King Ikeda Peace Award April 9 for his “lifelong dedication to promoting peace and human rights.” Past recipients of the award, presented since 2001, include Nobel laureates Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Michael Gorbachev, as well as Rosa Parks.

Alp Aslandoğan, president of the Alliance for Shared Values — an umbrella body for U.S.-based organizations affiliated with the Gülen movement — accepted the award on behalf of Gülen, who was unable to attend due to his medical condition.

“I can only accept this award on behalf of the participants of the Hizmet — which means ‘service’ in Turkish — movement who devoted themselves to serving fellow humans without expecting anything in return,” Gülen said.

Scott Alexander from Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union delivered the keynote address to explain about the Gülen movement. Another honoree was Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Bangladesh’s ambassador to the United Nations, recognized for this work on empowering women. He also is founding member of New York-based Global Movement for The Culture of Peace.

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

Muaddhin Calls Adhan in 50 States in 35 Days

On May 8, Muaddhin Jameel Syed of the ISNA headquarters in Plainfield, IndiAuburn Hills, Michigan, became the first ana, and concluded in his own mosque person in history to call the adhan in all 50 at Maghrib in Rochester Hills, Michigan, states within a record 35 days. The 40-yearon Friday, May 8. His adhan reached the beaches of Disney’s resort in Honolulu, old born and raised in Ann Arbor, a graduate of the University of Michigan, and a marHawaii, all the way to the majestic mounketing executive/business owner, identified tains of Anchorage, Alaska. He interviewed three core objectives to his journey. notable Muslim leaders, including Imam “A Muaddhin has to do what a Muaddhin Jameel Syed (L.) meets with ISNA Siraj Wahaj (Masjid Taqwa), Mohammed does,” he said. “I wanted my adhan to touch Communications Director Edgar Hopida (R.) Zeyara, Dr. Ihsan Bagby (MANA), Rizwan everything in its path. I haven’t left my home, but to praise God’s Jaka (ADAMS Center), and also interviewed two fathers who Messenger, that is worthy of his character. I will bring the best of lost their sons to violence-related hate crimes — Somali AmeriHis speech to America, to the world. His last sermon perfectly can Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein, 15, in Kansas City, Missouri, summarizes 23 years worth of a perfect prophetic mission: human and Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He rights, unity and the oneness of God. Exactly what we need in witnessed and captured the diverse landscape of the Muslim these troubled times. I want Muslims to author their own narra- American community along with all of the positive contributions tives. We won’t play defense anymore. We will open 50 windows they’re making to improve society. across America so that Muslims and people of other faiths and His treasure of photos and footage is being integrated into persuasions around the world can recognize and understand one a documentary for distribution both nationally and internaanother. And, we’ll make history while we do it.” tionally. Its condensed version will be played at the ISNA 2015 Aside from Hajj, this journey of a lifetime was launched from convention where Syed will lead a session about his journey. the Tawheed Center of Farmington Hills, Michigan, where Syed’s He has received requests for speaking engagements about his late father, Salam Syed, passed away in prostration while perform- trip and will begin a nationwide speaking tour after Labor Day, full-day workshops for the adhan and muaddhin, and keynote ing salat right before the Taraweeh prayer in Ramadan 2003.

Syed’s journey began during the Friday prayer April 3 at presentation of his journey.

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PHOTO CREDIT: MOUNDS PARK ACADEMY

Teen Wonder Chooses Harvard

Munira Khalif, 18, the St. Paul, Minnesota, high school student who achieved the rare honor of being accepted by all eight Ivy League schools and three highly accredited colleges, is heading to Harvard where she will study political science.

Khalif said after visiting she was able to envision herself making Harvard University her home for the next four years.

“The best part for me was being able to call family members on the phone and to hear their excitement,” she told KMSP-TV’s Rachel Chazin April 8. “This was truly a blessing from God.” Khalif, born and raised in Minnesota after her parents fled Somalia during the civil war, said she was inspired to work hard

because of the opportunities her family and the U.S. had given her. She was one of nine youngsters in the world to receive the UN Special Envoy for Global Education’s Youth Courage Award for her education activism, which she started when she was just 13 years old. Besides achieving top grades, Khalif has immersed herself in other activities in and out of school — particularly those aimed at social service. She launched a nonprofit group, Lighting the Way, to make education more accessible for East African youth, especially girls, through scholarships, libraries and improving sanitation issues. She also was appointed as A World at School Global Youth Ambassador to promote universal education.

Besides Harvard, Khalif was accepted at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. Khalif also was accepted to Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Minnesota.

“She is composed and she is just articulate all the time,” said Randy Comfort, an upper school director at Mounds Park. “She’s pretty remarkable.”

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Greater Chicago Muslims Appoint Executive Director Tabassum Haleem has joined as executive director of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago (CIOGC) May 13. Her appointment was approved by the CIOGC House of Representatives.

As executive director, Haleem will lead the organization’s efforts in working with member organizations, interfaith partners, civic organizations, elected officials and government agencies to advocate for Muslim community interests, assist the Muslim American community in positive contributions to the country and broader communities, and build coalitions to promote a fair and just society, per a CIOGC announcement. Haleem, a licensed certified public accountant and chartered global management accountant, has held various executive corporate and nonprofit sector positions. She is married to urologist Azeem S. Haleem and has four sons.

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COMMUNITY MATTERS

Ellison Stresses Changing Dynamic of Income Disparity

Minnesota Democrat Rep. Keith Ellison gave the graduation address at Hartford Seminary May 15. He also received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree.

Ellison, who presented diplomas to 64 graduates, talked about the “myth of scarcity” in the United States, that there isn’t enough to go around.

“The people are not just units of production, they are souls, they are spirits,” he said.

“They are made in the image of God.” Raised as Catholic, Ellison converted to Islam and was the first Muslim elected to Congress. He talked about the New Testament story of the loaves and the fishes, and said that among many theories on how the

PHOTO (C) YOUSUF BHUVAD

In an unprecedented show of solidarity and unity, more than 1,000 people of all faiths gathered at the Islamic Center of Central Phoenix (ICCP) June 1 to express their support for the valley Muslims. This gathering was in contrast to the May 30 demonstration of hate and bigotry against Islam and Muslims.

The event called “Love is Stronger than Hate” was sponsored by the Islamic Speakers Bureau of Arizona (ISBA), where participants brought flowers, the symbol of love, and many carried the “Love is Stronger than Hate” banners. Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Sikh faith leaders addressed this emotional congregation, amid the thunderous applause, assuring Muslims of their support in these troubled times. There were tears, hugs, greetings, prayers and reaching out to one another in the spirit of love and brotherhood. All local TV stations and press covered the event. Azra Hussain and her team of interfaith leaders organized this historical and memorable event.

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Burmese Muslims Open Indiana Mosque

Love is Stronger than Hate

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food multiplied was that maybe Jesus’ (alayhi as salaam) disciples underestimated what they had to feed the multitudes.

“What if the world we live in today, there’s actually a lot,” he said. “The United States of America has never been richer than it is at this very moment. What if there’s radical abundance, if we only had a spirit of generosity.”

Ellison also talked about Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam), who was born poor. “My point is that in every tradition the orphan, the widow, the poor have to be blessed in the eyes of the believer.”

So how do we change the dynamic of the income disparity that has grown exponentially in the last few decades?

“You’ve got to believe that something good can happen. We’ve got to get out of our narrow confines,” he told the graduates and their families. “What you supply to the equation is the faith.”

“Faith says God has big plans, no matter what day of the week you pray on,” he said.

“People like me, politicians, we will listen, and let me tell you why: Politicians see the light when they feel the heat. … I want the faith communities to tell me — ‘this is what we expect of you.’”

Ahmed Elhattab, executive director of the ISNA Islamic Development Foundation, joined more than 2,000 women, men and children who came from across the country to celebrate the opening of the Phase One of Masjid Noor ul-Islam in Fort Wayne, Indiana, May 24.

Ye Win Latt, a spokesman for the local Burmese community, said the facility cost about $1.1 million. The dedication ceremony brought out Muslim leaders, Mayor Tom Henry and Fort Wayne Police Chief Garry Hamilton.

Tariq Akbar, president of the Universal Education Foundation of Fort Wayne, said the Islamic Center offers English language classes, but Burmese immigrants are only a part of about 20 nations represented in the local Muslim community. Of the estimated 7,000 to 8,000 Burmese immigrants in Fort Wayne, about 2,000 are Muslim.

Muslim and Christian Burmese have been oppressed in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

COMMUNITY MATTERS

NEWS BRIEFS The Arizona Muslim Voice, a Phoenix area publication for 20 years, was unanimously voted as member by the Arizona Newspapers Association May 14.

In March 2015, its ownership came under Wafa Unus, who serves as its owner/publisher and is assisted by a small team of writers, photographers, columnists and editors.

Unus, who started a media consulting and publishing business earlier this year, is pursuing a doctoral degree at Arizona State University.

“The previous owner was looking for someone dedicated to quality content that told the stories of the local Muslim community in Arizona, and after a few conversations regarding other ventures entirely, he took interest in my dedication to quality, knowledge-based journalism,” Unus said.

“Not many people consider purchasing a newspaper to be a wise investment in this day and age and it certainly wasn’t on my radar at this point in my career, but it seemed an opportunity too valuable to pass up. As a lifelong student of journalism and a professional in the field, I have a special love for local news.”

“It is my hope that The Arizona Muslim Voice will not only serve the local Muslim community in Arizona, but that it will serve as a learning lab for young journalists,” she said.

Under the management, the paper does not print religious content and doesn’t represent any particular religious views. Its goal is completing a new website to better serve its readership. The newspaper is in tabloid format and distributed via newsstands but will be starting a subscription service in the coming year.

Muslim leaders of St. Louis, home to more than 100,000 Muslims attending roughly 18 Islamic centers with nearly a dozen Muslim organizations, have created the Muslim Council of Greater St. Louis (MCGS) to foster greater unity and sharing of resources.

In a climate of growing fear of Muslims, MCGS will be a united voice against rising Islamophobia.

“We are proud to be a part of this historic effort,” CAIR-St. Louis Executive Director Faizan Syed said. “By bringing all of these leaders under one roof we are now on the journey of developing region-wide coopera16

tion, organize citywide events, and have a united voice to tackle current challenges.”

The All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center in Sterling, Virginia, hosted the Muslim Christian Coalition (MCC) inaugural dinner and fundraiser May 1.

“The Muslim community must stand up for Christians and minorities in the Middle East. Religious freedom is a top priority for us all,” said Imam Mohamed Magid, executive religious director at ADAMS and a former ISNA president who was the keynote speaker.

MCC, a movement of Muslims, Christians and people of other faiths defending Christians and religious minorities in the Arab world, is an initiative of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation (HCEF).

It brings together Christian and Muslim voices against the violence, discrimination and persecution in the Middle East, especially in Iraq, Egypt and Syria.

“Our gift to the world as Muslims is not just raising money for those in need, but providing a model of tolerance, respect, and care for all people,” said Sayyid M. Syeed, national director of the ISNA Interfaith and Government Office, speaking at the dinner.

“We build upon the glorious tradition of the Holy Quran for human rights and religious freedom. What we [Muslims and Christians] have in common tells us that it is not the force of arms, but the force of love — for God and neighbor — that is the greatest witness to God himself in a world of growing unbelief.”

Speakers included: the Rev. Drew Christiansen, distinguished professor of ethics and global human development, Georgetown University, co-founder and board member of HCEF; the Rev. David Renwick, senior pastor, The National Presbyterian Church; Stephen Corbin, former Special Olympics senior vice president of community impact and support, Living Faith Lutheran Church Elder; the Rev. Avelino Gonzalez, director of the Office for Ecumenism and Interfaith Affairs for the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and pastor of St. Gabriel’s Catholic

Church; Reem Shamoon, Iraqi Chaldean Christian and student of government and international relations at George Mason University; Syed Moktadir, president of the ADAMS Center and vice chairman of MCC; and Rizwan Jaka, ADAMS board chairman and ISNA board member, who acted as master of ceremonies.

The New York City-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) welcomed Azzad Asset Management as the first Islamic financial firm to its shareholder coalition April 9.

As the premier member organization focused on corporate social responsibility and environmental advocacy, ICCR leverages the influence of its shareowner members to enact change. The two organizations expressed optimism about the opportunities of this collaboration.

“We are pleased to count Azzad Asset Management among the ranks of our members and look forward to partnering with them to advance the cause of conscientious capitalism for the benefit of all members of society,” said ICCR Executive Director Laura Berry.

Azzad is investment advisor to the Azzad Funds and sponsor of the Azzad Ethical Wrap Program.

Ottawa resident Safaa Fouda was awarded the Mayor’s City Builder Award for her volunteer work in bringing Canadians, new immigrants, and faith groups together.

Mayor Jim Watson and Beacon HillCyrville Ward Councillor Tim Tierney presented the award to Fouda April 29.

Fouda is a pioneering female engineer who moved to Canada from Egypt in 1969 and holds a doctorate in chemical engineering. She retired in 2005 as deputy general manager for the CANMET Energy Technology Centre, Natural Resources Canada.

She has volunteered in a broad range of advisory committees with various federal government departments, and served as a

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

consultant on Islam for the police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Fouda, an interfaith advocate, has worked to help immigrants integrate into and serve their new community, and to promote shared respect and common values.

The Mayor’s City Builder Award recognizes those who, through outstanding volunteerism or exemplary action, demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to making Ottawa a better place today and for the future.

After she retired, Fouda became actively involved in philanthropic and community work especially in helping vulnerable communities and in cross-cultural bridge building, peace-building, Muslim/non-Muslim relations and supporting human relief.

She has received several recognitions, including the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and Ontario’s “Leading Women Building Communities” award.

AHEAD OF HER TIME: Saheela Ibraheem, a Piscataway, New Jersey, resident graduated from Harvard at age 20, reported the Harvard Gazette, May 27. Ibraheem joined Harvard at age 16 after being accepted by 14 colleges, six of them Ivy League institutions.

She took tough courses and was a teaching fellow for Harvard’s largest class.

Ibraheem, who majored in neurobiology and computer science, aims for a career in academia.

At 16, she was named among “The World’s 50 Smartest Teenagers,” and earlier this year was invited to the White House, where she introduced President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at a reception to kick off Black History Month. “She’s like the State Department and the National Institutes of Health all rolled into one,” Obama said.

“Young people like this inspire our future.”

At Harvard, Ibraheem was a member of the Harvard Islamic Society and worked with the Science Club for Girls, which provides after-school mentoring at the Amigos School in Cambridge, and Dreamporte, which uses

3D technology to teach geography and world culture to foster children.

Ibraheem’s father is a quantitative analyst for a New York bank, and her mother is an accountant. She has three younger brothers, two of whom are in their first year at Yale University and Dartmouth College.

Mercer University, in partnership with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Georgia (CBF/GA), dedicated its new interfaith prayer garden on the Cecil B. Day Graduate and Professional Campus in Atlanta May 14.

The lead gift was made by Aziz Dhanani, CEO of Premier Petroleum Inc., who has significantly contributed to the Atlanta area through his involvement with the local Muslim community and his philanthropic endeavors. The garden was dedicated in memory of his parents, Zehrakhanu and Allauddin Dhanani. CBF/GA received contributions from about 40 donors representing various religious faiths and walks of life.

Participants in the dedication ceremony included, Plemon El-Amin, imam emeritus of the Atlanta Masjid of Al Islam.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) recognized the contributions of Linda Sarsour with its 2015 Hala Salaam Maksoud Leadership Award during a June 13 dinner gala at its 35th anniversary National Convention in Washington, D.C. The annual award is given in honor of the late former ADC president and community leader.

Sarsour, a Palestinian Muslim American and a self-proclaimed “pure New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn,” is a racial justice and civil rights activist and mother of three. She is the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York and senior strategist for the Campaign to Take on Hate. In the wake of the killing of Mike Brown, she co-founded Muslims for Ferguson to build solidarity amongst Muslim American communities and encourage work

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

against police brutality. She is a member of the Justice League NYC, a leading force of activists, formerly incarcerated individuals, and artists working to reform the New York Police Department and criminal justice system. Sarsour co-chaired the March 2 Justice walk, a 250-mile journey to deliver a package to end racial profiling, demilitarize police and demand the government invest in young people and communities. This year, Sarsour joined leading social justice faith leaders as a Senior Fellow at Auburn Seminary. She has received numerous awards and honors, including “Champion of Change” from the White House, the New York City Council’s Shirley Chisholm Women of Distinction Award, and received the inaugural American Muslim of the Year honor from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Kennesaw City, Georgia, Mayor Mark Mathews, three of the five city council members and Police Chief Bill Westenberger joined the inaugural ceremony of the Suffa Dawat Center. The center, located 20 miles northwest of Atlanta, is using a temporary location until it is able to construct more permanent offices, according to an April 10 report in The Marietta Daily Journal.

Initially, the community was denied a permit for the mosque, but later council members relented when confronted with action from the U.S. Department of Justice under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The proposal was unanimously approved, reversing an earlier 4-1 decision to deny early last December.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) presented the Excellence in Advocacy Award to Mustafa Abdullah of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU-MO) at its annual Civil Rights Luncheon June 12, as part of the 35th anniversary ADC National Convention in Washington, D.C. Abdullah, a program associate in ACLU’s St. Louis Office, was recognized for his strong commitment to civil engagement through advocacy, interfaith work, and community organizing. He is co-founder of Muslims for Ferguson, an organization of Muslim Americans who are committed to seeking justice for Michael Brown and supporting relevant campaigns in Ferguson.

When law enforcement cracked down on protesters in Ferguson last summer following Brown’s death, Abdullah organized 17

COMMUNITY MATTERS the Muslim community to act in solidarity with the issues facing the African American community there. The ACLU-MO works daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person by the Constitution and laws of the United States.

Hala Tyree, Ismat Shafiqullah, and Rania Kanawati were elected to the Islamic Center of Tucson’s seven-member board of trustees. While women have often served on the center’s executive committee and board of education, this is the first time that center has elected women to the top positions.

Tyree, 55, also serves as secretary on the center’s school board. Kanawati, 43, who teaches Arabic at the Al-Huda Islamic School, is chairwoman of the school board.

Shafiqullah, 71, has been serving behindthe-scenes at the center since her husband became one of the founding members of the mosque in the early 1970s.

About 30 people were nominated for the 3-year positions. Board members must be members of the Islamic Center, receive at least two nominations from other members and accept their nomination. The center leadership is looking to expand.

Abdelhafid Djemil was elected April 15 as president of Majlis Ash-Shura, the Islamic Leadership Council of New York City. He is an adjunct professor at the Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, Queens, New York City.

“It is the plan of Allah Subahanahu Wa Ta’ala that we gather from different places and diverse ethnicities in New York to work together,” Djemil wrote in a letter to the community. “Each of us has a role in the betterment of the society, and each is to fulfill that role. I am committed to work with every one of you for the purpose of advancing the interest of the community. Our community has to be secure, respected, and at the table for important matters involving our city, our state and our country. My duty is to work with you to unify and strengthen our voice and direct the efforts toward higher levels of achievement. We need to build stronger work relationships with friends and allies, and keep an ongoing dialogue with all parties with whom we share common interests and concerns. We are determined to eliminate divisive actions and misrepresentation, defend the integrity and the rights of the community, and fight Islamophobia 18

and bigotry.” The Majlis Ash-Shura is New York City’s oldest umbrella organization of mosques, founded in 1989, and comprises a diverse membership of mosques, organizations, and institutions.

The Al-Hidaya Center, Latham, New York, was inaugurated May 10 with an open house event that included the Capital region civic and religious leaders.

It took 25 years of planning and fundraising to build the mosque, which can accommodate more than 800 congregants, has two minarets, a large central dome, a large skylight, marble floors and ornate wooden elements imported from Turkey.

The wooden doors are made up of 99 floating sections, the number, which symbolizes the 99 names/attributes of God. Mosque officials said the building was financed by donors with no mortgages or loans, in keeping with Islamic rules.

The Islamic Society of Edmond, Oklahoma, received unanimous approval from the city council May 11 to start construction of a fellowship hall next to the mosque that was built in 1990. The mosque prayer hall is 680 square feet.

Leaders have been trying for years to build, but the city council turned down the request for a special use permit in June 2012 and December 2013. A permit for the present mosque was approved in a split 3-2 vote on June 25, 1990. In the May 2013 vote, planning commissioners recommended issuance of a permit to allow construction of the twostory, 34-foot-tall building with a 14-foot dome. Under the revised proposal, the addition was reduced from 8,307 square feet to 1,100 square feet and the dome was removed.

The site will have 22 parking spaces. The mosque also has written permission to use 14 parking spaces owned by a church a half block to its south.

Duke University’s Center for Spirituality, Theology & Health (Vol. 4 Issue 10 April 2015) newsletter, Crossroads, reported:

“The inaugural issue of the online journal Muslim World Affairs (muslimworldaffairs. com) appeared last month with articles written by Abdul Basit and colleagues.

