Thursday, May 17, 2007

Culture Clash in US Mosques

Theres a Culture clash in US mosques. Young Muslims steeped in American life are tuning out imams brought in from foreign countries to teach Islam.

Over the past 40 years, hundreds of thousands of Muslims from around the world have emigrated to the United States, bringing their own cultural interpretations of Islam and electing imams who support their views. This practice worked well until recently, when large numbers of these immigrants' Westernized children reached adulthood, creating a disconnect between faith and culture. Foreign imams are at the center of this fast-growing divide between immigrant Muslims and their American-born children.

When Muslim immigrants flooded into the US from the Middle East and South Asia in the 1960s and '70s, their "first priority was to preserve their cultural integrity".  The need for an imam from their background is to preserve the cultural authenticity of that community.

Immigrant imams have served this purpose well, but the children of this immigrant wave – now adults – identify more with US culture than the one found in their parent's homeland. As a result, they find themselves increasingly at odds with foreign imams, who lead 85 percent of non-African-American mosques in the US.  A mosque's imam is selected by its congregants, who often want someone fluent in Arabic, which is the language of the Koran.

Given the important role an imam plays in a Muslim community, having one who understands the Islamic faith and American culture equally well is vital, say many American Muslims. Most communities rely on imams to give religious guidance, lead prayers, deliver sermons, and serve as a community representative.  Islam has no central authority, such as the papacy, to issue official decisions. It falls upon local imams to help the community deal with the various challenges it faces.

Some American-born Muslims now question whether an immigrant imam can adequately fill this role.  There is a strong feeling that not just the immigrant imams, but also the first generation often can't relate very well to the society around them.  There's just a very different worldview.

Every culture that adopted Islam infused its local traditions into the religion – from the food eaten at religious holidays to the social boundaries between men and women. Provided these indigenous customs don't clash with the theological core of Islam, this is perfectly permissible.
The immigrant generation is still living psychologically in their homeland. The second generation is the one that begins to assert itself as belonging to the new society.

In our communities, the challenge is people who just won't let go of ideas that they think define Islam when in fact it just defines the culture in which they were born.  When immigrant imams are helping you and answering your questions, they're giving it from the perspective of wherever they're from without taking into consideration where they are, what's the context, what's the country like, what's the culture of the country.  A lot of that is pushing young people away from the mosque.

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