Call of Mecca: A Rising Response

Mecca was three days of rapture for Mahasin Hasan-Salih, born in Los Angeles and raised a Catholic until she found Islam.

She remembers her first moments in the Holy City, struggling to keep her feet in a swirl of more than a million pilgrims at the hajj , the yearly ritual where Muslims gather to follow in the footsteps of the Prophet Mohammed.

Gazing about, she saw people of all colors, the men in white seamless garments and the women clad in formless outfits from foot to forehead.

“Take me to the Kaaba,” she said, longing for her first sight of the black-draped shrine that 900 million Muslims turn to in prayer five times a day.

‘It Was Beautiful’

“Somebody said, ‘Turn around,’ ” she recalled. “So I did, and I saw the Kaaba with thousands of birds flying around it. It was beautiful.”

Hasan-Salih is among an increasing number of U.S.-born converts who follow the Prophet’s teaching of submission to Allah, as God is called in Arabic.

Once the faith of isolated immigrants, Islam now inspires an estimated 4 million believers in the United States. Its leaders believe that the time has come for the religion and its followers to play a bolder role in American life.

“Islam is not the kind of religion that can be practiced in a corner or in the dark,” said Ihsan Bagby, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of North America, a nationwide alliance of Muslim groups.

“Muslims are supposed to be productive, active members of society. So we have contributions to make, and we are slowly taking that role,” he said.

Almost a third of American Muslims are native-born converts, according to a recent study by Indiana University researcher Carol L. Stone. Although a precise number of U.S. Muslims is not available, Stone estimates the total at 4.6 million, a 24% increase from 1980. Among the converts, she said, all but about 80,000 are Afro-Americans like Hasan-Salih.

Most U.S. Muslims are immigrants or their descendants, part of an influx that started around the turn of the century with the arrival of peasants from Syria and surrounding areas who worked as peddlers, wheat farmers and factory hands.

These early immigrants were followed by students and professionals after World War II. More recently, many Iranians who fled the Khomeini regime in Iran came to the United States, most of them settling in Southern California.

Converts like Hasan-Salih have helped spread the word.

Now office manager at a private school in Pasadena, she returned from her 1977 pilgrimage and spent much of the next seven years visiting California prisons to teach about Islam.

‘Word Is Like Raindrops’

“I told God that if anybody gave me an ear, I would tell them what I can of his greatness because the word is like raindrops onto a waiting seed so it can break the crust and blossom,” she said.

Converts come from many walks of life and different ethnic backgrounds. Some, like S. T. Abdulkader, take Arabic names. Abdulkader, also known as Steven T. Thomas, is a financial consultant at a Torrance brokerage firm.

“For most of the people who embrace Islam in America today, it is an intellectual process,” said Abdulkader, who worships at the Islamic Center of the South Bay, a mosque housed in a remodeled private home in Lomita.

Raised an Episcopalian, he grew up wanting to be a “Bible-thumping archeologist.” He studied Hebrew and thought of converting to Judaism.

But a quotation from the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, caught his eye while he was studying Arabic at the University of Chicago to prepare for an archeological expedition in Syria.

Known as the Chapter of Purity of Faith, it reads, “He is God, the One and Only; God, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; And there is none like unto Him.”

Abdulkader said the reference to a God who “begetteth not” helped resolve his own doubts about Jesus Christ being the son of God.

He said he accepts the Muslim tradition that honors Abraham, Moses and Jesus as prophets along with Mohammed, who is seen as the last and greatest of men to relay the word of God. Mohammed lived in what is now Saudi Arabia from about AD 570 until 632.

“It happened by accident for me, and it took a couple of years to work through,” he said.

Dr. Maher Hathout, a Los Angeles Muslim leader, defined Islam’s appeal as “very simple but very profound.”

“There is a direct relationship between man and Creator,” said Hathout, an Arcadia physician. “It’s a religion that you enter into of your own free will. You don’t need to be ordained or baptized or born into a certain race. You are no better than anybody else. There are no ranks. There is no hierarchy. It caters to the needs of the mind, the body, the soul.”

Converts make up about a fourth of the congregation of the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles, according to Administrator Misbah Eldereiny.

The Los Angeles mosque attracts as many as 10,000 of the faithful during major holidays such as the recent month of Ramadan, when Muslims fasted from dawn to dusk and celebrated nightfall with prayer and communal meals.

Eldereiny, who came to the United States from Egypt, said the mosque has grown from a small group of immigrant families meeting in a private home 20 years ago to its current location, a converted insurance company storage building on Vermont Avenue.

