American Muslims Mix Modern, Traditional Routes to Marriage

From the Sacramento Bee - October 31, 2010


Sarah Moussa, 23, and Mahmoud Abdelmaged, 25, are soon to be married in a traditional Muslim ceremony.
By Stephen Magagnini
smagagnini@sacbee.com

A mosque in northeast Sacramento recently hosted a speed-dating event for 48 singles looking for love American Muslim style.

Every four minutes, the men played musical chairs, moving one seat to their left to chat up the next woman across the table. Each took notes on whether they'd like to continue the conversation.

Call it "speed mating" – Muslims don't date without chaperones and aren't allowed to have premarital sex. Dancing, kissing and drinking also are off limits.

Similar "matrimony events" are unfolding at Islamic centers across the country to help Muslims – many of them career-driven professionals – find spouses before the pool of good catches dries up.

A growing number of Muslim religious leaders and parents believe young Muslims should marry as soon as they are adult – and before they give in to sexual temptation.

Some young adults and their parents want to wait until they've earned their professional degrees and launched their careers.

Imam Mohamed Abdul-Azeez of Sacramento suggests that young Muslims start trying to meet potential spouses in college through Muslim student associations that do charity work.
"Once you put the idea in your mind, it will take a couple of years to find the right person," said Azeez of the Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims, which hosted the SALAM Muslim Singles Matrimony Event earlier this month.

Couples who marry early form a tighter bond by sharing hardships and challenges as they build a life together, said Azeez, who married at 24. "Every single bit of bitterness we went through solidified our relationship."

But more and more Muslim kids "are rebelling against conventional ways and all of a sudden, I'm 50 and forgot to get married," Azeez said. "It's a bigger problem with girls than it is with guys."

Hard to meet men

Women, many of of them professionals, outnumbered men 25 to 23 at the SALAM speed-dating event. They ranged in age from 18 to 50. Some wore hijabs to cover their heads, others came casually dressed in slacks and without head coverings. The men tended to be older – and divorced.

Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslims; women can't marry outside the faith. Non-Muslim men who want to marry a Muslim woman can convert – a process that takes months.

Women have few chances outside of college to meet men on their own and often depend on friends and relatives to introduce them to potential suitors.

"A lot of Muslim women are living on our own, extremely competent professionals with limited opportunities," said Tanya Ali, a 34-year-old management consultant who drove to the SALAM event from the Bay Area.
Matrimony events are much better than online dating, she said. "At least here you get to say hello to somebody and you know exactly how they look, so you can get that factor out of the way."

She met a couple of men who showed interest, both engineers. "Let's see what happens," she said. "The next step is to meet for coffee."

Sacramento civil engineer Younes Idrissi, 37, called the professional women he met "refreshing" because they too are "hybrid Muslims" who have embraced American culture.

"I was married at 34 for two years to a woman I met in Morocco arranged by my sister," he said. They divorced because "it was too hard for her to blend in here and accept my American friends who drink," he said. "I don't drink, but I don't have an issue with that. She just wanted to stay home and wasn't engaged in my lifestyle."

Most American Muslims enter arranged marriages initiated by relatives or friends and agreed upon by their parents, Azeez said. Few arranged marriages end in divorce.

Children have veto power if the match doesn't feel right.

Ali said her "aunties" and friends have tried to set her up with a dozen potential suitors over the years, but there was no chemistry.

Medical consultant Ahmed Abedin, 39, knows the feeling.

Like other Muslim professionals in their 30s, he's feeling the pressure from his parents – "every single day they say, 'Give us grandkids before it's too late.' "

He's gone to matrimony events in Irvine and Chicago and has dated non-Muslims, "but ultimately, what I'm looking for is a Muslim age 25 and up," preferably a Palestinian American who shares his culture and tastes in food.

Supporting traditional marriage

Azeez welcomed the singles to the event, calling traditional marriage one of the wonders of the world and the bedrock of Muslim culture.

"You might not find your mate today, but showing Allah you are willing to embark on this path, he will reward you," Azeez said.

Allah "reminds you your happiness might not necessarily be with a person who fulfills your preconceived ideas of the perfect mate," Azeez said, encouraging them to consider mates of different ethnic backgrounds.

The couples shared stories about their hobbies, careers and tastes - one Bosnian from San Francisco recommended her favorite, potato pizza.

Loqman Khemici, one of the organizers, said his oldest daughter married her karate instructor at 24. "He was a Brazilian American who became a Muslim three years ago."

