The mosque on 10 1/2 Street, tucked behind Team Tires, doesn’t look like the traditional Islamic house of worship—no domes, no minarets, no glazed tile floors.
Like other houses in the neighborhood, the mosque is a folky abode with a wide porch that on most Sundays accommodates a colorful mound of children’s footwear—shiny basketball high-tops, running shoes, Birkenstock sandals and flip-flops.
In an upstairs room, teenagers attending the mosque’s Sunday school form a semicircle around Nooruddeen Durkee, a tall man with a long white beard and a dark hat called a kufi, sitting before an open Qur’an, Islam’s holy book.
Durkee listens as the children—boys on his right, girls on his left—read from a thin workbook containing the Qur’an’s final 36 surahs, or chapters, while he follows along in a copy of the full 2,000-page version.
The book is a transliteration and translation that Durkee himself completed, with the help of his wife, Noura, in 2003. The transliteration spells out the Qur’an’s original Arabic words in Roman script, so that someone with no knowledge of Arabic can still read the Qur’an as it was written nearly 1,400 years ago. Durkee’s version also provides an English translation.
It is only the second American translation of the Qur’an, and the first full transliteration done in America by someone with, as Durkee says, “an American ear.”
“It gives people a lot of access right away,” says Durkee. “I learned Arabic in Mecca, and it was very hard. It doesn’t have to be that hard. We’ve taught hundreds of people to read this way.”
Durkee imparts to his students the doctrines of the faith—the rules for prayer, fasting, tithing and pilgrimage—and the spiritual reasons for them. “It’s an explanation of Islam,” says Durkee. “It’s the practical application. It’s one way to answer the question: ‘What can I do?’”
It’s an important question for his young students, who find themselves in a potentially confusing situation. Most of the 50 or so pupils who regularly attend the Sunday school are second-generation children of immigrants or refugees. They’re also students in City public schools.
The Durkees helped start the mosque Sunday school about seven years ago to fill a local void in Islamic education. In Muslim countries, Islam dominates public and private life—children learn the faith in school and absorb it through culture. In America, however, where Islam is subject to both curiosity and misinterpretation, there is not a strong education system for young Muslims.
“In Muslim countries, parents don’t have to think so much about teaching,” says Noura. “In this culture, if children don’t have some formal education about Islam, they won’t pick it up.”
Even as they teach Islam’s tenets and history, the Sunday school’s instructors must impart a more complex curriculum—they must help the students learn how to practice their faith in a materialist society.
The mosque Sunday school’s most important function, then, may not be the facts it imparts so much as the examples its teachers set on how to live a spiritual life in a culture dominated by Big Macs and Maxim. Noura says the students, like all children, don’t always think it’s cool to follow the adults, but she says it’s important that the model exists.
“They test the limits, they push against it,” Noura says. “But they keep coming to the school with great pleasure. It changes their minds about what’s possible for them.”
Islam’s first commandment to Muslims is simple—read. Specifically, read the Qur’an, which Muslims believe was delivered to its author by divine revelation over a period of 23 years and completed in 632 A.D. in the city of Madinah, in present-day Saudi Arabia.
Islam’s first commandment isn’t so simple, however, if you are not literate in Arabic, a complex and fascinating ancient language. For new students of Islam, confronting a page full of indecipherable squiggles, slashes and dots can seem like a good excuse to give up before they even get started. Yet it is imperative for Muslims to read the Qur’an as it was written.
Muslims all over the world, no matter what their native language, typically recite their prayers in Arabic, says Abdulaziz Sachedina, professor of Islamic studies at UVA and another of the Sunday school’s founders. Speaking a common language “provides a sense of community with Muslims all over the world,” Sachedina says.
Durkee’s transliteration is important because it makes it much easier for his students—who also include prisoners and university students—to feel included in this universal congregation.
“It makes it possible for them to join the community,” Sachedina says. “They can take advantage of reading the Qur’an without going through the lengthy process of learning the script.”
When Durkee’s students open his transliteration to the first surah of the Qur’an, they see the right-hand page in the original Arabic. On the left-hand page, they see the transliteration, which reads: “BISMI-LLAHI-R-RAHMANI-R-RAHIM,” and below it they can see the English translation: “In the Name of Allah, the Universally Merciful, the Singularly Compassionate.”
The faithful believe these are the words of God. Reading these words, in the language in which they were written, is an action Durkee compares to planting a seed. New readers won’t grasp the full meaning of the Qur’an on their first pass, but Durkee says that with many repetitions, the words will blossom into an understanding of what he calls the Qur’an’s “divine geometry.
“You put that form, that column of sound, inside the person. You give them the knowledge, and understanding comes later,” says Durkee. “But the only way it works is if you do it.”
