Crossing and Reinforcing Borders of Religion andCulture

Discourses of Difference among US Muslims in the Mosque- Summer Satushek

“Recent border studies and theory fail to pursue the possibility that fragmentation of experience can lead to reinforcement of borders

instead on an invitation to cross them.”- Pablo Vila

Bellingham Association of Muslims member:“Islam and culture get mixed up. Like when I went to Palestine. My family is Palestinian. The

Quran says the headscarf is an obligation, for modesty. You start to wear it at puberty, when youbecome a woman. When I went to Palestine, I was 15, my relatives there were like ‘oh you are so

young. Don’t wear it. Not until you are older.’ and I was like ‘ but it says in the Quran.’”

Islamic Society Whatcom County member:“In Islam, unity is very important. I may not agree with everything that you do, but it is important

that we come together and pray.”

The shaping of Muslim identity in the US can be located in

the discourses and negotiations at the borders of religion

and culture. The continuity of a tradition of diversity and

adaptation to varying social contexts in the history of

Islam can be seen in these discourses, now taking place in

the US context. This point was brought to my attention by

participant observation with the community of Muslims in

Bellingham, Washington.

The discourse in Bellingham centers around the role and

function of the mosque in community. Since 2008, the

community in Bellingham has been divided into two groups for

the communal Friday prayers. The larger group, the Islamic

Society of Whatcom County (ISWC), operates a dedicated

prayer facility, and can be described as being more grounded

in a religious Muslim identity that is deeply intertwined

with the fibers of culture and tradition, especially culture

and tradition from Pakistan and the Hanafi school of law.

The members of the offshoot group, Bellingham Association of

Muslims (BAM), are claiming a new identity as “American

Muslims” – one that eschews the intertwining of religion and

culture in favor of a renewed textual interpretation on one

hand and a hybrid American cultural identity on the other

with a distinct understanding of separation between the two.

The site of dispute for these two expressions of identity is

located in a difference of interpretation of the correct way

in which the community should comes together for worship on

Fridays. The borders of religion and culture, deeply

imbricated in the appropriate manner of expressing faith in

community, is in question on two topics: 1) Is the khutba1 a

matter of worship(religion), as it is for the ISWC, or

practice(culture), as it is for the BAM, and (2 is gender

segregation culturally relevant or religiously proscribed?

1 The sermon or lecture given at the Friday communal prayer.

Border Studies Theory

In this article, I would like to bring borders studies

theory to bear on this topic. Border studies and theory has

been commonly used in the United States to explore identity

formation along the southern border as well as in

communities of immigrants scattered across the country.

While much of this work has focused on the real and physical

borders and the people who cross them, the work of others

has decentralized the notion of border, removing the binary

quality of the line, and introduced a theory of borders with

which to approach the human interactions and identity

building in diaspora. One method can be seen in the work of

David A. Chang. Chang locates nodes of interaction that form

where people are actively engaged in crossing cultural

borders. “Rather than studying places such as the U.S.-

Mexican borderlands as the region surrounding one border, we

can usefully conceive of them as nodes in a network of

global processes.” [Chang 384, 2011] Recognizing the

widespread effects of the powerful and evocative work of

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Chang

acknowledges, “scholars have since exploited its utility in

sites across the United States and the globe.” [Chang 385,

2011] “Borderlands history, by simultaneously refusing to be

limited by borders and refusing to ignore their power”

offers a challenging voice against homogenization of

experience while simultaneously making space for a global

dialogue, “making global history local and making local

history global.” [Chang 403, 2011]

Another voice for non-site specific applications of border

studies theory is scholar Lisa Lowe. Lowe astutely uses the

word intimacy to describe the connections, collusions and

collisions of people and empires from the four continents of

Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, Lowe locates the

sites of border crossing wherever people came together,

whether voluntarily or by force. In Lowe’s unpacking of the

terminology, intimacy comes to have three distinct meanings.

First is “intimacy as spatial proximity or adjacent

connection.”[Lowe 193, 2006] This type of intimacy can be

increasingly identified worldwide, and for my purposes,

throughout the immigrant population of Muslims in the United

States. Second, Lowe identifies intimacy in terms of

“privacy, often figured as conjugal and familial relations

in the bourgeois home, distinguished from the public realm

of work, society, and politics.” [Lowe 195, 2006] While this

distinction of intimacy can be connected with romantic or

sexual relations, it more constructively describes the

borderlands between the realms of private and public space.

