Islamic Leader Urges Aid to the Needy

The Southern California-based president of the Islamic Society of North America says most Muslim communities should be mature enough today to look beyond building mosques and schools to establishing good relations with the broader culture.

In keeping with the fasting month of Ramadan, expected to start Wednesday, as a period of reflection and charity, Muzammil Siddiqi of Garden Grove said Muslims should be thinking about being of service to non-Muslim neighbors.

“We should be more active in helping people who are in need,” said Siddiqi, religious director of the Islamic Society of Orange County for 15 years. By establishing better relations with others, “people can see what Islam is and not what they imagine it is,” he said.

Elected in May to a two-year term as president of the Islamic Society of North America, Siddiqi said that the organization, based in Plainfield, Ind., has begun its first social services program.

Though the program has little money budgeted, the society’s leaders initially hope to provide encouragement and coordinate exchanges of information on family counseling, shelters for the needy and training of social workers, he said. This year, the society’s convention in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend had a record 22,000 registrants, but the organization’s membership needs to be expanded beyond its estimated 60,000, Siddiqi said.

Looking ahead to Ramadan, the Orange County Islamic group’s facilities were the site Dec. 7 of a meeting of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. The council reviewed astronomical data to provide local Muslims with the likeliest dates for the start and end of the lunar fasting month.

While the council acknowledged that in Muslim tradition Ramadan begins only after visual sightings of the slim crescent of the new moon, Ahmed Salama, senior NASA astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the group it is unlikely that the crescent will be seen before this Tuesday night.

Hence, healthy, adult Muslims have been alerted to begin their daylight abstention from food, water and sensual pleasures Wednesday. Salama said the crescent moon signaling the next lunar month should be first seen Jan. 28, making that the last day of the fast. Early morning mass prayers by tens of thousands of Southland Muslims on Jan. 29 at various locations will mark the start of Eid al-Fitr, a three-day “festival of fast-breaking.”

More than abstaining from food and drink, Ramadan is about the larger virtues of self-restraint, generosity and reflection on a Muslim’s role in the world, Siddiqi said. “One should transcend material things to think about charity and social service,” he said.

HOLIDAY RITES

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On Sunday, the fifth day of the eight-day Hanukkah festival, thousands of Jews are expected to attend a holiday fair at Calamigos Ranch near Agoura Hills. The fair, which starts at 11 a.m., last year drew more than 8,000 adults and children, according to the sponsoring Chabad chapters in the San Fernando and Conejo valleys. The event will end with a menorah lighting at dusk. Admission is free. (818) 991-0991.

* Unity of Hollywood, a congregation in the positive-thinking metaphysical church tradition, will present a “burning bowl ceremony” during its 11 a.m. service Sunday at the Stella Adler Theatre, 6773 Hollywood Blvd. Participants will write down negative thoughts and activities on pieces of paper that will be burned, “establishing a clean slate for their lives in 1998,” said Doris Johnson, spiritual leader at Unity of Hollywood. (213) 936-1610.

* New Year’s Eve services will be conducted Wednesday evening at some churches, including a 7 p.m. concert of contemporary music and service at Lake Avenue Church, 393 N. Lake Ave., Pasadena. (626) 795-7221. In addition, a six-hour retreat titled “New Year’s Eve Sacred Time” will be led, starting at 4 p.m. Wednesday, by Sister Judith Fergus at the Catholic-run Center for Spiritual Development, 434 S. Batavia St., Orange. $40. (714) 744-3175.

DATES

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Deepak Chopra of La Jolla, the best-selling author of books on mind/body medicine, is scheduled to launch a six-evening UCLA Extension series of lectures on “The Human Condition on the Threshold of a New Millennium” on Jan. 29. The India-educated Chopra, author of “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,” will lecture on “The Role of Spiritual Values in Our Lives Today” at Veterans Wadsworth Theater in Brentwood. Later speakers will include former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, now a visiting professor at UCLA, and science writer-producer Ann Druyan. The Chopra lecture is $37. The entire series is $115. (310) 825-230.

FINALLY

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What’s in a religious label?

A high proportion of Protestant pastors nationwide describe their churches as “evangelistic,” “seeker-sensitive” and “multicultural,” said religious pollster George Barna of Oxnard.

Yet Barna said an August survey of 601 senior pastors--a representative sample from an estimated 325,000 Protestant churches in the United States--has indicated that the labels fall short of reality.

Ninety percent of the pastors in the survey called their church “evangelistic.” But Barna said his other national surveys this year showed that fewer than a third of churchgoers said they had shared their faith with a non-Christian in the previous 12 months.

Three of every five pastors said their church was “seeker-sensitive.” But the same survey of pastors showed that “just one out of four churches offer a weekend event specifically designed with the needs and perspectives of nonbelievers in mind,” Barna said.

“Incredibly, half of all the pastors interviewed--51%--claimed that their church is multicultural,” he said. “Recent Barna Research surveys, however, show that in more than 80% of the congregations of America at least 90% of the congregants are of the same racial group.”

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PEOPLE

The Rev. Frederick K.C. Price, founder-pastor of Los Angeles’ Crenshaw Christian Center, has been named one of 10 recipients of the 1998 Horatio Alger Award. Price’s independent Pentecostal congregation holds nationally televised services at the church’s 10,100-seat FaithDome in South-Central Los Angeles on the former Pepperdine University campus, which the church bought in 1981. The Alexandria, Va.-based Horatio Alger Assn., which honors “those who exemplify inspirational success,” will present the awards April 24 in Washington, D.C. Recipients besides Price will include Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson and Dennis Franklin Holt, chairman of Western International Media Corp. of Los Angeles.

* Father Gilbert Romero, an authority on biblical theology and Hispanic piety, will become the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese’s director for ecumenical and interreligious affairs at the start of the new year. Romero most recently finished nearly six years as a campus chaplain at Cal State Los Angeles. He will succeed Father Alfred Burnham of Culver City in the interfaith relations post.

* The Rev. John N. Langfitt will become the new executive officer for the Southern California Synod of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), effective Thursday. Most recently the synod executive in Kansas City, Mo., Langfitt is a graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary and was ordained in Los Angeles. He replaces the Rev. Steve Jenks, who served two years as interim executive in the Southern California synod’s Los Angeles office.