NEWS STORY: American Muslims urged to turn growth into political power

c. 1998 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ With Islam set to become the nation’s second largest religion early next century, community leaders are urging American Muslims to harness their growing influence through greater political involvement. Doing so could mean increased pressure on the U.S. government to alter its policy toward Israel and other international issues […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ With Islam set to become the nation’s second largest religion early next century, community leaders are urging American Muslims to harness their growing influence through greater political involvement.

Doing so could mean increased pressure on the U.S. government to alter its policy toward Israel and other international issues about which the community is generally united, Muslim leaders agree.


But because of their wide economic and social diversity, American Muslims are less united on domestic issues and any impact their greater political involvement might have in that realm is unclear.

Various American Muslim groups have launched isolated efforts to spur community political efforts in recent years.

The Washington-based American Muslim Council, for example, launched a limited national campaign seeking to register additional Muslim voters in time for the 1996 presidential election. In Berkeley, Calif., the American Muslim Alliance continues to encourage Muslims to run for political office.

However, a coordinated and sustained Muslim effort to register voters, educate them about the issues and unite them behind specific candidates has been lacking, according to Muslim leaders.

Abdurahman Alamoudi, president of the American Muslim Foundation, a Washington think tank, recently called for remedying that situation through the establishment of a national body to coordinate various Islamic-oriented political efforts.”Ours is the fastest-growing religion in America, and its ethnic and social composition becomes more diverse every year,”Alamoudi wrote recently in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.”As the challenges affecting us all become more complex, we must give priority to avoiding duplication, confusion, conflict and wasting important resources by working at cross-purposes.”Moreover, we must begin the process of establishing such a council quickly if we are at least to establish our presence at local levels in the 1998 election year and prepare to make an impact in the national elections of 2000.” By 2010, according to various estimates, the Muslim community, which now numbers about 5 million, is expected to surpass in size the 5.8 million-member American Jewish community, currently the nation’s largest non-Christian religious minority.

Almost half of the Muslim community consists of African-American converts to the faith. Immigrants from India and Pakistan, the Arab countries and other Middle Eastern nations account for most of the remainder of the community.

But a variety of obstacles must be overcome if American Muslims are to play a significant role in American politics, said speakers at a recent conference at Washington’s Georgetown University.


Some of the hurdles are self-imposed. Others are reactions to ongoing stereotyping and discrimination many Muslims say they regularly encounter.

Speaking at the Georgetown conference Friday (April 17), Mumtaz Ahmad, a political science professor at Virginia’s Hampton University, said immigrant Muslims, in particular, often remain aloof from American politics even after gaining economic security out of a belief that one day they will return to their native land.

Others _ having come from nations in which true participatory democracy does not exist _ view politics skeptically or believe that to get involved is invariably to be sullied in the process.”It’s a frozen sociology that must be overcome if we are to make progress here,”Ahmad said.

Mamoun Fandy, a Georgetown professor of Arab studies, blamed the”flow-back effect”for keeping some Muslims from getting politically involved.

The effect, he explained, results from seeing Muslims repeatedly portrayed in the media as terrorists and anti-American.”They get demoralized and become ghettoized,”Fandy said.”It moves the Muslim community away from becoming American.” Muslim women remain particularly distant from the American political process, added Sharifa Alkhateeb, a representative of the North American Council on Muslim Women. The situation exists, in large part, because tradition-minded Muslim men fear female participation in any activity that takes them outside the home, she maintained.”What can we achieve if half the Muslim population is kept from participating?”she said.

In 1996, American Muslim voters favored President Bill Clinton in his bid for a second White House term over Republican Bob Dole and independent candidate H. Ross Perot, various polls agreed.


One 1996 poll, conducted for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), found Muslims in support of prayer in public schools, against abortion, opposed to cutting welfare subsidies and in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy.

Despite those findings, however, Mohamed Nimer, CAIR’s research director, said”solid information”about Muslim voters remains scant.”Muslims in the United states are only now beginning to concern themselves with the political process,”he said.”That includes even discerning beyond the anecdotal what Muslims really want and believe politically.” Given the foundation building still required, Nimer concluded, it will be years before the American Muslim community becomes a political factor in U.S. national politics.”If anything happens, it will not happen overnight. There is much to be done,”he said.

DEA END RIFKIN

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