Month: April 2004

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

—The First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.

—Mark Twain“I love that Mark Twain quote,” says Josh Wheeler. “I’m going to have to start using that.”

Besides being a repository of quotes on the value of free speech and the dangers of censorship, Wheeler is the assistant director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. For 14 years the nonprofit organization, inconspicuously housed above the Kluge-Ruhe aboriginal art museum on Pantops Mountain, has called attention to First Amendment issues across America. But even though many of history’s great minds, like Twain, considered free expression vital to democracy, it’s not something most people pay close attention to.

Why would they? After all, it’s hard to think about censorship without conjuring images of pornographers, potty-mouthed rappers, or poop-throwing “artists.” In fact, Wheeler says that nine times out of 10, free speech advocates defend people with whom they disagree.

But that’s not the point, he says. Government censorship doesn’t just reflect opposition to offensive words and images. It also suggests that our leaders don’t trust us to think and decide on our own.

“When the government tells a person, ‘You don’t have a right to say that,’ they’re also telling the rest of us, ‘You don’t have the right to hear that,’” says Wheeler. “I think most people would prefer to make those choices for themselves.”

That’s where the Center comes in. On Tuesday, April 13—appropriately, Thomas Jefferson’s birthday—the Center announced the recipients of its 13th annual Muzzle Awards, calling attention to what Wheeler calls “the more ridiculous or egregious affronts to free expression” that happened in 2003.

This year’s Muzzle “winners” include Secret Service agents who interrogated high school students and Texas police who claimed Eve’s nipples constituted a crime scene. And even though the Center doesn’t go out of its way to include local cases, the Albemarle County School Board showed it can compete with censors on a national level.

Ironically, the most prolific censors are public schools, says Center director Robert O’Neil, and this year schools and colleges took three Muzzles. The television network CBS brought home its third Muzzle. And what list of censors would be complete without Donald Rumsfeld?

Read on and laugh (or cringe) at the Center’s 2004 Muzzle Awards. It may seem funny that our judges, teachers and politicians would work themselves into such a tizzy over what might seem fairly tame words and ideas. But remember—through censorship, these leaders also implicitly claim that you, dear readers, are simply too fragile, too childish, too stupid, to chew on these ideas for yourself.

“One of my favorite quotes is from a journalist, Joseph Henry Jackson,” says Wheeler. “He said ‘Did you ever here anyone say that a work should be banned because I might read it, and it might be very damaging to me?’”

On that note, the 2004 Muzzle Awards go to

Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum

For barring the press from the jury selection process in the trial of Martha Stewart, saying the case generated interest “quite beyond the public’s right to know.”

When homemaking diva and CEO Martha Stewart faced Federal prosecution for giving false statements to the government, judge Cedarbaum excluded the press and the public from the jury selection. She reasoned that potential jurors would be more candid if the press weren’t present.

Cedarbaum’s decision, according to the Center, is part of a disturbing trend of judges in high profile cases setting aside for celebrity defendants courtroom rules that apply to their less famous counterparts.

In addition to a Muzzle Award, Cedarbaum also received a smackdown from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that she erred in her decision.

 

The U.S. Department of Defense

For monitoring attorney-client communications and imposing a gag order on defendants in military tribunals.

After September 11, the White House announced that terror suspects would be tried as “enemy combatants” in military tribunals. According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense, any attorney representing an alleged enemy combatant must first swear not to discuss any aspect of the trial—a gag order. Rummy also said attorney-client privilege did not apply to military tribunal trials, which is a special court run by the military, instead of a citizen judiciary.

Terrorism and war certainly create new pressures on free expression, says Thomas Jefferson Center director Robert O’Neil. “But threats to free speech don’t have a common political origin,” O’Neil says.

 

The Secret Service

For going way, waaay overboard in protecting the president.

Wait. Hold on. You mean the Secret Service sometimes takes things too seriously? No way!

