Muslim Community Leader Dies During Rammadan

Baruch Dayan Ha-Emet; Blessed is the Eternal Judge.

During the sacred month of Rammadan, the Muslim community in America lost a great spiritual leader.
At Duke, I was privileged to speak on a panel with Imam Mohammed and to meet him again when he later visited Smith.
For now, I am including an obituary by the Chicago Tribune, but will follow at a later time with personal reflections.
Rabbi Bruce

From the Chicago Tribune:
Imam W. Deen Mohammed, the rebellious son of the late Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad who broke from black nationalism and guided his followers toward mainstream Islam, died Tuesday, according to family members. He was 74.

As Muslims marked the holy month of Ramadan, Mohammed was scheduled to speak Tuesday in Chicago, but many grew concerned when he did not appear. His last speaking engagement was his regular monthly address delivered Sunday in Homewood, Ill., and aired to a live radio audience.

"He was a pioneer in the Muslim American community and was one of the first leaders to get Muslims to think about their faith in context of the larger society," said Rami Nashashibi, executive director of Inner-City Muslim Action Network in Chicago. "He was also a pioneer in getting Muslims to embrace their religious identity at a time when that wasn't very popular."

Mohammed succeeded his father in 1975 as leader of the Nation of Islam, a religious movement that melds black nationalism with the Islamic faith. He immediately tried to move its followers toward traditional Islam, eventually leading to a split between those who agreed with Mohammed's approach and those who joined a revived Nation of Islam under Minister Louis Farrakhan.

"He will be remembered as a person who brought the Nation of Islam carefully and consistently into mainline Islam," said Yvonne Haddad, a professor of the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University. "Eventually, he'd start talking about American Muslims -- how we can be Muslim and American at the same time."

In the later years of his life, Mohammed's profile diminished somewhat. He focused more energy into his nonprofit ministry, the Mosque Cares. He also worked on building interfaith relations, meeting with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in 1996.

Some saw his lessened visibility as the final steps in his efforts to restructure his organization into a loose group of organizations without a central charismatic figure.

Wallace D. Mohammed was born Oct. 30, 1933, in Detroit, the seventh of eight children of Elijah and Clara Muhammad. (He became known later as Imam Warithuddeen Mohammed.)

His father was a disciple of W.D. Fard, a door-to-door salesman who founded a small sect in that city known alternately as the Lost-Found Nation of Islam and the Allah Temple of Islam. Upon Fard's mysterious disappearance in 1934, Elijah Muhammad proclaimed Fard to be God, and he announced himself as his Messenger, a divinely inspired prophet.

W. Deen Mohammed was for many years an obedient son. He was the minister of the Nation of Islam's mosques in Chicago and Philadelphia in the 1950s. On his 28th birthday in 1961, Mohammed was sent to federal prison in Minnesota for refusing, on the basis of Nation of Islam teachings, induction into the U.S. military. While serving his prison sentence, Mohammed reevaluated his father's preaching.

Expelled from the Nation of Islam for criticizing his father's sometimes harsh doctrine, Mohammed supported his own family by driving a cab, doing welding, plucking chickens and working as a house painter and junkman.

Mohammed publicly begged his father's forgiveness. He was readmitted to the movement, only to be expelled several times again. He was finally restored to grace in 1974, only six months before his father's death.

Farrakhan was expected to succeed Elijah Muhammad. But a closed-door family council chose Mohammed to be the movement's chief imam. He began preaching a more universal religious message. He also cut back on the group's commercial empire, saying business ventures distracted the movement from its religious mission.

Mohammed's changes produced a backlash within the group, which he renamed the World Community of Al-Islam in the West. Subsequently, the name was changed several times again. Of all his innovations, the most costly in terms of lost followers was his rejection of black supremacy.

In 1978, Farrakhan broke with Mohammed and formed his own counter-movement. He revived the name Nation of Islam, saying he intended to follow the teaching of Elijah Muhammad.

Mohammed decentralized power within the movement, making each mosque autonomous. But he reacted impatiently when the other imams didn't more closely follow his path toward mainstream Islam.

"I have tried over the last 10 to 12 years to encourage them to get more religious education, but I have made no progress," Mohammed said upon resigning as head of the American Society of Muslims five years ago.

But most observers think the greater number of African American Muslims remained loyal to W. Deen Mohammed than to Farrakhan.

Despite their differences, Mohammed and Farrakhan reconciled in a series of joint appearances starting in 1999 and pledged to work together.

