WASHINGTON, 31 December 2006 — This weekend, American Muslims mark the end of the yearly pilgrimage to Makkah, or Haj, with communal prayers and celebrations at locations around the country. It is estimated that around 17,000 American Muslims made their Haj this year.
Given 2,000 years of religious conflict, and current events, it’s easy to forget that Christians, Muslims and Jews come from the same biblical stock. As thousands of American Muslims prepare for one of the holiest days on the Islamic calendar, many would like their American neighbors to remember their religious linkage.
“We all follow the same Abrahamic faith and we come from the same Abrahamic family,” said Imam Ahuhena Saifulislam, the Muslim chaplain at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia.
Throughout the US, local religious leaders of other faiths, and the curious, have been invited to join the observance. “As Americans, we say, `One nation under God.’ I want to prove that through this ceremony. We need to look at the commonalities that exist between us,” he said. “People often see something very foreign in Muslims.”
The holiday commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael (the Biblical story for Jews and Christians has Isaac on the altar) before God intervened and provided a sacrificial ram instead.
As American Muslims gathered over the weekend to feast, pray and celebrate their unity, many Muslim community leaders say they have held interfaith workshops and invited local non-Muslim leaders to Eid observances to help bridge the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Meanwhile, thousands of Muslims in the Orlando, Florida area plan to gather on the soccer fields at the Central Florida Fairgrounds for one of the biggest holidays on the Islamic calendar.
Organizers describe the scene in past years as a mini-United Nations, with Muslims of various heritages — North African, Pakistani, Eastern European, Latin American and West Indian — wearing traditional clothes and holding plates of national dishes.
“It is a time to come together,” Imam Muhammad Musri, president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, told reporters. “People feel they can connect and celebrate together.”
While the public glare on Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks has faded somewhat, many American Muslims say they still face prejudice. “I still have women who come and talk to me about hijab (head scarf) issues, people who feel rejected by the general public and are looked upon with scorn,” Musri told reporters. “It’s sad to think you still have Muslims who feel America doesn’t want them, and Americans who feel no Muslim is pro-America.”
The Sept. 11 attacks also caused divisions within the Muslim community.
Mohamed and Mahmood Azhar, secretary of the Muslim Community of Palm Beach County in Florida, told local reporters that rifts exist among non-Arab Muslims from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan and Arab Muslims from the Middle East.
The tensions emerged after the terrorist attacks, when non-Arab Muslims sought to distance themselves from American stereotypes of Arab Muslims.
“We have to stand up beyond our ethnicities. This is a big challenge,” said Azhar, who has worked with other Muslim leaders to agree on a common date for the holiday for all Florida Muslims.
Islamic Training for Employees
Significantly, there are signs that federal authorities are making efforts to inform their employees about Islam. One month after the removal of six imams from a US Airways flight spurred accusations of harassment, federal government officials says they have given airport security trainers cultural awareness training about the Islamic pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.
“The cultural awareness training involved reminders about how to screen people with head coverings, policies regarding transport of holy water and the proper respect to show when handling a Qur’an,” said Amy Kudwa, a Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman.
Muslim leaders lauded the training of the nation’s 45,000 screeners as a positive first step, but said that much more was needed to protect American Muslim travelers from profiling and what they called inappropriate interrogations.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based advocacy group, said he didn’t expect the training to be a cure-all but he likened it to “chicken soup”: “It can’t hurt to have people better educated about Muslims and Islamic traditions,” he said.
