Influential American Muslims Temper Their Tone
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
ne is an African-American who guided his followers away from black nationalism toward mainstream Islam. Two are brothers from Egypt who settled in Los Angeles nearly 30 years ago. A fourth is a white convert, born in California, who bridges Eastern and Western intellectual currents.
They are among the most influential voices of Muslim America, a diverse and sometimes fractious community that was often openly critical of the United States. Now these same spiritual leaders are calling on their colleagues to tone down the incendiary anti-American messages that have long been a staple at some Muslim events. Some have gone so far as to retract their own hard words.
In the past it was common at lectures, Friday and holiday sermons, and at annual conferences of organizations like the Islamic Society of North America for a speaker to denounce the United States for a variety of perceived evils.
Their most frequent grievances were sexual promiscuity, movies and media perceived as anti-Muslim, racial prejudice and American foreign policy of supporting Israel, blockading Iraq and bolstering what they perceived as corrupt Middle Eastern regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
"Some people for example said that America is evil," said Dr. Hassan Hathout, who with his brother, Maher Hathout, founded the Islamic Center of Southern California, and now heads the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council, an alliance of four major groups. "We can say that American foreign policy is wrong, but America is not evil, and even when we say American foreign policy we should specify which issue. I think American foreign policy in Bosnia and Somalia was wonderful, but in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict it is perceived as biased and a double standard."
Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, spiritual leader at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Virginia, one of the nation's largest, which draws about 3,000 worshipers for communal prayers each Friday, said: "In the past we were oblivious. We didn't really care much because we never expected things to happen. Now I think things are different. What we might have tolerated in the past, we won't tolerate any more."
"There were some statements that were inflammatory, and were considered just talk, but now we realize that talk can be taken seriously and acted upon in a violent radical way," said Mr. Al-Awlaki, who at 30 is held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West: born in New Mexico to parents from Yemen, who studied Islam in Yemen and civil engineering at Colorado State University.
It is too early to say whether their message will be heeded, or whether it is mere posturing. But the call for soul-searching is no doubt being heard because of the sources. The most widely discussed self-criticism has come from Sheik Hamza Yusuf, the white convert in Hayward, Calif., whose video and audiotapes are best sellers on many Muslim Web sites. Educated in Mauritania, Morocco and Algeria, he has drawn crowds with erudite discourses on Islam, some laced with strong critiques of Western decadence, secularism and injustice. Two days before the Sept. 11 attacks, he gave a speech in Irvine, Calif., warning that America faced "a great, great tribulation."
In a telephone interview from London, he called his speech "tragic timing," and said he regretted having used language "that can be misinterpreted."
"I think Sept. 11 should be an overall paradigm shift for everybody," he said. "Too much is at stake, and we need to reassess how we've been speaking about conditions in the world, and developing a new language that doesn't compromise the core truths, but at the same time does not incite to more madness."
He said the intent of that speech, and others he has made, was to call on Westerners to "recognize that we do have moral responsibility and there are spiritual laws of cause and effect. If you are the cause of suffering of other people, then you too will suffer for that."
Sheik Hamza said he was working with the council of jurists in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, to release a fatwa, or legal opinion, saying, "Islamic law prohibits creating social disorder or disruption within a state, so all Muslims living in the United States or who have entered with visas are under contractual agreement with the U.S. government to obey the laws of the land."
There is a similar council of jurists in the United States, but its word does not necessarily hold sway. There is no unified Muslim leadership either in the United States or worldwide. In Islamic tradition, there is no pope or headquarters, no clergy and no ordination process. American Muslims come to prominence through their organizational skills, their intellectual or scholarly abilities, their power as preachers or their position as prayer leaders at large mosques.
Among the most prominent are black Americans like W. Deen Muhammad, the son of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, who has guided hundreds of thousands of Muslims away from his father's black nationalism and toward mainstream Islam; and Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a black mosque leader from Brooklyn who became the first Muslim to give the opening prayer in Congress, but has also been known to give an occasionally fiery anti-Western sermon.
W. Deen Muhammad's movement of African-American Muslims far overshadows, in numbers and in influence, Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, which is considered a heretical sect by most mainstream Muslims.
Assertive leadership has also come from Americans with roots in the Middle East, including the Hathout brothers, physicians who came from Egypt about 30 years ago and began building a center for a uniquely American Islam in Los Angeles; Sheik Jamal M. Said, a Palestinian with a large mosque on Chicago's South Side with a following among Palestinians all over the United States; and many mosque leaders who draw large numbers each week for Friday prayers and sermons, including Mr. Al-Awlaki, in Falls Church, Va., and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, spiritual leader of the Al- Farah mosque in Lower Manhattan and founder of the American Sufi Muslim Association.
There are also an increasing number of white American converts with national recognition, the most prominent being Sheik Hamza.
Part of the reason for the cacophony of messages is that Muslim leaders represent a multiethnic constituency. About 33 percent of Muslim Americans are of South Asian origin, 30 percent are African-Americans, 25 percent are Arabs, and the rest represent a variety of ethnic groups. There are about 1,200 mosques in the United States, an increase of 25 percent in the last seven years, according to a survey, "The Mosque in America: A National Portrait."
"When you're dealing with Islam, it's like dealing with Judaism," said John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. "You ask a religious question, and the answer is, Who's your rabbi? Who's your imam? It's both the strength and weakness of Islam. The strength is, you have a lot of diversity. The weakness is you've got competing religious leaders putting competing messages out there."
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