Charter of the Federation Moorish Science Temples
Category: Religion and Philosophy

The charter below is for the Federation Moorish Science Temples. Their linage is from Temple 13 and Shiek Timothy Dingle El

Federation: Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc...:

ALLAH IS LOVE

"FORCE TO MAKE CHANGES"

We, the Federation: Moorish Science Temple, Inc. are drawing our power and authority from the Great Koran (Quran) of Mecca and the Resurrection: Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc. (Book)

TO ALL WHOM THESE PRESENT MAY COME

GREETINGS

THE HOME OFFICE

5231 Denmore Ave. Baltimore, MD 21215

CHARTER

To this branch of the Federation: M.S.T. of A. in the county of (         ) and state of (        ) to be styled and known as Temple No. (          ).

Hear, now, ye cherubim, ye seraphim, ye angels and ye men! Hear, now, oh protoplast and earth and plant and beast! Hear, now, ye creeping things of earth, ye fish that swim, ye birds that fly! Hear, now ye winds that blow, ye thunders and ye lightnings of the sky! Hear, now, ye spirits of the fire, of water, earth and air! Hear, now, oh everything that is, or was or evermore will be, for wisdom speaks from out the highest plane of spirit life:

The Federation: Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc. will be exercising our rights in accordance with U.S. Supreme Court Decision in 1872 concerning Trial of Society etc…

Our intentions are to unite all Moorish Temples throughout the United States and abroad under the instructions and leadership of our Holy prophet, Noble Drew Ali (North, South and Central America) and if those said temples under the instructions of our Holy Prophet Noble Drew Ali do not unite under the principle of (love) they are enemies to the cause of uplifting fallen humanity and uniting their own people and justice will catch them.

The Federation: Moorish Science Temple, Inc. is to teach the lost and found Nation (Moabites) their ancient and modern nationality and Divine Creed. We, The Federation: Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc., are to appoint, anoint, confer sheikism, consecrate missionaries and confer any degree that is deemed necessary to uplift fallen humanity and establish a way of life of Allah in America.

The He or She who stand before this CHARTER . I The Prophet Drew Ali or the He or She who have been anointed; do herby declare that you are a Moslem under the Holy and Divine Law of the Holy Koran of Mecca Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom and Justice. Every He or She Shall and Must proclaim their nationality in honor of Prophet Jonah. Also proclaim their free-national name El or Bey etc. To be recognized by the government in which they live and the nations of the earth. The Moorish Americans are the descendents of the Ancient Moabites who inhabited the North Western and South Western Shores of Africa.

This Moorish Temple shall be styled and known by the above named titled possessing all power and privileges of a Temple holding an unclaimed warrant of authority duly granted by the Home Office. The Supreme Home Office can at anytime suspend or revoke this warrant of authority if the Agent herein authorized shall be deem no longer able qualified to fulfill said function.

AGENT (         )

This (    ) day of (     ) A.D. (      )

Baltimore, Maryland

Grand Sheik Jerome Graham-Bey   

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About Shiek Clifford Jackson Bey in Chicago

Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Moorish religious leader charges police brutality
Sheik’s son sought by arresting officers
By DELORES MCCAIN
Wednesday, January 24, 2007

A press conference was held at Wallace Catfish Corner (2800 W. Madison
St.) Jan. 18 by attorneys Lewis Myers Jr. and Berve M. Power, who
represent Sheik Clifford Jackson-Bey, divine minister of The Moorish
Science Temple of America, Inc., since 1979.

On Saturday, Nov. 25, 2006, Sheik Jackson-Bey alleges he was brutally
attacked by a Chicago police officer during a routine search for one of
his sons, for whom the officers allegedly had an arrest warrant.

Attorney Myers introduced Sheik Jackson-Bey as a national leader of the
Islamic community. Jackson-Bey made the following statement to the
press: "My name is Sheik Clifford Jackson-Bey. I am the National Grand
Sheik of the Moorish Science Temple of America. I oversee a number of
small temples here and around the United States. Our principles are
love, truth, peace, freedom and justice, and we teach basically the art
of nationality, the science of nationality and divine creed.
Professionally, I am a paralegal. I do murder and narcotics case
preparation for criminal defense attorneys."

