- On September 20, 2001 -- just nine days after the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf was the Muslim representative in a small ecumenical gathering held in the Oval Office. At the same time, FBI agents were trying to interview him at his house in California since he had declared two days before the attack: "This country is facing a terrible fate....This country stands condemned. It stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what it did -- and lest people forget that Europe suffered two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands." His wife told the incredulous agents Yusuf wasn't home, he was with the President.
Bay area suburbanite helps meld Muslim faith, modern culture
HAYWARD, Calif. — When Mark Hanson was a 1970s teenager growing up in Marin County as the privileged son of a college professor and a liberal activist mother, he barely escaped serious injury in an auto accident. Baptized Greek Orthodox and attending Catholic high school, he began to explore Buddhism, metaphysics and other philosophies. He read excerpts from the Quran, and he decided at 18 to become a Muslim, taking the name Hamza Yusuf.
"A lot of people get into something at that stage of life, and it's a phase," he says.
It wasn't a phase. Twenty-five years later, the 43-year-old Mr. Yusuf — as he is now known, though his legal name remains Mark Hanson — is one of the most popular and influential leaders of American Muslims, helping a younger generation of followers bridge the gap between traditional Islam and American culture.
His speech at a Muslim conference in Chicago last fall attracted more than 10,000 people. Similar crowds have flocked to hear him at New York's Madison Square Garden in the past decade. Videotapes of his talks sell briskly over the Internet. Nine days after Sept. 11, he was invited to meet with President Bush. Standing outside the White House, Mr. Yusuf declared, "Islam was hijacked on that ... plane as an innocent victim" — a statement that President Bush used in his speech to Congress that evening but that also prompted death threats from radical Muslims.
"He's kind of like a rock star for the religious set," says Syed Ali, who teaches sociology at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va.
In the wake of Sept. 11, many of America's three million Muslims are struggling with what it means to be both Muslim and American. It's a dilemma Mr. Yusuf embodies: a white man in a religion still dominated by nonwhite immigrants; an American in a religion often deemed anti-American; a self-described moderate in a religion often seen as extremist.
The same day he visited the White House, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents knocked on the door of his home in California to quiz him about a speech he made Sept. 9 in which he said: "This country is facing a very terrible fate. ... This country stands condemned. It stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what it did — and lest people forget that Europe suffered two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands."
Mr. Yusuf says he regrets those remarks and some other strident speeches he made over the years. "Anger is a dangerous emotion and not a part of the Islamic tradition," he says. "There are Muslims in the community whose anger has led them to do some pretty horrendous things. That's a problem, a horrendous problem. I don't want to contribute to that."
Like Catholic and Jewish immigrants before them, America's Muslims are confronting the challenge of assimilation versus tradition. Muslims are one of the country's most successful ethnic or religious groups. Nearly three-fifths are college graduates. Half make more than $50,000 a year and are in managerial, medical, professional, technical or teaching jobs. And as they have become successful, American Muslims have drifted away from the faith. Just 20 percent of American Muslims attend mosque regularly, according to Hamid Dabashi, chairman of the department of Middle Eastern languages and culture at Columbia University in New York.
Recently, however, many American children of these immigrants are returning to the fold, enrolling in classes that teach classical Islamic law and traditions and, in the case of some women, choosing to wear a head scarf and robe even though they grew up in assimilated homes. At a convention of the Islamic Society of North America recently, one of the best-selling T-shirts among young Muslims featured a woman in a head scarf with the phrase, "It's good in the hood."
These second-generation Muslims often shun their parents' immigrant mosques, perceived as too rigid and out of touch with American values. They are turning instead to leaders like Mr. Yusuf, who calls for renewed Islamic learning and understanding of Muslim history, but understands the challenges of child rearing, spirituality and marriage in modern society. Fluent in Arabic, Mr. Yusuf is comfortable peppering his sermons with quotes from the Quran and references to Oprah Winfrey, talking about the history of Islam and describing his struggle to keep his children from spending too much time on the Internet.
