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Washington Post - September 12, 2004 Facing new realities as Muslim Americans By Caryle Murphy "We need to know the definition of terrorism and terrorists," one mosque member told the agents. Why, asked another, had the FBI raided a Muslim organization that had helped him go on a pilgrimage to Mecca? A third member of the congregation said the FBI's informants were unreliable. He ridiculed its agents for warning his friend, a taxi driver who works 16 hours a day, that he was "moving around too much."… At some mosques, the angry questioning might have been considered imprudent. But not at Dar Al Hijrah, whose leaders have been outspoken in criticizing U.S. law enforcement actions against Muslims and U.S. policies in the Middle East. Officials at Dar, one of the Washington area's oldest and largest mosques, know firsthand about U.S. government scrutiny. The FBI and the federal 9/11 commission concluded that two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers briefly worshiped at the mosque after one of them befriended its imam in San Diego. FBI officials have said they found no evidence that the imam, who has since resigned and left the country, had prior knowledge of the attacks, and the commission's report said it was unable to reach a conclusion about his relationship with the hijackers. Dar stands out among mosques in the Washington area for another reason. It is closely affiliated with the Muslim American Society, a 12-year-old organization committed to promoting Islam in the United States. Several of the group's founders had been active in the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement started in Egypt in the 1920s that advocates a purer, more restrictive form of Islam throughout the Middle East. Although the Brotherhood favors establishing Islamic law in predominantly Muslim countries, many of its members say they see no conflict between Islam and democracy. Some U.S. government officials say the Muslim Brotherhood has dangerous links to terrorism, while others argue that most of the movement is moderate and should be enlisted as an ally against Islamic radicalism. In many ways, Dar Al Hijrah illustrates the challenges of adapting a conservative, foreign-grown Islamic ideology to an American setting. The mosque's leaders said their main focus, especially in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, is not Middle Eastern politics but community involvement that will serve to educate non-Muslims in this country about the Islamic faith and demonstrate that U.S. Muslims embrace American values. "We are stepping up our civic participation and outreach efforts to make up for years of isolation that put us in vulnerable position: being a largely unknown community and therefore easy target of stereotyping," Souheil Ghannouchi, who is president of the Muslim American Society and serves on Dar's board of directors, wrote in a recent online chat. "Our main priority is to . . . develop viable models for American Muslim personality and for Islamic life in America." The mosque, which opened in 1991, has pursued American Muslims' interests by holding candidate nights with Northern Virginia politicians, offering tours for schoolchildren, engaging in interfaith discussions and sponsoring voter registration drives…. Hidden behind rows of tall evergreens on a street near Seven Corners, Dar has long been a magnet for recent Muslim immigrants. Hundreds of taxis, pickup trucks and economy sedans converge on the mosque on a typical Friday, and the worshipers are as likely to wear jeans and T-shirts, or the long smocks of their homelands, as business suits and ties…. About 60 percent of the worshipers are Arab, said mosque spokesman Johari Abdul-Malik, but an increasing percentage hail from such countries as Pakistan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Cambodia. The roots of Dar Al Hijrah, which means "Land of Migration," lie in a group of mostly Arab college students who in the early 1980s broke from the Islamic Center in Northwest Washington, a mosque run by embassies of Muslim countries. After worshiping in temporary sites, the fledgling congregation purchased the 3.4-acre Falls Church property just off Route 7 in 1983. Three years later, it began construction of the $5 million mosque, with financial help from the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi Embassy in Washington. The mosque's current revenue comes entirely from the congregation, Omeish said. Some Dar founders also were among the immigrant activists who started the Muslim American Society in 1992. Some had belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood in their native lands, where they often worked clandestinely against governments that had banned their movement. They faced an entirely different issue in the United States: how to retain their Islamic identity in a secular culture where they were a religious minority. The founding of the society reflected the facts that their goals had changed and that they no longer needed to operate secretly, said Mohamad Adam El Sheikh, 58, a Brotherhood member in Sudan who helped launch both the American group and Dar, where he is the imam. Those who founded the society felt that "we should cut relations with the [Brotherhood] abroad and regard ourselves as Americans. . . . We don't receive an order from any organization abroad, and [they] have no authority to tell us what to do," Sheikh said. The society, based in Falls Church, now has 50 chapters across the country, many of them affiliated with mosques. Among its objectives, according to its Web site, are "to present the message of Islam to Muslims and non-Muslims," to promote understanding between the two groups and to encourage Muslims to build "a virtuous and moral society." Society president Ghannouchi, the nephew of Rashid Ghannouchi, an Islamic scholar and activist known throughout the Middle East, is a native of Tunisia and has been in this country for almost 20 years. He declined several requests for an interview. Colleagues said he believes that Muslims in America should become active in their communities on local issues rather than be preoccupied with problems overseas. "Even though we refuse . . . to be treated as a security problem and we are opposed to the way our government is conducting foreign policy, especially the way the war on terrorism is being conducted, we still enjoy many rights that Muslim activists do not enjoy in most Muslim countries," Ghannouchi wrote in the recent online chat that appeared on the society's Web site. …… http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14497-2004Sep11?language=printer |