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Democrats would have not been able to take the Congress in 2006 elections had it not been for the Muslim vote in Virginia. (Reuters Photo) |
Diverse is the American Muslim community; different ethnicities and dialects … Yet, Islam unites them under one umbrella in America. Being one of the most active political figures in the American Muslim community, Imam Mahdi Bray — Executive Director of MAS Freedom — is pushing Muslims towards more political participation, and thus more influence.
MAS Freedom's VIP (Voting is Power) campaign set its goal clear; "Participating actively in the process of voting is a first step toward that political empowerment so vital to our ultimate goal of raising and developing exemplary citizens who will contribute to the greatness of our country, and whose convictions and dedication will illuminate the brilliance and beauty of the great message of Islam."
IslamOnline.net's Muslim Affairs team had the pleasure to interview earlier this year the Executive Director of MAS Freedom Imam Mahdi Bray. He talked openly about Muslim in America, their political participation, and what MAS Freedom is doing about it.
• Coordination between US' Muslim organizations
• Ethnic diversity standing against unity?
• Lobbying in the Congress
• Reaching out to, and educating voters
• Political influence while still a small minority?
• Muslims running for positions and appealing to voters
• Basic issues disuniting Muslims?
• Driving while black, flying while Muslim
What is more precise to say, American Muslim or Muslim American community? and has it always been the same or changed?
I do that thing a lot with young Muslims, this whole thing of identity whether Muslim American or American Muslim for me is kind of inconsequential. I will tell you the reason why; it is like which comes first the chicken or the egg. It doesn't make any difference, if the chicken comes first, I'll cook the chicken and eat the chicken, and if the egg comes first, I will cook the egg and put some cheese in it and make myself an omelet. The point I am trying to make is the process of engagement. We are Muslims and we live in America, so as Muslims we have to engage in the society we live in and we have to engage our Deen (religion), so I think it doesn't make any difference.
The discussion sometimes premises on the assumption that if you put American first then for some reason you are denigrating being a Muslim; I don't see that as a conceptual aspect. I think that what it really is about being American Muslim or Muslim American is that you are Muslim, you live in America and, once again, you have to engage both aspects. You have to engage in the society you live in through the rules of Allah, Most High, and the example of his prophet Mohamed (peace and blessings be upon him).
As president of the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations (CCMO) which, at face value, acts towards unity of Muslim organizations in the United States, why still there is not apparent unity among Muslim organizations?
I think there are a couple of reasons why. First of all, historically the primary institutions within the Muslim community in America have been the mosque, Muslim schools, and Muslim charities. We are looking at only a 15-year-old phenomenon of other institutions like organizations that deal with civil rights and political empowerment that deal with policy issues (think tanks). These are new institutions that also deal with legal protection by forming a consortium of lawyers that will protect the legal rights of Muslims and Muslim issues.
There are also other coalition groups that are working with tactical coalitions with non-Muslim organizations as some issues confront us both as Muslims and non-Muslim in America. Because of the presence of these organizations now, the ability to collaborate is an emerging process and I think will get better Allah willing. Collaboration and unity, however, among groups in America does not happen overnight; there are some ethnic and religious groups that have been there for a while and they were able to create umbrella organizations.
I think for us in the CCMO, we are not dealing with the kind of rhetorical unity. I think that we are more focusing on coordination and hope that Allah, Most High, will strengthen us in terms of unity, so that is the first process.
About 25 percent of the US Muslim community is Arab, 25percent Asian, 25 percent African American; don't you think that ethnic divisions can stand against the unity of this community?
I think that ethnicity is certainly a positive factor. I like the fact that in Muslim American Society( MAS) we see that as a challenge. Primarily, MAS happens to be the largest grass-root organization in the United States with 55 chapters in 55 states. It was primarily perceived as an "Arab organization", but its members realized that division according to ethnic lines is, above all, not the prophetic model that prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) taught us. Prophet Muhammad(pbuh) grouped up and united the different ethnic groups and tribes, and we should follow him. So, ethnic division does not work on the prophetic model nor on the practical model, because if one divides based on ethnicity then it makes you weak, and the worst thing that a minority group in America can do is to become sub-minority within a minority, which does not make much sense.
