SHURUQ 2009: THE MANY FACES OF AMERICAN ISLAM

For Immediate Release

SHURUQ 2009: THE MANY FACES OF AMERICAN ISLAM

March 23rd April 5th, 2009

(New York - 3/21/09) For seven years now, Shuruq (Arabic for Sunrise) has been a celebration of Islam's rich diversity. Shuruq raises awareness of Islam and Muslims in an experiential way, through emphasis on lived realities and artistic expressions, working to build an attitude of harmony and mutual understanding within the New York City community. For two weeks every year, Shuruq puts together a series of increasingly popular events on NYUs campus to highlight the breadth of culture, music, literature, religion and politics throughout the Muslim world -- including America's millions of Muslims.

Shuruq 2009 kicks off on Monday, March 23rd, at the Kimmel Center, with Cultural Passport: Explore the Taste of the Muslim Palate, an opening banquet featuring cuisine from across the Muslim world. Shuruq 2009 will host a number of events across campus, bringing to the University and to the City a chance to hear from, learn and engage with noted activists, academics, performers and American Muslims leaders. This represents for many New Yorkers an excellent opportunity to understand American Islam, where it has come from and where it is going.

"We started Shuruq in 2002," says Haroon Moghul (NYU CAS '02), the Islamic Center Director of Public Relations. "Islam is so many different places, languages and peoples. Islam was adopted by so many people, in so many places, that it is never just one thing. And we in America are building an Islam that inspires our reality and reflects our experience."

Shermeen Rahman, Chair of Shuruq 2009, says We hope that through this series of entertaining and educational events people will see that Islam manifests itself in many different ways. Shuruqs goal is to shed light on these facets of Islam that are often ignored in todays society and encourage a much lacking communication between American Muslims and the broader society we are part of.

American Muslims have to proactively engage the communities that we are connected to, says Imam Khalid Latif, Director and Chaplain of the Islamic Center at NYU. We are working to engage our fellow New Yorkers, communicating through many different ways, through music and movies, food and festivals, teach-ins and workshops, that Islam is a big tent, and there is a lot of room in that tent for a lot of experiences.

For a complete listing of this years events, please visit www.icnyu.org/shuruq

All events are free and open to the public. Members of the University and New York City residents are especially encouraged to attend.

The Islamic Center at NYU serves the Muslim population at New York University, a private institution of higher education and research located in lower Manhattan. The Islamic Center at NYU is overseen by the Office of the Muslim Chaplain, established in April 2007 to meet the needs of a growing Muslim community.

Inspired by the idea that Americas Muslim community will best develop in a supportive environment, the Islamic Center has not only seen tremendous increase in membership but has motivated its student population to find new ways of harnessing their resources and expanding their relationships with the wider community.

Todays Islamic Center caters to a wide and growing audience, reaching not only Muslims in New York City but also individuals from other communities. The Islamic Center at NYU is dedicated to fostering a sense of awareness, activism and scholarship amongst the Muslim community both on and off campus

For More information please contact:
The Islamic Center at NYU at 212.998.4712
Khalid Latif: Director/Chaplain, ICNYU at kl442@nyu.edu.
Haroon Moghul: PR Coordinator, ICNYU at moghul@gmail.com
Shermeen Rahman: Chair, Shuruq 2009 at nyushuruq@gmail.com

When NYPD wears a Muslim topi

By Harry Bruinius | Correspondent / March 19, 2009 edition

New York

Around five in the morning one day in the summer of 2007, just as Imam Khalid Latif was preparing for the salatul-fajr, the obligatory prayer between dawn and sunrise, the phone in his small Manhattan apartment began to ring.

He had been up late the night before, having just conducted a nikkah, a Muslim wedding ceremony, for a South Asian couple he knew from New York University, where he served as chaplain. Afterward, he offered to drive a few students back into the city, so he had not gotten home as early as he might have expected.

On the phone was an operations dispatcher from the New York Police Department (NYPD), where Imam Latif also served as a chaplain, having been named only three months earlier to the post. This was his first emergency call: Two cops had been shot, one fatally. He was to go to the hospital to minister to the families and fellow officers of the fallen.

He has had a number of emergency calls since then, but none has been for a Muslim officer or family. The eight members of the NYPD Chaplains Unit – a group of part-timers that includes Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Jews – take turns being on call. But even when the relevant denominational chaplain arrives, the first responder often stays. For six hours, Latif remained with the mother of the slain officer, an Orthodox Christian. She wept the entire time.

