ALLAH’S CHILDREN : Growing Muslim Community Seeks Better Understanding of Universal Islamic Values

As neighbors in a new land, says Muzammil H. Siddiqi, director ofthe Islamic Society of Orange County, “it is very important” for Muslims, Christians, Jews and other ethnic and religious groups living in the Southland “to have a better understanding of each other.”

The 43-year-old scholar, who has headed the Islamic center in Garden Grove for more than five years, said one of his primary tasks is to help the community understand that “Muslims are like them--hard-working, loving, raising families.”

Often, he said, “Islam and terrorism are identified, quite wrongly.” The growing Muslim community in Orange County and elsewhere in Southern California, he said, “is very much concerned with presenting Islam as it is, with its universal values.”

The Islamic Society of Orange County has a membership of about 1,000 families, and is expanding. There are now 125 children in grades one through four in the society’s day school, and 50 more on a waiting list.

Both Muslims and non-Muslims teach at the school, which shares a former church building with the worship center. They will break ground this week on a 12-classroom facility. When it is completed next September, Siddiqi said, they hope to expand even further to add high school-level classes.

Like many parents, Siddiqi said, “Muslims are concerned with the values of Orange County, especially when it comes to their children.”

In addition to their concern about what he called the “secularism and materialism” that surrounds them--a criticism leveled by fundamentalist Christian groups--he lamented that “there is not much opportunity for our children to know about Islam.”

Particularly at Christmastime, he said, life in the United States can be as difficult for Muslim children as it might be for Christian children in an Islamic land.

During this season, he said, “Muslim children feel the problem of this isolation. There is so much pressure to assimilate, even to look alike.”

Midday services on Fridays, the Muslim Sabbath, regularly attract 700 worshipers--up from 200 when he came, Siddiqi said. As a concession to life in a non-Muslim country, there is also a Sunday service, which attracts between 500 and 600 congregants, as well as a Sunday school for children who do not attend the day school.

A monthly newsletter, “The Orange Crescent,” has a mailing list of 1,500, and on the wall of Siddiqi’s office is an architect’s drawing for an ambitious expansion complex for the school and religious center.

On Dec. 26-27 the society will be sponsoring its third biennial “Sirah,” an international conference on contemporary issues facing Islamic life, titled “Challenges and Solutions.” Scheduled for the Anaheim Hilton and Towers, the conference features speakers from across the country and throughout the Muslim world. The first such conference held in Orange County, in 1982, attracted 2,000 people; the second, in 1984, drew 4,000.

Orange County’s Muslim community is largely composed of professionals--doctors and engineers, mostly--as well as computer programmers and people in business, Siddiqi said. Like many immigrants to Southern California, they come for the economic opportunities and the climate. Siddiqi estimates that his congregation is equally divided between Muslims from the Middle East and those from India and Pakistan, with about two dozen American converts.

Reflecting the worldwide Islamic population, the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the county are Sunni. Some Shia Muslims, mostly from Iran and Iraq, also belong to the society.

“We have both Sunni and Shia,” Siddiqi said, but “I call myself a Muslim,” playing down any doctrinal distinctions between the two groups.

The fact that the Islamic Society chose to bring to the congregation someone of Siddiqi’s background and stature says a great deal about the goals of the Muslim community.

Born into a family of Muslim scholars and businessmen in Rampur, India, Siddiqi was first educated at religious universities in nearby Lucknow. He then left India for four years of graduate study in Saudi Arabia, followed by more research in Switzerland.

Schooled in England

The next stop was England, where he lived at Woodbrooke, a Quaker college, while earning a master’s degree in theology at Birmingham University and working with Islamic immigrants in Great Britain. Siddiqi still spends a good deal of his time in ecumenical activities, an interest he says dates back to his stay at Woodbrooke.

“I liked their peaceful style,” he recalled. During this same period, he was researching parallels between Islamic mystics and Christian monks in the medieval era.

Across the Atlantic, Siddiqi migrated down the East Coast of the United States, earning a Ph.D in comparative religions at Harvard, working at the United Nations for the Muslim World League and finally serving as director of the Islamic Center in Washington.

Siddiqi said he gave up his Washington post in part because of factional strife within the organization, which resulted from upheaval in the wake of the Iranian revolution. But he also was disenchanted because Washington “was not a settled community” in which to raise his family, with so many diplomats and government officials coming and going.

‘More Family-Oriented’

When leaders of the Orange County Islamic community invited him to speak at the society, he said he found the atmosphere “more family-oriented” than in the nation’s capital. “They asked if I would like to come here,” he recalled. “I liked the place and thought it would be a challenge.”

A specialist in Islamic ethics and jurisprudence, Siddiqi now teaches at Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach. He has a regular weekly radio show on KMAX-FM and speaks frequently at interfaith dialogues around the country. Last month, the center hosted a panel discussion, which included a local minister and a rabbi and drew a packed audience.

Since he has assumed the religious leadership of the county’s Muslim community, Siddiqi’s traveling hasn’t slackened. He has lectured and taught in Canada, Mauritius, Pakistan and New Zealand. During one week last month, he returned from a conference on Islamic banking in Turkey for just two days before flying to Salt Lake City.

His time here is taken up preparing for sermons and lessons, which are delivered in English with citations from the Koran and commentary in the original Arabic. Administrative tasks and counseling occupies still more time, particularly since congregants assume he is on 24-hour call.

Now that he has settled into his duties here, there’s just one more thing Siddiqi would like: “I wish I had more time for scholarly work,” he said wistfully.