"Islamist" Organizations

I recently reread an article a friend of mine, Fawad Siddiqui, wrote about local basketball tournaments run by Muslim youth in the South Florida area. I remember back when I was a freshman in high school, me and my closest friend initiated the first annual MYNA Basketball Tournament at Florida International University in 1996 I believe. The tournament was very modest initially, but then later ballooned to contain upwards of 25 teams for boys and nearly half a dozen girl teams. All the proceeds went to charity each year, we only kept enough money to break even.

Going through the article I was reminded of the constant ramblings of anti-Muslim pundits. I grew up like many Muslim American youth, being involved with a Muslim youth group and then going on to college and joining the Muslim group on campus. It seems that every religiously minded college student ends up with their respective religious college organization. Christians have their Catholic or Bible groups, Jews have Hillel, Hindus have the Indian student group, and Muslims usually the Muslim Students Association or some other derivative. But obviously only the MSA is viewed as suspect in light of the fact that probably most of the people who founded the original MSA in Illinois (or Indiana?) were former members or nominally inclined to the Muslim Brotherhood and its teachings of activism (and world domination of course).

The MSA then led to the creation of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and then to the creation and establishment of the Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA). These three organizations, the MSA, ISNA, and MYNA, were at one time the three largest Muslim American organizations in the country. ISNA and MSA are still very strong, but MYNA has essentially become defunct since much of its leadership was made up of high school kids who obviously moved on to college, while likely failing to recruit new kids to keep the organization going.

I read the articles of the radical right with amusement when they describe what they see as the goals of such Muslim organizations. The MSA is described as some sort of indoctrination clan for Muslim college students and ISNA and its annual convention as the hub of "Islamists." Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. MSAs all over the country usually don't follow any set objectives ordered from above by MSA National. At most MSAs will copy cat events that other MSAs conduct and were proven to be successful like the Ramadan Fast-a-thon or Hijab solidarity events. ISNA is even less influential. The annual convention is a time for Muslim families to come together and... shop. The bazaar is probably the most popular attraction at the annual conference, while listening to lectures from Muslim scholars is a distant second. But for many Muslim high school and college students, the annual ISNA conference is all about exploring gender issues, namely approaching the opposite sex and looking to get married or at the very least, getting a phone number or email address.

The reason I mention the above is because when I read the articles of the radical right about these Muslim organizations I'm shocked at how ignorant they are of these organizations and their functions and influence. MSAs all over the country do not adhere to some sort of Ikhwan guide to survival in America - far from it. Almost every MSA I have worked with (and I have worked with many all across the south) functions differently largely because it's the members who make up the agenda of that particular Muslim college group. Few are Salafi dominated, while most are just clubs that do very little serious work and do not follow any ideology, let alone the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, there was a time probably through the 1990s that many MSAs adhered to Ikhwan like teachings, while some others were heavily influenced by Salafi teachings. From what I've seen most of that went out the window with the arrival of Imam Hamza Yusuf (and scholars like him) in the late 1990s as probably the most liked and dominant Muslim personality in the U.S. at the time (his lectures were always jam packed, and still are, at ISNA conventions). Imam Hamza's call was to adhere to traditional Islamic teachings, what may be called neo-traditionalism. The Ikhwan and Salafi agendas didn't appeal as much in comparison because Imam Hamza and others like him were looked upon by most Muslim youth in America as representative of America and an American Islam - someone they could relate to. Foreign ideologies became less appealing from my estimation and their influence seems to diminish with every new Fall semester.

Personally, I look back on my resume of "Islamic" work with MYNA, the FIU MSA, the Islamic Society at Boston Univ., and now with CAIR and no where did I find any sort of calling to extremism. No exaggeration. At FIU for one year Salafism was being promoted by a bunch of goons. Their actions though were just typical anti-American jargon and calls to the path of the Qur'an and Sunnah - typical Salafi propaganda that almost all Muslim students on campus were turned off by (empty general body meetings were signs that their "call" to the Qur'an and Sunnah was falling on deaf ears). Harmless as they were, it's probably guys like that who give most Muslims a bad name. In any case, the work we did as youths and now as adults I can proudly say was never tainted by anything extreme or radical. We visited nursing homes, fed the homeless, held camps where we learned to become better individuals and explored topics that were of interest to us, like how to avoid drugs and peer pressure. We also held a gazillion sporting events - and that has been the constant that I've witnessed throughout my 25 years of life: Muslims love sports tournaments. And we sent all the money we raised as kids to charity. And then as college students we did pretty much the same thing except after 9-11 we had to carry a more serious agenda of presenting Islam as a religion where terrorism has no place.

The larger issue in all of this is how so many of these right wing bigots have attempted to silence the majority of Muslims in this country. In their estimation everything the Muslim population in the United States says is a lie (taqiyya according to some who have failed to grasp that their definition of this word is found no where in Islamic discourse the last 1,400 years). Every reputable Muslim organization has had mud slung at them in order to marginalize and ultimately to silence them. Muslim Americans are a threat to them not because Muslims want to overthrow the Constitution, but because Muslims are amongst a large majority of people who see right through the crass propaganda efforts of the right to scare everyone into submission of their agenda. Islam and Muslims have to be viewed by Americans as a threat in order for more wars to be fought and more people people to be killed in the name of the war on terrorism, but for which such violent actions are done in the best interest of ruling elites and the corporations whose boards they sit on. Progressives have to be termed the "loony left" so that their obvious observations of how corrupt our government is can be laughed away as the observations of a crazy person bent on conspiracy theories.

It's a shame that reason cannot prevail with such people. Their hatred of Islam and Muslims is so apparent and obvious that taking them seriously at all is very difficult when it comes to their "advice" on how to battle Muslim extremism. It's their own extremism that plagues our society and helps to give fodder to the radicals on the other side of the Atlantic. Muslim American organizations are trying to help our country better understand the religion of the people it is killing in multiple countries across the globe. People on the extreme right are looking to stifle such work because it interferes with their world view of clashing civilizations. It will be a shame if they succeed.