COLUMN ONE : Muslims a Growing U.S. Force : But despite the rise in numbers, they feel their beliefs are misconstrued as hostile to the West. Now they fear they will be held responsible for a war most say they didn’t want.

Draped in a floor-length black garment, her head covered in a white scarf, and with only her hands and face exposed, Majida Salem cuts an exotic figure even in ethnically diverse Los Angeles. When she emigrated from Jordan seven years ago, she was prepared to encounter stares from puzzled Americans.

Now, however, curiosity has evolved into hostility and “the looks are different,” Salem said a few days before war erupted in the Persian Gulf. “At first they questioned my appearance,” she explained in near-fluent English, “but they didn’t have those hateful looks.”

These are wrenching times for Salem and millions of other Muslims living in the United States. Through immigration, a high birth rate and conversion, especially among American blacks, Islam is one of the fastest-growing faiths in America. Yet Muslims say their beliefs are widely misconstrued as war-prone and hostile to Western ideals. Isolated in a culture that makes little effort to understand them, they fear their neighbors will hold them responsible for a war most say they did not want.

“When the bodies of American youth come back, (people) are going to blame the Muslims,” predicted Zaheer Uddin, editor of a Muslim magazine in Jamaica, N.Y. “It will give a very negative picture (of us).”

War has come just as many Muslims have begun building bridges to mainstream America by, for example, participating in interfaith services and entering political life for the first time. Now some worry these fledgling efforts will be undermined.

No one knows exactly how many of the world’s 1 billion Muslims live in the United States, although there is general agreement that by the year 2010 Islam will overtake Judaism, with its 5.5 million adherents, as this nation’s second leading religion.

The very vagueness of the population estimates--anywhere from 3.5 million to 6 million--is powerful evidence of how little political organization Muslims have. As one sign of Islam’s swelling presence, however, the number of mosques and student centers has grown from 598 to more than 950 in the last five years.

Two-thirds of the Muslims in this country live in 10 states, with more than 20% in New York and New Jersey, and 10% in California, according to Dawad Assad, secretary general of the Council of Masjid (Mosques) in the U.S.A., which represents 195 houses of worship. Active Muslim communities with a growing number of mosques are found in New York City, the greater Los Angeles area, Chicago, Boston, Houston, Detroit and the Washington area.

Construction has already been completed on a $14-million, 88,000-square-foot building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which will be the largest mosque in the United States when it opens this spring.

What the population increase means, said historian Yvonne Y. Haddad of the University of Massachusetts, is Americans “cannot continue to define ourselves as a Judeo-Christian society.”

Islam traces its origin to the 7th Century, when the Prophet Mohammed is said to have received divine revelations from the angel Gabriel, which were passed on orally and incorporated into the Koran, the Muslims’ sacred book.

Since Islam is a non-hierarchical religion, there is no one institution that speaks for Muslims. Nor is Islam, like some other religions, officially divided according to liberal, moderate or conservative traditions. As with any other religion, many Muslims have assimilated into secular life. Nearly all those who practice the faith, however, are religious conservatives with a literalist view of the Koran.

Many in this country have been influenced by the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism, a worldwide movement which seeks to reassert Muslim values and authority. But most American Muslims rejected the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 death threat against British writer Salman Rushdie after publication of his novel, “The Satanic Verses.” Rushdie, who was born in India of Muslim parents, initially insisted on his right to reject Islam; last month, he embraced the faith but was unable to get the decree against him lifted.

In the United States, Muslims tend to group themselves according to their ethnic background, with, say, Arab Muslims predominating in one mosque or Islamic center, South Asians making up the bulk of another and African-American Muslims in yet another. (However, some mosques, such as the Islamic Center of Southern California, pride themselves on their ethnic diversity.)

“The ethnic thing is very big,” said religion professor Carl William Ernst of Pomona College. “Arabic-speaking Muslims from Lebanon and Syria have very little in common culturally with Muslims from India and Pakistan.”

Also impossible to gauge is the proportion of Muslims who closely observe the rituals of their religion. Only about 10% to 15% of U.S. Muslims are believed to be affiliated with mosques, but since it is permissible to pray at home, those figures do not give a complete picture.

Less educated Muslims are often--but not always--more observant than those with more schooling. In a 1987-88 survey of 200 members of Los Angeles’ highly educated Iranian Muslim community, UCLA sociologist Mehdi Bozorgmehr found that only 2% would classify themselves as very religious.

Some Muslim immigrants become more devout after they have lived in this country for a while, according to Haddad. “They feel alienated so they turn to religion,” she said.

