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FAITH IN SONOMA COUNTY
Islam spiritual center takes root in downtown Santa Rosa
Muslims face toward Mecca and pray five times at day at the mosque run by the Islamic Society of Santa Rosa.
JOHN BURGESS / PDPublished: Saturday, September 4, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, September 4, 2010 at 10:48 p.m.
Editor's note: This story is part of a yearlong series profiling the varied ways people worship.
The call to prayer, “Allahu Akbar” — God is Greatest — is delivered by a gray-robed man in a black skullcap facing northeast into one cinder-block wall of the mosque, toward Mecca.
Outside, traffic moves along Mendocino Avenue a few blocks north of Old Courthouse Square.
About 80 men — and a much smaller group of women seated separately behind office divider screens — are here in this high ceilinged-room for midday prayers, or Juma. They are gathered on a carpet striped diagonally in green, for centuries the traditional color of Islam.
In what once was a movie theater, in the same building as a Unitarian Church, is the physical and spiritual center of Sonoma County's Muslim community.
“I would not have come here if there was not a mosque here,” said Arif Iftekhar, 35, recalling his decision to move from Minnesota to Santa Rosa in 2006.
“We were not going into the wilderness,” said the Medtronic product development manager, a native of Bangladesh.
“Just the act of going to the mosque and praying and talking, it makes my life more peaceful,” said Alex Barreto, 34, a former Catholic who converted to Islam in 1998.
Through August and until Sept. 8 or 9, depending on the lunar calendar, the mosque's prayer schedule has expanded in observance of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting and a time of heightened worship and spiritual reflection.
“Ramadan is like a school, it opens the doors once a year,” said Sheikh Abou El Abbas, 41, an imam from Alexandria, Egypt, who spends about three months a year in Santa Rosa as the mosque's religious leader.
But this year Ramadan is occurring at the same time as a bitter national debate about a Muslim cultural center with a mosque that has been proposed near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks. The plan has stirred outrage in some quarters and has rallied defenders of civil liberties in others.
As prayers to Allah are offered and Muslim families join nightly to joyfully break their daily fast with meals of lamb and okra and honeyed pastries, so too, on airwaves and in news columns, in letters to the editor and on talk radio, a chorus of voices criticizes Islam.
Its detractors say it is a religion that is counter to Western values and spurs violence, that in its practice it oppresses women and ignores human rights.
Muslims are used to such criticism by now, and they are tired of it.
“This is the reality, this is what you have to deal with,” said Iftekhar's wife, Naheed Ali, who was born in Cincinnati to Bangladeshi parents. “You do what you have to do to deal with it, you try to change it, and you hope it will be just another chapter in American history.”
Ali and other members of the Islamic Society of Santa Rosa, which runs the mosque, point out that there are extremists in every religion, and say media coverage ignores the vast majority of moderate Muslims, in the U.S. and abroad, who are living peaceful, productive lives.
“Nobody hears much about us, and when they do, it is usually not good,” said the society's president, Said Mansour, who likes to point out that his son Ibrahim was captain of Maria Carrillo High School's football team three years ago.
The mosque's members are quick to condemn acts of violence committed by extremists who say they are acting in the name of Islam.
“Completely unnacceptable,” Iftekhar said.
“Islam is peace,” said El Abbas, the imam.
But they are equally quick to say that Muslims are being asked to account for the acts of a few in a way that adherents of other religions aren't. They complain, too, that they are unfairly linked with violence rooted in political agendas unrelated to true Islamic teachings.
“It's very hard water to tread, because we don't want to apologize for something we have nothing to do with,” Barreto said.
People who commit crimes in Islam's name are “the fringe,” he said. He added that a lack of knowledge about the religion not only skews non-Muslim views of Islam, but allows Muslims to “take a verse out of context.”
Praying toward Mecca
Islam is a monotheistic religion in the tradition of Christianity and Judaism, and all three trace their roots to Abraham. Islam holds that there is only one God, called Allah in Arabic.
