TruthBook Religious News Blog

Obama appoints The first Muslim American woman head of Gallup as advisor
Tuesday, 21 April 2009

The first Muslim woman appointed to a position in President Barack Obama’s administration met with lawmakers Monday and discussed her role on an interfaith advisory board the new administration hopes will broaden dialogue and understanding.

Dalia Mogahed’s dimpled smile shined from under her hijab, the Muslim headscarf, as she addressed senate staff and think tanks at a meeting organized by the Congressional Muslims Staffers Association to discuss American Muslim public opinion in the wake of a recent survey.

The Egyptian-born American who heads the Gallup American Center for Muslim Studies a non-governmental research center providing data-driven analysis on the views of Muslim populations around the world, became the first Muslim veiled woman to be appointed to a position in the White House.

"I am very honored to be given this opportunity to serve my country in this way," Mogahed, who will be Obama's window into the Muslim American community, told AlArabiya.net.

Last month, Obama signed an executive order setting up a new body at the White House called the “Office of Religious Partnerships” to support religious institutions and strengthen inter-faith dialogue and government ties. The advisory group, consisting of 25 religious and secular representatives, is to report to the president on the role religion can play in resolving social problems and addressing civil rights issues.

"The key idea of the council is to tap into the energy and wisdom of religious organisations and leaders who focus on faith groups to solve common problems," explained Mugahed.

Mogahed will brief Obama on what Muslims want from the U.S. in a bid to create channels of communication and correct erroneous image of Muslim Americans.

The advisory group will help define issues of concern to religious constituents including the effects of economic crisis on minority groups and the phenomenon of fatherless families. It will also seek to reduce the number of abortions and strengthen inter-faith relations between Muslims and Christians.

"The main premise behind the council is cooperation between faiths and helping them become a force that helps push society forward," said Mogahed. "These societal challenges are shared by all faith-based groups and it is our task to unite them against common challenges."

Mugahed will keep her full time job at Gallup while serving as an advisor.

Mogahed’s appointment comes at a critical time given the rising tide of Islamophobia in the media and within some academic circles.

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Labels: American Muslims, Dalia Mogahed, faith, Gallup American Center for Muslim Studies, interfaith, Office of Religious Partnerships, President Obama, religion

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Friday, March 06, 2009

JCPA Approves Effort To Build Dialogue With Muslim Groups

By Nathan Guttman
Published March 04, 2009,

Washington — The Jewish community’s main umbrella organization for domestic policy has struck a significant blow against internal resistance to dialogue with Muslims.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs adopted a resolution March 2, calling for local and national Jewish groups to build coalitions with Muslim Americans and to oppose anti-Muslim bias.

The resolution comes 18 months after Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism — America’s largest Jewish religious denomination — broke new ground by addressing a major Islamic organization, despite strong criticism from some quarters of the Jewish community.

Previous attempts at engaging with the Muslim community have left some Jewish activists bruised and scarred by skepticism and harsh criticism from their fellow Jews.

One such activist is Rabbi Michael Paley of New York, who warned a room filled with community leaders, “It’s a dangerous conversation.” The danger, Paley said, is not from what is being said inside the room, but rather from how it will be perceived by other Jews.

In August 2007, after already being deeply involved in dialogue with the Muslim community, Paley spoke out in defense of the principal of a planned Arabic-language middle school in Brooklyn who had come under fire mostly from Jewish scholars. The critics accused her, wrongly, of being a “9/11 denier”— someone who rejected Muslim or Arab responsibility for the World Trade Center attack.

Following his public comments on the principal’s behalf, Paley, a scholar-in-residence and director of UJA-Federation of New York’s Jewish resource center, was ordered not to speak on the issue anymore. He told communal activists attending the plenum that pursuing Jewish-Muslim ties requires some courage.

Rabbi Jack Moline of Agudas Achim Congregation in Arlington, Va., also encountered criticism when trying to promote dialogue between Jews and Muslims. He said that each attempt to raise the issue brought about challenges from congregants “who believe Islam is essentially anti-Jewish.”

The issue boils down to the question of what makes a legitimate partner on the Muslim side.

But Rabbi Schneier noted that at the behest of Jewish groups, ISNA president Sayeed Syeed intervened with the King of Saudi Arabia last year to convince him to disinvite the Jewish anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta from a high-profile international gathering of religious leaders the monarch was sponsoring.

