Big Tent Islam

I think this is a good thing. Islam needs to have it's own Reformation and I think it will start here.

Only natural that things get more tense over here between Shia and Sunni. But our country is a rare place for Islam, an environment where Shia and Sunni regularly and unremarkably pray together in the same mosques, something that stuns Muslim journalists when they cover our scene.

As one journalist from India recently put it:

“It is something we never see at home. They want to kill each other everywhere except in the USA.”

How can we export that to the the rest of the world?

At a time when rising numbers of American Protestants are attending non-denominational community churches and referring to themselves simply as Christians rather than Baptists, Methodists or Lutherans, a similar thing is happening among Muslims in the USA.

“It’s a whole new era,” says [Muslim sociologist Eboo] Patel. “The bulk of the American Muslim community is overwhelmingly young, under age 40. And they are experiencing a huge momentum toward ‘big-tent Islam.’”

“We don’t want to be defined by the classification of history and the Middle East. The Quran is our authority,” says Salim Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Al-Marayati, a Shiite married to a Sunni, expects to see 10,000 Muslims of all sects celebrate the Eid [feast at the end of Ramadan] with the Islamic Center of Southern California next month in Los Angeles.

He calls himself “Sushi,” the popular term for a combination of Sunni and Shiite. Once the glib nickname for the children of intermarried couples, it has become shorthand for Muslim who blur sectarian lines.

Gotta love “Sushi.” Yet another example of Japan’s successful cultural exports! Seriously. A term people choose for themselves because the word strikes them as cool.