Egypt Presents 10 Scholarships to Islamic Society for Conference Role

The Egyptian government Friday presented the Islamic Society of Orange County with 10 scholarships to Cairo universities and a collection of Muslim books in recognition of the Garden Grove organization’s work in sponsoring the Third International Sirah Conference in Anaheim.

Dr. Muhammad Ali Mahjoub, an Egyptian cabinet minister, made the announcement on behalf of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on the first day of the two-day, biennial conference that has attracted more than 2,500 participants from around the nation as well as speakers from throughout the world. The term sirah refers to a study of the life of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed.

Speaking in Arabic through a translator, Mahjoub also announced that Dr. Muzzamil H. Siddiqi, head of the Islamic Society of Orange County, has been appointed to Egypt’s Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, a 400-member consultative body that Mahjoub heads.

The 10 scholarships, Siddiqi said, were to Cairo University and Al-Azhar University, one of the oldest institutions of Muslim study in the world. Recipients will be chosen by the Islamic Society of Orange County, Siddiqi said.

The books, for the society’s library, will be shipped here from the Egyptian consulate in San Francisco.

In his address to the conference at the Anaheim Hilton, Mahjoub called on the participants to “work together to stop the shedding of blood,” since the “true image” of Islam is that of “a religion of love and brotherhood.”

The racially mixed audience, in which men and women were seated separately, provided an indication of the range of national origins of the participants.

At each session, hotel and conference security men with walkie-talkies patrolled the periphery of the rooms.

At the back of the large meeting hall was an architect’s scale model of the Islamic society’s expansion plans for its Garden Grove center and religious school, as well as one of the hotel’s white Christmas trees.

Qutbi Mahdi, president of the Islamic Society of North America, an Indiana-based umbrella organization, compared Muslims in this country to Mohammed and his followers in the city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, in the formative years of the religion.

Both groups, he said, were “few in numbers” and “strangers” in a land in which they were not always welcome.

In North America, Mahdi said, the image of Islam is “distorted,” with the average person viewing Islam as “a religion of terrorism,” one in which a man can have four wives whom he can divorce “at whim.”

The reason for this misconception, he said, is that “we left the job to someone else to introduce us to the West.”

Mahdi said that the study of Mohammed’s life “is not an academic exercise” but a guide to contemporary conduct, a force that can “rectify the social ethics of the people . . . that’s Islam.”