Allah Came Knocking at My Heart"
By Giles Whittell
Reprinted from the Times
Monday, January 7, 2002
"It All Seemed to Come Together"
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been a surge in conversions to Islam since September 11, especially among affluent young white Britons.
Six months ago Elizabeth L. — a graduate in political science, the daughter of affluent white British parents, an opponent of terrorism in all its forms — climbed Mount Sinai at night to watch the desert sunrise from its summit.
“It was the stillest, most peaceful place I’ve ever been,” she says. “I could hear my feelings come up from within me, and in one surreal moment it all seemed to come together.”
Last Friday, at 4.45pm, Elizabeth went to Regent’s Park Mosque in Central London and converted to Islam.
It wasn’t hard. She didn’t even have to wear a scarf. Witnessed by two Muslim men and nine other friends squeezed into the imam’s office, she pronounced, in Arabic learnt from a tape the night before, the words she will repeat like a mantra five times a day for the rest of her life: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” Afterwards there was a modest celebration at Al-Dar on the Edgware Road. Elizabeth and her well-wishers sipped mint tea and smoked apple-flavoured tobacco from a hookah. There was no booze, but she never drank much anyway.
Why has she done this? “I know it sounds clichéd, but Allah came knocking at my heart. That’s really how it feels. In many ways it is beyond articulating, rather like falling in love.”
It was, in other words, intensely personal. As she read the Qur'an and prepared for her conversion, the September attacks came and went and failed to derail her spiritual journey, despite their proven link to a fundamentalist Islamist terror network. In as far as they featured in her thinking, they even elicited some sympathy. All terrorism is cowardly, she says. “But I can see why people get fed up with the West. Capitalism is enormously oppressive.”
A Surge of Conversions
Elizabeth is not a freak, and she is certainly not alone. There is compelling anecdotal evidence of a surge in conversions to Islam since September 11, not just in Britain, but across Europe and America. One Dutch Islamic centre claims a tenfold increase, while the New Muslims Project, based in Leicester and run by a former Irish Roman Catholic housewife, reports a “steady stream” of new converts.
This fits a pattern set by recent history. Similar surges followed the outbreak of the Gulf War, the Bosnian conflict and the declaration of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Some of the newcomers doubtless do not share David Blunkett’s enthusiasm for overt espousals of Britishness. They may even have been caught on police videos flag-waving for the Taleban. But most will speak our language and support our football teams with roughly average fervour, and some — by all accounts a rapidly expanding minority — are white, more educated and more middle-class than the Home Secretary himself.
These are some of Islam’s more surprising converts. They have chosen their new creed over the world’s other great religions having had the privilege of choice, often confounding their own and their families’ prejudices in the process. They are highly articulate and tolerant to a degree. They’re People Like Us, only they’re not. They’re Muslims. They pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan and hope to go to Mecca before they die. They answer their mobiles with “salaam alaikum”.
Unlike Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber of American Airlines Flight 63, Britain’s pukka Muslim converts, as the label implies, tend to be over-privileged, not under. Unlike James McLintock, the Scots lecturer’s son being held in a Peshawar jail, the fighting in Afghanistan has dismayed rather than attracted them.
They are people like Elizabeth (who asked for her name to be changed because she has not told her parents yet); like Lucy Bushill-Matthews, a 30-year-old graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, who flirted with Islam as a student in order to dismiss it, but found it “so simple and logical I couldn’t push it away”; like “Yahya”, whose father is a pillar of the Anglo Establishment and who feels that Islam “fits right into British tradition”; and like Joe Ahmed-Dobson, a son of the former Labour Minister Frank Dobson who believes that Islam transformed his spiritual life — and helped him to get a first at university.
If there is something familiar about these people’s startling choices, there should be. We have been here before, or at least Imperial Britain’s adventuring classes and their moneyed gap-year successors have.
T. E. Lawrence fell hard for the romance and otherness of Islam and came to embody them for succeeding generations even though he never converted. Gai Eaton, a former British diplomat now in his seventies, did convert. His influential work Islam and the Destiny of Man has become required reading for bright young Anglo-Saxons turning to his adopted faith, often as an expression of dissatisfaction with a Western culture that appeared to have offered them everything.
Matthew Wilkinson made headlines when he converted and changed his name to Tariq in 1993; he was a former Eton head boy. He and Nicholas Brandt, another Etonian and the son of an investment banker, swapped their destinies as scions of the Establishment for a Slough semi shared with four other Muslims.
Lord Birt’s son, Jonathan, forsook a fast track into the ranks of the great and the good by converting in 1997 and starting a PhD on British Islam. So did a son and a daughter of Lord Justice Scott, the scourge of Tory sleaze and the chairman of the Arms to Iraq inquiry.
And so did Jemima Khan. “My decision . . . was entirely my own choice and in no way hurried,” the 21-year-old daughter of the billionaire James Goldsmith declared angrily after suggestions that she had converted to marry Imran Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain. She noted accurately that the Koran allowed Imran to marry any Muslim, Jew or Christian (even though it bars Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men). She pointed out that Imran’s sisters, far from being oppressed by his brothers-in-law, were all educated professionals, and she insisted that she found the tunic and trousers she would henceforth have to wear “far more elegant and feminine than anything in my wardrobe”.
Her plea seemed hard to credit in the circumstances, but it is a common one from educated British women trying to persuade baffled non-Muslims that conversion did not mean surrendering their independence or their critical faculties.
For Lucy Bushill-Matthews, it meant the reverse. “When I went to Cambridge I joined the Christian and Islamic societies and all three political parties,” she says. “I wanted to explore all the possibilities in order to dismiss them.”
She thinks of herself as pragmatic and not all that spiritual, and as such she found Islam irresistible. “It made sense of all the world’s faiths. It was a clear, simple way to believe in God.” She claims that it has even helped her to land good jobs by marking her out as a free thinker. Her husband is a Muslim of English and Iranian descent whom she married after converting.
Yahya, too, chose Islam from the broadest possible religious gamut. He was raised in a high-profile London family that, because of his father’s position, could not be seen to favour one faith over another. He then took a degree in comparative religion — the theological equivalent of a blind wine tasting — and Islam, quite simply, won.
“It’s pure monotheism,” he says. “It has a clear moral system and an intact tradition of religious scholarship. No scripture expresses its message of the oneness of God as clearly as the Koran. It also has a remarkably rich mysticism, which may be what appeals to middle-class white Brits like me.”
Yahya converted five years ago. Now 33, he is at Oxford writing a PhD on British Islam and is dismayed not just by last September’s attacks, but also by the mauling he says his religion has suffered since in the media, even — or especially — at the hands of would-be sympathisers. “It’s very painful for all of us to be associated with such sickening barbarism (of the attacks),” he says. “That’s not what we signed up for. And now we can’t portray our religion in undiluted form. It’s always mediated by someone else. It’s incredibly frustrating to have Polly Toynbee trying to save you from yourself.”
So does this wry and thoughtful soul share the credo of al-Qaeda? Of course not. But the belief system in which he and the terrorists co-exist has a serious and often lethal public relations problem. The parallel that comes to mind is with the environmental movement, boasting tens of millions of members paying dues to the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Sierra Club, and a handful bent on burning down ski lodges in the Rockies.
"Constant Impetus to do the Right Thing"
Well before September 11, well-heeled defectors from Anglicanism to Islam proved so unsettling to traditionalists that the Cold War author and journalist Philip Knightley branded them “the new Philbys”. They were running from privilege, he suggested, driven as much by a sense of guilt at what they had as wonder at the mysteries of Islam. The fact that Kim Philby’s father happens to have converted to Islam was taken to support the accusation. Levelled at Joe Ahmed-Dobson, it quickly seems ridiculous. The son of the former Health Secretary is a child of new Labour and the opposite of a rebel. He works on inner city regeneration, finds spiritual satisfaction in Islam’s “constant impetus to do the right thing”, and credits his first-class degree to the structure his faith has brought to his life.
All those I spoke to agreed that Christianity claims to answer the same yearnings for meaning and guidance. All had rejected it on intellectual grounds. Why grapple with mental puzzles such as the Holy Trinity and Original Sin, they asked, when the alternative, asserting neither, proved to them so much more satisfying?It was this clarity that won over Batool Al-Toma, the former Catholic who offers guidance to converts at the New Muslims Project. She tells them they need not change their names, advises women to dress modestly but not alienate their families with radical wardrobe changes and checks they have converted freely. Islam is not generally a missionary faith, she says. At one billion and counting, history shows it doesn’t need to be.
Famous converts
Gérard Depardieu: The 54-year-old French film star converted to Islam, but later converted back. He also experimented with Buddhism and the Russian Orthodox Church but says he has now found happiness in his vineyard in Anjou. “I work and keep quiet,” he told French Vogue.
Jemima Goldsmith: The daughter of Sir James, the late financier, she converted “of her own conviction” in preparation for her marriage to Imran Khan in 1995. “It would seem that a Western woman’s happiness hinges largely on her access to nightclubs, alcohol and revealing clothes,” she said. “However, as we all know, such superficialities have very little to do with true happiness.”
Eleasha Elphinstone: The wife of the boxing star Prince Naseem Hamed switched faiths in 1998 before marrying. The previous year the wedding plans had been abandoned when Eleasha had a change of heart and refused to convert.
Malcolm X: A former street hustler, Malcolm Little converted to Islam in jail, where he was serving time for burglary. He joined the Nation of Islam, was later expelled and assassinated by Nation members in 1965.
Muhammad Ali: The 59-year-old boxer previously known as Cassius Clay became an international role model, revered as much for his political stance over Vietnam and adherence to his faith, as for his showmanship in the ring.
Cat Stevens: Born Steven Georgiou, the singer dropped his nom-de-plume to become Yusuf Islam in 1977. His moment of enlightenment had come the previous year, when his brother gave him a copy of the Koran. From being a superstar at the age of 19 when Matthew and Son became a hit, Yusuf married a Muslim woman from central Asia called Fawzia, and became a high-profile spokesman for the British Muslim community.
