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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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From: salamsejahtera
Muslims in North America
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Groups Give U.S. Muslims a New Voice
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Four organizations step up efforts to overcome historic obstacles, scattered
constituencies.
By SOLOMON MOORE
TIMES STAFF WRITER
November 24 2001
Even before the second plane crashed on Sept. 11, Ibrahim Hooper of the
Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations was typing out a condemnation
of terrorism. By noon, it was ricocheting off faxes and computer screens worldwide.
In the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Maher Hathout and Salam
Al-Marayati offered the "Muslim point of view" on the Arab television network Al
Jazeera, CNN and Fox News.
A few blocks away, executives at the American Muslim Council called an ally, a GOP
stalwart with presidential access. A lot of innocent, hard-working American Muslims
could get hurt because of this incident, they told their intermediary. We need the
president to say something. Two days later, during a televised conference call with
New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki, President Bush did just
that: "We must be mindful that as we seek to win the war, that we treat Arab Americans
and Muslims with the respect they deserve," he said.
Those moments illustrated how a bevy of young American Muslim organizations have
suddenly risen in visibility. A decade ago many of those groups did not exist. Since
Sept. 11 they have mounted a coordinated campaign to contain an anti-Muslim backlash
and weigh in on U.S. decisions affecting the Muslim world. They are also telling a
fearful and suspicious American public who Muslims are, what they believe--and how
they distinguish themselves from madmen with box cutters.
Their evolution has been shaped by historic obstacles and the diasporic character of
their constituency. About a third of U.S. Muslims, whose numbers are variously
estimated at 1 million to 7 million, are African Americans. Many of the rest are
recent immigrants from nations as varied as Lebanon, Nigeria, Malaysia and Mauritania.
There are Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims. There are Sufi mystics, nonaffiliated
Muslims and secular Muslims--who drink, eat bacon and attend mosque only on holidays.
Many American Muslims emigrated from some of the world's most repressive nations. As a
result, they have traditionally been reluctant to vote, run for office or speak out in
their own defense. U.S. Muslim groups have recently faced those challenges by avoiding
fractious doctrinal disputes and focusing on political education and advocacy.
Groups Sprang Into Action Sept. 11
Following the lead of secular civil rights groups such as the National Assn. for the
Advancement of Colored People and the Anti-Defamation League, U.S. Muslim groups are
more likely to fax a news release than issue a fatwa (a religious edict). The new
breed of U.S. Muslim groups that surged into action Sept. 11 is ecumenical and
media-savvy. They endorse political candidates and lobby Congress on the treatment of
Muslims here and abroad. Verified membership numbers are hard to come by, but each of
the two largest groups--the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim American
Society--have drawn more than 25,000 people to their annual conferences.
"It's really a defining moment for our community," said Aly Abuzaakouk, president of
the American Muslim Council, which in recent weeks has held nonstop meetings with
officials from Congress, the State Department, the Department of Energy and other
agencies.
In a recent article in the Jerusalem Report, David Harris of the American Jewish
Council wrote, "the Arab and Muslim populations are growing, mainly through
immigration, along with their political savvy and self-confidence. Political
candidates come to their organizations' meetings; the media seek their communal views."
>From among about 20 national Muslim organizations, four groups have taken the lead:
* In the style of African American civil rights organizations, the American Muslim
Council lobbied for symbolic "firsts": The first Muslim prayer during a congressional
session. The first Muslim U.S. Army chaplain. The first Muslim holy day celebration at
the White House. The first U.S. stamp to commemorate the end of Ramadan, the Muslim
holy month of fasting.
* The American Muslim Alliance, led by UC Berkeley ethnic studies professor Agha
Saeed, is focused more narrowly on cultivating U.S. Muslim political candidates and
registering voters. Saeed envisioned what he calls "a demographic strategy for
Muslims." By 1996, 400 Muslim candidates--many of them trained by the alliance--ran
for everything from U.S. senator to school board. Ninety-two Muslims were elected.
That same year, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole came looking for an
American Muslim voting bloc. It was a mixed victory--Dole refused to meet publicly
with Muslim leaders, so the alliance turned him down. The aborted endorsement of Dole
made U.S. Muslims realize how important--and how poor--their public image was.
