The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has provided American Muslims with a unique opportunity to put our faith into practice: signing up for health insurance helps us to look after our own health more productively, as well as the health of others in our community.

It is narrated in a hadith (narration) of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (peace be upon him) that “Your body has a right over you,” (Sahih Muslim). In other words, Allah has blessed and entrusted us with a physical body, and we have an obligation to take proper care of it. Indeed, dietary restrictions and the instructions to perform ablutions before any prayers indicate the importance of maintaining one’s physical health. By having the proper tools, such as health coverage, one can better afford routine appointments with primary care physicians, who can provide important advice on maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Health insurance also makes preventive services such as cancer screenings more affordable, so that many cancers can be detected and treated before they become dangerous. Thus, taking care of one’s own health is a way of giving thanks to God for His gifts.

In addition, Islam stresses the importance of looking after others in society. The Qur’an says, “They ask you as to what they should spend. Say: Whatever wealth you spend, it is for the parents and the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer, and whatever good you do, God surely knows it,” (Qur’an 2:215). Many Muslims receive health insurance through a spouse or parents; thus, buying a health insurance plan enables Muslims to provide healthcare access to their entire family. The ACA makes this process easier by allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until they are 26 years of age, and making it illegal for insurance companies to charge men and women different premium rates.

Finally, it is the responsibility of American Muslims to look after our community’s well-being. Thus, signing up for health insurance is critical to our community’s long-term prosperity in the United States. It is narrated to us in another hadith of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ that, “The believers, in their mutual mercy, love and compassion, are like a (single) body; if one part of it feels pain, the rest of the body will join it in suffering,” (Sahih Bukhari). Inadequate insurance coverage can lead to severe financial hardship when disaster strikes, and medical bills are the most common cause of bankruptcy in the United States. As a relatively small community in America (Muslims are roughly 1% of the U.S. population), it hurts us all when even a single brother or sister faces financial trouble. If we want to contribute to American society we can start by signing up for health insurance and protecting ourselves against financial ruin.

We urge all Muslim Americans to at least become better informed about their options. It is also important to note that signing up for health insurance is not in and of itself enough to improve one’s health; indeed, one must take personal responsibility for one’s health and make sure to keep regular doctor’s appointments, take appropriate medications, and follow nutritional guidelines, among other things. Visit www.HealthCare.gov for more information or to sign up for health insurance today.

Photo: Nathan Rupert

The Muslim world right now is undoubtedly going through some major tests and hardships. We pray that the Muslim lands will be blessed with justice, peace, sovereignty,comfort and civility. In countries with a Muslim minority, we see the constant persecution of Muslims in Myanmar; in China they are prevented from fasting Ramadan and taking children to Mosques; the two million Muslims in Moscow have only been allowed to build 5 mosques and in France they are prohibiting women from their choice in dressing modestly.

Here in America there are some attempts to scare Muslims with anti-shari’ah law bills. These witch-hunt bills will not be able to hinder the rights of Muslims to practice and promote their faith thanks to those brave revolutionaries who fought to give us freedom from the tyranny of Britain. Those Founding Fathers intended that this country would first and foremost be a place where all people would be free to practice and preach their religion, while the state would not be able to adopt or enforce any religion.

When the Founders suggested defining religion as authored by Jesus Christ, Thomas Jefferson made a motion which garnered support of the majority to remove such specification in protection of the rights of the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindu and Infidel of every denomination.

Then we have Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote: “[…] so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”

As a result, the United States is one of the best countries in the world for observant Muslims to live and prosper. We are very blessed here and that is definitely something to cherish and be happy about.

Celebrating national holidays is a matter over which our scholars have differed. There is a group who prohibits it since the Prophet ﷺ (peace be upon him) taught that we only have two holidays; thus, they say that Independence Day is obviously a holiday not approved by the Prophet ﷺ, and therefore it should be prohibited.

The other group of scholars permits it saying that the Prophet ﷺ was talking about celebrating a religious holiday. They contend that he was not referring to customary occasions not related to worship or celebrating a specific religion.

The Prophet ﷺ prohibited innovation and called for its rejection—“Whoever innovates something in “this affair of ours” that which is not from it will be rejected.” “Whoever does an action not in accordance “with our way” then it will be rejected.” All scholars interpret the portion of these hadiths (narrations) “in this affair of ours” and “in accordance with our way” as referring to Islam. Thus the meaning is whoever would innovate or institute something in religious worship that is not Islam whether it is made up or taken from another religion then it will be rejected.

