An introduction

But that day at the diner, they focused on plotting their coming out: On Nov. 15, during the Muslim holiday of Eid, they will launch in Manhattan as the Progressive Muslim Union of North America, the first national organization devoted to liberal Muslim projects. The group's goals are ambitious: nothing less than the redefinition of what it means to be Muslim in the modern world, emphasizing values of social justice and gender equality, and calling for a fresh reading of Islam's 1,400-year-old texts.

"We are not afraid of asking questions," said Nassef, a 38- year-old Egyptian-American who brings the maverick approach of a California upbringing to his role as executive director. "We need to have an honest confrontation with our own history, our own texts. Nothing is off-limits in terms of asking questions. The Quran and the hadiths have been studied for hundreds of years by Muslim commentators and have been understood in so many different ways."

With just weeks to go until the launch, Nassef and other organizers are lining up a board that is a global Who's Who of Muslim leaders, from former Pakistani ambassador to Britain Akbar Ahmed to Muslim Public Affairs Council director Salem Al-Marayati.

Plans for a conference at Harvard Divinity School in March to kick off the movement also are under way with seed money provided by Harvard's Pluralism Project.

And although organizers acknowledge the movement is in its infancy, they point to signs of an emerging constituency: Meet-ups similar to the one in Manhattan are happening in cities from Chicago to Minneapolis to Morgantown, W.Va., attracting hundreds of mostly younger, Americanized Muslims.

A popular Web site

The group's flagship, MuslimWakeUp.com, the Web site that Nassef and a friend founded in January 2003 to gauge interest in progressive ideas, is up to 65,000 to 70,000 readers a month of its often-pointed takes on politics, religion and culture. Its style is rough and tumble: Last week, for instance, it ran an item about men and women praying in side-by-side areas in a large Djakarta mosque ("What next for these lax Indonesians? Mixed lines? A woman leading the prayer?") and a tart review of the third presidential debate ("No Middle Easterner left behind"). And those are tame compared with its popular Sex and the Umma section featuring Arabic love poetry and racy fiction and its Hug-a-Jew column.

"Among a large section of the Muslim community, there's a huge enthusiasm and a thirst for more of this sort of conversation and for more enlightened interpretations of Islam regarding gender, justice and international relations," said Ebrahim E. I. Moosa, an Islamic scholar who is co-director of the Center for Study of Muslim Networks at Duke University.

But not everyone agrees that MuslimWakeUp or the new Progressive Union are likely to advance that conversation.

"I don't find it [MuslimWakeUp] interesting," said Ingrid Mattson, vice president for the United States for the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization in America. "My biggest complaint is that a lot of the language is unnecessarily vulgar. As I understand it, propriety, dignity and modesty are all important characteristics for Muslims. So it's not a discourse that I believe is beneficial, or that leads a Muslim closer to truth, justice and God."

Still, the official position of existing Muslim organizations toward the Progressive Union is that they welcome the new kid on the block. "Every group is free to compete for the attention of the American Muslim community," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Unofficially, though, some sound scandalized by the group's assertion that it considers no questions out of bounds. "Can a woman walk down the street in a bikini and consider herself Muslim?" asked one Muslim leader who did not want to be identified by name. "Can a man drink alcohol or eat pork? All these things, to my knowledge, are open to them. They think that Islam is what you want it to be. And I'm sorry, that is not Islam."

Which is precisely the point for the progressives: No one gets to judge who is and is not Islamic, they say. If you identify yourself as Muslim, then you are Muslim - without having to pass litmus tests about your beliefs and practices. Many participants are, in fact, devout; others are not religious at all but identify as cultural Muslims.

"It's as if everyone expected Jewish Americans to have forelocks and dress in black cloaks and to practice their faith like the Hasidim," said Hussein Ibish, a 41-year-old Lebanese American who is well known in the Arab and Muslim communities for his work as the former communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Ibish, who describes himself as an "arch-secularist," said he, nonetheless, sees himself as "an organic part" of the Muslim community who takes pride in his heritage. For that reason, he agreed to serve as the new group's vice chairman.

"The acceptable range of Muslim beliefs and activities has shrunk considerably over the last 25 years, and we need to expand that," he said. "We need to put back in play ideas that are extremely important to many traditional interpretations of Islam but that have atrophied recently - values such as pluralism, tolerance, generosity of spirit, acceptance of diversity and active interest in a dynamic interpretation of faith and culture."

Such ideas have been percolating in the Muslim community for some time. But the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks "were a great accelerator," said Sarah Eltantawi, a 28-year-old Harvard graduate who will serve as the group's communication director.

"After Sept. 11, there was such an imperative to correct misunderstandings and there was such an intense period of self-reflection," she said. "A fire was burning beneath our feet."

Web site a hit

Out of that ferment came several developments: One was the startling success of Muslim WakeUp.com, which has become a sort of flagship and base of operations for the new group.

"This past month, we got close to a million pages browsed," Nassef said. "So it's growing and it's becoming a presence that's affecting even the traditional community."

Another was the publication last fall of a collection of essays by 15 scholars that has become a sleeper hit. The book, "Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism," critiques orthodox stances on issues such as gender and pluralism.

But the book is also a call to action. Editor Omid Safi, an assistant professor of Islamic Studies at Colgate University in upstate Hamilton, makes an impassioned plea for Muslims to "stand up to those whose God is too small, too mean, too tribal and too male," as well as to those "who look down at others through an imperialist lens."

"At this stage of history," he wrote, "our primary responsibility is to come to terms with the oppressive tyrants and fanatics inside our own communities, our own families and our own hearts....Hiding behind the simple assertion that 'Islam is a religion of peace' does not solve our problems."

Holding out the example of non-Muslim religious leaders such as Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama, Safi calls for an inclusive, socially engaged Islam that combats injustice both within and without the Muslim community.

A short time after the book's release, Nassef interviewed Safi for his Web site, and the two men struck up a friendship. They began e-mailing and talking several times a week, brainstorming ideas to propel a progressive movement forward. Safi, a deeply religious man as well as an academic, agreed to serve as chairman of the new group to provide the intellectual heft for a scholarly debate. Nassef, a marketing maven and organizer, would be the man on the ground.

Reception may be rocky

How the Progressive Union will be received by the nation's extraordinarily diverse Muslim community, estimated to number anywhere from 2 million to 7 million, is anyone's guess. Though many believe it's an idea whose time has come, there is already sniping from both the left and right in a sign of the shoals ahead.

Farid Esack, a South African theologian and a champion of progressive Islam, stunned some organizers when he turned down an invitation to join the board.

Though Esack says he endorses the group's goals, he said he was dismayed that Malik Hasan, a former HMO mogul who is an outspoken supporter of President George W. Bush, also had been chosen. "You're entitled to have a big tent, but Muslims for Bush as a founding member?" Esack asked, referring to the group organized by Hasan's son and wife.

Nassef defends the choice, saying that organizers made a deliberate decision to have a diverse board. "This will not get anywhere if we're just a few dozen people talking to each other," he said.

On the other side, some conservative voices complain that the group's critique could not come at a worse possible time for the Muslim community.

"Aren't there enough people bashing Muslims right now?" Safi quotes one letter-writer. "Why do you have to air our dirty laundry in public?"

For that, too, neither Safi nor Nassef makes apologies. "I recognize the metaphor of airing dirty laundry, which no one likes to do," Safi said. "But my commitment is to washing the dirty laundry. As a Muslim community we have issues we need to deal with."

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.