A New Welcoming Spirit in the Mosque

摘要

When the youth group at southern California's Mis -sion Viejo Masjid met re-cently, the scene looked like a public-service announcement for racial tolerance. The Sudanese imam sat next to a Palestinian-American student, who sat next to a female Anglo convert, who sat next to a son of Pakistani immigrants, who ...well, you get the idea. But this isn't a clever ad; it's mosque life on any given weekend in Orange County and cities across America. "You are finding a new kind of climate in a lot of Muslim communities," says Naim Shah Jr., a Los Angeles Muslim raised in the Nation of Islam who's now an orthodox Sunni. He is assistant to the imam at the mostly African-American Masjid Ibaadillah in the city's Crenshaw district. "I just got a call from a largely immigrant [Muslim] group who wanted to organize a camp together on Labor Day weekend," Shah says. "We never got those calls five years ago. I attribute a lot of that to the young people; they are knocking down old and unnecessary boundaries."