Kids race during a family day for the Islamic Center of Boca Raton, which calls itself an open religious organization for all and does not keep any membership. Photo provided
By Janis Fontaine
The terrible violence in the Middle East has forced many of us to rethink what little we know about Islam. It’s easy to be mind-boggled by all the players in the conflict: Hamas, the Palestinian territories, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the Muslims, Jews and Christians who are affected.
This is complicated by the U.S. government and the media, which at times change their attitudes about which side of conflicts to take.
“The U.S. government labeled Hamas as a terrorist organization,” said Florida Atlantic University Professor Bassem Alhalabi, a Muslim and U.S. citizen. “Still, we need to wait and see, as the American government has the tendency to make friends out of enemies after a while. As for the Palestinians, they are perceived as the only group who is resisting the occupation.”
To a Muslim or a Jew living in Palm Beach County, these issues don’t feel half a world away, and most local Muslims want to share their knowledge and their faith.
At the Islamic Center of Boca Raton, they welcome visitors to discuss the intricacies of Islam. “No force,” said Omar Uddin, “just an invitation to learn.”
On a recent Thursday night following prayers, about 30 people gathered to talk about Islam at the monthly open house hosted by the center.
“Brother” Omar welcomed the group with a smile and a friendly demeanor. He handed out copies of the Quran to anyone who wanted them.
“The thing people don’t realize,” he said, “is that we believe in Jesus too.”
Islam recognizes that the Virgin Mary was chosen by God to bear the Messiah. Just as Christians trace their religious lifeline back to the Old Testament, Muslims trace theirs back, too, through the teaching of Jesus Christ to the Old Testament. The God the Muslims call Allah is the same God of the Christians and Jews.
Muslims believe deeply in the Gospels, and they honor Jesus with the words “Peace Be Upon Him” whenever they speak his holy name. He is so important he is mentioned 25 times in the Quran’s 6,236 verses. As Muslims see it, theirs is just the continuation of Jesus’ story. In a Muslim’s view, there’s the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran, the "Last" Testament.
The words in the Quran were given to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel, the same angel who told Mary she would be a mother to God’s son.
These messages from Allah were dictated to Muhammad, who was admired for his honesty and trustworthiness but who was illiterate. Poets were plentiful but God wanted a common man. Scribes were called in to write down the stanzas of holy poetry that he recited with the eloquence and beauty of a gifted writer.
Some scholars say you can only truly understand the Quran in its original Arabic, and in Arabic, the Quran is like a long rhyming poem with stanzas of different lengths. Rhymes were a common tool used to make difficult information easier to remember. The writings are gathered together by theme rather than chronology.
“As an American Muslim, I want people to know how familiar Islam is to what they already know,” Uddin said. “A lot of people think we worship a foreign God, not the same God they worship.”
Professor Alhalabi says the biggest misconception about Islam is that it preaches violence. It doesn’t. It encompasses all of Jesus’ teachings about compassion and loving your neighbor as yourself, and it goes further.
“Islam emphasizes compassion, justice and moral conduct in personal and societal aspects. Islam encourages seeking knowledge and fostering a balanced and harmonious lifestyle. And Islam condemns terrorism and promotes peace, coexistence and respect for all human beings,” Alhalabi said.
But Hamas found a way to corrupt Islam, to bend it to say something different, which only perpetuates the myth. Its 1988 charter said, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
When the charter was re-written in 2017, they changed the enemy to the Zionist movement and blamed Europe and the United States for the antisemitism in the world.
That charter says, “The Zionist movement...is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation...and must disappear from Palestine.”
The word Hamas is an acronym for an Islamic resistance movement founded in 1987 during the first Palestinian uprising protesting the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Despite being officially designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department in 1997, Hamas won the parliamentary elections in 2006 (the last election ever held) and seized control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority.
Jeanine Santucci wrote in USA Today in October, “The group calls for establishment of an Islamic Palestinian state that would replace the current state of Israel and believes in the use of violence to carry out the destruction of Israel.” She reported Hamas army has only an estimated 30,000 fighters whose main source of support is Iran.