Basit, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Muslim Mental Health, is a former director of the Multicultural Mental Health Services in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago.

“This volume of the journal focuses on the issuing of spurious ‘fatwas’ by Muslim clerics and self-proclaimed religious teachers in the Muslim world, sometimes calling on the faithful to undertake ‘Jihad’ to protect and spread Islam (as some radical groups in the Middle East and Africa are now doing),” Crossroads reported. “Dr. Basit responds to these actions in a sensible and moderate manner, and is not afraid to call them what they are. If readers are interested in the views of leading Muslim mental health professionals on current world controversies, this is a great resource.”

Archbishop Dennis M. Schnurr, at right, explains the Coat of Arms of Archbishop Karl J. Alter found in the sanctuary of the Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains to representatives of the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati during an April 15 tour. (Courtesy of The Catholic Telegraph/John Stegeman)

Board members and other volunteers of the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati toured the Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains April 15 with Archbishop Dennis M. Schnurr.

The visit was reciprocal, as Archbishop Schnurr had toured the Islamic Center in 2010, reported The Catholic Telegraph.

The group learned about the cathedral’s history and saw most of the church’s key features, including the iconic mosaic along the wall behind the altar. Archbishop Schnurr and Father James Bramlage, a former rector of the cathedral, answered questions about the Catholic faith, learning more about their respective faith communities.

Inayat Malik, a urologist and past president and emeritus board chair of the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati presented Archbishop Schnurr with a framed copy of a document attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam), granting

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

protection to the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt.

Malik, a member of ISNA Founders Committee, and a prominent area Muslim leader and interfaith activist, is associated with ISNA’s Muslim-Catholic dialogue.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church addresses the church’s relationship with Islam as follows: “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.”

The archdiocese and local Muslim community have long collaborated on pro-life and immigration issues.

Indianapolis endocrinologist Shahid Athar was recognized on May 18 as Indiana’s 2015 Golden Hoosier, the state’s highest honor bestowed upon a senior citizen.

The award, presented at the Statehouse in Indianapolis, is a collaboration between the lieutenant governor’s office and the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration’s Division of Aging to acknowledge unsung heroes who serve other Hoosiers. It is not just one act of community service, but rather a lifetime of community service and commitment to serving others. Athar is an endocrinologist with St. Vincent Medical Group and a clinical associate professor of Indiana University School of Medicine.

“It is individual Hoosiers who make Indiana great, and people like you who are moving our state forward every day,” Republican Lt. Gov. Sue Ellspermann said.

A group of some 30 young Muslim Marylanders participated in the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ first Maryland Muslim Youth Leadership Symposium (#MYLS2015) April 8 in Annapolis.

This familiarized them with the Maryland General Assembly and the legislative process of how legislation is introduced and passed into law.

The group included 10 youth leaders from the Muslim Community Center, and youth from Islamic centers, and from public and private schools: Al Huda School, Islamic Center of Maryland, Dar al Taqwa,

Prince George’s Muslim Association, Islamic Community Center Of Laurel, and ethnic organizations.

The group, led by CAIR Maryland Outreach Manager Zainab Chaudry, and a core group of team leaders and chaperones, toured the state buildings, and heard from speakers who urged them to guide their communities from the margins to the mainstream. The program seeks to provide resources to foster a well-integrated Muslim American identity that flourishes in a pluralistic America.

CAIR has been organizing Muslim Youth Leadership Programs in various states for more than a decade.

Nephrologist Anis Ansari was elected chairman of the Mercy Medical Center in Clinton, Iowa, medicine department for the third time — the election is held every two years. He practices as part of a group comprising 40 physicians with him being the only nephrologist in Clinton.

Ansari has been active in the community with education efforts throughout the year. He has written more than 35 medical articles for community education with the last three being on ebola virus, flu epidemic and depression. In 2013, the International Association of Healthcare Professionals named him among the leading physicians of the world and top nephrologist in Clinton.

Talat Othman, co-founder of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago (CIOGC), was presented with this year’s Interreligious Leadership Award by the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago (CRLMC) on June 11 at its second annual Interreligious Leadership Awards. The awards are a way for CRLMC, which this year marks its 30th anniversary of work and presence in Illinois, to recognize and thank individuals, programs, or organizations that embody CRLMC’s own purpose of promoting religious harmony for the sake of the common good.

Syed E. Hasan, University of Missouri, Kansas City, geosciences professor emeritus, has been awarded a Fulbright award to Qatar by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholar-

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

ship Board. Hasan will teach courses in waste management and environmental geology at Qatar University, and offer seminars at other Middle East universities, during the 2016 spring semester.

“Qatar, with its unique marine and desert ecosystems, needs to implement a waste management strategy that is compatible with its natural environment,” Hasan said.

The Fulbright Program aims to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries, and it is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. The grant is made possible through funds approved annually by the U.S. Congress and, in many cases, through contributions from partner countries and the private sector.

Hasan, who established the UMKC MSA chapter in 1983 and has served as its faculty adviser since then, currently is serving as the chair of the Shawnee Mission Islamic Education Center (SMIEC).

Imam Sayed Moustafa al-Qazwini, head of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County, read the Moment of Solemn Expression that traditionally starts the Costa Mesa City Council meetings, May 5.

During his prayer, al-Qazwini prayed for the city and its surroundings, and reminded officials and those in attendance of the important role of cooperation between all members of the community to provide safety, justice, and prosperity for all.

The nation’s first Franciscan university, St. Bonaventure University, St. Bonaventure, New York, has established a Center for Arab and Islamic Studies seeking to promote an understanding of Arab and Islamic cultures and an appreciation for their historical and contemporary significance in the global community, according to a May 19 news release.

Beginning this fall, the center’s areas of focus are scholarship, on- and off-campus 19

COMMUNITY MATTERS instruction, and community outreach.The center also will foster strong and productive ties with the area’s Muslim community.

“The center is inspired by the historical encounter between Francis of Assisi and the Egyptian Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil in 1219, and seeks to promote an understanding of Arab and Islamic cultures, an appreciation of both their historical and contemporary significance in the global community, and respectful relations between Muslim and Christian people,” said Father Michael Calabria, a member of the university faculty from 2003 until 2012, who will serve as director.

IQRA International Educational Foundation’s CEO Safaa Zarzour attended the first International Conference for Education of Syrian Children hosted by Syrian Education Commission May 1-3 in Istanbul, Turkey. The three-day event drew experts on education from the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Zarzour participated on a panel discussing education systems in developed countries and the experience of Islamic schools in the U.S. and Canada. The conference was organized by The Syrian Education Commission, the leading organization providing education to Syrian children in refugee camps in Turkey and in northern Syria in areas not under the control of the Syrian regime or ISIS. The organizers and participants of the conference were impressed with the level of development of Islamic education in the United States and the leading effort of IQRA in providing quality curriculum and educational leadership for more than three decades.

College Prep School of America in Lombard, among the top schools from Illinois, ranked No. 181 on The Washington Post’s America’s Most Challenging High Schools 2015 list. The school had an average ACT score of 27 and an average SAT score 20

of 1,918. It also boasted a 100 percent, fouryear graduation rate with all of its students moving on to four-year colleges.

The Islamic Foundation School, Villa Park, ranked No. 252 nationally.

The report ranked 2,300 public schools based on their placement tests and graduation rates. The rankings were based on a “Challenge Index,” which is found by taking the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests given at a school each year and dividing that by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June.

The schools are then ranked based on their “Challenge Index” ratios and only those with a ratio of at least 1.00 — meaning they had as many tests as they did graduates — make the national list. Researchers said only 11 percent of the 2,300 U.S. public high schools analyzed reach that standard.

The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) recognized the Majlis Ashura (Islamic Leadership Council) of Metropolitan New York for its outstanding leadership and unification of the Muslim community in Greater New York with the 2015 Leadership Award April 18.

The award was received by Majlis President Abdelahfid Djamil. ICNA also awarded four members of the Majlis for their distinguished and continuous community service, civic engagement and education: Naji Almontarser, board member, his wife Debbbie Almontaser, president of Muslim Consultative Network, and Masum Ali, board member, and his wife S. Shahana Masum, community leader and activist.

Islamic education leader Abdul-Munim Jitmoud, principal at Al-Salam Day School, Ballwin, Missouri, and previously principal at Lexington Universal Academy.

Two years ago, Abdul-Munim lost his wife and author of Muslim literature, Linda Jamilah Kolocotronis Jitmoud. Friends remember Salahuddin as a creative, intelligent and gentle person. Salahuddin, fifth among six brothers, stayed back in Lexington after his father moved back to Missouri. He was pursuing interests in film and art. His instructor Miles Meehan told the Lexington Herald-Leader in an April 21 interview that Jitmoud was a mild-mannered, unassuming young man who “would never hurt a fly.”

“He was just a creator; he wanted to tell good stories. Any death to me is extremely unfortunate. But it seems especially so for someone who was trying to create,” Meehan said. Abdul-Munim Jitmoud, who received his doctorate in 1983, has led and helped establish Islamic schools in Seattle, Kansas City, Bangkok and Milwaukee.

On April 30, ICNA/MAS honored the former Majlis Ashura president Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid with its award for Excellence in Leadership for 2015 at its annual Imams and Community Leaders Dinner. The award was presented to Majlis Ashura’s Executive Director Cheikh Ahmed Mbareck who thanked ICNA on behalf of Imam Talib and the Majlis.

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

ISNA CANADA CONVENTION

My Prophet, My Beloved

BY AISHA RAKIE, ZAYNAB AHDAB, ARSHIA LAKHANI AND SANAA ALI MOHAMMED

T

he 41st annual ISNA Canada Convention held May 15-17 in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, offered Muslims a chance to connect as a community and learn, grow, and love together.

The convention theme, “My Prophet, My Beloved: Know him, Love him, Follow him,” aimed to help Muslims realign their hearts with Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) and his teachings, rooted in justice, mercy, kindness, and above all the love of God and His Messenger. The weekend included inspirational lectures, networking sessions, workshops, a bazaar, food, and a children’s convention.

Two guest khatibs, ISNA President Azhar Azeez and IQRA International Educational Foundation’s CEO Safaa Zarzour, emphasized knowing the Prophet’s purpose in God’s plan for creation, and on emulating his worship.

Calligraphic artwork created by local artist Seher Shahzad greeted attendees in the main hall.

ISNA Canada President Syed Imtiaz Ahmed delivered the opening address and Executive Director Shaykh Abdalla Idris Ali spoke on Muslims’ duty toward the Prophet.

ISNA Vice President Altaf Husain drew attention to the racism common within many North American Muslim communities, which contradicts the prophetic example and requires some soul searching.

To help counteract the misogyny common in mainstream popular culture and many Muslim households, Musleh Khan, imam at the Sakinah Community Center, discussed the Prophet as a reformer of masculinities and attitudes toward women.

Amjad Tarsin, University of Toronto’s first full-time Muslim chaplain, and Altaf Husain conducted a joint session on the sunnah of empathy, emphasizing the importance of extending support and understanding toward neighbours, family members, friends, and fellow citizens.

Daood Butt, a graduate student at the International Islamic University in Malaysia, and a graduate of the Islamic University of Madinah, provided practical examples of expressing love for the Prophet and following in the footsteps of the Tabi’in — the second generation of the carriers of Islam who were the students of the Prophet’s Companions. He gave an emotional reminder about the Prophet’s last sermon and the necessity of being conscientious of the message contained within it.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

Imam Hamid Slimi, imam, resident scholar and founder of Sayeda Khadija Centre, focused on how personal hygiene and health are integral to the faith, as exemplified by the Prophet. Ingrid Mattson, the London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies at Huron University College and a former ISNA president, spoke about the sunnah of solidarity and the amanah of speaking out against and righting injustices done to others around us, while Zarzour talked about the Prophetic tradition of hope and expecting the best from God. Tarsin’s reminder and presentation of the Messenger as a mercy to the worlds concluded the reflections on the Prophet’s life and renewed the level of love and connection to him.

Closing ceremony remarks were given by convention Vice Chair Chihab Kaab, ISNA Canada board member Pervez Nasim, Abdalla Idris Ali, Alaa Elsayed, director of internal and external affairs for Mercy Mission World and director of religious affairs at ISNA Canada, AbdulAziz Rasoul, principal of ISNA High School, Imam Hosam Helal of the Muslim Association of Hamilton, Butt and Tarsin. Speakers and attendees recognized the 250 volunteers who made the event possible. Everyone joined in singing “Tala’ ‘Al Badru ‘Alayna” as they honored Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam). The ceremony ended with fireworks and prayers.

This year’s convention offered American Sign Language interpretation, designated seating areas and full access to wheelchairbound attendees, and attendant care upon request. As part of ISNA Canada’s dedication to sustainability, a tree was planted in honor of every attendee and the event was kept free of water bottles. The program booklet was reduced by half and was printed on recycled paper.

This year also featured a complete children’s convention offering a variety of educational activities and games for children from birth to 10 years old. Children were placed in tribes with Meccan or Medinan origins, given the opportunity to explore Mecca and Medina Hajj rooms, and partook in storytelling sessions and a carnival.

Daily parallel sessions consisted of youth Q&A, open spaces, and a Muslim Cool workshop by Ahmed Saleh. ISNA Canada Compass also hosted practical and beneficial sessions, including a well received entrepreneurship networking session. Abdalla Idris Ali and Muhammad Robert Heft, founder of the P4E Support Group, Inc., presented a workshop on effective dawah. Attendees had the opportunity to meet with speakers and seek counsel and advice from them in a quiet space.

The Islamic Trivia Challenge, a new addition to the convention program and modeled after the popular game show “Jeopardy!,” appealed to all. There was a trivia session scheduled for each day of the convention, with the final round pitting teams of sisters and brothers against one another, and the sisters’ team taking home the prize.

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Aisha Rakie (ISNA Elementary School), Zaynab Ahdab (Islamic Teacher Education Program), Arshia Lakhani (internal outreach coordinator at Sexual Assault Survivors’ Support Line & Leadership) and Sanaa Ali Mohammed (ISNA Compass).

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52 ND ANNUAL ISNA CONVENTION

Strengthening the Muslim American Narrative The theme for ISNA’s 52nd annual Convention highlights challenges facing Muslim Americans today and the need to shape the Muslim community.

BY ISLAMIC HORIZONS STAFF

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his year’s Convention theme, “Stories of Resilience: Strengthening the American Muslim Narrative,” highlights the different challenges facing Muslim Americans today and the need to shape the Muslim community.

Throughout the world, from trials and tribulations of oppressed minorities to the private inner struggles of everyday people, are stories of human resilience to reflect on and from which to learn.

God says, “We do relate unto thee the most beautiful of stories, in that We reveal to thee this (portion of the) Quran: before this, thou too was among those who knew it not” (12:3).

What are stories of resilience? How to best shape and share them? What are some of the lessons Muslims can learn?

The Convention Program Committee (CPC) received more than 200 ideas, and there will be more than 200 speakers. The committee welcomed and accommodated proposals relating to individual and collective experiences, and will interweave subthemes for meaningful discussions in various parallel sessions within the following four tracks: Individual — This track will highlight individuals’ self-development and their role in shaping and strengthening the community.

We are looking for stories which highlight individual growth and perseverance, overcoming spiritual disillusionment, and increasing personal resilience through the proper tools and Islamic understanding.

Family — This track is meant to give Muslim families practical knowledge on how to nurture more loving and harmonious relationships within the home. It also will look at how we repair relationships after conflict or tragedy occurs in our families.

Community/Organizational — This track will feature critical and candid conversations regarding the current state of the Muslim community. Panelists will offer examples on how to develop and present Islam’s spiritual and ethical values through community projects and initiatives. The focus will be on current issues, trends, and projection for future development of the community.

Best practices — This track will feature projects, initiatives, and programs that have a success story related to strengthening our

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narrative. It is meant to highlight successful community organizations/projects that can be expanded, replicated, or borrowed by other communities.

Organizers aim to offer convention attendees the opportunity to learn community building skills, network, create partnerships, exchange ideas and initiatives. They will have the opportunity to meet with scholars, social activists, community organizers and artists.

During the Labor Day weekend event, lectures and seminars will examine historical and current day narratives, and workshops will showcase how best to shape one’s narrative

CONVENTION ORGANIZERS’ AIM IS TO ENSURE ATTENDEES ENJOY THE OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN COMMUNITY BUILDING SKILLS, NETWORK, CREATE PARTNERSHIPS, AND EXCHANGE IDEAS AND INITIATIVES. and other best practices. Parallel sessions have been developed based on proposals received from ISNA members, supporters and the Muslim community.

Speakers include former ISNA presidents, Abdalla Idris Ali (1992-97), Muzammil H. Siddiqi (1997-2001), Ingrid Mattson (2006-10), and Imam Mohamed Magid (2010-14). The speakers’ lineup includes: U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, Tariq Ramadan, Jamal Badawi, Siraj Wahhaj (imam of Masjid Al-Taqwa), John Esposito (Georgetown University), Mokhtar Maghraoui, Altaf Husain (ISNA vice president and former president of MSA-National), Nouman Ali Khan (Bayyinah Institute), Yasmin Mogahed, Ameena Jandali (ING), Abdul Nasir Jangda (Qalam Institute), Yasir Qadhi, Laila Muhammad (Mosque Cares), Hadia Mubarak (first woman president of MSA-National), Zaid Shakir (Zaytuna College), Suhaib Webb, and Mehdi Hasan (a British political and social commentator.)

Basharat Saleem, ISNA director of conventions, marketing and special projects, said the

Convention Steering Committee meetings are led by co-chairs Mir Khan and Asra Ali, and more than 20 subcommittee chairs are prepping for the convention.

“We are expecting more than 300 volunteers to contribute to the convention,” Saleem said. He added, volunteers come from various walks of life, young and old, from a variety of professional backgrounds, and play a critical role in the convention.

“ISNA is thankful to the contributions of all volunteers and is looking forward for their support and engagement with ISNA,” he said.

Saleem said the bazaar, which is an important part of ISNA’s efforts to promote Muslims in commerce, will have more than 500 vendors offering a world of choices from the United States and Canada, and overseas.

The Washington, D.C.-based ISNA Office for Interfaith & Community Alliances will host the Interfaith Unity Banquet at the convention Sunday, award the Interfaith Leader of the Year, and host a breakfast with government representatives and political officials.

The Shoulder-to-Shoulder Campaign, of which ISNA is a founding and sustaining member, will host an Emerging Religious Leaders Seminar for the second year in conjunction with the convention. A cohort of 20 seminary students and other emerging religious leaders, primarily from Christian and Jewish communities, will attend the convention to learn more about Islam, American Muslims, and to develop skills for interreligious leadership in the United States. The seminar’s goal is to prepare participants for leadership within their communities and in interreligious efforts to end anti-Muslim sentiment and promote inclusive models of pluralism in the U.S., said Catherine Orsborn, campaign director for Shoulder-to-Shoulder.

The convention fare includes the Community Service Recognition Luncheon, a young professionals networking forum, art exhibit and photography exhibit, film festival, meet the author panels, qiraat competition for two age groups, fashion show, two matrimonial banquets and a basketball tournament.

The entertainment program will mark the close of events on Sunday. MSA National, and MYNA will hosts their conventions within.

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

MUSLIM PILGRIMAGE

The First Time I Saw the Kaaba New Muslims enjoy an unfathomable experience in their journey of a lifetime

BY KIRAN ANSARI

think from social media feeds, she didn’t find everyone busy taking selfies. There was complete serenity all around, she said.

Due to physical limitations, Brown wasn’t able to perform the stoning ritual herself so she gave her pebbles to a friend. She was fortunate to visit some nearby historical sites and chuckled at the “mountains” she was shown. Having lived in Alaska with mountains thousands of feet high, those in Mecca looked like small hills by comparison, she said.

Her advice to anyone performing Hajj is to not get over tired before the Day of Standing in Arafat, as that is the main thing.

“Preserve your strength or the whole trip can be in vain,” she said.

ONE UMMAH, ONE PURPOSE

Barakah Brooke Alam and her husband.

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uslims born into the faith might have seen pictures of the Kaaba in their homes from a young age.

They might have seen photographs of family members in ihram or attended “Welcome Hajji” parties. Chances are they might even have been for umrah or Hajj as children or reenacted the pilgrimage rites at weekend school at some point in their life.

But how is it for reverts to Islam? For those who may not have ever heard of or seen the holy sites in Mecca and Medina, what are their expectations? What are their preparations and how does it pan out?

FROM HOMEBODY TO HAJJAH Maggie (Khadijah) Brown, 72, from Naperville, Illinois, performed Hajj in 2014, about three years after she embraced Islam. Ever since she converted, she had felt the urge to go for Hajj.

“I am not a world traveler by any means; I am a homebody,” Brown said. “But for the Hajj, I felt this internal push, and as I had the means to go, I made the trip as soon as I could.”

