U.S. Muslims Struggle for Political Unity

When a coalition of Muslim American leaders delivered its first unified presidential endorsement this week--backing Republican candidate George W. Bush--the move marked an important moment in the community’s long struggle for unity and a greater presence on the American political stage.

“There is a tremendous awakening in our community,” said Saed Moujtahed, 39, a Syrian-born entrepreneur. Once politically apathetic, he intends to back Bush and has put his telecommunications business on hold to raise more than $80,000 in his first political campaign ever, supporting San Jose Republican Rep. Tom Campbell’s bid for the U.S. Senate.

The potential size of the Muslim voting population in America is unclear. Estimates of the Muslim American population range from a few million to 10 million, with anywhere from 22% to 42% of them African Americans.

Despite the promise, the effort to unify that vote has not been without obstacles. Disagreements with the endorsement from African American Muslim leaders, most of whom support Democratic nominee Al Gore, highlight a division within the community.

And within days of the endorsement, both the Bush campaign and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s New York Senate campaign said they would return contributions from two groups in the Muslim coalition--the American Muslim Alliance and the American Muslim Council. Both campaigns said they objected to statements the groups’ leaders had made about the Mideast.

The dispute over the statements began with a New York Daily News article recounting remarks made a few years ago by Agha Saeed, a UC Berkeley political science professor and chairman of the Muslim Alliance.

Saeed had supported a 1975 United Nations resolution affirming the right of resistance, including armed force, for Palestinians and others living under occupation.

The attacks on his remarks were engineered as a “backlash from the pro-Israel lobby to keep us out of politics,” Saeed objected. “This is Islamophobic McCarthyism, and we have every intention of fighting it.” Saeed has been a driving force behind the coalition, the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council.

‘Invited to a Table With No Food on It’

The internal division was highlighted when the nation’s largest African American Muslim organization was not included at the podium when the coalition’s endorsement of Bush was announced.

“We felt slighted,” said A. Ali Khan, who heads the political action arm of the Muslim American Society, a largely African American organization headed by Imam W.D. Mohammed. “It was like being invited to a table with no food on it.”

The slight was the unintended consequence of miscommunication, leaders of the coalition said, and the two sides quickly made up and appeared together at an evening forum that day.

But the incident made clear that with a diverse community of immigrants from more than 50 countries and a sizable African American population, creating a Muslim bloc vote will be no easy task.

“Muslims are fiercely independent in our thinking,” said Khan, adding that such attitudes are embedded in the non-hierarchical character of Islam itself.

Unlike Jews, who have overwhelmingly voted Democratic for decades, Muslims face an immediate stumbling block in their quest for political unity: the social, cultural and political differences between immigrants and their African American brethren.

Differences in political attitudes are readily apparent. The immigrant-led Muslim organizations that endorsed Bush this week said the decision was based on grass-roots feedback from straw polls and town hall meetings. But the views are decidedly different among African Americans: Khan said a survey of 5,000 members of his group in seven major cities showed that 84% supported Gore, compared with 9% for Bush.

The Muslim leaders who endorsed Bush lauded the Republican’s accessibility to them, saying Gore has not responded to their invitations to meet. But the vice president has met twice with Najee Ali, a leading African American Muslim activist who heads Project Islamic HOPE in Los Angeles. Gore also included Mohammed of the Muslim American Society in a conference call with clergy leaders last week.

Political priorities are different too. In their endorsement, the immigrant leaders cited Bush’s responsiveness to their concerns over the use of secret evidence in deportation cases, a provision in U.S. immigration law that has been employed almost solely against Muslims and Arabs. That issue, however, is not a burning priority among most African Americans.

What is? Jobs, education, affirmative action and “other things that have to do with poor folks,” said Imam Haroon Abdullah of Masjid Al-Shareef in Long Beach, who expects to vote for Gore.

When Ali met with Gore, he raised the issues of hate crimes, civil rights and the AIDS epidemic in Africa. He cares about the Mideast, Ali says, but wonders, like many African American leaders, why Muslims raise millions for those suffering in Kosovo, Chechnya, Palestine or Iraq--but not in Africa.

Political Tactics Have Differed

Political strategies have also differed. Some African American leaders believed it was a mistake to hold a recent protest rally in front of the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles--a sure-fire way, they thought, to alienate American Jews rather than try to stir their compassion for the plight of Palestinians. But they say they were not consulted on the planning of that event or many others.

Such apparent exclusion has pushed one prominent African American imam, Saadiq Saafir of the Ilm Foundation, to step back from efforts to forge unity with immigrant leaders. Active in such efforts for two decades, he recently canceled his scheduled appearances at a Muslim political conference in Irvine and at pro-Palestinian rallies because, he says, he no longer wants to give credibility to events that fail to include other African American leaders.

“The problem has been that these people make decisions and expect us to rubber-stamp them. We want to be called in at the first meeting and come away with a joint decision,” said Imam Karim Abdul Hasan of the Bilal Islamic Center in Los Angeles. “We are not going to be boys for anyone; we’re going to be men for ourselves.”

For their part, immigrant leaders are quick to acknowledge the problems. Most say they reflect unfortunate but inevitable growing pains that will fade with time, especially as their American-born children are raised side by side with Muslim Americans of every stripe.

At the recent political conference in Irvine, Salam Al-Marayati and Maher Hathout of the Muslim Public Affairs Council urged the establishment of a formal process to bring immigrants and African Americans together regularly to narrow the gap between them. Hussam Ayloush of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, whose organization boasts board members of all backgrounds, said he is already beginning to see the problem fade among younger leaders, along with a shift of political priorities toward domestic issues such as crime and education.

Indeed, Khan said the Muslim American Society is planning to sign on soon with the political coordinating council.

Despite the setbacks, Muslims say, their political awakening and eventual unity will not be stopped.

“We are evolving,” said Shabbir Mansouri, an Islamic educator in Fountain Valley. “Allow us as a community to grow, make mistakes, even. Eventually our issues will converge in a major way.”