Mike Tyson: The former world heavyweight champion was sentenced to three years in jail for raping a teenager. He converted to Islam before returning to the ring in 1995. He told visitors that he had spent his time studying the Koran, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Dumas “and a lot of Communist literature."
Friday, March 4, 2011
Oppression Faced by American Working Women
Oppression Faced by American Working Women
Indian Express (New Delhi), August 3rd, 1986
(Zawaj.com Editor's Note: Although this article was written several years ago, it deserves being reprinted, especially since so many Muslim women now labor in the American workplace. Having been employed myself in the American workplace for many years, I have seen some of this behavior. I once had a female colleague who was clearly being harrassed by her supervisor. He would frequently belittle her in public and make references to her supposed inferiority as a woman. I urged her to report the problem but she refused, saying that "he didn't really mean it." However, I don't believe for a moment that this problem is confined to America alone. I have no doubt it is just as endemic in India and other parts of the world. We Muslims must make sure that Muslim women are not subjected to this form of abuse. We must have organizations such as CAIR which can defend and protect the rights of Muslim women in the workplace. And we must never blame or discourage a woman for reporting this kind of abuse. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace.)
They sound like experiences in a Delhi bus. Lewd gestures, offensive language, attacks on your person - the American workplace is for its women workers what public transport is for women in Delhi. A bank teller, Michelle Vinson, suffered physical abuse and alleged rape by the bank's Vice-president Sidney Taylor for four years until finally, assisted by a women's organisation, she went to court.
The district court rejected her appeal, largely because she had remained silent for 4 years and had not used the bank's complaint procedure to ask for help. It held that any relationship between the two was voluntary. The higher court of appeal rejected every finding of the district court and the matter finally found its way to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that sexual harassment is a direct infringement of a woman's right to employment. It creates a hostile and abusive work environment in which she may be forced to leave her job or in which she cannot function to her full potential, even if such unwelcome sexual demands are not directly linked to concrete employment benefits. In other words, the courts ruled that it violates U.S. civil laws against sex discrimination in the work place.
Sexual harassment of working women is endemic, said friends-of-the-court brief filed by numerous women's organisation for this case. In the last 5 years, about half the American female working force has suffered this type of harassment at work. This does not just happen to women in factories or at blue-collar workplaces. Within the fibreglass, multi-storied skyscrapers, the American office is not as pleasant for its women secretaries, lawyers and other professionals as its air-conditioning, carpeted and muted decor makes it appear.
About 42% of federally employed women were harassed in their jobs, stated a recent 2 year survey done by the Official Merits Protection Board. Another 60% of the members of the American Federation of State, Country and Municipal Employees said that sexual harassment was a frequent problem for them. And between 1981 and 1985, the number of such complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, established to monitor employment practices, shot up by 70%.
The complaints vary from the physical violence of rape and assault to the insidious harassment of unwanted pushing and touching, persistent sexual demands, offensive sexual comments, constant conversations containing sexual innuendoes and coarse language.
The offender usually makes his moves swiftly and silently, when there are no witnesses around. He is usually confident that fear, embarrassment, and often the hopelessness of the situation will keep the victim from making public complaints. And when complaints are made, he can use every defense that this grey area of social attitudes and innuendoes provide. When it is so hard for a rape victim to prove she has been violated, one can imagine how much harder it is for a victim of the less dramatic forms of violence to prove her case.
In such instances, if the offenders are their supervisors, women who resist or complain find themselves burdened with an increased workload, scathing work evaluation, unwarranted reprimands and sheer hostility. So many quit their jobs rather than go to court. When neither alternative seems feasible, they give in, quietly.
Indian Express (New Delhi), August 3rd, 1986
(Zawaj.com Editor's Note: Although this article was written several years ago, it deserves being reprinted, especially since so many Muslim women now labor in the American workplace. Having been employed myself in the American workplace for many years, I have seen some of this behavior. I once had a female colleague who was clearly being harrassed by her supervisor. He would frequently belittle her in public and make references to her supposed inferiority as a woman. I urged her to report the problem but she refused, saying that "he didn't really mean it." However, I don't believe for a moment that this problem is confined to America alone. I have no doubt it is just as endemic in India and other parts of the world. We Muslims must make sure that Muslim women are not subjected to this form of abuse. We must have organizations such as CAIR which can defend and protect the rights of Muslim women in the workplace. And we must never blame or discourage a woman for reporting this kind of abuse. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace.)
They sound like experiences in a Delhi bus. Lewd gestures, offensive language, attacks on your person - the American workplace is for its women workers what public transport is for women in Delhi. A bank teller, Michelle Vinson, suffered physical abuse and alleged rape by the bank's Vice-president Sidney Taylor for four years until finally, assisted by a women's organisation, she went to court.
The district court rejected her appeal, largely because she had remained silent for 4 years and had not used the bank's complaint procedure to ask for help. It held that any relationship between the two was voluntary. The higher court of appeal rejected every finding of the district court and the matter finally found its way to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that sexual harassment is a direct infringement of a woman's right to employment. It creates a hostile and abusive work environment in which she may be forced to leave her job or in which she cannot function to her full potential, even if such unwelcome sexual demands are not directly linked to concrete employment benefits. In other words, the courts ruled that it violates U.S. civil laws against sex discrimination in the work place.
Sexual harassment of working women is endemic, said friends-of-the-court brief filed by numerous women's organisation for this case. In the last 5 years, about half the American female working force has suffered this type of harassment at work. This does not just happen to women in factories or at blue-collar workplaces. Within the fibreglass, multi-storied skyscrapers, the American office is not as pleasant for its women secretaries, lawyers and other professionals as its air-conditioning, carpeted and muted decor makes it appear.
About 42% of federally employed women were harassed in their jobs, stated a recent 2 year survey done by the Official Merits Protection Board. Another 60% of the members of the American Federation of State, Country and Municipal Employees said that sexual harassment was a frequent problem for them. And between 1981 and 1985, the number of such complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, established to monitor employment practices, shot up by 70%.
The complaints vary from the physical violence of rape and assault to the insidious harassment of unwanted pushing and touching, persistent sexual demands, offensive sexual comments, constant conversations containing sexual innuendoes and coarse language.
The offender usually makes his moves swiftly and silently, when there are no witnesses around. He is usually confident that fear, embarrassment, and often the hopelessness of the situation will keep the victim from making public complaints. And when complaints are made, he can use every defense that this grey area of social attitudes and innuendoes provide. When it is so hard for a rape victim to prove she has been violated, one can imagine how much harder it is for a victim of the less dramatic forms of violence to prove her case.
In such instances, if the offenders are their supervisors, women who resist or complain find themselves burdened with an increased workload, scathing work evaluation, unwarranted reprimands and sheer hostility. So many quit their jobs rather than go to court. When neither alternative seems feasible, they give in, quietly.
Muslim Women Say They Find Liberation in Modest Attire
Muslim Women Say They Find Liberation in Modest Attire
By Jennifer Halperin
Of The Columbus Dispatch Staff
Columbus, Ohio
Friday, May 19, 2000
Growing up in California, Norma Tarazi spent the early years of her life mired in a culture of miniskirts and hot pants, where many considered beauty and bare skin as worthy goals. So her conversion to Islam as an adult -- after which she adopted the style of dress known as hijab that covers much of the body and hair -- amounted to no small change in lifestyle.
Dr. Asma Mobin-Uddin swings her daughter, Yasmine, 18 months, at a playground on the Northwest Side.
The Qur'an calls for both Muslim women and men to dress modestly in public. Although Islam doesn't specify a style or form of dress, Suzanne Haneef writes in her book "What Everyone Should Know About Islam and Muslims" that a woman is required to "be completely covered except for her hands and face and that her dress should conceal her form, be loose and nontransparent, and not of a kind to attract attention by its beauty.
"Many non-Muslim women might think of such dress as restrictive or even oppressive -- a sign of submission to men -- but those who have adopted hijab find it nothing less than liberating.
"People gauge who you are by what you wear and what you look like; you can't get away from that," says Tarazi, who lives in Worthington and edits the IQRA! newsletter of the Islamic Society of Greater Columbus. "I used to feel uncomfortable (trying to keep up with) styles and looks. I was an intellectual type with glasses; I didn't go to the prom. Hijab frees you from trends and trying to keep up with appearances."
Dr. Asma Mobin-Uddin, a local pediatrician who is vice president of the Ohio Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, finds irony in the perception that hijab somehow represents a woman's submission to her husband.
"It's the total opposite of subordination," she says. "We wear it because we choose to; we refuse to let ourselves be sex objects. We're saying: 'Value us for what we are, our character, not how we look. We're not going to play the game of trying to look good for you. We won't let you hire us because you like our legs, or we'll look good around the office.'
"In the West, I don't think women really see or realize how much you're tied to fashion, how much time you spend -- or waste, I should say -- dressing 'appropriately' and following fashion," Mobin-Uddin said.
Hijab is an Arabic word meaning "curtain." Some use it to refer to the headdress many Islamic women wear; others use it to describe modest dress in general -- loose, unrestrictive clothing that covers the body, including Western-style blazers and long skirts.
As religious and cultural groups unfamiliar with one another's practices begin to work and live together, misperceptions can arise, said Alam Payind, director of the Middle East Studies Center at Ohio State University.
Sometimes these misperceptions have led to clashes. The city of Portsmouth, Va., for example, recently agreed to pay $100,000 each to two Muslim women who were arrested in 1996 for wearing veils in public. They were charged with violating a state law prohibiting the wearing of masks. The law, aimed at exposing Ku Klux Klan members, exempted people who cover their faces for religious reasons.
In France, where Islam is the second-largest faith after Roman Catholicism, Muslim students often are expelled from schools for wearing Islamic attire. Last year, France's highest administrative court reaffirmed a ban on wearing hijab in public schools.
