A Quiet Revolution (28 page)

MSA in
1971
.
32

The Tabligh-i Jamaat in particular, a group with roots in India and a long tradition of noninvolvement in politics in whatever country they found themselves, was among those critical of ISNA’s position on voting. The Tabligh-i focus was primarily on promoting the correct ritual ele- ments of Islam, and in particular on calling “lapsed” Muslim males back to worship in mosques. In the
1980
s the annual conventions of this or- ganization sometimes brought together as many as
10
,
000
people—all males. When ISNA announced its decision to actively pursue educating Muslim American and Canadian citizens for participation in mainstream American and Canadian politics, the Tabligh-i Jamaat published an ar- ticle making clear that they, in contrast, “will have nothing to do with politics in Canada [where they were based] or even with Islamic move- ments in the Muslim world.” A further article appearing in the newslet- ter of a Tabligh-i–controlled mosque in Cleveland also emphasized that a “
kufr
(unbelief ) system (that is, the American government) cannot give rise to an Islamic state.”
33

ISNA was thus pursuing in America a course parallel to that pur- sued by the mainstream moderate Islamists in Egypt in the seventies and thereafter, a course consonant with its commitment to pursuing goals entirely within the legal political framework and through education, so- cial activism, advocacy, and participation in the political process. They brought with them the goal of working always to improve society— whatever society they found themselves in—and of doing so by apply- ing their Islamic ethics and values. A booklet entitled
In Fraternity: A Message to the Muslims of America,
published in
1989
by the Minaret Pub- lishing house in Los Angeles, advised that “the best that Muslims may offer to America are their Islamic values and ethical norm.” Written by three leadership members, among them the brothers Hassan and Maher Hathout, who had been members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the book- let went on to observe that “to be American... is not to blindly accept America as it is, but to strive to make it cleaner and better by using the available freedom, the constitutional rights and the democratic process persistently and relentlessly towards reaching that goal.”
34

In the eighties ISNA was beginning to emerge as the most prominent Muslim organization in America. By
1994
it had the largest number of mosques affiliated with it across America. In a survey conducted that year,
39
percent of mosques in America described themselves as affili- ated with ISNA,
19
percent with W. D. Mohammed,
5
percent with the Tabligh-i Jamaat, and
4
percent with ICNA, while
24
percent described themselves as unaffiliated.
35

Other organizations with similar Islamist roots were founded to serve different purposes—the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), for example, founded in
1994
, focuses on pursuing civil rights is- sues on behalf of Muslims in America. CAIR would also come to public prominence in the
1990
s. This organization also, like ISNA and the MSA, included among its founders former members of or people with connec- tions to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist movement. Seen as an agency devoted to particular causes and by no means a rival to ISNA, CAIR would come to be a prominent institution on the Muslim Ameri- can landscape, further adding to the commanding public position that Is- lamist organizations would come to enjoy—and still enjoy—in America.

ISNA and, to a lesser degree, CAIR, would come to represent the dominant and authoritative voice of Sunni Islam in America. It is often to ISNA and CAIR, for example, that government agencies and journal- ists turn for information on the Islamic position and for guidance on Islam’s beliefs and practices. The groups’ views typically represent the Islamist understanding of Islam as reviewed in the preceding pages. The veil as a religious requirement is absolutely and undeviatingly present in Islam as they represent it. Both organizations, for example, typically refer to the hijab as the “religiously mandated covering for Muslim women,” and in their publications—magazines, pamphlets, books—women in- variably are shown wearing hijab. The importance of hijab was the mes- sage that ISNA taught to the young in their schools, kindergartens, summer camps, and training centers. Zainab al-Ghazali’s response to the journalist cited earlier, to the effect that failure to dress in the Islamically required way, including in hijab, would cancel out all good deeds and lead to hell, encapsulates just how foundational women’s dress and hijab are to the Islamist message.

The consensus in the scholarship on Islam in America (as already noted) is that the vast majority of Muslim immigrants to America had no connection with Islamism in their home countries. Typically there was a “wide gap,” through the seventies and eighties and beyond, as Ghanea- Bassiri wrote, between Muslim activists and the “larger Muslim popula- tion.”
36
This larger group of Muslim immigrants had no tradition of organizing or even, for many of them, of attending mosque, and no de- sire to proselytize. As had been the case among the mainstream in Egypt, Islam was above all, for many in this group, a matter of personal ethical and inner spiritual resources.

A poll taken in
2007
reported that
72
percent of American Muslims

said that religion was “very important” to them, and
18
percent said that it was “somewhat important.” Only
40
percent, however, reported at- tending mosque regularly or even occasionally.
37
Yet this figure repre- sents an enormous increase in attendance over scholars’ estimates of mosque attendance for the
1980
s and
1990
s, which ranged from
5
per- cent to
15
percent.
38
Evidently a dramatic increase in attendance occurred after
9
/
11
and in the wake of the problems that many Muslim Americans began to experience after that tragedy.

Preoccupied essentially with the exigencies of establishing them- selves in their new lives, and lacking the resources that people had in their homelands for raising children within their faith—such as the sup- port of community and extended family—many immigrants apparently were glad to send their children to Sunday schools and summer camps to learn about Islam. Only gradually, as children came home to declare that the Islam the family practiced was “wrong,” would parents register that their children were learning different forms of religious belief and practice. Anecdotes abound of families who experienced this, as do sto- ries of parents quarreling with daughters over their daughters’ insistence on wearing hijab.