"He's not living in the past, he's living in the present," says Altaf Husain, president of the Muslim Student Association, which has sponsored talks by Mr. Yusuf at scores of college campuses. "He speaks our language. He is able to articulate in an American accent what Islam is like for young people."
With his slim build, neatly trimmed mustache and soft-spoken manner, Mr. Yusuf looks like a professor at a liberal-arts college. His father, who for a while taught college English, named his son after Columbia University English professor Mark van Doren. Today, Mr. Yusuf lives in an upper-middle-class home at the end of a suburban San Francisco cul-de-sac with a minivan in the driveway. His Mexican-American wife converted to Islam two years after marrying Mr. Yusuf and wears a head scarf and robe. On a recent Friday night, their four young boys clamored for Mr. Yusuf to read to them and settle sibling squabbles. Mr. Yusuf's wife cooked enchiladas in the kitchen.
In some ways, Mr. Yusuf's background echoes that of another Marin County seeker drawn to Islam — John Walker Lindh, currently awaiting trial in the United States for fighting on behalf of the Taliban. But whereas Mr. Lindh embraced the radical Islam of al Qaeda, Mr. Yusuf became a Sufi, a member of a mystical, intellectual branch of Islam that attracts many white American converts.
When he was a child, Mr. Yusuf recalls, his mother kept a poem by a famous Sufi poet on the wall, right next to a saying by a famous Jewish sage. Eventually, his parents enrolled him in a Catholic high school. "My mother is a seeker," says Mr. Yusuf. One of his sisters converted to Orthodox Judaism when she married a Jewish husband. Another became Muslim after Mr. Yusuf converted. "My family has a pretty deep interest in the deep questions," he says.
Islam, with its vivid descriptions of a single God passing judgment on people in the afterlife, appealed to Mr. Yusuf. So did the discipline of praying five times a day. Meeting other American converts to Islam in California and elsewhere gave Mr. Yusuf a sense of belonging, he says.
After converting, Mr. Yusuf dropped out of college and spent the next decade traveling to the United Arab Emirates and Mauritania, learning Arabic and studying with Muslim scholars. During a visit to Algeria, he was arrested as a spy. "They didn't know what to make of this American who wanted to learn Arabic and study Islam," he says
Mr. Yusuf returned to California to complete his college degree and went on to get a nursing degree, planning to return to West Africa. Soon, he began teaching at local mosques, and his sermons struck a chord with young people, many of whom had drifted away from Islam. Many Muslim immigrants, says Mr. Yusuf, "were too complacent, too caught up in the American dream, the pursuit of material goals. They lost sight of the higher goals." But he adds: "That's easy for someone who grew up in Marin County to say. I didn't grow up in Madras, India, in poverty."
On a recent Saturday, Mr. Yusuf sat before a crowd of 200 people in a former church assembly hall, dressed in a white robe. A cameraman videotaped his sermon, to be copied and sold over the Internet. The crowd was racially and ethnically mixed. About 32 percent of America's Muslims are from South Asia or of South Asian descent; 26 percent are Arab-American. African-Americans make up about 20 percent of the country's Muslim population.
The topic this day was male-female relations. Traditional Islamic law, Mr. Yusuf told the crowd, treated women fairly, giving them the right to divorce and also a share of communal property. Though a screen divided the women in the hall from the men, they participated actively in the discussion. One asked whether it is proper under Islamic law to seek a divorce from her husband after they had been separated for two years. Mr. Yusuf said it is. Another woman asked for the titles of good books on raising children. Mr. Yusuf recommended one by a Muslim scholar and several by British and American authors.
While Mr. Yusuf peppers his talks with modern allusions, he also embraces tradition. He encourages followers to pray five times a day and to study Islamic texts. He believes women should dress modestly, with their heads covered. Though he lives in a suburb with a first-rate school system, he home-schools his children and doesn't own a television. "Islam means submissions," he says. "It is hard. It is supposed to be hard. If it weren't hard, it wouldn't be worth doing."
