Join us to “Make a World of Difference”

Greetings of peace!

Apologies for the resend of the last article.  PreciousSpeaks.Com is currently being updated and the media distribution system erroneously resent the earlier post.

Many of you who subscribe to PreciousSpeaks.com are actively engaged in the interfaith movement and share a passion for working toward the betterment of humanity and toward solutions to our most pressing challenges.  Accordingly, I would like to invite you all to direct some of that passion toward getting involved with the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions  as a participant or program presenter. The 2009 theme is “Make a World of Difference:  Hearing each other, Healing the earth.”  Major sub-themes will include the environment, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, interreligious dialogue, poverty, peace building, securing food and water, and social cohesion—all issues, I believe, of immense concern to you.

I am currently working as a Program Associate with the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions to help plan the 2009 Parliament and would like to personally let you know that your participation and presence at this world’s largest interfaith gathering is most welcome! It is a very prestigious and well received effort toward peace and understanding, which has included such luminaries as Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama in the past–to name a few.

The Council holds a Parliament every five years in a different city.  This year the Parliament will be in Melbourne, Australia from December 3-9, 2009. To submit a program proposal, a 200-word description is needed and submitting online is easy. Program format options include lectures, seminars, panel discussions, academic papers, artistic performances, religious or spiritual observances, training sessions, interactive workshops, films and more. The deadline for proposal submission and for early bird registration is February 28, 2009.

It is the powerful dynamic of diverse participants coming together from all over the world that makes the Parliament a unique and transformative event. We encourage you to join us. Your contributions, whether as a presenter or a participant, will help us make a difference. It is our belief that there can be no peace in the world until there is peace among the religions. The eyes of the world will be on Melbourne in 2009 for this Parliament of the World’s Religions, at a time when our task—and the participation of extraordinary people like yourself—has never been more relevant and significant.

We hope you will take advantage of the “early bird” reduced rates; in addition, registering at this time gives significant savings due to the low Australian dollar.

I would very much like to learn about your current work, and sincerely hope you will join us in Melbourne. Please email me if I can be of further assistance.

In Peace,

Precious Rasheeda Muhammad

–
Precious Rasheeda Muhammad
Program Associate
Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions
precious@parliamentofreligions.org
www.parliamentofreligions.org

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Islam in America Vignettes:  

1893 New York City Muezzin

By Precious Rasheeda Muhammad

August 31, 2007 | On December 10, 1893 at 11AM, the Muslim call to prayer (adhan), called five times a day throughout the world wherever praying Muslims are found, could be heard three stories above New York City’s famed Union Square. This was the same call, which, by the appointment of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), had been first called and perfected centuries before by Bilal the Abyssinian ex-slave and reportedly seventh person to embrace Islam. The “melodious” call, carefully documented in a 200-plus word New York Times article published December 11, 1893, came from the third-story window of the Union Square Bank building at 8 Union Square East. This building faced Union Square where, among many other remarkable events, 250,000 people once rallied for the North at the start of the Civil War (1861); where Emma Goldman, the anarchist activist against poverty, injustice, and oppression, once told a crowd of 3000 unemployed, “Go into the streets where the rich dwell. Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.” (1893); and where, in the agonizing weeks immediately following September 11, people from all walks of life gathered to reflect, mourn, and pray for peace (2001). Appropriately then, it would be in such a place of historic precedence, with regard to collective action, that one of the earliest documented Islamic calls to congregational prayer in the history of the United States would take place.

