Islam and Muslims in the Western World : WHERE ARE AMERICAN MUSLIMS GOING?

Abstract

Only after the 9/11 attacks have all the deficiencies in the American Muslims’ organizations come to light. These organizations have completely failed in the long-term community development planning, because their programs failed to appropriately address foreign policy, religiously inspired violence, the role of the women, interpretation of the Qur’an and political activism. Therefore, we can say that the state of the American Muslims today is extremely difficult. The main cause lays in the fact that the American Muslim community does not educate its own ulama. Today we have medical doctors, vets or engineers promoting the Islamic education in America, thus replacing the traditional alim, who use to be the source of knowledge about Islamic traditions. Organizations like ISNA, ICNA, CAIR, mosques and Islamic centers are run by the Muslims educated in the West, replacing a thousand years old tradition of Islamic sciences, developed through separate Islamic disciplines, requiring a full devotion to a teacher-student principle and the issuance of the appropriate diplomas. Today’s conferences, conventions, seminars and electronic media are replacing challenging, systematic and extensive methodological study of the Qur’an, Hadith, logic, rhetoric, and more importantly, of the pedagogy, methodic and spiritual discipline techniques. While even poor Muslim countries have their own Islamic educational institutions and learned alim, providing necessary spiritual and psychological support to their communities, at the same time, the American Muslims are almost entirely without this important social support system. As a consequence, we have a tendency that almost all Muslim organizations, along with mosques and Islamic centers, focus on only one segment of social activism – the politics.