American Muslims: Cousins and Strangers.

When Siraj Wahaj, imam of Masjid al-Taqwa in Brooklyn, stood in the U.S. House
of representatives on June 25, 1991. He wove into his prayer one of the most oftcited verses of the Quran: Do you not know, O people, that I have made you
into tribes and nations that you may know each other. Our religious and cultural
differences should not be the occasion for division but, on the contrary, the
occasion for the biggest challenge of all: that we may know each other. The
Quran offers us all a good place to start: we should come to know each other.
But knowing each other is not easy in the American context.
Ali Asani, one of my Muslim colleagues here at Harvard, is realistic about just
how difficult the challenge to understanding is. I think the levels of prejudice
and the ignorance about Islam in this society are so deep that its really going to
be a long struggle to educate people in America about what Islam is, that Islam
is not just this monolith, and that if Muslims do something it is not necessarily to
be associated with their faith.
Relationship of reconciliation between Muslims and Jews to begin in America
where Jews and Muslims live together in a free society. 1 By the end of 1999 he
had worked with other
Muslims and with like-minded Jews in Los Angeles to sign a joint code of ethics
that would support respectful, mutual relations between the two communities.