If his 19-year-old daughter wants to marry early, "I'll even support them financially," Khemici said. "When you reach puberty, you start having those sexual feelings, and if you don't want your kids to break, we make it easy for them to marry."

Sarah Moussa, a 23-year-old UC Davis grad who works as a field representative for Sacramento Assemblyman Dave Jones, plans to marry Mahmoud Abdelmaged, a 25-year-old network engineer.

The couple met six years ago in Egypt. When she visited her ancestral home, he'd look out for her and tell her if she was staying out too late.

"Last year, we had a falling out over a relationship he'd had, and then he told me, 'I don't want to lose you – if it means flying across the globe to make you mine I'm going to do that,' " Moussa said.

Before families sign off on a match, "there's a background check like you're going through the FBI," Moussa said. "We value not just what the person can bring but what the family contributes – it's like two families marrying each other."

Many of the Sacramento region's 70,000 Muslims still hold to the belief that a man should marry only when he can support a family.

"If my daughter comes to me and says, 'I want to marry this person,' I will ask, 'Who is this person – is he of good character and what does he do for a living?'" said Rashid Ahmad, co-founder of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations. "Many families would not consider marrying their daughter to someone who has not finished their degree or who is unemployed."

His daughters married at 25 and 28 after they had finished medical school and law school, and their spouses were professionals.

If you wait to get married, you're not as likely to fall for a crush and can make a more mature, responsible choice, Ahmad said. "If a daughter gets married too soon, they have children, don't finish their education and their whole life changes."

Finding a Religious Common Ground

Sectarian Hostility Lies Beneath Hajj Spirit, Pilgrims Say

Muslim pilgrims pray in a street near Mecca as part of the hajj celebrations. Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP

Despite display of unity, visits to holy sites in Medina can be fraught, with some Shia Muslims from UK reporting victimisation

Full Article from The Guardian - November 16, 2010

Daisy Khan, an Eloquent Face of Islam

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Daisy Khan.

Full Article from the New York Times - November 12, 2010

Op-Ed by Nicholas D. Kristof: Here’s a Woman Fighting Terrorism. With Microloans.

Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

Parveen Baji, left, in front of the restaurant she started with a loan from the microfinance organization started by Roshaneh Zafar, right. Jobs and economic development can be a more effective way to fight extremism than firepower.

Full Article from the New York Times - November 13, 2010

Women and Islam

From the Los Angeles Times

Eastern Islam and the 'clash of civilizations'

Globalization is giving a harder edge to the softer strain of Islam in East Asia. Meanwhile, China's rising economic activity in the region is importing a glitzy capitalism and fueling consumerism.

October 24, 2010|By Robert D. Kaplan

Islam has been an American obsession for at least a decade. The 9/11 attacks and the intractable violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — however much we have been the cause of it — have left us bewildered and terrified by this seemingly austere and martial faith.

Islam was spread quickly by the sword from Arabia westward across North Africa, the history books tell us, and is supposedly prone to the extremities of thought to which deserts give rise. But there is a whole other side to Islamic history that has been obscured, even as it illuminates a key strategic geography of the 21st century. While we in the United States have concentrated on the western half of the Islamic world in the Middle Eastern deserts, there is an eastern half in the green forests and jungles of the tropics where global energy routes and merchant sea traffic now intersect.

Islam is only partly a desert religion; it is just as much a seafaring faith, the harbinger not of narrow soldierly thought but of a cosmopolitanism spread by sophisticated merchants over the centuries in the Far Eastern seas. The legendary Sinbad the Sailor was an Arab from Oman based in Basra, in what is now Iraq. His Homeric voyages of the 8th through the 10th centuries encompassed East Africa, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, testimony to the maritime reach of Islam across the longitudes as far as East Asia.

Whereas 20% of Muslims live in the Middle East, 60% are in Asia, according to the Pew Research Center. The Arab world plus Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan — the geographical summation of our own wars and trepidations — comprises 632 million Muslims. But in India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia and the southern Philippines, there are an additional 565 million Muslims. And as the burgeoning middle-class fleshpots of East Asia require increasing amounts of oil and natural gas from the Middle East, China has been aggressively courting the eastern Islamic world, which sits astride the main sea lanes of communication to the Middle East.

Throughout the seaboards of South and Southeast Asia, China provides military and economic aid and is building harbor and container facilities, and Chinese warships pay port visits. The Chinese government considers the South China Sea a "core interest" (much to the consternation of the United States and its allies) partly because it is the gateway to this tropical Muslim cosmopolis that the Chinese know well from the medieval trading networks of the Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties.