In 2003 the Thomas Jefferson Center found numerous reasons to award the Secret Service a Muzzle, including:

Forcing protestors on numerous occasions to assemble blocks away from sites where President George W. Bush or Vice-President Dick Cheney spoke, in so-called “Free Speech Zones,” while allowing supporters to stand much closer to the speakers.

Questioning a Los Angeles Times cartoonist for making a threat against the life of the president. The “threat” consisted of a political cartoon that appeared in the Times depicting a gun with the word “politics” pointed at the head of President Bush. Ironically, the cartoon was a criticism by the cartoonist of those he believes are attempting to politically assassinate Bush.

Sending agents to interrogate two 16-year-old high school students in California on the basis of their commentary during a classroom discussion on the war in Iraq.

 

Albemarle County School Board

For refusing to apologize to a sixth-grade student made to turn his NRA t-shirt inside out.

Shooting a gun at paper targets is not violent, says 12-year-old Alan Newsom.

Yet when Newsom wore his National Rifle Association “Shooting Sports Camp” t-shirt to Jack Jouett Middle School, an assistant principal made him turn the shirt inside out. Newsom’s father contacted the NRA, which asked the school for an apology.

Instead, the school changed its dress code to forbid any clothing with messages related to “drugs, alcohol, tobacco, weapons, violence, sex, [or] vulgarity” The Newsoms sued, and although a U.S. District Court judge refused to issue an injunction against Jouett’s dress code, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the code was too broad.

Ironically, the code could have banned the State Seal of Virginia, and shirts from Albemarle High School. Its mascot is a patriot armed with a musket.

 

Baseball Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey

For canceling the 15th anniversary celebration of the film Bull Durham.

Thanks to Dale Petroskey, baseball’s spotless reputation remains unsullied by the un-American specter of free speech.

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the release of Bull Durham, the classic baseball flick starring Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, Petroskey scheduled a celebration at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. This was before he discovered that—gasp!—the actors had opinions.

When Sarandon and Robbins publicly voiced their opposition to the Iraq war, Petroskey (who had served in the Reagan Administration) cancelled the Bull Durham celebration, claiming the actors’ opinions “could put our troops in even more danger.”

Petroskey later apologized to the actors, but the celebration remained cancelled.

 

CBS Television Network

For acts of self-censorship demonstrating both hypocrisy and an unwillingness to stand up to public and political pressure.

This was a tricky one, says Josh Wheeler. As a private corporation, CBS has the right to decide its own content. On the other hand, Wheeler says, three-time Muzzle winner CBS is a powerful company and a major source of information for many people.

This year’s Muzzle is based on two incidents. In the fall of 2003, CBS announced plans to air a mini-series about former President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan. When Reagan’s family and supporters denounced the program as inaccurate and demanded its cancellation, CBS—which is owned by Viacom—instead decided to air the miniseries on its sister network, Showtime. Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie found little virtue in the network’s move, saying CBS was, at best, “misleading a smaller audience.”

Then, another double standard. CBS executives refused to air during the January 30 Super Bowl a message from MoveOn.org, a tasteful 30-second spot depicting children performing manual labor with the tag, “Guess who’s going to pay off President Bush’s $1 trillion deficit?” The network cited a policy against “controversial” messages.

“If someone tried to force CBS to air the ad, we would have been defending the network,” says O’Neil. Yet CBS didn’t seem to have a problem with other controversial content, specifically a host of genitalia-themed ads—boner pills from Levitra and Cialis, a crotch-biting dog and myriad beer commercials some might deem crude and/or sexist.

 

University of New Orleans

For denying a Messianic Jewish missionary permission to distribute a religious leaflet on campus.

College is supposed to be a time when young people challenge themselves, confront new ideas and learn to make up their own minds in America’s marketplace of ideas. The University of New Orleans, however, decided that a religious leaflet was simply too dangerous for its students.