Latif recognizes the jarring cultural tableau he often presents to those he ministers. He is young, a 2004 graduate of New York University. Bearded, he wears a topi skullcap with his NYPD blue; his gold police badge bears his Pakistani name prominently. Indeed, part of his ministry, he says, is to help develop a particularly American form of Islam – one fully integrated into the social fabric of the United States.
“Day to day on the job, there’s the sensitivity trainings, culture immersion trainings – but it’s really about being there for Muslims and non-Muslims alike,” Latif says. “It’s a stressful job [for officers], and they need someone to talk to and someone who they feel will have their back, and stand up for them.”

• • •

Few Muslim clerics have attempted to extend their ministries beyond their own folds. In the US, nearly 60 differing ethnicities, cultures, and languages practice varying forms of Islam. The tremulous cadences of the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, are heard five times daily in parts of New York. But individual Muslim communities have remained mostly insular and separate.

In the past few years, as Latif has become a more visible figure in the emergence of an American form of Islam – he has turned down chaplaincies at Princeton and other universities to stay with the NYPD – he has grappled with how Americans view Muslims in a post-9/11 world. On the other side, as a young leader, he has also been seeking ways for Muslims to take part fully in such a diverse and predominantly non-Muslim culture – one that often remains suspicious and fearful of their beliefs.

And so he often wonders, what does it mean to be both Muslim and American? Like some ethnic Muslim-Americans, “we’re presented with Islam, but we’re not presented with an Islam that necessarily works in the context we’re in,” Latif says. “There’s a lot of questioning of how you remain true to traditional cultural norms … while maintaining yourself and fitting into a broader American society.”

Latif has consciously shaped his ministries to help forge a new kind of Muslim identity, one that confronts this painful clash of traditions. The experience echoes that of Catholic immigrants who a century ago found themselves in a largely Protestant culture suspicious of their beliefs.

Unlike their counterparts in Europe, Muslims in the US tend to be solidly middle class and mainstream. Their incomes and education levels mirror those of the general public, according to a comprehensive 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center. That has helped them fit into the broader society. No one is sure of their numbers, though. Some groups say there are as many as 7 million Muslims in the US. Pew estimates there are 2.35 million throughout the country, mostly in urban areas.

Many devout Muslim immigrants simply try to re-create their traditional cultures in the US, say some scholars. But when their children grow up within the American culture, they adopt American attitudes and values. “What the [older generation] sees is that religion can only survive in their particular cultural matrix,” says Sherman Jackson, professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Michigan, a Muslim who has also addressed Latif’s questions. “So their tendency is to take that cultural matrix wherever they go as a means of preserving the religion.”

“In America, we are in a different cultural space, and we are still in the process of trying to develop a culture that resonates with the teachings, the sensibilities, the moral parameters of our religion,” he continues. “What you have are two communities, one who says that Islam already has a cultural expression, the other saying that, no, Islam in America is in the process of developing a cultural expression.”

• • •

Latif’s own religious awakening began his junior year at Wardlaw-Hartridge, a private prep school in Edison, N. J., where he grew up as the youngest of three children. He played defensive back on the football team and was class president. His father, a doctor, had brought his bride to the US in the 1970s. Though not particularly devout in their early years, the family connected with their religious roots during the 1990s.
By his junior year, Latif was taking advantage of his reputation and position as a top student and popular leader to cut class – to attend mosque. But he would arrive there in his prep-school jacket and tie and driving a black Lexus. “I had no idea, I had no comprehension whatsoever, about differences in people’s perceptions of affluence and socioeconomic backgrounds,” he says. “I just wanted to pray. And so it became hard to find someone to teach me.”

At NYU, he continued to explore his religious identity and became a leader in the university’s Muslim student group. After graduating, he became the de facto chaplain. Eventually he attended Hartford Theological Seminary, which has a program in Islamic Studies.

His work at NYU and Princeton, where he also served as a chaplain, attracted the attention of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who appointed him an NYPD chaplain in April 2007. For Latif, serving in a world-renowned American institution was the perfect opportunity to forge a particularly American form of Islam.

“And now it’s like, how do you mesh together this seeming dichotomy of Islam and the West?” he asks.

“When I walk down the street and I’m wearing my uniform, and I also have a beard and my head covered, you see that that’s not a dichotomy, it’s a reality.”

Imam Khalid Latif's Reflection on Demark: A Must Read

as'salaamu alaykum

I had the opportunity to visit Denmark this past week alhamdulillah and below are some of my thoughts from the visit that I had written in the morning before my flight. 
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I am going to be leaving Denmark in about 9 hours inshallah. Its around 3am here and I am still jetlagged so I figured now would be a better time than any to collect some of my thoughts lest i forget them. I had come to Denmark last May for a couple of days and had the opportunity to get a minimal understanding of what life is like here for Muslims. This time around, my stay was for about 5 days and it was a lot more enlightening.

