Al-Huda
Foundation, NJ U. S. A
the Message Continues ... 4/126
Newsletter for February 2012
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The Role of the Mosque at the Dawn of a New Era:
It’s Justice, Not “Just Us”[1]
I. Introduction
As the impressive structure of the “high rise” cultural center,
known as The Islamic Center of San Gabriel Valley, nears
completion, even more impressive are the contents of its new
journal, Quba Magazine.
Its first issue, devoted to the theme “The Dawn of a
New Era”, carries
inspiring articles about the Center’s already on-going projects,
which in themselves justify the title, “The Dawn of a New Era”.
The most striking for me was the article by the neurologist, Dr.
Faisal Qazi, entitled “The Rise of Muslim Charitable Health
services”. A
quarter century ago, when I was Director of the Dialogue
Commission at the most successful interfaith organization at the
urban level in America, The Interfaith Conference of
Metropolitan Washington (IFC), I initiated a project for free
health care clinics for the indigent and those without medical
insurance.
Within a week, I had lined up twenty Christian doctors and
twenty Jewish doctors to donate an hour a week to a free clinic
or even to donate their own clinic free for a week.
A month later only one Muslim doctor showed any interest.
This was an Egyptian obstetrician who exclaimed, “This is
a great idea. I’m
going back home immediately to start such a program in Cairo”.
Of course, he missed the whole point.
Your local medical leader, Dr. Faisal Qazi, is the
Vice-President of the AMHP, American Muslim Health
Professionals, and is developing the Muslim Free Clinics Council
(MFCC) to network the more than thirty Muslim Free Clinics
across America in order to share logistical and financial
resources to support the growth of new clinics.
A leader in one of the earliest such clinics, the Al
Shifa Clinic in San Bernardino, said he was responding to
President Kennedy’s famous call for Americans to ask what they
can do for their country.
Dr. Qazi concludes his article on page 36 in
Quba Magazine with
the following insights:
“These charitable health organizations tap into a feeling
among Muslim Americans that service in local communities is
central to their identity as American citizens.
These Muslim Community-Based Health Organizations
(MCBHOs) seek to establish a compassionate, generous, healing
presence in their communities.
While only one window into American Muslim identities,
this growing movement of energetic Muslim Americans both
reflects and shapes the meaning of American Islam, and provides
a fresh perspective on the role of religion in the American
public square”.
II. It’s Justice,
Not “Just Us”
Yesterday, just before I flew out here from Washington, D.C., I
was informed that I am to speak about “The Role of the Mosque”.
What an appropriate topic for launching a mega-mosque.
We have all seen mega-churches, which is a sign of the
times. But where
are the mega-mosques.
Now we know that they have joined the new kids on the
block to enrich the public square with the insights that gave
rise to The Great American Experiment in peace, prosperity, and
freedom through justice.
The question posed to me is simple to answer.
The answer to the question, “What Is the Role of the
Mosque”, is another question.
“What is the role of Islam”.
An Islamic mosque, as distinct from an un-Islamic one,
has a minimum of at least eight purposes.
1.
Center of Worship.
We were created to worship God, Allah, in three ways,
namely, by acknowledging three things:
First, God’s presence in our personal and public lives;
Second, God’s justice in this world and the next; and Third, our
responsibility to be what the hadith qudsi calls God’s eyes and
God’s hands in the world.
Throughout the Qur’an this is the definition of a generic
Muslim.
Professor Ihsan Bagby’s study of the mosque in America indicates
that 60% of mosque goers say that the mosque is primarily a
place to join the Muslim umma in both formal and informal
prayer.
2. Center of
Knowledge.
The mosque functions to facilitate learning and teaching about
the essence of Islam and to help us practice it contextually,
that is, in accordance with the circumstances of our life in
America.
The essence of Islam may be understood best by contemplating the
prayer of the Prophet Muhammad,
salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa
salam: Allahumma,
asaluka hubbaka, wa hubba man yuhibbuka, wa hubba kulli ‘amali
yuqaribuni ila hubbaka, “Oh Allah, I ask you for Your love,
and for the love of those who love You, and for the love of
everything that will bring me closer to Your love”.
The essence of Islam is further contained in the Qur’anic ayah,
tamaat kalimatu rabbika
sidqan wa ‘adlan, “The word of your Lord is perfected in
truth and in justice”.
We may ask, what is justice?
