DURING a recent khutba, or Friday sermon, Imam Imad Enchassi spoke to a packed room of Muslims, most in Western attire, about the importance of being “proactive.” He cited the dictionary definition of the word before imploring the congregation to vote in the US state elections scheduled for the following Tuesday.
“I have in my pocket a strong tool given to me by Allah,” he said, pulling a small piece of paper from his breast pocket. “My voter registration card.”
The results of the mid-term elections bore fruit for the estimated 20,000 Muslims living in the centrally located Oklahoma state, commonly referred to as the “Heartland of America” and “the Buckle of the Bible Belt” because of its image as a bastion of traditional, suburban and rural Christian family values.
“Okla” means “people” and “humma” means “red” in the Choctaw Indian language; the state today has one of the largest populations of Native Americans in the country. The soil has a high amount of iron, giving the terrain a red-clay hue. It’s also a politically “red” state, home to some of the staunchest supporters of Republican neo-conservatism, evangelical Christianity, and President George W. Bush.
Despite Oklahoma’s political persuasion, the recent midterms proved to be a collective spanking of Republicans by the electorate. Oklahoma Democrats managed to maintain and take considerable ground. Democratic incumbent Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry, who recently sided with the state’s Muslim community over a local hijab issue (more on that later), retained his seat by a landslide in an election against a conservative former Republican congressman and a staunch Bush supporter.
“Six of the seven candidates we endorsed in the state won,” said Enchassi the week after his sermon. “And the first Muslim was elected to the US Congress,” he added, referring to 43-year-old Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) who told BBC in the weeks before his victory that he was running his campaign as an American, not a Muslim, “but I do hope that if we win, Inshallah, in November, that it will signal to Muslims that we should engage in the American political system.”
It seems that this is precisely what Heartland Muslims are up to these days.
Forty-two-year-old Enchassi is a stocky Palestinian with a shortly cropped beard. He speaks in English with a slight Chicano accent, probably because his wife (a Muslim convert) is half Mexican. Enchassi was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and came to America after Lebanese Maronite militia fighters with the support of Ariel Sharon massacred hundreds if not thousands (the number is disputed, Israel claims at least 700 while Palestinians say at least 3,000) of refugee noncombatants in September 1982.
Enchassi ended up in Ft. Worth, Texas where he began his college education. Later, he moved to Oklahoma City for a job at a restaurant chain and continued his education. Along the way the imam pursued Islamic studies and became active in the small but growing local community of Muslim immigrants, most of who came to Oklahoma as students.
“Let’s start back in 1995,” he said, recounting the conception of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, or ISGOC, whose mosque Enchassi leads. “We were a very small community, barely noticed. We were still in a small apartment performing Juma (Friday) prayers.”
Today that apartment has been replaced by a mosque and a community center located not far from Southern Nazarene University, one of the area’s Christian universities. Enchassi’s congregation is about 60 percent Asian, 25 percent Arab and the rest are white and African-American.
Enchassi’s office is adorned with bookshelves full of Arabic-language Islamic literature, pictures of a recently opened local Muslim cemetery, and three photos of the imam: At Haj, lunching with the governor, and shaking hands with the head of the state’s transportation department. Leaning against the wall of his office are blueprints for a locally funded $4.3-million complex, including a mosque, an accredited Islamic primary and a high school, and a gymnasium for boys and girls. Phase One of the project (it will be expanded later) will take up 39,000 square feet of a predominantly white and Christian suburban area of the city. The groundbreaking for the new facility, being paid for by local donations from the Muslim community, took place earlier this year.
“What makes the Muslims in the United States different is they’re all highly educated,” said Enchassi. “Whereas the Muslim immigrants in Europe or other places came as laborers. Most of the Muslims that come to the United States are students.”
The average Muslim adult in the US has 4.3 years of college education, according to the national Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.
“That’s almost a master’s degree for the average American Muslim,” said Enchassi, who has a Ph.D. in human resource management. “Muslims are the highest educated minority in the US. They’re among the wealthiest minorities in the US, too. With that demographic comes very effective strategies for overcoming challenges.”
