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VirtualMosque.com aims to stay at the forefront on the issues that face American Muslims. In recent months, due to sad events that have happened in our homeland and internationally, Muslim organizations have taken a lead in combating what has been termed “the radicalization process” amongst Western Muslims. We invited leaders from a spectrum of Muslim organizations to talk about this issue; perspectives ranged from organizations taking the stance that dealing with “Muslim youth radicalization” is part of serving our country and protecting her citizens, to other voices who did not agree with what they saw as a blanket accusation of an entire community.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Imam Mahdi Bray

Imam Mahdi Bray is a long time civil and human rights activist currently serving as the Executive Director of the Muslim American Society’s MAS Freedom (MASF) based in Washington, D.C. Bray also serves on the Board of Directors of the Interfaith Alliance, the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice and is a National Co-convener of Religions for Peace USA.

Omer M. Mozaffar

Omer Mozaffar is an Asian Classics Curriculum instructor at the University of Chicago and the Director of higher studies for the Islamic Organization of North America. He is also a film reviewer for rogerebert.com.

Haris Tarin

Haris Tarin is currently the Director of the Washington DC office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). He is currently pursuing his graduate work at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.

Wajahat Ali

Wajahat Ali is a playwright, journalist, attorney, humorist and consultant. His play, “The Domestic Crusaders” is one of the first major plays about the American Muslim experience. His blog, “Goatmilk: An Intellectual Playground” is ranked in the top 7% of all political blogs by blogged.com.

Reem Salahi

Reem Salahi is an activist and attorney specializing in national security and civil rights.  She is a member of the National Lawyers Guild and the President of the Muslim Bar Association of Southern California (MBASC). Reem hosts a weekly internet radio show with One Legacy Radio called Objection! where she examines civil rights, national security and foreign policy matters streaming at www.onelegacyradio.com.

Haroon Moghul

Haroon Moghul is the Executive Director of the Maydan Institute.  He is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, focusing on Islam in the Indian Subcontinent.  He is a freelance journalist, author and essayist.

Hussam Ayloush

Hussam Ayloush is the current Executive Director of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He frequently lectures on Islam, media relations, civil rights, hate crimes and international affairs.

Originally Published as an Op-Ed Article in the New York Times.

Just hours after the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as Muslims, Representative Peter T. King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, called for an “increased surveillance” of Islamic communities in the United States. “I think we need more police and more surveillance in the communities where the threat is coming from,” he told National Review. “The new threat is definitely from within.”

Mr. King’s hypothesis, and the widespread surveillance policies already in effect since 9/11, assume that the threat of radicalization has become a matter of local geography, that American Muslims are creating extremists in our mosques and community centers.

But what we’re learning of the suspects, the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suggests a different story, and one that has itself become familiar: radicalization does not happen to young people with a strong grounding in the American Muslim mainstream; increasingly, it happens online, and sometimes abroad, among the isolated and disaffected.

The YouTube page of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, for example, does not contain a single lecture from a scholar, imam or institution in America. One report suggests that he found the theology taught in a local Cambridge mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston, unpalatable: while attending a Friday service in which an imam praised the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Tsarnaev shouted that the imam was a “nonbeliever.” The younger Tsarnaev brother seems to have rarely attended a mosque at all.

Representative King’s theories also fail to explain why, if young people are being radicalized within mainstream Islamic communities, there aren’t more attacks like the one in Boston. By some measures Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, and the last decade has seen a rapid expansion of Muslim institutions across the country.

Yet what’s most obvious to anyone who has spent time in these communities is that whether they are devotional or educational, focused on the arts or on interfaith cooperation and activism, this mediating set of American Muslim institutions is keeping impressionable young Muslims from becoming radicalized.

Take the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center and its range of devotional, arts and educational programs, from preschool to a seminary. Or Chicago’s Inner-City Muslim Action Network, complete with a medical clinic, civic leadership education and a summer music festival that draws on the biggest names of Muslim hip-hop to promote peace through community organizing. Or Zaytuna College in Berkeley, Calif., the nation’s first four-year Islamic liberal arts school.

These institutions and others have different aims, but they abide by a common idea: if the center of Judaism is the law, and the heart of Christianity is love, what Islam requires, above all else, is mercy. And whether on display in health care provided for the poor at South Los Angeles’s UMMA Community Clinic, or in a patiently handled Arabic lesson that will one day lead a new convert into the fullness of the tradition, Islamic mercy, preached and practiced within the community, allows no room for radicalization.

Representative King and others have it exactly, completely wrong — the American Muslim community has actively and repeatedly, day in and day out, rejected such radicals on religious grounds: they do not know mercy.

More than a decade since 9/11, this should no longer be any secret. Across the nation, the doors are open, and more are opening every day. And despite whatever misplaced fears the Boston bombings evoke about radical Islam and homegrown terror, we’ll all find ourselves increasingly secure as more Muslims heed the call — coming to Islam as it is in the United States, as a real, living community.

Suhaib Webb is the Imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. Scott Korb, who teaches writing at New York University and the New School, is the author of “Light Without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College.”

OPEN TOWN HALL

Topic: Muslim Youth Radicalization?

February 20, 2010 | 7pm (PST)

Speakers include:

Wajahat Ali :: Lawyer and Writer, goatmilkblog.com

Haroon Moghul :: Writer and Executive Director of the Maydan Institute

Imam Mahdi Bray :: Executive Director, MAS Freedom Foundation

Haris Tarin :: MPAC-DC

Reem Salahi :: Lawyer and Community Activist

Omer Mozaffar :: Instructor, University of Chicago

Hussam Ayloush :: Executive Director, CAIR-LA

Register Now

:: Sponsored by SuhaibWebb.com (VirtualMosque.com) and One Legacy Radio ::

SuhaibWebb.com (VirtualMosque.com) aims to stay at the forefront on the issues that face American Muslims. In recent months, due to sad events that have happened in our homeland and internationally, Muslim organizations have taken a lead in combating what has been termed “the radicalization process” amongst Western Muslims. We have invited leaders from a spectrum of Muslim organizations to talk about this issue; perspectives range from organizations taking the stance that dealing with “Muslim youth radicalization” is part of serving our country and protecting her citizens, to other voices who do not agree with what they have seen as a blanket accusation of an entire community.