The Muslim Mainstream
Islam is growing fast in America, and its members defy stereotypes
America's polyglot neighborhoods are home to Muslims of every conceivable background: Malays from Southeast Asia and Bosnians from southeast Europe, Songhai from the Sahara desert and Uighars from the Taklimakan desert. America is seldom so truly a melting pot as in her mosques. There is even a mosque on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico: Islam has a small but long-standing presence among Native American communities from the Plains to the pueblos.
Islam, which stresses egalitarianism, has a special appeal for the marginalized, but the faith draws many converts from the white middle class: More than 80,000 of America's Muslims are of West European background. When Mariam Agah (nee Mary Froelich) started questioning the faith of her birth, she was not only white and middle class--she was a Roman Catholic nun. At the age of 25, after seven years as Sister Frederick, she gave up her habit: "I was not convinced that Jesus was divine," she says, "and that's when I realized that I needed to leave."
That was 28 years ago. Agah got a job at an elementary school, and for a long time she taught and she thought. She read her way through many bookshelves of philosophy, and two works stood out: the Koran and the Autobiography of Malcolm X. "I continued my spiritual journey," she says, "and it led me to Islam."
Jim Bates is another unlikely convert. In 1990, after four terms as a Democratic congressman from San Diego, he lost an election--and also lost his marriage, his home, and his sense of direction. Born and baptized a Catholic, raised Protestant in a series of orphanages and foster homes, then a loose follower of Unitarianism for most of his adult life, at age 50 Bates found himself searching, he says, for a truth that would never slip away. He found it through the faith of Pakistani-American friends he'd made during his tenure in Congress. Now Bates spends much of his time consulting, and the rest farming hay and raising quarter horses on a ranch in Idaho.
Minister Louis Farrakhan, with his inflammatory racial comments, may be the Muslim leader most familiar to Americans. But he commands the allegiance of only a fraction even of African-American Muslims. His Nation of Islam today boasts only 20,000 to 50,000 members, says Prof. Sulayman Nyang of Howard University. The charismatic Farrakhan can attract huge crowds, as the Million Man March demonstrated, but few of those in attendance actually convert.
Instead, the man who attracts the greatest following among American Muslims--black, white, or Asian--is a moderate who has left behind the divisive doctrines Farrakhan upholds. Warith Deen Mohammed, an imam--leader of prayer--and the son and successor of the black separatist Elijah Muhammad, has up to half a million solid supporters, and perhaps 1.5 million followers more loosely affiliated. He has championed unity among Muslims of different races and made significant headway, though desegregation is still a work in progress. Two decades ago, he led most of his father's radical Black Muslim flock into the mainstream of moderate Islam, and into the mainstream of everyday American life. "I've become almost a fanatical supporter of the United States government," he told U.S. News. "To me, the vision of the Founding Fathers is the vision that we have in Islam."
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