He also described himself as "an honorably discharged Viet Nam veteran,
a prominent nationally recognized religious leader, a well-known local
television broadcaster, and a much-sought-after private criminal
investigator."

"Today civil rights leaders, witnesses, clergy, family and friends from
Chicago and across the nation are gathered here to make it widely
understood that we will no longer accept this sort of insulting
religious persecution and police brutality.

"For a number of years, members of the Islamic community, the Moorish
Science Temple of America, Inc. has worked to foster ecumenical
cooperation between Islamic leaders and members of the Christian
community and other religious organizations in America. We have also
worked to develop an understanding with law enforcement agencies and
police departments after Sept. 11, 2001.

"The actions of the Chicago Police Department member who unjustifiably
and viciously attacked national Grand Sheik Clifford Jackson-Bey has
only worked to exacerbate tension between the Islamic community and the
Chicago Police Department."

Jackson-Bey alleges that on Nov. 25 he was beaten by a Chicago police
officer. In his written statement he alleges: "Saturday evening around 4
p.m., I was sitting in the bedroom with my wife talking. All of a
sudden, I heard my door slam, dogs barking and beating on the door. I
got up, went to the back door to see what was wrong. When I looked out
the door, I saw the police standing at the door pointing their guns in
my window. They yelled at me, telling me to put the dogs up before they
blow their brains out, and blow mine out too. I told them, "No problem.
I will put the dogs up," I put one dog in the cage and the other in the
bedroom.

"I then went out my front door and asked the officers what was wrong,
who were they looking for? They replied, ’You know who the f..k we are
looking for; they ran in your house!’ I asked them, ’Who ran into my
house?’ Suddenly, the officer grabbed my arm and told me I was going to
get him out of the house or I was going to jail for harboring a man with
a warrant.

"One of the officers said, ’Cuff him!’ The officer holding my arm placed
handcuffs on me and placed me in the back of an unmarked police car.
While sitting in the back of the police car, I saw a tactical officer
banging on the front storm door. All of a sudden he stopped banging on
the door, ran off the porch, jumped in the back of the police car and
began to beat me about the head and body. He straddled me and continued
to punch me while calling me Muslim bitches, saying, ’Nobody gives a
f..k about you Muslim bitches, nobody is going to help you, you Muslim
piece of s..t.

"Later, another officer came to the car, told me they were looking for
my son, Haneef Jackson-Bey, and that they had a warrant for his arrest.
The officers told me that Haneef ran into my house after being chased by
them. I told them that Haneef did not live here, and that he was not in
my house."

After entering his home, Jackson-Bey said they only found his wife and
14-year-old son. It was later determined, he said, that Haneef had been
in police custody since Nov. 23.

Jackson-Bey added, "While at the station, the officer who jumped on me,
came into the room where I was handcuffed to a wall and said to me: ’I
have to do something that I have never done before. I have to live with
myself. I have to sleep at night. I owe you an apology. I lost my temper
and things went further than they were supposed to go. I have never
apologized before. I have family in the area.’ A captain then came in
and asked if I wanted to file a complaint. I told him I did. I was taken
to South Shore Hospital where I was interviewed by medical staff and an
investigator from OPS."

The Moorish Science Temple has also sent a letter to Mayor Richard Daley
and Gov. Rod Blagojevich with a copy to Supt. Philip Cline. The letter
reportedly requests that the officer should be suspended and/or dismissed.

On Wednesday, the Austin Weekly News contacted Chicago Police News
Affairs for a comment about the allegations. A News Affairs spokesperson
said our questions would be forwarded to Monique Bond, director of News
Affairs, who would either reply to the allegations or direct the paper
to the proper officials in the department for a response.