Even if parents had noticed differences earlier, the parents, for the most part not scholars of Islam but simply practitioners of the forms of Islamic piety that they had grown up with, were probably themselves in- timidated by and came to accept the Islamist claim that “correct” Islam was only Islam as Islamists believed, taught, and practiced it.

Making up, as the scholarly consensus has it, the majority of Amer- ican Muslims of immigrant background, these non-Islamist American Muslims nevertheless, having no organization or institution represent- ing them, by and large also have no voice within the public conversation on Islam in America.
39

Moreover, as GhaneaBassiri observes, the “overwhelming majority of Muslims who were not activists,” and who had come to this country from many different parts of the world, did not readily “forgo their sec- tarian beliefs and cultural practices. Unlike Islamists,” GhaneaBassiri continues:

they did not reduce Islam to an ideology that could be sepa- rated from culture, work, family life, and community and then imposed them upon those aspects of life in order to con- form them to some puritanical reading of the Quran and the hadith. It is thus not surprising that most American Muslims in the
1970
s and
1980
s did not relinquish their cultural her- itage to participate in the agendas of national Muslim organ- izations.
40

As GhaneaBassiri also observes, most Muslims “of varying national and sectarian backgrounds who came to the United States in this [post-
1965
] period did not participate in any organization or collectivity that left a historical footprint. This does not mean that they did not actively or collectively practice Islam. They just failed to leave us a verifiable record of their activities.” This Muslim American majority consequently is essentially commonly left out of accounts of Islam in America. Not only is it the case that government agencies and journalists typically turn to ISNA and CAIR and the like for authoritative opinions on Islam, but even academics, as GhaneaBassiri observes, typically “merely nod to the multiplicity of Islamic beliefs and cultural practices” and then proceed to focus their narrative accounts of “Islam in America” entirely on “those Muslims who were involved in building national institutions like the Muslims Students’ Association, the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, or the ministry of Warith Deen Mo- hammed.”

Over these same decades, too—the sixties, seventies, and eighties—Islam- ists and Islamist organizations in the Middle East were forging connec- tions not only with immigrant Muslims but also with African American Muslims, both individuals and organizations.

Some important features of the Islamist movements that were under way in the Middle East and Muslim world through the thirties and forties made their appearance in America as early as the forties through, in particular, the teachings of Sheikh Daoud Ahmed Faisal (d.

1980
), who is said to have had a Moroccan father and a Jamaican mother.

There is no clear indication that Faisal was directly connected with either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jamaat-i. However, his publications, as Edward E. Curtis wrote, “often borrowed from other Muslim mission- ary tracts,” and Faisal’s intellectual life bore the clear influence of the “Is- lamic reform and renewal movements” then under way in the Muslim world.
41

Faisal, who published a book called
Islam, the True Faith: The Re- ligion of Humanity,
set up a mosque in Brooklyn and succeeded, ac- cording to Curtis, in converting “hundreds if not thousands of African

Americans” to Sunni Islam. In
1962
some of Faisal’s followers, influenced by the writings and thinking of Mawdudi, as well as by a member of the Tabligh-i Jamaat, broke away to set up another Sunni mosque, which adhered to the Tabligh-i commitments of renouncing worldly and po- litical engagement. The members of this movement, which became known as Darul Islam and which still has a significant following among African Americans, sought to live a life of “strict adherence with the eth- ical example of the Prophet Muhammad of Arabia.” Some of the men were polygamous, and the women “covered themselves with both a head scarf and a face veil.”
42

With Malcolm X, however, and subsequently Warith Deen Mo- hammed, connections between the Islamists of the Middle East—in- cluding the Muslim Brotherhood, the Jamaat-i Islami, and the Muslim World League—would begin to be forged and to steadily develop, con- nections that would come to have an impact on African American Islam.

In
1959
, PBS (New York’s WNTA-TV) aired a five-part series

hosted by Mike Wallace about the Nation of Islam. The series,
The Hate Which Hate Produced,
presented a generally negative portrait of the Na- tion, an organization then headed by Elijah Muhammad, portraying it as anti-American and black-supremacist. This coverage drew criticism of the Nation from many, including Muslims in the United States. In fact the Nation had already drawn criticism from a broad variety of Sunni Muslims for its “black separatist version of Islam.”
43

In the wake of this intense and mainly negative publicity, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad’s chief spokesperson, would find himself besieged when he spoke on campuses by Muslim students who, considering them- selves “the guardians of ‘true’ Islam,” emphatically rejected the Nation

and its teachings. These exchanges would have an impact on Malcolm X. In
1962
, a student from Dartmouth came to question him at the Nation’s mosque, and then followed up their exchange by sending Malcolm X lit- erature on Islam. Malcolm X read the material he had been sent and

asked him for more.

“These students and the larger trend of which they were part,” writes Curtis, “had a profound influence on Malcolm’s religious life.”
44
In
1964
, Malcolm X broke with the Nation. After his break he sought out, at the urging of the students, the Egyptian professor Dr. Mahmoud

Youssef Shawarbi, who was a Fulbright fellow at Fordham University. Shawarbi instructed Malcolm X in the fundamentals of Islam and ad- vised him to make the hajj. He also gave him a book,
The Eternal Mes- sage of Muhammad
by Abdel Rahman Azzam, an Egyptian and a leading figure in the founding of the Arab League. After serving as its first secre- tary general (
1945
–
52
), and after falling out with Nasser, Azzam left Egypt for Saudi Arabia.

Malcolm X would be very graciously treated by Azzam and by Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia when he went on hajj. Malcolm X witnessed during the hajj, as he famously recounted in his autobiography—the mingling of “tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white.”
45