Lowe’s third meaning of intimacies, describing “the sense of

intimacies embodied in the variety of contacts among slaves,

indentured persons, and mixed-blood free peoples living

together” [Lowe 202, 2006] brings to mind both the

experience of the diasporic immigrant, and his or her

continued longing or disavowal of the home country, and the

multicultural unions that form once disavowal has been

forced or voluntarily accepted.

Pablo Vila is one voice that might disagree with my

application of border theory to the borders of, in this

case, religion, culture, and gender. He cautions against the

ubiquitous-ness the term ‘border theory’ may take on when

applied beyond the regions of physical borders. If, “borders

are everywhere, the border-crossing experience is in some

instances assumed to be similar:… This approach not only

homogenizes distinctive experiences but also homogenizes borders.”[Vila

308, 2003] While I can concede to Vila in part, I cannot

fully agree for it is out of my range of experience not

having conducted research on a physical border, that there

may be a distinctive experience for those people living on

the border and a specific way in which border studies theory

may be applied in this situation. I submit that it is

foolish to throw away a fruitful application of theory that

may be applicable outside of the realm of its origin.

With appreciation for Vila’s caution, I will proceed to his

theory, which offers a valuable piece that is not often

found in border studies. “Recent border studies and theory

fail to pursue the possibility that fragmentation of

experience can lead to reinforcement of borders instead on

an invitation to cross them.” What does Vila mean by this?

With all the prevalence, and celebration, of ideas of global

connection such as cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and

even simple globalism, it is tempting to derive a utopic

view from border studies and to focus primarily on the

experience of the hybrid border crosser as the privileged

subject. These individuals are charismatic, successful, and

inspire a vision of a one-world future in which hybridity is

the norm and diversity is fully accepted. Missing from this

picture, however, is the experience of power; the power to

both define the border and the ‘other’ on the other side.

People negotiating their identity along border lines or

nodes are inevitably engaged in defining one version of

identity against the other. So, along with the power to

cross borders and define new and hybrid identities comes the

mirror impulse, to reinforce those same borders once a new

hybrid identity has come into shape.

The Community in Introduction

The first time I met members of the Bellingham Association

of Muslims (BAM) was on the occasion of the last breaking of

the fast (iftar) of Ramadan in 2010. The leadership of BAM

were Iman Ibrahim Salam, the acting president of BAM, and

her husband Monem Salam, in 2010 the vice president of

Islamic Investing at a local financial institution. They

managed the reservations of a space in a public meeting room

for communal Friday prayers (jummah) and for the breaking

of the fast and prayers during Ramadan.2 My connection to

this group was facilitated by a professor at Western

Washington University who teaches Islamic History. The

connection was through a young man; recently emigrated from

Egypt, the volunteer treasurer for BAM, and an employee at

the same financial institution as Monem Salam.3 2 The BAM formally organized under this name in 2010. Previously, the group had tried the name “Muslims of Bellingham.” The unfortunate acronym MOB rendered the name distasteful. BAM, however, didn’t prove to be much more satisfactory and so throughout the two years I spent talkingwith members of the Bellingham Muslim community at large, the group was often identified by their meeting place.

3 Saturna Capital is run by Nicholas Kaiser, a Bellingham WAnative. In 1984, Kaiser was approached by the North AmericanIslamic Trust, a Burr Ridge, Ill., group that oversees assets of the Islamic Society of North America, and the

After a few short emails had been exchanged I arrived at the

parking lot of the meeting space a little unsure of who I

was meeting and where. I followed a woman dressed in a long

black abaya and hijab and a child in a long white thawb up the

stairs to the upper level of meeting rooms and offices. When

I entered the upstairs room, I quickly realized that the

impression given by the woman and child I had followed in

from the parking lot was not representative. While a

majority of the women were wearing hijab, not all were and

each was dressed in a distinctive style. The styles I saw, I

would describe as ranging from a smart contemporary fashion

plus hijab, through traditional Pakistani shalwar and kameez

plus a loose scarf draped Benazir Bhutto style, all the way

to the Gulf Style black abaya and hijab. One of the younger

Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada,among other organizations, with a proposal to partner on development of a mutual fund trust. The result was Amana Mutual Funds Trust. It is the largest group of mutual funds run under Islamic principles open to the public in the world. Amana is the only one, out of seven, of the company’smutual fund trusts that is run under Islamic principles of investment. Amana Complies With Laws of Koran, By Ludwig Marek for Bloomberg News, Printed in the Washington Post July 10, 2005

women was wearing her green Muslim Students Association

sweatshirt. I was welcomed and invited to sit with a group

of women gathered at one side of the room.