The alleged incident in question occurred close to the temple’s
location, 8700 S. Marquette Ave. However, the attorneys and participants
wanted to hold a press conference on the West Side so that this
community could be informed. The host was 2nd Ward aldermanic candidate
and restaurant owner Wallace Davis.

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Peace Studies in Jerusalem
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Peace studies: Children of Israel

In a city marked by division, the Max Rayne school is unique – the only one in Jerusalem where pupils, principals and teachers are from Jewish and Arab communities. By Donald Macintyre

At first glance the class of excited nine-year-olds looks like any other when the principal drops in for a visit.

As their teacher, Yaffa Tala, writes each item on the blackboard her pupils shoot their hands up to specify what they hope will be in the brand-new school building that they will be moving into next month and will visit for the first time on a trip which Ms Tala explains will start at 8am today: a cafeteria (no); computers (yes); a proper playground (yes); drinks machines (for water, yes, for fizzy drinks, no); a library (yes); a gym (yes); individual lockers (yes).

"Will they have keys or codes?" one child asks. There’s a murmur of approval when the principal, Ala Khatib, announces that there will be two lavatories for every class instead of the six for the whole school in the "temporary" building it has occupied for the last decade. There is a gasp of excitement when Moid Hussein in the back row asks him if there will be an elevator and the head says yes – changing swiftly to disappointment when he explains it will be not for Moid and his classmates but for the disabled, and for elderly visitors to the school.

But in fact these 36 fourth-graders are like no others in any school in Jerusalem. For a start, as in every class here, there are two teachers – sharing the lesson with Ms Tala, an Israeli Jew, is her colleague Rajaa Natour, a Muslim Arab. And then you realise that about half the class are Arabs (including three Christians) and the other half Jews, with Jews and Arabs, boys and girls, paired up on many of the desks.

The lesson itself is in two languages. It begins in Hebrew – with most of the Arab pupils speaking it fluently. When it switches to Arabic – at the suggestion of the principal – the Jewish children feel less comfortable asking questions in a language most of them have not quite yet mastered. But when Omri Bar Giora, wearing a bright blue Israel national team shirt says – in Hebrew – that he hopes there will be "four football fields" at the new school, the face he makes shows he has no difficulty whatever in understanding the principal when he explains, in Arabic, that, sadly, that would be a bit much to expect. "I make a point of never speaking in Hebrew in class," says Mr Khatib, a first-rate Hebrew speaker.

But this is not for the benefit of the Arab children, but for the Jewish ones, who he is anxious to see turn their good "passive" Arabic – the ability to understand – into the confidence and ability to speak it.

But then Mr Khatib is, in truth, not the principal, but one of two co-principals, the other being Dalia Peretz, a Jewish Israeli teacher (who incidentally learnt her Arabic from her Moroccan Jewish immigrant mother for whom it was the first language). And the two close colleagues are equally presiding over a unique and visionary educational venture, the only Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem.

Any time now (when the Jerusalem municipality gives it the final permit) and thanks to a major donation from the Rayne Foundation, the charity set up by the late British Jewish businessman and philanthropist Lord Rayne, and other funds channelled through the Jerusalem Foundation from Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria, the Max Rayne School and its 406 pupils will move into its $11m (£5.4m) purpose-built premises.

The school is located on the border between the Jewish West Jerusalem neighbourhood of Pat and the Palestinian East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Beit Safafa from which many of the Arab pupils come. The official opening ceremony is on Sunday.

It is hard to overestimate the importance, pioneering rather than merely symbolic, of the school in a city whose religious and ethnic divisions are at the absolute heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Two members of the fourth-grade class, Yazid Ershed, the Arab boy, who asked about the drinks machines, and Aviv Pek, the Jewish girl, who asked about the library, have grown up together in the school having been at the kindergarden together. Discussing what the school means to them yesterday, they completed each other’s sentences several times. "I like the school and I really like the teachers," says Aviv. "I have lots of Arab friends. One of my best friends is an Arab girl and, of course, she comes to my house."