It’s still remarkable to me how difficult it is to be young and Muslim in much of the world. The Muslim community here now is often referred to as “The Ethnic Minority” . They are made up of immigrants of various backgrounds, including mostly Pakistanis, Moroccans, Turks, Palestinians, and Albanians. The situation as I have observed it here now is seemingly a lot more serious than during my first visit. Aside from the day to day experiences that one would assume surface in regards to identity issues, it seems that isolation and marginalization, in conjunction with socio-economic influences, has lead many young Muslims in Denmark to gain a sense of entitlement and empowerment by turning to the streets. Gang violence, drug usage and dealing, amongst many other things have begun to increase. I have been told that since last august, there have been about 61 reported shootings in Copenhagen and these shootings are becoming more frequent. To give an example, after the Jummah prayer this past Friday in Copenhagen, I attended a janazah prayer of a 19 year old boy who had been shot in the head recently. That evening, as we returned from a program in a town called Odense at 1am or so, we received news of a 25 year old boy who had been shot 4 times in the back. The next day, returning from a city called Århus, we received news of another young man who was shot and killed. All of this took place within the immediate vicinity of where I was staying. This daily violence has raised great concern amongst the general public and has simultaneously given more reason to a society that is already at odds with Islam all the more reason to believe that it cannot be compatible within its respective context.

Aside from the day to day street violence, domestic violence seems to be at a high as well. One of the seminars that I spoke at was at the Danish Police Academy and here I had the opportunity to meet with many of the higher ranking officials in their Police Department. A woman by the name of Susanne Stenberg who works specifically with what they call “honor crimes” (those crimes that deal with young men and women being physically abused for engaging in activity that would violate the cultural honor code of their parents) gave a presentation focusing on her work. One of the most striking statistics that she cited was in the past year about 440 cases of domestic abuse related to “honor crimes” that took place in Denmark had been reported to their police department. If one were to even assume that around 40% to 50% of people reported cases, and that would be an extremely high estimate in my opinion, we could estimate then there roughly 900 to 1000 instances a year of domestic violence in Denmark alone in the Muslim community. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to describe my feelings towards this. If anyone is interested in my thoughts on DV, you can listen to a khutba I gave at the IC on it some time ago here http://icnyu.org/loudblog/audio/Upholding_Female_Dignity.mp3

Through the lectures and workshops I conducted while I was here, I probably met with several hundred Muslims of various ethnic, cultural, and professional background , all of whom called Denmark their home. Frustration is seemingly very apparent. I would not be sympathetic in any way to those who are committing domestic violence, but I can see how the frustration arises amongst those who have turned to the street for a sense of belonging. Its hard for us at times to find a comfortable place in the Muslim community where we can fit in and belong without have to compartmentalize our identities. Either we don’t know how to fit in or we just don’t feel comfortable letting others around us fit in and still be a little different from us. These young Danish Muslims, like many young Muslims around the world, learned many things explicitly and implicitly during their processes of socialization concerning Islam. Most definitely they were shown and taught how to be Muslim. The problematic thing is that they weren’t shown and taught how to be a Muslim in Denmark. Interestingly enough, many of us were similarly taught how to be Muslim as well, but not how to be a Muslim in America.

The immigrant population that came into Denmark differed from the immigrant population that had come into the United States in that many U.S. immigrants came as a mix of white collar and blue collar positions, working as doctors and engineers as well as cab drivers and restaurant workers, while the immigrant population in Denmark came only as blue collar workers. Similar to the U.S. experience though, these immigrant groups established centers that became highly ethno-centric, meeting the immediate needs of the generation that established them, but not always taking into consideration the needs of the generations that would come after. Many of their children have broken dreams and few aspirations as they become more and more disenchanted by being unprivileged minorities amongst a privileged Danish Society while at the same time not knowing how to fit into the Muslim community that they have grown up in.

But amongst all of the confusion, frustration and anxiety, I met people who not only wanted to change things or who spoke about the necessity of change, but were laying down the groundwork for actively changing things. I gave a lecture at the Copenhagen Business School to about 150 Muslim graduate students, most of whom were the children of immigrant workers, and was later on told that the Medical School, the Law School, and other professional schools have even larger Muslim populations and are growing every year. They are looking to education as a key part of the process of empowerment and are beginning to explore opportunities for passing on the same desire for education to those young people who find themselves on the streets. These young men and women are looking to establish social centers, sports activities, after school programs, etc. in hopes of offering an alternative. They are looking to become a part of the social and political frameworks that govern how Danish Society is run in hopes of establishing and strengthening a Danish Islam. All they need is encouragement and support, someone telling them they can in fact change the situation that they find themselves in and that they don’t have to settle, be passive, or indifferent to the way they are perceived by the society at large.