Brown didn’t know a lot about Hajj before-

hand and she didn’t spend hours Googling it either. She had just seen a few pictures that a friend shared and saw some videos, of the umbrellas opening at the Prophet’s mosque in Medina. She was wheelchair-bound for the most part, but considers it a big blessing in the 117-degree Fahrenheit heat. She said the tawaf (circumambulation) was just beautiful and though she got to be about 15 feet away from the Kaaba, she wished she could get closer.

She found Muzdalifah -- where pilgrims arrive after sunset from Arafat on the 9th Dhul Hijjah, the second day of Hajj -- to be an incredible experience as she saw the mountain of Arafat all covered in white. She still can relive the wonderful day spent in complete prayer — and contrary to what people might

Habibe Ali, chief operating officer at ISNA Headquarters in Plainfield, Indiana, converted to Islam in 1973 and performed Hajj in 2000. She and a few other staff members were selected to go on the trip organized by ISNA. Joined by some single women from Chicago, she felt privileged to be a part of the group. Before leaving for the trip, she read several books, watched a few videos and asked around about Hajj.

Their trip started in Medina, which Ali felt was literally, and figuratively a city in a different era. She enjoyed having such a different routine than the entanglements of daily work, and felt a peace to be there for a communal purpose of worship. She felt the ladies area was difficult to navigate and like she was going to be crushed against the wall when the women started pushing one another to get ahead.

Her excitement started building as she was approaching the Kaaba and entered the open courtyard. When she finally saw it, she just wanted to cry. She vividly remembers the bright and sunny day, and how she walked through the mosque before she lay her eyes on the Kaaba.

“I just couldn’t believe, that I was actually there,” she said.

BEFORE SETTING OUT ON THIS JOURNEY, LET GO OF ANY EXCESS BAGGAGE — LITERALLY AND SPIRITUALLY. RECHARGE YOUR BATTERIES; THE STRONGER THE CHARGE, THE CLOSER TO GOD. —JUAN SERRANO, TAMPA, FLORIDA

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

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MUSLIM PILGRIMAGE

A Quick and Handy Hajj Guide

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slamic Horizons magazine invited Ansar Hasan Burney, principal of a Washington, D.C.-based architectural firm, to share the updated version of his chart, “Hajj at a Glance” with its readers. The chart helps develop an overall concept of Hajj in a short period of time. After developing the concept, one could look for details in books written specifically on this subject.

Burney developed the chart in 1983 after his first Hajj.

It first was published in 1984 in The Arab News, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The chart received much praise, motivating the newspaper to republish it the next week. Thereafter, the newspaper published it before Hajj for three years.

The chart was one of the first visual aids in the 1980s that presented the complete process of the Hajj and the sequence of activities that take place during the pilgrimage in a simple bar chart. It provides information on the three different types of Hajj in a concise one-page graphic display.

After its publication in the Arab News and, in an effort

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to assure its credibility and correctness, the chart was sent for review to the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Hajj and Awqaf in 1984. Subsequently, the chart was revised in light of the ministry’s comments.

Since its publication in the Arab News, other English language newspapers published this chart before the Hajj — the Khaleej Times of Dubai published it in 1985, 1986, and 1987, the Dawn in Pakistan published it in 1985, and the Munsif, an Urdu daily newspaper from Hyderabad, India, published it in 1990.

In 1995, the chart also was published in Islamic Horizons and it continued to publish for several years after.

The chart also was requested and published as a poster in 1996 by the bimonthly magazine Muslim Kaleidoscope, the Magazine for Muslim Children published by Amica International of Seattle, and distributed in Saudi Arabia

by Tihama Publications. Burney has since published the chart on the Internet.

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

Tips for your first Hajj Even though there has been much more construction after Ali performed Hajj, she feels one shouldn’t get distracted by the tall buildings towering around the Kaaba. She suggests staying focused on the purpose for which you are there, and everything else will fade away.

Like other hajjis, Ali would gladly go again. While she was able to complete all the rituals herself, Ali said Hajj can become taxing as you age. Though it was March the year she went, it was still around 90 degrees.

Ali said young Muslims who are able to afford Hajj should go the first opportunity they get.

really affected me,” Alam said. “SubhanAllah, it has been nearly 15 years but it feels like I was just there. Hajj made a huge impact on my life and I pray that it was accepted.”

INSPIRED BY IBRAHIM Juan Serrano from Tampa, Florida, performed umrah with a group of 106 people in March 2015 and was so grateful to celebrate his first year as a Muslim at the two Holy Mosques.

Juan Serrano

FEELING THE GRAVITY Brooke Alam from Houston, Texas, learned about Islam in 2007. She converted in 2008, married in 2009 and went for Hajj in 2010.

She went along with her husband and inlaws as part of a large, well-organized group.

Though she was not born into a Muslim home, Alam has one memory of Hajj etched in her mind. When she was about seven years old, Alam remembers seeing some mention of Hajj on the news and asking a family member what was a “pilgrimage.” She remembers seeing people in white clothes draped around them and walking in desert land. That image somehow stuck with her all these years.

“I was very excited and also humbled with the idea of being in the presence of the Kaaba,” Alam said. “I expected it to have a gravity about it. And SubhanAllah it did have a gravity, an intense pull... just a feeling of never wanting to leave and having an intense desire to return.”

When she first laid eyes on it, she cried.

She was surprised by her overwhelming emotions. At that point in time, it just hit her: The absolute miracle of making such monumental changes in her life and decisions that led her to this moment of being in the presence of the Kaaba.

“It is surreal to realize that the place to which we face in prayer so many times in our day … that very place is suddenly right in front of you,” she said.

Making tawaf around the Kaaba was special and she felt that the duas she made at that time were from the depth of her heart.

The sight of Mina like a city made out of tents was overwhelming and Arafat, the pinnacle of the Hajj, also was the pinnacle of her emotions.

“Just to internalize that millions of people are here at the same time for the same purpose

“Before my trip, I came to understand a very essential concept of my belief in Allah,” he said. “In order to be purified from my sins and have a clean slate, I need to walk in the footsteps of the patriarch of the world’s monotheistic religions — Prophet Ibrahim (‘alayhi as salaam). I needed to achieve spiritual purification and it was very moving to realize that I am here to worship Allah at the same place and the same way that Ibrahim worshipped Him.” Once he arrived in Mecca, Serrano could not believe he was standing in front of the Kaaba. It seemed like a dream.

“I did not want to lay eyes on the Kaaba until I was right in front of it,” Serrano said.

“So I held on to a brother in our group, looked down, and told him to let me know when we were there. When I first saw the Kaaba, all I could do was shake and cry.

The first words that came out of my mouth were, ‘Thank you God for permitting me to be here.’ I was drawn to it and did not want to lose a moment from the most beautiful sight I had in front of me.”

He said the highlights of his trip included being fortunate to pray Isha in front of the Black Stone. He did not realize that he was right in front of the Black Stone until he was going into sujood. As soon as it dawned on him, he began to sob.

“During saee, the first time I had to run

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

• Take long, fast paced walks for a month or so before Hajj so you get into the rhythm.

• Be prepared for hot weather. Pack light clothing, dark glasses, and comfortable shoes.

• Always carry a reusable water bottle with a sturdy strap.

• Be patient with the number of people and the mobs that can surround you. Remember everyone is there for the same purpose, so don’t be bothered by the throngs of pilgrims.

• Talk to people who have been for Hajj before you go. They can give you a much better perspective than books and videos.

• Practice your duas and sayings. Even though you can make some duas in English, you feel more in sync to repeat the same words like everyone else, such as Labbaik Allah Humma Labbaik. (Here I am my Lord, Here I am.)

• If you drop something, do not bend to pick it up. You can get trampled.

• Try to brush your teeth with bottled water just as a precaution.

• Read about Hajj as much as possible ahead of time to understand the significance behind every ritual.

• Learn about all the landmarks you can visit so that you make the most of the historical excursions.

• Don’t go on Hajj or Umrah with the mindset of following traditions. Go with the mindset of getting closer to God. • Kiran Ansari is a writer and mother to three children in Elgin, Illinois.

under the green lights from Safa to Marwa, I could feel the struggle Hajar endured in the desert while she was desperately looking for her son’s and her own survival,” he said.

His most memorable moment was the sound of Muslims making sujood. It sounded like thunder as everyone humbles themselves to God at the exact same time.

“Up to this day, I cannot get this sound out of my head and have not heard it anywhere else,” he said.

Finally, he felt a special bond develop between his group companions. Serrano learned from his mother that in Spanish, the word imán means magnet and so our faith must be the magnet that draws us closer to God. He said before setting out on this journey, let go of any excess baggage — literally and spiritually. Recharge your batteries; the stronger the charge, the closer to God. Once fully charged, don’t let your iman battery ever lose the charge or die.

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ISLAM IN AMERICA

Reclaiming the Seerah Are Muslims accessing the treasury of knowledge to internalize the Prophet’s example?

BY MERAJ MOHIUDDIN

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he Battle of Hunayn 630 CE (8 AH) was close, but the Muslims had routed the Hawazin tribe and relocated the captives and spoils to a nearby settlement. Just as the celebration was getting underway, two lone riders slowly made their way to the outlying foothills of Ji’ranah — the place where intending pilgrims take up the Ihram for hajj and umrah.

One of them, Safwan ibn Umayyah, never imagined he would have fought on the side of the Muslims. Just a few weeks before, he was one of only three men who refused to surrender to the army of Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) in Mecca.

As Safwan rode along in silence, he tried to figure out why, after so many years of bitter opposition, the Prophet had granted him four months of amnesty and allowed him to fight alongside his closest Companions.

The truth is, for the past 20 years, Safwan never tried to get to know the Prophet. At each stage of his life, he found every reason to oppose the Prophet. He grew up watching his influential father Umayyah torture the family’s Abyssinian slave, Bilal ibn Rabah, for converting to Islam. After learning that Bilal had killed his father in battle at Badr, Safwan hatched a scheme to assassinate the Prophet. The plan, however, backfired when the assigned assassin — his own cousin, ‘Umayr— ended up embracing the Prophet.

If ‘Umayr’s conversion was a blow to Safwan’s pride, ‘Ikrimah ibn Abi Jahl’s betrayal completely shattered him. ‘Ikrimah, son of the Prophet’s archenemy, like Safwan, grew up with a hatred for the Prophet that coursed through his veins.

As the two riders crested the next hill, Safwan remembered how ‘Ikrimah begged him to visit the Prophet in Medina. But Safwan swore back, “Even if every other man of Quraysh were to follow Muhammad, I would never follow him!”

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The rolling hills and tranquil pastures gave no indication of the contradictions swirling in Safwan’s soul. After 20 years of hostility, why did the Prophet just award him 100 camels from the spoils of Hunayn even when he did not give anything to his closest Companions?

As Safwan descended into the next ravine, he slowed to marvel at the abundance of livestock that had been abandoned by the fleeing Hawazin army.

“Is it pleasing to you?” whispered a voice from his side.

Safwan didn’t know how to respond, but his eyes gave him away.

“It’s yours,” the Prophet smiled, “the valley and everything in it.”

At that moment, the proud Qurayshi felt a sudden tightness in his throat as tears trickled past his trembling lips. Twenty years of fighting, 20 years of pride, and 20 years of denial. The price? Four months amnesty, 100 camels, and a ravine full of livestock?

For the first time in his life, Safwan stopped to look into the Prophet’s deep brown eyes. “I bear witness,” he wept, “I bear witness that no soul could have such goodness as this, if it were not the soul of a Prophet…”

One of the most remarkable features of the Seerah is that each Companion gravitated toward the Prophet along a distinct course, and at some magical moment, were drawn into his circle. If Safwan’s journey represented one end of the spectrum, Salman al-Farisi’s was at the other. Salman was born to a Zoroastrian family near the Persian city of Isfahan. As a young man he converted to Christianity and dedicated his youth to finding an Abrahamic Prophet whose imminent arrival had been foretold by the eastern churches. His search took him from Persia to Syria to Iraq. An unfortunate turn of events found him sold into slavery to a Jewish merchant in Yathrib, but even then, Salman never gave up on his dream of finding the Prophet. Ultimately, fate brought him to the remote valley of Quba where he

embraced the Prophet the moment he laid eyes on him.

The Seerah is as much about the Companions’ journey as it is about the Prophet’s life. Safwan was an insider, who spent 20 years evading the Prophet, while Salman was an outsider who waited 20 years to find him. Regardless of the paths they took, the moment they opened their hearts to the Prophet, their lives were dramatically altered.

Such remarkable phenomenon occurred at every stage of the Prophet’s life. We see it in the benevolence of Halima, the tenderness of Khadijah, allegiance of ‘Ali, the loyalty of Hamzah, the trustworthiness of Abu Bakr, the bravery of Talhah, the wisdom of Umm Salamah, the patience of Ja’far, the humility of ‘Ikrimah, the transformation of ‘Abd Allah ibn Mas’ud, and the selflessness of the Helpers — the Ansar.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

up in the American public school system.

While education was foremost in our house, my siblings and I never attended Sunday school. At that time, Islamic schools, immersion programs, and podcasts were not widely available. My parents raised us with a solid foundation in Quran and Islamic history.

However, as we grew older, most of the books in our house were limited to English transla-

Companion — the most dedicated to help, and the most eager to learn.

By the time I began residency, weekend intensive programs and audio lectures by Muslim American scholars were just starting to blossom. Hamza Yusuf, a young American convert who had studied in Mauritania, was gaining popularity in the West as an American voice of classical Islamic scholarship. I

THE DRAMATIC CULTURAL GAP AND HECTIC PACE OF THE 21ST CENTURY HAS LEFT MANY MUSLIMS DEPRIVED OF AN INTIMATE AND INSPIRING RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PROPHET.

The dramatic cultural gap and hectic pace of the 21st century has left many deprived of an intimate and inspiring relationship with the Prophet. For many, including myself, this has left us feeling disconnected from the Quran. I have seen others moved to tears by its verses, and yet somehow I have always felt a certain distance, separated by the Quran’s language and historical context.

As a non-Arabic speaking Muslim, I felt that the English translations had kept the Book’s true meaning and majesty out of my reach.

My understanding of the story of revelation (also known as the Seerah) was no different. Growing up in suburban America, I encountered a huge gap between my world and seventh century Arabia.

Neither an Islamic scholar, nor an amateur historian, I am the son of immigrants, born and raised in New Jersey and who grew

tions of traditional Urdu and Arabic texts … not the kind of material most teenagers wanted to read.

I was frustrated because my pursuit of the Quran and Seerah had stalled while I continued to excel at advanced coursework in high school and college. Unable to attend a language immersion program in college, I felt as though the prospect of learning Arabic was out of my immediate reach. Meanwhile, I struggled to learn the historical context of the Quran. The Islamic books I read at home were completely different than the textbooks I studied in school. Having learned to use diagrams, tables and glossaries, I was struggling to remember Islamic history from page after page of translated English text. The books felt devotional rather than scholastic. Books on Islam written by Western authors were limited — many lacked academic authority and others were mired in orientalism. What I lacked during those formative years was an efficient study guide of classical texts; something that could present the historical context of the Quran in a format I could study, analyze, memorize, and master.

Life in America doesn’t leave much in the way of free time, and medical school took that to the extreme. Four years later, I was feeling lopsided and restless.

How does a busy professional make the Quran an integral part of his life?

After struggling with this question for years, I imagined what it would be like to be a Companion of the Prophet. After all, his first followers did not read the Quran, but experienced it — rich in context — as it unfolded in front of them. Perhaps, my best chance at understanding the Quran lay in re-living the story of its revelation as the Prophet’s closest

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

purchased a copy of his 24-CD audio collection, “The Life of the Prophet,” and began listening to his lectures while I commuted to work. Rich with authentic narrations and Quranic references, Yusuf provides a classical exposition of Martin Lings’ renowned biography, “Muhammad: His Life based on the Earliest Sources” (2006). As I was listening to the fifth CD, I heard him pause in the middle of his lecture and expose the very problem we Americans having been facing: “This book … a lot of people find it difficult because of the names … it is a problem … and you know what would be really nice? If somebody actually went through the book, wrote down all the names, and then had a glossary of names. You could kind of keep that with you as you read the book. That would be really useful…”

I had been reading Lings’ book at the time and, as Yusuf suggested, started writing down all of the names I encountered: names of people, their ancestors, their parents and their offspring, and various tribes, clans, battles, treaties, and towns. At first, the sheer volume of names, places, and dates left me feeling hopelessly resigned that I would never truly master the material. After all, how does one keep track of 20 men who are all named “‘Abd Allah?” But as the list of names grew, my old habits from medical school reemerged. As a student, I knew how to consolidate multiple sources of information, reduce it to succinct notes and diagrams, organize it into an efficient study guide, and use it to master the original texts.

As I started to get a handle on the basic storyline, a number of questions occurred to me that I simply couldn’t ignore. For example: 27

ISLAM IN AMERICA • Why did young Muhammad feel so disillusioned with Mecca?

• Why did he condone caravan raiding?

• Why did he marry so many women?

• Why did he command his Companions to take captives?

• Why didn’t he stop the execution of the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah?

• Why did he forgive his fiercest opponents?

• Why was he worried, if he knew he would ultimately succeed?

To be sure, I’ve found the most difficult questions were always the most personal: Why does this bother me? Why can’t I come to terms with this?

In my ongoing search for answers, I started investigating several other respected biographies and commentaries about the Prophet’s life. My search led me to authors like Saifur-Rehman Al-Mubarakuri, W. Montgomery Watt, Tariq Ramadan, Hamza Yusuf, Karen Armstrong, Reza Aslan, and Adil Salahi.

What started as a personal study guide

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slowly developed into an extensive examination of the Prophet’s life. Urged by family, friends, and community leaders, I began assembling my research into a professionally edited textbook to share with others. My book, “Revelation: The Story of Muhammad” weaves more than 400 verses from the Quran into an authentic narrative of the Seerah that includes 340 unique commentary points, 90 maps, family trees and diagrams, more than 250 helpful elaborations, and an interactive glossary of more than 400 names. It’s the book I wish I had 20 years ago — something that could finally help me experience the Quran as it unfolded, in a format that I could study, analyze, memorize, and master.

Safwan and Salman’s stories teach us that the Seerah is as much about the journey of the Companions as it is about the Prophet’s life. But why did the Companions gravitate to the Prophet in the first place? What made him so irresistible? That question was put to Zayd ibn Harithah, the adopted son of the Prophet. At an early age, Zayd was kidnapped from his family in northern Arabia

and sold into slavery. His destiny led him to Mecca where, as a 10-year-old boy, he served in Muhammad’s household. Zayd’s father Harithah never gave up looking for his missing child, and after many years apart, learned that Zayd was still alive in Mecca. But when he came to reclaim his son, Zayd refused to leave. When his father asked what made Muhammad so irresistible, Zayd responded that he had a special feeling about this man.

Little did he know that many years later the Prophet would not only entrust him to command the entire Muslim army, but teach him how to raise an exemplary son, Usamah, who would soon outshine his father.

These stories point to one of the timeless truths about the Seerah — people wanted to know the Prophet because of how he touched their lives and inspired them to achieve greatness. And if Safwan’s story is any indication, it’s never too late to begin.

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Meraj Mohiuddin, a Harvard-trained anesthesiologist who practices in Phoenix, is interested in how modern advances in human cognition and social dynamics can deepen our understanding of classical Islamic thought.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

The world we live in is constantly evolving and ISNA is committed to being a positive driver of change. ISNA has long recognized the importance of engaging with other faith communities as a fundamental part of its mission, and therefore, we continuously host and participate in interfaith events, meetings and webinars to educate our friends, partners, officials and activists about Islam.

These interreligious initiatives have helped break down barriers of misunderstanding, formed genuine partnerships of faith and ethics, and established a platform to advocate for social justice issues for the common good.

We aim to work together to fight Islamophobia and share knowledge about the true teachings and understanding of our religion in all sectors.

The gift of education has a ripple effect—it creates change locally, nationally and globally.

Ignorance is our enemy, and with your support we can make a difference.

Please donate to ISNA today.

P.O. Box 808 • Plainfield, Indiana 46168 • (317) 839-8157 • www.isna.net

COVER STORY

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NO LON FUTURE — IT IS A PROBLEM

IS OUR ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY BEING MET? Are Muslims realizing their potential as stewards of the planet?

BY ASMA MAHDI

First Lady Michelle Obama and White House chefs join children from Bancroft and Tubman elementary schools to harvest vegetables during the third annual White House Kitchen Garden fall harvest on the South Lawn, Oct. 5, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy) 30

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

NGER A CONCERN OF THE M WE FACE RIGHT NOW.

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

t’s another hot summer in Mumbai, India. The air is filled with a heaviness that only weighs down against your skin in the way a snug down comforter can keep you warm during cold winter nights. And on your way to Friday prayer, you feel the weight slowly press down as you sense the oncoming torrential downpour of precipitation from the darkened skies above — monsoons. The city, known for its chaat stands, its diverse Indian culture, is instantaneously flushed by floods. Busy streets turn into rivers washing out into the ocean carrying with it gravel, trash, dirt, and sometimes even people.

