A Quiet Revolution (27 page)

Initially the MSA functioned on a small budget based on member- ship dues, but by
1968
it was receiving funds from Muslim-majority

countries, among them Kuwait and Pakistan. In
1965
the MSA had sent a delegation to Saudi Arabia to attend the meeting of the Muslim World League to promote and garner support for the idea of establishing a World Organization of Muslim Students.
14

By
1968
the MSA had begun publishing a newsletter,
Al-Itihhad,
as

well as printing and distributing books and pamphlets and other mate- rials promoting Islamist views. Among the books they distributed in
1968
was a short work by Sayyid Qutb, translated under the title
The Religion of Islam.
It was published by al-Manar press in Palo Alto, California, in

1967
.
15
Altogether, and largely as a result of the MSA’s activism, from

the
1960
s onward a “growing body of English-language literature” was becoming available in the United States presenting the works of Qutb and Mawdudi and the views of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat- i Islami as the correct and normative understanding of Islam.
16

The MSA officers and members plunged into the work of outreach, teaching and preaching, setting up venues for congregational prayers, founding mosques and Islamic centers, establishing and running schools teaching Islam (Sunday schools and summer camps)—activities that had been honed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in earlier decades and through which they had powerfully spread their message. During the Nasser era such activities had of course ceased or gone underground in Egypt, only to resurface in the seventies with renewed dynamism. Intro- duced to American shores in the fifties and promoted with the founding of the MSA in the sixties, Islamism would begin to take root and spread in America.

The group would continue its dynamic expansion through the
1970
s and beyond, an expansion in part spurred by the rapid rise in Mus- lim immigration beginning in the late
1960
s and by the steadily growing demands being made on the facilities and services the MSA was offer- ing. As Muslim families settled in America many of them began to turn, as Catholic and Jewish and other immigrants had done before them, to religious centers in search of community and assistance in raising their growing families.

The earlier wave of immigrants, which had consisted almost en- tirely of young men who had come to work in factories and had sent home their savings, had not resulted in the founding of many mosques

or Islamic institutions to which the post-
1965
immigrants could turn. Among the few mosques or Islamic centers established during the earlier migration was the first mosque in America, founded in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in
1934
. Now the oldest surviving mosque in the country, it is known as the Mother Mosque of America.
17
The impetus behind its founding had been the arrival of immigrant men’s wives and families. Muslim men had settled in Cedar Rapids in the late
1890
s and, by the
1920
s, they were evidently occasionally gathering in one another’s houses for congregational prayers. However, it was only when they were joined by their wives that the community began raising funds for a mosque. In
1933
the women founded a social club through which they “pushed the men” to raise funds for a mosque. It would serve as a social center as well as a place for congregational prayers; additionally, it offered classes in Islam and Arabic.
18

By
1971
, in response to growing demands on their services, the

MSA’s officers began studying the possibility of setting up a national headquarters and hiring a permanent secretariat of full-time workers. They would accomplish this goal by
1975
, when the MSA opened its new headquarters in Plainfield, Indiana, built on land it had bought for this purpose for the price of $
500
,
000
.
19

The association was organized into local, regional, and zonal struc- tures across the United States and Canada. Its local chapters, responsi- ble for the daily and ongoing work of “organizing juma [Friday] and Id prayers, seminars, conferences, Quranic study circles and social activi- ties,” were considered to be the backbone of the association.
20
The MSA also had departments overseeing its various activities and institutions, departments that might sometimes be headed by women, according to Ahmed. Each department director, Ahmed wrote, “held a doctorate in his or her respective field.”

Simply listing the different departments’ responsibilities vividly conveys the enormous scope of the work that the MSA was involved in carrying out. The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), for example, established in
1975
, served as the financial arm of the MSA. It oversaw

and held title to MSA properties, such as “mosques, student houses, Is- lamic centers and service organizations.” It also oversaw the Islamic Book Service, the agency responsible for the distribution of Islamic literature

and other materials, such as tapes, in both English and Arabic, across North America.

Another important department was the Islamic Teaching Center, concerned with da‘wa and outreach in general. Taking on the task of training people, particularly the young—“that key element of society” in the work of outreach and da‘wa—it developed summer schools and camps to attract elementary-age as well as high school students. The Cen- ter also oversaw and arranged lectures, study groups, and correspon- dence courses focused on da‘wa. It was responsible for outreach to non-Muslims as well as to Muslims, taking its project to American pris-

ons. In
1981
the Center contacted “
4
,
000
inmates in
310
prisons, enrolling

more than
500
in an Islamic Correspondence Course.” Da‘wa to pris- oners was also in these years evidently a matter of interest to the Muslim World League. A senior official of the League noted that in
1977
the League was involved in “carrying the message of Islam to our African- American brothers who are unfortunately in prisons.”
21

From the start the MSA had offered its energetic work of teaching, outreach, and service to the already settled American Muslim commu- nities, descendants of the earlier wave of immigrants. The MSA encour- aged members to volunteer as prayer leaders, lecturers, and purveyors of Islamic knowledge for these communities, and as Sunday school teachers for their children. Convinced that they themselves “had arrived at
the
proper understanding of Islam,” writes Kambiz GhaneaBassiri in his history of the MSA’s activism in relation to the settled Muslim Amer- icans, the MSA members presented themselves as instructors and lead- ers in Islamic understanding, “quite undeterred” as GhaneaBassiri also notes, by the fact that scarcely any of the MSA’s members had any for- mal training in Islamic scholarship.
22
Lack of such training in Islam was, as we saw earlier, overwhelmingly the norm rather than the exception among Islamists, who, like Hasan al-Banna himself, were typically edu- cated in secular rather than religious institutions. Often, moreover, their academic training was in the hard sciences.

