c. 1999 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ As American Muslims prepare to mark Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, what recent progress they have made in gaining increased public acceptance might well be described as a case of one step backward for every two taken forward.

On Capitol Hill, for example, weekly Muslim prayer services and forums to expose congressional staffers to Muslim viewpoints have become regular fare, and a bill has been introduced in Congress to issue a postage stamp commemorating Ramadan, which this year begins Dec. 9.

At the State Department, a Virginia travel industry executive was recently named ambassador to four small Pacific-island nations, making him the first Muslim to hold that rank. Elsewhere, the Paterson, N.J., school district said it will begin canceling classes on Islamic holidays to accommodate its growing Muslim population and courts across the nation have ruled in favor of Muslims in a number of workplace discrimination cases.

For Sulayman S. Nyang, a professor of African studies at Washington’s Howard University, these developments presage a bright future for Islam in America. Nyang’s optimism is so strong he believes the faith’s future in the United States could, qualitatively speaking, be even brighter than in many traditionally Muslim nations.”Islam in America now is safer than in its lands of origin,”said Nyang, one of the nation’s leading Muslim academic figures.”In America the cultural and economic systems are not threatened by religious expression the way they are in many Muslim nations where the impulse of the power structure is to control Islam and manipulate it for political use.”Here, Islam is free to be Islam.” Nyang is far from alone in his positive assessment.”The American Muslim community is more affluent and educated than anywhere else,”said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles.”That will lead to greater development of Islamic thought here to a degree that I think in the future the Muslims of America will be influencing the leaders of Muslim nations more than the other way around.” At the same time, recent events have shown that despite the optimism of Nyang, Al-Marayati and others, what Muslims view as negative stereotyping and anti-Islamic prejudice is by no means a thing of the past.”The future is bright, but not fully bright,”said Khaled Suffuri, executive director of the Islamic Institute, a Washington-based public policy organization.

Ironically, optimist Al-Marayati figured prominently in one of the most highly publicized incidents most often mentioned by Muslims who note how far they still must go before their full public acceptance is achieved.

Al-Marayati, a longtime activist with White House connections, was dropped from the National Commission on Terrorism earlier this year after some Jewish groups said he was soft on Middle East terrorism, which he strongly denied.

His ouster produced a good deal of Muslim anguish, and anger, over what the community views as one of its most urgent problems _ labeling as terrorist sympathizers all Muslims who so much as question U.S. Middle East policy.

More recently, a symbolic resolution condemning anti-Muslim discrimination and prejudice and acknowledging the contributions to the nation made by American Muslims stalled in the House Judiciary Committee, which refused to send it to the full House of Representatives for a vote. Muslim activists in Washington and congressional sources said the resolution was pulled back following pressure from unnamed Christian and Jewish groups.

Muslims also point to the speculation surrounding EgyptAir Flight 990, in which a common Islamic religious phrase uttered by a Muslim reserve pilot just prior to the crash prompted widespread speculation he had purposely crashed the airliner _ despite the absence of definitive corroborating evidence. The speculation, say Muslims, stemmed from the widespread _ and they say wildly inaccurate _ belief that Islam is an inherently violent faith.

Those events, said Riffat Hassan, a professor of religion at the University of Louisville, show that whatever gains Muslims have achieved in recent years are limited.”Based on my experience in the classroom and at many universities where I speak, I do not share the optimism,”she said.”There is still a tremendous amount of stereotyping going on. A lot of it has to do with talk about a clash of cultures between Islam and the Christian world and misunderstanding about women in Islam.”If anything, I think there has been some backsliding in recent years.” Azizah al-Hibri, who teaches at the University of Richmond Law School, also sounded a cautionary note. Much of the gains achieved by Muslims stem more from the nation’s broad acceptance of multiculturalism than from acceptance of Muslims and Islam per se, she said.”People are listening to Muslims and they want us to be represented and to hear our voice, but that is a far, far cry from saying we have no problems left,”said al-Hibri.

The subjective opinions of individual Muslim academics and activists divide over whether the glass is half empty or half full. However, a three-year, $1.25 million study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts is under way to produce a more definitive picture of the Muslim community’s role and acceptance in American public life. How Islam has been impacted by its encounter with American culture will also be studied.

Housed at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in Washington, the study is one of seven Pew is funding as part of its Religious Communities and the American Public Square project.

Nyang and Zahid H. Bukhari, former secretary general of the Islamic Circle of North America, are the principal researchers on the survey, which will home in on the estimated 6 million-member American Muslim community to an unprecedented degree.

The mere fact that Islam has been included in the project _ which will also look at how the evangelical and mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Latino and Afro-American communities fare in public life _ is, in Nyang’s view, indicative of Islam’s newfound stature.”It has a legitimizing effect for the Muslim community,”he said.

In many ways, added Bukhari, the Muslim experience in America is little different from that of earlier immigrant groups who also faced prejudice and stereotyping. But traits within the Muslim community have impacted the rate of acceptance, in some cases slowing the process.

An example is the community’s internal debate between traditionalists and progressives over whether Islamic religious law even allows Muslims to become involved politically in a non-Islamic society.

Some argue that involvement in a non-Islamic political system inevitably taints both Islam and Muslims. Others worry that too much involvement will lead to assimilation and a loss of Muslim identity, particularly among the American-born young.

The more socially liberal argue that only through political and other involvements in American public life will Muslims be able to progress toward full acceptance. Dominating the debate within the community, those arguing for greater involvement have taken a number of steps to speed the acceptance process.

One effort is an unprecedented voter registration effort eight major Muslim and Arab-American groups have announced in advance of next year’s presidential election.

Another is a series of workshops the Washington-based Council on America-Islamic Relations has conducted to teach Muslims how to work with the media.”I always encourage Muslims to enter three fields: journalism, law and political science,”said Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director.”The community has to put itself on the social and political map to move in the right direction.” Added the Islamic Institute’s Suffuri:”In 1990 when I went to Capitol Hill, not one staffer identified themselves as a Muslim. Today, I know of at least 18. The process is open to us if we do our part.”

DEA END RIFKIN