Meanwhile, in the western part of Uttar Pradesh, India, farmers are still waiting for the monsoons to hit. They have been waiting since 2013.

Severe drought conditions have made the region’s soil infertile for growing crops. Yet, farmers still hold on to hope and have faith, even as wells dry up and food becomes increasingly scarce. The lack of crop irrigation has not only become a financial plague, but also a plague of human survival.

Some may say waves of drought and severe wet weather are natural fluctuations seen historically, that these cycles are normal, and have come and gone throughout the planet’s existence. What is not normal is the intensity. That cannot be denied.

Islam teaches us that to live in balance (mizan) with nature is to be Muslim. To believe in the Oneness of God (tawhid) and His creation is to be Muslim. To be an environmental steward (khalifa) is to be Muslim.

To have a collective responsibility to our planet is to be Muslim. And still, many Muslims are disconnected from nature. Why is that? To be disconnected from nature, in essence, is to be disconnected from Islam.

Islam, perhaps more so than any other Abrahamic religion, connects humankind to the natural world through scripture, hadiths (Prophetic sayings/actions), and Sirah (Prophetic biography). More than 750 times, the Quran references the environment, our responsibility toward it, and the trust given to us by God. So why not cultivate a personal relationship with the earth and its Creator before we return to it?

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A Muslim Initiative COVER STORY

The world is beautiful and verdant, and verily God, be He exalted, has made you His stewards in it… (Hadith via Muslim)

E

ight years ago during Ramadan, which then was in October, a group of Muslims gathered in a suburban Washington, D.C., home for a zero-trash potluck iftar meal. The attendees wanted to do something more in the remembrance of God, for fasting is a cleansing of the soul — a way to reject consumption. This served to cleanse the everyday waste that we create from our existence. Green Muslims was born. The volunteer group has been in operation for eight years, and today is a source in the Muslim community for spiritually inspired environmental education, reflection, and action.

It engages locally while serving as a national resource.

HOW DOES GREEN MUSLIMS SERVE THE COMMUNITY? By raising awareness and teaching the Ummah its mission of living the environmental spirit of Islam.

Green Muslims (GreenMuslims.org) has online resources, such as the Green Scriptures project — citing Quranic verses and Islamic tradition that pertain to conservation and stewardship, leading spiritual reflection hikes, and providing educational talks within the community through dialogue and lectures at mosques, interfaith panels, and educational programs. Through programing and resources, the group invites community members to cultivate a personal, intimate relationship with the beauty of creation.

Green Muslims seeks to educate Muslims that every thought and action taken in relation to plants, animals, and humans is a reflection of the purity of their relationship with God. It also seeks to empower the Ummah to become leaders in changing the current environmental climate.

WHAT IS GREEN MUSLIMS DOING NOW? A few months ago, Green Muslims Executive Director Colin Christopher found himself in multiple conversations with parents who wished their children had more opportunities to connect the environment with their Islamic religious practice.

From those conversations, an idea was born — to create eco-Islamic programming that educates Muslim youth in the Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia region and allows them to experience the wonder of God’s creation firsthand. Thus, the “Our Deen is Green” Youth Outdoor Education Program came into existence.

Every Saturday in April, Green Muslims has hosted half day, outdoor eco-Islamic education programming for Muslim youth ages 8 to 18 years. The program drew connections between the life and teachings of Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam), the responsibility we have as stewards of our planet, and the environmental conservation efforts of local communities.

Over four weeks, the program engaged youth in spiritually focused Islamic curriculum and activities with a specific theme each week: water, food, waste, and energy. Each successive week built upon the last and showed “Our Deen is Green” students the intimate connection Muslims have to the earth and its resources, the impact of our actions, and possible solutions to solve environmental problems through an Islamic lens.

The group’s goal is to expand the program and continue to work on the curriculum to serve as a resource for parents, Islamic schools, youth programs, and mosques.

WHAT WE CAN DO Simple actions to reduce your environmental footprint: 1. Conserve water: Try using only 1 cup of water to make wudu 2. Buy local, buy organic food: A recent EPA study found that in 2012, Americans threw out 35 million tons of food waste — that’s more food in landfills than plastic, paper, metal or glass.

3. Stop using single-use items, such as plastics bags, including disposable snack bags. God advises: “O Children of Adam! wear your beautiful apparel at every time and place of prayer: eat and drink: But waste not by excess, for God loveth not the wasters” (Quran 7:31).

4. Be energy efficient. Re-consider light bulbs. While incandescent light bulbs may be cheaper, they are tremendously inefficient when it comes to using power. CFL (compact fluorescents) and LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs cost more on the front end, but use far less electricity.

5. Donate to, and support environment-centered organizations, helping them educate future environmental stewards.

The W. F. Powers Co. Litho., N.Y. (1917) (c) Frederic G.Cooper. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

In the Quran 33:72, God says: “We did indeed offer the trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains; but they refused to undertake it, being afraid thereof: but man undertook it; He was indeed unjust and foolish.”

God has placed trust in us, in the Ummah, to be stewards of all His creations. And God reminds humans of another of His favors in 77:27: “And [He] made therein mountains standing firm, lofty (in stature); and provided for you water sweet (and wholesome)?” Thus, it devolves upon the caretakers to act wisely.

The stark reality is our planet is in danger.

Climate change is no longer a concern of the future — it is a problem we face right now.

Our habits of over-consumption, from food to material goods, essentially depleting our resources, have led to much of what we are experiencing. We have suffered from more extreme weather events than ever before and these incidences are devastating populations.

Rising sea levels will soon submerge entire island nations, some of them Muslim.

Extreme weather events, such as the Syrian drought, which became the worst on record, began in late 2006 and dragged on for three years. Researchers concluded the drought worsened existing water security and agricultural woes, and prompted up to 1.5 million rural Syrians to migrate closer to urban areas. This migration spurred demographic changes that fed instability in and around cities. The drought also contributed to rising food prices and more nutritionrelated diseases in children, which exacerbated the turmoil.

have to bring these priorities to the forefront and reconnect with our tradition. We are witnessing first-hand how our own hands can so easily destroy our planet — the same hands tasked with its protection.

A LOOK AT SOME FACTS

President Obama briefs European leaders following a multilateral meeting in which a tentative agreement was reached at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, Dec. 18, 2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

As Muslims, we have to be aware of our impact, we have to be aware of our responsibility, and we have to be aware of the trust that has been bestowed upon us, on our Ummah, on mankind. God has called upon us to protect, care for, and live in harmony with our natural environment. His most perfect of all creation, Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam), lived this by example.

From water conservation during wudu to

modest food consumption — eating meat less than once per month — he never took from the earth more than he needed. It is his Sunnah of caring for creation, compassion for those most in need, and conservation of what has been provided that will lead us to the light of God. Islam is about peace. Islam is about life.

And Islam is about respecting creation and the environment. Now, more than ever, we

California has one year of water left. In his Los Angeles Times (March 12) article, Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth System Science at University of California, Irvine, warned, “As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought.” As he outlined a proposed solution to the current water crisis, he called out state regulators to rethink their Band-Aid approach for a short-term fix. “The state needs a task force of thought leaders that starts, right now, brainstorming to lay the groundwork for long-term water management strategies. Although several state task forces have been formed in response to the drought, none is focused on solving the longterm needs of a drought-prone, perennially water-stressed California,” he wrote.

“Our state’s water management is complex, but the technology and expertise

Going Green For Ramadan?

the Creator, the Provider of Sustenance. Many Muslim communities were inspired to hold green iftars and decided to adopt the Green Ramadan Initiative launched by ISNA’s Taskforce

BY NANA FIRMAN for Green Masjid Project. They worked with these guidelines: FOOD ntil recently, the entire human race lived in ➀ Reduce food waste and overconsumption: Take only what a natural state and evolved with varying traditions for you can comfortably finish, eating moderately, do not waste any hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, and people food, keeping in mind the hadith (fill one-third of stomach with conducted their lives in harmony with their natural surround- food, one-third water, and leave one-third empty). Distribute ings. However, these traditions have been undermined. the excess food (leftover food from iftars) for the needy, such Last year, ISNA invited and encouraged all Muslim communi- as those in homeless shelters. ties to use the month of Ramadan to start greener life habits. It WASTE ➁ Reduce plastic water bottles: Plastic use should be was an auspicious opportunity to remember and respect our planet that, by God’s grace, minimized because of harm related to global warming provides us the sustenance and health. Most plastics go with which we nourish our bodies and uplift community to landfill and harm the environment (it takes about 500 spirit during a month of fasting. Interacting mindfully with years to decompose). Adopt our environment is simply a a reusable water bottle/mug manifestation of faith. As and provide bins for all recyclable materials. we refrained from food and ➂ Eliminate Styrofoam: drink during the month, we reaffirmed our sense of selfStyrofoam is neither recyclarestraint and accountability to A resident of Mountain Lion Habitat Santa Monica ble or biodegradable, which PHOTO COPYRIGHT_SYED BURHAN QADRI

U

Mountains, California.

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COVER STORY means it will persist as garbage even 1,000 years after its use.

Use paper and other biodegradable products.

ENERGY ➃ Conserve electricity: Replace incandescent light bulbs with energy-efficient light bulbs, such as CFL, CCFL and LED. Utilize energy efficiently by switching off and/or unplugging unused electrical appliances and gadgets.

SERMON ➄ Green khutbah: Request imams, khateebs, scholars and leaders to remind and mobilize Muslim communities to become more responsible vicegerents of the environment by conserving and caring for all God’s creations.

As the vicegerents upon this earth (khalifah), humans have a responsibility to protect the environment (Quran 6:165); because Islam considers protecting the environment is simply an expression of worship. Muslims should advocate for Ramadan to be the green month every year during which all individuals, congregations and communities work to protect our planet.

Fact 1: In 2010, 73 billion disposable cups and plastic water

exist to handle this harrowing future. It will require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon. Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin,” he wrote.

Justin Moyer, in his Washington Post report (April 2), explained how Pat Brown, former governor of California (1959 to 1967) and father of current California Gov. Jerry Brown, created the water crisis of today with his philosophy of unlimited water for every Californian at any price, which was behind his massive mid-century push for water projects in the Golden State.

In reality, every environmental crisis is — to be politically correct — manmade.

Consider the case of having California as the nation’s major food source, such as producing 51 percent of the fruit. Tom Philpott, food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones (April 20) noted: “The West tends to be arid, the East tends to get plenty of rain and snow, and the Midwest lands, well, somewhere in the middle. However, the major food farming being done in largely arid California is simply self-inflicted pain.”

As the country advances toward the 2016 elections, Muslim Americans will be faced with choosing between candidates who will be environmentally friendly. However, campaign rhetoric often doesn’t transpire into post-election reality. An example is presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who has called climate change “the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face.” And yet, she has refused to take 34

bottles (about 230 per person) in the U.S. ended up in landfills, draining natural resources while producing millions of pounds of waste and high levels of greenhouse gases, which cause climate change.

Fact 2: As of 2011, 1.3 billion tons of food (about one-third of global food production) is lost or wasted annually. Loss and wastage occurs at every step of the food supply chain. In lowincome countries, most losses occur during production, while in developed countries much food (about 220 pounds per person yearly) is wasted at the consumption stage.

Fact 3: As of 2011, 23.5 million Americans (7.5 percent of the population) live in “food deserts,” including 6.5 million children.

A food desert is a low-income census tract where a significant number of residents are more than one mile away from the nearest supermarket. Most of the time, these communities are inundated with liquor stores and fast food, but produce is nowhere to be seen.

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Nana Firman is a GreenFaith Fellow who is passionate about promoting Islamic environmentalism.

any position on the Keystone pipeline, but in 2010, as Secretary of State, she said, “we are inclined to” approve it.

Senior Mother Jones reporter Mariah Blake noted in the September/October 2014 issue how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sold fracking to the world — the Chevron projects in Bulgaria and Romania. David Goldwyn, her special envoy for international energy affairs, had a long history of promoting drilling overseas as a Department of Energy official under Bill Clinton and as a representative of the oil industry. And most of the Republican presidential hopefuls question the science of human-caused climate change.

A Pew survey conducted in September 2013 found 59 percent of liberal voters opposed an increase in fracking, while 58 percent of conservatives supported an increase. Thus, fossil-fuel production could help Republicans in the general election.

They have a straightforward message on fossil-fuel development: “Yes, and more.”

Since his first homily in 2013, Pope Francis has preached about the need to protect the earth and all of creation as part of a broad message on the environment. Now, Francis is preparing to deliver what is likely to be a highly influential encyclical this summer on environmental degradation and the effects of human-caused climate change on the poor.

Francis plans to urge world leaders to enact a sweeping United Nations climate change accord in Paris this December. The accord would for the first time commit every nation

to enact tough laws to cut emissions that cause global warming.

Muslim leaders have to step forward and pursue the pro-environmental plank.

As stewards of this earth, all human beings owe a duty to strive for its safekeeping.

And as Muslims, we have to be more mindful of our impact, and the environmental legacy that we leave behind because of the Amana (trust) that has been bestowed upon us.

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Asma Mahdi is director of communications for Green Muslims.

AL-RAHMAH SCHOOL

Est 1987

6631 Johnnycake Road, Baltimore MD 21244 www.alrahmah.org

A private and fully accredited Middle States Association K-12 School is currently hiring for: • Director of Arabic, Islamic and Qur’an Department • Director of Elementary School Professional Qualifications: • Bachelor’s degree or higher, in specific subject area of teaching • Some administrative experience preferred • Certification/Degree in Education and/or relevant experience • US Classroom experience • Please visit www.alrahmah.org for detailed job description • Please email your resume, cover letter and references to resumes1@alrahmah.org • Competitive salaries and benefits package offered

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

The Green House of God Are Muslim Americans doing enough to have sustainable mosques?

BY UZMA MIRZA

“T

he earth has been made sacred and pure and a mosque for me…” — Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) (Muslim) God has bestowed upon humanity this earth as a sanctuary of His reflected Divine Light and a sign of His Mercy with balance in all things. It is a treasury of God’s awe-inspiring signs (ayahs) that assist the supplicant in this world; it is the primordial mosque and a trust (amana) bestowed to humanity as vicegerent (khalifa). Splendidly, the earth has a unique biosphere sustaining and protecting precious life and it is here where the panoramic landscapes are the mosque’s walls, the sky the ceiling and the earth the sacred ground upon which the Muslim prostrates to God in daily supplication. “And it is He (God) who has made you successors (khalifa) upon the earth and has raised some of you above others in degrees (of rank) that He may try you through what He has given you” (6:165) The natural world is the place where the Muslim’s salat (prayer), ibadah (submission), dhikr (remembrance) and sadaqah jaria (ongoing charity) manifest. God designed the universe to be green, the hue of balance (Al-Mizan), as this hue falls in the midpoint of the color spectrum of visible light. “(Our religion is) the Baptism of God: And who can baptize better than Allah? And it is He Whom we worship.” (2:138).

Islam, being the religion of the middle way, the community should be rooted in the balance as God emphasizes in the Quran.

Humankind was given a trust of this Mercy, which includes the creation of our selves. However, as an ummah, are we breaching this trust and blemishing our heart? “We did indeed offer the Trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains; but they refused to undertake it, being afraid thereof: but man undertook it; He was indeed unjust and foolish;” (33:72).

GREEN IS ECONOMY, ECOLOGY, ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND LIFE CYCLE COST Essentially, being green and sustainable is cost effective. It is economy and ecology in harmony. Today, sustainability is a way of doing things in balance and green is a tool to achieve balance. One of the greatest signs is the natural world created by God is cyclical, where there is no waste. In one cubic foot of soil, the waste of one is food for another. This is the beautiful and efficient, cyclical creation of God that we are hurting, polluting and destroying. Therefore, every Muslim community must try to view the mosque and all created communities, systems and materials as affecting the overall health of the community. They need to reduce the mosque’s waste and carbon footprint and reduce the waste produced by our community and stop making our planet a landfill. This will establish a mosque architecture resonating the beauty of Islam. “And there is no creaISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

ture on (or within) the earth or bird that flies with its wings except (that they are) communities like you. We have not neglected in the Register a thing. Then unto their Lord they will be gathered” (6:38).

Today, of the various tools measuring environmental efficiency in architecture the most well known is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), a green rating certification program evaluating a building on six categories: site, energy, water, indoor air quality, materials and innovation. There also are Green Globes and the Living Green Challenge. There are other independent green programs specific to materials that promote recycling, reusing, refurbishing, renewing and reduction of materials and system emissions, or the carbon footprint, for a new or an existing building.

However, the goal is not to create a “model green mosque” as a one-size-fits-all solution. The context of site and inclusivity of a community and its social needs is vital to sustainable design. It is recommended that experienced professionals provide the architectural and engineering service for successful delivery of green mosque design. To be green we need to change from seeing linear costs and systems to seeing life cycle costs and systems. Fundamentally, green design is called common sense economical design.

A GREEN MOSQUE IS ABOUT INCLUSIVITY As a Muslim ummah, making a green and sustainable mosque should be instinctive. It should be a communal space serving its community’s needs in harmony with the natural palette. Historically, mosques always were inclusive to the environment and its community, served religious, educational, social, charitable needs and contributed to the economic growth. Planting trees and gardens also were hallmarks of Islamic architecture throughout the centuries.

Furthermore, a green mosque should be designed with women in mind, which has been the norm in mosque design throughout Islamic history.

ISNA’s Masjid Development Committee launched the Green Masjid Project, led by a Green Masjid Task Force that addresses the importance of building green for new and existing mosques in North America. ISNA is taking an initiative to create national awareness in making mosques environmentally friendly as part of the prophetic green mosque campaign, and applauds Muslims who already have been voicing and initiating green activism. You too can join the initiatives of the ISNA Green Masjid Project, and help fulfill this vision. The task force has produced green guidelines for mosques available on its website. The need for green sacred spaces is overdue and needed. Let’s leave the earth a better place for its coming stewards.

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Uzma Mirza is principal architect/owner of AYN Architect Studio, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and a member of ISNA Green Masjid Task Force and ISNA Greening Ramadan Campaign.

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MUSLIMS IN ACTION

Inspiring Muslim Mompreneurs AYA KHALIL

M

any mothers — “mompreneurs” — across the United States and Canada have ventured to start their own businesses. Muslim American mothers also are in the fray while balancing family, school, religion, pregnancy, and social life. Whether these women have had their businesses for years or are just starting out, they are passionate about what they do. Check out these five inspiring Muslim mompreneurs. and entrepreneur, I’m also a wife, daughter, aunt, sister, friend, boss, community activist, and never in the same order,” she said.

Jondy recommends Sheryl Sandburg’s “Lean In” (Knofp, 2013) for mothers interested in starting their own businesses.

AMANY JONDY COO and co-founder of Zeena LLC Amany Jondy, 33, mother of two girls, 7 and 2 years old, launched a modest clothing line online, Zeena, in February 2011 with her sister and co-owner, Bayan. Zeena went mainstream in January 2015 opening a store in the popular Tyson’s Corner Mall in northern Virginia.

“Our goal since inception has always been to go mainstream. Exposure of our products in the mainstream allows even more women to have access to them. It was truthfully our five-year plan, but we took the plunge one year early,” Jondy said. “Our online staff work closely with the flagship store staff to ensure every customer is serviced properly and all their needs are met.”

For working mothers, having proper support and care is crucial, she said.

“The most common question we get is ‘how do you balance it all?’ I would be lying if I said it was easy, but I’ve accepted the fact that balance means very different things at different stages in my life,” Jondy said.

“I don’t believe one aspect of my life should define me, but rather all my work and accomplishments do. I’m not just a mom 36

ASIYAH MUHSIN-THOMAS Founder and handcrafter of Royal by Nature LLC Asiyah Muhsin-Thomas, a Georgia mother of five and a traditional midwife, started her own business making natural, hand-crafted products after she was dissatisfied with the chemicals-laden, store-bought products.

She started Royal by Nature (royalbynature.etsy.com) after experimenting with making hair products for herself. “My first few batches of hair creams, body butters and balms were horrible. I kept at it until I perfected it and have now been making products for my family for years,” she said.

The positive response to a Facebook photo of one of her shampoos (Facebook. com/RoyalbyNature) generated requests for samples. She then realized she was onto something.

She created a brand, Royal by Nature,

formed the corporation, and took the plunge.

One challenge in being a Muslim mompreneur, she said, is breaking into a market of customers of different faiths.

“With a product line such as mine, I seek to reach women of all races, religions, cultures, backgrounds, and ages,” she said. “When approaching a potential retailer or customer, I always remind myself that I make an excellent product and although I am Muslim, my products are not exclusively for Muslims.”

She likes to encourage her children to be self-sufficient and turn their passion into a business.

