From The Wall Street Journal
by Karishma Mehrotra
ROSWELL, Ga.—Growing up in the U.S., being a Muslim was very difficult for Ayesha Haddad. She couldn’t play volleyball because the shorts were too short. She couldn’t be a cheerleader because the skirts were too tiny. She couldn’t talk to certain people because they didn’t practice Islam.
Her mosque also didn’t offer any activities; it was only a place to pray. By the time she was 16, she had stopped practicing the religion regularly, saying that she “felt really alone.”
Now, Ms. Haddad, a 40-year-old after-school director at a charter school, attends Roswell Community Masjid, a mosque in a single-floor brick building where children are taken on rafting trips and where, among other things, Ms. Haddad serves as a Girl Scout troop leader.
The Roswell mosque is one of several in the U.S. that is trying to attract a burgeoning population of second- and third-generation American Muslims. These younger congregants are searching for mosques that are less rigid about separating genders during prayers and that have leaders who understand American culture. In response, more mosques are taking steps that include sponsoring scout troops and family retreats and requiring that women and young adults be named to their boards.
The Pew Research Center, which projects the number of Muslims in the U.S. to more than double by 2030, found in a study three years ago that 56% of the 2.75 million Muslims in the U.S. said they wanted to adopt American customs.
That may be out of sync with the culture of many mosques. A 2011 study by Ihsan Bagby, University of Kentucky associate professor of Islamic Studies, found that two-thirds of the roughly 2,100 U.S. mosques separate men from women during services and prayers. At the time, 85% of full-time imams, or mosque leaders, were born outside the U.S., and one-fourth of imams believed American society was immoral.
“There is a tension there,” says Johari Abdul-Malik, director of outreach at Dar al-Hijrah, a big Falls Church, Va., mosque. “You are trying to re-write, to re-evaluate, to bring in new talent in order to not lose your base.” While a few larger mosques like his are choosing younger imams and adding amenities such as basketball courts, smaller mosques tend to be resistant to change. “They’re not going to have Boy Scouts [and] Girl Scouts,” he said. “They’re operating much like they are still in Bangladesh or Pakistan, where the mosque is strictly a place to pray. And they’re very happy with that.”