I will conclude with a story from when I lived in Sunrise, Florida where there are close to a thousand Muslims in a village of almost 90,000 people. A few years ago in June, I met with a city councilman asking what we could do with the city in order to give better exposure to the Muslim community in light of the rise of Islamophobia. He said that he could get our Mosque a spot in the 4^th of July parade. That turned out to be a big opportunity for our community through which we got great exposure. It really helped people to see Muslims as Americans just like anyone else with their own distinct faith and values.

By Salman Khan

Lyndon B. Johnson, our 37^th President, sought to establish the Great Society. It was his vision for the future of America, a place filled with equality not only racially, but economically and socially. It entailed the passing of one of the most ambitious and comprehensive programs the country had ever seen, comparable only to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. LBJ had good intentions, and he fought tirelessly for this grand vision. All was going well, except for one thing. The war in Vietnam under Johnson was going horribly. Although he ran on an agenda of peace, he escalated the war tremendously. Ultimately and really regrettably, his foreign policy blunders overshadowed his great successes and good intentions on the domestic front. And, what we now remember of Johnson is his failure in Vietnam, not his remarkable vision for the Great Society. His entire presidency and all the good he sought to do took a backseat to the one area of his presidency in which he failed.

Now why is all this significant? Terrifyingly, LBJ is all too similar to many people in the Muslim community who are working towards a better future and vision. Many of us mean incredibly well, but unfortunately our actions and intentions are forever tainted with certain mistakes that we made along the way. The most common example includes many of our elders who work tirelessly to inculcate the love of Islam in our hearts but in doing so, focus on the outer technicalities– the clothes we wear or the beard length we sport–rather than the inner-morality. Also, often in the process of trying to teach we use abuse, whether physical or verbal, as a tool to shape the individual. However, this process backfires totally, and the individual is left with a feeling of rejection and contempt. This feeling of rejection leads, much like it did with LBJ, to a backlash, where the individual and society do not remember the good that we did, but rather the evil that we inflicted. This twisted image is what we as a whole are defined and remembered by, much like it was with LBJ. The worst part is when this attitude of negativity and aversion is associated not only with us, but with Islam itself.

Unfortunately, the Muslim community today is filled with stories like the ones above. These stories collectively have produced a generation of Muslims feeling contempt for their religion and community, rather than love and affection. This has led to devastating consequences. Not surprisingly, under his presidency LBJ experienced the emergence of the “counterculture,” a time ripe with revolt and protest over the way things were. It was a time defined by drug use, open sexuality, and rebellion by the youth. The Muslim community is facing a similar counterculture which has emerged as a result of our own practices in raising and “bettering” our youth. This is why Muhammad is in the club Friday night, instead of in the masjid. This is why Fatima could care less about her parents, because she sees them as backwards and controlling. This is why we have a huge segment of our youth ashamed of their Muslim identity, who in their college classes won’t even stand up to the wrongs that are said about their own religion. It’s because they themselves are ashamed of that identity and see it as something negative. And it all starts with the way in which we deal with our youngsters. Are we providing a safe outlet for them to ask why, or are we hitting them every time they do? Are we judging every single person that looks or acts differently, or are we providing a welcoming atmosphere to each individual regardless of how they look, dress, or behave? Are we listening to the advice of the Prophet ﷺ (peace be upon him) when he said to treat each person as you would like to be treated, or are we instead treating others as inferior to us?

If we as a community do not address the causes of the emerging counterculture, we will continue to experience backlash, and we will continue to decline. We need to remove our Vietnams, so they do not overshadow the good we seek to do. We have to learn from our great president, and ensure that the Great Society we envision for our youth is achieved without interference from the mistakes we make along the way.

By Dustin Craun

On a scorching hot summer day in the summer of 2002, I was in the desert on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico walking around a newly developing neighborhood made up of electrical wires running on the ground and brick houses . I stared at the militarized border fence demarcating a line drawn between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez only 160 years ago, and suddenly my attention was drawn to a group of young boys playing soccer. One child in particular stood out, a young boy no more than seven years old whose body was so deformed from polio, a waterborne disease supposedly eradicated in North America, that he had to flip his body over to walk. Once he noticed us he came over to greet us with excitement. This beautiful child’s name was Jesús, and we spent much of the day talking to him and playing soccer with him. I couldn’t believe that we lived in a reality where a child on one side of the fence could get a water-borne disease such as polio, while on the other side of the fence  you can see the University of Texas-El Paso and the El Paso mall, in which there is clean drinking water for all.