When Islam, as the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains, swept through Arabia and North Africa, it moved into "an essentially virgin area, so far as high culture was concerned," so that it constructed from scratch an entire civilization. But as wave upon wave of Arab and Persian merchants plied the eastern seas between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia in the Middle Ages — before the voyage of Vasco da Gama — bearing spices, cotton fabrics, precious stones and minerals, Islam became merely one layer of a richly intricate Hindu and Javanese cultural stew.

This is poignantly expressed by the Sufi Muslim saints or auliyas (protectors) who are believed to have helped found the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong, and who are often confused with Hindu deities; and by the throngs of Muslim schoolchildren, the girls' hair covered with jilbabs, who flock to the Buddhist temple of Borobudur in central Java.

Although democracy barely exists in the Arab world, it is commonplace in the Islamic societies of South and Southeast Asia. In the Arab world, Islam's determination to construct a complete, morally perfect civilization has left too little room for secular political legitimacy, with all its messy compromises, to take root. The result is that outside of the traditional monarchies and sheikhdoms, there needs to be frequent recourse to extremist ideology, or, for example, to the sterile Brezhnevite dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

But Islam in the eastern tropics is liberated from all that: It shares the moral space with other traditions, so that secular politics flourish. Indonesia has more Muslims than any other country in the world, yet it is not an Islamic state.

But this benign version of Islam is now being challenged by modern technology, which allows for the influx of Saudi money and religious ideology. There is also the dynamic influence of Middle East-based global television networks such as Al Jazeera, which has introduced tropical Islam to both Arab and European center-left political sensibilities, making Indonesians, Bangladeshis and others, for example, intimately familiar with the struggle in the Palestinian territories thousands of miles away.

Then there is the effect of commercial air travel, which allows 200,000 Indonesians each year to make the hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. Yemeni Airlines flies to Indonesia four times a week, strengthening the historic Indian Ocean links between the Hadhramaut region in Yemen and Java in Indonesia. Previous generations of tradesmen from the Hadhramaut and from the Hejaz in Saudi Arabia brought liberal and heterodox Sufi influences to the South Seas. But today, Wahabi money translates Hitler's "Mein Kampf" into Bahasa Indonesia, the official language of Indonesia.

This truly is globalization, in which various strains of thought are homogenized by mass media, in turn influenced by determined interest groups, into a monochrome worldview.

Yet this new, postmodern Islam with a hard Middle Eastern edge is ramming up against another import: the glitzy materialism that in Malaysia and Indonesia is associated with nominally communist China. This is the real "clash of civilizations" going on. Americans thought they owned the face of global capitalism after the collapse of the Berlin Wall; it turns out that in Islamic East Asia, the Chinese do. Ethnic Chinese own many of the spanking new malls packed with Louis Vuitton, Versace and other designer stores, the places to observe women in the most fashionable silk jilbabs and the most revealing, sophisticated dress. In Muslim Southeast Asia, modesty often stops at the neck.

While Americans understandably fret over the rise of an authoritarian China, it is China's dynamic capitalist model that is largely responsible for the consumerism in the Muslim Far East, which is hard to disaggregate from the free flow of ideas in the region.

Who will win the battle for the hearts and minds of Muslim East Asia — the extremist Saudis or the materialistic Chinese? We should be rooting for the Chinese.

Robert D. Kaplan is the author, most recently, of "Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power." He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for the Atlantic.

Ending the Culture of Hate - By Sharon Stapel

Posted on Advocate.com October 22, 2010 02:17:08 PM

Ending the Culture of Hate

Teen suicide, hate violence in the street. New York City Anti-Violence Project's executive director Sharon Stapel wonders: Can we end the culture of hate?

By Sharon Stapel

Suicides. Gay bashings. Targeting and torturing people just because they are gay. It has been a difficult time for any of us who love our kids, our friends, our families, and our neighbors — to watch people we love beaten and killed because of who they are. Yet this is every day for some people — lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who have lived with fear and violence each time they leave the house, go to work, walk down the street, or kiss their partner goodbye. 

Violence against LGBT people has not suddenly increased — it has been increasing all along. In 2008 we had the most violent year for LGBT people since Matthew Shepard was murdered 10 years earlier. October 2009 was the most violent month of the year and the same month that President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. During the latter half of 2009 and early 2010, a gay or transgender person was killed every month in Puerto Rico. What has increased alarmingly is the severity of the violence — anti-LGBT violence becomes more brutal each year. 