“We are too often told that we must get a job to support ourselves. Well, my children see me ‘go to work’ daily across the hallway from their bedrooms and I always have a smile on my face,” she said. “My older boys have already started brainstorming of what their entrepreneurial journeys will be.”

Muhsin-Thomas encourages Muslim women to start their own businesses, if they are passionate about it.

“There are so many things that we do on a daily basis that we enjoy. Why not make money doing it? I believe that when we are passionate about something, our love for it overflows and is visible to potential customers,” she said. “When they feel your happiness, they become happy and will be loyal customers.”

ZARINAH EL-AMIN NAEEM Chief spiritual officer of Niyah and Beautifully Wrapped A Michigan mother of three and anthropologist, Zarinah El-Amin Naeem began Beautifully Wrapped by selling calendars

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

More than Abracadabra What do you do when your husband comes home with 20 pounds of lamb fat from the Eid Al-Adha sacrifice?

Rhoda Omeira, a Southern California stay-at-home mother of four and grandmother of five, always has been resourceful — making full use of everything before it was considered trash. After a bit of research, she found that with the right moves this fat could be made into soap. Her first batch was a huge success among family and friends and she decided to start making soap to sell. She said it took her three batches and an immense amount of study before she perfected the soap recipe.

Omeira started Rhoda’s Soap (etsy.com/shop/ rhodasoap?ref=pr_shop_ more) as her children were trickling out of the house to pursue their own endeavors.

Her soap business began in 2013, one day after she was confronted with the lamb fat. Her unique sales proposition was halal unscented soap for hajj and umrah. She later ventured into making scented vegan soap — her most popular product. She said maintaining a level of consistency and quality is paramount in her work and she only uses natural ingredients.

Omeira recently opened an Etsy shop and works based on demand out of her home.

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to raise money for 10,000 Girls, a development and educational program in Senegal.

“Beautifully Wrapped (Facebook.com/ Headwraps) is an international, interfaith company that works to build economic freedom, love and understanding utilizing the global art of head-wrapping,” Naeem said. “As an anthropologist, I’ve always been fascinated with phenomena that occur crossculturally, and as a Muslim who covers her hair, head-wrapping has always had a special place in my heart.”

What started out as a hobby, is now a “full social enterprise” for Naeem who says, “Beautifully Wrapped is centered around live events, head-wrapping parties, and coming soon, our own line of head-wraps.”

Naeem hosted The Headwrap Expo on May 17 in Dearborn, Michigan.

“The expos are full-day events that provide a platform for peoples of various ethnic and religious groups to share their fashion, culture, and spirituality with others,” she

said. “The other thing we are working on is securing funding for a multimedia [traveling] exhibition on head-wrapping that will tour the nation beginning next year.”

Naeem said as a mother raising a family, “it may take you a bit longer than a single person who can work all day and all night, but that is okay. All success comes step-bystep and what is for you is for you. It can never be taken away. Measure your success by you alone, not others.”

Another piece of advice is to stick to one’s boundaries.

“I remember pitching the Beautifully Wrapped calendar story to a very successful author and radio personality,” she said.

“His advice to me was to get out there and hustle at one of the big upcoming events. I casually mentioned that the event was during Ramadan so I may have to pass. He looked at me and said ‘do you want to be successful? Then you’ll have to do some things you may not want to do. Make some tough

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

choices.’” Needless to say, that is a nonnegotiable for me. A Muslim mompreneur should be ‘okay with having your boundaries as a Muslim and as a mom.’”

Naeem advises aspiring mompreneurs to make sure to spend time with their children and network with other business people in different fields. Mompreneurs, she said, should remind themselves that it is okay to make mistakes, and to be nice to themselves.

“Running a business takes a lot of heart.

There are going to be major down periods before the success rolls in. Be prepared for that, not just in mind, but in spirit,” she said.

SARAH SIDDIQUI Founder and artist of Imaginairyart Floridian Sarah Siddiqui, a student, artist, graphic designer, and a mother to a nearly 4-year-old girl, has been making art for as long as she can remember.

“I do illustrations and lettering with intricate patterning in pen and ink,” she said. “I take ordinary objects, animals, letter shapes, etc., and make them fun and interesting by adding my pattern work into them. I am all about being perfectly imperfect — I draw crooked lines and irregular circles because that makes my work real to me.

“I have done some phone cases as well as T-shirt design work. I am currently transitioning into more of the graphic design side of things, branching into logo design, branding, and digital and print artwork,” Siddiqui added.

Siddiqui said her family always encouraged her to use her skills. She lived in Pakistan most of her life and I tried to sell her work at local art stores.

“It wasn’t a very successful venture,” she said. “When I moved to the United States in 2011, I started an Etsy (www.imaginairyart. com) store because I think it’s a nice online platform for artists to put their work out.”

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MUSLIMS IN ACTION As a Muslim artist, Siddiqui has had difficulty finding the perfect niche.

“Most of my art consists of intricate drawings and illustrations,” she said. “As a Muslim artist, I sometimes feel like I should perhaps focus more on ‘Islamic’ art and the Muslim market, but if I try to push myself in that direction I find that I’m not being true to my skills.”

“I also feel like when people hear of a Muslim artist, they automatically expect you to do calligraphy and other Islamic art, when that is not necessarily what every Muslim artist does. I get so many requests to do things like that and it makes me feel like I might be doing it all wrong, but I have to keep reminding myself that good art can’t be planned out, it just happens. It is really hard to just create for oneself and then try to sell it to an audience that wants something very specific.”

Siddiqui said striking a balance between parenting and work can be challenging.

“I think for moms who work from home, it is difficult to divide your time between the two,” she said. “You can’t just pretend you’re not around and get work done, especially if you don’t have help during the day. My biggest struggle is getting work done and getting enough sleep at the same time so that I’m not exhausted all day, because when you’re tired, you’re not happy, and we all know it’s harder to be kind to people when you’re not happy.”

Siddiqui encourages mompreneurs to be active on social media to market their products, and be confident and passionate about what they are doing.

“There will always be people who think you don’t do anything or that you sit at your computer all day long, or that the fact that you’re not getting enough sleep is really just your own fault because you have bad management skills. Ignore those voices, and do what you need to do to be successful,” she said.

Siddiqui said it’s important when children watch their mothers work to create their own products.

“It is also important for children today to see the kind of hard work that can go into handcrafting things. In this age of mass production and machinery, a lot of people don’t realize that there are still societies out there that do so many things with their hands, and how talented, skilled and hard-working they are,” she said.

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JUASHAUNNA KELLY Founder of Zakiyah Candles JuaShaunna Kelly, 24, mother to a 3-monthold boy, used to help her mother make homemade candles and bath and body products when she was younger. The North Carolina resident wasn’t happy with the prices or quality of many candles when she received them as gifts when she got married in 2013.

Kelly was a student and expecting her first baby when she decided to start her business, Zakiyah Candles. She decided she would stick to making candles using 100 percent natural soy wax.

A difficult pregnancy put her business on hold and she focused on an internship for a college degree. After her son, Zayd, was born in January 2015, Kelly started making candles again.

In between caring for her newborn, Kelly would get at least five hours of work done.

As her son grew older, she realized it was more challenging to make her candles and run a business. Her husband, Tariq, who helps with their son often so that she can work on her business, often reminds her that God is the best of planners when things don’t always go as planned.

“I would advise all mompreneurs to remember and believe in that quote,” she said. “It may be difficult to take in at times, especially when the results are the complete opposite of what you envisioned while spending countless hours to get your product or service to turn out a specific way.”

Kelly advises new moms who want to start their own business to not give up.

“Regardless of how hard things get, continue to work on your craft,” she said. “I understand that families go through certain situations, but you can use your craft as something to keep you at peace. Before you know it, you’ll be back in business. Even if you have to wait until the baby is a teenager before you start officially operating your business again, don’t stop. You can easily market your items throughout these years.

For example, if you knit, create pieces of clothing for your family and have them wear them when they’re outside of the house. You never know who will fall in love with your craft and place an order for themselves.”

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Aya Khalil is a freelance journalist and educator who blogs at www.ayakhalil.blogspot.com.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Pluralism in Islam —

Muslim intolerance is principally to blame for the controversy, while Muslims, by even more lopsided majorities, see Western disrespect for the Islamic religion as the root of the problem. The clashing points of view are seen clearly in Nigeria where 81 percent of Muslims blame the controversy on Western disrespect, and 63 percent of Christians say Muslim intolerance is to blame.” Not taking the time to understand each other creates the environment for toxic flashpoints.

Between Scripture and Praxis Are Muslims embracing Quranic pluralism?

WHO INHERITS HEAVEN?

BY PARVEZ AHMED

I

n her April 15 New York Times article, the Egyptian-American freelance journalist and commentator Mona Eltahawy recounted her 2005 meeting with Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the then-spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. When she suggested that Quranic verses regarding women’s dress have several interpretations, he replied that there was “just one interpretation.”

A 2012 Pew survey (“The World’s Muslims: Unity and Diversity”) showed nearly six out of 10 Muslims believe that “there is only one true way to interpret the teachings” of Islam, ranging from a high of 78 percent in Egypt to a low of 34 percent in Morocco.

Do such attitudes reflect the core values of the Quran and the historical diversity among Muslims?

This survey — conducted in 39 countries covering nearly 67 percent of the world’s Muslim population — showed strong consensus among Muslims regarding devotional practices. Nearly nine out of 10 people said they fast during Ramadan, seven in 10 people give zakat (obligatory charity), and six out of 10 people pray five times daily. Nearly 100 percent declare their faith in God and believe that Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) is God’s Prophet and Messenger. Nearly nine

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out of 10 people believe in heaven/hell, fate (qadr) and angels; eight out of 10 people believe the Quran to be the word of God. However, beyond such basic agreements, there is divergence in thought and actions, particularly as it relates to religious pluralism.

Attitudes of Muslims toward intra-faith pluralism is varied and often elusive. Nearly one in five Muslims do not consider Sufis to be Muslims — 44 percent in Egypt. Such opinions overlook Sufis’ role in the spread of Islam. Equally concerning, nearly one in four Muslims do not consider Shia as Muslims — in Egypt, the most populous Arab nation, it’s 52 percent. However, in three countries where Shia constitute the majority (Azerbaijan, Iraq and Lebanon), on average less than 6 percent of respondents disregard them as Muslims.

The picture for interfaith pluralism is also gloomy. A 2006 Pew report (“The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other”) showed Muslims viewed Westerners as selfish, arrogant and violent, while Westerners viewed Muslims as fanatical, violent and arrogant. Examining the fallout from the publication of cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) in a Danish newspaper, the report noted, “By wide margins, Westerners who had heard of the controversy believe that

Theological doctrines of salvation is an important issue in all religions. How such doctrines are put into practice may dictate attitudes toward interfaith relations. A 2013 Pew survey, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society,” shows that on average only 18 percent of Muslims believe people of other faiths may inherit heaven. In Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, and Malaysia, nine in 10 Muslims believe “Islam is the one true faith leading to eternal life in heaven.” However, in Bosnia, Kazakhstan, Cameroon, Chad, and Mozambique, nearly four out of 10 Muslims responded that, “many religions can lead to eternal life in heaven.”

Among Muslim Americans (“U.S. Muslims — Views on Religion and Society in a Global Context”), 56 percent believe that many religions can lead to eternal life. On arguably one of the most important questions that consume people of all faiths, there is impressive diversity of opinions. However, the parochial views in large Muslim-majority countries should elicit concerns.

Although hardline conservatives often deny the salvific value of other faiths, Muslim scholars Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim noted that while heaven is eternal, hell is not. AlGhazali and Ibn Arabi inferred that the mercy of God cannot be held in such low estimation as to conceive that salvation is only attainable

by Muslims. Mohammed Hassan Khalil, in his University of Michigan doctoral dissertation, “Muslim Scholarly Discussions on Salvation and the Fate of ‘Others’,” concludes that given the wide variety of opinions about the salvific fate of people of other faiths, Muslims should avoid one-dimensional answers to questions regarding salvation. Verses such as, “If God had so willed, He would have made you one community,…(5:48)” and “Each community has its own direction to which it turns… (2:148),” suggests that pluralism is an integral part of Quranic values. Abdulaziz Sachedina, professor of Islamic Studies at George Mason University, in his book the

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

“Democratic Roots of Islamic Pluralism,” cites 2:213 to argue about the pluralistic vision of Islam, “Mankind was a single community, then God sent prophets to bring good news and warning, and with them He sent the Scripture with the Truth, to judge between people in their disagreements.”

Kurdish theologian Said Nursi (18771960), in his Quranic commentary “Risalei-Nur,” asserts that if followers of other faiths perform genuine worship of God, then “the manifestations of the unseen and the epiphanies of the spirit, revelation and inspiration,” are not exclusive to Islam and can be found in other divinely guided faith traditions. Contemporary Turkish scholar Fethullah Gulen stressed in a Fountain magazine July/Sept. 2000 article, “The Necessity of Interfaith Dialogue,” that Muslims cannot remain prisoners of their history and act out of “political partisanship” while cloaking it in the “garb” of Islam. He noted that Islam made history’s greatest ecumenical call by stating in the Quran, “Say, ‘People of the Book, let us arrive at a statement that is common to us all…(3:64).” In his view, this verse provides a big tent under which, “followers of revealed religions could end their separation.”

WHAT IS PLURALISM? Merely accepting diversity is not enough, said Harvard Pluralism Project’s Diana Eck. In a multicultural, multi-religious world, it is necessary to “celebrate diversity,” which requires knowledge of the “other.” This does not imply relativism, often associated with watering down of one’s beliefs. Eck notes, “Pluralism is the process of creating a society through critical and self-critical encounter with one another, acknowledging, rather than hiding, our deepest differences” and a commitment to nurture constructive dialogues. Practicing pluralism holds out hope for a deeper human shared dignity.

For many Muslims, religious pluralism evokes deep-seated fears about Westerninspired secular relativism, given the absence of exact Quranic or Hadith terms about pluralism. In his 2009 paper, “Diversity and Pluralism, A Quranic Perspective” (Islam and Civilizational Renewal, Vol. 1 No. 1, p. 29), Mohammed Hasan Kamali, former professor of law at the International Islamic University of Malaysia, advocates using al-ta῾addudiyyah as the Arabic cognate for pluralism.

Labeling every heterodox practice as “unIslamic” erodes the fabric of the ummah and is the genesis of the takfiri attitude (calling

ALTHOUGH THE QURAN PROVIDES A FRAMEWORK FOR DEVELOPING A PLURALISTIC SOCIETY WHERE PEOPLE NOT ONLY TOLERATE EACH OTHER BUT ALSO TAKE A GENUINE INTEREST IN GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER, ATTITUDES TOWARD PLURALISM ARE VARIED AND OFTEN ALARMING. Muslims as kafir or infidel), most violently manifested in terrorist groups. Decrying that Islam is the most misunderstood religion in the West, and yet succumbing to easy stereotyping of people of other faiths, leaves Muslims vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.

The Quran condemns such attitudes, “Do you order righteousness of the people and forget yourselves while you recite the Scripture?

Then will you not reason? (2:44)”

INCLUSIVISM IN THE QURAN Verse 2:256 of the Quran reads, La ikraha fi-din (There is no compulsion in religion…), where the use of “la” to start the verse indicates that the negation is inclusive of the past, present and future. This is akin to the use of La-ilaha (there is no god), in the Shahada (Declaration of Faith), which ends with the emphatic il-Allah (but God). Following la is the word ikraha, often translated as compulsion. The triliteral root for the word ikraha is kaf ra ha, the same root that produces the verb kariha, meaning dislike or hate. The word makruh, which not only literally means dislike, but also is used as a legal standard to denote actions that are displeasing to God, also comes from the same root. In other words, compulsion (ikraha) is forbidden because it is an action that is disliked or hated by God. “There is no compulsion in religion,” cannot then be viewed as merely a philosophical statement but rather a foundational value and an obligatory practice.

Another similar Madinan verse 3:20 also informs Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) that, “… your only duty is to convey the message” not compel people to convert. Thus, ideas about pluralism are not alien to Islam. Curtailing the freedom of conscience for any individual or group will be in defiance of the will of God. The Quran also acknowledges cultural pluralism, “Another of His signs is the creation of the heavens and earth, and the diversity of your languages and colors (30:22).”

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

The Quran also notes that all Prophets and Messengers were sent to their people to preach in the tongue of the local population (14:4). The cultural, political, religious and economic pluralism, which we observe in all aspects of human civilization, is a purposeful divine action — “If God had so willed, He would have made you one community…(5:48).”

Contemporary scholar Reza ShahKazemi in his paper, “Tolerance” (in Amyn B. Sajoo, ed, A Companion to Muslim Ethics, London: I.B. Tauris, 2010) wrote, “For Muslims, tolerance of the other is integral to the practice of Islam. It is not an optional extra, a cultural luxury. The Quran sets forth an expansive vision of diversity and difference, plurality and indeed of universality. This is all the more ironic since the practice of contemporary Muslim states, not to mention extra-state groups and actors, falls lamentably short of those expectations as well as of current standards of tolerance set by the secular West.” Shah-Kazemi proposes developing pluralistic attitudes in Muslim societies as a, “principle at the very heart of the vision of Islam itself: a vision in which the plurality of religious paths to the One is perceived as a reflection of the spiritual infinity of the One.” In “Risale-i Nur,” commenting on the oft-cited Quranic verse of diversity, (“People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another” (49:13), Nursi said, “Being divided into groups and tribes should lead to mutual acquaintance and mutual assistance, not to antipathy and mutual hostility.” Mutual assistance is possible when there is mutual respect, which is fostered by an unequivocal commitment to engaging with diversity, not merely tolerating it.

IS THE QURAN ALSO EXCLUSIVIST? Muslims who ignore the Quran’s message 41

POLITICS AND SOCIETY of universality often cite 3:19 and 3:85 as evidence that salvation belongs exclusively to Muslims. In 3:19, the Quran reads, “True religion in God’s eye is Islam.” Later in the same chapter, verse 85 reads, “If anyone seeks a religion other than (Islam) complete devotion to God, it will not be accepted from him: he will be one of the losers in the hereafter.” Several translations (such as M.A.S. Abdel Haleem’s “The Quran — A New Translation,” Oxford, 2004) used the lowercase “i” suggesting that islam is being used as a verb, which means submission or devotion to God. It is not being viewed only as the exclusive name given to the religion of Islam as it is practiced today. Even if literal exegesis is given preference, they still do not deny the truth contained in other religions.

Several verses in the Quran present the act of freely submitting to God as a universal religion. In 10:72, prophet Noah is commanded to submit (muslimin) and in 2:131, prophet Abraham is asked to submit (aslim).

Prophets Abraham and Jacob advise their sons to not die except in willing submission to God (muslimun) in 2:132. Japanese scholar, Toshiko Izutsu in “God and Man in

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the Koran” (Islamic Book Trust, p. 199. 2000) asserted that if islam is meant as submission and not a distinctive religious identity, then it closes the door of exclusivism and provides material for, “a very eloquent understanding of religious pluralism, one wherein all revelations throughout history are seen as different ways of giving to God that which is most difficult to give — our very selves.”

GETTING TO KNOW ONE ANOTHER The Quran in 2:113 and 2:120 condemns those Christians and Jews who assert that only their followers will be offered salvation by God. Why would the same Quran then endorse such exclusivist attitude by Muslims? Pluralism, as it is understood today, is certainly not a major theme in the Quran. And yet, when placed in the context of state of human knowledge in the seventh century, the message of the Quran unequivocally celebrates diversity and encourages engagement (li-taa-rafu in 49:13). Persian poet Saadi Shirazi best surmises the Quranic ethos of pluralism in his celebrated poem Bani Adam: “All men and women are to each other the

limbs of a single body, each of us drawn from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl; and when this life we share wounds one of us, all share the hurt as if it were our own. You, who will not feel another’s pain, you forfeit the right to be called human.” (Gulistan, translated by Richard Jeffrey Newman (Global Scholarly Publications 2004).

Muslim scholars, political leaders and civic society must emphasize the Quran’s pluralistic message and urgently address the pervasive exclusivist attitude among many Muslims. Neglecting this message has allowed fringe groups to use anachronistic stereotypes about fellow Muslims, people of other faiths and entire nation-states, to unleash a form of violence rooted in extreme interpretations of Islamic eschatology (the study of end of time). From divisive identity politics to deranged messianic violence, all have their genesis in willful disregard of pluralism as a core Quranic value. It is not coincidental that societies that have embraced pluralism also tend to be more successful and peaceful.

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Parvez Ahmed, a former Fulbright Scholar, teaches at the University of North Florida.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

Muslims and the American Story You cannot ask from others what you are unwilling to give

BY EBOO PATEL

First Lady Michelle Obama toured the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas, with Stephanie Kyriazis, chief of interpretation and education, May 16, 2014.

(Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

A

few months after Sept. 11, 2001, my father attended a banquet hosted by a Muslim activist organization. Somber prayers were offered for the victims of the attacks, appropriate anger was directed at the terrorists. One of the hosts gave a passionate address about the coming threat to Muslims in America, how our rights were about to be trampled by the government in the name of security. The response, he told the firedup crowd, should be a Muslim civil rights movement.

Perhaps, the speaker felt as if he was paying homage to the movement that the dinner’s chief guest, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, had helped lead. What happened next must have come as something of a shock. In his remarks, Jackson pointedly said that there was no such thing as Muslim civil rights.

That night, Jackson wanted to make sure his audience left with a full understanding of the meaning of the civil rights move-

ment. The marches, the sit-ins, the braving of fire hoses and attack dogs, it had not been about safeguarding the rights of one community. The purpose was to expand and secure a framework that protected all communities. “We weren’t fighting for black civil rights,” Jackson said. “We were fighting for your civil rights. You have a choice right now: you can talk about an America where your people don’t get sent to the back of the bus, or you can talk about an America where no one gets sent to the back of the bus.”

I could sense the emotion in my father’s voice when he called to tell me about the event. He paused for a long time, collecting his thoughts, and then said, “We owe our citizenship to that movement.”

It was a movement not for the AfricanAmerican dream, but in the words of Jackson’s mentor, Martin Luther King Jr., for “the American Dream, the dream of men of all races, creeds, national backgrounds, living together as brothers.” It was a movement that not only helped pass legislation dismantling racist policies in the domestic realm, but whose spirit changed immigration laws, as well, ushering in the Immigration Act of 1965 — legislation that allowed people like those gathered at that Muslim banquet to come to America. King had a vision of a nation where all communities participated in the privilege and responsibility of pluralism, a vision that included religious identity as readily as race: “One of the first things we notice about this dream is an amazing universalism. It does not say some men, it says all men. It does not say all white men, but it says all men, which includes black men.

It doesn’t say all Protestants, but it says all men, which includes Catholics. It doesn’t say all Gentiles, it says all men, which includes Jews” (Feb. 5, 1964; Drew University, Madison, New Jersey).

Registering your story in the narrative of American discrimination offers opportunities for commiseration, but more importantly, it gives your community a dramatically expanded set of responsibilities. You quickly learn that other American communities used their moments of suffering to work for a nation where no one suffers. You quickly realize that other people’s struggles have secured your rights. It begins to dawn on you that you have a responsibility to use the moment when the spotlight shines on you to secure the rights of others. “Whoever degrades another degrades me,” wrote Walt Whitman. That is the heart of the American spirit.

REGISTERING YOUR STORY IN THE NARRATIVE OF AMERICAN DISCRIMINATION OFFERS OPPORTUNITIES FOR COMMISERATION, BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, IT GIVES YOUR COMMUNITY A DRAMATICALLY EXPANDED SET OF RESPONSIBILITIES.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

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President Barack Obama tours the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial in Washington, D.C., Oct. 14, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

It was a lesson I learned from John Tateishi, executive director of the JapaneseAmerican Citizen’s League. One of his earliest memories was being released from an internment camp in 1946 — shortly after Pearl Harbor in 1942, the U.S. government ordered the removal of Japanese Americans and their incarceration in internment camps.

His father held him by the shoulders and said, “Son, do not forget this moment, and do not let America forget it. This country is too good for what it did to us.” Tateishi was heading south on I-5 out of Seattle on the morning of Sept. 11, driving to an early meeting. He casually was turning the radio dial when he caught the news of the first 44

plane hitting the World Trade Center tower.

He turned the volume up and listened as the second plane hit, the towers collapsed and threats directed at Muslims started to pour in. He turned his car around and called his assistant. “Cancel my meetings for the rest of the week,” he said. “And start calling our regional directors. Tell them to cancel their meetings. The focus of our organization has just become about protecting American Muslims.” When I asked him why he did that, he told me how grateful he was for the people who stood up for Japanese Americans during World War II. Had there been more, he believed, the internment camps would not have happened. When it was his turn

to protect another community, it was his responsibility to take it. The most American thing you can do is stand up for someone else.

In Chicago, the Interfaith Youth Core hosted an intern during the 2010 ground zero mosque controversy in New York City who embodied that ethic. His name was Nick. He was from DePaul University, and he had the task of tracking the flood of news relating to Muslims during that time. He spent hours every day reading the hundreds of articles and blog posts on attacks on Muslims, and compiling reports on the trends, highlights and points of concern. One day, he wrote an article of his own. It was about Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who committed suicide after his sexual encounter with a man was streamed live. Nick wrote that he understood Clementi because, as a gay man, he had planned his own suicide many times. He described it in detail: the note he would write, the pills he would swallow, the look on his grandmother’s face when she found his body.

I had been so consumed by the rampant Islamophobia of 2010 that I had completely missed the bigotry others were suffering around that same time. Yes, we Muslims faced an ugly strain of intolerance, but nothing like what the LGBT community had suffered — torture in the Bronx, bullying so severe it led to multiple suicides. It amazed me that a member of that group was spending his time sticking up for Muslims.

Why would Nick volunteer for an organization advocating for religious pluralism? For Nick, the reason was simple. If he wanted his community to be free and safe in America, he had to work for an America where everybody was free and safe.

Talking to Nick about his essay, I realized just how many people had stood up for Muslims during the ground zero mosque crisis.

Our allies included Evangelical Christian ministers, hip-hop moguls, Jewish comedians, atheists, and the list goes on. I couldn’t help but wonder, would we Muslims take risks to stand up for them? Would we support Nick when he suffered anti-gay bullying?

You cannot ask from others what you are unwilling to give.

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Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, is author of “Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation” (Beacon Press, 2010) and “Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America” (Beacon Press, 2012).

Editor’s note: The essay is adapted by the author from “Sacred Ground.”

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Interfaith Engagement

Religious individuals need to leave their comfort zones behind.

BY JAY WILLOUGHBY

Ed Martin (L) and Akrami (R)

E

d Martin, director of the Center for Interfaith Engagement, Eastern Mennonite University, has a long history of personal engagement with the “other” - 18 years as the Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) director of programs for Central and Southern Asia and the Middle East, and a member of the American Friends Service Committee as the Quaker International Affairs Representative for Iran. In the latter role, he was tasked with building connections between Iranian institutions and the United States and providing resources for public education and advocacy for Iran in the United States.

The Mennonites, followers of Menno Simons (1496-1561), are known for their strong attachment to family and community, mutual accountability, and striving “to agree and disagree in love.” MCC put these beliefs in action in 1990, when it partnered with the Iranian Red Crescent Society to provide

relief to the Iranians affected by a devastating earthquake in northwestern Iran. But there were other reasons, as well. Among them, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union (USSR), the end of the Cold War, and a concern in some U.S. quarters that Tehran would emerge as “the new Moscow.”

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

THE CENTER FOR INTERFAITH ENGAGEMENT The Center for Interfaith Engagement (CIE), a new undertaking started in 2009, was initially called “Abraham’s Tent.” It assumed its present name due to objections from Middle Eastern women that this “patriarchal” name excluded Sarah and Hagar, while some people felt it did not reflect the center’s intent to engage non-monotheistic religions in the future.

Martin said a conscious decision was made to hire a Muslim professor due to the growing number of Muslims in America, the rise of Islamophobia, and the need for the predominantly Christian students to learn about other faiths from practitioners of those faiths.

Amir Akrami, who was ultimately selected, 45

POLITICS AND SOCIETY holds a doctorate in the philosophy of religion from McGill University, completed at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy. He had impressive credentials as a former visiting scholar at the University of Birmingham, a teacher at the Al-Mahdi Institute in Birmingham, and a regular participant in the internationally respected Building Bridges Seminars. He had been involved with the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization (en.icro.ir) and its center for Interreligious Dialogue.

AKRAMI JOINS THE CIE The two men first met in Tehran in 2002 when Akrami was director of the Center for Interreligious Dialogue, and again in 2010 when Akrami attended a conference at Notre Dame University. Several years later, after CIE secured the necessary funds to support a visiting scholar, Akrami was one of the 16 Muslim applicants. He arrived on campus in September 2012; his wife Sedigheh (Sheida) Shakouri Rad, an academician of religion, joined him several months later. Aside from teaching, they led a series of monthly, informal coffeehouse-style programs about Iranian life and culture. Akrami taught “Introduction to Islam” and “Issues in Islam,” as well as a non-credit mini-course on Rumi, and was a frequent guest lecturer in other classes.

Feeling quite at home in the quiet rural town of Harrisonburg, Virginia, he said “it was heaven for me, but not for my wife, who is used to life in the big city.” Living in this rural Mennonite environment has allowed him to see several commonalities between the two communities, such as their emphasis on a communal and simple life, and the importance of religious institutions.

“I really enjoy being here,” he said adding, “(it has) opened my eyes to see those aspects of my own religion that have been partially neglected.” When asked about how Americans react to him, he said he has met no hostility either on or off campus for being Iranian or Muslim. He has received many invitations to speak at churches, Christian institutes, and centers.

HISTORICAL AMNESIA Akrami expressed concern about American Christians’ general “lack of historical view regarding their own religion.” He cited Arnold Toynbee’s An Historian’s Approach to Religion (Oxford University Press: 1956), which points out that contemporary perception of Christianity as a religion of peace is a relatively recent development, and that 46

FUNDAMENTALISM IN ANY RELIGION IS DANGEROUS.” ED MARTIN historically Islam has been more tolerant and less violent than Christianity. Such a lack of historical knowledge also “hides” the fact that, just a century ago, American Christian women were facing many of the same problems that Muslim women face today.

When asked how he deals with the “God” issue during interfaith discussions, he said the norm is to place this divisive issue to one side because participants are usually far more concerned with political, social, and gender issues. As for the “triune god” concept itself, he said Christians, ever since the beginning of their religion, have never agreed on what this term means exactly and that its designation as a “divine mystery” does not necessarily contradict God’s unity. In fact, he said, some Shi‘a groups in the past have seen Imam Husayn’s (radi Allahu anhu) function as close to that of Jesus (alayhi as-salam) in terms of being humanity’s sole savior. “The view is there, and cannot be excluded,” he said. In other words, a “monolithic view” does not exist.

One of his favorite classes was “Comparative Monotheism,” an evening discussion among a Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholar on a particular topic. After the discussion ended, the audience was invited to participate, but there was a condition: Each person had to have read the assigned material so he/she could ask serious and probing questions. Among the common themes were scripture, social-political teachings, spirituality, and theology. Akrami regarded it as a unique and interesting experience.

FUTURE PLANS The CIE, Martin said, has two immediate plans for the future: (1) to invite more visiting scholars and use them more broadly.

Akrami, whose appointment ended April 30, threw himself into such activities wholeheartedly by participating in off-campus events during his residency. He also took on an additional task – teaching introductory Farsi due to popular demand – when existing arrangements fell through; and (2) to integrate the center more deeply within Eastern Mennonite University as a whole, and with other Mennonite universities through technical hook-ups and virtual classrooms.

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Jay Willoughby, a freelance copyeditor, is author of “Ta‘ziyah: The Great Casting Off.”

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MUSLIMS ABROAD

The Challenged Minority Has the Indian government acted to address injustices being done to Muslim Indians?

BY MOHAMMAD REYAZ

I

ndia is home to roughly 170 million Muslims, a majority of whom live abysmally miserable lives. The Indian Constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, race, caste, sex, descent, place of birth, and residence in any state action involving citizens (Article 15) or employment or appointment to any public office (Article 16). In reality, however, minorities are under constant scrutiny and suspicion. Muslims in India suffer from systematic discrimination and bias. Their representation in the parliament (Lok Sabha — Peoples House) was never proportional, but the current parliament has the all-time lowest figure of only 22 out of 570 members (4.2 percent).

There is much debate over the status and condition of minorities in India, particularly Muslims. Except for a few minor academic researches, there has been no comprehensive assessment of Muslims. In 2005, the now defeated Indian National Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government had

appointed a high-level committee, headed by Justice (retired) Rajinder Sachar to assess the “Social, Economic and Educational Status of Muslims of India.” The 403-page report presented in November 2006 concluded the conditions of Indian Muslims in several areas was worse than that of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST), who are considered the lowest in the nation’s social hierarchy. “While the overall levels of education in India, measured through

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

MOST MUSLIMS ARE SELF-EMPLOYED OR WORK IN THE UNORGANIZED SECTOR AND ARE THUS MORE VULNERABLE.

various indicators, is still below universally acceptable standards, the educational status of the Muslim community in particular is a matter of great concern,” per the report.

Most Muslims are self-employed or work in the unorganized sector and are thus more vulnerable. The report noted the number of Muslims in regular, salaried jobs, especially in the government or large public and private-sector enterprises, is much less than members of other faiths, although their population is about 14 percent (roughly 13 percent according to 2001 census). The religion-based data of the 2011 census has not been released yet, but media reports suggest that Muslims comprise only about 2.5 percent of civil servants. Their share in different state and central government security agencies is a mere 4 percent. At the higher level, the number further declines.

Often Muslim majority areas have poor infrastructure, such as roads, electricity and availability of social services. In the urban areas, Muslims increasingly are ghettoized.

The report of the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities — headed by former Chief Justice of India Ranganath Mishra, submitted to the government in 2007 and tabled in Parliament in 2009 — recommended a 10 percent reservation for Muslims in jobs and admissions as affirmative action, besides a 5 percent quota

47

for other minorities based on their “socioeconomic backwardness.” It also proposed delinking of Scheduled Caste status from religion by an abrogation of the 1950 Scheduled Caste Order which “still excludes Muslims, Christians, Jains, and Parsis [Zoroastrians] from the Scheduled Castes net.”

These two reports set the new benchmark for academia and policymakers.

Subsequently, the government was obliged to take several corrective measures, many of them half-hearted. In 2006, the central government initiated the “Prime Minister’s 15-point Programme” for minorities, yet flinched upon critical decisions of giving preferences to them. The committee recommended setting up an Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC) to examine deprived groups’ grievances, and the creation of more equitable situations in employments, education, and services.

The government has taken several steps, and over the years, development funds allocated for minorities have been increased, although there have been serious leakages and implementation has been a big problem.

The Post-Sachar Evaluation Committee or Kundu Committee — set up in August 2013 under the leadership of Amitabh Kundu, retired professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University — presented 48

its report to the new minority affairs minister, Najma Heptulla, Oct. 9, 2014, after the April/May 2014 elections brought to power Hindu fundamentalist Narendra Modi.

The committee evaluated and assessed the implementation of the Sachar Committee’s recommendations and made suggestions for obtaining a better outcome in its final report submitted to the minister. “A start has been made in addressing the development deficit of the Muslim minorities during the past few decades, particularly after the acceptance of the Sachar Committee Report. And yet, serious bottlenecks remain,” per the report.

The Kundu Committee reiterated addressing the issue that Muslims still lag behind even the SC/ST in access to amenities, irrespective of their better child health outcomes due to community characteristics.

It proposed a Diversity Index (DI) based on caste, religion, gender, which can be applied to the public and private sectors with DI score-based incentives.

Proposing a “paradigm shift in India’s approach to equality,” this committee recommended “formulation and enactment of a comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation to prohibit discrimination based on disability, sex, caste, religion and other criteria.”

It also reiterated the need to focus on specific areas of education, economic empowerment,

health and housing. However, the government is yet to act. Addressing the issue of high unemployment among the youth, especially among rural females, the report recommended developing “an environment that helps the unemployed Muslim youth relocate themselves from homes and take up the jobs in manufacturing and modern service sectors.”

It took 26 years for the Uttar Pradesh state government to enforce the ruling that all rules and notifications, government orders and public notices also will be published in Urdu. The Congress-led UP government on Oct. 7, 1989, had recognized Urdu as the second language, and the state high court rejected that challenge from UP Hindi Sahitya Sammelan. After the court upheld the decision, they sought the supreme court, which affirmed the decision in 2014. The state government April 21 directed all levels of administration to ensure that Urdu is used as a second official language.

Yet, the challenges don’t seem to be subsiding. A senior government official told the Indian Express, April 25, that while there is demand for Urdu translators in government, the bureaucratic process will become lengthy because for many officers and ministers, correspondence in Urdu will have to be translated before taking action.

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Mohammad Reyaz is assistant editor of Twocircles.net.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

MUSLIMS ABROAD

Empowering Muslim Indians Are Muslim expatriates doing enough to uplift India’s deserving students?

A decade ago, this gap was even higher.

And among women, the literacy rate is even lower.

The Jahangirabad Educational Trust Group of Institutions (JETGI; http://www. jit.edu.in/), managed by IMRC, is running three institutes: Jahangirabad Institute of Engineering of Technology (JIT), Jahangirabad Institute of Management (JIM) and Jahangirabad Media institute (JMI). And they plan to expand it into a fully functional university.

AFFORDABLE HIGHER EDUCATION

BY MOHAMMAD REYAZ AND MOHAMMAD ISMAIL KHAN

T

he looks will float one to another era, but this Mughal era fortress in Jahangirabad, about 25 miles from Lucknow, capital of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, is home to a unique experiment being pursued by a group of successful expatriate Muslim professionals from India.

They are contributing toward running vocational colleges for engineering, management and media — education made available at affordable fees that serves India’s hinterland.

Toward this end, a number of educated and professionally successful non-resident Indian (NRI) Muslims, most of them based in the United States, are working through the California-based Indian Muslim Relief and Charities (IMRC; http://www.imrcusa.org/).

One of the few organizations influencing and channelizing the resources of Muslims of Indian origin living in the United States to give back to their communities in India, IMRC has its imprint on almost every area of

need to better Muslim lives in India. Besides education, IMRC also a focuses on health, rural development, and rehabilitation of victims of disasters. It also financially supports other grassroots organizations across India.

IMRC was established by a group of Indian immigrants living in the United States who wanted to make a difference for their less fortunate compatriots. It started in the wake of the 1983 Nellie Massacre in Assam where, in just in few hours, thousands of mainly Muslim villagers, including women and children were hacked to death, left to die in open fields. However, due to the Indian and international media’s poor coverage, this genocide did not evoke much immediate relief.

Compared to other religious communities in India, Muslims have the lowest literacy rate. They lag behind with a literacy rate of 67.6 percent compared to the national rate of 74 percent, said All India Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen President Asaduddin Owaisi addressing the India Education Conclave 2012 hosted by the Muslim Educational Social and Cultural Organization in Hyderabad (Times of India, Hyderabad, Dec 30, 2012).

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

In last few decades, the education sector has emerged as an important industry in India, where investors aiming at maximizing their profits aim for the top paying students. IMRC-run institutions, however, take as many qualified students as possible, but being supported by a charitable organization, they focus primarily on the hinterland, and reach students from otherwise poor and deprived classes.

August is admissions season at Jahangirabad. The campus is visited by students from remote districts from not only Uttar Pradesh, but also neighboring Bihar, from

IMRC Projects in Progress Jahangirabad Institute of Technology (JIT), Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh Challenger International School, Moinabad, Hyderabad, Telangana Challenger Girls’ Orphanage, Moinabad, Hyderabad, Telangana Indo-US Hospital, Hyderabad Health camps in several states Bihar, Assam, Karnataka, Gujarat, UP, AP and more • Work on rural development in several states • Provide relief materials to poor and victims of calamities • Qurbani meat and iftar kit distribution Soon to begin: Indo-US Public Schools • Goal to build 100 schools, 10 schools this year Website: www.imrcusa.org

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MUSLIMS ABROAD

Meeting Manzoor Ghori The man behind the idea of giving back to the community, Manzoor Ghori has served as chairperson of IMRC since its founding. He retired after 33 years of service in the health sector and has dedicated himself entirely to IMRC, nurturing it to be an effective institution.

He talked to Islamic Horizons about his vision and mission: Manzoor Ghori: Although I have left India, where I was born and raised, my roots and home are still there. We felt that it was our responsibility to remember the less fortunate and help our fellow community members who are in dire need.

What are the challenges of raising funds in the United States for projects in India?

MG: When it comes to giving, Americans are the most generous people I have known. They are ready to donate for the wellbeing of the community, and to establish best schools for the community in India.

How would you assess the situation of Muslims in India?

the eastern state of West Bengal and further up from Assam, and even the southern state of Kerala queuing up for admission in courses like engineering, management, and media. Many come from lower-income families like farmers, shopkeepers, clergy, and village teachers, who would otherwise not be able to pay private college costs. Their village schools are poorly resourced, and most of them get lower rankings in national entrance examinations and find it difficult to get enrollment in government-run higher education institutions where fees are lower.

And the expensive private institutions are beyond their means.

Rashid Alam, son of a Bihar police constable, who was seeking admission into a bachelor of technology degree program, had come with his father, requesting a partial waiver in tuition.

To help students in need, these vocational colleges have kept their tuition lower than most private colleges in the state. Furthermore, they give rebates and scholarships to students based on merit and need.