Lastly, I think that it is important to understand that people often put a lot of emphasis on "I am from Egypt," "I am from Brooklyn," "I am from Karachi" .. do you think that Allah, Most High, would really care where one is from? So, if we understand that concept then we can see how it is an inconsequential argument. It is like two bold-headed men arguing who will first use the comb.
MAS sees that as a vision with which we are working and striving to deal. It is a problem, but I would say it is getting better all the time for two reasons; Firstly, I think that it is getting better because we have children who are born in the United States. They have never lived in Karachi, they have never lived in Cairo, they have only lived in America, and that brings them together as a generation with less divisions based on ethnicity; even though, sometimes parents push it a little bit, but it is not engrained in the young generation — the third generation of Muslims — that is inhabiting the United States.
The second reasons is that the tragic events of 9/11 put everybody together. The reality is that all of us, whether born in the United States or coming from outside, have been lumped in one boat in term of dealing with the backlash of 9/11. It have brought about some unity; 9/11 is a very tragic thing, but sometimes Allah will give you something that do not like, yet in some aspects it has some good in it. I think that the good that has come out of this is that it has forced Muslims to be able to have to work closer together because of the backlash, discrimination ,and the other things that we face as the result of the events of 9/11.
Politically, you have done some work about the political participation of US Muslim; the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) ex-president said that the reason behind the success of the AIPAC in the United States is that they present to the congress what is in the interest of the United States. What do Muslims do concerning the congress and working for the interest of the United States and which benefit will be for the US Muslims?
| The "Muslim Factor" played a big role in determining the results of the 2006 Senate elections. |
First thing is that you have to understand the political process in America and how Muslims historically have dealt with that. We are only about 10 years away from the great debate we used to have of whether voting is Halal or Haram, and that is mostly non-issue now for most Muslims. There are some segments that say it is Haram, forbidden, or best case scenario: Bid'a, innovation in religion. But, in reality the comparison is not actually a good one when you talk about AIPAC because they have a long history of politics.
There is not only AIPAC, but many other interest groups .and we are only 15 years into the formation of doing public policy and political work. So, the first thing that one has to do politically in order to have some impact is to get Muslims to understand conceptually that you can participate and change policies that affect your society without compromising the integrity of your religion.
That becomes a big question: if I get involved with this movement will I be a good Muslim? Every Muslim should be concerned about what he or she is doing, whether it is according to Islam, or whether it affects people in terms of how good of Muslims they are. So, that becomes the first conceptual aspect to theologically understand that you have a responsibility when you live in a society to engage in, but you don't engage for the sheer of power because there is no mightier power than Allah, you do not engage for vanity to say that we are the top group, and you don't engage to have dominance, you engage in it primarily for what Allah, Most High, asked you. You engage because you have the responsibility to enjoin what is good and forbid what is evil.
So, with that mandate that you enter into the sphere of public policy; that is what we are at this point now, we are dealing with the conceptual aspect of enjoining good and forbidding bad by participating in a process that deals with public policy of who gets what, when, how, and how much. And so, we have not developed large think tanks or interest groups, but we are getting there.
In the elections of 2006, as a result of our effort of working and registering our people, educating, and mobilizing them, the front page of the Washington Times, which is not so flattering to Muslims, showed that the Democrats would have not been able to take the congress, particularly the Senate, had it not been for the Muslim vote in Virginia where we have a headquarters.
For us, we had a strategy; we identified the battleground states and the places where the elections would be close and we matched them up with figures of the number of Muslims in the battleground states. We then were able to narrow them down to about nine states, and ultimately they came down to be five states, and Virginia was one of them.