But Hamas isn’t the only radical, violent Islamic group. ISIS is another, but is fundamentally different from Hamas, according to Brian Glyn Williams, professor of Islamic history at UMass Dartmouth. ISIS is considered the world’s deadliest terrorist group, but it disagrees with Hamas mostly because the two are on opposite sides of Islam's Sunni versus Shia branches.
Being prejudged according to the myth that Islam-equals-violent-extremists is something Muslims deal with every day. Alhalabi says it feels “normal” for people to be suspicious of him. That’s a feeling most other non-white Americans say they have felt themselves.
But just as Christians don’t want to be judged by the behaviors of radical self-professed Christian groups like the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, which is classified as a hate group, Muslims don’t want to be judged for Hamas’ acts.
Westboro’s members spread vitriol during public protests against homosexuals, including showing up at military funerals with signs that say, “Thank God for dead soldiers.”
Violence gets media attention, which is one of the things extremists want.
Alhalabi said, “It is crucial to recognize that such actions go against the fundamental teachings of Islam...and the majority of Muslims worldwide reject and condemn terrorism.”
At the very least, with accusations of genocide being leveled against Hamas and Israel alike, and the ongoing attempts at genocide in China, Darfur and Myanmar, we must agree that any group of humans whose goal is to annihilate the existence of another group of humans cannot be tolerated.
Janis Fontaine writes about people of faith, their congregations, causes and community events. Contact her at fontaine423@outlook.com.
Islamic worship and information centers
Islamic Center of Boca Raton: 480 NW Fifth Ave. 561-395-7221 or icbr.org
Al Amin Center: 8101 S. Military Trail, Boynton Beach. 561-880-7806 or facebook.com/alamincenterflorida
Muslim Community of Palm Beach County: 4893 Purdy Lane, West Palm Beach. 561-969-1584 or mcpbc.org or email info@mcpbc.org
Islamic Institute of Palm Beach County: 1876 Donnell Road, West Palm Beach. 561-248-7356 or iiopbc.org
Islamic Center of Palm Beach: 101 Castlewood Drive, North Palm Beach. 561-623-7647 or www.PalmBeachMuslims.com
Religious facts from around the world
Palm Beach County:
• In a county with a population of 1.5 million and rising, about 600,000 people are ’affiliated’ with a religion.
• An estimated 15% of the population practices Judaism, or about 225,000. (Estimates range from 167,000 to 238,000, but most of that data is a few years old.)
• According to the Muslim Community of Palm Beach County, about 30 Muslim families lived in the county in the mid-1980s.
• By the late 1990s, fewer than 1,000 Muslims total lived in the county, according to the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, an organization that collects data from American faith groups.
• The best guess is about 1% of Palm Beach County currently practices Islam. That’s about 15,000 people.
• A few groups practice other religions, like Hindu or Shinto, but the balance (350,000 or so) are Christians.
Florida:
• Floridians tend to be less religious overall than the general U.S. population, with less than 40% calling themselves ’affiliated.’
• Florida has the 12th-largest Muslim population in the U.S., with about 127,000. New York has the largest Muslim population with about 724,000.
• Florida’s Muslim community is primarily Arab, South Asian and African American.
United States:
• According to WorldPopulationReview.com, the U.S. Muslim population in 2023 was about 4,444,000.
• The United States is largely Christian. About 64% of affiliated Americans identify as Christian, but 50 years ago, 90% were Christian, according to a Pew Research Center study from 2020.
• People are no more or less religious today than they were 50 years ago. The percentage who were ’affiliated’ with a religion in 1971 was 48.7%. In 2020, it was 48.6%.
World:
• Worldwide, Islam is the second-largest religion with about 1.8 billion people, compared with Christianity’s 2.42 billion. Judaism has about 16.2 million followers.
• Based on population estimates prepared by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, there were about 14.3 million Palestinians in the world in 2022.
• About 5.35 million of them lived in the Palestinian territories (Gaza and the West Bank), split almost 50-50 between males and females.
• According to the Institute for Middle East Understanding, about 93% of Palestinians are Sunni Muslims and about 6% are Christian.
• Less than 20% of Muslims are Arabs, but 85% of Arabs are Muslims.
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