John Lant, the muezzin (one who calls the adhan), was affiliated with the Islamic outreach programs of the nineteenth century statesman Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb, the first known white American convert to Islam. In the Timesarticle, Lant is described as “…like Muhammed [Mohammed] Alexander Webb…a devout follower of Islam.” At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions hosted in Chicago, today “recognized as the occasion of the birth of formal interreligious dialogue worldwide,” Webb was the main representative for Islam. He gave two lectures, one titled “The Spirit of Islam” and the other “The Influence of Islam on Social Conditions.” Muslims passing through New York City from the Chicago World’s Fair, which the World’s Parliament of Religions intentionally ran somewhat parallel with to maximize the number of participants from around the world, were also present that December morning. Congregational prayer followed the adhan. The inaugural meeting of the Society for the Study of Islam—likely one of the several study groups Webb established in the United States—ensued with a key address by Emin L. Nabakoff, another Muslim affiliated with Webb who later became his successor. The congregation ended with a discussion on “Islam in America.”

Whether awe-inspiring or ire-inspiring, several adhans, and the history behind them, have caught the attention of the American public for some time now and have been documented in diverse ways from oral history to a complete media circus such as in the following stories.

There is the adhan that is called once a day for a week from the steps of Widener Library—the world’s largest academic library and also home to one of the world’s rare Gutenberg Bibles. A member of Harvard Islamic Society calls this adhan during their yearly Islam Awareness Week. A Harvard professor once shared with the author of today’s article how she was sitting in her office when the adhan was called and the sound resonated so sonorously throughout Harvard Yard that it seemed the birds even stood still.

There is the two-minute adhan broadcast over loudspeakers requested by the Bangladeshi Al-Islah Mosque—in the once majority Polish and Roman Catholic city of Hamtramck, Michigan—that made international news, set off a national debate, and even ignited protests from, among many others, the National Alliance, a white nationalist and white separatist organization. In May 2004, Al-Islah began broadcasting the adhan daily after an unanimous vote from the City Council and a majority vote from residents on an amendment to Hamtramck’s noise ordinance, which would “permit ‘call to prayer,’ ‘church bells’ and other reasonable means of announcing religious meetings to be amplified between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. for a duration not to exceed 5 minutes.”

And then there is the goose-bump inducing adhan at the beginning of the Emmy-Award nominated ESPN short feature on the nearly undefeated Lady Caliphs basketball team of W.D. Mohammed High School in Atlanta, Georgia. As the call to prayer is heard, a resonant voice over announces, “…it’s a call to prayer that starts in Mecca, half a world a way, but is answered here, in a gym near downtown Atlanta, by a team of young women and their coach.” The clip goes on to show how these young African American Muslim girls played on to victory despite the constant taunting and hatred they endured because of their religious beliefs and modest uniforms, which included long sweatpants and headscarves.

These three represent only a handful of the adhans that have made it into the American public square and historical record. But the 1893 Union Square Bank building adhan is possibly the most significant as it is likely one of the earliest, and one of the most detailed, documented occurrences of the adhan in the history of the United States. It was located in the city know today as “the capital of the world” and was documented in the newspaper known as much for its slogan “All the News That’s Fit To Print” as it is for the idea that it is “the nation’s newspaper of record.” Moreover, there were Muslims present who were either from other parts of the country or the world making it more of a national or international event. Perhaps most notably, it was affiliated with supporters of Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb who was identified in the August 6, 1893 New York Times as “the first American to take interest in Mohammedanism [Islam] and introduce it into this country” and in the September 20, 1893 Chicago Daily as “the head of the Mohammedan or Islamic religion in this country.” Webb started the earliest documented mosque in U.S. history (in the Moslem World Building, 1893), the earliest known Islamic institution in New York (the American Moslem Brotherhood, 1893), and the first Islamic publishing company in the United States (the Oriental Publishing Company, 1893).

While non-Muslim’s exposure to the Muslim call to prayer may sometimes be seen as an encroachment on American culture, as in Hamtramck, Michigan, it was not the case in New York City, 1893. In fact, the 1893 Times reporter found it surprising that “…cosmopolitan as the city is ” the “…call of the Muezzin” had only just happened “for the first time in New-York’s history.”