To everyone in Copenhagen, Odense and Århus, my thanks and appreciation for the hospitality that you gave to me, for your openness in sharing your respective stories with me, and the opportunities for growth and development that you presented to me. You have a unique opportunity to be amongst those who define what it means to be a Muslim in the Danish Context. Don’t let that opportunity pass you by.

To everyone back in the States, we have to realize the immense opportunity we have to better the global understanding and perception of our deen. We don’t have the same obstacles that others have and we have to begin to mature in our conversations and our activism so that we can really effectively improve our situation. Alhamdulillah, it might not be bad, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to make it better.

To my community at NYU and my family, people here are making du’aa for you and know much of what it is that you all are doing. Every time I travel I realize how truly blessed I am to be part of this community and I am grateful that you all allow me to work, serve, and be with you. You are helping to set a precedent for people here and inspiring them to do more with themselves. Keep making moves inshallah and don’t be complacent with anything that might be perceived as success.

May Allah give all of us and the entire Muslim community tawfiq in all of endeavors and May He guide and bless us all. Ameen.

 

 "All our dreams will come true - if we have the courage to follow them." ~ Walt Disney

________________________
Imam Khalid Latif
New York University
Director/Chaplain
Islamic Center at NYU
371 Sixth Avenue
New York, NY 10014

Tel: 212.998.4712
Email: kl442@nyu.edu
Web: www.icnyu.org

Inspector/Chaplain
NYPD: New York Police Department
Tel: 212.248.0950
Pager: 917.788.0280
 

Eid Mubarak!!!

According to the shura of Imams associated with Imam W D Mohammed, the moon was sighted in Florida indicating the first day of shawaal will be tomorrow. Eid Mubarak!

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Subject: ICNYU Eid ul Fitr Announcement l Info on Prayers and Brunch

as'salaamu alaykum

Based off of confirmed local moon sightings in Florida, Texas, and other parts of the county, the Islamic center at NYU will be observing Wednesday, October 1st as the first of Shawwal and subsequently Eid-ul Fitr.

We will be holding Eid prayers tomorrow inshallah at the Islamic Center located at 371 6th Avenue, on the corner of 6th avenue and Washington Place. Eid Prayers will begin at 9:30am and will be followed by brunch. Both prayers and the brunch are open to everyone, nyu and non-nyu, so feel free to attend inshallah even if you are not an NYU student, faculty member, or part of the staff.

For directions to the Islamic Center please visit our website at www.icnyu.org

In preparation for tomorrow, our khatib Haroon Moghul has passed on the following message:
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"Since Eid prayer is not like regular prayer, it's best we know what to expect and to prepare for the prayer in advance, mentally and spiritually. Eid Prayer is scheduled to begin by 9.30 a.m.

Eid Prayer will follow Hanafi fiqh on this occasion; it is important to recognize that the eight schools of law are all equally valid in fiqh. There are differences in how different schools perform the prayer, so Eid prayer may be different than you remember it in your respective communities. This doesn't mean your community was doing anything wrong.

There will be no adhan or iqama for the Eid prayer. The prayer consists of two raka', or cycles. In the first raka', there are 3 takbirat after the initial takbir (raising the hands and saying, "Allahu Akbar," meaning: God is greater); in the second raka', there are 3 takbirat after the initial takbir. So, there are 6 extra takbirat in total.

In between each of the takbir, you are recommended to read to yourself the following invocation: Subhanallah wa'l-hamdulillah wa la ilaha illa Allah wa'llahu Akbar (meaning: Glory be to God, praise be to God, there is no other god but God, and God is greater [than all]).

After the prayer, there will be a short khutbah. Normal rules of khutbah apply. The Eid prayer is not counted unless the fajr prayer is performed. Before the prayer, the Imam will review this procedure."
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Eid Mubarak wa Eid sa'eed wa kulla 'aam wa antum bi khayr. May Allah accept from all of us on this blessed day and grant us the best in this world and the best of the next. Ameen.

was'salaamu alaykum
Khalid Latif

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EID MUBARAK TO ALL MY READERS!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND MAY G-D CONTINUE TO BLESS US ALL!!!