Americans Facing Toward Mecca

By Richard N. Ostling

Ogene Davis of Atlanta faithfully attended a black church through high school but became deeply troubled that "good" Christians could tolerate a socially and racially unjust world. "Christianity was not working for blacks," he concluded. Karima Omar Kamouneh (nee Virginia Marston) of Burbank, Calif., was raised by devout Episcopalians but felt plausibility was somehow lacking. "I had milked everything out of Christianity, and it still didn't make sense," she relates. Dawud Wong Chun, a Chinese American in Brooklyn, says simply that he thirsted for a "pious, virtuous, fruitful life."

For all three, the answer was Islam, a choice that until recently might have seemed highly peculiar. Despite 800 million adherents around the world, the faith of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an, the Muslim scriptures, has long been all but invisible in the U.S. More than that, it has been an object of misunderstanding and contempt. "Traditionally, there has always been a rather bad image of Islam in the West," says Ninian Smart, religion professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "In recent years," he adds, "that has been accentuated by the revolution in Iran and terrorism." Insists Dawud Assad, president of the U.S. Council of Masajid (mosques): "People call us terrorists, while ours is a religion of peace."

A steady trickle of homegrown converts has been joining a flood of immigrants to create a sizable American Islamic community. The number of Muslims among those entering the U.S. has doubled in the past two decades, and they now constitute 14% of immigrants. Adding to the total is the indigenous movement formerly known as Black Muslims. Once seen as heretical by orthodox believers because of the unconventional and antiwhite doctrines propounded by Founder Elijah Muhammad, the group has shed those teachings and gained recognition by mainstream Islam. With these trends and their high birthrate, U.S. Muslims are expected to surpass Jews in number and, in less than 30 years, become the country's second largest religious community, after Christians.

The quietly expanding scope of American Islam has become evident only as the result of new research. At a symposium at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Carol Stone, a doctoral student at Indiana University, estimated that there are 4,644,000 U.S. Muslims, with the largest concentration in California. The large majority of U.S. adherents are not affiliated with a mosque, but this is not for lack of opportunity. UMASS Historian Yvonne Haddad, who organized the Amherst sessions, counts more than 600 Islamic centers across the U.S.

Islam in America is not without its problems. "Hold fast to the rope of Allah and be not divided," urges the Qur'an, but in the U.S. that injunction has gone largely unheeded. American Islam is gravely weakened by divisions among nationalities: Egyptians worship with Egyptians, Lebanese with Lebanese. In some locations, separate congregations that use different languages share a building but have no joint activities. "There is no unified, strong Islamic movement in America," complains Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of Orange County, Calif. Coordination among U.S. Muslims is lacking even on something as fundamental as the dates for beginning and ending Ramadan, the month of dawn-to-dusk fasting that concludes this week.

American Muslims have difficulty obeying the traditional practices and moral tenets in a society that is both non-Islamic and highly permissive. Like Christian conservatives, observes Barbara Aswad, an expert on Middle Eastern culture at Wayne State University, devout Muslims "are shocked at what they consider moral problems here, like sexual freedom, drug use, crime and lack of respect for parents." Immigrant parents quarrel with their Americanized offspring about the use of alcohol, which is banned in Islam, and about dating, which the faith forbids. Observing dietary laws is an additional challenge: pork products are strictly off limits.

The most difficult practice to maintain is the prescribed five daily periods of prayers and prostrations conducted while facing Mecca. Laila Al-Marayati, a medical student from Long Beach, Calif., seeks out an empty room at her hospital, but, she admits, "if I was praying and heard someone come in, I'd stop and pretend I was doing something else." Attending weekly prayer services, held on Friday afternoons, is a problem. "Many Muslims who aren't assertive about their faith aren't able to get off from work," says Akil Rahim of Baltimore's Muslim Charities Institute. "One of our major problems is sticking up for our rights."

That is slowly beginning to change as American Muslims feel the need to become more organized and visible. Worshipers at Ramadan services around the U.S. last week heard appeals for greater unity and community participation. "Mutual recognition is starting to dawn among us Muslims," pronounced Talib Abdur-Rashid, a Harlem imam, at Brooklyn's Fatih Mosque, where some 500 faithful -- blacks, whites, converts and a dozen different nationalities -- gathered to pray and break their fast. A similar mix was gathered at the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles, where community leaders have worked hard to reduce tensions between the dominant Sunnis and the more recently arrived Iranian Shi'ites among the 10,000 families the center reaches.

A telling sign of growing cohesion and self-confidence is the number of new mosques that have begun to sprout. An $11 million house of worship is under construction on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and will open for prayers in six months, with plans for a $29 million expansion. Near the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, a 2,000-capacity mosque costing $4 million is due to open next year. The most impressive mosque to date is the splashy $4 million Islamic Center located in the cornfields of Perrysburg, Ohio, outside Toledo. Accommodating 1,200 people for services, the center, opened in 1983, boasts a membership that includes 22 nationality ! groups. Plans call for $40 million more to be spent on an Islamic school, recreation center and other facilities.

American Muslims are seeking a greater voice in affairs outside their immediate religious communities. Voter registration, for example, is a major goal at the Los Angeles center. Los Angeles was the birthplace, six months ago, of the Muslim Political Action Committee, which aims to advance the rights of American Muslims as well as such overseas causes as self- determination for Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories. Another goal: electing a Muslim to the U.S. Congress by 1992. "We'd like people to start thinking of the U.S. as a Judeo-Christian-Muslim society," declares Salam Al- Marayati, MPAC's Iraqi-born spokesman. Ironically, the role models for MPAC and politically inclined Muslims are American-Jewish lobbies. "The Jews are doing their homework, and we are not," says Tajuddin Bin Shu'aib of the Islamic Studies Center in Los Angeles.

At the local level, Muslims are achieving greater acceptance and religious tolerance. In Dearborn, Mich., where 10% to 15% of the population is Arabic, public schools recognize Muslim holy days and do not serve pork in cafeterias. To accommodate modesty rules, girls learn to swim in all-female classes and are allowed to wear slacks instead of shorts for other gym instruction.

Some Muslim leaders see an invigorating sort of challenge in the highly secular and sometimes hostile American environment. "The freedom of expression in this country is allowing Muslims here to practice in the true sense," says Safi Qureshey, a devout Sunni and successful California businessman. Historian Haddad notes that many immigrants and "sojourners" -- students who come for several years -- are nominal Muslims who arrive knowing little about the faith. The freedoms of American society lead them to reflect on their beliefs, she says, and many return to their homelands as leaders. The U.S. has thus become not only a melting pot for Muslims from all nations, she notes, but also an important "incubator for Islamic ideas."

With reporting by Michael P. Harris/Amherst and Jon D. Hull/Los Angeles