How Religion Views Immigration

I had traveled to El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico to take part in a two week long border awareness experience operated by the Catholic liberation theology-based organization, Annunciation House. Their work is a prophetic response to immigration and the crisis of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created unprecedented migration after this targeted economic warfare destroyed whole cities where agriculture was the primary industry throughout Mexico. The mission of Annunciation House was to live in solidarity with the poor and follow the teachings of Jesus, alayhi as-salaam (peace be upon him) and  the directive in the Bible to serve the poor and immigrants: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35). It was at this moment, standing there with Jesús, that I began to ask if God believed in these borders. I looked to the Islamic tradition related to immigration, with the central questions “What is our prophetic response to injustice?” and “How do we answer the call when we see these things with our own eyes?”

If we look at immigration from an Abrahamic and Islamic perspective we learn from the stories of Abraham, Lot, Jonah, Jacob, Moses and the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon them all) that there are three primary elements to these stories:

• First, the people and prophets face grave injustice which threatened their lives;
• Second, they migrated seeking just allies and safety;
• Third, they enacted a Prophetic response and call to justice and transformation for their people.

Our moment is directly reflective of the first two elements with 11 million people in this country living in the shadows of our society. Our question then, if we are true believers, should be what is our Prophetic response, and who is ready to stand on the side of justice?

For Muslims, the Prophet Muhammadﷺ is seen as our exemplar, whose life sets an example for us in every aspect of our being: from who we are as leaders, how we pray, how we eat, how we interact with one another, to how we interact with people of different faiths. While the best parts of the Prophet’s ﷺ life set beautiful examples for us, so do the struggles and hardships he faced as he led a community which faced continuous warfare, as a father who lost six children during his life, and as someone who was a refugee and immigrant.

Immigration During the Prophet’s Time

Muhammad ﷺ was born and raised in Mecca as an orphan, but of the highest tribe in Mecca, the Quraysh. He ﷺ was someone who was greatly respected by nearly all the people of Mecca, but after the revelation of the Qur’an began and he started to speak publicly about his call as the final Prophet sent to humanity, he was heavily rebuked by the tribes of Mecca who feared that he would upset the social order which they benefited from politically and financially. The Quraysh began to wage war against the Muslims, torturing and even killing many of the new converts to the religion. To protect the community, the Prophet ﷺ began a series of migrations where he sent fourteen of his followers to Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) seeking the protection of a righteous Christian king, who provided refuge for the suffering Muslims.

As things in Mecca deteriorated, the remaining Muslims were invited to move to the city of Medina, where a large number of Christians, Jewish people, and a growing population of converts to Islam were living at the time who would accept the Muslim migrants in their community. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, after waiting for all of his community to leave for Medina before him, was finally forced to leave Mecca when all the tribes in the city plotted together to assassinate him. He ﷺ left in the night with one of his closest companions, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, radiAllahu `anhu (may Allah be pleased with him). As a displaced refugee, the Prophet ﷺ stated:  “Of all God’s earth, you [Mecca] are the dearest place unto me, and the dearest unto God. Had not my people driven me out from you, I would not have left you.” Anyone who has been displaced from their homeland can relate. As the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr (ra) set out on the two hundred mile journey across the brutal Arabian desert, they were closely followed by assassins who at one point came so close to finding them that they had to hide in a cave for three days. Told in detail in books like Omid Safi’s Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters, they would have been found if it wasn’t for a spider who miraculously spun its web across the cave while a dove sat calmly near the entrance to make it seem as if no one was inside of it. The animals knew which side of justice they stood on.

As the Prophet ﷺ entered Medina, he was greeted by his new community with open arms and songs of poetry. His ﷺ first words to them as they began to build a new life together were, “O people, give unto one another greetings of Peace; feed food unto the hungry; honor the ties of kinship; pray in the hours when men sleep. Thus shall you enter Paradise in Peace.” To enact a prophetic response to his community’s migration, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ took the group of Muslim converts from Medina who he called “the helpers,” and he paired each person with a member of the new group of migrants. He had the established group split their wealth in half and give it to the newly arrived immigrants. With this act, he ﷺ allowed his community to start their new community on the same ground where all were equally welcome, and no one had to suffer in poverty alone.

How to Apply the Prophet’s Teachings Today

Today we live in similar times, as people throughout the world face grave economic and social injustices, with estimates of over 43 million refugees and 100 million people throughout the world who are migrant workers. Ranging from NAFTA’s economic war against Mexico   to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and in other parts of the world, millions and millions of people have walked along this same prophetic path of displacement and migration since the time of Muhammad ﷺ more than 1400 years ago. Indeed, after the genocide against the American Indians and the forced migration of millions of enslaved Africans, it is the central narrative of the United States and most of us have some type of immigration story. We are not being asked to split our wealth in half, but we must each ask ourselves what our prophetic response will be as we raise our voices with the 11 million undocumented people in this country. We raise our voices to say enough! We will not let families continue to be divided as the Obama administration has set a record for deportations as nearly two million people have been deported during his administration alone.