According to UNO policy, people not affiliated with the university “have limited rights of distribution on campus of printed materials,” yet the policy provides no guidelines for what materials would or would not be approved. In August 2002, Michelle Beadle, a Messianic Jew, asked permission to distribute a pamphlet asserting that almost anything is acceptable for polite conversation these days, except the assertion that “Jews should believe in Jesus.” Fearing the statement could be offensive, UNO denied Beadle’s request. In 2003, she filed a lawsuit challenging UNO’s policy. The case is still pending.

 

The Administration of Dearborn (Michigan) High School

For sending a student home when he refused to remove a t-shirt featuring a picture of President Bush and the words “International Terrorist.”

Sure, free speech is all well and good for adults, but what about high school students?

Sixteen-year-old Bretton Barber said he wore the shirt to express his concern about Bush’s foreign policy. Fearing the shirt would cause a “disruption,” administrators ordered Barber to remove his shirt or go home. Barber went home and contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit on his behalf.

In September, 2003, Michigan Eastern District Judge Patrick Duggan ruled that the school could not prevent Barber from wearing his shirt, saying “students benefit when school officials provide an environment where they can openly express their diverging viewpoints and when they learn to tolerate the opinions of others.”

 

The South Carolina House of Representatives

For passing a resolution asking the Dixie Chicks to apologize for dissing the president.

With a 2003 budget deficit of about $400 million, South Carolina, like many U.S. states, is in serious financial trouble. But while other legislatures quibble about revenues and expenditures, folks in the Palmetto State are uniquely fortunate to have a House of Representatives that has its priorities straight.

When Texas native Natalie Maines, singer for country music trio the Dixie Chicks, told a London audience in March 2003 that she was embarrassed to share a home state with President Bush, many Right-wing pundits demanded that country music fans boycott the all-female group. Some disc jockeys at Republican-owned Clear Channel stations jumped on the overreaction bandwagon by burning or steamrolling the Dixie Chicks’ albums.

Not to be outdone, the South Carolina House of Representatives passed by 50-35 a resolution calling for the Chicks to apologize and to perform a free concert for South Carolina troops and their families. The resolution called Maines’ comments “unpatriotic,” “unnecessary” and “anti-American.”

 

The Parks and Recreation Division of Broward County, Florida

For attempting to exclude a church’s display in an annual holiday light show.

Surely a Christmas light show is no place to praise a jobless, long-haired rebel who favored wine over water.

Broward County’s annual “Holiday Fantasy of Lights” is a month-long event designed to raise revenue for the local government. In April, when Calvary Chapel submitted a proposal for a display that included the phrase “Jesus is the Reason for the Season,” the committee overseeing the event rejected Calvary’s design, due to its religious nature.

The church, represented by the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute, sued. U.S. District Court Judge William Zloch ruled the county violated Calvary’s right to free speech, but he ordered the church to change the phrase to “Calvary Chapel says Jesus is the Reason for the Season” so that viewers would not misconstrue the source of the message.

 

Jeff Webster of Soldotna, Alaska, and the Unnamed Arsonist of Harrisonburg, Virginia

For using violence against people peacefully expressing their opposition to the war in Iraq.

In March 2003, Jeff Webster dumped a bucket of water on anti-war protesters in below-freezing temperatures—mostly female Quakers, including 82-year-old Billie Dailey. The protestors declined to prosecute and police ordered Webster not to do it again. But he did, and the second time Webster doused the protestors he videotaped the attack, set it to patriotic music and e-mailed the video to his friends. He was arrested and sentenced to 320 hours of community service.

Like the Alaska protestors, Virginia residents Sam Nickels and his wife, Cindy Hunter, opposed the war in Iraq. After they posted an anti-war sign in front of their house in Harrisonburg, the sign was torn down repeatedly and their house egged. On October 20, a 14-year-old arsonist (unnamed because he is a minor) lit the sign on fire, which spread to the house and caused $60,000 damage. The minor was sentenced to indefinite probation, and he and his parents agreed to help Nickels and Hunter rebuild their home.

 

The Arizona State License Commission

For denying an application for a “Choose Life” license plate.