"That's an ethnocentric mentality," Payind said. "You have women in the Middle East thinking they are more free than women here. Who is more free, they ask: Women who buy lipstick, are slaves to fashion, need new clothing every season and try to make themselves appealing to men? Somehow we all have the view that when others do things differently they are oppressed."
Payind theorizes that misperceptions about hijab might be rooted in media reports about oppression of women in some Islamic nations, such as Afghanistan, ruled by the restrictive Taliban regime. But he notes that of the world's 56 Muslim countries, most don't require women to dress in any certain way; indeed, headscarves and other hijab coverings are discouraged in some, such as Turkey.
The religious mandate of modest dress is hardly limited to Islam, he says; observant Jewish women, for example, are urged to cover their hair and bodies to hide their beauty in public. Nuns' habits are rooted in a religious call for modesty, as well.
"What seems to be overlooked or misunderstood in the West," says Margaret Mills, chairwoman of OSU's Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department, "is that hijab in a society often can be looked at as a way to 'decommercialize' women by looks, sexuality and fashion."
Jennifer Halperin is a Dispatch editorial writer.
By Jennifer Halperin
Of The Columbus Dispatch Staff
Columbus, Ohio
Friday, May 19, 2000
Growing up in California, Norma Tarazi spent the early years of her life mired in a culture of miniskirts and hot pants, where many considered beauty and bare skin as worthy goals. So her conversion to Islam as an adult -- after which she adopted the style of dress known as hijab that covers much of the body and hair -- amounted to no small change in lifestyle.
Dr. Asma Mobin-Uddin swings her daughter, Yasmine, 18 months, at a playground on the Northwest Side.
The Qur'an calls for both Muslim women and men to dress modestly in public. Although Islam doesn't specify a style or form of dress, Suzanne Haneef writes in her book "What Everyone Should Know About Islam and Muslims" that a woman is required to "be completely covered except for her hands and face and that her dress should conceal her form, be loose and nontransparent, and not of a kind to attract attention by its beauty.
"Many non-Muslim women might think of such dress as restrictive or even oppressive -- a sign of submission to men -- but those who have adopted hijab find it nothing less than liberating.
"People gauge who you are by what you wear and what you look like; you can't get away from that," says Tarazi, who lives in Worthington and edits the IQRA! newsletter of the Islamic Society of Greater Columbus. "I used to feel uncomfortable (trying to keep up with) styles and looks. I was an intellectual type with glasses; I didn't go to the prom. Hijab frees you from trends and trying to keep up with appearances."
Dr. Asma Mobin-Uddin, a local pediatrician who is vice president of the Ohio Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, finds irony in the perception that hijab somehow represents a woman's submission to her husband.
"It's the total opposite of subordination," she says. "We wear it because we choose to; we refuse to let ourselves be sex objects. We're saying: 'Value us for what we are, our character, not how we look. We're not going to play the game of trying to look good for you. We won't let you hire us because you like our legs, or we'll look good around the office.'
"In the West, I don't think women really see or realize how much you're tied to fashion, how much time you spend -- or waste, I should say -- dressing 'appropriately' and following fashion," Mobin-Uddin said.
Hijab is an Arabic word meaning "curtain." Some use it to refer to the headdress many Islamic women wear; others use it to describe modest dress in general -- loose, unrestrictive clothing that covers the body, including Western-style blazers and long skirts.
As religious and cultural groups unfamiliar with one another's practices begin to work and live together, misperceptions can arise, said Alam Payind, director of the Middle East Studies Center at Ohio State University.
Sometimes these misperceptions have led to clashes. The city of Portsmouth, Va., for example, recently agreed to pay $100,000 each to two Muslim women who were arrested in 1996 for wearing veils in public. They were charged with violating a state law prohibiting the wearing of masks. The law, aimed at exposing Ku Klux Klan members, exempted people who cover their faces for religious reasons.
In France, where Islam is the second-largest faith after Roman Catholicism, Muslim students often are expelled from schools for wearing Islamic attire. Last year, France's highest administrative court reaffirmed a ban on wearing hijab in public schools.
"That's an ethnocentric mentality," Payind said. "You have women in the Middle East thinking they are more free than women here. Who is more free, they ask: Women who buy lipstick, are slaves to fashion, need new clothing every season and try to make themselves appealing to men? Somehow we all have the view that when others do things differently they are oppressed."
Payind theorizes that misperceptions about hijab might be rooted in media reports about oppression of women in some Islamic nations, such as Afghanistan, ruled by the restrictive Taliban regime. But he notes that of the world's 56 Muslim countries, most don't require women to dress in any certain way; indeed, headscarves and other hijab coverings are discouraged in some, such as Turkey.
The religious mandate of modest dress is hardly limited to Islam, he says; observant Jewish women, for example, are urged to cover their hair and bodies to hide their beauty in public. Nuns' habits are rooted in a religious call for modesty, as well.
"What seems to be overlooked or misunderstood in the West," says Margaret Mills, chairwoman of OSU's Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department, "is that hijab in a society often can be looked at as a way to 'decommercialize' women by looks, sexuality and fashion."
Jennifer Halperin is a Dispatch editorial writer.
Turkish Government's War Against Hijab
Turkish Government's War Against Hijab
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 29, 2000
ISTANBUL – Five months ago, a Turkish court sentenced 23-year-old Nuray Canan Bezirgan to six months in jail for "obstructing the education of others." Her crime: wearing a head scarf to her college final exams.
In the past two years, more than 25,000 women have been barred from Turkey's college campuses because they refused to remove the head scarves they wear as part of Muslim tradition, according to Turkish human rights groups. Hundreds of government employees have been fired, demoted or transferred for the same reason. And this school year, the government has extended the ban to Islamic religious schools, prompting some Muslim girls to drop out.
The modest head scarf has become the object of one of Turkey's most divisive struggles as the country seeks to join the European Union and the globalized economy. The conflict leaves the country straining to balance greater democratic freedoms with preserving a secular state in a region of expanding Islamic influence.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish republic in 1923 to secularize and modernize a land that had been hobbled, in his opinion, by its Islamic and Ottoman imperial heritage. In recent years, the still fiercely secularist government and military have drawn criticism from human rights groups for their methods of opposing the rising influence of Islamic fundamentalism.
The government has prosecuted writers and journalists it says have espoused the spread of Islam. It has shut down an Islamic political party and is trying to ban its successor. Parliament is expected to revive a law twice vetoed by the president that would allow the government to fire civil servants suspected of having connections with Islamic or separatist political organizations.
Some of the most explosive fights have been waged on college campuses, where government regulations require students "to wear modern costumes and look modern." This month, university and high school classes opened with protests and demonstrations against administrations that barred women with head scarves.
"To ask people to choose between education and their faith is cruel," said Binnaz Toprak, a political science professor at Istanbul's Bosphorus University. "Here, two really basic rights clash with each other. People are left with a terrible choice."
Nur Sertel, deputy dean of state-run Istanbul University, which was the first to ban head scarves three years ago, defended the government. "The head scarf is not only a way of dressing, it has been used as a symbol of Islam, a flag of fundamentalism" and a political football for Islamic organizations, she said.
Turkey's National Security Council last week said education was a critical area in which to oppose the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. Council members discussed cracking down on religious influence in Turkish schools, particularly Islamic institutions.
But human rights groups have condemned the government crackdown as a violation of freedom of personal and religious expression. "In Turkey the wearing of the head scarf by students or elected representatives has not presented a threat to public order, health or morality," the New York-based group Human Rights Watch said in a report last month.
Two years ago, police dragged Nuray Canan Bezirgan and three other students from their classroom at Istanbul University a week before she was to graduate. She was barred from returning and, in May, was sentenced to six months in jail. On appeal, she was ordered to pay a small fine instead. Two other charges are pending against her for participating in illegal demonstrations, each carrying a prison term of up to three years, according to her attorney, Ibrahim Ozturk.
"Because I wear a head scarf, I can't finish my education," said Bezirgan.
The issue became so vitriolic in the opening days of school this year that government institutions began warring with each other.
"We have no right to ask people who think differently from us to disappear," Turkey's tourism minister, Erkan Mumcu, said in an address at Istanbul University, which has one of the country's largest and most economically diverse student bodies. University campuses, in particular, should encourage "freedom of thought and expression," he said.
The military – which has declared Islamic fundamentalism one of Turkey's greatest national security threats – said in a news release that it is "concerned with these statements, which can be interpreted as . . . leading Turkey to fanaticism. In contrast with Mumcu's statements, it is clear that if we are not careful about political Islam, it will lead Turkey to a new Dark Age."
Teachers and other government employees are also barred from wearing head scarves. Last year, a parliamentary deputy was forbidden to take her oath of office when she arrived at the Grand National Assembly wearing a head scarf.
Nezine Yildiz, 16, said she dropped out of high school this year and is taking U.S. correspondence courses via the Internet because the government decreed that students at her all-girls religious academy could not don head scarves when entering classes taught by men. Single-gender religious schools have been told to begin integrating their classrooms this year.
In grading national college entrance exams, the government puts graduates of religious schools and technical training schools at a disadvantage, compared with students from public high schools. That practice, plus the new restrictions on religious schools, has prompted a sharp decline in applications to Islamic academies, according to an association of religious high schools.
The government also has begun barring women from wearing head scarves in photographs for drivers licenses, passports and university enrollment documents. In an era of digital camera technology, some photography shops have found a booming business in digitally doctoring women's photographs with fake hair.
But officials have started to catch on. At three times the price of a normal passport photograph, digital hair has turned out to be only a short-term fix to a long-term issue.
Articles
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 29, 2000
ISTANBUL – Five months ago, a Turkish court sentenced 23-year-old Nuray Canan Bezirgan to six months in jail for "obstructing the education of others." Her crime: wearing a head scarf to her college final exams.
