500 Books on Islam Are Donated to CSUN

Cal State Northridge is receiving a gift of more than 500 books on Islam from the personal library of a retired Harvard scholar--enough, say elated CSUN scholars, to form the basis of a center for Islamic studies that might be the first in the area.

The news comes as Muslims in Southern California and around the world prepare to celebrate Eid al-Fitr today, beginning with several large prayer gatherings in the Los Angeles area that mark the end of the 29-day Ramadan fast, Islam’s holiest month.

The envisioned campus center--which still must be formally proposed to university administrators--would be an academic institution, not devotional. But new CSUN faculty member Amir Hussain said the books and papers of Wilfred Cantwell Smith will form a solid foundation for substantial studies of Islam.

They may be worth “tens of thousands of dollars,” Hussain said.

“Because of our budget restrictions, we’d never be able to get this kind of significant increase in holdings unless it was a gift,” said James Goss, president of the CSUN faculty and chairman of the religious studies department.

Goss said he knows of no existing university program in Islamic studies in Southern California. Cal State Northridge, with 10 full-time religious studies professors and a Jewish studies program, is believed to have the largest undergraduate enrollment in courses on religion in the state university system--more than 1,500 students each semester, including about 40 religion majors.

Goss and Hussain said that the new library resources will help not only to deflate old stereotypes of Muslims but also to enhance nontraditional intellectual approaches by Muslims to contemporary issues in western society, such as the role of women.

“There are some wonderful thinkers in North America who are challenging some of the traditional assumptions by Muslim scholars,” said Hussain, 32, who defies expectations himself.

Though he was born in Pakistan, his family moved to Canada when he was 4. A fan of music from jazz to country, Hussain recently wore a suit jacket with a short string of pearls hanging from his handkerchief pocket (a tribute to Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls”) and has four photos of music personalities on his desk, including one autographed by country singer Reba McEntire.

“I wrote to her about five years ago, telling her how much her album, ‘For My Broken Heart,’ helped me get through the death of my wife about the same time her [McEntire’s] band members were killed in an accident,” Hussain said.

Moreover, he said, “I see music as a way of looking at religiosity and religious expression.”

Hussain’s graduate studies in comparative religion at the University of Toronto led in part to the donation by Wilfred and Muriel Smith, fellow Toronto residents, to CSUN.

“He’s arguably the greatest Islamic and comparative religion scholar in Canada,” Hussain said of Smith, who created the Institute for Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Smith then spent two decades (1964-1984) teaching comparative religion at Harvard Divinity School. For nine years, he directed the school’s Center for the Study of World Religions.

The Smiths, now in their 80s and moving to smaller quarters, said they thought first of donating their books and articles to McGill or Harvard.

“But McGill already has one of the best collections on the continent” and Harvard has extensive library resources, Wilfred Smith said in a telephone interview.

Hussain, hired by CSUN last March, had dinner with the Smiths in early August and suggested donating the collection to the Northridge campus.

“We knew the books would be helpful to a library that was starting out,” said Muriel Smith, “and it would be nice for the Muslim community to have access to books about their own tradition.”

No reliable estimates exist of the Muslim population in the San Fernando Valley, although the Islamic Centers of Northridge and Reseda hope that several thousand will attend Eid prayers this morning at the Granada Hills mosque and the Odyssey restaurant.

Turnouts at Eid prayers, held in previous years on the CSUN campus, have run from 2,000 to 4,000.

During the Christmas break, Hussain went back to Toronto and packed 23 boxes with about 500 books--mostly in English but also in Arabic, Persian and Urdu--and 12 boxes of scholarly articles and reprints. They will be shipped to Northridge after they are appraised for tax purposes, he said.

“This is a tremendous collection of old and new books, many of them personally signed by colleagues who were influenced by Smith,” Hussain said.