Many Muslims see themselves as the victims of cultural stereotypes and caricature, as underscored most recently by outrage over the current movie, “Not Without My Daughter,” which tells the story of an American woman trapped in Iran by an abusive husband.

“You will not find a single Arab or Muslim who does not believe that America ridicules them,” said Haddad.

The popular image of Islam as a bellicose religion was spread by the West as a means of rationalizing its conquest of the Muslim world, Ernst said. “If you have an image that the enemy you are subjugating is violent then that justifies your own violence,” he added.

Muslim law allows self-defense in response to aggression, but does not sanction religious imperialism, according to Ernst. “There is a quotation from the Koran that is quite explicit,” he said. “It says: ‘There is no compulsion in religion.’ ”

Most Muslims in this country have condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, saying that Saddam Hussein, a secular leader who has persecuted religious activists in his own nation, has exploited the concept of jihad , or “righteous striving,” to justify his actions.

Jihad is popularly known as “holy war,” though it can also signify an internal struggle. In its external sense, it is authorized only in defense of people “whose human rights have been violated and whose land or freedom of faith have been attacked,” said Fathi Osman, resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Southern California.

At the same time, many Muslims say the Saudi government was wrong to ask the U.S. government for assistance. They feel it is improper for non-Muslims to occupy holy land or intervene in a problem among Muslims.

As in the Middle East, Muslims here are staunch supporters of the Palestinian cause, and most believe the Jewish state should never have come into being. “Often we say that we are not against Jews, but against Zionists, those who had the goal of creating a state run by Jews,” said Issa Smith, deputy director of the American Muslim Council in Washington.

But some Muslims are willing to accept Israel as a legitimate state.

“If you would have asked me in 1945, I would have said that a Jewish state should not be created,” said Maher Hathout, spokesman for the relatively moderate Islamic Center of Southern California. “But you don’t go around and dismantle a state.”

To many American Muslims, textbooks are to blame for disseminating and perpetuating misconceptions about their faith. And now some are seeking to have these images changed. When Shabbir Mounsouri, a board member of the Los Angeles-based Islamic Center, complained that his daughter’s textbook depicted Islam as the religion of “sword-carrying Bedouins,” the center began pushing for revisions.

The new seventh-grade textbook recently approved in California “represents a real advance over what’s been available in the past,” said Ernst, who reviewed competing textbooks at the request of members of the Islamic community. Still, he said, the book continues to “leave the impression that camel nomads are the basic identity of Muslims, which is patently ridiculous. . . .”

Contrary to the stereotype, the Muslim world stretches across about 50 countries from Africa to Europe to Asia, with more followers in Indonesia than elsewhere.

No one is exactly sure when Islam first appeared in this country, although there are some indications that Muslims from Spain and West Africa were here before Columbus. Some Arabic-speaking slaves practiced Islam but were pressured to convert by Christian missionaries.

Most U.S. Muslims can trace their roots to four waves of immigration, beginning in 1875, when Arab immigrants, mostly uneducated laborers, began arriving in the United States. The largest and most recent wave--still going on--began in 1967 and is made up of better educated and more Westernized Muslims than before, according to Haddad.

Perhaps as many as 400,000 African-Americans are followers of Islam. The independent black Muslim movement dates back to the founding of the Moorish-American Science Temple in Newark, N.J., by Timothy Drew, who believed that Islam could be a way of uniting oppressed people.

Eventually, the movement came under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, who saw himself as a “messenger of God”--in contrast to orthodox Islam, which holds that Mohammed was the last prophet--and who preached a doctrine of black separatism.

But with Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, his son, W. Deen Mohammed (who prefers a different spelling of the name), brought the movement into the Muslim mainstream by rejecting the concept of black separatism. This change was welcomed in Saudi Arabia, which has provided funding for many mosques associated with W. Deen Mohammed, including the $4-million Masjid Bilal now going up in Watts.

A separatist remnant of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam is led by the controversial Louis Farrakhan. And there are still other primarily black Muslim mosques, including 15 under the spiritual leadership of Jamil Al-Amin of Atlanta, the former Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown.

W. Deen Mohammed’s movement is staunchly patriotic--an American flag is depicted on the front page of its monthly newspaper. For this reason, and perhaps also because of their ties to the Saudis, he and his followers have stood behind the Bush Administration’s approach to the Persian Gulf crisis.

“We have commended the American government for honoring its friendship with the Saudi Arabian government,” according to Mohammed’s son-in-law, Edmond Abdul Hafeez of Michigan City, Ind.