In the past two years, more than 25,000 women have been barred from Turkey's college campuses because they refused to remove the head scarves they wear as part of Muslim tradition, according to Turkish human rights groups. Hundreds of government employees have been fired, demoted or transferred for the same reason. And this school year, the government has extended the ban to Islamic religious schools, prompting some Muslim girls to drop out.
The modest head scarf has become the object of one of Turkey's most divisive struggles as the country seeks to join the European Union and the globalized economy. The conflict leaves the country straining to balance greater democratic freedoms with preserving a secular state in a region of expanding Islamic influence.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish republic in 1923 to secularize and modernize a land that had been hobbled, in his opinion, by its Islamic and Ottoman imperial heritage. In recent years, the still fiercely secularist government and military have drawn criticism from human rights groups for their methods of opposing the rising influence of Islamic fundamentalism.
The government has prosecuted writers and journalists it says have espoused the spread of Islam. It has shut down an Islamic political party and is trying to ban its successor. Parliament is expected to revive a law twice vetoed by the president that would allow the government to fire civil servants suspected of having connections with Islamic or separatist political organizations.
Some of the most explosive fights have been waged on college campuses, where government regulations require students "to wear modern costumes and look modern." This month, university and high school classes opened with protests and demonstrations against administrations that barred women with head scarves.
"To ask people to choose between education and their faith is cruel," said Binnaz Toprak, a political science professor at Istanbul's Bosphorus University. "Here, two really basic rights clash with each other. People are left with a terrible choice."
Nur Sertel, deputy dean of state-run Istanbul University, which was the first to ban head scarves three years ago, defended the government. "The head scarf is not only a way of dressing, it has been used as a symbol of Islam, a flag of fundamentalism" and a political football for Islamic organizations, she said.
Turkey's National Security Council last week said education was a critical area in which to oppose the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. Council members discussed cracking down on religious influence in Turkish schools, particularly Islamic institutions.
But human rights groups have condemned the government crackdown as a violation of freedom of personal and religious expression. "In Turkey the wearing of the head scarf by students or elected representatives has not presented a threat to public order, health or morality," the New York-based group Human Rights Watch said in a report last month.
Two years ago, police dragged Nuray Canan Bezirgan and three other students from their classroom at Istanbul University a week before she was to graduate. She was barred from returning and, in May, was sentenced to six months in jail. On appeal, she was ordered to pay a small fine instead. Two other charges are pending against her for participating in illegal demonstrations, each carrying a prison term of up to three years, according to her attorney, Ibrahim Ozturk.
"Because I wear a head scarf, I can't finish my education," said Bezirgan.
The issue became so vitriolic in the opening days of school this year that government institutions began warring with each other.
"We have no right to ask people who think differently from us to disappear," Turkey's tourism minister, Erkan Mumcu, said in an address at Istanbul University, which has one of the country's largest and most economically diverse student bodies. University campuses, in particular, should encourage "freedom of thought and expression," he said.
The military – which has declared Islamic fundamentalism one of Turkey's greatest national security threats – said in a news release that it is "concerned with these statements, which can be interpreted as . . . leading Turkey to fanaticism. In contrast with Mumcu's statements, it is clear that if we are not careful about political Islam, it will lead Turkey to a new Dark Age."
Teachers and other government employees are also barred from wearing head scarves. Last year, a parliamentary deputy was forbidden to take her oath of office when she arrived at the Grand National Assembly wearing a head scarf.
Nezine Yildiz, 16, said she dropped out of high school this year and is taking U.S. correspondence courses via the Internet because the government decreed that students at her all-girls religious academy could not don head scarves when entering classes taught by men. Single-gender religious schools have been told to begin integrating their classrooms this year.
In grading national college entrance exams, the government puts graduates of religious schools and technical training schools at a disadvantage, compared with students from public high schools. That practice, plus the new restrictions on religious schools, has prompted a sharp decline in applications to Islamic academies, according to an association of religious high schools.
The government also has begun barring women from wearing head scarves in photographs for drivers licenses, passports and university enrollment documents. In an era of digital camera technology, some photography shops have found a booming business in digitally doctoring women's photographs with fake hair.
But officials have started to catch on. At three times the price of a normal passport photograph, digital hair has turned out to be only a short-term fix to a long-term issue.
Articles
Keeping the Faith: More and More American Muslims are Choosing to Home-School
Keeping the Faith: More and More American Muslims are Choosing to Home-School
By Ephrat Livni
ABCNews.com
NEW YORK, August 23, 2000: Fatima Saleem’s day begins before the sun rises with the Salatul Fajr, the first of five formal daily prayers to Allah.
Hibba Ibrahim, 12, reads the Qur'an
(Jassim Mohammed/AP Photo)
A devout Muslim since her conversion to Islam 10 years ago, the 25-year-old Columbia, South Carolina mother is directed by her religion in every aspect of her existence, including her five-year-old son’s education.
Saleem is the founder of the Palmetto Muslim Home School Resource Network, a Web site that helps Muslim home schoolers locate information on everything from buying books to choosing a curriculum to learning the laws of their individual states. She was a full-time home-schooling mom until an Islamic school was established in her area this year.
The value clash between the teachings in public schools and her religious beliefs, coupled with the scarcity of Muslim schools in her region, left her little choice but to educate her child independently, she says. Today, her sentiments are shared by thousands of Muslim Americans, the fastest growing group within the national home schooling movement.
There are 1.7 million American kids who won’t be going back to school this September, but instead will be home educated. While home schooling has its origins in parents wanting to provide religious instruction to their children, the movement is growing by 7 percent to 15 percent per year, according to Brian Ray, the president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore., as more Americans with different ideologies choose to educate their children as they see fit.
Passing on Values
“Home educators aim to create an education in which the parents’ values and beliefs are passed on in an easy way that the factory school model cannot deliver,” says Mark Hegener, publisher of Home Education Magazine, of Tonasket, Wash.
Religion, however, is still the main impetus for home schooling. Currently, some 75 percent of home schoolers are Christians who “consciously and conscientiously want to promote their own values,” says Ray.
The increase in the size of the American-born Muslim population in this country, the rigorous demands of the faith and the difficulty for public schools to accommodate the needs of the religion, all help to explain the rise in home schooling among Muslims, proponents say.
Experts estimate that Islam is the fourth largest religious group in the United States today and by 2010 may displace Judaism, the third largest group which today represents 2 percent of the population. Protestants currently comprise 58 percent of America and Catholics, 26 percent.
Scott Sommerville, staff attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association, in Purcellville, Va.. says only about 5,000 Muslim home schoolers exist now, but predicts their numbers will double every year over the next eight years. Barring the implementation of a nationwide school voucher system — which would convert state and local education dollars into individual scholarship certificates for parents to spend at schools of their choosing — he believes 60,000 Muslim children will be learning at home by 2010.
“There’s a growing need to teach moral values and conduct to Muslim school children,”says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Committee on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington, D.C. “That’s traditionally what has happened in the Christian community.”
Keeping Customs While Educating
Value clashes with the public school system spurred Saleem to home schooling. “The public school system is not accommodating to Muslims,”says Saleem.“Especially around puberty, there are a lot of tenets that they have to adhere to, and interaction between boys and girls is greatly frowned upon.”
Further, Islam requires its practitioners pray five times a day, which means interrupting the school schedule, and emphasizes modesty.
“The girls get a lot of flack from their peers for having to cover up funny and boys sometimes try to pull off their covering,” explains Saleem. She says teachers sometimes penalize girls who are quiet in class, unaware that in conservative Muslim families they are taught not to speak in mixed sex society.
Additionally, Muslim school children cannot always participate in seemingly harmless school activities such as raffles and, eventually, as Muslim home-schooling mom Cynthia Sulaiman puts it, all the explaining to teachers and school officials gets to be tedious. She opted out before it became a big issue, saying,. “I could see [trouble] coming.”
An Attleboro, Massachusetts resident, Sulaiman has been educating her four children, at home for five years now. She is the founder of the Muslim Home School Network Resource — another Web site offering Muslim home schooling parents advice, assistance and support on home educating the Islamic way.
“You have to know your limits,” Sulaiman explains, adding that she only teaches at home until the eighth grade. Her eldest daughter now attends a private high school. The younger children are still at home with her, and their curriculum includes Koran, the Islamic holy book, along with the usual math, science, reading, writing, geography, and her family’s favorite, history. Their schedule varies, depending on what extracurricular activities are planned on a given day.
Extracurricular Activities
Like many home schoolers, Muslim home-school children are often very involved in extracurricular activities. The Sulaiman children all take swim classes and Tae Kwan Do, the boys are on a local football team and are involved in gaming clubs, and their mother says they are well-adjusted. “My kids are for the most part more enjoyable than kids who come to the house to play,” she says. “They are known for being ‘good kids’ in the neighborhood.”
Because home schooling laws and requirements vary from state to state, and every family is individual, each home schooler does it differently. Many Muslim moms have turned to the Internet for help in deciding exactly how to go about teaching their children. They chat online, exchanging curriculum and activity ideas, as well as their fears and hopes about the responsibility they have taken on.
“We live in a society that holds us accountable, so I would not put my family in a situation that would stunt their growth,” says Saleem, who follows a mixed curriculum. But she knows some American Muslims who feel so grossly misunderstood that they abandon American education altogether, basing their curriculums exclusively on studies from the Koran and other classical Arabic texts. Others, however, receive material from the local schools and censor what they consider blasphemous. “No one is unified on what approach to take,” says Saleem.
Opinions Differ on Results
Home-schooling advocate Ray is not certain method matters. “Not matter how you cut it, slice it or dice it, research shows home school kids are doing better [than their private and public school peers],” he says. In fact, a new three-year study out of the University of Durham in Scotland shows home-educated children significantly out performed their school contemporaries in literacy, mathematics and social skills. The top three finishers at the national spelling bee this year were educated at home.