The Islam they taught and inculcated was, to be sure, their own com- mitted, activist, and deeply modern understanding of Islam. This was a form of Islam that, emerging as it did in the twentieth century, was shaped by the assumptions of the supremacy of rationality and the irrel-

evance, for the most part, to a “true” understanding of the Quran, of the long Islamic tradition of what were, in the eyes of many Islamists, mere casuistry and interpretation. The Quran as they saw it was essentially a transparent text that any rationally trained person—a doctor, an engi- neer, a social scientist—working within the framework of Islamism could reasonably interpret for himself and others.

Some scholars maintain that the MSA had close links with the Mus- lim World League, and that through the
1960
s and
1970
s they were deeply influenced by Wahhabism. Hamid Algar writes that in those decades “no criticism of Saudi Arabia would be tolerated at the annual conventions

of the MSA.”
23
At Friday prayers, Algar also noted, the League’s publi- cations, both in English and Arabic, were made available at MSA venues. As noted earlier, the League did in fact typically make available materi- als—books, tapes, pamphlets, educational materials and literature— promoting Wahhabi thought to mosques and Muslim organizations across the world, in addition to providing support for the building of mosques and Islamic centers.

The MSA’s intellectual mentor for some years, Algar further noted, was Ismail al-Faruqi, a scholar who had devoted substantial work to the study of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism. In
1980
the MSA’s publishing division brought out three works by al-Faruqi on Ibn

Abd al-Wahhab entitled
Sources of Islamic Thought
.

Gradually, however, according to Algar, the MSA would diversify its relations with the Muslim world, though its connection with Wah- habism did remain strong for some time. In due course, he writes, in a book published in
2002
, the hundreds of Muslim student groups that composed the Association would reflect a “diverse range of opinions” and thus would resist “any uniform characterization.” By
1983
the MSA had
310
local affiliates across the campuses of North America, with a membership of some
45
,
000
.
24

By the late
1970
s the MSA found itself once more considering expansion. Specifically, the group saw the need for establishing a separate organi- zation dedicated to serving the broader community—rather than pri- marily attending to the needs of students, which had been the original mandate. By now a number of the organization’s officers were no longer

students and had themselves settled in America and begun raising fam- ilies. In
1977
, the MSA leaders held a series of meetings with prominent Muslim activist members from across the United States and Canada, and they appointed a taskforce to study the needs of the nonstudent Muslim American population and to put forward proposals for courses of action.
25

In
1981
, in response to the taskforce’s recommendations, the MSA established the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).
26
Once ISNA was established, the MSA withdrew to its original purpose of focusing on college and university campuses, passing on to ISNA the work of deal- ing with the larger Muslim community and many of the departments and institutions that had been under the MSA’s purview, including NAIT and the Teaching Center. By the
1980
s, NAIT, which held the titles to ISNA and MSA properties, included among its holdings
300
of the roughly
900
mosques that there were at that time in America.
27

As was the case with the MSA, some of ISNA’s founding members had belonged to or had had connections with the Muslim Brotherhood (in its Egyptian and other Arab branches) and/or with the Jamaat-i Is- lami.
28
Former MSA officers and people from these backgrounds would hold the leadership positions in the new organization.

By the late eighties ISNA also had acquired land in Plainfield, In- diana, costing $
21
million. Here it would construct an Islamic center, which included a large mosque, a library for books and audiovisual ma-

terials, and a complex of buildings for training facilities and classrooms. It included a daycare center, dormitories, and recreational facilities.
29

As Muslims settled down and raised families in North America, ISNA was also engaged in developing policies with respect to new issues that were arising. In the mid-eighties ISNA addressed itself to the role of Muslim Americans and Muslim American organizations in American political life. Following procedures instituted by the MSA, ISNA set up a Planning Committee to study the matter and establish plans for the ensuing years.

The Planning Committee held a public hearing to identify priori- ties for the forthcoming decade. It followed this with a report recom- mending that ISNA direct its attention to educating American Muslims on their voting rights in the United States, with the goal of mobilizing

them to vote on issues affecting Muslims. Prior to this there had been some criticism of ISNA’s leadership by ISNA members on the grounds that the leadership rested “primarily in the hands of individuals with Is- lamic movement backgrounds, that is the Ikhwan al-Muslimun [Muslim Brothers] and Jamaat-i Islami,” who were seen as preoccupied with pol- itics and the Islamic movement back in their homelands.
30
Perhaps in re- sponse, in part, to such criticism the ISNA leadership took a strong position in support of the report, and in support of educating Muslim American citizens to be full participants in mainstream American poli- tics.
31
The position that ISNA adopted—of encouraging activism and engaged involvement in the political process among its membership— was, as we saw in the last chapter, a policy that Islamist groups had en- ergetically pursued in Egypt.

Some other Muslim American organizations would take a different view of this matter. Throughout this time, it should be noted, other Mus- lim American organizations were also being founded, although the MSA and ISNA emerged as the most prominent. One other important, al- though still secondary, organization was the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), founded by South Asians who broke away from the