All Content Copyright © 2007-2009 Precious Rasheeda Muhammad

Islam in America Vignettes was published weekly in the Muslim Journal. This article appeared in the August 31, 2007 issue. Each week, Precious focused on a different person, place, event, idea, study, and so forth. After each article went to press it was posted on PreciousSpeaks.Com.

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Islam in America Vignettes:
To Tell the True Story of African American Muslims

By Precious Rasheeda Muhammad

August 3, 2007 | Desperate to tell the truth of their lives, some Africans, of Muslim heritage who were enslaved in America, found a way to document their history against all odds and in their own words. The Muslim scholar Lamine Kebe instructed his biographer in America to “write down what I tell you exactly as I say it …”(1835). Omar ibn Said identified the exact audience that he wanted to know his truth, “O ye people of North Carolina, O ye people of South Carolina, O all ye people of America …” he wrote in his Arabic autobiography (1831). And Abdul Rahman Ibrahima ibn Sori wrote several documents in Arabic and dictated to others clear accounts of his life. Now, 179 years after he was freed, his existing relatives in Africa and America continue to know him through his own words; and a documentary about his life is underway using many of these words. Indeed the African American Muslims of today will likely have to follow the example of their racial and religious forebears; that is, they must more actively participate in the documentation of their own community and family histories, as did their learned African predecessors like Omar, Lamine, and Abdul Rahman. One thing is clear, African American Muslims’ increasing frustration with the media, and academia’s tendency to examine Islam’s history in America primarily through the lens of the immigrant Muslim experience, will compel them to do no less.

The struggle of African Americans of diverse faith traditions to right the believed “incomplete or deformed truth” about their histories is centuries long. In “To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865, Dr. William L. Andrews examines the genesis and evolution of the African American autobiography and identifies the point in American literary history at which African Americans concluded that “no one could do justice to himself better than himself.” Andrews asserts, ”Whatever else it is, autobiography stems more often than not from a need to explain and justify the self.” African American Muslims have not had a greater need to explain who they are than now, at a time when, on the one hand they are responsible for most of the pioneering firsts in the Muslim American community overall that exemplifies Islam’s ability to co-exist with America; but, on the other hand, they are too often portrayed in studies and the media as the minority population in the Muslim American community with majority threat status and minimal significance.

At the May 22, 2007 press conference marking the release of The Pew Research Center study “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,” which was based on random interviews with 1, 050 Muslim Americans, African American Muslims were represented as only an estimated 20% of the overall Muslim population (other studies have put this number as high as 40%) but the most inclined toward extremism. The president of The Pew Research Center explained, “Only 36 percent of the African Americans had a high unfavorable view of al Qaeda” compared to “more than 60 percent among the rest of the Muslim public.” The study also professed that African Americans were “clearly the most disillusioned segment of the Muslim American population.” Analyses of these isolated aspects of the study, which was also published in Arabic, circulated on hundreds of websites and blogs around the globe including publications with significant readership such as the BBC and India’s National Newspaper The Hindu, which reaches four million plus readers.

This is the message distributed throughout the world about African American Muslims; unfortunately, the Pew study is only one of many examples. Another such example is the June 1, 2007 New York Times article titled “A Growing Demand for the Rare American Imam.” The title, and content, forwards the idea that it is rare to find a native-born American imam, leaving out the fact that there are plenty of native-born African American imams in the America, three of whom include Imam Makram El-Amin, the imam of the first Muslim congressman in United States history; Imam David Shaheed, one of the earliest Muslim judges in United States history; and Chaplain (Major) Abdul Rasheed Muhammad, the first Islamic Chaplain in the history of the United States Armed Forces—all three men are African American and examples of native-born imams. This begs the question, at a time when the United States is trying so hard to show that it is not against Islam, why are some of the most positive aspects of America’s Muslim heritage, which have taken place overwhelmingly in the African American community, not acknowledged more; and why are immigrant and other Muslims in America not doing more to highlight this as well? After all this is their history too.