The national teachers’ union disagrees. In 1999, the National Education Association issued a home-schooling resolution, stating, “The NEA believes that home schooling programs cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience.” Association spokespeople refused further comment. The U.S. Department of Education also refused to comment on this story.
Ray says homeschoolers — whether New Age or conservative Muslim — also tend to face a lot of resistance from relatives, friends and neighbors.
But Fatima Saleem is not answering to her neighbors, and she doesn’t want her child lost to the secularism that rules this society. She does, however, want him to succeed, and expresses a sentiment many parents, regardless of their religion, likely share, “We’re just trying to fit the pieces in a huge puzzle. We’re all caught in the dilemma of what to do with our children.”
Islam in America
Founded in 610 CE in Saudi Arabia by the Prophet Mohammed, Islam’s origins in America go back to the early 19th century. Some historians estimate that about 10 percent of African slaves were Muslims.
The word “Islam” means “submission” [to God]. To become a Muslim, one must accept and declare the creed of Islam, which states, “there is no other God but Allah, and Mohammed is His messenger.” Muslims also believe in six articles of faith: God, the Angels, the Scriptures, the Prophets, the Day of Judgment, and Fatalism, or “the will of God”. There are five religious duties known as “The Pillars of Islam,” which a Muslim must perform. They are: the professions, prayer, alms giving, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.
Around 1878, thousands of Muslims came to the United States from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine, but that wave of immigration was halted in 1925 by the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which limited immigration, and the Asian Exclusion Act, which classified Arabs as Asians.
At about that time, the Islamic African-American movement took hold in the United States and continues today. The more radical African-American Muslims, most notably The Nation of Islam, number in the hundred thousands, and are a minority in the American Islamic community.
After the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 the quota system was relaxed and the Muslim population in America grew again through immigration, with an increase in arrivals from Arab Muslim countries like Iraq, Egypt, and Syria. Today, South Asian Muslims from Pakistan and India comprise the biggest increase in Muslim immigration to this country.
According to the Committee on American Islamic relations, there are six million Muslims in America today. Estimates indicate that by the year 2010 that number will reach 10 to 16 million, making Islam the third largest religion in the United States.
By Ephrat Livni
ABCNews.com
NEW YORK, August 23, 2000: Fatima Saleem’s day begins before the sun rises with the Salatul Fajr, the first of five formal daily prayers to Allah.
Hibba Ibrahim, 12, reads the Qur'an
(Jassim Mohammed/AP Photo)
A devout Muslim since her conversion to Islam 10 years ago, the 25-year-old Columbia, South Carolina mother is directed by her religion in every aspect of her existence, including her five-year-old son’s education.
Saleem is the founder of the Palmetto Muslim Home School Resource Network, a Web site that helps Muslim home schoolers locate information on everything from buying books to choosing a curriculum to learning the laws of their individual states. She was a full-time home-schooling mom until an Islamic school was established in her area this year.
The value clash between the teachings in public schools and her religious beliefs, coupled with the scarcity of Muslim schools in her region, left her little choice but to educate her child independently, she says. Today, her sentiments are shared by thousands of Muslim Americans, the fastest growing group within the national home schooling movement.
There are 1.7 million American kids who won’t be going back to school this September, but instead will be home educated. While home schooling has its origins in parents wanting to provide religious instruction to their children, the movement is growing by 7 percent to 15 percent per year, according to Brian Ray, the president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore., as more Americans with different ideologies choose to educate their children as they see fit.
Passing on Values
“Home educators aim to create an education in which the parents’ values and beliefs are passed on in an easy way that the factory school model cannot deliver,” says Mark Hegener, publisher of Home Education Magazine, of Tonasket, Wash.
Religion, however, is still the main impetus for home schooling. Currently, some 75 percent of home schoolers are Christians who “consciously and conscientiously want to promote their own values,” says Ray.
The increase in the size of the American-born Muslim population in this country, the rigorous demands of the faith and the difficulty for public schools to accommodate the needs of the religion, all help to explain the rise in home schooling among Muslims, proponents say.
Experts estimate that Islam is the fourth largest religious group in the United States today and by 2010 may displace Judaism, the third largest group which today represents 2 percent of the population. Protestants currently comprise 58 percent of America and Catholics, 26 percent.
Scott Sommerville, staff attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association, in Purcellville, Va.. says only about 5,000 Muslim home schoolers exist now, but predicts their numbers will double every year over the next eight years. Barring the implementation of a nationwide school voucher system — which would convert state and local education dollars into individual scholarship certificates for parents to spend at schools of their choosing — he believes 60,000 Muslim children will be learning at home by 2010.
“There’s a growing need to teach moral values and conduct to Muslim school children,”says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Committee on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington, D.C. “That’s traditionally what has happened in the Christian community.”
Keeping Customs While Educating
Value clashes with the public school system spurred Saleem to home schooling. “The public school system is not accommodating to Muslims,”says Saleem.“Especially around puberty, there are a lot of tenets that they have to adhere to, and interaction between boys and girls is greatly frowned upon.”
Further, Islam requires its practitioners pray five times a day, which means interrupting the school schedule, and emphasizes modesty.
“The girls get a lot of flack from their peers for having to cover up funny and boys sometimes try to pull off their covering,” explains Saleem. She says teachers sometimes penalize girls who are quiet in class, unaware that in conservative Muslim families they are taught not to speak in mixed sex society.
Additionally, Muslim school children cannot always participate in seemingly harmless school activities such as raffles and, eventually, as Muslim home-schooling mom Cynthia Sulaiman puts it, all the explaining to teachers and school officials gets to be tedious. She opted out before it became a big issue, saying,. “I could see [trouble] coming.”
An Attleboro, Massachusetts resident, Sulaiman has been educating her four children, at home for five years now. She is the founder of the Muslim Home School Network Resource — another Web site offering Muslim home schooling parents advice, assistance and support on home educating the Islamic way.
“You have to know your limits,” Sulaiman explains, adding that she only teaches at home until the eighth grade. Her eldest daughter now attends a private high school. The younger children are still at home with her, and their curriculum includes Koran, the Islamic holy book, along with the usual math, science, reading, writing, geography, and her family’s favorite, history. Their schedule varies, depending on what extracurricular activities are planned on a given day.
Extracurricular Activities
Like many home schoolers, Muslim home-school children are often very involved in extracurricular activities. The Sulaiman children all take swim classes and Tae Kwan Do, the boys are on a local football team and are involved in gaming clubs, and their mother says they are well-adjusted. “My kids are for the most part more enjoyable than kids who come to the house to play,” she says. “They are known for being ‘good kids’ in the neighborhood.”
Because home schooling laws and requirements vary from state to state, and every family is individual, each home schooler does it differently. Many Muslim moms have turned to the Internet for help in deciding exactly how to go about teaching their children. They chat online, exchanging curriculum and activity ideas, as well as their fears and hopes about the responsibility they have taken on.
“We live in a society that holds us accountable, so I would not put my family in a situation that would stunt their growth,” says Saleem, who follows a mixed curriculum. But she knows some American Muslims who feel so grossly misunderstood that they abandon American education altogether, basing their curriculums exclusively on studies from the Koran and other classical Arabic texts. Others, however, receive material from the local schools and censor what they consider blasphemous. “No one is unified on what approach to take,” says Saleem.
Opinions Differ on Results
Home-schooling advocate Ray is not certain method matters. “Not matter how you cut it, slice it or dice it, research shows home school kids are doing better [than their private and public school peers],” he says. In fact, a new three-year study out of the University of Durham in Scotland shows home-educated children significantly out performed their school contemporaries in literacy, mathematics and social skills. The top three finishers at the national spelling bee this year were educated at home.
The national teachers’ union disagrees. In 1999, the National Education Association issued a home-schooling resolution, stating, “The NEA believes that home schooling programs cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience.” Association spokespeople refused further comment. The U.S. Department of Education also refused to comment on this story.
Ray says homeschoolers — whether New Age or conservative Muslim — also tend to face a lot of resistance from relatives, friends and neighbors.
But Fatima Saleem is not answering to her neighbors, and she doesn’t want her child lost to the secularism that rules this society. She does, however, want him to succeed, and expresses a sentiment many parents, regardless of their religion, likely share, “We’re just trying to fit the pieces in a huge puzzle. We’re all caught in the dilemma of what to do with our children.”
Islam in America
Founded in 610 CE in Saudi Arabia by the Prophet Mohammed, Islam’s origins in America go back to the early 19th century. Some historians estimate that about 10 percent of African slaves were Muslims.
The word “Islam” means “submission” [to God]. To become a Muslim, one must accept and declare the creed of Islam, which states, “there is no other God but Allah, and Mohammed is His messenger.” Muslims also believe in six articles of faith: God, the Angels, the Scriptures, the Prophets, the Day of Judgment, and Fatalism, or “the will of God”. There are five religious duties known as “The Pillars of Islam,” which a Muslim must perform. They are: the professions, prayer, alms giving, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.
Around 1878, thousands of Muslims came to the United States from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine, but that wave of immigration was halted in 1925 by the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which limited immigration, and the Asian Exclusion Act, which classified Arabs as Asians.
At about that time, the Islamic African-American movement took hold in the United States and continues today. The more radical African-American Muslims, most notably The Nation of Islam, number in the hundred thousands, and are a minority in the American Islamic community.
After the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 the quota system was relaxed and the Muslim population in America grew again through immigration, with an increase in arrivals from Arab Muslim countries like Iraq, Egypt, and Syria. Today, South Asian Muslims from Pakistan and India comprise the biggest increase in Muslim immigration to this country.
According to the Committee on American Islamic relations, there are six million Muslims in America today. Estimates indicate that by the year 2010 that number will reach 10 to 16 million, making Islam the third largest religion in the United States.