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"We are dealing with the conceptual aspect of enjoining good and forbidding bad by participating in a process that deals with public policy of who gets what, when, how, and how much." —
Mahdi Bray |
Then, in the 2006 elections, the Democrats were already winning the House of Representatives, yet it was kind of uncertainty about the Senate. And, it all came down to one state, Virginia, and one Senatorial election held between Jim Webb (Democrat) and George Allen (Republican), and the former won by 9,000 votes. But, here is what I call the "Muslim Factor" of our organizations, student, and Imams of Masjids, mosques, were able to do. Webb won by 9,000 votes, we put out 48,000 votes ,which is 80percent of our total body of people who could vote in the state of Virginia.
So, 80 percent (48,000) of our people showed up at the polls. Of the 48,000, 93 percent voted for Webb, the Democrat, and 7 percent voted for Allen. So, I don't care how you slice it, dice it, or chop it, the fact of the matter that Webb won by 9,000 votes and we casted a little over 40-something thousand votes for Jim Webb.
The newspaper is correct, the Democrats won through the Muslim vote. I don't want to overestimate the political power of Muslims in America, but we are a sleeping giant, we are growing, and we are learning. Interesting enough, Carl Rove, who was Bush's Chief of Staff or referred sometimes to as "Bush's Brain", was speaking to a group of conservatives in Boston about how they lost the Senate. He said they had counted the Evangelicals’ (the Christian Right) vote and they knew they had a lot, but what they underestimated was the Muslim vote. This was a small victory, but indeed it was a victory.
My point is this, right now we are in the process of registering our voters and getting people to realize how important it is to participate in the process. We also are trying to train our young people to offer themselves to public office. We have our first US congressman from Minnesota the 5th district; so that is where our focus is on right now.
Also, we are building Political Actions Committees ( PACs) because MAS doesn't participate in donkey or elephant politics( donkey and elephant are the symbols of the Democratic and Republican parties respectively). We rather educate people on the candidates and we tell them not to be obsessed with party labels and to look at the candidate and see how is it in the best interest of your community and in the best interest of the society; and that is how you should pick your candidate whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or, as in my case, an Independent.
By Allah's willing, I think, the time will come where we will have our own policy advocacy groups that will be able to rival AIPAC; but we are not at this stage; we are at the basic level.
15 years ago we bought — for the lack of a better word — the overseas-model of how you do politics in America. We had a few uncles who made all the decisions for the community that didn't have to be engaged, they just trust the uncles to do it. But now, we are rather laying the foundations to start from bottom up and not the other way round, to have the house, family, and then place the roof up.
What are the methods you employ in reaching out to people and educating them about the importance of voting?
More specifically, we call political workshops, trainings, seminars, and work boxes. We have booklets that we sell out that show how one can conduct campaign. Working online is one aspect; we use basic text stuff with no political science or law.
All Muslims at the domestic level, grass-roots, are those who are very important. It is about the people of the streets. All of them are thinking we do not want to do any thing. We have organizations in Washington and to some degree, there is a sense of what we are doing politically.
We were taking pictures with Bill and Hilary having Ramadan breakfasts and we meet Malden Albright, and Collin Powell ( both are former US secretaries during Clinton's and Bush's administrations respectively). Uncles send these pictures back to Muslim communities, saying that they are in the political arena, so it is a politics of fluff with no real stuff.
What happened was that superficiality, it is important to know candidates to have assessments to political figures, have some value in it, so you make recognition of your community. What happened when 9/11 came was that we were treated really badly. Thousands of Muslims rounded up like in Pinochet's Chile. No body knows where they were, family do not know where they were, lawyers do not know where these arrested Muslims were, and the government would not tell us about them.
| We are doing it the very old-fashion way. We go to masses and train them to have skill sets to protect their communities. |
Although it is a right, we have people concentrated for four months and no body knew where they were. It was more than one thousand Muslims that were rounded up after 9/11, which The government had to report. Not one, I emphasize- had anything to do with terrorism. A rush of hysteria devalued all their human rights as residents and citizens of the United States of America. So, we began to see that we wanted to connect together and that’s why we formed MAS.