For Muslims, Allah's word was revealed through the Prophet Muhammad who, 570 years after the death of Jesus Christ, was born in Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Thus, at prayers, Muslims in Sonoma County direct themselves northeast, the shortest direction toward Mecca.
The first verses of the Quran are said to have been revealed to Muhammad at the start of Ramadan, making it a revered time.
But for many Muslims, the spreading outcry over the proposed New York community center and mosque has meant a holy month during which meditations on peace take place in concert with an increasing sense of upset and unease.
“A lot of our members are afraid,” said Barreto, the society's secretary. “Some people make a point not to identify ourselves as Muslim.”
“Deep down I'm afraid that it will get worse and completely out of control,” Ali said.
“Muslims are just wringing our hands,” she said, her hair covered by a head scarf, or hijab, striped in green, blue and brown.
For Ali, 30, now an intern at the Sonoma County Water Agency, the hostility directed at Islam is a distressing sign that nine years after the Sept. 11 attacks, perceptions of her religion are still ill-informed.
“In 10 years' time that gap should have been bridged,” she said. “In terms of what Islam is and what that day was and what a billion Muslims are.”
Issue of religious freedom
The alarms being sounded against Islam and about the New York mosque are particularly troubling to her, she said, because they clash with the values she was raised with.
“My conflict right now is that as an American who believes in religious freedom, I'm being told that because I'm Muslim, I can't have that,” Ali said.
Others in the society say that the controversy — as well as the approaching ninth anniversary of 9/11 — are continued opportunities for healing and to foster understanding of Islam.
In her family's Rohnert Park grocery, Sal's Halal and Mediterranean Market, Azizeh Radwan said that while painful, times like these are when people show their true feelings and are also a chance for Muslims and their supporters to respond.
“Sometimes I believe that these issues need to be brought up openly so people can let their hate and fear come out, and then let the other people speak, too,” said Radwan, seated in the store's back room where during the day she prays on a green throw rug,
A Windsor resident who was born in Jordan, Radwan, 41, said that for Muslims, the goal in hard times should be the same as in good. “I think everyone should have the mission to present the good picture about who they are if they are a good Muslim man or woman.”
The controversy over the New York mosque will prompt more media coverage of Islam that in the end “positively affects the treatment and status of Muslims,” said Aisha Jill Morgan, an education consultant and principal of the Islamic School, which meets Sundays at Santa Rosa Junior College and has about 60 students.
“It may take a long time,” Morgan, 61, acknowledged, but “if it is God's will, Insha'Allah, all people will be treated with dignity and respect.”
A former Episcopalian, Morgan converted to Islam just before the 2001 attacks, which she said shook her faith to its core.
“I reacted at first, as did many Americans, that 9/11 was perpetrated by Muslims representative of the faith,” she said. “I was devasted to think I had adopted a religion in decline.”
In the years since, Morgan said, through study of Islam and prayer, she has come to understand that the attacks were “aberrant actions of a few Muslims” and “the extreme actions by people of any affiliation do not represent the majority.”
From Quran to controversy
At the mosque, sermons during recent prayer services have been devoted to subjects discussed in the Quran — Islam's holy text — such as the rights of neighbors and the virtues of giving. But the tensions of the outside world sometimes slip in through the heavy metal doors.
Near the end of one midday service, Mansour referred directly to the New York mosque controversy.
“There is a lot of hate and rhetoric about Islam going on right now and we cannot give up,” he said. “We must stand up for our rights, it's guaranteed by our Constitution.”
Standing by a small wooden pulpit and wearing an ankle-length white gown called a dishdashah, Mansour said, “We have a lot to be proud of for our contributions to this country.”
He choked up, paused for a moment, then added: “That is why I ask you to stand up for our rights.”
A Palestinian engineer who came to Sonoma County from Indiana where he was teaching at Purdue University, Mansour, 58, was among the society's founders.
There were perhaps 10 members at first, he recalled. They met in a living room and then, when they outgrew it, in a large garage and driveway.