Mohammed also achieved several historic milestones for Muslim Americans. In 1992, he became the first Muslim to deliver an invocation to the U.S. Senate. In 1993 and 1997, he recited from the Koran at President Clinton's two inaugural interfaith Prayer Services.

Coming Together During Our Sacred Times

Over the past few days there has been a lot of criticism of His Holiness Pope BENEDICT XVI who seemingly attacked Islam in a talk with representative of science. Taken out of context, his quotation surely is an attack on Islam. But, my reading of the text makes it clear that the Pope does not agree with this statement. He introduces it twice--once historically and once critically. His historic quotation mention that both Christianity and Islam contain truth: " I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both." His critical introduction adds his feelings about the types of ciriticisms of Islam that were part of his talk: "Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general." (Boldness appears in Vatican Text edition).

That people would take the Pope's citation of an anti-Muslem text as an attack, even when he distances himself from it using strong language shows how fragile the relations are between Christians and Muslims. This relationship, weak as it is, is stronger than the relationship between Jews and Muslims. The strained relationship between Jews and Muslims is evident in popular media and in the media of both communities. Over the past week, I rebuked rabbinic colleagues for being overly critical of Islam. Instead of focusing on the positive and trying to build a better world, I had read a number of critiques of Islam in the mode of "my religion is better than yours."

This weekend starts the Holy Month of Rammadan and the Yamim Noraim--our Days of Awe. As the Shalem Center has been encouraging us for almost a year, we need to use this time to come together and not drift further apart. A holy teacher should be allowed to mention a text that he describes as different from his point of view. Even if he meant to use that text to portray Islam as he saw it, he should be allowed to make the comment (even if its use would break up a dialgoue). Staying true to one's faith is a prerequisite of any dialogue.

In this spirit, I offer my rebuke to my readers (It might not make perfect sense since the discussions are restricted to Rabbinical Assembly Members. Accordingly, I am sharing what I wrote and not what anybody else wrote):
"Today a group of Israelis, Palestinian, and Jordanian students came to talk at Smith. They are all current or former students at the Arava Insittute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura.
Arava is now an approved study abroad option for Smith students and they are traveling to campuses to promote their program.

The program started with a listing of the co-sponsoring departments and organizations at Smith College: Environmental Science and Policy Program, Jewish Studies Program, Department of Government, Hillel, the Offices of the Jewish and Muslim Chaplains, Al-Iman and Hillel at Smith, the Middle East Committee, and the Office of International Study. Talking to an overflow crowd, each of the students told their personal stories of how they came to Arava and what it has taught them about the environment, coexistence, and peace.

More importantly, they spoke about how they have learned about the other and developed first wary relationships and finally friendships with people who are just like them but come from the other side of a political/ethnic divide.

They also addressed the past summer's renewed conflict and how it impacts them individually and collectively. Muhammed--a graduate who is now doing a PhD in Kansas on political science--explained that this summer his families' house in Gaza was destroyed by aircraft. His mother is a UN employee, he is a peace activist, and other family members work for NGO's that deal with food and poverty. No member of his family is part of Hamas or any other group. He said it is justifiable and understandable for him to react out of his anger and for Israelis to react out of their anger, but in the end that only brings people farther apart. It feeds a cycle of hate. Instead, he focuses on the future by building relationships and working for peace one step at a time.

I don't want to deny that there are hateful Moslems. I have heard more than enough hateful Jews (sometimes even on Ravnet) to know that bad apples exist in all communities. And it is true that our community tends to push hatemongers to the fringe more than we have seen from Islamic leaders. But the Muslim leaders I work with day-to-day and the students I share meals with in Smith's kosher and hallal dining (where I will eat in a few minutes) do not promote hate. In fact, I have probably heard more Jews and Christians say hateful things on campuses than Muslims.

In this period of Elul, let's focus on how we can build a better world one step at a time. Colleagues justifiably argue that is not worth the time to reply to the Agudah bash of Conservative Judaism. I say do the same here. Find a Muslim and talk. Find a Palestinian and listen. Tell them your story and listen to theirs. Then focus on the future. If you can't find the right Muslims to talk to in your community, I am sure my colleague Al Hajjah Khalilah Karim-Rushdan (Chaplain to the College and Advisor to the Muslim Community) would be happy to be invited to your shul. She could also help me connect you with like-minded people in your community.

I just think there is too much work to be done to argue about how hateful Islam is and what one group of misguided students did on one campus.

Bruce (JTS '00)

Shanah Tova and (soon) Ramadan Mubarakh