We are going to do it the very old-fashion way. We will go to the masses. No do not depend on me in Washington D.C. Let me send people to train you or let me come and train you and then you have skill sets to protect your community, how you deal with the media and the political process. We provide workshops and trainings. We provide power-point pontification. We do interactive trainings.
We do all trainings. We pretend actors and represent them to the congressmen and see how me and you come in and do your issue then we grade you upon it. We do press conferences. And let them to see how you do it right and how you do it wrong.
Sometimes, we tapped them and let them see how they actually look because that is how they would look to the public. And actually, with these kinds of trainings we say that forget national organizations in Washington D.C. you have to do it at the grass root level. All politics is local.
Yes, it is important to know about the national elections, but the reality is that 95 percent of Muslim children go to public schools. So, your first top should be whose in your school board, whose educating your children, you could be in the school board, so you are going to have your input as a Muslim parent. And that is what we mean by the grass-root level.
You have mentioned that mobilizing Muslim vote and getting Muslims engaged in politics for influence is very important. However, Muslims constitute only 2-3 percent of the population.
How would they have influence on politics when they are a small minority? For example, the influence of American Jews is high despite their small numerical population. Yet, they have their lobbies, their Political Actions Committees, and experienced politicians, so how will Muslims have a similar impact?
I think that one of the things that is unique to American Muslims is that our relationships with the Jewish community are indirect, which is a little bit different if one perhaps live in Palestine.
We are less obsessed with the Jewish community. We do not play victim with things. We say ok, so they are out there. If their AIPAC says something about our leaders, or their senator says ugly things about me, do not make them even. Get better, work at it.
| There are other groups that we can form strategic alliances with, like African Americans … There is no an African American that does not have somebody, a cousin, or somebody in the family that is Muslim. |
There is a thing also called coalitions. Our number is somewhat small, but in certain areas, because of our numbers like in Virginia, we make a difference. Because we are sizeable in Virginia, California, Texas, and Florida, we can influence national elections.
In addition to, we are saying that there are other groups that we can form strategic alliances with, like African Americans, because they know about civil rights and discrimination issues. I grew up in a civil rights community. I grew up learning how to do civil rights activities. My house was fired down by racists. I faced racists' terrorism as early as in 1955 when someone burned a house, shot guns into our homes and my grandmother was trying to rescue me, as 5-year old boy, and my brother. My point is this; we have something we can learn and do with African Americans who make a plausible portion of the Muslim community.
There is no an African American that does not have somebody, a cousin, or somebody in the family that is Muslim. You can even go to any places of African community and say As-Salam Alikom (greeting in Islam means peace upon you) and they reply we Alikom al salam (and you too peace upon you).
African American understand the Muslim content. In addition, they are viable ally, because they know civil rights' values and they know how to speak about civil rights),
We also talking about numbers. The largest minority groups, the Latinos, have common interest with us. We both have immigration problems and we can form strategic alliances around the issue of immigration. So, one has to think smartly about these politics. I think Muslims might have to know how to work inside the box and outside the box. Internally, we have to learn how to resolve our divisions and reach out together. And we have to reach out to people externally.
The idea that we can not move forward before first organizing our community means nothing. I do believe that you have to work simultaneously inside your community and outside your community in a parallel track, which would give you the political momentum.
Back to first questions, what comes first, being a Muslim or being American?
What comes first always is being a Muslim, but this is debatable. The order of the word does not dictate priority.
Regarding Muslims who run for governmental positions, in districts, the Senate, or the House, how would they appeal to voters? What if one comes with issues in conflict with Muslim faith?
I think that a well-grounded Muslim can participate in the public and political process without compromising religious integrity. For example, I worked for a civil rights American movement, one of the oldest civil rights organizations. In the most recent years, the gay issues become a very important thing. I have worked for them for years. I made very clear my position on homosexuality based on my faith. I have to respect the humanity of every human, but my faith tells this lifestyle is not acceptable. I do affirmative action issues. I do discrimination issues.
| I think that a well-grounded Muslim can participate in the public and political process without compromising religious integrity. |
I think that what happens to some weak Muslims is that they want to play what I call the 50s. They want to be half on that side and half on the other side. I think people respect you if you are straightforward and when you tell people where you stand. We have differences , especially strong ideological differences, but it does not mean that we have strong theological differences; we have common grounds.