But the tech boom was under way and Sonoma County's Telecom Valley businesses were multiplying. Engineers, scientists and other technology professionals were arriving in the county, among them Muslims from Bangladesh to India, from Egypt to Morocco, swelling the mosque's ranks.
The group moved into a Mendocino Avenue office and then, in 2004, to the Glaser Center in downtown Santa Rosa, a building that formerly housed a United Artists Movies' 5 cinemas.
“It was an elating feeling,” Mansour said of the years when the society was being formed. “There was a sense of jubilation, excitement and accomplishment.”
A third of the current membership of about 100 families is made up of such professionals, who have persevered through the recession and Telecom Valley's decline, which reduced their numbers. Working-class employees and small-business owners make up the remainder.
The mosque now holds prayers five times a day, seven days a week, and has adapted to regional or national differences in the practice of Islam.
For example, at nightly prayers during Ramadan, called rakaa, while Middle Eastern Muslims perform eight “units” of prayer — recitations from the Quran, bowing and supplication — Muslims from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan traditionally perform 20 units.
“Whoever wants to stop at eight can stop at eight,” Mansour said. “Whoever wants to continue to 20, we can do 20. We cater to different approaches.”
The society is also trying to build on its efforts to strengthen ties with the larger Sonoma County community.
“We want to educate, to show we are a part of this community,” Barreto said.
The society has joined interfaith groups, hosted Jews and Buddhists at its prayer services and holds open houses. The next one is planned for Sept. 19 at the mosque.
For the most part, its members say, Sonoma County has proved a welcoming, tolerant home for Muslims.
“We have to admit we are fortunate to live in Sonoma County, the most open-minded people that you could have in the United States,” Mansour said.
Or, as he put it at a recent prayer service after noting recent incidents of violence directed at Muslims and mosques around the country: “Alhamdulillah (Praise to God) we are living in Sonoma County.”
Outreach at market
This year, the society for the first time set up a table at the Santa Rosa Downtown Market to increase its outreach.
The reception has been “mostly positive,” said Barreto, who often spent Wednesday evenings at the market answering questions.
Among the lessons about Islam he provided:
Jihad means primarily “the inner struggle of being a person of virtue and submission to God in all aspects of life.” And that from Islam's start, women held rights not recognized elsewhere for centuries, including the right to own property and businesses, to divorce, vote and join in legal or political affairs.
“The people who come with a negative view of Islam, when they have left, they have left at least shaking our hands,” said Barreto, who is Canadian-born with a Peruvian father and a Venezuelan mother.
The most frequent questions heard at the market table had to do with how Islam regards women, he said.
The mosque's female members, who also staff the table, say they are used to suggestions that they are downtrodden.
“People always have the idea that a Muslim lady is always covered up so she's not allowed to speak, she's living a miserable life with her husband. And that's not true, you know,” Radwan said.
Protective dress
The questions arise largely over Muslim women's garb, which is designed to be loose and cover most of the body, or from the separation of men and women at worship.
“For me, as a lady, I feel like the way I dress, it brings me protection first,” Radwan said. “When people talk to me, they do not look at my body, they hear what I am saying.”
The same admonishment to be modest governs the division during prayers of men and women, said Morgan, describing herself as “an independent professional woman” who is surprised at how she has become “so comfortable being separate.”
The separation guards against “inappropriate behavior and chatter,” she said. “Besides which, when we're in rukuu, the bending over, or sujuud, which is prostration, our butts are up in the air, so I don't want a man behind me.”
For Ali, who said strangers have asked her why she would wear the hijab, perhaps the best response is her own life. “I feel like anyone else,” she said. “I have a college degree, I work, I might go back and get my MBA, my schedule is up to me.”
As for dressing in accordance with her religion's instruction to be modest — which applies to men as well — she said: “Islam gave me dignity.”
Over time, Mansour said, such lessons, especially if they take place within the context of personal encounters at the mosque's open houses, at work, at the downtown market, will lead to a simple recognition.
“We are part of the community,” he said. “We are just like you and anybody else.”
You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com.
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