While no one is keeping track of conversions among blacks, it is likely the faith is gaining followers, said C. Eric Lincoln, an authority on black Muslims who teaches at Duke University. “Islam is no longer an exotic religion,” he noted.

With their growing numbers, some Muslims say it is time to forge an American Muslim identity, with greater visibility, participation and clout.

“Over the last 30 years, the first instincts were self-preservation and maintaining Muslim identity as much as we could,” said Ahmad Zaki Hammad of Chicago, president of the Islamic Society of North America. “The prevailing climate among American Muslims now is that we cannot live in isolation.”

Although unwelcome, the Gulf War has given Muslims an opportunity to educate the public about their religion. Scholars have been invited to talk about Islam and imams have been asked to participate in interfaith prayer services.

In what represented a major political step, many Muslims were active in Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign as part of his “rainbow coalition.” Haddad said Jackson was the first U.S. leader “who sought and received money from the Arab community.”

Previously, she said, “there was a general attitude that Arab money was dirty money.” While a sprinkling of Arab-Americans--among them, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) and U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W. Va.)--have held political office, they have been Christian rather than Muslim.

As the textbook protest shows, Muslims are becoming less hesitant to assert themselves. During several emotional meetings last fall, the Islamic Society at Stanford University, along with members of other faiths, vigorously denounced a new housing policy that gave unmarried couples and homosexuals the same status as married students. Islam bans premarital and homosexual relations.

“I am happy we expressed our views, and the university realized that this issue is not agreed on by all,” said Islamic Society President Abdullah Bature, a graduate student from Nigeria.

Many Muslims stress the similarities between their monotheistic religion and the principal American faiths. Jewish and Islamic dietary laws resemble one another so closely, for example, that many Muslims buy meat from kosher butchers.

The Islamic Center of Southern California last month mailed Christmas cards to 500 Christians with a message from the Koran in which an angel announced to Mary that she would bear a child named Jesus.

The card “was a reminder . . . that Muslims honor (Jesus) as one of the prophets of the Bible,” explained Hassan Hathout, the outreach director for the Los Angeles-based center.

But although Muslims believe they have much to offer American society in terms of ethics and family values, their religious and cultural practices often keep them apart. In addition to premarital and homosexual sex, there are strict prohibitions against alcohol, smoking, dancing with members of the opposite sex and eating pork. During the holy month of Ramadan, fasting is required from dawn to dusk.

What draws the most attention, perhaps, are the restrictions on women, who are not supposed to socialize with men outside their family and must pray separately--either on a different floor, behind a barrier or in the back of the mosque. Unless there is financial need, women are encouraged to stay home with their children rather than work.

When Muslim men congregate, they discuss religion and politics, while the women--seated in a different room or at a different table at a restaurant--are more inclined to talk about their families and homes, according to Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, a musicologist at the University of Alberta. “The men have a different agenda,” she said.

Female attire is usually a matter of cultural interpretation, scholars say, since the Koran requires only that both men and women dress modestly.

Danya Al-Kuteifani of Bellflower, a native Californian who converted to Islam from Christianity six years ago at the age of 20, is among a minority of Muslim women who wear the hijab --or covering--whenever they are in mixed company. She said it prevents women from competing for male attention and fends off men “with a disease in their heart.”

When they pray, Muslims stand, kneel and bend forward to touch the floor with their hands and heads. Separation between the sexes at such times is also practical, she said, explaining: “When I (pray) my rear sticks up in the air . . . I don’t want the men to see (that).”

Wearing a scarf can cause problems at the workplace, said Mahasin Salih of Altadena, who used to work as a part-time secretary. “In some job situations you’re not made to feel very comfortable if you want to cover (your head),” she recalled.

Islamic law--which is not followed in this country when it conflicts with U.S. law--makes it harder for women than men to obtain a divorce and provides them half the inheritance of their brothers. A Muslim man may marry a Jew or a Christian, but a Muslim woman is not allowed to marry outside the faith. Although adultery is strictly forbidden, polygamy is permitted. (It is not encouraged, however, and is practiced in only a few countries, such as Saudi Arabia.)

Birth control is frowned on by traditional Muslims, while abortion is allowed only when a mother’s life is in danger, Haddad said.

Yet Muslim women say their religion offers them many advantages--for example, they have no financial obligation to support their family. If abandoned by their husbands, their closest male relative is required to take care of them.

“Muslims respect their women quite a lot,” said Haddad, a Christian Arab. “It’s true they do not have as much freedom. Here women have more freedom but less respect.”

Today in View: profiles of American Muslims. Friday in Metro: The Islamic Center of Southern California, where American-style activism is blended with Islamic observances.