Islam in the city of brotherly loveBy Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor

Philadelphia is a city rich in cultural, religious, and racial diversity. Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Jews make up the majority of the city’s population, but the city also has a large Eastern Orthodox population and a growing Muslim community, as well.

There are more than 200,000 Muslims in Philadelphia. (At least 85% of them are African-American.) Mosques are plentiful: there are nine mosques in West Philadelphia alone. At a large mosque at 58th and Overbrook, the imam is Adbur-Razzaq Miller, a Jew, who once studied to be a rabbi. There are mosques in Germantown, and there’s a small mosque in Fishtown on Girard Avenue.

Muslims in Philadelphia do not present the problem that immigrant Muslim communities present in Europe, at least according to Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept—How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within. Bawer’s book has been praised in many quarters, but some dismiss it as anti-Muslim and incendiary.

I think Bawer’s book tells the truth, as unsettling as that may be.

Bawer’s thesis is this: In cities across western Europe—Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid and Stockholm—expanding Muslim enclaves are not assimilating into the larger culture but enforcing fundamentalist Islamist law, which has a history of oppressing and abusing women, vilifying Jews and homosexuals, and insisting on keeping customs such as honor killing and forced marriage. In the name of politically correct multiculturalism, Europe’s political elite have turned a blind eye to these abuses in order to pacify these radicals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoC-saTQDOs

The Muslim community in Philadelphia is quite different. There are no honor killings here, and gangs of immigrant Muslim youths do not attack Jews and gays, such as they do now in the big cities of Western Europe. Filmmakers like Theo Van Gogh, who made a film critical of Islam’s treatment of women, are not butchered in the street by radical religionists. Harmonious assimilation has pretty much made American Muslims part of the mainstream in Philadelphia. If immigrant Algerian or North African Muslim youths were to follow the example of their European counterparts, and attack or kill people they perceive to be sinners or infidels, they’d be placed in jail. In Europe the perpetrators of these crimes are often exonerated or given light sentences, because judges fear alienating radical fundamentalists. American courts have no such fears.

"The identification of nationality with ethnic identity; and then equation of membership in the society with an attachment to longstanding tribal traditions—all this is still part of the fabric of Europe, and it continues to make true, full, American-style integration next to impossible," Bawer writes.

In Europe, immigrant Muslim communities expect the European host country to eventually adopt their values, not the other way around.

In a recent poll of British Muslims, nearly 61% say they’d like to see Islamic courts make decisions on civil matters, such as divorce, custody, marriage, and inheritance. In other words, Muslims in Britain would be subject to a different set of rules than the rest of British citizenry.

That is not happening in Philadelphia or in the rest of America, although recently Muslim cabbies in Minneapolis wanted to discriminate against passengers who violate Islam’s prohibitions against alcohol. Drivers wanted the option of refusing service to passengers transporting liquor or entering the cab with alcohol on their breath. A proposed city ordinance, which would have installed color-coded lights on cab roofs indicating which cabs would not transport passengers carrying alcohol, was overwhelmingly defeated.

The people of Minneapolis obviously worried who might the cabbies refuse to transport next: women in "immodest" clothing, gays, Jews, Christians?

Philadelphia Muslims, as far as I can tell, are not in this league, although I suspect that many are more socially conservative than most Christians I know.

The Philadelphia Clergy Council, a Muslim organization, has adopted a hard stance of shunning Muslims who abuse their spouses (in the name of the Koran). The Council recommends that Muslims refrain from patronizing a shunned Muslim’s place of business or having anything to do with him socially.

In the U.S. (and Philadelphia especially), there are progressive Muslims, even out gay Muslims who belong to gay Muslim organizations like al-Fatiha.

I’m reminded of a gay Muslim friend who travels to Saudi Arabia four times a year and who tells me about the large secret gay population there. The penalty for consensual gay sexual relations in Saudi Arabia can range from 1,200 lashes to long-term imprisonment. When he goes to Saudi Arabia, that part of himself he keeps hidden, although once back in Philadelphia—a place where one is free to be gay, straight, bisexual, or even non-committal—he’s able to relax and count his blessings.

Thom Nickels can be reached at ThomNickels1@aol.com.