“This was unprecedented,” he said in an interview last October. “This is the kind of relationship we have been working for.”

A recent Gallup Poll of Muslim Americans, the largest ever conducted, suggested another possible common ground for Muslim and Jews — political affiliation. Both groups have similar voting patterns: Half of the Muslims identify as Democrats, a third as Independents and only a small minority as Republicans. The survey also found American Muslim women to be more highly educated than women in every religious group except Jews.

The JCPA plenum supported the pro-dialogue resolution by a large majority.

The Reform movement’s Mark Pelavin, who presented the resolution, stressed that many local Jewish communities across the country are “looking for guidance” on how to go about reaching out to Muslims.

But the American Jewish Congress’s acting co-executive director, Marc Stern, voted against the resolution and argued that guidance is exactly what it lacks. “It talks only about the easy issues,” he said, noting that the resolution does not address the problems of choosing Muslim interlocutors and setting the agenda for a dialogue.

Labels: American Muslims, dialogue, interfaith, Jewish-American, Judaism, Nathan Guttman

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Survey reveals makeup of rarely studied group: Muslim-Americans

By The Associated Press
March 2, 2009

Gallup Organization interviews with a random sample of 946 Muslim Americans in 2008 shed light on the demographics of this rarely studied group:

RACE: Muslims are the nation's most racially diverse religious group. At least a third of Muslim-Americans are black — mostly converts or children of converts to Islam. "The significant proportion of native-born converts to Islam is a characteristic unique to the United States," Gallup said. More than a quarter call themselves white, while nearly one in five identified as Asian and about as many classified themselves as "other."

RELIGIOSITY: Muslim-Americans are more religious than other Americans, but less likely than those in predominantly Muslim countries to say religion plays an important part in their lives — 80 percent of Muslim-Americans compared to virtually all in Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Morocco, for example.

IDEOLOGY: Muslim-Americans are the U.S. religious group most evenly spread out along the political spectrum — 29% liberal, 38% moderate, 25% conservative.

PARTISANSHIP: 49 percent of Muslim-Americans called themselves Democrats, 8 percent Republican and 37 percent independent. Gallup found that among all Americans in 2008 34 percent identified as Democratic, 26 percent Republican and 33 percent independent. But voter registration was relatively low among Muslim-Americans.

OTHER DEMOGRAPHICS: Muslim-Americans skew young, with 36 percent age 18-29, double the rate for the general population. They're more likely than other Americans to be single. Forty percent have at least a college degree, compared to 29 percent of Americans overall. Muslims may be slightly more likely than other Americans to report low household income.

Results were subject to sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points for Muslim-Americans, 0.2 points for all Americans.

Labels: American Muslims, Gallup Poll, ideology, partisanship, race, religiosity

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Friday, December 05, 2008

Obama's inaugural oath

When Obama takes the oath of office, there's no reason not to include his middle name.
November 30, 2008

When George W. Bush was sworn in for his second term in 2005, he began his oath of office with the words: "I, George Walker Bush." Never mind that Bush isn't in the habit of using his middle name (as opposed to his middle initial, which became the title of an Oliver Stone movie). In inaugural oaths, as in baptisms and other ceremonies, the addition of middle names adds an appropriate note of solemnity.

No controversy surrounded Bush's inclusion of his middle name in the oath. The same might not be true of a decision by Barack Obama to take his oath as "Barack Hussein Obama" -- which is precisely why he should do so.

Stripped of such evil intent, the "Hussein" in Obama's full name shouldn't be taboo. Nor should the idea of an openly Muslim citizen deciding to seek the presidency. That point was made eloquently by former Secretary of State Colin Powell when he endorsed Obama. "Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?" Powell asked. "The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with a 7-year-old Muslim American kid believing he or she could be president?"

Most Muslim Americans believe in and are pursuing the American dream, and as Powell also noted, they are sometimes dying for it. Last year, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey concluding that American Muslims are "largely assimilated, happy with their lives and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world." The survey also found that "Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries."

The way to increase those numbers is to make clear that an American with an Islamic faith -- or an Islamic name -- is not a second-class citizen. When the new president takes the oath, he should say, loudly and proudly: "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Labels: American Muslims, Barack Obama, Colin Powell, inauguration, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life