Two experts, one a Christian the other a devout Muslim, are both wary of a plan in progress to establish the first four-year accredited Islamic college in the United States.
Both fear that the proposed school, which could open as soon as next fall, would promote the idea of the Islamic state.
�Certainly, an attempt at the formation of an accredited college by Muslim academics can be a good thing if it is founded in the ideas of freedom and liberty and against Islamism (political Islam),� said Dr. M. Zuhidi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), to The Christian Post.
�But I�m not convinced that this college will be creating anti-Islamist Muslims who will reform sharia (Islamic law) and bring Muslim thought into an era where religious law can be separated from government as the Establishment Clause mandates,� he added.
Jasser, who is a devout practicing Muslim American and a former physician to the U.S. Congress, pointed out that one of the college�s main scholars, Imam Zaid Shakir, had said in a 2006 New York Times story that he hopes the United States will one day be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law.
The �primary root cause� of Islamic radicalism, stressed Jasser, is the mission to establish an Islamic state.
�The leadership of Zaytuna [College] seems to be all about political Islam with no public critique of the global mission of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist idealogies,� said Jasser, whose public critique of problems he sees in his faith has resulted in a backlash from the Muslim community.
He added, �I dream of the day where universities have established endowed chairs in the study of anti-Islamist studies from the viewpoint of freedom and with devout Muslims leading the charge and the academics.�
A group of American Muslims, including Zaid Shakir, is leading an effort to establish Zaytuna College, or what some call the �Muslim Georgetown.�
Shakir, who converted to Islam while serving in the U.S. Air Force, said the college will offer liberal arts education and Islamic studies, The Associated Press reported. The college plans to start with offering two majors: Arabic language and Islamic legal and theological studies.
In 1996, Shakir founded Zaytuna Institute based in Berkeley, Calif. The American Muslim imam, who now has tens of thousands of followers, was trained under Islamic scholars in North Africa and the Middle East for years after his conversion.
Shakir told the New York Times earlier that he wants the United States to be ruled by Islamic law �not by violent means, but by persuasion.�
Dr. William Wagner, author of How Islam Plans to Change the World, said he is not surprised about the plan to build a Muslim college in the United States. He said for years Islamists have planned to open universities in western countries.
�They see the value of education especially in educating their young leaders for eventual takeover of some western countries,� said Wagner, former professor of missions at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in San Francisco, to The Christian Post.
�Their strategy includes extensive student work in many U.S. universities and the start of a new university is only an extension of their main strategy,� he said.
Wagner served for over 30 years as a missionary in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa with the International Mission Board.
Currently, leaders of Zaytuna are in the midst of a fundraising campaign. They need $2 to $4 million to launch the school next year. A Zaytuna adviser told AP in a recent interview that the school will soon raise tens of millions of dollars to build a campus in the Bay area in the next few years.
Friday, May 29, 2009
A Muslim U.S. College is proposed
Prison system serves as Muslim 101
At least two of the Muslim ex-convicts arrested last week in the Bronx on charges of planning to bomb synagogues and shoot down airplanes came to Islam while in prison. Their arrest has raised the point that America's prison system often serves as Evangelism 101 for Islam.
A few years ago, I visited several Muslims in a state penitentiary in Culpeper, Va., and combed local mosques for former inmates to learn why so many prisoners choose Islam.
Dantes Augustin, a former Catholic, told me of a "humble, meek and very pious" Muslim prison chaplain he met in a federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa. The chaplain took the time to explain the basics of the religion and Mr. Augustin converted within a year.
In Islam, he explained, "Cleanliness is highly recommended; you should not use profanity, you should be courteous. I always wanted to practice virtues and Islam gave me the tools."
Mr. Augustin added, "I met Muslims from all over the world in American prisons: Indonesians, Palestinians, Egyptians, even Chinese. Islam is the fastest growing religion in prison because people there see it for what it really is."
There are anywhere from 200,000 to 340,000 Muslim inmates in local, federal and state prisons, or 9 percent to 15 percent of the nation's incarcerated population even though they are 2 percent of the total U.S. populace. The federal Bureau of Prisons told me Muslims comprised 5.7 percent of their inmates, and a spokeswoman for the District's jail system told me 18 percent of its inmates were Muslim.
Prison is a fertile ground for inmates who already feel victimized by American society, according to Roy and Niger Innis of the Manhattan-based Congress of Racial Equality.
"Prison is the best recruitment ground imaginable," Roy Innis said. "Young black men change their so-called white Christian slave names to a Muslim name. Then they are told it wasnt their crime, it was racism that put them in jail."
Conversions to Islam, they said, are considered the ultimate rebellion against a white-controlled system. Black Christians, they added, are called traitors to their race and Christianity is labeled as a weak and powerless faith because of the killing of its founder. Islam, which honors Jesus as a prophet but denies that He rose from the dead, is portrayed as the religion of power.
"Criminals are made to feel they are political prisoners and revolutionaries in the criminal system," Niger Innis said. "Once people are released, they go back to Watts or Harlem and integrate themselves into the black community. So, if they are part of a terrorist cell in prison, they spread that into the black community."
Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society and the founder and former director of the National Islamic Prison Foundation, had a different read on why inmates convert.
"Islam is organized in prison; there's prayer five times a day; and things that are organized run better," he says. "There's needs for boundaries and needs for certainties. Machismo has an important aspect in prisons and Islam has a strong concentration on being manly. That really resonates with people who come from homes without fathers around."
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