As Durkee’s students join the community of Muslims, however, they face additional challenges: “There is a culture conflict going on in general, with all religions,” says Sachedina. “My Christian friends, my Jewish friends, we’re all concerned about the things we see in this consumerist society.
“All youths,” he says, “are faced with a culture that does not inspire any moral or spiritual vitality.”
Durkee’s path to Islam began with his own confrontation with consumer culture.
“Four billion people live on $2 a day. That’s nuts,” he says. “We’re living in the midst of an ecological nightmare. There’s something funny going on with our civilization.”
Cell phones, traffic, television, commerce, corporate ladders—these things lose all meaning, Durkee says, when a person stops to contemplate where he comes from and why he’s here.
“You have to reach a point inside yourself when you realize you are out of control,” says Durkee, who is 65. “You realize everything you’ve ever thought is wrong, all your dreams are nothing. That’s a point I got to in my life, and you have to go looking for an answer.”
Durkee’s search led him to India, at a time when many young people felt disillusioned about America and sought enlightenment in Eastern philosophy. He and Noura became Muslims in 1970 while in Jerusalem, and then Nooruddeen went on to study in Mecca and Cairo before beginning his teaching career in Alexandria, Egypt.
He and Noura returned to America for a vacation, but decided to stay in Charlottesville to be near family members. He currently presides over the Charlottesville- based an-Noor Education Foundation (www.an-Noor.org), which published his transliteration of the Qur’an, and he delivers lectures at religious conferences and symposiums around the world. So far, he says he’s sold about 1,000 copies in the three months the transliteration has been available.
Durkee and Sachedina both highlight a disconnect between the academic view of Islam and Muslims on the street, who learn their faith in what Durkee calls “the school of hard knocks.”
Sachedina says that as an academic, he approaches the Qur’an with a historical view that most community teachers lack.
“I look at the context in which the text comes to me. I take into account it is the product of a 7th-century tribal society,” he says. “When the community teacher looks at the scripture, history is totally out of the question.” Sachedina is part of a team that is creating the first American Islamic teacher’s association in Los Angeles. “We’re coming to grips with the fact that the community is ill informed about its own history,” he says.
Durkee, however, “is more well-read than the average teacher,” Sachedina says.
The academic view of Islam, Durkee says, cannot teach the hairdresser or the doctor how to live their faith in a secular, heterogeneous culture. That’s the lesson the mosque’s Sunday school is trying to impart.
“In Muslim countries, moms don’t work. Children can learn the faith at home,” says M. Sajjad Yusef, a founder and president of the Islamic Society of Central Virginia. He says a proper Islamic education has become even more important for American Muslims since 9/11, because more people are asking questions about the Muslim faith. In American Muslim households, however, both parents often work, the children go to school early in the morning and there is little interaction between Muslim children outside the masjid.
“It is very difficult for parents to do the job,” says Yusef.
On a recent balmy Sunday at the mosque, Durkee is wrapping up his lesson, trying to keep his young students focused on the text. The students take turns reading, each picking up where the last left off, with Durkee emitting an approving grunt as the next student’s cue to begin. Around the room they go, until a girl in a headscarf is caught unprepared.
“Ahhh!” Durkee barks, as she scans her workbook in frantic silence. “That’s because your mind is here,” he says, pointing to his forehead. “It should be here!” He jabs his finger to the text.
After the lesson, the students kneel along strips of duct tape along the green carpet, and utter prayers toward Mecca, which is basically northeast of Charlottesville. Then, one of the Sunday school’s teachers, Amr Rasheed, invites the students to her apartment for dinner. The boys—mostly orphan refugees from Afghanistan whose mothers work cleaning local hotels—play basketball on a court near her building. They pass the ball to Durkee, saying “shoot, Baba!” (a term of respect, similar to “Papa”) and they get a big laugh when Durkee launches a massive air ball.
Rasheed says she hosts these get-togethers so the children can socialize with American Muslim adults, and learn by example how to live their faith in a culture that often seems strange, even hostile.
“The children are coming from very traumatized backgrounds,” says Rasheed. “They are told that Muslims are terrorists, they are called ‘Osama’ or ‘Saddam.’ The culture here is new to them, and we try to help them deal with that.
“The main thing we want them to learn,” says Rasheed, “is not to get bogged down in labels that are put on them. If they remember only one thing, it should be that they are always in the presence of their Creator.”
In a society that values instant self-gratification above all else, the idea that we all share a common human spirit bestowed by a Creator by whom we will all one day be judged—not for what we’ve achieved or what we own, but for what we’ve done—seems almost subversive.
Such issues can be especially complex for women, says Noura Durkee. While Muslim culture encourages modesty for girls, American culture—via Britany Spears videos and thong underwear marketed to pre-teens—encourages exactly the opposite.
