It’s a 20-minute drive from Northwestern’s Evanston campus to the Muslim Community Center (MCC) in Morton Grove. My Uber drops me off outside a large tan building. It’s not particularly tall and it doesn’t look especially wide from the outside, but inside a lot is happening. Half of the building is a mosque, and the other half is a school attended by students in grades six through nine.
After signing in at the front desk, I sink down into a chair to wait for Abeer Saleh, the director of middle school and college prep at Muslim Community Center Academy (MCCA).
MCCA enrolls over 600 students in preschool through ninth grade. The school has two campuses – the one in Morton Grove that I visited and another in Skokie that teaches students through grade five. According to MCCA’s website, the school is “the largest Islamic preschool-8th grade in the nation.”
Both Common Core classes and courses about Islam are part of MCCA’s curriculum. As a graduation requirement and part of the Islamic studies course, male students are required to give a practice khutbah, or sermon, about Islamic values or current events. The khutbahs are given one per week before prayer on Friday and are attended by about 200 students and 20 to 30 community members. Parents often record their sons’ sermons.
I am only sitting down for a moment before Saleh pops into the waiting area with Mohammed Abdelmagid, an eighth grader at MCCA who is preparing to give his khutbah in January. Abdelmagid is eloquent, friendly and polite, though maybe a little shy around me. He has a fluff of dark curls on his head, and someone passing by points out that his sneakers are untied.
Abdelmagid is going to give his practice sermon on the importance of parents and the responsibilities that children and parents have toward each other. Mersad Imamovic teaches the Islamic studies course that this assignment is part of, and he says that students like to pick topics for the khutbahs to which they can relate. For example, many students want to write about “sins of tongue,” like back-biting, because those are things that they learn about in school and at home and things with which they may have more immediate experience. Imamovic explains that Abdelmagid’s father passed away, and since that time he has become closer to his mother. Their relationship has likely influenced the content of Abdelmagid’s khutbah, says Imamovic.
Students spend significant time preparing for their khutbahs. Abdelmagid started preparing by doing research online and finding different types of khutbahs to use as references. During class, students have Q&A sessions when they can ask their teacher and classmates questions. They peer edit one another’s sermons and get advice from Imamovic on their topics and the structure of their writing. One week before they deliver their khutbahs in earnest, they present them in class and get feedback from classmates. Some students may also get assistance from their families. Abdelmagid says he hasn’t asked his mother for help yet, but he probably will in the future.
Students in grades six and seven attend Friday sermons, so they get used to seeing others deliver khutbahs. Abdelmagid says that one thing he’s learned from watching other students is that he wants to have his sermon written out in front of him in case he forgets what to say. He also wants to keep eye contact, make hand gestures and not wiggle around too much while he’s speaking.
The khutbahs must include two verses from the Quran, two sayings of the prophet Muhammad, and two “take-home points” about how listeners can become better people. Students are also graded on delivery, fluency in Arabic, accuracy in translation from Arabic to English, elaboration of verses and sayings, and ability to understand and convey a message.
Both Abdelmagid and Imamovic say that public speaking is the most valuable skill the assignment teaches. Imamovic explains that it is especially important that children start developing this skill while they’re younger, before they develop the consciousness that “people are listening to me.”
Sharing a lesson through his khutbah also appeals to Abdelmagid. He says, “They’re a great way to form bonds with your community and teach people. It makes you feel happy when you give one.”
***
I have come here to the MCC three times, and each time I’ve been inside, I have seen something different.
The first time I visited the Center I came with three other Northwestern students. The school day was over and the building was mostly empty. Eventually people started flowing into the mosque for prayer. Many of them live in the surrounding neighborhood and walk here from their homes. During the prayer, some children played tag and duck-duck-goose in the back. They squealed with excitement during their games and begged for a few more minutes with their friends when their parents told them it was time to leave. After the prayer ended, the office manager Sabih arranged a discussion between us and some men from the mosque. They spoke to us about the mosque, the school and Islam and encouraged us repeatedly to ask any questions we could think of.
The second time I came to Center was to learn more about MCCA. Saleh gave some other visitors and me a tour of the school, during which I got thoroughly lost. (We went up some stairs, then down some other stairs and kept popping out in new places. There’s a lot fit into this one deceptively small building.) Students sat working in some classrooms. One boy’s clear singing floated into the hallway from his Hifdh class, in which he and other students memorize the Quran. Backpacks hung on hooks in the halls, lunchboxes and books spilling out of them. At the end of the tour, Saleh asked us to write good stories that portray Muslims fairly.
The last time I visited MCCA, I came during recess. Happy shouts and bouncing basketballs echoed from the gym through the entrance to the school. Announcements over the loudspeaker pierced the other sounds. After we sat down in an empty conference room, Imamovic, like Sabih, encouraged me to ask any questions I might have.