Some congregation members are from Arab countries, but most are not because Arabs make up only about 10% of the world’s estimated 900 million Muslims. Others who belong to the congregation are from Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, India, Turkey and other countries.

They share a common bond in Islam, but the ethnic and cultural differences brought along from dozens of foreign countries do not quickly fade.

“You may think these people know each other, but they don’t,” Eldereiny said on a Saturday evening during Ramadan, looking out on a dining room filled with hundreds of people who chatted with their neighbors and ate box dinners of chicken and rice.

Some were from Iran and others from Iraq, warring neighbors in the Middle East, but they sat side by side.

“The identity is only Islam. They introduce themselves; they ask where they are from,” Eldereiny said. “They have to eat together. They have to break the fast at specific times, and this teaching is understood by every individual no matter where he came from.”

Some smaller mosques cater to worshipers from Islamic countries who hope to retain their native life styles. Others made up predominantly of American-born blacks seek a strict Islamic tone.

Peculiarly American

But larger Muslim mosques have developed a pared-down style of Islam that is peculiarly American.

“For this culture and this place, this is the best possible way to maintain Islamic culture and identity while helping members integrate into American society,” said Najwa Denny Dweik, a sociologist who studied Muslim communities in Boston and Quincy, Mass.

The American style of Islam began as a way to avoid conflicts between immigrants from different countries and sects, many of whom clashed at first over standards of modesty or other rules of behavior that are not spelled out in the Koran. To Muslims, the Koran contains revelations given to Mohammed as expression of God’s eternal truth.

The need to make converts feel at home has also shaped American-style Islam, but that goal has not been easy to achieve.

“When Muslims get to the point where they can agree to disagree, it’s a real triumph,” said Karima Omar Kamouneh, a six-year convert who writes satirical articles for Islamic magazines.

“Secretly each of us believes that we’re the only true believers, and everybody else is damned to hell, and that’s what has to be overcome,” she said.

At the Vermont Avenue center, as in every mosque in Islam, prayers are recited in Arabic and the Koran is also read aloud in Arabic, its original language. But Koranic passages are immediately translated into English, and English only is used in religion classes.

Women, instead of being sequestered as in some mosques, pray together with men. They line up and prostrate themselves in the back of the prayer room, but they attend the same religion classes and eat together with men in the mosque’s dining room.

Roles for Women

Women in many mosques have also taken the lead in fund raising, staging community meals and bake sales in the style of an American church supper.

Indeed, Muslim women are quick to reject what they see as a stereotyped image of them widely held in the United States: veiled, reclusive, dominated by their fathers or husbands.

At American-style mosques, most women simply cover their heads with a kerchief during prayers toward Mecca. “There is no forced dress code, unless they come half-naked, of course,” said Aida Morad, editor of Minaret, the Islamic Center’s monthly magazine. “Our view is that in the Prophet’s time women were just as active as men. Life is hard enough on people. Why impose a lot of strictures on people that God and nature hadn’t imposed?”

Hathout, a spokesman for the Southern California Islamic Center, said the goal of Americanized Islam is “to establish a genuinely American institution that will survive the first generation of immigrant founders and offer something to converts and the immigrants’ native-born offspring for generations to come.

“We have all the colors of the rainbow here, but what is helping us is that we are so keen not to violate any rules of Islam. We won’t make dances here and serve liquors. We will do only things that Islam will accept. But we also do not make rules that Islam does not make.”

Many Muslims born in Islamic countries report a stronger feeling of religious commitment in the United States than at home. “We consider this country to be heaven,” Eldereiny said. “We feel more free to practice Islam here than in so-called Islamic countries. Here there is the concept of freedom to do whatever you want. . . . Here the conscience of the individual makes a difference.”

For decades, Islam has had a special appeal for some blacks in America, largely through the teachings of the late Elijah Muhammad and his Black Muslim movement known as the Nation of Islam.

Son Takes Over Movement

Elijah Muhammad spoke about whites being devils and blacks being gods, a message that was dropped in 1975 when his son, Warith Deen Muhammad, took over the movement after his father was assassinated.

The younger Muhammad guided the Black Muslim movement back into harmony with the beliefs of Muslims worldwide, although a rival group, led by Louis Farrakhan, rejects the changes introduced by Warith Deen Muhammad and keeps alive the name “Nation of Islam” and the policy of racial separatism.

“Afro-Americans always used Islam as a battering ram to separate themselves from American society,” said Prof. Sulayman Nyang of the department of Afro-American studies at Howard University in Washington

Many Black Muslims dropped out after the change. But the ranks of American Muslims today still include blacks who were alienated by Christian icons and by white society in general.