I introduced myself as a student and as a person who wanted

to learn about Islam. The conversation that followed was in

part influenced by the date, the celebration of the end of

Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, was falling on September 11th this

year, in two days. The coincidence of Eid falling on this

date, and the resultant conversation, underscores the

saliency of this date and the impact it has left on the

lives of Muslims in America. Iman Salam spoke of the “19

people who hijacked” and “destroyed our religion” She

acknowledged the mainstream media conversation that was

asking questions about the sensitivity of Muslims

celebrating on the anniversary of this day, and she

responded thus, “if we don’t celebrate, it is like they (the

hijackers) won.” 4 A second woman, an elderly Pakistani

woman, interjected at this point, “but still, America is the

4 Author’s notes, September 9th, 2012.

best place to practice Islam.” After passing around a box of

dates to break the fast, the group reconvened in a second

room. Two carpets were laid out on the floor. The women

lined themselves up at the back of the first and the men on

the carpet in front of them. At the end of the evening, Iman

Salam offered me her contact information and invited me to

join them on Fridays for the communal prayer.

The woman in abaya also made an invitation to me. She

invited me to study Arabic with her, she is an Iraqi

national, and to meet her brother who was looking for an

American wife. I declined her second offer, but accepted the

first. In December of 2010, after a few meetings with her to

study Arabic, she invited me to attend the mosque. There is

only one location dedicated in the area as a mosque. I asked

her how it was going to be different than prayers on Friday

with BAM, and she said, “Its nice.” Clarifying this

statement by adding, “There is a space for the women.”

The renovated house is provided and managed by the Islamic

Society of Whatcom County (ISWC). For members of this

community it is called simply the mosque or the masjid;

sometimes the name is clarified with the location, Nevada

Street. There are no visible signs, either written or

pictorial, to denote the purpose of this small beige

building. My guide met me across the street from the mosque,

with a scarf in hand. Once inside, she took an abaya from a

hook near the door and dressed me in that as well. She

comments to the others, “She is so beautiful, because she is

so white.”

The women’s prayer space is small and spare. Just inside the

door and to the left is a washroom, which also serves as a

laundry room. The main room is carpeted on an angle with a

patterned carpet that marks out spaces for worshippers to

pray, side-by-side and facing in the direction of Mecca.

There are two more doors in the room on the front wall, left

and right. The door to the left is never opened, as it leads

to a hallway near the men’s washroom. The door on the right

opens into the main prayer room and is shielded by a screen

placed on the other side. The door was open when we arrived,

but before the sermon and prayers could start it was

suddenly slammed shut. From later experience, I learned that

the door would stay open unless the women were talking, as

they were on this day due to my arrival. The rather forceful

closing of the door hushed the voices for only a moment and

then some continued to talk while others exchanged

exasperated looks.

I was given two documents to take home from this mosque. One

of these, the “Assignments and Accomplishment Book for

students [sic] Islamic Society of Whatcom County,” is printed

by The Copy Source. The Copy Source is a local business,

owned by two brothers, one of whom is generally considered

to be the leading figure in the mosque. The text includes

instructions in etiquette related to the Qur’an, Muslim

dress and the mosque. It includes 115 prayers, in fully

voweled Arabic and in English translation, each with a cited

source reference. These are the “assignments” and each has a

space to write the date of the assignment, the date it was

accomplished, and the teacher’s signature. Near the back is

a log to record memorization and/or reading of the chapters

of the Qur’an and the date completed. Finally, there is a

list of “Some Good and Bad Qualities” and “Some Fortunate

People.” The second text I was given is titled, “What Every

Woman Should Know” by Abdul Hye, PhD. 5 This text is written

for female converts and aims to show the superiority of

Islam empirically through comparative analysis of Islam with

Judaism and Christianity mainly, but also Buddhism and

Hinduism.

My initial experience as an outsider with these two groups,

the BAM and the ISWC, was quite different. The prevailing

attitude in BAM was apologist. The story I was being told

was one of innocent and maligned American Muslims who are

working hard to lead good lives and to right the wrongs that

have been done to the good name of their faith. For this 5 Hye has published a number of texts including “Basics of Islam,” “Qur’an: Final Revelation,” and “Coran,” in Spanish with co-author Julio Cortes. These texts and more are published in Houston Texas.

group of people, I represented the dominant other, but one

whose interest in them they might be able to capitalize upon

in order to spread the word of their goodness and innocence.

