Local Muslims United in Distress Over Iraq Violence

After Friday-night prayers, inside a modest mosque behind a McDonald’s on Murchison Avenue in Pomona, nearly 400 Muslims were gathered for a rare town hall meeting on the situation in Iraq.

They were Shiites and Sunnis, men, women and children from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds from throughout Southern California. But, inside Ahlul-Beyt Mosque, a Shiite house of worship, those labels appeared not to matter.

What united them appeared to be the wrenching pain they were experiencing as Muslims over the Feb. 22 bombing of a sacred Shiite site in Samarra and the violence that followed. They were also united as Muslims watching events unfold from the United States.

“We are Americans,” said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council. “The question is, what can we do about the situation from here?”

As the night progressed, and in the days to follow, the answer would prove elusive. But on this night, Feb. 24, many attending agreed that the meeting itself was an important step.

“Unfortunately, it takes such a tragedy to bring Muslims together here in Southern California,” said Imam Moustafa Al-Qazwini of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County in Costa Mesa.

Yet, good can come of what perpetrators meant for evil purposes.

Al-Qazwini, a Shiite, is a member of a prominent family of Islamic scholars and activists in Southern California and Detroit. As he put it, “One of the goodnesses of the tragedy is that we see tonight in this place -- and in other places throughout the world -- Sunnis and Shia getting together, expressing their outrage against this crime.”

In the mosque, men and women sat or knelt on a green-carpeted floor, the sexes separated by a low, green curtain partition. A number of teenagers were there too, some checking their cellphones as the discussion wore on for hours.

The mosque was full, so latecomers stood in the courtyard, straining to hear the proceedings through open windows.

During the meeting, the air thick with emotion, people vented their anger, shared their pain and, again and again, pondered -- in English and Arabic -- their role as American Muslims.

Hamida Desuqi, an African American, suggested that Muslims remember how blacks changed the hearts of Americans by marching peacefully during the civil rights movement.

“We as Muslims have to learn to protest ... without the destruction of property and without harming any human being,” said Desuqi, a teacher. “Then and only then will we be able to gain the respect of the world and gain the pleasure of Allah.”

Some said they wanted to help raise public awareness of their faith. Some blamed the news media for accentuating only the tensions between the Sunni and Shiite sects and failing to put the divisions that do exist in the proper context.

Still others expressed their displeasure with a fellow Muslim, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, and said he should be recalled. The ambassador, who is a Sunni, and other embassy officials have reportedly pressured Shiites to make political concessions, such as firing an unpopular interior minister, to appease Sunnis.

“One of the problems that instigated the tragic attack [in Samarra] was the inflammatory statement of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad two days earlier,” said Al-Qazwini. He said the ambassador’s comment that the Iraqi government was “sectarian” gave “the green light to those barbaric people to attack the holy shrine.”

But how to respond? After nearly three hours of discussion by scholars and religious leaders, their comments interspersed with exhortations in Arabic from the audience, all that the gathering could agree on was to seek a congressional inquiry into America’s role in Iraq.

Such an inquiry, Al-Marayati explained later, would ask Congress to “review our stated goals, look at achievements and failures, and provide an honest assessment of the mission in Iraq to the American people.”

Muslim Public Affairs Council officials distributed a list of members of Congress from Southern California who serve on the House International Relations Committee and urged everyone to bombard them with e-mails, phone calls and letters.

In the days after the town hall meeting, area Islamic leaders reflected on the challenges ahead for their faith.

“The nature of such attacks has unleashed a chain of events which benefits neither Shia nor Sunni,” said Imam Sadullah Khan, a Sunni and religious director of the Islamic Center of Irvine. “Rather, it undermines Islam and hurts the already wounded people of Iraq even further, and it has caused a deep and ugly scar on the history of Muslims.”

Khan, along with numerous other Islamic leaders in California, says there is no friction between the two sects here. He and Al-Qazwini frequently work together, he said, and Khan has been invited to speak at Al-Qazwini’s mosque on several occasions.

“We don’t even see the barrier,” he said.

In Southern California, with 80% Sunni and 20% Shiite Muslims, it is common to see both sects worship in the same mosque.

At Khan’s predominantly Sunni congregation at the Islamic Center of Irvine, 20% to 30% of worshipers are of Shiite background, he said.

Khan, who teaches Islam at the Academy of Judaic, Christian and Islamic Studies at UCLA, said there are no fundamental differences between the two groups. Both believe in one God and the role of Muhammad as God’s messenger.

The only thing they disagree on is the question of leadership.

“When the prophet passed, there was a difference as to who should succeed,” Khan said. “The idea was a difference in political leadership that had consequences.”

Since then, he said, political agitators have used that difference to instigate trouble.

Let God judge what Muslims did in the past, suggests Maher Hathout, senior advisor to the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

“We cannot be buried in a big graveyard called the past,” he said. “We have to negotiate our future and improve our present.”

For American Muslims, that means looking for ways to influence U.S. policy, he said.

“As an American I feel that our policy needs to be questioned,” he said. To do that, he said, Muslim Americans need to hold their government accountable.

But Torrance physician Nazir U. Khaja, chairman of the Islamic Information Service, said that even as Muslim Americans speak up and hold their government accountable, they need to remember the power of prayer.

“Now with anarchy that prevails over there, it’s just a free-for-all,” he said.

“We do have to pray. We need to seek each other’s counsel and ask that God will direct our steps.”