Lessions of Inclusion
Lessions of Inclusion
American Public School Kids Learn About Ramadhan
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 28, 2000;
Page B01
Daad Mohamed, 12, from Sudan, and Mariela Uceda, 12, from Peru, try on Muslim clothing as students at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School get a lesson in Ramadan. (James A. Parcell - The Washington Post)
Squeezing through a thick swarm of his giggling and gregarious sixth-grade classmates, Luis Macias, 12, stood on tiptoe to get a peep at a table crammed with clothing from the Middle East, sesame candies and leather-bound books with curly swirls of Arabic writing.
Within seconds, he spotted what he wanted: a black, green and velvet Kufi hat, with round mirrors and glitter dotting the sides. He placed the hat from Afghanistan atop his mop of black hair and quickly scrambled to his seat.
"Now that you are all wearing clothes from the Middle East, we can talk about them and what the upcoming special month for Muslims is," said Samira Hussein, a guest speaker at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Silver Spring. "Does anyone know what is coming up?"
Blank faces. Embarrassed shrugs. Even though Luis was smiling in his Kufi, the boy from Ecuador had never heard of Muslims, let alone what their holy month was.
"It's Ramadan, my holiday," answered Daad Mohamed, 12, a Sudanese American student. "We fast and get gifts at the end."
Eyes grew wide. Hands starting shooting into the air with questions as Hussein, a Muslim activist who works as a cultural liaison for the Montgomery County public schools, explained the 30-day period of fasting and reflection that started this week.
As the Muslim population in schools soars, lessons like this--complete with extensive lesson plans--have become more common in classrooms across the Washington region. It's part of a growing effort in public schools to increase understanding and decrease stereotypes of Muslim students and their traditions.
Educators said they are careful to keep the lessons focused on information rather than religious preaching. But they added that with thousands of Muslim students now attending Washington area schools, basic knowledge of Muslim students and their holidays is needed, especially during a time of tense conflict in the Middle East.
Cynthia Ross, who runs the Middle Eastern/South Asian Club at Chantilly High School, where about half the club's members are Muslims, said: "I recently got a call from a parent who wanted to know why we would sponsor a club like this. She started echoing stereotypes, and it was very tough and very painful. I think we very much need these kinds of sessions and clubs so people can gain some understanding."
Some Muslim activists and students are also talking about the idea of having a formal Muslim or Middle Eastern Heritage month, much like Hispanic and African American heritage months.
At Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Amani Elkassabany, a Muslim teacher and adviser for the Muslim Students Association, said she supports the idea and believes it could boost the self-esteem of students from the Middle East.
"The students are really struggling against negative images of Islam," said Elkassabany. "It's hard enough being a teenager and wanting to be accepted. As Muslims, some of these students are really reluctant to tell their peers about their culture because of the stereotypes that are out there."
At the school, Muslim and non-Muslim students alike prepared information cards that explained Ramadan. The cards described how Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset during the month. They also said that Muslims have a three-day party called an Eid al-Fitr with food and gifts at the end of Ramadan, which marks the revelation of their holy book, the Qur'an.
The students also made small packages of dried apricots, dates and almonds--foods used to break the fast every day after sunset--and placed them in the mailboxes of all the teachers in the school.
"It's kind of hard when you tell people that you are fasting," said Afshan Chaudhry, 17, a Muslim student at Wootton. "Most people don't know much about the religion."Many Washington area schools are hosting information and Islamic heritage sessions around the time of Ramadan. Several school districts, including Montgomery County and Fairfax County, have also held Ramadan sessions for teachers that include trips to local mosques.
"I sent out e-mails to the entire staff explaining about Ramadan," said Isabel Showkatian, a second-grade teacher at Bailey's Elementary School in Fairfax County, who is Muslim. "And I brought out books about Ramadan and told teachers they could borrow them from me. The Muslim students become so excited when they meet someone who knows what Ramadan is about."
At Herndon Elementary School and at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Muslim mothers and teachers have visited classrooms to explain to students the meaning of Ramadan and why some of their classmates are fasting.
"I talk to them about tolerance and teasing and how it's not funny to have someone wave a Twinkie in your face when you are fasting," said Amaarah Decuir, a Muslim who is a sixth-grade teacher at Herndon Elementary School. "I think after you explain that, many students understand."
Afeefa Syeed, an intercultural trainer and consultant, has developed a lesson plan she has used in schools in Fairfax, Montgomery and Prince George's counties to teach about Ramadan. The curriculum contains a show-and-tell with prayer rugs, Korans and coloring books about the holy month, along with arts-and-crafts projects for students.
Muslim students said they find that the lessons often make it easier for them during Ramadan.
"People always ask if you get presents like Hanukah and Christmas," said Salma Monastra, 11, a sixth-grader at Herndon Elementary. "After a teacher explains, they understand a little bit that it's a fun time and it's not just about fasting."
Students said they prefer that teachers or visitors explain what Ramadan is, saying they sometimes feel uncomfortable talking about it.
"When I went to Muslim school, everybody knew," said Fatima Showkatian, 13, now an eighth-grader at Thoreau Middle School in Vienna. "I kind of like when someone explains to everyone here what it is. It makes it easier for me."
Muslim teachers, including Wafa Hozien, who teaches government at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, said they also appreciate it.
"It's nice, because I like Madonna and I grew up very American," said Hozien, 31, who came to this country from Libya when she was 8. "They can now explain that I can be very American and still have my religion and pride. It's more complicated than people assume."
American Public School Kids Learn About Ramadhan
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 28, 2000;
Page B01
Daad Mohamed, 12, from Sudan, and Mariela Uceda, 12, from Peru, try on Muslim clothing as students at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School get a lesson in Ramadan. (James A. Parcell - The Washington Post)
Squeezing through a thick swarm of his giggling and gregarious sixth-grade classmates, Luis Macias, 12, stood on tiptoe to get a peep at a table crammed with clothing from the Middle East, sesame candies and leather-bound books with curly swirls of Arabic writing.
Within seconds, he spotted what he wanted: a black, green and velvet Kufi hat, with round mirrors and glitter dotting the sides. He placed the hat from Afghanistan atop his mop of black hair and quickly scrambled to his seat.
"Now that you are all wearing clothes from the Middle East, we can talk about them and what the upcoming special month for Muslims is," said Samira Hussein, a guest speaker at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Silver Spring. "Does anyone know what is coming up?"
Blank faces. Embarrassed shrugs. Even though Luis was smiling in his Kufi, the boy from Ecuador had never heard of Muslims, let alone what their holy month was.
"It's Ramadan, my holiday," answered Daad Mohamed, 12, a Sudanese American student. "We fast and get gifts at the end."
Eyes grew wide. Hands starting shooting into the air with questions as Hussein, a Muslim activist who works as a cultural liaison for the Montgomery County public schools, explained the 30-day period of fasting and reflection that started this week.
As the Muslim population in schools soars, lessons like this--complete with extensive lesson plans--have become more common in classrooms across the Washington region. It's part of a growing effort in public schools to increase understanding and decrease stereotypes of Muslim students and their traditions.
Educators said they are careful to keep the lessons focused on information rather than religious preaching. But they added that with thousands of Muslim students now attending Washington area schools, basic knowledge of Muslim students and their holidays is needed, especially during a time of tense conflict in the Middle East.
Cynthia Ross, who runs the Middle Eastern/South Asian Club at Chantilly High School, where about half the club's members are Muslims, said: "I recently got a call from a parent who wanted to know why we would sponsor a club like this. She started echoing stereotypes, and it was very tough and very painful. I think we very much need these kinds of sessions and clubs so people can gain some understanding."
Some Muslim activists and students are also talking about the idea of having a formal Muslim or Middle Eastern Heritage month, much like Hispanic and African American heritage months.
At Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Amani Elkassabany, a Muslim teacher and adviser for the Muslim Students Association, said she supports the idea and believes it could boost the self-esteem of students from the Middle East.
"The students are really struggling against negative images of Islam," said Elkassabany. "It's hard enough being a teenager and wanting to be accepted. As Muslims, some of these students are really reluctant to tell their peers about their culture because of the stereotypes that are out there."
At the school, Muslim and non-Muslim students alike prepared information cards that explained Ramadan. The cards described how Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset during the month. They also said that Muslims have a three-day party called an Eid al-Fitr with food and gifts at the end of Ramadan, which marks the revelation of their holy book, the Qur'an.
The students also made small packages of dried apricots, dates and almonds--foods used to break the fast every day after sunset--and placed them in the mailboxes of all the teachers in the school.
"It's kind of hard when you tell people that you are fasting," said Afshan Chaudhry, 17, a Muslim student at Wootton. "Most people don't know much about the religion."Many Washington area schools are hosting information and Islamic heritage sessions around the time of Ramadan. Several school districts, including Montgomery County and Fairfax County, have also held Ramadan sessions for teachers that include trips to local mosques.
"I sent out e-mails to the entire staff explaining about Ramadan," said Isabel Showkatian, a second-grade teacher at Bailey's Elementary School in Fairfax County, who is Muslim. "And I brought out books about Ramadan and told teachers they could borrow them from me. The Muslim students become so excited when they meet someone who knows what Ramadan is about."
At Herndon Elementary School and at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Muslim mothers and teachers have visited classrooms to explain to students the meaning of Ramadan and why some of their classmates are fasting.
"I talk to them about tolerance and teasing and how it's not funny to have someone wave a Twinkie in your face when you are fasting," said Amaarah Decuir, a Muslim who is a sixth-grade teacher at Herndon Elementary School. "I think after you explain that, many students understand."
Afeefa Syeed, an intercultural trainer and consultant, has developed a lesson plan she has used in schools in Fairfax, Montgomery and Prince George's counties to teach about Ramadan. The curriculum contains a show-and-tell with prayer rugs, Korans and coloring books about the holy month, along with arts-and-crafts projects for students.
Muslim students said they find that the lessons often make it easier for them during Ramadan.
"People always ask if you get presents like Hanukah and Christmas," said Salma Monastra, 11, a sixth-grader at Herndon Elementary. "After a teacher explains, they understand a little bit that it's a fun time and it's not just about fasting."
