Americans Facing Toward Mecca

Monday, May. 23, 1988 By RICHARD N. OSTLING

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Ogene Davis of Atlanta faithfully attended a black church through high school but became deeply troubled that "good" Christians could tolerate a socially and racially unjust world. "Christianity was not working for blacks," he concluded. Karima Omar Kamouneh (nee Virginia Marston) of Burbank, Calif., was raised by devout Episcopalians but felt plausibility was somehow lacking. "I had milked everything out of Christianity, and it still didn't make sense," she relates. Dawud Wong Chun, a Chinese American in Brooklyn, says simply that he thirsted for a "pious, virtuous, fruitful life."

For all three, the answer was Islam, a choice that until recently might have seemed highly peculiar. Despite 800 million adherents around the world, the faith of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an, the Muslim scriptures, has long been all but invisible in the U.S. More than that, it has been an object of misunderstanding and contempt. "Traditionally, there has always been a rather bad image of Islam in the West," says Ninian Smart, religion professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "In recent years," he adds, "that has been accentuated by the revolution in Iran and terrorism." Insists Dawud Assad, president of the U.S. Council of Masajid (mosques): "People call us terrorists, while ours is a religion of peace."

A steady trickle of homegrown converts has been joining a flood of immigrants to create a sizable American Islamic community. The number of Muslims among those entering the U.S. has doubled in the past two decades, and they now constitute 14% of immigrants. Adding to the total is the indigenous movement formerly known as Black Muslims. Once seen as heretical by orthodox believers because of the unconventional and antiwhite doctrines propounded by Founder Elijah Muhammad, the group has shed those teachings and gained recognition by mainstream Islam. With these trends and their high birthrate, U.S. Muslims are expected to surpass Jews in number and, in less than 30 years, become the country's second largest religious community, after Christians.

The quietly expanding scope of American Islam has become evident only as the result of new research. At a symposium at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Carol Stone, a doctoral student at Indiana University, estimated that there are 4,644,000 U.S. Muslims, with the largest concentration in California. The large majority of U.S. adherents are not affiliated with a mosque, but this is not for lack of opportunity. UMASS Historian Yvonne Haddad, who organized the Amherst sessions, counts more than 600 Islamic centers across the U.S.

Islam in America is not without its problems. "Hold fast to the rope of Allah and be not divided," urges the Qur'an, but in the U.S. that injunction has gone largely unheeded. American Islam is gravely weakened by divisions among nationalities: Egyptians worship with Egyptians, Lebanese with Lebanese. In some locations, separate congregations that use different languages share a building but have no joint activities. "There is no unified, strong Islamic movement in America," complains Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of Orange County, Calif. Coordination among U.S. Muslims is lacking even on something as fundamental as the dates for beginning and ending Ramadan, the month of dawn-to-dusk fasting that concludes this week.