Writings

I wrote this unpublished article in 2008, shortly before leaving for London. Multiple people told me it lacked nuance. It wasn’t really imaginative. It was just reporting for the masses. Do the masses need it, anymore?

A New ‘Radical’ Islam: The Progressive Muslim Movement

Sally A. started hating Islam when she was nine. “No good Muslim woman would report her husband to the police for beating her,” she heard a teacher say in a Friday sermon at the Al-Ghazaly Islamic school. That was her teacher’s modern-day, Jersey City, New Jersey, spin on a verse in the Quran, the Islamic holy book, that is sometimes controversially interpreted as assigning men the duty to discipline their wives—by force, if necessary. Aboelela told her parents, recent immigrants from Egypt, and though they were shocked by the sermon, they continued sending her to Al-Ghazaly.

So like many American teenagers, Sally A. grew up skeptical, rebellious, and spiritually adrift. But in the midst of a depression in her late 20s, she revisited Islam. What she found was the Progressive Muslim movement, an infant campaign being launched on email groups, websites, and at meetings in Los Angeles and New York. Islam, organizers say, can help empower women, promote equality for gays and lesbians, and fight religious and racial intolerance. And young American Muslims like Sally A. —searching for an alternative to the screeching Islamophobia of Fox News personalities and the brute traditionalism of their parents’ mosques—are flocking to the message that Islam is an agent of progressive social change.

“Muslims are allergic to the word reform,” said Kareem Elbayar, a board member of Muslims For Progressive Values, or MPV, which with more than seven hundred members, is the largest active progressive American Muslim organization. MPV’s guiding principles say Islamic texts must be interpreted to reflect the basic Islamic principles of tolerance, compassion and fairness. “We are returning to the fundamental, original message of Islam, which is inherently progressive,” said Elbayar. “We are not trying to ‘reform’ anything, we are trying to restore our faith.”

Their numbers are small—there are an estimated 2.4 million Muslims in the U.S., and MPV’s list-serv claims only about 200 members. But the movement is growing as disaffected young Muslims search online for alternatives to local mosques.

In New York, the MPV offshoot Progressive Muslim Meetup has drawn more than 600 members through the Meetup.com social group networking site, and about a dozen to three dozen attend its weekly events: Saturday coffeehouse socials in Greenwich Village and trips to the Independent Film Center to see documentaries on Iraq and Islam. And every Friday night, in a children’s classroom rented from the Unitarian Church in midtown Manhattan, members debate topics ranging from the Quranic perspective on animal rights to the Obama-Muslim smear campaign.

At a May meeting, a motley crew of men and women, 40-somethings and 20-somethings, Arab, South Asian, African and African-American in ethnicity, sat cross-legged in a loose circle of chairs. None wore headscarves, almost everyone wore jeans, and one sported a Yankees hat with dark blue Converse sneakers. The topic for the night was women’s rights in Islam, and Aboelela brought up the same Quranic verse her schoolteacher had interpreted as permitting domestic violence. While other members pointed out the potential mistranslation—the Arabic word “adriboo” used in the verse has multiple meanings, “to beat” and “to avoid” among them—Aboelela voiced impatience. “Can I just say, that verse is just not relevant to my life?” she asked. “Can I say that and still be a Muslim?”

The chorus answer? A decided maybe. “We can all agree that the Quran tends toward male superiority,” a gray-haired Pakistani said, his arms folded over his chest. “But does the Quran give us leeway to change the rules?”

There is no central Islamic religious authority, like a pope or orthodox church, that can claim to definitively answer questions like Aboelela’s. Progressive Muslims argue that Islamic texts are thus open to dynamic and critical interpretation, even by non-scholars. In the past two centuries, anti-imperialist Muslim activists in South Asia, Africa and the Arab world have argued similarly: Islam was traditionally a force for radical social change. The Prophet Muhammed’s message that girls could veto the marriages arranged by their fathers was wildly progressive for its time. But today some in the Islamic clergy (and, of course, religious extremists), are trying to barricade Islam from modern re-interpretation.

“The Quran is a book for all times and all people,” said Ani Zonneveld, the president of MPV and organizer of the Los Angeles Progressive Muslim Meetup, which hosts similar meetings once a month. “We can’t play hip hop because the Prophet didn’t listen to it 1500 years ago? Let’s live in the twenty-first century, shall we?”

Zonneveld and other organizers argue that conservative pundits have unfairly characterized Islam as inherently misogynistic and violent. Ironically, that media portrayal, and the 9/11 attacks, led Muslims like Mohammed Siagha to investigate Islam for the first time. A half-Palestinian man raised in the Fort Greene Projects of Brooklyn by his Colombian mother, he was interrogated by the FBI in 2001—a school security guard, he’d been in the habit of flashing peace signs to kids in the hallway and believes that’s what provoked the interrogation. That experience, he said, made him “stumble for a while.”

So he checked a Quran out from his local library and began reading it for the first time. He visited several Manhattan-area mosques, including the one in Harlem opened by Malcolm X. But, said Siagha, “people weren’t open, they didn’t say hello, or I didn’t speak Arabic.” He started going to the weekly Friday night discussions to find “the real ideas” of Islam, he said.

Fatima Davis also turned to the New York Meetup out of frustration with traditional mosques. Returning home after six years in uniform as a Navy gunner stationed in the Middle East, she bristled at being told what to wear by members of her African American mosque in Brooklyn: no earrings, because they drew attention to her face, and no nail polish, because then God wouldn’t accept her prayer. “It became too insane to me,” she said.

MPV hasn’t yet provided people like Davis an alternative mosque, it has no plans to take over or leaflett traditional mosques. But organizers say they plan to open an office, including meeting and prayer space, in L.A. in September 2008, and that they ultimately envision the construction of  ”spiritual spaces” that would host art exhibits, poetry readings, and music shows.

For now, New York’s Progressive Muslims meet in places like Dojo’s, the thrifty East Asian-ish diner in the West Village. Over a soy burger with ginger-tahini dressing, Davis explained to other New York Meetup members that her headscarf style—folded in a sort of trapezoid above her ears, and clearing her neck—was inspired by the heat of the day, the first 90 degree day of the summer. It was her first meeting, and she recalled that she had found it by typing “woman Imam” on Google. “It took,” she said, “forever to get here.”