Students said they prefer that teachers or visitors explain what Ramadan is, saying they sometimes feel uncomfortable talking about it.
"When I went to Muslim school, everybody knew," said Fatima Showkatian, 13, now an eighth-grader at Thoreau Middle School in Vienna. "I kind of like when someone explains to everyone here what it is. It makes it easier for me."
Muslim teachers, including Wafa Hozien, who teaches government at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, said they also appreciate it.
"It's nice, because I like Madonna and I grew up very American," said Hozien, 31, who came to this country from Libya when she was 8. "They can now explain that I can be very American and still have my religion and pride. It's more complicated than people assume."
Muslims Schools in U.S. a Voice for Identity
Muslims Schools in U.S. a Voice for Identity
By Susan Sachs
New York Times - November 10, 1998
The playground at Al Noor School in Brooklyn. The principal said 400 students were turned away for lack of space at the 600-student school.
The school year is already in full swing and still the parents come, crowding into the principal's office at Al Noor School in Brooklyn, painstakingly filling in forms, proffering checks and pleading in Arabic and English for a chance to enroll their children in the New York area's biggest Islamic private school.
"We turned down 400 kids because we don't have space," said Nidal Abuasi, the principal, whose resources are already stretched to accommodate Al Noor's 600 students. "We have people who come hoping we have space even if their child has to be demoted to a lower grade. There is a huge demand."
Across the country, Islamic schools like Al Noor that offer religion and Arabic classes along with a standard academic curriculum are expanding and flourishing, with many becoming oversubscribed so quickly that principals are scrambling for money to build more.
The reasons for the surge are as diverse as the American Muslim population itself, which embraces American-born converts and a swelling immigrant population from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
But the educational structure these schools have forged -- prayer, discipline and American-style teaching -- has an appeal that cuts across lines of national origin and background.
At Al Iman elementary and high school in Queens, as at the 23 other Islamic schools in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey, the day begins with prayer: rows of children, separated by sex, reciting in Arabic the ancient words of submission to Allah.
Posters of Islam's most famous mosques and the sayings of the prophet Mohammed hang in every classroom. Children must wear uniforms: long shapeless robes and head scarves for the older girls and neat blue sweaters and gray trousers for the boys. Besides their regular studies, students take two classes a week in Islamic studies and three a week in Arabic, the language of the Koran.
A glance at Al Iman's handbook for students and parents further underlines the differences from public schools. The rules are strict: three demerits for taking toys, comics, cosmetics, jewelry or other unauthorized materials to school, one for wearing nail polish, five for disrespectful behavior to teachers or for "pursuing acts of romanticism" like flirting with a schoolmate. The punishment for five demerits is detention during lunch for three days. After 30 demerits, a child is suspended for a week, and after 40, expelled.
For students who transfer from public school, the transition can be difficult.
"My parents insisted I come here and I didn't really argue with them," said Amel Ahmed, 17, whose parents emigrated from Yemen in 1980. She admitted she had picked up some bad habits in public school, but said the individual attention and strictly enforced regulations at Al Iman had set her straight.
"I wasn't on the right track there, maybe because you get influenced by your friends," Amel said. "Here they don't only teach you. They guide you."
Until recently, a full-time academic course load combined with Islamic teaching was available mainly through the national network of Sister Clara Muhammad schools, named for the wife of the Nation of Islam's founder, Elijah Muhammad, mainly serving African-American students. Two in New York City have been operating since the early 1970's, although they are no longer associated with the Nation of Islam. Now a new type of school serving a broader group of Muslims has emerged. In a sudden growth spurt, the number of Islamic schools nationwide has jumped to at least 200, according to the Council of Islamic Schools in North America, an informal body that sponsors workshops for Muslim educators. But neither the council nor any other group keeps official track of school openings, and American Muslims say they believe that the national figures are even higher.
Al Noor School in Brooklyn and other Islamic schools offer religion and Arabic classes with a standard academic curriculum and use a formula of piety and penalties.
As recently as three years ago, fewer than 200 children in New York City and Long Island attended private Islamic schools. Today, with two full-time high schools in Queens and plans to build three more in Brooklyn and Manhattan, total enrollment is 2,400 spread among 13 schools, with the majority of students from immigrant families. In New Jersey there are now at least 10 private Islamic schools, not only in big cities, with their notoriously troubled public schools, but also in small towns with respected school districts.
Private school enrollment is up in general, and many of the attractions are the same for all parents, Muslim or not, who view public schools as too permissive, rowdy and crowded.
But a more subtle dynamic is at work in the national surge in Islamic private schools. It represents a coming of age, in the view of many Muslim leaders, for a community striving to define itself as a cohesive religious minority in the secular American society.
Long a community of distinct and often introverted parts, Muslims have begun a process familiar to many immigrant and ethnic groups. They are trying to reach beyond their internal demarcations of national origin and find a unified voice to defend and promote their interests in a multicultural society.
Convinced that many Americans have a distorted view of Muslims and their Islamic religion, compounded by images in the movies and the media, they have created national organizations, lobbying groups, voter-registration campaigns and outreach programs to explain Islam to their neighbors.
Those who help to create a school system see themselves as an integral part of this communal effort to define, for themselves and for others, what it means to be a Muslim in the United States.
"My father's family survived in Bosnian society as a minority for centuries," said Saffiya Turan, a founder of Noor al Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J., whose father emigrated more than 30 years ago from Yugoslavia. "To survive, you have to know who you are."
The challenge for Islamic educators is to create a spiritual educational experience for young Muslims that is also relevant to their lives in a secular society. It has been a process of trial and error, ad-libbing and self-discovery.
Many schools cobble together teaching materials from other countries. Abuasi, who is Palestinian-American, said he experimented with books from Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere before settling on Arabic texts from Jordan to teach the Koran, which Muslims believe is God's word as transmitted to the prophet Mohammed.
At Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, one teacher, Abir Catovic, decided it made more sense for American schools to write their own texts.
"Overseas, you aren't taught to ask why," said Mrs. Catovic, 31, who grew up in New Jersey after her family emigrated from Egypt. "Here you've got students who ask why, and you'd better be prepared to answer more than just, 'Because it says so.' "
Religious schools for American Muslims also have to contend with a widely diverse student body. At Al Iman in Queens, for example, any one class might have children from Egyptian, Yemeni, Pakistani, Indian and African-American backgrounds. For Souhair Ayach, who teaches Islamic studies, having that mix of cultures requires her constantly to stress the difference between old country traditions and religion.
One recent day, Ms. Ayach's class strayed from a discussion of the divine source of human genius to a more worldly topic that was on the minds of her 11th- and 12th-grade students: arranged marriages.
"Is there something in Islam that, like, says a girl should get married at a young age, or is it just tradition?" asked a teen-age girl who gave her name only as Sabih, whose parents came from Pakistan but whose accent announced her New York City upbringing.
Ms. Ayach, herself a recent immigrant from Lebanon, steered a cautious course. "In the past, people had everything they needed to live," she said. "They were shepherds. They were merchants. They had castles. They didn't have all these expenses of life.
"Here," she continued, "you have to have education because you need a good job, a respectable job, to make your living. So it's better if you marry early, but under some circumstances it's better to develop your life first."
Private schooling still touches only a small portion of American Muslims, whose numbers are growing. There are no official national figures, but a 1992 study commissioned by the American Muslim Council, a lobbying group in Washington, estimated the Muslim population in New York State at 800,000 and in New Jersey at 200,000. A more recent study by demographers at the State University of New York at Cortlandt concluded that 450,000 Muslims live in the New York metropolitan area alone.
Islamic schools are still small players in the private-education business. In New York State, 480,000 students, 1 in 5 of school age children, attend one of 2,400 registered nonpublic schools, most of them Roman Catholic schools or Jewish day schools and yeshivas.
But Muslim educators say the numbers of full-time Muslim students do not tell the complete story. Many of their schools have only now reached a point of critical mass at which they can attract more students because they offer advanced grade levels and have a demonstrable academic track record.
Still, it is difficult to gauge the real demand for Islamic schools, most of which charge up to $3,000 a year in tuition. But school administrators say that in an area that already supports 450 mosques in New York City and Long Island, there is a vast untapped pool of families willing to pay for an alternative to the secular public schools.
"This year we added 140 students from the public schools, all coming with the behavioral and academic problems they inherited: name calling, taunting with labels and names, casual profanity," said Abuasi at Al Noor. "Here they have to watch the way they walk, watch the way they talk and watch what comes out of their mouths."
The formula of piety and penalties at schools like Al Noor seems to have whetted the appetite of Muslim parents. Al Noor opened only three years ago, with an initial enrollment of 350 students in six grades. It now has 600 children from prekindergarten through ninth grade and is raising money from Arabic and Muslim businesses in the area to build a $4 million addition to the school.
To meet expected demand in Manhattan, the Kuwaiti-financed Islamic Cultural Center of New York is building a $10 million, five-story school for 1,000 students, next to its complex at Third Avenue and 96th Street.
Al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, one of the busiest in the city, is soliciting donations to convert its top four floors into an Islamic junior high and high school for girls.
Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed, the imam at the mosque, said the need for a girls' school is particularly acute in his neighborhood of immigrants. Families from conservative Arab countries abhor the mixing of boys and girls in public schools, he said, and panic when their daughters become teen-agers.
"Many are thinking of sending them back home," Mohamed said. "We tell them that's not a solution. If you take them back, you have to go back with them."
Like new immigrants, more established Muslim families worry that their children may lose their religious identity or do poorly in public schools where their dress, holidays and religious taboos can make them curiosities.
Dawn El Mezyen, a convert to Islam, tried to help her son fit in at a conventional kindergarten, at one point acceding to his pleas to join in exchanging Valentine's Day cards with his schoolmates. It took hours, she said, to sort through piles of store-bought cards and toss those with romantic messages she believed were inappropriate for a Muslim boy to give.