“We aim to provide quality education at an affordable price,” said Manzoor Ghori, IMRC executive director. “We are making sure that students acquire leadership skills because in our community, we have hardly any leaders who could represent us.”

Every semester, about 30 top students, who get more than 70 percent discount (five each from the five engineering courses and five from MBA), are given an additional 50 percent discount in tuition based on test scores.

50

MG: The condition of Muslims (in India) has not improved. In fact in the past 60 years, it has worsened. According to the 2006 Sachar Commission Report, the literacy rate of Muslims in India is below the national average and the concentration of Muslims in states lacking infrastructural facilities implies that a large proportion of the community is without access to basic services. Of course, the government is responsible, but in a democracy, minorities should also struggle, work hard, and strive for their rights within the constitutional framework.

What is one area that needs urgent attention?

MG: Education will bring empowerment, and we at IMRC realize this. We have taken the initiative to give quality education at affordable cost and have started and supported a school (in Hyderabad), as well as engineering, management and media institutes, which we envision to expand into full-fledged university in a decade, InshaAllah. We also give scholarships and are taking initiatives to educate children coming from slums.

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The Hyderabad-based Sahayta Trust, IMRC’s Indian arm, helps qualified students with tuition payments, and in some cases, fully sponsors tuition and boarding costs.

In the last batch alone, they sponsored more than 50 students, said a JETGI source.

Being a minority institution, half the seats are reserved for Muslims by law, who are able to avail maximum benefit of the scholarship opportunities. But also there are students from other communities of India, including Hindus. Badri Vishal Mishra, an engineering major who belongs to the uppermost Brahmin caste but is from a poor family, chose JIT over other institutions as it was “comparatively cheaper,” and he also received scholarships.

Jahangirabad Institute of Technology (JIT) Courses offered: Engineering: computer science, civil, electronic, electrical and mechanical.

Management: MBA Media: Certificate and diploma courses in broadcast journalism, television program production and journalism & mass communication Courses in pipeline: Bachelor’s of education, business administration and master of technology Diploma in engineering Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in media Website of JETGI: www.jit.edu.in

There are various government-run affirmative action programs and scholarships, particularly for students belonging to those defined as “socially backward communities” of Dalits (the Untouchables), Tribals, and minorities. At the start of every academic year, JETGI assigns an accounts office employee to help students avail of such programs.

JETGI, however, does not want students to remain a “poor cousin” and helps them with personal development and spoken English, considered important in today’s competitive world. Today, many of its graduates are doing quite well after college.

The new engineering building has wellequipped workshops and a library that is as good, if not better than several privately run institutions.

Since the 2009-10 academic year, JIT has been offering an MBA program, besides courses in computer science, electronics, civil, electrical and mechanical engineering.

In 2010, JMI — started in 2005 but was closed due to logistic issues — became operational again. It offers diploma and certificate courses, and has state-of-the-art studios and infrastructure.

Several new programs are in the pipeline, including a teachers’ training institute, bachelor of business administration, master of technology, a diploma in engineering, and full-time bachelor’s and master’s degrees in media. JETGI has acquired neighbouring lots for expansion.

Professor Khwaja Muhammad Rafi, who is credited with expansion of another private

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

MUSLIMS ABROAD

university, Al-Falah School of Engineering & Technology (AFSET) in Faridabad, Haryana, has been given the “mandate to establish a center of excellence.” He is working toward it by recruiting highly qualified faculty, and promoting good academic ambience on campus. The aim is to expand it into a fullfledged university.

SPECIAL FOCUS ON PROMOTING WOMEN’S EDUCATION To promote quality education among women, particularly from among minorities, JETGI started offering special scholarships and rebates of up to 50 percent in tuition in all courses from the 2014-15 session.

While the campus has a men’s dorm, the women’s dorm, located next to staff housing, can accommodate only about 35 students.

The lack of proper infrastructure and the inavailability of social sciences courses, which are more popular among women, account for their lower enrollment. However, JETGI has acquired the land and construction is about to begin for a new women’s dorm. The women’s dorm director is confident a separate hostel for women would give them and their parents a sense of security.

Rafi said one reason for the lower enrollment of women is the Muslim community’s lack of awareness about educating daughters.

However, he said the campus is quite safe and reiterated his commitment to promoting education among girls through special scholarships.

JIT plans to start a College of Education that can begin classes this year, if they get the clearance on time. This will be followed by 52

the start of an undergraduate in education program. These courses are quite popular among girls and the enrollment of female students is expected to go up once the new department begins.

IMRC also runs the Challenger International School at Moinabad, about 15 miles from Hyderabad, to provide quality education to the homeless and orphaned children.

Although the bulk of IMRC donations largely come from Indian origin Muslims in the United States, their benevolent patrons are spread across the world. Besides education, IMRC also runs a hospital in Hyderabad, organizes health camps, works in rural development and provides aid to the poor and victims of calamities, such as ethnic riots in Muzaffarnagar or flood victims in Indian-occupied Kashmir.

THE CHALLENGED MINORITY The 600-page Tiwari Commission report on the 1983 Nellie Massacre, submitted to the Assam Government in 1984, is still a closely guarded secret. The police filed 688 criminal cases, yet not a single person was prosecuted — 378 cases were closed due to “lack of evidence” and 310 cases were dropped as a part of the Assam Accord.

This year marks IMRC’s 32nd year of service for the needy in India. Today, it runs an engineering, management and media institute in Uttar Pradesh, a school and an orphanage in suburban Hyderabad, it is involved in relief work in the states, including Gujarat, Bihar, Assam, and IndianOccupied Kashmir. IMRC’s largest project each year is the feeding program where food

and cooked meals are distributed to the poor, especially during Ramadan. It also performs qurbani (sacrifice) and distributes meat in rural, remote villages where there is little access for these communities to benefit from qurbani programs in larger cities.

“We started off as a relief organization to help in times of calamities almost 30 years back, but increasingly we felt the need to expand to not just provide fish, but to train them fishing,” MRC Vice President Maqsood Quadri said. “We hence invested into education and health sector for long-term rehabilitation.”

Education remains the organization’s main focus as one-third of its collections is spent on education and scholarships.

A Mughal-era fort in Barabanki has been converted into the Jahangirabad Institute of Technology, providing programs in engineering, management and media, and quality education at an affordable cost. Nearly 90 percent of JIT students rely on financial assistance through scholarships based on merit. Several other educational institutions also are supported throughout India with school fees, supplies, and uniforms.

“We are soon going to open a junior girls college with state-of-the-art lodging facilities, targeting mainly the children of NRIs,” said Syed Aneesuddin, chairman of the Sahayata Trust — IMRC’s sister organization — responsible for implementing projects in India.

However, the initiative he is most excited about is the Indo-US schools, a pilot project which will start this fall near the slums of Hyderabad to cater to students from poor families.

In 2009, IMRC inaugurated the IndoUS Multispecialty Hospital in Hyderabad.

Under the India Health Initiative (IHI), a team of doctors from the United States volunteers each year at free health camps organized by Sahayata Trust to provide medical care to the needy. In 2015 alone, IMRC reached out to more than 10,000 patients in Hyderabad, Bijapur, and Bangarapet.

IMRC also has helped with the rehabilitation of victims of calamities, such as ethnic riots in Muzaffarnagar and people affected by flood in Indian Occupied Kashmir. While several NGOs help the needy and poor of India, IMRC focuses on remote villages to assist those in extreme poverty.

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Mohammad Ismail Khan, a Hyderabad based lawyer and journalist, is associated with TwoCircles.net. Mohammad Reyaz is assistant editor of TwoCircles.net.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

MUSLIMS ABROAD

Muslims in India Since Early Years of Islam Can the new generation of Muslims in India craft a meaningful position for themselves and their community?

BY KASHIF-UL-HUDA

S

oon after Islam spread in the Arabian peninsula, Muslims arrived on the coast of India following the well-established and ancient trade routes. The earliest artifacts of Muslims in India are found in Kerala in southern India, and in Gujarat in western India, both prominent stops along the spice trade route.

Legend has it that the Cheraman Perumal of Kodungallur in Kerala saw the splitting of moon (shaqq-ul-qamar). Arab traders later told him about Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam). He is said to have accepted Islam, and traveled to meet with the Prophet. On his return journey, the king

fell, but before he died, he had instructed his travel companions to establish a mosque in India. India’s first mosque, the Cheraman Juma Masjid in Thrissur district of Kerala is said to have been established in 629 CE (7-8 Hijri).

The first Muslim foray into Gujarat region appears to be in 15 Hijri (635 CE) when the governor of Bahrain sent an expedition to Thana and Bhaurch. Muslim contact with India continued for several centuries in the form of expeditions, trade, and migration.

However, most of the Muslims in India are of native origin with masses upon masses converting due to the efforts of the many

INDIAN MUSLIMS’ EXPERIENCE IN LIVING FOR MORE THAN A THOUSAND YEARS IN A PLURALISTIC SOCIETY, AND ABOUT 70 YEARS UNDER A SECULAR AND DEMOCRATIC ARRANGEMENT HAVE MADE THEM WELLSUITED FOR A GLOBALIZED WORLD.

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Sufi scholars. One of the first commentaries on hadiths was written in Gujarat and some of the first translations of the Quran were done in India. The contribution of Islamic scholars from India toward the sciences of hadith and Islamic jurisprudence was highly appreciated by other scholars of repute.

Madrasas contributed toward spreading of Islamic education not only in the Indian subcontinent, but also overseas. The famous lamp of Ponnani Jama Masjid in Malabar has illuminated the lives of many international scholars for more than 500 years.

Muslim control over most of northern India began with the Mamluks (1193-1290 CE) followed by the Khiljis (1290-1320 CE), the Tughlaqs (1320-95), Sayyid (1400-42), and the Lodhi (1457-1518). Independent Muslim kingdoms in different parts of India like the Begums (Ladies) of Bhopal, the Nizams of Hyderabad, and the Sultans of Gujarat also contributed to that region’s social, cultural, and political development.

But it was the Mughal dynasty (1526-1857) that gave India much of its present day social and cultural identity. Muslims combined foreign and indigenous elements harmoniously to create a new style in art, cuisine, music, dance, and languages that are uniquely Indian with a strong Muslim influence. The effect of innovation in governance, economy, communication, during the rules of Muslim dynasties is still evident in India. The Grand Trunk Road running across the Gangetic plain built by Sher Shah Suri (reign 154045) continues to be used even today in India and Pakistan. Suri introduced the currency “Rupiah” and both India and Pakistan still measure their wealth in “Rupees.”

The Mughals with their military might were able to control large parts of India shaping its political unity. The stability and security under Mughals were instrumental in the rise of agriculture, trade, and commerce in India. India’s riches have attracted traders and raiders since long. The British also arrived in India to trade, took advantage of the lax rulers, acquired military strength, and soon started playing a political role. The frustration and anger at British policies led to the great war of 1857 when British officers were removed from many places of India, but then Delhi fell to the British forces and that signaled the end of Mughal rule in India.

The control of India passed from East India Company to Britain and India became a jewel in the British crown. Having learned their lessons from the 1857 war where both

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

OBITUARY Hindu and Muslims worked together to fight them, the British devised the divide and rule policy to keep the two big religious communities separated.

The British, who chose to believe that Muslims were responsible for the anti-British uprising made them the subject of ruthless punishments and merciless vengeance. As an important step, in 1835, two decades before formally ending the Mughal rule, English replaced Persian as the official language, rendering Muslims unemployable and hapless. More importantly, it was the direction toward “civilizing” the natives whom they considered less than human.

MAKING MUSLIMS RELEVANT AGAIN The Darul Uloom (founded in 1866) at Deoband, a highly influential seminary, and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s Aligarh movement for spreading modern education among Muslims were two varied responses to the political downfall of Muslims — the ousted ruling class. While Muslims associated with Deoband carried the banner of struggle against colonial forces with the publication and distribution of newspapers, the Aligarh movement thought it best to cooperate with the British masters.

The abolition of Caliphate in Turkey gave rise to a movement against British colonialism in India that popularly came to be called as the Khilafat Movement. In the 1920s, Mohammad Ali Jauhar (1878-1931) and Maulana Shaukat Ali (1873-1938) — popularly known as the Ali Brothers — made this a pan-India movement. Many Hindu leaders also participated in this movement, which made Mohandas Gandhi a leader for all Indians. This pan-India movement also jump-started the struggle that led to the independence of India. Meanwhile, a section of Muslims under the banner of All-India Muslim League, apprehensive of the position of Muslims in a Hindu-dominated India, demanded a separate homeland for Muslims.

By the time India was independent in 1947, the country was partitioned into India and Pakistan. This caused immeasurable suffering to millions of Hindus and Muslims. The wounds of partition are still raw in the Indian subcontinent. “Go to Pakistan” is a common taunt Indian Muslims hear. The guilt of partition, social discrimination, and violence made life difficult for North Indian Muslims.

In 1992, following a sustained campaign, the 700-year-old Babri Mosque was invaded and destroyed after being claimed the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. Thousands died in anti-Muslim violence leading up to and after the mosque’s destruction. Anti-Muslim hatred helped the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Parishad (BJP) win elections in several states. BJP’s growth has meant political marginalization of Indian Muslims. Last year, the BJP won the parliamentary election in a landslide victory resulting in the lowest number of Muslim parliamentarians returned to India’s premier legislative body.

The Muslims of India are, however, not resigned to their fate. A new generation is emerging that is confident of its place in India and the world, and carries none of the baggage or guilt of their ancestors. They are advancing and pushing the boundaries in the social arena, academics, sports, politics, and journalism.

India is the third-largest Muslim country. The communities of Muslims in India are diverse in terms of their religious practices, social customs, traditions, and languages. They are the single-largest Muslim group to spend such a long time under democratic institutions and electoral politics. Their experience in living more than a thousand years in a pluralistic society and about 70 years under a secular and democratic arrangement have made them well-suited for a globalized world.

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Kashif-ul-Huda is editor of TwoCircles.net which covers India’s marginalized communities.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

Syed Shamshad Husain A Chicago Icon 1938 – 2015

A

n icon of Chicago’s Muslim community and intrepid ISNA volunteer, Syed Shamshad Husain, passed away in his sleep June 3, after a yearlong sickness.

He was a loving and dedicated family man and an untiring stalwart of Islamic and community work. He had a masters of science and an MBA degree in accounting and finance. He was a founding member of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago and served as its secretary until his recent illness.

A pioneer in building institutions/Islamic centers along with many other stalwarts who came to United States in the 1960s, he directly or indirectly contributed in founding of the city’s Muslim Community Center, the Islamic Society of the Northwest Suburbs, Islamic Foundation, Muslim Society Inc. (MSI), and other organizations. A founding member of IQRA Educational Foundation, he took early retirement from a lucrative job to work fulltime as its financial advisor.

Attendees of the ISNA conventions in Chicago would have seen him serving in one capacity or another on the convention floor. He was an active member of ISNA steering committee for all the conventions held in Chicago, organizing and volunteering for various functional committees.

He was a pioneer in interfaith dialogue and had the vision to see its importance in the 1980s. He co-founded the first sharia-based mutual fund in Chicago, Islamia Mutual Fund, which later was acquired by Azzad Funds. He served as a Azzad Funds trustee until a couple of months before his death.

He served several terms as president of MSI Islamic center Living up to his reputation as consensus-builder, he always was elected president of Islamic centers. During his term as MSI president, he initiated an annual Community Appreciation Dinner for the Glendale Heights community where civic leaders, including the mayor, police and fire chiefs, and aldermen are invited to interact with the local Muslim community, raising awareness about Muslims and Islam.

MSI recognized him with an award for lifetime service to the community.

He is survived by his wife, Anwaar Husain, sons, Khalid and Javeed Husain, daughters, Naheed and Asra, and several grandchildren.

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Islamophobia in India

BY AJIT SAHI

V

iolence, as the late Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi explained, takes myriad forms.

Campaigns of physical violence — dubbed “riots” by the Indian news media — carried out by supremacist Hindu groups against religious minorities, especially India’s Muslims, are well known outside India.

Little known, however, even inside the country is that the state’s very structure is fully complicit in systematic discrimination against India’s religious, social, and ethnic minorities. Most prominent among the victims are Muslims, who constitute roughly 14 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people. The second and third categories include, the Dalits, the former untouchables of Hindu caste-based society, and the adivasis, an umbrella term for a heterogeneous set of ethnic and tribal groups considered the country’s aboriginal population, many of whom are now armed insurgents.

Systemic discrimination against Muslims, however, has manifested severely. In the 1947 partition of India, an overwhelming number of Muslim elites and middle classes migrated to the newlyminted nation of Pakistan, leaving Muslims who stayed back in India poor and rudderless. It has therefore been easy for the Indian state, and generally in the social structures across business, health and education, to keep out the relatively less educated Muslims.

More sinister is how India’s supposedly counterterrorism doctrine has deployed, especially since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Indian law enforcement agencies have framed thousands of mostly young Muslims on unsubstantiated charges of terrorism, ruining their and their families’ lives, instilling fear in the hearts of tens of millions. Regrettably, India’s judiciary has played along. Thousands spend years in confinement before being acquitted. Incredibly, even though the acquitting judges, mostly of the state high courts or the Indian Supreme Court, have in their rulings often criticized the police and prosecution for wilful fabrication of cases, no punishment is ever accorded to the guilty officers nor are the sufferers compensated. Acquittals mean nothing to the police, who continue to hound these former accused forever, often implicating them in new false cases. An example is Abdul Nasser Madani, a politician from the southern state of Kerala who spent nine years in prison before being acquitted, only to be rearrested a couple years later in 2010. The second case against him 56

is more unfounded than the first. Madani now has failing health, is near blind and wheelchair-bound resulting from a bombing in 1992 allegedly by Hindu extremists. And yet, the trial court judge rejected Madani’s bail plea several times before the supreme court ruled in his favor.

Madani is luckier than scores of his coreligionists who often are embroiled in multiple cases across different states so they keep being shifted from one city’s prison to another for court appearances. Only a lucky few can dream of getting bail in every case during trials. The reality is grimmer: most don’t step out of prison even after being acquitted in several cases, only because one more trial remains.

Then there are more traditional forms of injustices that Indian Muslims continue to bear. The most common among these is the judiciary’s failure to punish intelligence and security officials, most prominently the police, for the thousands of incidents of hate violence by Hindu fascist groups. The latest example came in March 20, 2015, when a New Delhi court acquitted 16 paramilitary, Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) personnel accused in the 1987 Hashimpura massacre related to killing 42 Muslims from a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut city.

Judge Sanjay Jindal gave them the benefit of doubt despite survivors’ testimonies. On May 22, 1987, PAC personnel rounded up about 50 Muslims from a congregation gathered outside a mosque in Hashimpura, then shot them and threw their bodies into a canal.

Muslim victims — those who survived such violence and the families of those who didn’t — rarely have had occasion to rejoice in the finding of an Indian court in such a case.

The courts’ abysmal record in dispensing justice to Muslim hate crime victims since 1947 worsened after the demolition of the 16th century Babri Mosque in 1992 by supremacist Hindu mobs in Faizabad (now euphemistically labelled as “the temple town of Ayodhya”). Since then, courts across the country have failed to hold hate groups, police, and the central and state governments accountable for escalated violence against Muslims, including outright massacres. And the condition of Indian Muslims has declined further since Sept. 11.

The epitome of religious discrimination, injustice and intolerance against Muslims is found in the western state of Gujarat, where Hindu mobs killed more than 2,000 Muslims in February-March 2002 claiming “retaliation” for the alleged torching of an interstate train, which killed 60 people, many of them members of a right-wing Hindu campaign to build a temple on the site of the demolished Babri Mosque. The man on whose watch the killings occurred, then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi, is now India’s prime minister, and politicians from his Bharatiya Janata Parishad and its affiliate Hindu fascist groups convicted of the massacres after painstaking civil society efforts, are now enjoying bail and power.

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Ajit Sahi, a reporter for the weekly Tehelka, and public speaker has written extensively on Muslim issues.

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

They are humans. Period.

Will the world ever take notice of the ethnic cleansing in Burma?

BY ISLAMIC HORIZONS STAFF

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f they are not accepted (as citizens), they cannot just be sent onto rivers. Can’t be pushed out to sea. They are humans. I just see them as humans who are entitled to human rights,” Nyan Win, a spokesperson of Myanmar’s (previously Burma) opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) told reporters May 18 on the sidelines of a meeting between political parties and President Thein Sein in Yangon (Rangoon).

NLD chairperson and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has faced criticism for her silence on the 2012 Rakhine State riots, as surging Buddhist nationalism has deepened the desperation of Rohingya Muslims, who were constitutionally reduced to stateless being labeled as “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh. After receiving the Nobel Prize, Suu Kyi told reporters she did not know if the Rohingya could be regarded as Burmese citizens.