The point is echoed by Yazid: "I have Jewish friends too," he says. "We go to each other’s houses. We play football, we play with computers or we just talk."

Conscious that outside the school Jewish and Arab children remain segregated, Yazid says: "If they all went to school together there would be no war. They would live next to each other in peace and not fighting each other." What did their friends from segregated school think about them coming here? "When I tell them I go to a Jewish Arab school, they are very surprised," says Yazid. "They don’t understand it." Aviv recalls: "A woman who is a neighbour started shouting at my father: ’Poor girl, what is she going to learn from the Arabs?’ She doesn’t understand that Arabs have a life, they are nice people and not the monsters of the city."

Yazid explains that the school observes all the main religious festivals – the Jewish high holidays, the great Muslim festivals such as the Eid al Fitr just passed, and Christmas. Some of the holidays are shortened to ensure that the pupils are at school for as long as other children in the city.

And he adds: "Last year we studied all the religions together but this year each kid is learning about his own religion." In school, the children speak partly in English– which both are learning – but more in Hebrew, in which Yazid is fluent. So again, does Yazid speak Hebrew better than Aviv speaks Arabic? Aviv nods. Her Arabic is "not good enough". "But I am learning to speak it slowly," she adds. Yazid says of the school pupils in general: "If we speak in Arabic part of the kids will understand but if we speak in Hebrew all the kids will understand."

This asymmetry isn’t hard to understand in a city in which the mainly Arab families whose children go to the school – most of whom have Israeli citizenship – deal every day with the many institutions of a city which has been under Israeli control since the 1967 Six-Day War. Arab children are much more likely to be exposed to Israeli entertainment and media than Jewish children are to their Arab counterparts and the principal attractions, such as the city zoo, to take a single example of many, are Israeli.

Improving the Arabic language skills of Jewish children, says Mr Khatib, who like Mrs Peretz, has two daughters at the school, is one of the challenges the school faces. As he points out, "no one told us" how to run a school with Jewish teachers teaching Hebrew to Arab children and vice versa.

Indeed the training, as Mrs Peretz, who happens to be the sister of the former defence minister and Israeli Labour leader Amir Peretz, is very much "in service". But the other challenge is to persuade the Israeli Ministry of Education, having fully accredited the school up to the ninth grade, to allow it to build the high school for which level the school’s first pupils will be ready next year. The school is one of three across Israel in what is known as the "Hand to Hand" project – the others being in the Galilee and the northern Wadi Ara triangle of Arab towns and villages. The project’s mission statement says that the growth and success of the schools already "testifies to the extraordinary power of a simple idea – that by coming together, face to face, Arab and Jewish children can study side by side, learning each other’s languages and cultures" – in turn teaching "that our common humanity is more important than any differences that divide us".

So far, of course, many of the parents who have chosen the school are middle-class professionals. (Aviv’s father is a business consultant; Yazid’s a lawyer) But Mrs Peretz, who would like to see 10 "Hand to Hand" schools across Israel in the foreseeable future, says that the school is already making strides – partly through scholarships to cover the relatively modest £600 per year costs to families – in attracting more lower income families. Some residents of Pat, a lower middle-class Jewish neighbourhood, alienated from the ethos of the new school being built in their midst, have even held protest demonstrations. But the school is planning intensivediscussions with local community leaders, not least to persuade them to encourage local children to become pupils.

Meanwhile one of the school’s many important functions is to confront both communities with the different, and indeed wildly contradictory, narratives of the other. To Israelis, 1948 is the victorious War of Independence and to Palestinians the Nakba, or "disaster", in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced to leave their homes. That can be painful for Jewish as well as Palestinian pupils.

"Some of them feel guilty saying ’Did my people really do what you are saying’," says Rajaa Natour. "Others feel very proud of their state. In one class a kid got up and said ’We won the war’."

Such a statement, she explains, then provoked a deep discussion about what that victory meant. Ms Natour adds that she works in the school because it "is a very leading project and this may be the only place to make education a tool for change".