Then she transferred him to the Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J. "I needed him to be around other Muslim kids," Mrs. El Mezyen said. "I wanted it to be a day to day thing. I didn't want him to be the sore thumb that sticks out. Here we all celebrate a holiday together."
At Al Iman School in Queens, robes are required and cosmetics, jewelry and flirting are forbidden.
Articles
By Susan Sachs
New York Times - November 10, 1998
The playground at Al Noor School in Brooklyn. The principal said 400 students were turned away for lack of space at the 600-student school.
The school year is already in full swing and still the parents come, crowding into the principal's office at Al Noor School in Brooklyn, painstakingly filling in forms, proffering checks and pleading in Arabic and English for a chance to enroll their children in the New York area's biggest Islamic private school.
"We turned down 400 kids because we don't have space," said Nidal Abuasi, the principal, whose resources are already stretched to accommodate Al Noor's 600 students. "We have people who come hoping we have space even if their child has to be demoted to a lower grade. There is a huge demand."
Across the country, Islamic schools like Al Noor that offer religion and Arabic classes along with a standard academic curriculum are expanding and flourishing, with many becoming oversubscribed so quickly that principals are scrambling for money to build more.
The reasons for the surge are as diverse as the American Muslim population itself, which embraces American-born converts and a swelling immigrant population from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
But the educational structure these schools have forged -- prayer, discipline and American-style teaching -- has an appeal that cuts across lines of national origin and background.
At Al Iman elementary and high school in Queens, as at the 23 other Islamic schools in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey, the day begins with prayer: rows of children, separated by sex, reciting in Arabic the ancient words of submission to Allah.
Posters of Islam's most famous mosques and the sayings of the prophet Mohammed hang in every classroom. Children must wear uniforms: long shapeless robes and head scarves for the older girls and neat blue sweaters and gray trousers for the boys. Besides their regular studies, students take two classes a week in Islamic studies and three a week in Arabic, the language of the Koran.
A glance at Al Iman's handbook for students and parents further underlines the differences from public schools. The rules are strict: three demerits for taking toys, comics, cosmetics, jewelry or other unauthorized materials to school, one for wearing nail polish, five for disrespectful behavior to teachers or for "pursuing acts of romanticism" like flirting with a schoolmate. The punishment for five demerits is detention during lunch for three days. After 30 demerits, a child is suspended for a week, and after 40, expelled.
For students who transfer from public school, the transition can be difficult.
"My parents insisted I come here and I didn't really argue with them," said Amel Ahmed, 17, whose parents emigrated from Yemen in 1980. She admitted she had picked up some bad habits in public school, but said the individual attention and strictly enforced regulations at Al Iman had set her straight.
"I wasn't on the right track there, maybe because you get influenced by your friends," Amel said. "Here they don't only teach you. They guide you."
Until recently, a full-time academic course load combined with Islamic teaching was available mainly through the national network of Sister Clara Muhammad schools, named for the wife of the Nation of Islam's founder, Elijah Muhammad, mainly serving African-American students. Two in New York City have been operating since the early 1970's, although they are no longer associated with the Nation of Islam. Now a new type of school serving a broader group of Muslims has emerged. In a sudden growth spurt, the number of Islamic schools nationwide has jumped to at least 200, according to the Council of Islamic Schools in North America, an informal body that sponsors workshops for Muslim educators. But neither the council nor any other group keeps official track of school openings, and American Muslims say they believe that the national figures are even higher.
Al Noor School in Brooklyn and other Islamic schools offer religion and Arabic classes with a standard academic curriculum and use a formula of piety and penalties.
As recently as three years ago, fewer than 200 children in New York City and Long Island attended private Islamic schools. Today, with two full-time high schools in Queens and plans to build three more in Brooklyn and Manhattan, total enrollment is 2,400 spread among 13 schools, with the majority of students from immigrant families. In New Jersey there are now at least 10 private Islamic schools, not only in big cities, with their notoriously troubled public schools, but also in small towns with respected school districts.
Private school enrollment is up in general, and many of the attractions are the same for all parents, Muslim or not, who view public schools as too permissive, rowdy and crowded.
But a more subtle dynamic is at work in the national surge in Islamic private schools. It represents a coming of age, in the view of many Muslim leaders, for a community striving to define itself as a cohesive religious minority in the secular American society.
Long a community of distinct and often introverted parts, Muslims have begun a process familiar to many immigrant and ethnic groups. They are trying to reach beyond their internal demarcations of national origin and find a unified voice to defend and promote their interests in a multicultural society.
Convinced that many Americans have a distorted view of Muslims and their Islamic religion, compounded by images in the movies and the media, they have created national organizations, lobbying groups, voter-registration campaigns and outreach programs to explain Islam to their neighbors.
Those who help to create a school system see themselves as an integral part of this communal effort to define, for themselves and for others, what it means to be a Muslim in the United States.
"My father's family survived in Bosnian society as a minority for centuries," said Saffiya Turan, a founder of Noor al Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J., whose father emigrated more than 30 years ago from Yugoslavia. "To survive, you have to know who you are."
The challenge for Islamic educators is to create a spiritual educational experience for young Muslims that is also relevant to their lives in a secular society. It has been a process of trial and error, ad-libbing and self-discovery.
Many schools cobble together teaching materials from other countries. Abuasi, who is Palestinian-American, said he experimented with books from Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere before settling on Arabic texts from Jordan to teach the Koran, which Muslims believe is God's word as transmitted to the prophet Mohammed.
At Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, one teacher, Abir Catovic, decided it made more sense for American schools to write their own texts.
"Overseas, you aren't taught to ask why," said Mrs. Catovic, 31, who grew up in New Jersey after her family emigrated from Egypt. "Here you've got students who ask why, and you'd better be prepared to answer more than just, 'Because it says so.' "
Religious schools for American Muslims also have to contend with a widely diverse student body. At Al Iman in Queens, for example, any one class might have children from Egyptian, Yemeni, Pakistani, Indian and African-American backgrounds. For Souhair Ayach, who teaches Islamic studies, having that mix of cultures requires her constantly to stress the difference between old country traditions and religion.
One recent day, Ms. Ayach's class strayed from a discussion of the divine source of human genius to a more worldly topic that was on the minds of her 11th- and 12th-grade students: arranged marriages.
"Is there something in Islam that, like, says a girl should get married at a young age, or is it just tradition?" asked a teen-age girl who gave her name only as Sabih, whose parents came from Pakistan but whose accent announced her New York City upbringing.
Ms. Ayach, herself a recent immigrant from Lebanon, steered a cautious course. "In the past, people had everything they needed to live," she said. "They were shepherds. They were merchants. They had castles. They didn't have all these expenses of life.
"Here," she continued, "you have to have education because you need a good job, a respectable job, to make your living. So it's better if you marry early, but under some circumstances it's better to develop your life first."
Private schooling still touches only a small portion of American Muslims, whose numbers are growing. There are no official national figures, but a 1992 study commissioned by the American Muslim Council, a lobbying group in Washington, estimated the Muslim population in New York State at 800,000 and in New Jersey at 200,000. A more recent study by demographers at the State University of New York at Cortlandt concluded that 450,000 Muslims live in the New York metropolitan area alone.
Islamic schools are still small players in the private-education business. In New York State, 480,000 students, 1 in 5 of school age children, attend one of 2,400 registered nonpublic schools, most of them Roman Catholic schools or Jewish day schools and yeshivas.
But Muslim educators say the numbers of full-time Muslim students do not tell the complete story. Many of their schools have only now reached a point of critical mass at which they can attract more students because they offer advanced grade levels and have a demonstrable academic track record.
Still, it is difficult to gauge the real demand for Islamic schools, most of which charge up to $3,000 a year in tuition. But school administrators say that in an area that already supports 450 mosques in New York City and Long Island, there is a vast untapped pool of families willing to pay for an alternative to the secular public schools.
"This year we added 140 students from the public schools, all coming with the behavioral and academic problems they inherited: name calling, taunting with labels and names, casual profanity," said Abuasi at Al Noor. "Here they have to watch the way they walk, watch the way they talk and watch what comes out of their mouths."
The formula of piety and penalties at schools like Al Noor seems to have whetted the appetite of Muslim parents. Al Noor opened only three years ago, with an initial enrollment of 350 students in six grades. It now has 600 children from prekindergarten through ninth grade and is raising money from Arabic and Muslim businesses in the area to build a $4 million addition to the school.
To meet expected demand in Manhattan, the Kuwaiti-financed Islamic Cultural Center of New York is building a $10 million, five-story school for 1,000 students, next to its complex at Third Avenue and 96th Street.
Al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, one of the busiest in the city, is soliciting donations to convert its top four floors into an Islamic junior high and high school for girls.
Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed, the imam at the mosque, said the need for a girls' school is particularly acute in his neighborhood of immigrants. Families from conservative Arab countries abhor the mixing of boys and girls in public schools, he said, and panic when their daughters become teen-agers.
"Many are thinking of sending them back home," Mohamed said. "We tell them that's not a solution. If you take them back, you have to go back with them."
Like new immigrants, more established Muslim families worry that their children may lose their religious identity or do poorly in public schools where their dress, holidays and religious taboos can make them curiosities.
Dawn El Mezyen, a convert to Islam, tried to help her son fit in at a conventional kindergarten, at one point acceding to his pleas to join in exchanging Valentine's Day cards with his schoolmates. It took hours, she said, to sort through piles of store-bought cards and toss those with romantic messages she believed were inappropriate for a Muslim boy to give.
Then she transferred him to the Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J. "I needed him to be around other Muslim kids," Mrs. El Mezyen said. "I wanted it to be a day to day thing. I didn't want him to be the sore thumb that sticks out. Here we all celebrate a holiday together."
At Al Iman School in Queens, robes are required and cosmetics, jewelry and flirting are forbidden.
Articles
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