205,000 parents of U.S. citizen children have been deported and torn apart from their families , and millions and millions of workers have been exploited, cheated, robbed and abused because they do not have papers and fear turning to the authorities when they are taken advantage of.

The American Muslim community is a majority immigrant community, and there are thousands of undocumented Muslims in this country. However, because of the level of Islamophobia and the victimization of an entire group of people based on the acts of only a few which have been vehemently condemned by Muslims throughout the US and the world, many immigrant Muslims are fearful to talk about immigration in our community and to take a more active role in the movement for comprehensive immigration reform.  Our prophetic example makes it clear that we stand on the side of the interfaith, and social justice movements call for a pathway to citizenship that is no longer than seven years for all 11 million undocumented people. We also feel it is important to raise the issue of religious and racial discrimination, and to make clear that these forms of bias should play no role in US immigration policy, despite the fear mongering that can be raised by a small group of well-funded Islamophobes. Our communities must stand united in our call for just immigration policy as we continue to build a country that is just and fair for all people regardless of race, religion, or country of origin. May God bless and unite us all in this call for justice.

Dustin Craun is a writer and educator, and works as a Muslim clergy organizer for the PICO National Network the United States largest faith-based community organizing network. To contact Dustin, please email dcraun@piconetwork.org 

“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect.”

That was the execrable tweet that has been hung around Octavia Nasr’s neck like a slain Twitter albatross, as CNN wasted little time in sacking her. After all, how on earth could anyone have expressed any condolences upon the death of “Hezbollah giant” Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah who was implicated, albeit insubstantially, to the Beirut barracks bombing of 1983 that resulted in the deaths of 299 American and French military personnel?

CNN Senior Vice President, Parisa Khosravi, took to the helm in a modern day Zagiew to crucify fellow CNN Senior Middle East Editor of twenty years, Lebanese-born Octavia Nasr, stating:

“…[W]e believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.”

Naturally, expressing condolences at the death of an enemy of the United States and a key ally in particular is unthinkable and unconscionable. Good thing she relapsed from her temporary insanity and openly expressed regret and apologized for her inexcusable indiscretion.

Imagine this hypothetical scenario: A fearsome tyrant who has invaded sovereign neighbors and hammered them into serfdom, who has targeted and downed a civilian airliner belonging to a key U.S. ally, who holds over the USA and the whole world the threat of nuclear terror, and who has committed countless atrocities throughout his career, dies. Such a passing leader could be from a list of many adversaries of the USA: Saddam Hussain, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Osama bin Ladin, Mullah Omar and many others. Imagine that after this death, the following statement is released by the U.S. Department of State on behalf of the President of the United States:

“The President has sent a message expressing his condolences…on the death of [Hypothetical Tyrant]. In his message the President emphasized to the people and Government of [Unnamed nation] his desire for cooperation between the two countries in the search for a more peaceful world.

As the President reaffirmed in his address…the United States has sought and will continue to seek a constructive and realistic dialogue with [Unnamed nation] aimed at building a more productive and stable relationship. Our objective is not dialogue for its own sake, but a dialogue that produces real solutions to the many concrete problems that divide us.”

Can one fathom the above statement being released at the death at one such despot and author of terror? Can we envisage such words of condolences at the death of Saddam Hussain? Can we conceive such words expressing a desire for rapprochement between the USA and the Taliban upon the death of Mullah Omar?

Here I must admit a little fib on my part. The above “hypothetical” statement of condolences over the death of a “hypothetical tyrant” is actually not hypothetical at all. It was none other than the official statement released by the U.S. Department of State on February 10, 1984 upon the death of Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party and Head of State of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR).

A list of Yuri Andropov’s achievements throughout his career looks like a tally book for Al Capone. As ambassador to Hungary, he orchestrated with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev the bloody Soviet military intervention in repressing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. These events later convinced him of the necessity to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968 and, later, Afghanistan in 1979 – a war which resulted in 1,000,000 Afghan casualties.

In 1967 he was appointed head of the KGB and served as its longest running chairman. This began a career of what he coined “extreme measures” in eradicating all forms of dissent within the Soviet Union.¹

Yuri Andropov spearheaded the most aggressive campaign to oppress adherents of all religions in Russian history. The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion² relates the following from a Russian textbook:

Q: What does the Mullah do?
A: Mullah reads the Qur’an and when someone dies he reads prayers.
Q: What does he read about in the Qur’an?
A: We do not know.
Q: Does he himself understand what he reads?
A: No
Q: Does he read the prayers for nothing?
A: No, he gets money for this.

