A Collective Future

ATHENS – Two girls, kindergarteners at East Elementary School, are playing in the classroom. One of them is Muslima; the other is not. They are friends. But then the American girl says something to her Palestinian friend that really upsets her.

“My daddy said that the Muslims have destroyed America.”

The young Muslima came home in tears that day.

Her parents are friends of Loren Lybarger, a professor of world religions at Ohio University. They discussed the incident when Lybarger was visiting them. “They didn’t really know how to respond to it,” Lybarger said. “I think they are still shaping an idea of how to deal with the bad images that some people have of Islam.” But the misconceptions of Islam don’t discourage the family from practicing its religion.

Lybarger’s friends are part of the 1,4% of Athens County’s population that is adherent of Islam, according to the latest City Data statistics from 2002. Simply Map statistics show that 0,43% of the Ohio population is Muslim, which means that almost 50.000 Muslims live in the state of Ohio. Most of them live in Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo, where the third Mosque ever built in America is located.

The Islamic Center of Greater Toledo was established in 1954, and moved to a different, bigger location in Toledo thirty years later, after an increase of the immigration of Muslims in the sixties and seventies. On the online resource ToledoMuslims.com it is claimed that the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo is one of the grandest mosques of America.

One mosque that is not so grand, but nonetheless appreciated by its community, is the Islamic Center of Athens. Its facilities differ from the prayer hall to a library with books about Islam and even a small offer of housing. The Islamic Center also organizes events like lectures and discussions, and is the home of the Muslim Students Association at Ohio University.

One of the regular visitors of the Islamic Center is Mohamed, a junior in computer science at Ohio University with Algerian roots.

Mohamed spent his youth in various countries, due to his father’s job as an ambassador. He lived in Libya, Syria, France, Turkey, Algeria, and finally moved to America on his own for college in 2008, leaving his two sisters and parents behind in Algeria. Even though Ohio was different from the places he had lived, Mohamed didn’t experience a huge culture shock. “I had heard about America and the American lifestyle,” Mohamed explained. “And I knew people who lived in the United States.”

However, to the question what is different about America compared to Algeria, Mohamed responded with “everything.” He especially pointed out the different social rules. “In the United States, there is a very individual society. Everybody represents himself and you’re self-depending. The society I come from is a collective society where people rely more on each other and on their family.” Loyalty is an important value where Mohamed comes from. “In America, sometimes people get scared when you’re just being nice.”

However, Mohamed does appreciate the independency that people have in America. “Self-dependence is a good thing, as long as it’s to a certain height where you don’t become lonely.”

Specialists like Tariq Ramadan, a world known Swiss professor in Islamic Studies, perceive a silent revolution among Islamic communities in the West. Muslims, especially from the young generation, would seek ways to live in harmony with their religion within a Western context. As Ramadan said in one of his speeches in Austria: “I am a European by culture; I am a Muslim by religion; I am a European Muslim. This is home for me; this is home for you and this is home for us.”

Combining Islam as a religion and western culture does not necessarily have to be a hard thing, even though there are some contradictions between western and Islamic values, according to Mohamed. The ratio between Mohamed’s Muslim friends and his non-Muslim friends is about fifty-fifty. “Of course, I have some disagreements with others about certain habits, like the use of alcohol.” But Mohamed chooses not to argue about such matters. “I have other Muslim friends who get into a debate about it, but I prefer not to. First of all, I respect other people’s values. And second, I don’t think it will make a difference anyway. People are stubborn creatures.”

Nothing really hinders Mohamed to practice his religion, in which faith is most important to him. He practices the five pillars of Islam, which are Shahadah (the basic creed of Islam), Salah (the ritual prayer, that must be performed five times a day), Sawm (fasting during the month of Ramadan), Zakat (alms-giving) and Hajj (the pilgrimage in the city of Mecca). He usually prays at home, and at Fridays he goes to the Islamic Center for the weekly congregational prayer. “Before making the final decision to come to Athens for college, I searched if there was a mosque here,” Mohamed said. “Friday prayer is unmissable for me.”

Mohamed became a member of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) in his first year of college. He’s done volunteer work with the MSA for several times. As an example, he helped organizing a discussion evening with the church about Christianity and Islam. “I like being part of MSA,” said Mohamed. “It feels like being home.”