The women of ISWC saw in me a potential sister. They

embraced me, dressed me, complimented me on my beauty and

whiteness and all in all tried to present a vision of a

united community in which women and family values are

cherished and honored.

The Sites of Contestation / A Split in the Community

Understanding the general character of these two sites of

communal prayer is instructive background before I delve

into the sites of contestation between the two groups,

especially as the difference is not readily apparent. Both

groups consist of a similarly diverse mix of ethnicities and

countries of origin. Both include members of all ages from

children to elders. Both include foreign-born immigrants and

first born Americans, although the BAM is weighted more

heavily towards the latter category, and men born in

Pakistan, are prominent leaders in both. One clear

difference is the contingent of Caucasian converts. Many of

them initially prayed with the ISWC, but all seem to have

since found their way to BAM.

In fact, many members of BAM at one time prayed with the

ISWC. For eighteen years members of the group that would

institutionalize as ISWC prayed together in a small rented

apartment. This space was only one room and only men prayed

there. In the summer of 2008, the renovation of a small

house was completed, with a great deal of community

involvement and volunteerism, and a space for women was

opened. It is precisely at this time in history that the

members who would institutionalize as BAM began praying in a

separate location. Gender inclusion and segregation being

one of the two primary sites of contestation, it is

interesting to note this timing. Just when a site for women

was opened in the established institution, a second

institution with a revised formulation of women’s roles

began to operate. Though different in scope, actually both

institutions were making a space for women in the Friday

prayer.

Gender Borders

I want to focus attention for just a moment here on three

American female Muslim voices; Amina Wadud, Asra Nomani and

Laleh Bakhtiar. Keeping these three in mind as

representative of some of the many ways women are engaging

with and reimagining the relationship between Islam and

gender, can help us to conceive of the social context for

the following discourses of disagreement. Amina Wadud is a

scholar of Islam. She published in 1999 a text entitled,

Quran and Woman; Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. In

this text, Wadud offers a new hermeneutic method that seeks

to find and interpret the female in the Qur’an. “One

objective behind my research was to establish a definitive

criteria for evaluating the extent to which the position of

women in Muslim cultures accurately portrays the intention

of Islam for women in society.” [Wadud ix, 1999] “The

confirmation of women’s equality that resulted from my

studies in the Qur’an was overwhelming.” [Wadud x, 1999] In

2005, Wadud led a mixed gender Friday prayer organized by

Asra Nomani. Nomani, a journalist, activist, scholar, and

subject of the documentary The Mosque in Morgantown, writes and

campaigns on the topics of gender, terrorism and the “soul

of Islam.” Together with Wadud and others, she has taken up

a “gender jihad” movement. Laleh Bakhtiar, while less of a

public figure than Wadud or Nomani, is important to note for

her translation of the Qur’an into English, the first by an

American woman6.

There has been no comprehensive study of mosques in the US

that can give us definitive data on the ways and means of

gender segregation within them. Judging by public discussion

and personal experience, my best guess is that the majority

incorporate some sort of physical divide between the

genders. In some cases this is a partial wall or screen, in

6 The Sublime Quran; English Translation, Laleh Bakhtiar includes a certification by al-Azhar University General Department For Research, Writing and Translation. Note that the certification, however, is a certification of the authenticity of the Arabic text, not the translation.

others completely separate rooms and entrances are used.

This is the situation at the Bellingham mosque where they

are following the Hanafi tradition as practiced in Pakistan.

Members of ISWC see gender segregation in the mosque as a

practice that is justified in two ways. One is that it is

useful for “concentration on God.” One man brought up the

mixed gender prayer led by Wadud. Without naming her or

Nomani he said, “In New York, there is a mosque where they

pray behind a woman…. If you go to the mosque and it is

mixed men and women, you won’t be thinking about god, you’ll

be checking out the chicks!” Although the event happened

only once, in his telling and remembering of it, it is so

important that it has become an ongoing event.