And, as Ms Peretz points out, the Jewish parents have already signed up, before their children come, to a school "ideology" which provides for such debate. One parent, an Israeli photographer, Quique Kierszenbaum, who took the pictures for this article and who serves on the school parents’ committee, sums up why he and his wife, Sharon, wanted his five-year-old son, Guili, at the school. "We are a very liberal family and we feel that normal schools in Jerusalem have an atmosphere of not knowing anything about the others who live in this city," he says. "For us after six or seven years of the intifada the school seemed like the only solution to staying in this place.

"If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem and we want to be part of the solution."

This, he believes, translates "into normal life in a way that is easy and natural". Whether it is the pleasure his son has taken over the last month of greeting everyone he meets, Jews and Arabs, with the seasons-old Arab greeting Ramadan Karim, or the Arab and Jewish intensive and free-ranging parents’ discussion about how exactly to commemorate the 12th anniversary next week of the assassination of the Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing fanatic, there is more emphasis on the discussion of democracy, peace and non-violence, and less on mere ceremony.

"We are living co-existence here, not just dreaming or talking about it," says Mr Kierszenbaum. "We’re giving to it the most important thing we have –the education of our sons and daughters."

One of the school’s newest pupils is Maria Amin, a six-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza who is confined to a wheelchair which she navigates with a joystick operated by her chin. A patient at Jerusalem’s remarkable rehabilitation hospital, the Alyn, she was paralysed from the neck down when the car she was travelling in was caught in an Israeli missile strike on an Islamic Jihad commander which killed her mother, uncle, grandmother and elder brother.

She wasn’t at the school yesterday because of medical problems, but Mrs Peretz hopes she will be at the school for several years to come.

You can’t miss, fixed to the door of her classroom, under inscriptions of greeting in Arabic, a colourful painting – a house a flower, a tortoise, a vivid rainbow – by her new classmates. In large letters on the painting are written the words"Welcome Maria". In Hebrew.

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From my forthcoming book on Bilali

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The Future of American Islamic Literature

The Future of American Islamic Literature and its debt to Bilali Muhammad and others

In order to preserve an Islamic identity among our youth, it is necessary for us to develop means by which they can express pride in being a Muslim and an American. There are instances where these ideals may seemingly conflict, however the same was true when Islam entered Iran, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and West Africa. By developing Islamic texts in the native languages and education systems, the children will be taught Islamic rituals and doctrines in a language they understand and the texts and methodologies can be adapted to meet local needs and demands. Part of the process should be to a choice of which texts are important to be taught, translated, or even written from scratch.
Developing an identity as an American Muslim can be a daunting process since most of the Islamic schools and ethnicities from the whole world can be found within the borders of the United States, and they often have differing views on Islamic Law and History. Finding what essentials need to be preserved and transmitted will be of prime importance. Also, doing oral histories of communities and writing biographies of Islamic pioneers in this country will increase the effectiveness of this project.
Magribine Press has reprinted the works of the Islamic Party, Shaykh Dawud Ahmed Faisal, Muhammad Alexander Russell Webb, and others as part of this process. In the future, there will be a need for original poetry, plays, Mawlids, short stories, and novels representing the American Muslim experience need to be written, taught and studied. A project to develop a course work on American Islamic Literature and history at the graduate level is underway. Whether this will be seminars, several courses, or a Masters program has to be determined.
In the past the process of developing an emergent Islamic literature for new converts included writing the language in Arabic script, translating important Sufi and Fiqh texts, translating the Qur’an and writing commentaries in the language, and composing original literature in the form of poetry and prose. The more important of these later two categories includes Mawlids and collections of prayer, Hadith, and Islamic rulings. In the United States writing this new literature in Arabic script is impractical, but having a system of incorporating Islamic terminology into an American Islamic English as part of the process is necessary and a part of the process that can not be ignored.
In the United States the process of translating texts and developing an Islamic Press is an ongoing process, but there needs to be a preservation of what has already been done. This can include archiving old Islamic newspapers and other texts printed in the United States and doing oral histories of individual communities. When Muslims write wills there needs to be a component of developing trusts (Waqfs) to assist in this process by donation of personal libraries and family papers to such Waqfs and funds for translating important texts, cataloging and preserving donated materials, and scholarships for Islamic weekend schools and for students who chose to study Islam in America at the post secondary level.
This text, an extended commentary and translation of one of the first Islamic texts in America, of Bilali Muhammad is the first Fiqh text written in North America. It had defied translation and commentary in the past due to its difficult orthography and misidentification of its author. This study, hopefully, solved some of those difficulties, and placed Bilali’s text within the field of American Islamic Literature as to be commented upon and studied in depth. Hopefully this will not be the last American Islamic text to be given such treatment.
If we ignore the contributions of Bilali Muhammad, Hajj ’Umar ibn Said, and other early pioneers, or we make false claims of an Islamic past that did not exist we are doing a disservice for the future generations of Muslims in the Americas. Having an emergent literature and a process to study our history on these shores will insure that Islam in the United States is not just an achronistic episode in the history of the United States like the adhan being called in Cork, Ireland in the June 1631 when over a hundred Irish were taken as prisoner of war by Barbary pirates. Future American Muslims will neither be ghettoized nor reject their Islamic heritage if this process is done systematically and with the collaboration of youth and American Muslim educational and community leaders.