* The Council on American-Islamic Relations started sending out press kits with
vocabulary lists and usage guides. (Examples: Allah means God, not "a god." jihad
means struggle, not "holy war." "Moslems" prefer to be called "Muslims.") With 12
regional offices, the council's main strategy is to use public relations campaigns to
combat anti-Muslim discrimination in Hollywood and in the workplace.
The council's first major response came after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. In the time it took to discredit false
reports of "Middle Eastern suspects," there were a spate of hate crimes, including an
attack on a pregnant Middle Eastern woman. And an innocent Jordanian American was
arrested, named in news reports and photographed in handcuffs.
"We actually flew [Executive Director] Nihad Awad [from Washington] to the site to
coordinate the Muslim response there and meet with the media," said council co-founder
Hooper. Such a direct approach was unprecedented for the Muslim community, Hooper
said. A photograph of that scene shows Awad standing alone at the center of a thick
moat of reporters.
"Since then we developed the idea of a crisis team," Hooper said.
A Place to Seek Redress
The council also began publishing annual reports on anti-Muslim incidents--spurring
law enforcement agencies to be more vigilant in their protection of Muslims. In the
same way African Americans have historically called upon the NAACP, the council has
become one of the first places many Muslims turn when they believe their rights have
been violated. Since the terrorist attacks the group has recorded more than 1,000
reported anti-Muslim incidents.
* The Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council combines public relations with
lobbying, Muslim advocacy and interfaith efforts. The group often takes unconventional
stands, such as when it denounced an Iranian cleric's death edict against novelist
Salman Rushdie after he satirized Islam.
"It would have been hypocritical to claim our right to dissent on American policies,
but not allow anyone to dissent in our faith," said executive director Al-Marayati.
Like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Al-Marayati's organization publishes
op-ed articles and position papers and calls boycotts against offensive Hollywood
movies. It has supported President Bush's proposal to make it easier for faith-based
groups to receive federal funds for social programs.
Most recently, the group has organized Jewish-Christian-Muslim forums in Southern
California.
All this is a sharp contrast to an American faith community that was for most of its
history shrouded in obscurity and plagued by schism.
The Nation of Islam, founded July 4, 1930, by a mysterious man named W.D. Farrad, was
America's first lasting Muslim institution. In the 1960s, Elijah Muhammad codified
this quirky blend of black separatism, mythology and Islam and attracted a small
number of urban African Americans.
After Elijah Muhammad's death, his son, Warith Deen Muhammad, led disaffected Nation
of Islam members to a less politicized, more orthodox organization that later became
the Muslim American Society.
Meanwhile, immigrant Muslims who were enrolled at U.S. universities formed the Muslim
Student Assn. in 1963. It was a less-than-spontaneous process, historians say. The
group was heavily encouraged by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Morocco and other Muslim nations,
said Yvonne Haddad, an Islamic studies professor at Georgetown University. Also
playing a central role in the group's establishment was the Muslim Brotherhood, an
Egyptian fundamentalist movement that the State Department says was a founder of the
Muslim extremist group Hamas.
The split between black Muslim converts and immigrants remains to this day.
In Los Angeles, Najee Ali, the African American founder of Operation Islamic Hope,
recently complained in an open letter that black Muslims were being marginalized by
immigrant Muslims.
"With so much attention and discussions on Islam," Ali wrote, "it appears that we are
being intentionally neglected by the American media as well as by the leaders of the
immigrant Muslim population."
Ethnic Tensions Plague Groups
Immigrant Muslims have experienced plenty of conflict among themselves. In 1968, a
group of Urdu-speaking Indian and Pakistani Muslims formed the Islamic Circle of North
America--an association of professional and student groups and Islamic centers. The
Islamic Circle was partially funded by the fundamentalist Jamaat Islami of Pakistan.
About 10 years later, Middle Eastern and Arabic immigrants split off from the Muslim
Student Assn. to create a similar but ethnically distinct group: the Islamic Society
of North America.