In addition to this problem of distraction, male members of

ISWC see a space for women as superfluous and potentially

even a cause of danger for her. A hadith7 from the collection

7 An account of an event in the life of Muhammad, or something he said, that has been verified for authenticity and recorded in a trustworthy collection of such accounts.

of Abu Dawood is recounted in which the Prophet Muhammad

says to a woman, “I know that you like to pray with me, but your prayer in

your room is better for you than your prayer in your courtyard and your prayer

in your courtyard is better for you than your praying in your house, and your

prayer in your house is better for you than your prayer in the mosque of your

people, and your prayer in the mosque of your people is better for you than your

prayer in my mosque.” Extrapolating from this hadith and from

the fact that communal Friday prayer is not a religious

obligation for women as it is for men, the space created for

women in the mosque is deemed as unnecessary, and therefore

a generous addition.

For the women who regularly attend, it is a welcome

addition. Women I spoke with there expressed gratitude at

having a space of inclusion. It is interesting to note,

however, that their numbers are very small, only 3 to 5

women regularly attend as compared to the average 30 male

attendees. This also contributes to the tense feelings

around the decision of inclusion or exclusion of women in

the mosque. A male member said, “The apartment didn’t have a

space for women. They complained and so now at the mosque,

they made a place for the women to come pray…but they don’t

come!”

The position of the members of BAM on women in the mosque is

a (con)textualist one. They look to the Qur’an and hadith

literature for direction, but they contextualize it with

information on the sunna of Muhammad and his companions.

Since the evidence shows that women prayed in the back rows

of the mosque during Muhammad’s lifetime, this for them is

the obvious choice. The hadith from the collection of Abu

Dawood, in their view, is seen to only by applicable in this

one case, with this one woman, else why would women at that

time still by joining the men in the mosque? The practice of

segregating the genders in this case is seen as a cultural

habit overlaid on the “true” and “pure” tradition of Islam,

with weak support from one hadith. The theme of “pure” or

“authentic Islam” as opposed to “cultural Islam” will be

revisited over and over again in BAM member’s arguments

against the practices of ISWC.

Adding weight to this argument, one of the young men who

acts as Imam for BAM, a young Egyptian graduate of al-Azhar

University, recites a story about a woman who was raped in

the early hours of the morning when she was on her way to

the mosque in Mecca to pray. The event was recorded as well

as the result; her rapist was caught and punished. The rape

itself is not the important point of this story. What is

important in the telling is that this event did not effect

any change in the habits of women to pray in the Mecca

mosque nor did it provoke Muhammad to suggest any change in

women’s attendance at the mosque. This story is recounted as

proof that the suggestions of some Muslims that it is better

for a woman to stay at home and pray than it is for her to

venture out to the mosque, is untrue. In the interpretation

of this account, the woman’s actions in the religious realm

are not contingent upon the harmful and dangerous acts of

others outside of the religion. The sort of cause and effect

logic, which would make women’s vulnerability a reason for

her to stay at home, is dispensed with. That the story shows

the dangers a woman was willing to risk in order to pray in

the mosque – in this case not even on a Friday afternoon,

but in the early morning hours – is in the eyes of BAM

members, is ample proof of women’s needs and rights to pray

in a sacralized space.

There is a second gender critique that comes from a member

of ISWC, which is that the president of BAM is a woman. “A

woman, she can be a leader,… for other women, but not for

men and women together.” In this statement, it is unclear

whether the ISWC member is extending the limitations on the

scope of women’s leadership beyond the religions realm by

implying that it is improper for a woman to lead any sort of

organization that includes men and women, or if he is under

the misapprehension that the BAM president is a religious

leader for the group. This disapproval of the female

leadership of BAM is particularly salient when one takes

note of a large critique that ISWC members level at BAM.

They are “called Bellingham Association of Muslims, but who

do they represent?!”

The role of the female president of BAM is as much a

statement as it is a practicality8. By her gender, she is

subverting visually and physically, perceptions of women in

Islam as weak, subservient, or oppressed. She is involved in

organizing and coordinating religious celebrations,

fundraising events, and volunteer opportunities. Her role is

performed primarily, however, as spokesperson for the

organization, and more broadly for “American Muslims.”9 8 There are issues of charisma and power structures, which Iwould love to, but cannot, go into deeply here, around the power couple Iman Ibrahim Salam and Monem Salam. While she takes care of the administrative side of the organization, he is the unofficial religious leader of the group. He leadsthe Friday prayers whenever he is not out of town for business or speaking at Islamic Society of North America conferences. They are also the subject of a documentary On a Wing and a Prayer: An American Muslim Learns to Fly. The film is built around Monem Salam’s dream to become a pilot and the expected resistance that he will encounter in post 9/11 America. While this is the premise and the hook of the film,the actual tone and content are set by the films portrayal of his family as a “normal American family” going about their normal lives. Iman also blogs and has made a trailer for a film entitled Faith Walks the Land, in which she is tryingto “justify my religion” to small town America. In 2011, theSalam family moved to Malaysia where Monem is now President of Saturna Capital’s Malaysian branch. Follow up research will show if the BAM group continues without them or not. 9 “American Muslims” is BAM members preferred moniker for themselves. They describe their identity as being