“It’s very hard to find a t-shirt for girls that comes down below the waist,” says Noura.
Noura says the Sunday school teachers do not impose certain behaviors, such as headscarves. Instead, she tries to impart an understanding of why many Muslim women choose to cover their hair.
“Some of the girls are very submissive, and some are very rebellious,” says Noura. “They want to be good Muslims, and they also want to do whatever they want to do. How do they put that together? We try to teach them what is self-respectful, gently. They have to come to the answer themselves.”
The Sunday school helps children find a personal balance between Islam and America, says Fraidoon Hovaizi, the school’s principal. That process, he says, is important to helping them grow up at peace with both cultures.
“For second-generation Muslim immigrants, there is a danger of lack of identity,” says Hovaizi. “In this society, every individual is identified by religious affiliation.”
Hovaizi, who left Iran after high school in 1977, came to America to pursue a college education. He earned a doctorate in economics and now runs Mastery Learning, an Internet-based education company in Charlottesville. One reason he enrolled his two daughters in the mosque Sunday school is to educate them about their religious identity.
“We want them to have equal exposure to Western and Islamic culture,” Hovaizi says of his daughters, 19-year-old Neda and her younger sister, Mona, who is 15. “We want them to be productive members of society, and if they were not familiar with their own culture, it would be a handicap for them.”
Neda Hovaizi, with her dark, flowing curls and flared blue jeans, blends in with the rest of the ‘Hoos teeming through UVA’s Newcomb Hall. Her voice mixes the accent of Amherst, Massachusetts—her birthplace—with a hint of Virginia drawl. As she sits on a sofa in the second floor, thinking of her Muslim education, she doodles an Islamic star and crescent in her biology notebook.
Despite her father’s concern for her sense of identity, Neda says she never felt like her ethnicity or faith made her much different from her peers. She remembers the Sunday school, from which she graduated last year, as a place to meet friends. “It’s been wonderful to see it grow,” she says. Durkee, her first teacher there, “made everything really exciting and interesting.”
She believes that Islam, like any religion, isn’t just uttering prayer or attending worship service—it is the sum of little decisions you make every day. She chooses not to wear a headscarf, and as a busy student she can’t always pray five times a day, which is the orthodox practice of Islam.
“My religion has more to do with how I interact with other people,” says Neda.
“I don’t feel like I can make statements on behalf of the Muslim world, but if people ask me questions, I want to be knowledgeable enough to answer them,” she says, echoing her father’s imperative.
“It’s kind of my responsibility,” she says. “Otherwise, I can’t complain that nobody knows anything about Islam.”
Teaching Islam online
www.pbs.org/empires/islam
This website offers a brief overview of Islam’s faith, art, inventions and leaders. Its simple layout and colorful pictures appeal to kids and adults alike. There’s even an interactive timeline, free e-postcards of Islamic art, and film clips on impressive Islamic architecture, including the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Alhambra in Granada. Links to lesson plans also make this site an ideal tool for school projects—hint, hint.
www.islamfortoday.com
This online religious journal founded by a Christian who converted to Islam includes articles ranging from news to serious discussions of Ramadan fasting to fun stories like “Beyond Belief—The Rabbi and the Imam,” which tells the story of a friendship between two religious leaders. There is also an extensive feature on women in Islam with websites created by Muslim women.
www.moonsighting.com
Kalid Shaukat’s “Khalid’s Home of Astronomy Linked Islamic Duties and Scientific Historical Achievement Using Known Astronomy Today” (get it?) tracks the visibility curve and path of the Moon, and mentions of the moon in the Qur’an, which are important for determining the Islamic calendar and religious holidays. Did you know the new crescent moon was first seen in Virginia, Texas and Arizona on March 21? The site also charts Qibla direction, which is important for daily prayer.
www.al-bab.com/arab/food.htm
A variety of Arabic recipes, history of ingredients, and information on Islamic dietary laws are listed on the website. Take note of halal and haram—what can and cannot be eaten. Then check out suggested Arabic cookbooks. Now you can make your own falafel or try some baba ghanousch!
http://answering-islam.org.uk/
An intriguing, somewhat personal website, “Answering Islam, A Christian-Muslim Dialog and Apologetic,” engages in a online discussion between Christians and Muslims to share, challenge and explore each others’ religions in search of better understanding. Topics include Muhammad, Women in Islam, and Islam and Terrorism, which includes personal bulletins such as one from an Arabian Christian. There are also links to religious humor sites seeking to lighten up the heavier debates.
www.islam-democracy.org
This is the homepage for the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization that works toward reconciling democracy with Islamic beliefs. The site contains current news on the ongoing projects, such as the Third Assembly for the Movement for Democracy that recently took place in Durban, South Africa.