Fourteen years ago this week, on Sept. 11, 2001, the world changed in ways that none of us could have imagined. Among other things, the attacks launched that day destroyed our illusion of security and helped to launch the United States into two long and bloody wars, the outcomes of which are still to be determined.
For Muhammed al-Ninowy, a physician and university professor living in Lawrenceville, the events of that day created a crisis of another sort. A brutal attack on his adopted country, the United States, had been perpetrated by terrorists in the name of Islam, a faith that he held dear. The experience left him shattered.
“Nine-eleven really just shook me so much that I didn’t know what to make of it,” al-Ninowy recalled in an interview earlier this month, “and from that point on I began looking into things on a much deeper level: What’s going on? And I understand that 9/11 was (perpetrated by just) a few people, while the Muslim faith is 1.6 billion people, so that’s in no way a representation (of Islam.) But still it bothered me, it bothered me that someone would go and kill in the name of God.”
“So I quit everything. I quit teaching medicine. And I went straight to figuring out what the problem is.”
Today, al-Ninowy is the imam at a mosque in Duluth and founder of the Madina Institute, with branches in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Canada that teaches Islam as a religion of peace. It also houses a small seminary that attracts Islamic theology students from around the globe, and flying above the mosque and seminary is a large American flag.
“Islam always tells you to be thankful, to be thankful to people, so I’m thankful that I live in this country,” al-Ninowy says. “That’s why this mosque has an American flag flying. That’s a statement that I want to make, because we are part of this place.”
In his travels overseas to minister to fellow Muslims, al-Ninowy says, he encounters suspicion about the United States and his own credibility as a Muslim.
“Especially when I talk of love and unconditional compassion,” he says. “Unconditional. To me, that is the very first thing in Islam: Unconditional compassion. Some — a minute minority — think this is a sellout. They think, ‘OK, you’re coming from the States and you’re telling us that we need to be compassionate toward people whom we view as hostile toward us.’ They say, ‘That’s a sellout’. I say, ‘That’s being true to the scripture itself, why don’t you read it? Instead of hijacking it based on a political principle’.”
However, al-Ninowy also disputes claims from fellow Americans that the Muslim community is somehow tolerant of violence and that its leaders do not speak out against terrorism.
“My question when I hear that is, ‘When was the last time that you went to a mosque, to a sermon at a mosque?’ Because if you come here …. Obviously, I can’t teach every single Friday about terrorism, but anyone who has been here knows well where we stand. I think the American Muslim community has been really unequivocal in its condemnation of all that violence,” he says. “But I don’t know how to make that heard on a national level, in national media.”
For an extended transcript of the interview, go to http://bit.ly/JBook9-11
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