by Eric MartinEdward E. Curtis IV has a useful summary of facts/myths surrounding mosques in the United States (via). In one portion, he comments on Sharia law (a topic of some concern on this site in recent weeks):
In Islam, sharia ("the Way" to God) theoretically governs every human act. But Muslims do not agree on what sharia says; there is no one sharia book of laws. Most mosques in America do not teach Islamic law for a simple reason: It's too complicated for the average believer and even for some imams.
Islamic law includes not only the Koran and the Sunna (the traditions of the prophet Muhammad) but also great bodies of arcane legal rulings and pedantic scholarly interpretations. If mosques forced Islamic law upon their congregants, most Muslims would probably leave -- just as most Christians might walk out of the pews if preachers gave sermons exclusively on Saint Augustine, canon law and Greek grammar. Instead, mosques study the Koran and the Sunna and how the principles and stories in those sacred texts apply to their everyday lives.
Curtis on the history of mosques in America:
Mosques have been here since the colonial era. A mosque, or masjid, is literally any place where Muslims make salat, the prayer performed in the direction of Mecca; it needn't be a building. One of the first mosques in North American history was on Kent Island, Md.: Between 1731 and 1733, African American Muslim slave and Islamic scholar Job Ben Solomon, a cattle driver, would regularly steal away to the woods there for his prayers -- in spite of a white boy who threw dirt on him as he made his prostrations.
The Midwest was home to the greatest number of permanent U.S. mosques in the first half of the 20th century. In 1921, Sunni, Shiite and Ahmadi Muslims in Detroit celebrated the opening of perhaps the first purpose-built mosque in the nation. Funded by real estate developer Muhammad Karoub, it was just blocks away from Henry Ford's Highland Park automobile factory, which employed hundreds of Arab American men.
In fact, there is a mosque in the Pentagon itself - though few, if any, are complaining that its presence is "insensitive" to the 9/11 victims that perished at that site (insensitive, presumably, because having Muslims praying near such a site reminds the victims of terrorists because all Muslims are terrorists?).
Meanwhile, it is worth pointing out that the recent spate of anti-Muslim violence, vandalism of mosques and terrorizing of mosque-attendees risks to upturn the traditional advantage that the US has had over Europe in terms of limiting the number of home grown terrorists.
For one, they tend to straddle worlds (second or third generation Muslims living in the West), and become increasingly alienated from their adopted homeland - this, usually due to the host country's lack of assimilative tendencies, as well as overt hostility to, and rejection of, foreign cultures.
In this regard, it is widely assumed in counterterrorist circles that the United States (with its immigrant history and melting pot dynamic) has enjoyed some insulation where European nations (that tend to emphasize a historical, nationalist identity) have been exposed.
However, the Republican Party's demagoguery in recent years has taken the form of an indiscriminate hostility toward all Muslims and Islam in general - thus helping to alienate young Muslim Americans that would otherwise feel a part of American culture and society.
In addition, many of those that are eventually radicalized experience some traumatic, violent incident of hatred, either directly or to loved ones. Those would be the same type of incidents as are beginning to pop up across the country - a logical, and inevitable, result of the dangerous anti-Muslim animus being whipped up by key Republican pundits, politicians and journalists.
To repeat, this anti-Muslim hatred being stoked for short term political gain is as reprehensible morally as it is risky in terms of national security.