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Can an American Islamic Culture Arise on these shores?

Can an American Islamic Culture Arise on these shores?

Muhammed Abdullah al-Ahari (Doctoral candidate)

Bismillah IrRahman IrRahim,

            What is the future for an American Islam that is able to be seen as a full component part of the larger Muslim world? In other nations Muslims were able to be Malay and Muslim, Berber and Muslim, Indian and Muslim, or even Turkish and Muslim.

            Muslims have been in the Unites States ever since Columbus "discovered" the New World and claimed it for the Crown of Spain. During the time of slavery, Muslims were here and some were able to preserve some of their culture for a short time. We see this in Selim the Algerine attending the first Continental Congress and in the Arabic writings of al-Hajj 'Umar ibn Said and Bilali Muhammad and his selections from the Maliki fiqh text al-Risalah.

            When slavery ended we had some false starts at an American Islamic Community. The most noteworthy, from the beginning of the 20^th century, was from a Missouri born convert – Muhammad Alexander Russell Webb – who founded an Islamic journal and press and wrote the first text for propagation of Islam in America.

            After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and World War I, large numbers of Arab, Turkish, Albanian, and Bosnian immigrants came to America. Most assimilated quickly and only further immigration kept the number of Muslims growing.

            In the general American society many ills were occurring such as Racism, Sexism, etc. The abused saw Islam as a solution but the immigrant (for the most part) were not spreading the Message of Islam. Therefore, sects and schisms arose that spoke more of solving social ills than of practicing Islam.

            In the late 1950s the Sunday School Movement was started in Toledo by the Bosnian scholar Shaykh Kamil Yusuf Avdich – a graduate of Sarajevo's Gazi Husref Bey's Madressa and Cairo's al-Azhar. He also helped to start four Islamic journals in America and to open the Northbrook, Illinois Islamic Cultural Center (ICC) and the Bosnian American Cultural Home formerly on Halsted in Chicago from which the ICC grew.

            From that humble center on Halsted, MCC (Chicago's Muslim Cultural Center) and Mosque Foundation were given birth. Today we see the fruit of the pioneers, but we are still chasing after every identity but that as American Muslims.  The tragedy of September 11^th should have opened our eyes. As American Muslims we were harmed also. Our brothers and sisters were killed in the twin towers.

            How to we achieve the American Muslim Identity?