Arizona, like many states, allows members of nonprofit groups to have specialty license plates on their vehicles. Although the Arizona Life Coalition met all the state’s requirements for a specialty plate, in August the commission denied its application for a “Choose Life” plate. According to Kris Myers, a flak for Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, the plate was deemed “divisive.” A lawsuit is now pending in Federal court.

 

The Pilot Point, Texas, Police Department

For threatening to prosecute an art gallery owner for displaying a mural of the biblical character Eve in a state of nakedness.

What kind of monster would expose a young child to an unclothed female breast?

Wes Miller, that’s who. Inspired by the book of Genesis, he commissioned artist Justine Wollaston to paint a mural for the façade of his Farmers’ and Merchants’ Art Gallery in Pilot Point, Texas. The scene depicts the hand of God pointing at a nude Eve, with an apple suspended between them.

Unveiled in June 2003, the mural inspired raves, outrage and a few police reports. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that art cannot be considered “obscene” simply because it depicts nudity, Pilot Point Police Sergeant James Edland told Miller that unless he covered the breasts, he would be prosecuted for displaying “harmful materials” to minors.

According to the Bible, Eve was in fact naked before she ate the forbidden fruit. Nevertheless, Miller covered the nipples with non-Biblical crime scene tape, which satisfied Edland. He is now chief of police in Pilot Point.

 

Free thinkers
The Thomas Jefferson Center fights all forms of censorship

Media mogul Thomas Worrell, Jr. founded the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in 1990, with an endowment of about $2.5 million. According to the Center’s website, Worrell envisioned it as “a force that carefully and eloquently, and when necessary, vengefully fights any serious attempt to limit or control, in any way, the right of man or woman to think, to see, to read, to say, to sing, to print, to sculpt, to film, to paint, or to embody their beliefs or ideas graphically or symbolically.”

Today, upholding that mission falls to Robert O’Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center, and Josh Wheeler, the assistant director. They run the Center with interest collected from Worrell’s endowment, or they solicit private funding for specific projects such as the Monument to Free Expression, a giant chalkboard the Center hopes to build near Charlottesville’s City Hall.

Most often, the Center participates in court cases by filing amicus (“friend of the court”) briefs—basically, the Center offers expert advice on questions regarding the First Amendment, censorship and free speech. A nine-member board composed of legal and media luminaries such as New York University law professor Norma Dorsen, syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick and local celeb Sissy Spacek inform the Center’s opinions.

“We are an activist organization,” says O’Neil, a former president of UVA. The Center has taken on a wide variety of issues, from defending cross-burning Klan members to sponsoring a children’s musical on liberty at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

“We try to be nonpartisan,” O’Neil says. “We have folks who would be considered far Right and far Left. Free speech doesn’t have a common political origin, and heroes of free speech come from the Left and the Right.”

The Muzzle Awards are one of the Center’s cheekier endeavors. Each year, O’Neil, Wheeler and the board canvas First Amendment issues across the country and whittle the cases down to “the most ridiculous and egregious,” Wheeler says.

Each Muzzle “winner” gets a chance to defend themselves before the award is given out. Some receive the award proudly, others protest. “Invariably, we get a letter that begins ‘I’m a firm believer in the First Amendment, but’ and they just dig themselves in deeper,” says Wheeler.

Wheeler says no one at the Center is a free speech “absolutist.”

“Everyone believes there ought to be limits, but we disagree about what those limits should be,” he says. “In a free society, the answer to speech you disagree with is more speech. Not censorship.”—J.B.

 

Take me down to Shantytown
In spring 1987, UVA students and local demonstrators stood on the Lawn, protesting a perceived violation of their First Amendment rights. They joined hands to form a circle around a crude wooden shanty, and broke into strains of “We Shall Overcome.”

Their obstacle, ironically, was then-UVA president Robert O’Neil—whose current position as the director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression reflects his lifelong battle against censorship. In a situation proving that hell hath no fury like an outraged college student, that year O’Neil found himself on the receiving end of a free speech lawsuit.

