USA: Yahya Hendi on Practicing Islam in America
July 9, 2007
U.S. imam questions if “American” Islam exists
Tom Heneghan (Reuters)
Yahya Hendi is not sure that an “American Islam” exists. When the Palestinian-born imam talks about his religion, though, it sounds as if it has become as integrated into American life as he has.
Hendi, 40, is the Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University, a Catholic institution that in 1999 became the first university in the United States to hire a full-time imam. He teaches a course on interreligious dialogue there along with a priest and a rabbi.
He is also chaplain at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and a mosque in Frederick, another suburb north of the capital. He lectures around the country to explain Islam to non-Muslims and U.S. religious pluralism to Muslims.
The question of whether Islam can be “westernized” — a key aim of European officials seeking a “British Islam” or “French Islam” to help integrate Muslim immigrants — seems to be more than an ocean away for this pragmatic thinker…
Entry Filed under: Muslims, United States. .
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A Free Spirit | October 31, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Making interreligious dialogue perhaps more difficult than it need be, those of us interested in the religious domain tend to miss the obvious: that we share an interest in the same domain. Our intra-domain differences, I submit, are dwarfed by the distance from our planet to others…such as the planet of the stock market enthusists. For more, if you are interested, pls see my post. http://deligentia.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/missing-the-obvious-in-religious-discussion-something-we-have-in-common/