            Several scholars have provided answers such as Dr. Ismail Farooqi and the "Islamization of English" and many social scientists that are beginning to see Islam as an American phenomenon. However, like all cultures, we need an Islam that is a reflection of the culture we are in. Muslim societies have done this in the past by the use of prose, poetry, novels, and other literary devices. Food, clothing, and change in language are other ways this can be affected. It is hoped that we as American Muslims can find a path to develop as a cultured people.

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American Islamic Culture?

English as the Auxiliary Language of the Muslim Community in America[1]

Bismillah IrRahman IrRahim,

            Let me first quickly introduce myself. My name is Muhammed al-Ahari. I accepted Islam in the fall of 1982 in South Carolina. In December 1983 I came to Chicago to study at the American Islamic College where I attended for three years. It was there where I bought a copy of Imam Kamil Avdic's Survey of Islamic Doctrine, heard about Seid Karic, and met the future Reis Ulema of Bosnia Mustafa Ceric. I first attended ICC in 1990, later becoming a member and marrying Indira Islamovic, a Bosnian from near Bihac in 1994.

            From the first days I declared I was Muslim I struggled with what my identity as an American Muslim should look like. I attended meetings at various Arab & Indo-Pak mosques, the Nation of Islam, Sufi Brotherhoods, and the Moorish Science Temple. The fruit of this search has been the publishing of a collection of articles of Avdic's journalistic writings and more than fifty articles on the history of Islam in America. During this search I looked at attempts to pass on Islamic traditions to the next generation. Most attempts to do so were done either informally through family or at fairly unprofessional Islamic Sunday Schools where most teachers had little or no training in pedagogy and formal curriculum development methods.

            The schools in Toledo and in Chicago were exceptions to this and were both started by Imam Camil Avdic. Studies of the Arabic Muslim communities in Detroit and Toledo done in the early 1960s found that Islamic and Arab ethnic identity were stronger in Toledo. In Toledo the focus was on transmitting Islam identity and moral ethical standards through the medium of the English language. Detroit, on the other hand, had a focus on learning Arabic and reciting the Qur'an rather than on developing an identity of an Arab American Muslim of just American Muslim. Rates of intermarriage with non-Muslims and conversion to Christianity were much higher where the focus was on culture and language rather than on just the transmission of Islam.

            Avdic provides a model for the future of the Bosnian and larger Muslim communities in America. He never rejected a Bosnian identity nor quit speaking Bosnian. He layered his identity with each experience he went through. First he went to Ghazi Husref Madressa and the Islamic College in Sarajevo. This college was later closed by the Communists while he was a student at al-Azhar. Later, he became fluent in French, Arabic, and English and even began to publish in Arabic and English before his arrival in the United States in 1954.

            In the United States he helped establish the first Bosnian language periodical Glasnik: Muslimanskog Vjerskog i Kulturnog Doma (The Herald of the Muslim Cultural Home) with the assistance of Seid Karic, Shaban Torlo, Mustafa Hasanagic, and Ihsan Zulfikary. His curriculum, developed in Toledo, was serialized there. That curriculum had a focus on Islamic History, basic rituals such as prayer and fasting, and the ideas of a Muslim responsibilities to their family, community, and the larger world. This curriculum, named an Outline of Islam, went through two editions and then was revised as a Survey of Islamic Doctrine which was published after his death.

            Avdic also designed a Mawlid to be recited in English. There were sections that were read in Arabic, Turkish, Albanian and Bosnian, but the larger framework was in English. He also encouraged Muslims to become citizens and held English language and Civics classes for adults at the Mosque toward those goals.

            Avdic also started the ICC Newsletter which had twenty issues published during his lifetime. This newsletter took the message of Islam as presented through the filter of a Bosnian Muslim editor's mind to the larger world, both Muslim and non-Muslim. The newsletter also had Bosnian language inserts, and presented ideas of Intra-Faith Dialogue and Inter-Faith Dialogue. With the current battles between Muslims in Iraq (Sunni versus Shia) and the bad will against Muslims following 9-11, this message needs to be spread, and the best means is in the English language.

            Thank you for your time.

            As-Salaam Aliekum.

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