Fasting Month Brings Muslims Together

As Muslims prepare for the daytime-fasting month of Ramadan, which will begin Tuesday, most American blacks who espouse Islam will have a greater sense of unity with U.S. Muslims of other ethnic origins.

Warith Deen Muhammad, son of the late Elijah Muhammad, founder of the once-militant Black Muslim movement in America, took the last step toward identifying his Chicago-based organization with worldwide Islam late last month by announcing the dissolution of the American Muslim Mission.

From all accounts, the action was greeted favorably and enthusiastically by affiliated masjids (mosques) around the country, including six in the Los Angeles area.

“Our reaction was one of relief and happiness,” said Riza Jardan, the imam, or spiritual leader, for the Masjid Bilal Ibn Rabah in Los Angeles. “We had been expecting the announcement for some time.”

When the announcement was made in Chicago, Jardan was at a joint celebration with representatives of Masjid Felix Bilal, the largest of three Los Angeles mosques, and of mosques from Long Beach, Compton and Altadena. The three Los Angeles mosques probably have a combined membership of about 2,800 people, he said.

“The Koran says that we should not take names other than Muslim,” Jardan said. “We have felt that any particular designation is divisive. We don’t even care to call ourselves ‘Sunni’ or ‘Shia’ Muslims,” he said.

Warith Muhammad and other black Islamic leaders in the organization had progressively shed their sectarian distinctions in the 10 years that Muhammad has headed the organization. Warith Muhammad succeeded his father at the time of the elder Muhammad’s death and started discouraging the group’s identity as a bulwark against what the father had seen as a racist and exploitative white society.

The son changed his given name, Wallace, to the more Islamic name Warith and changed the name of the group to the World Community of Islam in the West, then to the American Muslim Mission. Whites were invited to become members of the mosques and local imams were encouraged to develop ties with clergy of ethnic Muslim mosques and of other faiths.

While many accepted the changes, others resisted. A segment led by Louis Farrakhan has kept both the name “Nation of Islam” and the viewpoint of militant racial separatism.

The School of Theology at Claremont, an ecumenical graduate seminary of the United Methodist Church, will give degrees to 81 men and women today, its largest graduating class ever, in commencement exercises at the United Church of Christ, Congregational, in Claremont.

Late last month, the student council at the seminary voted unanimously to declare the student body a sanctuary for Central American refugees. Churches, religious orders such as the Franciscans and secular universities have publicly said they would harbor refugees who have fled danger in their home countries, but Sharon Snapp, who chairs the students’ sanctuary committee, said she believed the Claremont school was the first seminary to do it.

Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer, since early last year the vice president of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, will be presented the “People of the Book Human Rights Award” on June 2 by a group called the New Jewish Agenda.

Meyer, who was an outspoken rabbinical leader in Buenos Aires for 25 years before coming to Los Angeles, recently has been active in trying to elicit Jewish support for the sanctuary movement to protect Central American refugees.

The Heritage, a Jewish community newspaper, reported in mid-April that Meyer was dismissed from his university job and quoted Meyer as saying that he did not know the reason. But soon afterward Meyer and other university officials said they had no comment on the matter, and that Meyer was still on the job. A spokeswoman for the university repeated again this week that officials had no statement to make concerning Meyer’s employment.

The Interreligious Council of Southern California has voted to urge its 12 major religious constituencies to urge the U.S. Senate to ratify the anti-genocide treaty of the United Nations when legislators consider the matter in coming weeks. People should not be victims of systematic murder whether their “crime” is being “a Jew in Hitler’s Europe, a Buddhist in Cambodia or an Ibo in Nigeria,” said council president Rabbi Paul Dubin.

“American failure to act affirmatively on the treaty, which has been ratified by 90 nations, is a standing embarrassment to America’s protests against human rights violations,” Dubin said.

The interreligious council also urged that the treaty be adopted without containing a reservation to exempt the United States from World Court jurisdiction. Such an exemption has been proposed by some Republican leaders.

California Roman Catholics recently were informed that Father Junipero Serra, the 18th-Century founder of nine California missions, has been designated “venerable,” another step toward sainthood, and that Pope John Paul II, long rumored to be planning a trip to the western United States, might visit California next year.

Franciscan Father Noel Moholy told the Los Angeles archdiocesan weekly, Tidings, that Pio Laghi, the papal nuncio in Washington, indicated that the beatification ceremony for Serra “could take place during a visit to California by Pope John Paul that is being planned for 1986.”

Moholy, who has worked 35 years on research to advocate Serra’s elevation to sainthood, said the last step was one of the most difficult, in which “we had to prove that Serra was ‘virtuous to a heroic degree.’ ”

Serra’s name has to be found connected to one “miracle,” such as an otherwise unexplained healing, for church authorities to name Serra “blessed”; a second such miracle must be demonstrated for canonization as a saint.