An interfaith gathering on the 10th year anniversary of 9/11

was one such opportunity. At this event members of a local

church and members of BAM came together to pray, to share

stories and to eat together. She spoke to those gathered on

that day of her gratitude to be accepted and seen, as an

American and as a Muslim, and for feeling, in this moment,

that she was not limited by the media representation of

Muslims. Interfaith and public gatherings are one way in

which BAM members, especially their leadership, take an

activist stance in making “American Muslims” visible and

having a woman in the most prominent position within the

organization directly inverts a common perception of Islam.

Language Borders

While I have yet to encounter scholarship by scholars of

Islam in the United States on the subject of the language of

the khutba, the talk that is given on Fridays during the

communal prayer, there is ample discussion available on

websites and forums by Muslims scholars. What seems to be at

“culturally American” and “religiously Muslim.”

issue amongst the members of the Bellingham community is

twofold. One is whether or not the khutba, delivered in any

language other than Arabic is valid, and the second is

whether or not the khutba is a part of worship or of

practice.

The ISWC follow the Hanafi school of law. Under Hanafi

ruling a khutba delivered in a language other than Arabic is

makhruh tahrimi; that means it is “an undesirable act,

bordering with the forbidden, though not clearly forbidden

by the law.”10 Abu Hanifa, the founder of the school, ruled

that delivering the khutba in a language other than Arabic

was discouraged but that it would be accepted as the

required precedent of the communal prayer. Students of

Hanifa interpreted the ruling slightly differently, saying

that the khutba in any language other than Arabic will not be10 The other three schools of Sunni law more strictly require that the khutba be in Arabic only. Only Abu Hanifa allows that it a khutba in a language other than Arabic will be accepted as part of the prayer. http://www.as-sidq.org/darusalam/friday.html - The Language of the Friday (Jumu’ah) Khutbah, Mufti Taqi Usmanihttp://islamicencyclopedia.org/public/index/topicDetail/id/607 - definition of makhruh tahrimi

acceptable as the required precedent of the communal prayer.

Only in the case where there is no one who can speak any

Arabic would it be acceptable by the law of necessity, and

it must be a very dire case to merit this measure, one in

which no Muslims present know any amount of Arabic. Although

there are a few members of ISWC who are native Arabic

speakers, they meet this requirement by having a student of

Arabic recite from a script. “The khutbas (sermons) given in

that masjid are sermons written in Arabic by our pious

predecessors and eminent ulama many years ago. Nothing is

added from our side”11

In fact the leadership of BAM look to Hanafi fiqh (law) as

well but in this case they have changed the terms of the

debate by discarding the description of the khutba as a part

of the prayer. This description, they claim is a “cultural”

innovation. One of the acting Imams for BAM says, “they

11 Talha Malji, a student/ scholar in the Deobandi traditionwho has traveled three times for the duration of Ramadan to assist and advise at the ISWC mosque. Masjid is another word for mosque, and uluma references the scholars of Islamic law.

wouldn’t say it is cultural,” speaking of the ISWC however,

“you only find it in one group of people.” At another time

when I had asked for clarification about the difference

between BAM and ISWC, I was told that, they (ISWC) practice

“immigrant Islam.” BAM members charge that ISWC members are

practicing cultural traditions that were allowed to seep

into the religion over time. BAM members see themselves

engaged in a practice of purified Islam. They are

consciously engaged in both sloughing off the traditions of

their parents and of their countries of origin and creating

clear demarcations between the realms of religion and

culture.

There are two pillars of the Friday prayer, Monem Salam

says. They are the two speeches and the prayer. What is

critical for his interpretation of the two pillars is the

separation between them. In Islam, he explains, there are

matters of worship and matters of practice. Worship consists

of two things only, prayer and fasting. Everything else is

practice and, while innovation is strictly forbidden in

worship, it is actually encouraged in practice. Utilization

of such strict separation between worship and practice

provides BAM (and American Muslims in general?) with a solid

framework upon which to build their “True Islam.”