Which begs the next question, in the New York Times article when Dr. Sherman Jackson, an African American Muslim and professor of Arabic and Islamic law at the University of Michigan, is quoted as saying, “Islam in America is trying to create a new cultural matrix that can survive in the broader context of America,” does he have in mind the examples of this happening within the African American community?

The following actual facts, in no way an exhaustive list, are quite telling of African Americans’ existence as practicing Muslims surviving in the broader context of America and working hard to make this country better.

In United States history, the first Muslim congressman (Keith Ellison); the first Muslim state representative, state senator, and longest, and at one point the highest, serving Muslim elected official (Larry Shaw); the first female Muslim state representative (Yaphett S. El-Amin); the first female Muslim Master in Chancery in the courts (Zakia Mahasa); the first Muslim judge (Adam A. Shakoor); the first Muslim military chaplain (Abdul Rasheed Muhammad); the first Muslim mayor (Charles Bilal); the first confirmed Muslim to appear on a U.S. postage stamp (Malcolm X); the first female founder of a Muslim Museum (Okolo Rashid, The International Museum of Muslim Cultures); the first founder of a traveling Muslim museum (Amir Muhammad, Collections and Stories of American Muslims); the first Muslim to give the invocation in the United States Senate (Imam W.D. Mohammed); the first Muslim American to found an international cultural and educational institution open, and of service, to all people (Muhammad Ali, The Muhammad Ali Center); the first nationally recognized all girls Muslim sports team and featured on ESPN (the Lady Caliphs basketball team of W.D. Mohammed High School); the first and largest Islamic School system in the United States history and open to children of all faiths (Clara Mohammed Schools); the first Islamic-based sorority and dedicated to sisterhood, scholarship, leadership, community service, and open to non-Muslims (Gamma Gamma Chi Sorority, Inc.); the first Muslim president of a non-Muslim academic college or university and a female (Dr. Althia F. Collins, 13th president of Bennett College); and the two first known Muslim Americans ever to receive the highest civilian awards in the country (the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Muhammad Ali; and the Congressional Gold Medal which was awarded as a group honor to the famed Tuskegee Airman, America’s first African American military airmen, of which Major George Shade, a Muslim, is one)—all these firsts in United States history were achieved by African American Muslims. Additionally, of the thousands of active duty Muslims serving in the U.S. military, the vast majority are African Americans. Furthermore, of the 100 influential signers to sign the historic Williamsburg Charter of 1988 (a reaffirmation and reappraisal of the First Amendment/First Freedom of the U.S. Constitution, the freedom of religion), the internationally respected African American Muslim leader Imam W.D. Mohammed was the only Muslim signer thus representing the entire American Muslim community. And history further illustrates that New Medinah, Mississippi, a “town” founded and run by African American Muslims since 1987, was given a symbolic key to the nearby city of Hattiesburg, MS in 1996 by the mayor for their positive community building efforts with people of all faiths.

In these examples alone, there is enough back-story to fill encyclopedias.

Americans in general, and Muslims in particular, must ask themselves how is it that so many community building accomplishments can be present in the African American Muslim community; yet most of all that is highlighted is negative like the Pew study’s indication that African Americans are lower in numbers, educational levels, and incomes but high in extremism. The African American Muslim story is America’s history. It belongs to all of us together. To neglect to tell the true story of Islam in America, inclusive of the pioneering contributions of African American Muslims and their ability to purposefully live Islam in the “broader context of America,” is a disservice to all Americans and a roadblock in our path, as a nation, to tolerance, fellowship and understanding.

All Content Copyright © 2007 Precious Rasheeda Muhammad

Islam in America Vignettes is published weekly in the Muslim Journal. This article appeared in the August 17, 2007 issue. Each week, Precious will focus on a different person, place, event, idea, study, and so forth. After each article has gone to print it will be posted on PreciousSpeaks.Com.

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