According to professor Lybarger, how and the extent to which Muslims practice their religion is influenced by the image that others have of Islam. This image has changed throughout the years, and so has the way Muslims practice their religion in America.

“All ethnic and religious groups that came to the United States – African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and Muslims – have had to be confronted with times of exclusion and racism in the beginning,” Lybarger said. “Especially when the first generation of Muslims came to America, they were seen as outsiders, as a different minority.”

In his book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, Tariq Ramadan wrote that the Western cultural universe was particularly “disturbing” for the first generations of Islamic immigrants. “It appeared that no customs or taste corresponded to those of their cultures of origin and, even worse, that there was hardly any respect for the traditional rules of Islamic morality,” Ramadan wrote. “The first and very natural reaction was to isolate themselves, either as individuals, as families, or as communities when they were able to organize themselves in a given place.”

Other Muslims, according to Lybarger, would try to hide their Islamic identity as a result of being seen as outsiders. Women would remove their scarves, men would shave their beards.” Lybarger once interviewed a Muslima from Chigago who was in her thirties. Her parents came to America in the sixties, and adjusted to the American way of life. “In my youth, I never learned how to speak Arab,” she had said. “We even celebrated Christmas at home.”

However, as more Islamic immigrants moved to the United States, organizations started institutionalizing Islam. The founding of mosques increased rapidly in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Councils that now have an undeniable influence on the American government arose, like the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Council on American-Islamic relations. The woman that Lybarger interviewed said that, with the increase of Islamic facilities in her environment, she rediscovered her religion.

“Especially since 9/11 the image that many Americans have of Islam has obviously become more negative,” Lybarger said. “Muslims are described as a problematic minority. You can read about it in the newspaper, see it on the television, hear people talking about Islam in a negative way.”

Mohamed remembers being discriminated in his first year of college. “I lived on campus with two American roommates,” he said, “and after less than a quarter they said I had to move out because I was a Muslim. I didn’t ask them why they had a problem with my religion. I didn’t want to know; I didn’t care. The next day I moved out.”

“Especially young American Muslims feel the urge to openly respond to these experiences of exclusion to defend themselves,” Lybarger said. Many do this by reinforcing their identity. They do go out and wear a hijab; they do fast during Ramadan while their non-Muslim colleagues are having lunch. Also, Islamic organizations organize numerous events in order to create more understanding about what Islam really means and to stimulate discussion and cooperation.

“Instead of isolating themselves from the western society, American Muslims engage in society,” said Lybarger. “I think that is the best way to fight Islamophobia. Especially with flair-ups like the Ground Zero debate or that lunatic in Florida who wanted to burn Korans, there is no choice but to stand up and inform people about the true nature of Islam.” Or, as Mohamed said it more straight on: “Americans should know that Islam is not related to terrorism.”

Lybarger expects that, if people continue to hold such negative attitudes towards Muslims, along with military aggression abroad, the existence of Muslims will be seen as a threat. “With two wars ongoing and no end in sight, I don’t see an end to this anytime soon,” Lyberger said. And that will continue having an impact on Muslims reinforcing their religious identity, standing up, getting involved in society and forming a political force. “That doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, because this will create more understanding of Islam in the long run.”

This kind of involvement can only be realized with the engaging characters of American Muslims, like professor Lybarger’s friends from Palestine, who have approached their daughter’s elementary school about teaching Arab; or Mohamed, who volunteers for the Muslim Student Association in Athens to create more awareness of Islam.

“Whatever the future is,” Lybarger said, “I prefer not to speak of the future of Muslims, but of the collective future of us Americans. There are more than one billion Muslims in the entire world. Are we going to continue in the West to think of them as a single entity that is a threat to the West? That is absurd, ridiculous and dangerous. We need to be thinking more collectively about what is our shared future with Muslims.” According to Lyberger, we have come control of that. We are going to determine that in how we decide to relate to one another.

“Muslims contribute to whatever it is what we are as Americans; and what that is, is constantly changing. New groups become members of our society and contribute their heritage and shape the culture,” Lybarger said. “America, with its long history of immigration, has the capacity to be open to that.”

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