These U.S. organizations showed that Muslims were here to stay. But their
self-segregation into black, Indo-Pakistani and Middle Eastern-Arab organizations
highlighted the ethnic tensions roiling the most diverse Muslim community outside of
Mecca.
"Take a country like Saudi Arabia," said Ali Asani, an Islamic Studies professor at
Harvard University. "The kind of Wahhabi Islam they practice there does not tolerate
any other kind, so people are not confronted with the issue of diversity and
pluralism--in fact, diversity is forbidden.
"In the United States, Muslims really have to come to terms with these issues."
The immigrant Muslim organizations managed a relatively broad but shallow unity among
Muslims of different sects and nationalities by focusing on social networking more
than theology.
That approach has drawn criticism among some Muslims. Cleric Sheik Hisham Kabbani of
the Washington-based Islamic Supreme Council of America recently complained that U.S.
Muslim leaders are "businesspeople, doctors and engineers. They have no credentials to
run Muslim affairs."
In many Muslim nations, leaders are trained for years, sometimes decades, in
state-endorsed theocratic institutions. The graduates of those schools form the
backbone of civil society. Such institutions do not exist in America and most U.S.
Muslim groups have, for the sake of interdenominational unity, attempted to avoid
clerical leadership.
Individual U.S. Muslims and congregations have filled that void of authority by
retaining strong bonds with various religious leaders in Muslim nations such as
Pakistan, Qatar and Iran.
Those links are strengthened from time to time by foreign contributions for new
mosques, schools and other U.S. Islamic institutions. Foreign money has even had an
impact on the Islamic Circle and Islamic Society, said John Esposito, a Middle Eastern
studies professor at Georgetown University.
"They were supported by funds from governments overseas," he said. "You could see that
leadership would shift depending on where the money was coming from."
W.D. Muhammad said his organization of American converts accepted Saudi funds until
foreign religious leaders tried to exert too much influence.
Such global pressures on the nascent U.S. Muslim groups slowed the "domestication of
Islam in America," said Sulayman Nyang, an Islamic history professor at Howard
University in Washington. The result was an insular Muslim community that was often at
odds with itself, out of step with the American mainstream and ill-prepared for a
series of embroilments between the U.S. and the Muslim world.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was heating up and the U.S. sided with Israel. After
the OPEC oil embargo of the mid-1970s, Hollywood began churning out images of fat
sheiks wearing sunglasses and riding in Rolls-Royces. U.S. investigators later
exploited those negative impressions when FBI agents posing as Arabs implicated
several congressmen in a bribery sting.
Hostage Crisis Led to Attacks in U.S.
The Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 sparked attacks on Middle Eastern immigrants and
Arab Americans across the country. And in 1985, a U.S. activist with the Anti-Arab
Discrimination Committee in Orange County was killed by a bomb. To the chagrin of
Muslims, the case was never solved.
Alarmed at their vulnerability and lack of a voice, Muslims in the 1990s formed
lobbying and public relations groups. Most of these groups raise money only on U.S.
soil, aware of how even a hint of foreign influence could sabotage their credibility.
Also key to many of the groups' efforts has been a virtually united front. Although
Muslim groups have disagreed from time to time--most recently 15 groups called for an
end to the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, while at least three supported the war--they
are agreed on an avowed goal to establish a "Judeo-Christian-Islamic" American society.
Some Jewish organizations worry that Muslims' newfound political voice will create
more pressure to reduce U.S. foreign aid to Israel and de-emphasize Israel's strategic
importance for the U.S. They criticize some of the American Muslim leaders for
refusing to denounce militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Both groups are
widely known for bombing Israeli civilians and soldiers in the name of Palestinian
liberation. Muslim leaders say their main focus has been on protecting the rights of
American Muslims.
Although Muslims cannot measure how much they have influenced government decisions,
Maher Hathout of the Muslim Public Affairs Council is confident that "our message is
getting through."
In the first of three meetings with Bush since the attacks, Muslim leaders asked the
president to provide humanitarian aid to Afghans and to get at the root causes of
anti-American sentiments.
Days later, Bush convinced Israel to remove its troops from Palestinian-controlled
territory on the West Bank. And U.S. planes peppered their bombing runs with
parachuted food provisions.
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