Justice is the
maqasid al shari’ah, which are the purposes, also known as
the kulliyat or
universal principles, of normative Islamic jurisprudence.
These purposes provide the guidelines for interpreting
and applying the fiqh
or rules and regulations associated with Islamic law.
There are eight of these purposes, each one of which is
explained in a chapter of a book that I wrote a couple of years
ago but have not yet published.
These consist of two sets.
The first four are guiding principles for the second set.
In order of cause and effect the first four are:
1.
Haqq al din,
the duty to respect freedom of religion.
This is discussed at length in my book,
The Natural Law of
Compassionate Justice, An Islamic Perspective, which was
written in 2006 and 2007 but was not launched until January,
2009, at the Rumi Forum, when it became available on Amazon.
2.
Haqq al nafs,
the duty to respect the dignity of the individual person.
This first-order purpose includes the the right to life,
haqq al haya, which
is known as the main
hajja or second-order goal under its parent principle,
haqq al nafs.
3.
Haqq al nasl,
the duty to respect the sacredness of the human community at
every level from the nuclear family to the organic nations at
the global level, because communities derive their sacredness
from the individuals within them.
4.
Haqq al mahid,
the ecological duty to respect our physical environment on
planet earth. This
was added recently by Professor Hossein Nasr to the classical
list of universal principles of human responsibilities and
rights.
The second set of four, which are designed to implement the
first four, are:
1.
Haqq al mal,
the duty to respect private property in the means of production.
This includes the right of every human being, especially
in a capital intensive economy, to earn not only from one’s
labor but from ownership of productive wealth.
Only by overcoming the barriers to expanding capital
ownership by acknowledging future profits as collateral can we
reverse the power concentration that has produced an
unsustainable wealth gap within and among countries.
2.
Haqq al hurriyah,
the right of political self-determination, known as political
freedom. The
second-tier of goals within this higher purpose are:
khilafa or the
responsibility of both the rulers and the ruled primarily to
God; shurah or the
responsibility of the rulers to the people;
ijma or the
responsibility of the opinion leaders in society to express the
popular consensus in order to guide
the rulers; and an independent judiciary.
Political freedom or
haqq al hurriyah
requires haqq al mal,
because whoever controls money and the means of production owns
the government.
3.
Haqq al karamah,
the duty to respect
human dignity as the basis of all the other
maqasid, but
especially in gender equity.
Unfortunately, most of the eight highest principles in this set
of human rights and responsibilities have been observed
primarily only in the breech, because the various empires and
tyrannies in the history of the Muslim world, as well as
everywhere throughout human history, generally regarded human
rights as subversive of their own power.
Almost all of the greatest Islamic scholars have been
imprisoned for years, decades, or for life by the ruling
dynasties of their day for their commitment to delineate,
advocate, and defend human rights.
4.
Haqq al ‘ilm,
the duty to respect knowledge.
This has a second tier of implementing goals or
hajjiyat known as the
freedom to disseminate knowledge through free speech, free
publication, and free assembly.
3)
Center to Strengthen Muslims Identity.
This applies to every person and to every community or
umma, both locally
and globally.
Allah tells us in the Qur’an,
wa min ma halaqna ummatun
yahduna bil haqqi wa bihi ya’adilun, “And among my creations
is a community that is guided by truth and practices it through
justice”. Further
the Qur’an tells us that, “You are the best of people”, meaning
that this is your identity in potential, known fully only to
Allah, so seek it as best you can and become what you already
are.
Every one of us has multiple identities.
For example, you may be a Muslim, an American, and a
Californian, just as I am a Cherokee Native American, a
tree-hugger, and a life-long ultra-marathon runner.
All of these are compatible with each other and can be
even mutually reinforcing.
We should remember that 80% of Christians in America say they
are Christians first, and Americans second.
4)
Center for Interfaith Outreach.
A major purpose of every house of worship, and especially of
every Islamic mosque, is to develop increasingly higher levels
of cooperation from tolerance, to diversity, to pluralism.
Tolerance means merely, “I won’t kill you yet”.
Diversity means, “You are here, and I can’t do much about
it”. This is
sub-optimal level of “peaceful co-existence”.
Pluralism, which is the highest level, means, “We welcome
you because we each have so much to learn from each other”.
Advancement from tolerance to pluralism helps us move
from interfaith dialogue and understanding to interfaith
cooperation.
5)
Center for Engagement.
