By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 8, 2007
In its modest way, the Muslim Community School in Montgomery County is a tiny bulwark against the hate-filled sectarian violence that has ripped Iraq apart, threatens to divide the Muslim world and has created tensions among Muslim immigrants in the United States.
Each weekday, 125 Shiite and Sunni children from 18 countries pray side by side, share lunches of chicken dogs and cantaloupe, and study under teachers from both sects. Girls are allowed to wear bright-colored headscarves as well as traditional black or white ones. On Fridays, the weekly sermon is given in English, Arabic and Persian.
"We do have a few differences, but at the end of the day, we share the same morals and values. We hate to see war and people dying. We are friends, and we trust each other," said Kadiatu Bah, 17, a senior and Sunni Muslim from Guinea who plans to attend Catholic University in the fall.
"When I go to greet another Muslim, I don't ask if the person is Sunni or Shia. These divisions are political, not religious," said Fatema Mohammadi, 16, a senior and a Shiite from Iran. "At our noon prayer, Sunnis pray behind Shias. At afternoon prayer, Shias pray behind Sunnis. For us, there is absolutely no difference."
Although the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon have exacerbated tensions between Shiites and Sunnis in much of the Muslim world, the Washington region's Islamic immigrant community has largely resisted the trend.
There have been no reported incidents of harassment or hostile confrontations between Shiites and Sunnis in the region, as have occurred recently in Michigan and other states. Among the area's Muslim university students, a population in which sectarian passions often run strong, attitudes appear to be tolerant and open.
"Here, there is such diversity that we are used to the differences. Even if there is a problem, it does not go beyond words," said Anis Nordin, 33, an engineering student from Malaysia who wore a pink headscarf as she chatted in a coffee shop on the George Washington University campus with two other Muslim friends.
Nevertheless, area Muslim activists say that intrafaith relations tend to be formally polite at best, with little social mingling and most mosques or Islamic centers dominated by one sect or the other. They also say that the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon have frayed nerves, even though they bring Muslims together in grief for the losses of life and civility.
"The issue of Iraq has opened a Pandora's box," said Haithem al Hassani, a consultant to the nonprofit Iraq Council in Washington. "I am a Shia, and my sister is married to a Sunni. There is still respect between families and colleagues. But there is also fear. Every day, people with neutral positions are lessening, and both sides are justifying wrong acts. We talk a lot about trying to bring people together, but feelings are still too raw."
It is impossible to definitively count the area's Muslim immigrants, but census figures show there are at least 106,000 foreign-born immigrants from the major Muslim countries, especially Pakistan and Iran, and 62,000 from India, which has a large Muslim populace. Adding U.S.-born children, Muslim leaders say, there are at least 200,000 in the community. There are also tens of thousands of indigenous U.S. Muslims, including converts from other religions, in the D.C. area.
Periodic bridge-building efforts have been made, such as a joint news conference held a year ago by area Sunni and Shiite clerics to condemn the suicide bombing of a historic Shiite shrine in Iraq, and an evening program last month to promote Sunni-Shiite understanding at American University. But sponsors of such events say that many Muslims are uneasy about participating.
"It is the elephant in the room that no one talks about," said Mohamed Hag-Magid, the Sudan-born Sunni imam at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Sterling. "There were hidden and ignored feelings, and now they are coming to the surface because of the tensions in Iraq, especially on some university campuses," he said. "We don't want this to spread. We have to set an example of respect and tolerance, not just as a slogan."
Sunni and Shiite Muslims worship Allah and believe that the prophet Muhammad was his messenger. They have disagreed for 14 centuries, however, over how the prophet's first successor was chosen after his death and which heirs of his four successors, or caliphs, were legitimate leaders of the faith.
There are also differences in religious practice. Most Sunnis hold their hands up while praying; Shiites hold them at their sides. Most Sunnis say "amin" at the end of certain prayers; Shiites don't. Sunnis touch their foreheads to the ground when they pray; Shiites touch a small stone.
Such differences never caused friction among local Muslims until the 1979 Shiite revolution in Iran, which provoked a feud among Washington area mosque officials. After that, community leaders say, inter-sect friendships and marriages continued, but formal religious congregations tended to splinter along sectarian lines.
More recently, as sectarian violence has exploded in Iraq and begun to divide the Muslim world into radicalized Sunni and Shiite camps, tensions have risen in Muslim communities in the United States. There have been confrontations on college campuses in New Jersey and acts of vandalism in Michigan.
The 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the establishment of a democratic government have given the country's Shiite majority a dominant political role for the first time in history, arousing Sunni resistance and fear of the expanding influence of neighboring Shiite Iran.
In December, the videotaped execution of Hussein intensified emotions on both sides, and the two sects in Iraq are bitterly divided. In Lebanon, once a diverse and cosmopolitan country, recent civil strife and the political rise of the Shiite Hezbollah militia have also heightened sectarian tensions.
In the Washington area, the international diversity and high education level of the Muslim immigrant community have helped keep heads cool. So has the work of people such as Sahib Hashim, 70, a retired Iraqi American pediatrician in Rockville who founded a Web site devoted to Sunni-Shiite understanding.
"Iraqis in this area are all pulling together against the madness," said Ali Attar, an Iraq-born doctor in Falls Church whose clinic partner is a Pakistani dentist. "Both Sunnis and Shias here denounce sectarian killings. They know the violence is the result of a regional political power struggle, and they don't fall into the trap of confrontation."
Yet that distant power struggle, in which Shiites are challenging longtime Sunni dominance, is very much on the minds of D.C. area Muslims. At the recent American University forum, the moderator asked the audience not to bring up events in the Middle East. But the very first questioner spoke of the widening Sunni-Shiite clash and asked, "Can it happen in America, too?"
Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, a Palestinian American whose Bethesda-based organization, the Minaret of Freedom Institute, sponsored the event, said that sectarian feelings in the area were often laced with "silent contempt" but that the ongoing bloodshed overseas could also help bring Muslims together.
"Everyone here is horrified by what is going on, and it may even have a mild positive effect as an impetus for reconciliation," Ahmad said. He said that envoys from Iraq and several other Arab countries were invited to a reception recently at the Iranian Interests Section, an office that functions in lieu of an embassy, to celebrate the anniversary of the Shiite revolution.
On area university campuses with substantial numbers of Muslims -- including George Mason, Towson and George Washington -- there are active and well-organized Muslim student organizations, but no trouble has been reported.
Fatima Saeed, 28, an engineering student at GWU and a Sunni from Egypt, said she had felt somewhat ostracized as a Muslim in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and had even been called a terrorist once, but she had never encountered problems with Shiites, on campus or off.
"Everyone here is busy studying and working," she said. On Fridays, Muslim students at GWU rent space in a nearby church for their weekly prayer service, and Shiites and Sunnis fill the small room.
"We pray on different lines, but we are peaceful," Saeed said. "Whether you wear socks when you pray or not, what matters is that we are all praying."
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