Why is this happening? At the Anti-Violence Project we know that the more visible we are, the more vulnerable we are to those who would act on their anti-LGBT prejudice. Over the past 10 years we have seen a historic increase in visibility around LGBT civil rights — we are regularly included in national, state and local debates about politics and policy. For every person who speaks to the necessity to achieve equality and respect for LGBT people, there is another who spews anti-LGBT rhetoric. With bus tours preaching against gay folks or signs that promote nooses as the "solution" to same-sex marriage, these are dangerous times. Tens of millions of dollars are spent by so-called community leaders and antigay groups each year to denigrate and denounce LGBT people, creating a culture of hate that results in attacks and suicides. 

Antigay rhetoric promotes the stigma and isolation that drives LGBT youths to take their own lives and encourages violent gay bashings, and we've seen the very real harm this does. Hate speech creates a hostile environment that demeans LGBT people and encourages physical attacks against our communities. Anti-LGBT hate speech is dangerous, it is ignorant, and it is wrong.

The rhetoric is all that more dangerous because it is supported by national anti-LGBT policy. Every national law in this country, save one, either excludes LGBT people or discriminates against us. The only law that protects us, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, is the one meant to prosecute those who would harm us because of this culture of hate. And in what has become a painful irony, the government's failure to repeal the laws that actively discriminate against us — "don't ask, don't tell," the Defense of Marriage Act — and refusal to pass those that would acknowledge our equality, such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or a fully inclusive Civil Rights Act, contributes to this culture of hate.

So what is the solution? We have to change the culture of hate. We have to demand immediate equality because we have been put on notice: It is, literally, deadly to wait. Our laws must not only protect LGBT people but also proclaim our equality to everyone and denounce those who would target us for discrimination and violence. We have to stop the anti-LGBT rhetoric, from the jokes to the nooses. The government must do that through policy, but so can we by word and deed. 

This is everyone's issue. If you were affected by the stories of gay kids killing themselves, if you were horrified to see gay people targeted and tortured, if you think that people should be able to walk down the street without being jumped and beaten simply for being who they are, then this is your issue. And now, more than ever, we need our straight allies to say, "I will not tolerate this anti-LGBT rhetoric. I will not allow another gay joke to go unchallenged. I know how dangerous it is and I will stop it." The people who are dying, who are harmed, are our children, our friends and neighbors. Stand up. Stand up against homophobia. Stand up against violence. Stand up for those who can't and with those who can.

- Sharon Stapel is the executive director of the NYC Anti-Violence Project and coordinates the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects.

Adam Lambert Too Gay for Malaysia?

From the Advocate - October 11, 2010

By Advocate.com Editors

A fundamentalist Muslim political party in Malaysia is demanding the cancellation of an Adam Lambert concert near the capitol city of Kuala Lumpur because the group says his show will promote gay culture.

According to Reuters, the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party — Malaysia's second-largest political party — plans to protest Lambert's Thursday concert at the Putra Indoor Stadium in Bukit Jalil.

A youth organizer for the party is quotes as saying Lambert's shows "are outrageous, with lewd dancing and a gay performance that includes kissing male dancers," which is "not good for people in our country."

The party has previously protested concerts by Rihanna and Mariah Carey, and a representative says the party plans to send "many of its members and supporters" to proselytize at the concert.

A rep for Malaysia's arts, culture, and heritage department said Lambert agreed to a set of rules, including not removing any clothing and maintaining a distance of about 25 feet between his stage and the audience.

Gay Muslim Film Festival Opens in Indonesia

Only Gay Muslim Film Fest Set for Weekend

By Advocate.com Editors

The largest gay film festival in Asia and the only one in the Muslim world will take place this weekend in Indonesia, reports news websiteMSN. The Q! Film Festival will showcase 150 films from more than 20 countries that focus on such issues as gay rights and HIV/AIDS.

While organizers don't anticipate public opposition, they prefer to keep the event fairly low-key due to the "stigma against gays" among conservative sections of the mainly Muslim population, according to festival director John Badalu.

Badalu also says that the festival is being discussed on social networking sites such as Twitter which indicates it has already achieved one of its goals, "let people know that the queer community exists in Indonesia"

The festival will launch today and hopes to attract 15,000 viewers to screenings and other events.