A fundamental task of every Islamic mosque in society is
to rehabilitate the role of religion as the most effective
paradigm and cure for problems, not as the inevitable cause of
them. The task is
to move from the extremes of rejectionism and assimilation, both
of which are suicidal, to pluralist integration designed to
bring out the best of each religious tradition together in
serving the Will of God.
6)
Center for Sadaqa Outreach.
Charity or sadaqa is
one of the five pillars of Islam in action.
It serves to help the marginalized in society, for
example, by providing free health clinics open to all in a
society when the existing institutions are defective.
The Youth Group of The Islamic Center of San Gabriel
Valley, partly under the guidance of Muhammad Khan, has been
active in several such activities, including helping on skid row
as part of a model for other mosques.
This outreach is part of the purpose of proactive
participation in society, which is a key to civil governance.
7)
Center for Political Education.
Every Islamic mosque in America has an obligation to help all
Americans in their efforts to help America fulfill its mission
and, in sha’a Allah, its destiny as a moral, economic, and
political model for applying the eight universal purposes of
natural law embodied in the
maqasid al shari’ah.
The guidelines were laid out in Thomas Jefferson’s writings on
separating organized religion from organized political power,
which he said is necessary in order to assure that faith and
governance will support each other.
He wrote, “No people can remain free unless they are
properly educated.
Education consists of learning virtue.
And no people can remain virtuous unless both their
private and public lives are infused with awareness of and love
of Divine Providence”, by which he meant God.
Jefferson penned the preamble to the American Constitution,
which posits five purposes in forming a “more perfect Union”.
These are to secure justice, domestic Tranquility (or
order), national defense, prosperity, and “the Blessings of
Liberty”. Justice
comes first, as it did in the writings of all of America’s
founders, and liberty came last as its product.
This set of priorities is thoroughly Islamic and comes
from the Scottish Enlightenment of Edmund Burke, not from the
secular European Enlightenment, which gave rise to the
totalitarian French Revolution.
An essential sub-principle of political education and action is
recognition that the mosque, as part of organized religion, is
not a proper venue for seeking political power.
Its purpose is to seek an enlightened and compassionate
justice, not power, for example through bloc voting, as an
ultimate end.
8)
Center for the Transmission of Traditionalist Wisdom.
The eighth, but not the least, of an Islamic mosque’s purposes
is to serve as a center for transmitting the knowledge and
wisdom of enlightened Islamic scholars to individual Muslims.
There has always been a disconnect between the Muslim
scholars and the rulers, just as now there is a disconnect
between the scholars and 90% of the Muslims.
Most Muslims are unfamiliar with the breadth and depth of
Islamic thought and with the vast tradition and wisdom within
the scholarly community.
This lack of knowledge makes them vulnerable to
extremists who may know even less than they do.
The challenge is not merely for the mosque leaders to develop
receptivity to this knowledge.
The greater challenge is to the scholars, who must
develop a language understandable to non-scholars, as well as to
non-Muslims, and to develop think-tanks for this purpose.
Think-tanks are the new link between academia and policy
makers as a means to bring out the best of America.
III. Accentuate the
Positive and Eliminate the Negative
One of the most popular World War II songs in America had the
title, “Accentuate the Positive, and Eliminate the Negative, and
Don’t Mess with Mr. In-Between”.
As an advisor and sometime speech writer for three
presidents, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, I have learned that the
greatest challenge is to be aware of the worst in America in
order to bring out the best.
As a conservative, Richard Nixon addressed both equally.
In his last book,
Beyond Peace, Nixon wrote:
“With the end of the Cold War we must ask ourselves what we
stand for in addition to national strength and prosperity.
Democracy and capitalism are just techniques unless they
are employed by those who seek a higher purpose for themselves
and for society.
“Today our enemy is within us.
The real threat in the world lies in the fact that our
country may be rich in goods, but we are poor in spirit.
Poor-quality education, rampant crime and violence,
growing racial divisions, pervasive poverty, the drug epidemic,
the degenerative culture of moronic entertainment, a decline in
the notions of civic duty and responsibility, and the spread of
a spiritual emptiness have all disconnected and alienated
Americans from their country, their religions, and one another.
“Our crisis of values at home, coupled with our lack of a
coherent mission abroad, has created a ‘dark night of the
soul’.”
Nevertheless, Nixon was also profoundly optimistic.