In the late 1980s, UVA held investments in several companies that did business in South Africa, which at the time practiced apartheid, a strict system of racial segregation. To protest those holdings, students built crude wooden shanties to symbolize the difficult lives black South Africans endured under apartheid.

In 1986, just one year after O’Neil left the president’s office at the University of Wisconsin to take the helm at UVA, a neighborhood of shanties lingered for two weeks near the Rotunda, a National Historic Landmark.

“After weeks of shanties on the lawn, I issued an order banning the shanties,” O’Neil recollected to C-VILLE. All hell broke loose.

A group called the Students Against Apartheid Coalition, under counsel from local attorney Steve Rosenfield, sued O’Neil and the Board of Visitors in March 1987. The plaintiffs claimed O’Neil’s order violated their rights to free speech, arguing that moving the shanties away from the Rotunda would make them less visible.

On May 15, U.S. District Judge James Turk found that UVA’s shanty ban was too broad, and that it did not offer students ample alternatives to present their message, and he ruled that UVA’s rule was unconstitutional.

“I thought the Federal courts made a good point, that the rules needed to be more precise,” says O’Neil, who adds the whole experience was “uncomfortable.”

The very next day, O’Neil (after consulting the National Park Service as a model for precise rules) made UVA’s policy more specific, banning everything on the lawn except baby strollers, wheelchairs, bicycles, hand-held signs and chairs. O’Neil allowed the students to continue building shanties on the south lawn, near the statue of Homer. Then UVA appealed the court’s decision, and Turk found that UVA’s new policy was constitutional, and the shanties could be banned.

On May 28, local members of the NAACP and the Charlottesville Peace Center joined the students in protest, but despite their songs a UVA employee legally removed the shanties.

The students appealed Turk’s decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. That court again found in favor of UVA, and the students decided to drop the case. Apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994.—J.B.

 

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.

Q: Ace, I heard a rumor that an animal with rabies was caught in City limits last week, supposedly the first one in a really long time. But we hear about rabies pretty frequently. What’s the deal—was there a rabies case, and if so, is it really all that rare?—Diz Ease

A:Charlottesville animal control officer Bob Durrer confirmed for Ace a recent case of rabies in the City. On Wednesday, March 17, Durrer says, he received a call from a woman living near the intersection of Sunset and Wesley in the JPA neighborhood who said she’d been chased by a gray fox. After patrolling the area for about 30 minutes he says he came up with nothing, and stopped to ask a man walking his dog on Piedmont Avenue if he’d seen anything. The man said no, Durrer says, and he got back in his patrol car. While looking in his rearview mirror he saw the man flagging him down. Improbably, at that moment the fox had jumped out of the bushes and attacked the dog-walking citizen’s pooch. After a not-so-merry chase Durrer says he finally caught the fox, which, after being tested by the health department, was diagnosed with rabies, sent to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and destroyed.

Durrer tells Ace he’s been working the job for 23 years, and this is only the second time he’s caught a rabies-infected animal in the City. He says he often sees wildlife with distemper, which leaves them extremely weak. But rabies are a rarity, he says—at least in the City proper.

Cross over into County lines and it’s a little more common. Ace looked at the State Health Department webpage (vdh.state.va.us), which breaks down rabies cases by locality. In 2003 Albemarle had seven found rabies cases, mostly raccoons but also a bat, fox and a skunk. In 2002 there were nine cases.

Donald Hackler, environmental health manager with the Thomas Jefferson Health District, says the disease is still fairly rare. But the health department checks up on all animal bites to make sure rabies—a virus that fatally attacks the nervous system and is transmitted by bites or through contact with infected saliva or brain tissue—is not a concern. He says the best way to protect humans is to vaccinate your pets. (Durrer says that the dog involved in the fox fight had gotten the proper shots, which means fido should be fine after a booster shot.)

Beyond that, Hackler suggests avoiding contact with wild animals. Keep an eye out for critters showing strange behavior, including extreme aggression or loping about in the daytime. That should keep your mouth-frothing encounters to a minimum.