article, might be of interest to some, on Hamza Yusuf.
Achtung
‘Rock Star’ of New Muslim Generation
Also Happens to Be White Suburbanite
By JONATHAN KAUFMAN
Staff Reporter
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,SB101372652597775160,00.html
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.
‘A Rock Star’
“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% 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.