Project Nur And Moderate Muslims

Jane Horr and Sana Saeed, who direct outreach for Project Nur--a student-led initiative of the American Islamic Congress--write about the project:

Campus Radicals: A New Muslim Student Group Tries to Rouse the Moderates

...Only a half-century ago, there was hardly any Muslim communal presence at American universities. In the 1960s, the Muslim World League, a Saudi charity, funded the establishment of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), initially to support foreign students studying in the U.S. and, according to the organization's Web site, to advance Da'wah (proselytizing). The MSA established its first chapter at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and now can be found on more than 100 campuses across North America.

Critics have challenged the MSA founders' associations with the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Sunni radical movement (a Brotherhood internal memo from 1991 included the MSA in a list of "organizations of our friends"), and note the MSA's publication in the 1980s of the writings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, the ultraconservative interpretation of Islam that dominates Saudi Arabia. Others have also pointed out some of the more notorious MSA leaders -- such as Rutgers MSA co-founder Ramzi Yousef, who is currently imprisoned for helping plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

This kind of radicalism does not appeal to most Muslim students, of course, who are simply trying to maintain a connection to their faith while they are at school. Nouri, a sophomore in Boston who asked not to be identified by his full name, recalls an outside imam lecturing his campus MSA about the "great sins" of looking at members of the opposite sex and missing prayers because of classes. "We were at a modern liberal university," Nouri observes, "listening to an imam who stepped out of the medieval period." When Muslims on his campus broke Ramadan's daylight fasts at iftars, separate food lines and tables were set up for men and women.

The result on many campuses is a binary scene, divided between what Nouri calls "hardcore Muslims and cultural Muslims." More than 70% of Muslim students on campus, he estimates, are not involved with any organized Muslim association.

Yusuf, a senior at George Washington University, notes the anger that surrounded the campus MSA's decision to partially remove a gender- divider at prayers. "There is a lot of tension between more conservative and more liberal students," he says. "We need more options for Muslim students, not a monolithic voice."

It was precisely this need that inspired a group of Washington-area students to establish a new campus initiative last fall. We were young men and women, mostly but not entirely of Muslim background, who decided to create an inclusive space where people of all backgrounds could join together to explore Muslim identity and community. We chose the name Project Nur, adopting the Arabic term for "light" and "enlightenment."

Read the whole thing and check out their website.
Hopefully, they will be true to their name and provide more light than heat.

Technorati Tag: Moderate Muslims.