Science Talk

Ramabriga · Guest

Sunday June 29, 2008
Being Muslim in America
WIDE ANGLE
By HUZIR SULAIMAN

Muslims in the United States find that hope lies not in assimilating or shedding their
identities but in winning over the hearts and minds of their fellow Americans.

MUBARAKAH Ibrahim is an American woman living in the town of New Haven, Connecticut, where she
works as a fitness instructor and personal trainer. Having appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show,
she is also something of a celebrity.

She is also a second-generation Muslim. Of African-American descent, her parents both converted
to Islam when they were very young – her father when he was 16, and her mother at the age 25.

Her family are all practising orthodox Sunni Muslims. Her husband is in the New Haven police,
and her children attend the local schools.

I met Mubarakah last week when I joined her and two other speakers in a panel discussion
entitled Muslim Identity: the Personal vs the Political jointly organised by the New Haven
International Festival of Arts and Ideas and the Yale World Fellows Program.

I was particularly intrigued by Mubarakah’s stories as they provided an interesting insight
into the everyday situation of American Muslims.

As a woman who wears the hijab, and carries out her work as a fitness trainer – including
running on the shore – clad in such modest attire, she certainly stands out in the local community.

But her exercise regimes and her writing on weight-loss and fitness have found clients and
readers across all faiths.

As she said, “No matter where women worship, they all have the same question: ‘How do I get rid
of cellulite?’”

There are non-Muslim women who appreciate her conservative attire: “I find I have a lot of
Orthodox Jewish women clients, and conservative Christians, because they too share similar
ideas of modesty.”

These traditional communities are also more comfortable with the idea of an all-female exercise
class.

Nonetheless, she sometimes encounters a sort of polite bewilderment that she could be an
American and a Muslim at the same time, as though Islam were the religion of foreigners, or
recent immigrants at best.

“People will ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ and I’ll say, ‘I’m from here’, and they’ll say,
‘Where are you really from? Where are your grandparents from?’

“Well, I tell them my grandfather was in the Army in the Second World War, and he fought on the
beaches of Normandy.”

She spoke of how Muslims in the United States refer to the generation of children who were 10
or 11 years old at the time of the September 2001 terrorist attacks as the “9/11 generation”.

In the seven years since the attacks, those children have had to come of age in an environment
where their identity as Muslims is very much in focus. The mood in schools changed.

“Before 9/11, you were the strange Muslim kid, sitting in the corner, all covered up. After
9/11, you were the strange Muslim kid, sitting in the corner, all covered up, who might blow
you up.”

Muslims school kids went from being outside the mainstream in a relatively innocuous way –
alongside all the other geeks, nerds, Goths, and other teen subcultures – to being looked upon
with outright suspicion.

“Being Muslim places extra demands on you as a parent. Normally, you don’t have to have
political conversations with your nine-year-old. Now, you do,” she said.

“Leading up to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I had a series of conversations with my
son, telling them what was the real Muslim teaching on terrorism: that if you kill one innocent
person, it is the same as if you had killed all of humanity.”

“And sure enough, at school, when they were discussing the 9/11 attacks on the anniversary, the
teacher turned to my son and said, ‘As a Muslim, how do you feel about 9/11?”

“I was so proud of him that he was able to give an answer: we believe that if you kill one
innocent person, you will answer for it in the hereafter, as though you had killed everyone
from Adam to the last person born. I was so proud of him.”

After hearing Mubarakah and others, it seemed to me that even though there is still an enormous
amount of Islamophobic rhetoric coming out of the right-wing media in America, there are also
great efforts being made to counter it, not just by Muslims themselves, but by other Americans
who still want to think of their country as accepting, tolerant, diverse, and just.

The media is being deployed with increasing effectiveness: there is a funny and ultimately very
moving music video on YouTube entitled A Land Called Paradise, which features diverse American
Muslims answering the question “What would you like to tell people?”

The soundtrack is a song by Kareem Salama, a Muslim country and western singer from Oklahoma.

Muslims in the United States, in the face of suspicion and prejudice, are now far more united,
Mubarakah told me.

Now, one can really begin to speak of a Muslim community, whereas before 9/11 American Muslims
tended to engage only with their own ethnic group: some mosques were Arab, some Pakistani, and
so on.

And that unity is beginning to pay dividends in the form of recognition and acceptance of
Muslim religious practices.

Mubarakah said, “During Ramadan, I explained to the school that my son was fasting, and
wouldn’t be eating his lunch. They were very understanding.

“One day, he was sick, and he missed school, and the next day he went back, but he was still
not fully recovered – and of course you don’t fast when you’re sick. But when he went to eat
lunch, the teacher spotted him and stopped him! They thought he was being naughty!”

“They called me and said, ‘Is he allowed to eat?’ I told him them it’s fine, that he doesn’t
have to fast today. But they wanted to check!”

She laughed. “In the old days, nobody would have noticed. Nowadays, as my son said, ‘They
grabbed my sandwich!’”

It’s stories like Mubarakah’s that suggest that hope for the Muslim community in America lies
not in assimilating or shedding their identities, but in slowly and patiently garnering the
understanding and support of their fellow Americans, so that they can be Muslims in their own
way, on their own terms.

Huzir Sulaiman writes for theatre, film, television, and newspapers.

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2008/6/29/lifefocus/21678970&sec=lifefocus
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

Duncan Patton · Guest

On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:01:25 -0500
Ramabriga <Ramabriga@gmail.com> wrote:

Guest · Sunday June 29, 2008 Being Muslim in <SMAK>!

"Ramabriga" <Ramabriga@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:afc11$486876b5$1824@news.teranews.com...

Guest · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 11:01 am Post subject: Re: Being Muslim in America

"Duncan Patton" <campbell@neotext.ca> wrote in message
news:20080630021351.22284c18.campbell@neotext.ca...

Duncan Patton · Guest

On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:21:03 +1000
<tHe_PC_JeLLy BeAn!!> wrote:

Patriot Games · Guest

On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:01:25 -0500, Ramabriga <Ramabriga@gmail.com>
wrote:

Michael Laudahn eOppositi · Guest

"Patriot Games" <Patriot@America.Com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:4vph64hvh7qsl1es00siot0b06bv7ti3tp@4ax.com...

Patriot Games · Guest

On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:04:34 +0200, "Michael Laudahn eOpposition"
<nuke.islamistan@your.earliest.convenience> wrote:

Guest · Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 7:57 am Post subject: Re: Being Muslim in America

"Duncan Patton" <campbell@neotext.ca> wrote in message
news:20080630054851.de19eafd.campbell@neotext.ca...