The benefits of innovation in practice, such as reading a

sermon in English, are clear. From an outsiders view, this

act can be seen as an act of assimilation to the norms of

the nation. Transparency can also be claimed; outsiders

cannot accuse them of hiding what they are saying.

Accessibility for new converts, and curious students, is

another benefit. A sermon delivered by Monem Salam in 2010

plays to all of these benefits. He spoke in an informal way

about a speaker at a finance conference in Washington DC the

week before; the motivational talk was delivered by Dr.

Robert Cialdini on his theory of the “Six Weapons of

Influence” (Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social

Proof, Authority, Liking, and Scarcity) that make a person

successful. While listening to the speaker, Monem recounted,

he thought of the one human he knew who exemplified these

qualities – the prophet Muhammad. He went through the six

attributes, he no did not call them weapons in this context,

and gave examples from the prophet’s life for each. He

discussed how new research in such things as behavior

psychology can be seen to be true, because it was already

evident in the life of Muhammad and in Islam. Islam, he

said, provides the path to becoming a persuasive and

successful person and science is just now proving this

truth. Finally he said, people flocked to the prophet – one

by one at first, but then in greater numbers – whole tribes,

whole empires converted. It will be this way again in the

end times. People will see others joining and they won’t

want to be left out of Heaven.12 In this sermon, he rooted

science, capitalism, and the American dream in the prophetic

figure of Muhammad and in the practices of Islam.

The American Muslim Mosque

It is well documented in the United States that there is a

disconnect between what the mosque environment is providing

12 Authors notes October 22, 2010

and what the US Muslim community needs and wants from the

mosque. A 2011 study of The American Mosque shows that while

the number of mosques being built is steadily increasing,

the number of attendees is decreasing. The survey estimates

that less than forty percent of US Muslims attend Eid

celebrations, and only around 10% regularly attend the

communal Friday prayer. These numbers match my own estimates

for the Bellingham community.

Documentary films such as Nomani’s The Mosque in Morgantown,

and the forthcoming film Unmosqued, are two efforts to bring

attention to the problem, conceived as a disconnection

between the mosque leadership and the growing population of

second and third generation American Muslims, indigenous

Muslims, and converts. As it is in Bellingham, the borders

between religion and culture, as expressed through gender

inclusion/exclusion and the language of the khutba, are the

primary sites of contention. A paper by Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-

Allah, entitled Islam and the Cultural Imperative, also approaches

this topic. Written for an American Muslim audience, Abd-

Allah identifies the “mosque sub-culture” as “the biggest

challenge” for its ability to alienate “a substantial part

of the community.” [Abd-Allah 9, 2004] The solution, for

Abd-Allah and the creators of Unmosqued, is a conscious

creation of an indigenous American Muslim identity.

There is something in all of this debate that unsettles me.

This is why I have chosen the passage from Vila,

“fragmentation of experience can lead to reinforcement of

borders instead on an invitation to cross them.” In the push

to accommodate and include the second and third generation

immigrant Americans and the indigenous US Muslims, there is

a dialogue of othering that is taking place. Privileging

“American Islam” others the rest of Islam and implicitly

privileges American culture over the cultural and

traditional values of the rest of the world. Although this

is not a new story, but one common to the multi-generational

immigrant experience throughout US history, I want to be

careful to avoid in scholarship a blind privileging of the

hybrid border crosser without a recognition of the mirror

impulse, of the same hybrid, of border reinforcement.

In this case, members of BAM are actively promoting their

identity as ‘American Muslims’ to the exclusion of both

their relatives in their countries of origin and other US

Muslims who continue to express their faith through cultural

traditions from those countries of origin. Where it might at

first seem that they are examples of the quintessential

border crossers, of hybrid identity, I submit that there is

another side to this engagement with American identity. They

are also reinforcing borders within the Muslim community. I

believe that in an effort to rescue the reputation of their

religion, and to improve their own security as Muslims

living in the United States, BAM members are promoting a

discourse that places blame for negative aspects of Islam on

a cultural overlay. And they are placing this cultural

overlay onto “non-American” Muslims.

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Film Resources - - “On a Wing and a Prayer” Unity Productions in association with

Hand Crank Films Director Max Kaiser, 2009- Unmosqued The Movie Trailer, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=2d-ySfbhILQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player