Under the 1982 Citizenship Law, most Rohingya are unable to qualify for citizenship. As such, the estimated 1.3 million Rohingyas are treated as illegal immigrants with restrictions on their movement, property ownership, access to education and public service jobs. Critics describe Suu Kyi’s stance as politically motivated. However, she said she wanted to work toward reconciliation, claiming she cannot take sides as “violence has been committed by both sides.”

The Economist (June 15, 2013) wrote Suu Kyi’s “halo has even slipped among foreign human rights lobbyists, disappointed at her failure to make a clear stand on behalf of the Rohingya minority.” Her political future seems bleak. She turned 70 in June, and the constitution bars anyone whose spouse or children are loyal to foreign countries from becoming president or vice president. Suu

Kyi’s two sons are British citizens, as was her late husband.

While she spoke out against a ban on Rohingya families near the Bangladeshi border having more than two children, she was silent on the 2012 atrocities that led to their situation deteriorating dramatically, displacing tens of thousands who remain trapped in miserable camps. The violence was the catalyst for an exodus of migrants across the Bay of Bengal, with thousands taking to makeshift boats heading for Thailand, Malaysia and beyond.

On Dec. 29, 2014, the U.N. General Assembly approved a non-binding, European Union-drafted resolution urging Myanmar to provide “full citizenship” to

its Rohingya Muslim minority, to allow them to call themselves Rohingya, and to move freely throughout the country.

DEEP ROOTS Muslims first arrived as travelers, adventurers, pioneers, sailors, and traders on the Arakan coast in the ninth century CE before the establishment of the first Burmese empire in 1055 CE. They moved upward into the hinterland to Maungdaw. Ninth century Arab, Persian, European and Chinese travelers have documented these early Muslim settlements and the propagation of Islam. However, ever since the central Burmese kings conquered Rakhine, the people there have been treated badly.

Rohingya Muslims are indigenous. Burma’s first constitution and its first democratically elected government recognized them as

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

citizens like the other 144 indigenous races.

Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, founder of the Communist Party of Burma and considered the father of the nation, when he visited Arakan in 1947, promised Rohingya Muslims will live together as long as the country survives. U Nu, the first democratically elected prime minister, called them by name as Rohingya.

“If the Rohingya Muslims of Burma are not the citizens of this country, then I myself am not entitled to be the citizen of this country,” said Sai Shwe Thike, the country’s first democratically elected president.

BUDDHIST ISLAMOPHOBIA After Burma transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in 2011 with newfound freedom of expression, the Buddhist majority fanned flames of hatred against the Rohingyas. Buddhist mob violence left up to 280 people dead — most of them Rohingyas — and 140,000 people were chased from their homes. The Rohingyas now live under apartheid-like conditions in camps or in restricted villages in Arakan state.

“The [media] stories are true,” wrote Jack Kornfield, a former Buddhist monk, a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Center and among those to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West, in his blog “Lion’s Roar” relating a June 2014 visit. “Traveling across Burma recently, I encountered some of these monks who are drumming up hate and jingoistic fervor. They don’t want to talk about peace and have succeeded in sowing mistrust across much of the country. Under their influence, taxi drivers and shopkeepers from Rangoon to remote towns talk about their fear of a Muslim takeover and ‘the Buddha’s teaching’ that sometimes violence is needed to protect the nation. This dangerous situation needs some explanation.”

Radical monks have successfully linked Buddha-dharma with nationalism. “With 40 percent of the Burmese population in 135 ethnic groups, three million Muslims, and a dozen simmering civil wars, the misguided monks tell Burmese Buddhists they need to fight against those who are different to maintain the nation,” he wrote.

Besides mass killings and religious per57

MUSLIMS ABROAD secution, Buddhists are destroying ancient inscriptions, relics and scriptures from the Mrauk U caves and places of worship, such as a 350-year-old mosque.

DEHUMANIZATION Last November, the Burmese Parliament declared white cardholders ineligible to vote in the May 2015 election. In 1996, the government, under a U.N.-financed project, replaced the Rohingyas’ green national registration cards with white cards promising they would be issued the regular pink citizenship cards within four months. This promise was never fulfilled. They changed the law, barring white cardholders from voting, declaring they are all “Bengalis” — illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. In the last 2008 election, all citizens including white card bearers were entitled to vote.

Wakar Uddin, a Pennsylvania State University professor who serves as director general of the Arakan-based Rohingya Union (www.ar-union.org), said registered and unregistered camps of an estimated half a million Rohingya refugees exist in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and India as a result of constant outflows from Arakan over the past several years. There have been dramatic increases in the influx of refugees to these countries following anti-Rohingya violence in 2012 and 2013 and ongoing persecution. The dire situation in Rohingya IDP camps and Rohingya villages in Arakan has made the victims more prone to exploitation by human traffickers and smugglers in Southeast Asia. As the refugees continue their perilous journey, sailing particularly to Malaysia and Indonesia through high seas, new humanitarian crises emerged this past May.

CRISIS IN THE ANDAMAN SEA On May 7, off the coast of Southern Thailand in the Andaman Sea, a wooden boat with several hundred Rohingya refugees was spotted adrift. This is part of a regular flow of thousands of Rohingya escaping atrocities

by Myanmar’s armed forces and Arakan state officials, and violence by Buddhist Rakhine.

Malaysian authorities reportedly turned away the fishing boat packed with men, women, and children, covered under plastic sheets to protect them from the intense sun. The refugees were in the high seas for months; the boat’s captain and crew abandoned them a week before they were spotted drifting in the sea. The victims were trying to reach 58

Malaysia but the recent crackdown against human traffickers in Thailand, which has long been considered a regional hub for human trafficking, has made traffickers keep the people several miles offshore in the high seas.

Ten people died during the voyage and their bodies were thrown overboard, according to reports. The Thai military provided some

of smugglers who hold them in captivity in squalid jungle camps until a ransom is paid by their families back home or relatives in Malaysia. Recently, several camps have been reportedly discovered in Southern Thailand.

In early May, Thai authorities discovered an unusually large year-old camp used to detain Rohingya refugees at the Thailand-Malaysia

AFTER BURMA TRANSITIONED FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY IN 2011 WITH NEWFOUND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, THE BUDDHIST MAJORITY FANNED FLAMES OF HATRED AGAINST THE ROHINGYAS. water and food after they were spotted, and then assisted the boat’s departure farther out to sea, according to news reports. An estimated 8,000 Rohingya men, women, and children were at sea, fleeing atrocities and dire circumstances in Arakan, per the reports.

In early May, more than 1,500 Rohingya came ashore in Malaysia and Indonesia, and both countries have expressed intentions to turn away any more refugees, per media reports. Subsequently, the Indonesian Navy turned away a boat with several hundred Rohingya, while Malaysian authorities turned away two boats with at least 800 passengers.

Thailand also has been cracking down on human trafficking in its southern region, forcing boatloads of migrants to beach in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

HUMAN SMUGGLING, TRAFFICKING, AND MASS GRAVES An estimated quarter of a million Rohingya have been trafficked in Thailand since the 2012 Arakan violence. The U.N. Refugee agency estimates roughly 25,000 Rohingya boarded smugglers’ boats in the first three months of 2015. In most cases, brokers of smuggling rings lure Rohingya refugees offering the trip to Malaysia for $200, but the price increases significantly — as much as $2,000 — once they are in the custody of human traffickers, facing abuse.

More than 120,000 Muslim Rohingya have been boarding ships and paying smugglers to help them flee persecution.

Once in Thailand, many Rohingya are forced to cross the country using vehicles

border. It is located three kilometers away from the first camp, where 26 bodies of Rohingya were discovered in a mass grave.

The newly discovered camp, which has 21 bedrooms, eight toilets, holds more than 1,000 people.

Malaysia and Thailand continue finding mass graves. Police reports indicate the dead are Rohingya refugees who starved to death or died of disease while held by traffickers who were awaiting ransom payments. Involvement of Thai police in trafficking further complicates the issue. Some police officers in Thai prisons and detention centers reportedly collude with traffickers, often deceiving Rohingya families who are taken out of prisons and detention centers, and instead of relocation, the men, women, and children are separated during transportation. Women are taken to separate destinations for sex trade. Men are taken to hard labor camps to work in plantations and farms, and children are used as laborers or sold to third parties.

“Unfortunately, the United States has lifted nearly all of its sanctions on Burma, which in turn has removed the ability to leverage effective pressure for legitimate democratic reforms,” Brianna Oliver, director of communications at U.S. Campaign for Burma, told Anadolu Agency. “The U.S. should deny Burma admittance into the Generalized System of Preferences trade program and add those most responsible in the Burmese government for the persecution of the Rohingya to the Specially Designated Nationals list, as well as demand the government to end its ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.”

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

NEW RELEASES Shared Stories, Rival Tellings: Early Encounters of Jews, Christians, and Muslims Robert C. Gregg 2015. pp. 712. HB. $39.95 Oxford University Press USA obert Gregg’s comparative investigation studies how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpreters, including writers and artists, developed their distinctive and exclusionary understandings of narratives common to their holy books: Cain and Abel, Sara and Hagar, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, Jonah and the Whale, and Mary the Mother of Jesus. He argues that scripture interpreters played an often underappreciated role in each religion’s individual development of thought, spirituality, and worship, and in the three religions’ debates with one another, and the cultural results of those debates.

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Muslims in the Western Imagination Sophia Rose Arjana 2015. pp. 280. HB. $29.95 Oxford University Press USA hroughout history, Muslim men have been depicted as monsters. The portrayal of humans as monsters helps a society delineate who belongs and who, or what, is excluded. Even when symbolic, as in post-Sept. 11, 2001, zombie films, Muslim monsters still function to define Muslims as non-human entities.

Sophia Arjana, the first to present a genealogy of these creatures, from the demons and giants of the Middle Ages to the hunchbacks with filed teeth that are featured in the 2007 film 300, argues that constructions of Muslim monsters constitute a recurring theme, first formulated in medieval Christian thought.

Muslim monsters are often related to Jewish monsters, and more broadly to Christian anti-Semitism and anxieties about African and other foreign bodies, which involves both religious bigotry and fears surrounding bodily difference. Arjana argues these dehumanizing constructions are deeply embedded in Western consciousness, existing today as internalized beliefs and practices that contribute to the culture of violence — both rhetorical and physical — against Muslims.

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Jerusalem Interrupted: Modernity and Colonial Transformation 1917-present Lena Jayyusi, editor 2015. pp. 500. PB. $60 Olive Branch Press, Northampton, Massachusetts cosmopolitan city, Jerusalem saw a continuous and dynamic infusion of immigrants and travelers, many of whom stayed and made the city theirs. No one then could have imagined the radical rupture that would come in 1948, with the end of the British Mandate and the establishment of Israel.

Lena Jayyusi brings together distinguished scholars and writers to relate the history of Jerusalem from the culturally diverse British Mandate (1920-48) period through its forcible transformation into a predominantly Jewish city. These essays detail often

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ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

unexplored dimensions of the social and political fabric of a city that was rendered increasingly taut and fragile, even as areas of mutual interaction and shared institutions and neighborhoods between Arabs and Jews continued to develop.

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Undivided: A Muslim Daughter, Her Christian Mother, Their Path to Peace Patricia Raybon and Alana Raybon 2015. pp. 256. HB. $22.99 Thomas Nelson book for parents whose adult children have left the family’s belief system, it will help those same children as they wrestle to better understand their parents. For anyone troubled by the broader tensions between Islam and the West, this personal story distills this friction into the context of a family relationship — a journey all the more fascinating. While a conversation is desperately needed in America between Christians and Muslims, this book offers a real-time conversation to follow.

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Performing Salah Using the Prophetic Example (Color): Based on Authentic Hadiths From the Six Most Authentic Books M. Mushfiqur Rahman 2015. pp. 568/Abridged pp. 166. PB. Color: $42 B&W: $30 Abridged $14 Fitrah Press This book, perhaps the first such book in the English language, collects all the authentic hadiths on each aspect of the performance of the salah — be that a physical movement or what is recited in it — then groups them together, allowing the reader to see the exact practice of the Prophet (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam). The main edition is intended for those seeking in-depth evidence for each topic while the Summary Edition is an easy-to-read small book designed for those who only want to know the basics.

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Seven Steps to Spiritual Intelligence Musharraf Hussain 2015. pp. 104. PB. $8 Kube Publishing, Markfield, Leicestershire, UK slim book that tells ways to develop a spiritual intelligence, while summarizing 14 centuries of spiritual wisdom in Islamic literature, from the great scholars and Sufis.

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Makkah and Madinah Activity Book 2015. pp. 32. PB. $5.95 Aysenur Gunes (Author), Ercan Polat (Illustrator) Kube Publishing, Markfield, Leicestershire, UK his fun sticker activity book helpers children explore the wonders of Makkah and Madinah. It features dot-to-dot drawings, coloring, puzzles to solve, and more than 60 stickers.

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FOOD FOR THE SPIRIT

Channeling Anger Productively

wrong, both for themselves and for others. If anger is channeled effectively, then it can be a very useful tool for improving ourselves, and supporting others to do the same.

THE NEGATIVE SIDE:

The Prophet (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) asked, “Whom do you consider the strong man (sura’a) among you? His companions replied, ‘the one whom others cannot wrestle to the ground.’ He said, ‘Rather, it is the one who controls himself while angry.’” (Sahih Muslim; also Nathar al-Durar Vol. 1, p. 183; Sahih al-Bukhari Bk. 73, #135).

BY SAYEDA HABIB

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ecall a time when you became angry and it had a lasting effect on your relationship.

How did you express anger, and what was its lasting impact? How do you feel now about what happened?

Anger can be compared to fire. It is a useful tool which can burn and destroy relationships, and us, if it isn’t managed judiciously. How can one channel this emotion constructively?

THE “POSITIVES” OF ANGER: Islam neither denies that anger exists, nor rejects it. Anger, like any other emotion, has positive and negative aspects. Getting angry isn’t the problem. It becomes an issue when we use negative behaviors to express it, or let it get out of control. We can learn from the Prophet’s own example, the times when he expressed his anger constructively, and times when he controlled it. We’ll begin by exploring the “positives” of anger, to help us to keep the purpose of the emotion in mind.

First, anger serves as a sign, an alert that something isn’t quite right. Anger emerges because we sense an injustice, or feel hurt, frustrated or misunderstood. Anger tells us that there is something that needs to be fixed.

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This anger can help us improve the relationship. First we will need to figure out what’s underneath the anger, and then work with the other person(s) to resolve the issue constructively. Having these warning signals can help save relationships that really matter.

Another positive is that anger can be a strong motivating force. Have you ever been angry with someone who thought that you couldn’t do something? Did you work even harder to prove them wrong? Anger can motivate in either fixing what’s wrong, or proving something to us or someone else. It compels us to take action, to create change, to fix what’s not acceptable to us. It’s not unheard of for people to achieve amazing things when they channel their anger constructively.

A third positive is that anger serves as a deterrent. For example, the thought of God’s wrath is a strong deterrent from wrongdoing.

Thinking about it on a human level, we see that people using anger constructively also works as a preventative tool. One example is parenting. Parents often use anger (though sometimes their expression may not be constructive) to teach their children difference between right and wrong. Anger is an emotion and it tells the other person that what they did is unacceptable. In addition to parenting, as believers, Muslims are encouraged to promote the right and to stand against the

The negative side of anger is that these thoughts and feelings may manifest in unproductive behavior. Anger is a strong and raw emotion, and people may do things in anger that they will later regret. For example, saying nasty things, shouting, fighting and so on are unproductive manifestations of anger.

The reasons may be valid, but the behaviors are not.

These negative behaviors happen because anger can trigger our fight/flight mechanism before we even realize it. Anger is one primitive response to a threat, so if we sense a threat, we may start shouting and fighting before we even realize what’s happening. The fight/ flight system is designed to help save us from physical harm, but since the mind does not distinguish the difference between physical threat, and emotional threat, the system gets triggered automatically. If we aren’t conscious of it, the triggered hormones can remain in circulation causing anxiety and other symptoms. Therefore it is vital to learn how we respond to threat individually, and if our anger is manifesting in negative behaviors.

Raising our awareness of how we respond to anger will help us make changes in order to channel our anger productively. Now lets explore some strategies to make better use of this valuable emotion.

KNOW YOUR TRIGGERS: Anger can be best managed through awareness. The first step is to know what makes you upset or angry. Knowing your triggers can help you better manage them when your

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

buttons get pushed. Take some time to ask yourself: What are the things that trigger my anger? Write down what comes to mind. You may discover that you are more susceptible at certain times of day, or in particular situations. Perhaps, it’s a certain challenging context with which you are having a hard time dealing. Be honest with yourself and write these things down. Also, ask yourself, “What do I do when I get angry?” The person may have done something that we didn’t like, but our response is our own. By becoming aware, you will be able to notice when something is causing you to get upset, and God willing take a more constructive course of action. The next step is to come up with a contingency plan. Ask yourself: “What can I do differently if I become angry again?” Think of two or three different ways you will handle the situation should it happen again. With awareness and practice, you will find better behaviors to channel the emotion.

TAKE A TIMEOUT: If channeled properly, anger is a natural and useful emotion. However, it can become destructive, if we give in to the anger and allow ourselves to behave poorly. If you find

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a common prescription for releasing stress.

Anger is a form of stress for the body. So, if you are feeling anxious or upset, get out there and get some physical exercise. You will not only feel calmer, but your health will benefit too.

COMMUNICATE: yourself feeling angry, then take a timeout.

It is better to allow the issue to sit for a while until you are able to discuss it calmly and rationally. The Prophet, for example suggested that we step away to make wudu when we feel angry (Sunan Abi Dawud). The next time you find yourself losing your temper, excuse yourself from the situation. Then once you have calmed down, come together to discuss the problem till you find a solution. Both you and the other person will appreciate it.

EXERCISE: Anger can trigger the fight/flight mechanism.

Fight/flight throws a variety of hormones in our body that are meant for taking action, such as running for our lives. These hormones will continue to circulate, if we don’t physically move our bodies. If they remain, they will cause anxiety, weight gain, ill health and other negative results. This is why exercise is

ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015

The anger we feel comes up for a reason. The way to resolve the issues is to communicate calmly. Acting negatively from anger can only cause more damage to our relationships. If you really want to resolve the issue, then pick a time when you and the other person can discuss matters calmly. Talk about what’s really going on underneath the anger. Discuss what you really need, and talk about the things that aren’t acceptable in the relationship. With each person getting a chance to speak, put down some boundaries together. This way you can find ways to communicate with respect and come to a deeper understanding.

Anger can be very useful, or destructive. It all depends on whether we use it, or let it use us. I invite you to explore how you currently deal with anger, and then use the strategies in ways that are appropriate for you.

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Sayeda Habib, a professional life coach, works with Muslims to help them overcome obstacles and to achieve their goals.

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ROAD MAP TO IMPROVE THE IMAGE OF MUSLIMS/ISLAM in USA Your mosque can do it, but you can do it by yourself Today, the image of Muslims is under attack. However, we should not forget, that it is our responsibility to correct it collectively and individually: it is every Muslim’s responsibility. YES, if we do it seriously we can see positive results emerging in a few years. Muslims, who are spread out across the United States, should place this ad. in their local newspapers and magazines.

Below is a sample text for the ad. that you can use:

Islam is a religion of inclusion.

Muslims believe in all the Prophets of Old & New Testaments.

Read Quran — The Original, unchanged word of God as His Last and Final testament to humankind.

More information is available on following sites: www.peacetv.tv • www.theDeenShow.com Or 877whyIslam www.Gainpeace.com • www.twf.org Such ads are already running in many newspapers in the United States but may not be in your area of residence yet. Placing these ads can be a continuous reward (sadqa-e-jaria) for yourself, your children, your loved deceased ones and with the prayer for a sick person that Allah make life easy here and in the Hereafter. Please Google the list of newspapers in your state and contact their advertising departments.

Such ads are not expensive. They range for around $20 to $50 per slot and are cheaper if run for a longer time.

Call your local newspaper and ask how many print copies they distribute, and run it for a longer period of time to get cheaper rates.

Don’t forget that DAWAH works on the same principles as that of advertisement, BULK AND REPEATED EXPOSURE CREATES ACCEPTANCE. Printing continuously for a long period of time is better than printing one big advertisement for only once. Let your advertisement run for a longer time even if it is as small as a business card.

NOTE: If you are living East of Chicago, Please call 877WHYISLAM and check if someone is already running an advertisement in the same newspaper as yours. If that is the case choose another newspaper. And if you are living West of Chicago, please check with www.Gainpeace.com before putting your ad. Also, after the ad appears, please send a clipping to the respective organization.

If you have any questions, or want copies of the ads that others have already placed in their area newspapers/ magazines, please contact me, Muhammad Khan at: mjkhan11373@yahoo.com so that I can guide you better.

You can also contact 1-877-why-Islam or Gainpeace.com

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) P.O. Box 38 • Plainfield, IN 46168-0038

NON PROFIT ORG. US POSTAGE PAID PERMIT #15 KENT, OH