In this same book, he wrote, “The twentieth century has
been a period of conflict between the West and the Muslim
world. If we
work together we can make the twenty-first century not just a
time of peace … but a century in which, beyond peace, two great
civilizations will enrich each other and the rest of the world”.
Another great visionary, who was caught in the meat-grinder of
Washington politics and accomplished little other than saving
his own soul, was Ronald Reagan.
Throughout his life, Reagan focused on the wealth gap caused by
the concentrated ownership of productive wealth and on the means
to remove the barriers to broadened capital ownership without
taking away from the existing owners.
He was a labor leader in Hollywood and admired President
Roosevelt as his mentor.
In an unpublished letter to the New Orleans Times Picayune,
based on a note from John McClaughry, Senior Policy Advisor,
Reagan-Bush Committee, on October 31st, 1980, a few
days before his election as president of the United States,
Reagan wrote:
“Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is
the enemy of liberty and the rights of man.
They knew that the American experiment in individual
liberty, free enterprise, and republican self-government could
succeed only if power were widely distributed.
And since in any society social and political power flow
from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would
have to be widely distributed among the people of the country.
The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.
“Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy,
if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few,
while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on
their backs? Could
there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few
controlled a nation’s wealth, while millions labored for a
pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of
employment?
“It should be clear to everyone that the nation’s steadfast
policy should afford every American of working age a realistic
opportunity to acquire the ownership and control of some
meaningful form of property in a growing national economy.
This is not to say that the government should confiscate
from the ‘haves’ and bestow upon the ‘have-nots’, beyond the
requirements of a compassionate welfare program to provide for
those who cannot provide for themselves.
Far from it.
But it is to say that our duty is to foster a strong, vibrant
wealth-producing economy which operates in such a way that new
additions to wealth accrue to those who presently have little or
no ownership stake in their country”.
The question, of course, is how can this be accomplished.
To answer this question, President Reagan, at the urging
of Norman Kurland and myself, who were co-founders of the Center
for Economic and Social Justice, convened the first
Congressionally-established presidential task force, the
Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice, for which I was
Chairman of the Financial Markets Committee.
This task force was based on President Reagan’s call for a
Second American Revolution, the particulars of which were laid
out in the many books and position papers now available at
www.cesj.org,
as well as in the home page of The American Revolutionary Party,
www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us.
The ideological framework for this Task Force was laid
our three years earlier in 1983 in President Reagan’s first
major foreign policy pronouncement to commemorate Presidents
Day, in which I had a small part.
His basic thrust was to emphasize our “responsibility to
work for constructive change, not simply to preserve the status
quo”. “History”, he
declared, “is not a darkening path twisting inevitably toward
tyranny. … It is the growing determination of men and women of
all races and conditions to gain control of their own
destinies”. In this
foreign policy manifesto, President Reagan showed his courage by
recognizing the Palestinian nation and asserting that
satisfaction of this “people’s legitimate rights is a
fundamental objective of our foreign policy”.
President Reagan called for American policy-makers, both
Republican and Democrat, to recognize, as he put it, “the
central focus of politics – the minds, hearts, sympathies,
fears, hopes, and aspirations not of governments, but of people
– the global electorate”.
He concluded, “The American dream lives – not only in the
hearts and minds of our own countrymen, but in the hearts and
minds of millions of the world’s people in both free and
oppressed societies who look to us for leadership.
As long as that dream lives, as long as we continue to
defend it, America has a future – and all mankind has reason to
hope”.
IV. Conclusion
As a concluding insight, it is apparent to me that we are
in the middle of a profound renaissance,
al hamdu li Allah, in
all fields of Islamic scholarship, thanks perhaps in part to the
decline of civilization worldwide and to the resulting
Islamophobia among those who are burdened with existential
angst.
Ironically, this has brought the essence of Islam to the
forefront in the interfaith task of rehabilitating the role of
religion as the source of justice.
This, in turn, has revived justice as the only paradigm
adequate for the pursuit of peace, prosperity, and freedom.
The leadership of Muslims in America will soon pass from
one generation to another, namely, to those who have never had
any social identity other than American.
The Islamic Center of San Gabriel Valley is paving the
way for such a transformation of Islam in America.
Its most important old/new message for all generations of
Muslims in America should be,
“It’s justice, not ‘just
us’!”
[1] Dr. Crane gave this presentation on May 8, 2011, as a guest speaker at the very successful fund-raiser for the new mega-mosque,
The
Islamic Center of San Gabriel
Valley, located near Los
Angeles.
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