ISNA HEAD SAYYID SYEED SPREADS TAQYYIA AT CHAUTAUQUA: MARY DESMOND SEE NOTE PLEASE
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WHAT IS GOING ON AT THE PRESTIGIOUS INSTITUTION….HAVE THEY BECOME AN ISLAMIC PUBLIC RELATIONS AGENCY? SMOOTH TALK BELIES AN ORGANIZATION THAT PROMOTES SHARIA….IF YOU CHOOSE SEND A RESPONSE TO THE EDITOR…..RSK
A few years ago, Sayyid M. Syeed, the national director of the Islamic Society of North America, was on his way to an interfaith meeting in Michigan during the holy month of Ramadan. While on the plane, Syeed began to consider how uncomfortable he would make his non-Muslim colleagues feel if he didn’t eat or drink with them. He then recalled that in the Quran, it says that a person may be exempt from fasting if they are traveling.
“I said to myself, I don’t have to fast, because I’m going from Washington to Michigan, and I will sit there, and I will also drink and eat, because Quran tells me,” he said.
When he arrived at the meeting, he had almost forgotten about his decision to partake in the meal.
“I didn’t see any water there, no coffee, no tea and even no lunch, then I realized what was happening,” Syeed said. “They were fasting in solidarity with me; and I didn’t have to fast.”
Syeed then decided that he would fast, in solidarity with the Christian leaders sitting around him.
“This is the kind of faith environment that we are building in America,” Syeed said.
On Thursday, Syeed continued the Week Seven Interfaith Lecture theme, “Creating Cultures of Honor and Integrity,” as he discussed the history, growth and optimism of an expanding Islamic community in North America. His lecture was titled “Islamic Experience in a Pluralist Democracy: Building a New Muslim Identity and Institutions in America.”
The Prophet Muhammad was born 570 years after Jesus Christ. He did not have his first transcendental experience with God until he was 40. After his first experience, when God told him he was a prophet who was to go teach monotheism in Mecca, he approached his wife. She advised that he visit her cousin, the one Christian living in Mecca at that time.
Muhammad’s wife’s cousin told Muhammad that what he was experiencing were messages from God; he also warned him that he and his followers would be persecuted for spreading a message that was against tribalism, exploitation of man, and idolatry, Syeed said. Muhammad and his followers were forced to flee to Medina.
“Those who followed him believed in the oneness of God, the line of the prophets, the immaculate birth of Christ, Moses, Abraham,” Syeed said. “Those who followed him, they were subjected to torture, they were beaten, and many of them would tolerate this because it was their belief. That is what integrity is — you stand up for your beliefs.”
After a while, the suffering became too much for some of Muhammad’s followers, and they asked him if there was a place they could go to seek refuge. He advised them to go to Abyssinia, where a there was a Christian ruler. When they arrived, the king welcomed them and asked about their faith. The refugees read him a chapter of the Quran about Mary, Syeed said. When they finished reading, the king said, “You are welcome here, I will protect you here.” He then drew a line in the sand and said, “This represents the very thin line between Christianity and Islam,” Syeed said.
Over time, Islam spread and became the religion of Arabia, Syeed said. It was a religion that appealed to the oppressed, gave people dignity and created connections with Christians and Jews. Eventually, an Islamic Empire appeared, though in the West, there already existed a religious Christian Empire.
“Empires sometimes don’t deal with each other the way their faiths dictate,” Syeed said.
For 250 years, the Western Empire waged the Crusades to rid the Holy Land of Muslims. To motivate fighters, leaders in Europe preached sermons and spewed messages of hate, Syeed said. They told the crusaders that Muslims did not believe in Christ, and that the Muslim God was the Devil.
The Crusades, and then the subsequent colonization of the Arab world by Christians, drove a wedge between the two faiths.
“What I am going to talk about is a new opportunity, a new millennium for humanity where those two religions are going to create a new reality of cooperation and understanding that is here in this country,” Syeed said.
That community is possible in the United States, because 250 years ago, the Founding Fathers committed to freedom of religion. Though it has taken some time for their goal to come to fruition, the society has gradually realized the interfaith vision the Founding Fathers had for the U.S., Syeed said.
Each time a new faith is embraced in the U.S., it benefits society, Syeed said. For example, when Catholics were incorporated into the American melting pot, they contributed to the education system by building schools and colleges.
The acceptance of Muslims has taken some time, but it is happening, Syeed said. When he came to the U.S. 40 years ago, there were only eight or 10 mosques in the country, he said. Now, there are 2,000.
After Muslim countries gained independence from colonizers, they sent their students to the U.S. to complete higher studies in science, technology and education. About 500,000 Muslim students came to the U.S. during the 1970s, but they had no places of worship.
The community that is emerging in America is an Islamic community. We are authentic, we believe and practice Islam, but at the same time, we are in the process of developing an understanding in an authentic way, which incorporates the actual principles of Islam which have, over centuries, been misinterpreted.
—Sayyid M. Syeed
“It was the Christians who opened the doors of their churches and said you can pray and organize your religious prayer in our churches,” Syeed said. “That was the beginning of Islam in America — it was an interfaith cooperation.”