LESSONS OF 4/19
Challenges indeed.
On the University of Oklahoma’s campus in the college town of Norman, about 50 kilometers from downtown Oklahoma City, one park bench is newer than the others in the area, an indication it was installed more recently. This was where the homemade explosives belt of Joel Henry Hinrichs, a 21-year-old white, non-Muslim engineering honor student, detonated on Oct. 1, 2005, destroying the original bench. The mayhem took place 500 feet away from a stadium filled with 84,000 sports fans enjoying a late-summer college football game. Realizing he wouldn’t get past the security check, Hinrichs wandered to this resting spot where either he took his own life or the explosives detonated by accident as he was plotting what to do next.
The media initially tried to link Hinrichs to the local mosque based on the basis that he had a roommate from Pakistan.
“When the news broke that somebody blew himself up and tried to get into the stadium, I recall sitting with my wife watching the news and saying to her: ‘They’re going to try to link this to Muslims somehow’,” said Enchassi. “Then they reported that he lived near the mosque in Norman. Well, as you might know, the mosque is near the campus. A lot of things are ‘near the mosque’ in Norman.”
Enchassi said that in the days following the explosion, he was visited by journalists trying to link Hinrichs to the Muslim community, not just in Norman, but also to the ISGOC’s mosque, over 50 kilometers away.
“The media so badly wanted link it to us,” he said. “What made the story die was Hinrich’s own father who came out and spoke about his son’s psychological problems and how he could not have, he would not have, been a Muslim.”
A decade earlier, minutes after the terrorist attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City’s small downtown district on April 19, 1995, the local media widely broadcasted an unsubstantiated and eventually discredited rumor that “three men of Middle Eastern descent” were being sought for the crime. It wasn’t until Timothy McVeigh was apprehended that same day that the media was forced to back down from its rumor-mongering.
“There is no such a thing as a friendly media,” said the imam. “It seems that—with Islamophobia, us being Muslim, the nation at war overseas—bashing Islam or Muslims is sellable. It seems there is a thirst to hear about this new invented enemy, like the Communists or the Japanese—except now it happens to be a religion.”
Enchassi says that reporters rarely show up at the ISGOC for stories unless they are investigating “the Muslim connection” to crimes like the 4/19 bombing, or the Hinrichs suicide.
“I always finish my talks with the reporters by saying ‘until next time, until another story breaks’,” he said with a smile. “I remember joking with a reporter once, telling him Muslims had nothing to do with the Asian tsunami or the flooding in New Orleans.”
When Frank Keating, the governor of the state at the time of the 4/19 terrorist attack, inaugurated a fundraising campaign for the families affected by the bombing, the first check received by the campaign was from the ISGOC. It may have been a politically based decision, but it was also a message to the community. Enchassi insists that the non-Muslim community is not the root of the problem.
“One day (after the 9/11 attacks) I recall very vividly coming for fajr (dawn) prayer in the morning and there was what looked like an aluminum box in front of the building. I was scared—I thought somebody left a bomb. But as I approached the building, I realized it was a bouquet of flowers, compassionate letters, and chocolate,” he said. “People left things at the door saying ‘we’re sorry you’re going through this, we know your faith does not teach violence’, and of course the news started to spread. People from different churches and organizations offered to come and secure the mosque. They would pick up groceries for the women who were scared to go shopping. I have to be fair and say this was a really positive community thing.”
CHECKING STATE AUTHORITY
“On the other hand,” he continued. “The federal authorities came down with an iron fist. They would just show up at people’s work flashing badges. Putting Muslim employees under the spotlight at their job—some lost their jobs because of that.”
Enchassi says that, with a few exceptions, violent crimes are virtually non-existent in Oklahoma.