While each visit was different, they shared the palpable desire of the people with whom I spoke to demonstrate that Islam is not a violent religion as prevailing stereotypes suggest. Almost all of them told me in the sincerest language that they wanted to answer all of my questions. In the meeting with Sabih and other mosque members, when my classmates and I didn’t ask questions about Islam and Muslim stereotypes, our hosts brought them up anyway and explained how they were incorrect. Sabih also gave us a solid stack of pamphlets explaining other aspects of Islam, and many of these addressed misconceptions about Muslims and Islam, as well.
One of the thickest pamphlets Sabih distributed is titled “What is Islam? Who are the Muslims?” Inside it explains basic aspects of Islam as well as ideas like “How Islam views Judaism and Christianity,” “What does Islam say about Jesus,” “Does Islam recognize Science and Technology,” and “What is the Status of Women in Islam.” These sections directly address stereotypes and fears about Muslims, and the pamphlet tries to correct those false assumptions and assuage those concerns by demonstrating how Christianity, Judaism, American values and lifestyles, and Islam have much in common and are compatible.
Nadia Marzouki describes this as “formatting” in her book Islam: An American Religion, the process by which Muslims are pressured to ‘format’ Islam around American ideals of ‘proper’ religion. She writes, “The acceptability of Islam and Muslims in the eyes of the American public operates…via a standardization of Islam as faith” (24). Marzouki argues that for Islam to be seen by Americans as a legitimate and non-threatening religion, it must appear similar to dominant religions in the United States – mainly Christianity and Judaism.
These similarities were emphasized in both my conversation with Sabih and the other MCC mosque attendees, as well as in the pamphlet. Where there are differences between Christianity and Judaism and Islam, the people I spoke to and the pamphlet describe those differences using Christianity and/or Judaism as a basis for the explanation. (Christianity/Judaism are used for demonstrating comparisons or contrasts, but they are not critiqued, which is important.) In one example of this formatting, the pamphlet explains that Muslims are also supposed to believe in the teachings of the Torah and the Bible, but the Quran is the primary source of instruction since they believe that previous scriptures were tainted by translation. In another example of formatting, Sabih compared MCCA to a Catholic private school, and he also brought up the role of Jesus in Islamic belief.
The pamphlet also addresses more culturally “othering” stereotypes of Islam and explains how Islam is, in fact, compatible with American values. It explains that, contrary to some beliefs, Muslim women are not oppressed and the employment of science and technology is encouraged.
In the introduction to Islamophobia/Islamophilia, Andrew Shryock explains that “disciplinary pressure” is imposed on Muslims to conform to Americans’ (and other Muslims’) concepts of religious practitioners and good democratic, patriotic citizens (19). Conformity is “rewarded with higher levels of political influence and societal inclusion,” so if Muslims want to have a voice and a place in the United States, they have to conform to expectations of what it means to be American (19).
In this process of formatting themselves as good American Muslims, Shryock says that Muslims internalize both the positive and negative perceptions that others have of them, and this informs how they act and portray themselves. Edward Said also addresses this idea in Covering Islam, writing, “We depend for our sense of reality not just on the interpretations and meaning we form individually for ourselves, but also on those we receive” (46). This is like Imamovic saying that as we get older, public speaking becomes more difficult because we are more aware that people are listening to us and judging us.
In my discussions with people at the MCC and MCCA, it was clear that they had internalized stereotypes of Muslims as foreign, violent and terroristic, and they wanted to disprove those ideas by telling us everything they possibly could about how and why Muslims are not those things.
During the meeting with Sabih and the others, they said that the MCC holds interfaith dialogues to engage people from other religious backgrounds in friendly conversations. The conversations are meant to help teach people that Muslims do not fit the stereotype and do not need to be feared. Between these discussions and the eagerness of everyone with whom I talked to answer my questions, it seems as if people at the MCC and MCCA are working to dispel fears and misconceptions through dialogue. Marzouki argues that dialogue is not enough to overcome the cultural divide between Muslims and Islamophobes or others who are distrustful or discriminatory.
“It’s not by stacking words upon works or by opposing positive clichés to negative ones that we will break the cycle of this narcissistic dueling where each party tries to be right,” Marzouki says (210). Instead, she encourages “human encounters,” genuine and normal interactions between people, as a way to “make appear the possibility of an original relation, unstereotyped, to the world and the other” (210). In her opinion, dialogue simply reiterates stereotypes or reductionist beliefs without changing anyone’s opinions, while individual encounters emphasize people’s common humanity and create more equal grounds for sharing. Conversations between Muslims and people of other faiths may also be influenced by Muslims’ sense of the need to format themselves.
With all of its flaws, dialogue is still easier to initiate and control than chance encounters. It’s difficult to manufacture genuine human encounters (especially if people come into them with preconceived opinions about others’ characters based on misinformed stereotypes), but I believe that the conversations encouraged by people at the MCC and MCCA are attempts at creating these kinds of human experiences as much as they can.
And by letting people into their building and their lives, as they did for me, they also facilitate human encounters. Waiting awkwardly in the lobby with Abdelmagid, apologizing for taking him away from his recess and watching him chat with other students and teachers, we started to get to know one another as individuals.