'Moving The Mountain' By Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (EXCERPT)
Excerpt from Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s Moving the Mountain: Beyond Ground Zero To A New Vision Of Islam In America (Free Press, May 2012)
Posted: 05/08/2012 8:20 am Updated: 05/08/2012 8:21 am
I am an American citizen born in Kuwait of Egyptian parents. I grew up in Great Britain, Malaysia, and Egypt and have lived in the United States since 1965, when I was seventeen.
When I arrived in America, I experienced serious culture shock. For someone with a religious upbringing, the 1960s were an extremely difficult time. Even though religion was a big part of the civil rights and peace movements, in my college religion was treated as irrelevant, hopelessly stodgy, and behind the times. This was the heyday of the “God is dead” movement. Islam was almost always portrayed negatively in the media and larger culture. Most American Muslims were Black Muslims, members of the separatist Nation of Islam headed by Elijah Muhammad, of which most white Americans were terrified. Arabs were then considered uncouth, dirty, and uncivilized.
In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I’d grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World. I understood their anger about the military draft and the Vietnam War, but their talking and singing about revolution and idolizing Che Guevara and Fidel Castro made no sense to me at all.
Add my own search for identity to this mix, and the freedom that was everywhere—in the form of drugs, sex, and alcohol—was unnerving, to say the least. Staying chaste until marriage, a commandment of my faith, was one of the most difficult challenges of my young life. I had a powerful sense that if I did not get a grip on my identity, my ethics, and my religion, I would go off the rails.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/08/moving-the-mountain-imam-feisal_n_1499222.html