Good Muslim officials should be ware of these common grounds. The best Muslim officials who want people to get out and vote for them should do what great Prophet Muhammad ( PBUH) did in Makkah and Madina. He served everybody justly, he cared about everybody, Muslims and non-Muslims. Even the lady who throw something in front of his house; when she was sick, he was a good neighbor and went to check her.
I am saying that as a Muslim, be it one with the highest income per capita and best educated in the United States and wealthy, one should care about the 50 millions of our neighbors who do not have health insurance. In the United States, the richest country in the world, a young, poor boy died simply because he had a tooth disease.
The virus infected his brain. Two days later he was dead simply because his parents did not have the money to take him to the dentist. Islam addresses the conditions of humanity whether Muslim or non-Muslim. If we address these issues with humanity, and if we all found an apple every one to be treated justly dividing it, we will make sure that the poor, whether Muslims or non-Muslims, are cared for.
You have talked about disagreements between the Muslim communities in the United States and how you are working to bring them together internally in the political level. But sometimes, regarding grass-roots issues that are very simple to solve, it does seem that US Muslims failed to solve them, like agreeing on fasting on the same day?
| Now people identify with where they live much more with where their ancestors came from. |
These problems are found not just in the United States but in Umma as a whole.
But in the United States if we find Umma council or Muslim Council, they would not organize fasting the same day, just basic things you now.
Because again , it is a very basic problem. I mean it is simple, but the reason we have this kind of inability is that we have a big council that gives no day for the Eid. The problem is not the younger people, but people who come from Egypt, Morocco, and others which they call back home. It seems that a generation has on foot here in the United States and another in Egypt, Morocco, and Arab society.
As time passes, these issues become non-issues, because people identify with where they live much more with where their ancestors came from. I think of more of a casual thing. It is not a major Fitna, division. So, that is why at MAS, we put so much emphasis on young people. When it comes to the elders I do a madness, when it comes to young people, we are mentor, and there is a difference.
About your work, I do put your name in Google, and I found sites describing you as terrorist and you know all these descriptions that put you in the defensive. As a Muslim African American activist who is working in the United States, how difficult do you find your work to be? What challenge is in that?
| I am so confident that Islam or "Islamist" can stand in free market place of ideas with anybody else, even your detractors. |
One of the first challenges I have since 9/11 is driving while black and flying while Muslim. Seriously, first of all you know, I am celebrating 30 years of being a Muslim. Each and every day, I am inspired , so I do not see myself always being in the defensive. I am seeing myself being proactive. Many who attack us are pro-Israeli groups and right wings who want to demonize me and things like that. Yet, they did this even to people who are far greater, like prophet Muhammad (PBUH). So, who I am to cry about such things.
Secondly, I was used to it in civil rights movements, and I understand the strategy in civil rights movements: now terrorism, it was communism. Civil rights students were all inspired by Communism. We do not want to be a second-class citizens. Today it is terrorism: the same soap, but with different ballets. I understand the strategy. I am so confident, not in the arrogant way, but through the strength and the blessing of Allah, Most High.
I am so confident that Islam or "Islamist" can stand in free market place of ideas with anybody else, even your detractors. So, I have a radio station and if you are the person who is right wing , co-Zionist, you are perfectly welcomed to come and say what you are going to say. You cannot defame other peoples' faith. Other than that, bring it on. Let us do it. Allah, Most High, gave us mercy to go into civil rights: my grandfather being civil rights activist and my mother being labor activist.
I grew around people who are used to fight for justice and things of that nature. And Allah, Most high gave me one full blessing; He allowed me to acquire all these skills and to bring them and dedicate them for him ,and him only. I used to say thirty years ago I found Islam. No, I did not find Islam. Allah, Most High carry me to Islam. And, that is my motivating factor, so I do not care about those who attack me online.
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