It's a message many young Muslims find appealing. Hosai Nisari was born in Afghanistan but didn't go to mosque or wear a veil when she was growing up in California. In college, she became more interested in Islam and decided to start wearing a head scarf and robe. She has been coming to Mr. Yusuf's talks since 1997 and now teaches at an elementary school run by a local mosque. "If you go to an immigrant mosque, you get ideas that are foreign," she says as she leaves the two-hour session. "He speaks to us from an American Muslim perspective."
Most controversially within the Muslim community, Mr. Yusuf is sharply critical of what he calls "political Islam" — the focus of many Muslim leaders on political issues, which he believes has turned many Muslims away from mosques.
"Middle East politics have become so central," he says. "It's definitely important, but it's one component in a very large tradition. The concern of the Muslim community has to be centered here. There needs to be a lot more outreach to people alienated from mosques, people alienated from the anger-based approach."
Mr. Yusuf has expressed his own anger about Israel in the past. In 1995 he said, "The Jews would have us believe that God has this bias to this little small tribe in the middle of the desert and all the rest of humanity is just rubbish. I mean that is the basic doctrine of the Jewish religion, and that's why it is a most racist religion."
Mr. Yusuf says he regrets those remarks, saying they were "inappropriate, non-Islamic and out of character." He says he and many other Muslims have allowed "political animosity" over issues like the Middle East to become "racial and ethnic animosity."
"We have to change that," he says. "I am groping with that myself." Even before Sept. 11, Mr. Yusuf was delivering sermons urging Muslims to show respect for Jews and meeting with rabbis.
Upon hearing of the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Yusuf says, his first response was to pray that Muslims weren't involved. When it became clear that they were, Mr. Yusuf says he became aware of the "deep rage in parts of the Muslim community." Suhail Khan, a Muslim aide in the Bush administration who had heard Mr. Yusuf speak over the years, invited him to the White House to meet with Mr. Bush the day of the president's Sept. 20 address to Congress. Mr. Yusuf was one of six religious leaders, and the only Muslim, to meet the president privately, presenting him with a copy of the Quran. Mr. Yusuf attended the speech that evening, sitting near first lady Laura Bush.
Lately, Mr. Yusuf has become increasingly critical of Muslim countries, even as he says he is troubled by the United States invasion of Afghanistan. Unchecked power in the hands of any government can lead to repression and unilateral military action, Mr. Yusuf says. "The only reason that Muslim countries are not doing it is because they do not have the power," he said in a sermon delivered after Sept. 11. "That is why they can only do it to their own population."
Such views, and Mr. Yusuf's critique of mosques that focus on Middle East politics, are prompting criticism from other Muslim leaders.
"Mr. Yusuf is a popular speaker, but I don't think he is a relevant figure in Muslim politics," says Agha Saeed, national chairman of the American Muslim Alliance, which encourages Muslim involvement in politics. "His political views don't reflect the feelings of the community. The Palestinian issue remains central to American Muslims."
After Sept. 11, says Mr. Saeed, Mr. Yusuf responded "more as a person born in this country. The different parts of his biography came into conflict."
It's a conflict Mr. Yusuf says he shares with growing numbers of American Muslims. "We're struggling to find not only our identity in this country, but our voice," he says.
Following the recently concluded World Economic Forum, Mr. Yusuf sat in a New York hotel lobby, dressed in a conservative dark suit, sipping tea, reflecting on meetings with American business and political leaders, as well as influential Arabs, some of whom were consumed with talk of American conspiracies against their interests.
It pains him, he says, to hear the "us versus them" approach that Muslims and Americans often take with each other.
"I'm one of us, and I'm one of them at the same time," he says.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Jonathan Kaufman | Feb. 15, 2002