Ultimately, Andropov devised a policy to institutionalize educated people who insisted on adhering to a religious faith; he also considered following religion to be a form of psychosis.³

In spite of this, the U.S. State Department released the following on behalf of President Ronald Reagan at the time of Andropov’s death:

WHITE HOUSE STATEMENT, FEB. 10, 1984 – “The President has sent a message expressing his condolences to Mr. Kuznetsov, the Acting Soviet Chief of State, on the death of Chairman Andropov. In his message the President emphasized to the people and Government of the U.S.S.R. his desire for cooperation between the two countries in the search for a more peaceful world.

As the President reaffirmed in his address of January 16, the United States has sought and will continue to seek a constructive and realistic dialogue with the Soviet Union aimed at building a more productive and stable relationship. Our objective is not dialogue for its own sake, but a dialogue that produces real solutions to the many concrete problems that divide us.

There are, to be sure, fundamental differences between the American and Soviet systems and our respective political beliefs. But the American and Soviet peoples have a common interest in the avoidance of war and the reduction of arms. It is this need to preserve and strengthen the peace that is at the heart of U.S. policy.

The President’s policy toward the Soviet Union seeks to achieve progress in three broad areas: developing ways to eliminate the use and the threat of force in international relations; significantly reducing the vast arms stockpiles in the world, particularly nuclear weapons; and establishing a better working relationship with Moscow, characterized by greater cooperation and understanding and based on mutual restraint and respect.

At this time of transition in the Soviet Union, our two nations should look to the future in order to find ways to realize these goals. In the nuclear age, there is no alternative to dialogue.

The United States hopes that the Soviet leader will work with us in this spirit and take advantage of the opportunities at hand to find common ground and establish a mutually beneficial relationship.”

U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz released the following statement:

“The President has expressed his personal condolences to the Soviet leadership on the death of Chairman Andropov, and I have sent a similar message to Foreign Minister Gromyko.

At this time of transition in Moscow, let me reaffirm the basic principles of our policy toward the Soviet Union. We remain ready for a constructive and realistic dialogue with the Soviet Union. In this nuclear age, the United States will work to build a more stable and more positive relationship. As the President has stressed, we seek to find solutions to real problems, not just to improve the atmosphere of our relations. This applies, in particular, to the task of reaching equitable and verifiable agreements for arms reduction and reducing the risk of war.

The President has made clear to the people and Government of the Soviet Union his desire for constructive cooperation in the search for peace. We invite the Soviet leadership to work with us to that end. There are opportunities at hand. Let us find common ground, and let us make the world a safer place.”

These statements of condolences were made about a man whom President Ronald Reagan had reviled as the embodiment of evil itself. Reagan was quoted as saying about the USSR under Andropov that they were the “focus of evil in the modern world,” that they were the “prime example” of “sin and evil” that Americans were “enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose.”⁴ David Remnick of the Washington Post had reviled him as “profoundly corrupt, a beast.”⁵

In all honesty, this was an era when America had not yet lost its soul. Though the existence of a near rogue CIA with various questionable covert operations hid in the ether, America could still unabashedly call itself the “Land of the Free” without breaking a nervous sweat. Such conciliatory messages upon the death of an enemy are no short of chivalry one would expect from the knights of yore.

Yet, as Parisa Khosravi and CNN have quite plainly exemplified, those days are gone. Now it seems that freedom of expression, thought and speech all have an unreasonably qualifying footnote “Not for the benefit of Muslims in any way, shape or form.”

An alarmingly increasing demographic of America seeks to silence religious freedom in deference to Christian dominance and a redefining of America’s foundations to be for the purposes of establishing a Bible based law. Yet, while waving their Bibles in the air they seem to have forgotten to read it:

“Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the LORD. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” [Romans 12:17-21]

The Qur’an has a similar message:

“And not equal are the good deed and the bad. Repel [evil] by that [deed] which is better; and thereupon the one whom between you and him is enmity [will become] as though he was a devoted friend.” (41:34)

As a Lebanese-American Christian, it is seriously doubtful that Octavia Nasr harbored any religious devotion to Shi`ite Muslim cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. She was one of the first to ever interview him and as an objective journalist, she would, naturally, respect with indifference someone who wielded so much spiritual influence over a tumultuous part of the world. Being an Arab, a Christian and a woman gives her the ability to peer into the perspectives of both East and West. She explains her reasons lucidly and in depth in a CNN published blog which I highly recommend.

Perhaps, America can learn a thing or two from Octavia Nasr about truly living in accordance to the principles lauded in the Bible rather than rattling the Bible like a saber for political gain.