“It was very difficult to accustom myself to a white God, Jesus,” Hasan-Salih said. “As a black person, I had no relation to this God.”

Indeed, Elijah Muhammad’s message was persuasive because “the black man was elevated to a level of superiority,” said Saaddiq Saaffir, the imam, or spiritual leader, of the Masjid Ibaadillah, a predominantly Afro-American mosque on West Jefferson Boulevard. (Misjad is the Arabic word for an Islamic house of prayer.)

Black superiority was “a psychology that worked well because the black man always had been seen as inferior,” Saaffir said.

Now, however, blacks who remain active in Islam realize that “God creates you the same as all people. . . . God gave you that sense of equality,” he said.

Still, some invisible barriers persist. While some blacks attend the Islamic Center of Southern California, most Afro-American Muslims in Los Angeles tend to worship at Misjad Felix Bilal, a large mosque in the South-Central District, or in smaller mosques.

Even among Muslims “we are always identified or forced to respond as Afro-Americans,” said Beverly McCloud, an adjunct professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.

“We haven’t experienced negativism,” she said at a recent Islamic conference at the University of Massachusetts. “What we do experience is a lack of community. What you see in conferences, including this one, is a lack of community. People don’t come up and get to know you.”

‘Cultural Differences’

But she acknowledged that this could be a function simply of “cultural differences.”

Political and cultural diversity are also factors in retarding the development of a large, cohesive Muslim political lobbying group. But movement is apparent there, too.

Hathout of the Islamic Center of Southern California has been involved in the establishment of the Muslim Political Action Committee. “We will try to raise the awareness of Muslims about their rights and duties about politics and to entice them very strongly to register to vote,” he said.

Many Islamic leaders hope for greater expansion in America. Some dream of a world ultimately united by belief in one God, with Mohammed as his prophet.

Muzammil H. Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of Orange County, does not deny this goal. But “first we have to see how committed Muslims themselves are to Islam,” he said.

“This is the basic concept of Islam: People should submit themselves to God,” said Siddiqi, whose mosque in Garden Grove recently received a $240,000 grant from the Saudi Arabian government to help it acquire land for expansion.

“My whole concern is to see that the whole of humanity turns toward the Creator and lives with the values of purity, honesty and truth, not just concerning themselves with making more money and having more fun,” he said.

“This is the basic message of Islam. If it appeals to America--good. Good for America. Good for everybody. Because that’s what Islam stands for.”

BASIC TENETS OF ISLAM

Islam is the Arabic word for submission. One who undertakes submission to the will of God is a Muslim , voluntarily bound by basic rules known as the Five Pillars of Islam. They are:

* Shahadah , the confession of faith in no god but Allah and in Mohammed as his prophet, recited several times a day. “It is not only the Muslim’s legal passport into the Muslim community but also the quintessence of the Muslim’s faith and an expression of identity,” wrote the late Islamic scholar Ismai’il R. Al Faruqi, who was on the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia.

* Salat , or worship, five times a day: at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, evening and before sleep; a duty that entails a ritual washing of the hands, feet, elbows, ears, face and head before actual prayer begins. Congregational prayer is only required at noontime on Fridays; Muslims try to schedule their other prayers before or after work and during lunch breaks.

* Zakat , a form of charity taxation requiring that 2 1/2% of the wealth of the prosperous be distributed every year. “Its purpose was . . . to convince the wealthy that the title to their wealth is mitigated by the title of their fellow humans to life and subsistence, and to assure the needy that their fellows will not passively see them suffer misfortune,” Faruqi wrote.

* Siyam , or fasting, which bars food, drink and sex from dawn to sunset for every day of the month of Ramadan, the ninth month in the Islamic calendar. Because time is measured in Islam by counting lunar months, Ramadan and other Muslim holidays seem to move through the Western calendar and arrive 11 days earlier every year.

* Hajj , or pilgrimage, which is required at least once in the life of Muslims who can afford it. It is now easier by far than the grueling camel trek it once was (package tours for the upcoming hajj next month in Mecca start at about $1,800 from Los Angeles). The ritual entails a walk seven times around the Kaaba, an ancient Arab shrine; a trot seven times between the hills of Safaand Marwah, where Muslims believe that the biblical figure Hagar sought water frantically for her son Ishmael, the progenitor of the Arabs; a journey to the plain of Arafat, where Mohammed delivered his farewell sermon; and a stop at the oasis of Mina, where pilgrims throw pebbles at one of three pillars representing Satan. There they sacrifice a sheep or goat and give the meat to the poor.

Islam also bans the use of pork products and requires that other meats be certified as properly slaughtered, or halal .