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Muslims: America free but immoral

UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI religion correspondent

WASHINGTON, April 28 (UPI) -- There are seven million Muslims in the United States, according to a new report published by the Council on American-Islamic relations.

The report compiled by the Hartford Institute for Religious Research shows that U.S. Muslims are theological conservatives with a mixed view of American life.

On the positive side, 99 percent agree either "strongly" (82%) or "somewhat" that "America is a technologically advanced society that we can learn from. Moreover, 35 percent feel strongly that America is an example for freedom and democracy, and 42 percent concur "somewhat" with this statement.

However, two thirds are either strongly (28%) or somewhat (39%) of the opinion that America is an immoral, corrupt society. This view was most forcefully expressed by African-American Muslims, who account for 30 percent of the followers of Islam.

Of this group, 39 percent agreed "strongly" with the claim that "America" is immoral. By contrast, only 23 percent of the southern Indian immigrants or their descendants share this feeling as adamantly, according to the Hartford report.

On the other hand, only 15 percent of the American Muslims agreed strongly with the statement that American society was hostile to their faith. Another 42 percent, however, told researchers that this was "somewhat" true.

Compared with Europe, the Muslim population in America is still relatively small. Germany whose population of 82 million is less than one third as large as that of the U.S. has 3.2 million Muslim residents. France, population 60 million, has four million Muslims, who are by now the second-largest religious group in that country.

In the Netherlands, chiefly in Rotterdam, scores of churches have been converted because their former Christian members had deserted them.

"In many European countries church attendance is so low that the day does not seem far off when weekly worshipers of the Islamic faith will outnumber regular churchgoers," IDEA, a Protestant wire-service, predicted years ago.

In the United States, 46 percent of Christians attend services at least once a week, compared with one-tenth of church members in many Western European countries. Nevertheless, it is still considerably less than the 76 percent of Muslim men who go to mosque for Friday prayers in America.

Like Christians, American Muslims are by no means a homogenous group. There are 40 different Islamic denominations of which the Islamic Society of North America is the largest. Of the 1,209 U.S. mosques, 27 percent adhere to this organization, the Hartford Study shows.

The average membership of an American mosque numbers 1,625. This is 25 percent more than in 1994 when the Hartford Institute conducted its last survey of American mosques. This brings the number of U.S. Muslims associated with a house of worship to two million, out of a total of seven million.

Of those who participate in the life of an American Mosque, 75 percent are male, 81 percent have a high school diploma and 48 percent a college degree.

Almost 30 percent of American Muslims are converts from other religions. In Europe, by contrast, the number of conversions to Islam is insignificant, according to a recent IDEA report.

Theologically, American mosques are very strict. When asked, "How important are the following sources of authority in the worship and teachings of your mosque," 95 percent of the respondents described the Koran as "absolutely foundational," and 90 percent said the same about the Sunnah (teachings) Of Mohammed.

Similarly, 96 percent reported that their mosques emphasized in their teaching abstinence from alcohol and from sex outside marriage.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 29, 2001

Answers

Most of these folks must be first generation Americans. I give them 2 generations and they will be as corrupt as the rest of us.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 29, 2001.

Buncha religious repug freaks

-- (Dumbya@kill.right_wing_freakoids), April 29, 2001.

Buncha religious repug freaks

-- (Dumbya@kill.right_wing_freakoids)

I don't know if you can make statements like that. Until they (American muslims) prove that they suck repug dick like the right wing moral majority freaks do then you shouldn't classify them as repugs. They might be on our side! Now if you are just making a blanket statement about repugs, then I agree - fucking right wing bastard repug freaks!

-- Tony Baloney (Fuck the@repugs.com), April 30, 2001.

They have repug mentality. You want people like that on our side?

-- (Dumbya@kill.rightwing_freakoids), April 30, 2001.

Only when it comes time for an election (like in 2002 and especially 2004) Then we can show the fucking repugs the minority that they are.

-- Tony Baloney (Fuck the@repugs.com), April 30, 2001.

I'm a little confused about this, and there's nothing new about this confusion. For some reason [most likely my ignorance] I've seen in my mind's eye the term Muslim used to reference a more fervid brand of the Moslem faith. In fact, I noticed myself interchanging Muslim with Moslem in a recent post to Tarzan.

I learned quite a bit about the Moslem faith from a neighbor who was Moslem. She, her husband, and her two children were immigrants from India. Her father was from India, as well, and he was of the Catholic faith, so I don't know whether she converted when she met her husband or whether her mother had been a Moslem married to a Catholic. I DO know that her father was a smoker and she sent him out onto the patio to smoke.

#1 daughter wrote a paper on the Moslem faith in elementary school and I asked this woman to listen to it and correct any falsehoods. She said that, overall, it was correct. We chatted many times, and those chats included subjects like why Moslem women always kept their head, legs, arms, etc. covered in public. It was then that I learned that the Moslem faith considered the hair on a woman's head a "private part", only to be seen by her immediate family, other women, and certainly not something to be exposed to the world at large.

I don't remember her children ever playing with mine. They pretty much went to school [where they excelled], coming home, doing homework, and maybe engaging in religious rights of which I was unaware. Her husband was a cab driver and he attended Mosque every morning at 5am. I don't remember him EVER speaking to me.

They pretty much kept to their own kind [outside of the chats that she and I shared.] It's a pity, IMO. I would have enjoyed learning much more about her culture.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), April 30, 2001.

I too would like to learn more of the culture, the hair issue was interesting. I'd like to know tho why the little girls dont adhere. Is there an age issue, I wonder?

how come some wear pants, others dont?

maybe i'll do a search. Yeah, instead of laundry :-)

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), May 01, 2001.

Anita, the word "Muslim" seems to have gradually replaced the word "Moslem". Do you go back far enough to remember when it was called "Mohamedism"?

The first time I heard "Muslim" was in the 60s when the Black Muslims hit the national scene. It remained their word for a while, but now it seems that everyone uses it.

It always made me think of the material "muslin" til I got re-educated.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), May 01, 2001.

Lars: I DO vaguely remember Mohamedism [or something like that], but I have that cousin who married the guy from Lebanon, and I'm pretty sure that HE's Moslem. She's the dentist in California, if that jerks your memory on that one. I've found that in our discussions she references more Allah in reference to the faith. I kindof think of it all as "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

It's kindof funny, actually, but family members feel more jumpy about my cousin's marriage to a Moslem than they feel about MY relationship with SO. Everyone in my family accepts SO, but they worry that my cousin's mate may take his kids back to Lebanon, and, apparently it's extremely difficult to recover children that have been removed from the U.S. to Moslem countries.

'Sumer: Yes...there's an age-thing going on there. Heh. It's much like the age thing that had me at the beach in only shorts when I was 4 or 5 years old. It had never occurred to my parents that anyone would look at me and see nipples as a sexual feature. When puberty strikes, everything changes.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), May 01, 2001.