It was a new experience for Muslims moving to the U.S. from authoritarian, non-democratic or colonial states. For some, it was the first time being in a country that had no colonial relationship with the Muslim population.
“Muslims were respected, because that’s what this country believes in — that everybody should be recognized and respected for what they are.”
Syeed founded ISNA to facilitate the growth of a Muslim society in America. He said he felt the greatest gift to Muslims, Americans and the world would be to demonstrate that Islam can grow and prosper in a democratic, pluralistic society.
In the course of his work, he would visit Muslim communities of 30 to 40 families and give them a ready-made constitution, which allowed them to be affiliates with the national organization so they could raise funds and be a tax-exempt group.
In the U.S., men and women both acted as fundraisers. Also, the constitution Syeed delivered included women as members in the Islamic societies.
Women became leaders in the Islamic societies of the U.S.
“We were creating a new identity in America,” Syeed said. “We were not just bringing a group of people from, say, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, and transplanting them here, but we were giving them experience in building a democracy inside and outside.”
During the past 40 years, that American Muslim community has grown. It is a community that believes in equal rights for women and interfaith interaction, Syeed said. A few years ago, ISNA had its first female president, Ingrid Mattson.
“The community that is emerging in America is an Islamic community,” Syeed said. “We are authentic, we believe and practice Islam, but at the same time, we are in the process of developing an understanding in an authentic way, which incorporates the actual principles of Islam which have, over centuries, been misinterpreted.”
Syeed has six children — three sons and three daughters. All his daughters know how to drive, which in Saudi Arabia is against the law. Nowhere in the Quran is it written “thy women shall not drive,” Syeed said. Muhammad aggressively instructed that men and women should have equal learning opportunities, Syeed said. Today, Syeed’s daughters are not only good drivers, but contributors to American society, he said.
“America provided them a wonderful opportunity to be true to their faith and contribute in a good way to America itself,” he said. “It has taken you 200 years to create that kind of space for us, and we have benefited from that.”
Every year, ISNA holds a convention with 30,000 to 40,000 people that includes 50 or 60 speakers from Christian and Jewish faiths. It also works with the National Council of Churches, the Conference of Bishops, and the Union for Reformed Judaism.
Together, they work on interfaith initiatives and publish a magazine.
“It helps us transmit messages of optimism, messages of hope,” Syeed said.
Spring does not emerge from winter immediately, and just like any evolutionary process or change, there are still vestiges of hate that punctuate society, Syeed said.
Syeed
Photo by Michelle Kanaar.
Last year, a pastor from Florida with fewer than 30 followers decided to burn a Quran. The media picked up the hate attached to that act and translated it to the people of Pakistan as an act committed by the Christian church as a whole. Pakistanis felt that the U.S. and the entire community of Christians had decided to burn the Quran.
In 2010, there was uproar about the idea to build an Islamic community center at ground zero in New York City. Though the case in New York was high-profile, around the same time, in Murfreesboro, Tenn., a community of 200 Muslim families was not allowed to build a mosque they had been saving for, Syeed said.
Those events, all at once, began to worry ISNA, and, Syeed said, it thought maybe the interfaith friendships and understanding it had established were eroding. But then letters began to arrive.
“We started getting letters of support, and letters from friends in the Christian and Jewish communities,” Syeed said.
Many Christian and Jewish groups contacted ISNA and said that pervasive hatefulness is not only bad for Muslims, but bad for America. The faith groups decided to hold a conference in the National Press Building on Sept. 7 to commence a new campaign against anti-Muslim bigotry, Syeed said.
“A new baby was born — it was not a Muslim baby, it was not a Christian baby, it was not a Jewish baby,” Syeed said. “It was an American baby fighting against bigotry and believing that if there is bigotry against one religion, it is bigotry against the whole of America.”
The campaign works at every level in American society, but Americans are still privy to horrific acts of hate, such as the shooting in a Sikh temple a week ago, and the burning of a mosque in Joplin, Mo., that happened a day later. Though the acts of terrorism are in themselves terrible and painful, Syeed said he is proud of the response from the other religious communities in the areas. When he called the imam of the burned mosque in Missouri, he told Syeed that every church in town had rallied to the mosque’s support and had invited its members to pray in the town’s churches.
That kind of response could not happen in many Muslim countries in the world, Syeed said. The problem is that in many areas, there is no democracy. Countries have been held hostage by dictators. But now, the dictators are falling.
In authoritarian states such as the former Soviet states, and those occupied by dictators, people have no power or freedom, and their religions are stifled and corrupted, Syeed said.
“This is why we cherish this opportunity, this freedom, this brotherliness, this sisterliness, this common heritage of building America, a pluralist America where everyone feels vindicated, dignified, empowered,” he said. “Where we are able to identify the nuts and bolts, keep the nuts away from our bolts.
“If they told me 40 years (ago) what democracy means, I had no proof. Today, I can tell them that in democracies, Islam and Muslims flourish much better than in those dictatorships.”
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