“As far as anything deeply violent, no. After September the 11th we had a student who was beat up in Broken Arrow, a town outside of Tulsa,” he said. “But really, as far as violent? No, not in Oklahoma. In other parts of the world, yes. Here we deal mainly with issues of job discrimination . . . we agreed that the FBI’s job is to collect information, to interview as many people as possible. But the techniques that they were using were not cool.”
The FBI’s interviewing technique lacked any consideration for the suspect’s situation. For example, investigations were showing up to speak to, say, a dishwasher at a restaurant; they would show up at the front of the establishment, flash their badges, and ask to speak to the suspect.
“And if you’re the manager of this restaurant and the FBI wants to talk to your dishwasher, you’re saying to yourself, ‘Oh my God, Mohammed is a terrorist!’” said Enchassi. “Otherwise, they’re thinking, why would the FBI come and see him? Some people lost their jobs over these interviews, including doctors and students.”
So the ISGOC and CAIR approached the FBI and asked them to explain how they determined who would be interviewed.
“The FBI explained to us that sometimes all they had was a name,” said the imam. “They didn’t seem to recognize that ‘Mohammed Ali’ is a very common name. They had nothing else. No social security number, no mother’s name, no father’s name. Nothing.”
Sometimes authorities would visit suspects at home, something Enchassi said he addressed with feds.
“We explained to the FBI, among other things that most of these immigrants come from systems where if authorities show up at the door at 6 o’clock in the morning that means trouble, that somebody will disappear or be killed,” said Enchassi. “The FBI had a lot of learning to do and we had a lot to teach them.”
And it seems, according to the imam, that the federal authorities were willing to listen.
“The FBI agreed to some points, such as if they want to speak to somebody — considering that this person is not a highly suspect person — they would call them and give them a choice, ask them to meet someplace outside of work,” he said. “They agree that if they showed up at a person’s place of employment, they wouldn’t identify themselves as FBI but simply say ‘I’m John Smith and I would like to speak to Mohammed Ali’. For the most part they have honored this. There has been a couple of violations — it seemed like we had a problem was one specific agent, and the FBI eventually reprimanded him — and now he hates our guts.”
Oklahoma has also been involved in the debate swirling around a Muslim woman’s “pro-choice” views over what to wear.
In 2003, Nashalla Hern, an 11-year-old student in the small eastern Oklahoma town of Muskogee, was suspended from school for wearing her hijab on the basis that it violated the schools dress code. The news was reportedly nationwide. But after approaching the local school board, the imam says officials backed down.
“There is a saying in Arabic that says ‘the truth has to be said’. There are Muslim countries that are banning the headscarf — Tunisia and Turkey, for example,” said Enchassi. “Here they would not dare do that. They would not even attempt it, because they know that eleven million Muslims in the United States very deeply adhere to the teachings of Islam.”
A few months before the Muskogee incident, the Oklahoma Department of Transportation suddenly began asking Muslim women to remove their headscarves (not to be confused with the face-covering niqab) for their identification cards the ISGOC and CAIR went into action.
“We went to try to speak to them sensibly, telling them that it has been allowed for women to wear hijab for years,” said Enchassi. “State authorities put their foot down and said ‘no’, so we went to Plan B, which included an email campaigns, a permit to demonstrate, and this got the attention of the state authorities that said they would work on the issue. We met with them and they changed the law within 30 days.”
The small Muslim minority in one of America’s Christian conservative bastions seems to asserting its rights in big ways. The arrangement made with the FBI; the victory of the hijab in school and on state photo identification cards; the new mosque; progressive Islamic education, including physical education for girls; the political victories; and the two-way community outreach efforts are clear examples of how Heartland Muslims are integrating into American society while still retaining their cultural autonomy and religious freedoms unavailable in many countries.
There are many challenges for Muslims in America, but some of them have exhibited that the best way to defend and assert human and civil rights is by literate and peaceful “proactivism”.
“Freedom of speech is guaranteed under Islamic law, too,” said Enchassi. “I would like to think the bridges we have built since 1995, and the relationships we have put forth with the politicians and the elected officials, have helped tremendously.”
