Believers mark their days in prayer. They fill their lives with obedience. Now they hope others can look at them and see peace, not planes, towers or terrorists.
Audio from the the May 7, 2004 Friday jumua service at the Hernando County mosque near Spring Hill. Delivering the sermon is a guest speaker, Zia Sheikh, the imam serving the Islamic Community of Tampa Bay in Tampa. Click to hear the audio
Part two of six
For 25 years, Muslims in Hernando County have gone about the quiet business of building their community and becoming pillars in the county’s health care system. But they are worried that their American dreams may be threatened by the fallout from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terror.
Over the past year, the Times has researched the story of Hernando’s Muslim community. The newspaper has interviewed more than 90 people and attended 30 weekly prayer services at the local mosque. This six-part series is the result of that research and shows how, through it all, local Muslims remain united by faith.
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In crowded cities around the Muslim world, the call to prayer is shouted over rooftops from the pinnacles of towering mosques.
In Hernando County, the call to prayer is announced in a much quieter voice, one that fits with the humble simplicity of the county's lone mosque on Barclay Avenue.
Yet, the call, chanted in Arabic, carries the same message:
God is most great, God is most great.
I bear witness that there is no god but God.
I bear witness that Mohammed is a messenger of God.
Hasten to prayer.
Hasten to success.
God is most great.
There is no god but God.
Each line but the last is said twice. As they are spoken, every man, woman and child in the little building on Barclay faces a window to the east.
Spiritually, the prayers orient Muslims toward a black cube half a world away - the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is the stone structure, wrapped in black silk, that Muslims believe Abraham built as the first house of worship to God.
For most of the Muslims in Hernando County, the Kaaba is much closer to their place of birth than is the mosque on the eastern edge of Spring Hill.
In that sense, the five daily prayers - which are an obligation of their faith - also help local Muslims set their spiritual compass as they go about life in a country that understands little about their faith. And it aligns them with another billion Muslims around the world.
"Everybody has to pray in the same direction, no matter where they are," said Towheed Ramjohn, a retired lab technician and one of the county's newest Muslims.
"It brings humanity together, no matter what nationality."
Muslims pray together in the mosque and at home on their living room floors.
But the demands of living in accord with prescribed prayers throughout the day means they may pray even in places as public as Busch Gardens.
As such, most Muslims keep a clean prayer rug in the trunks of their cars.
This intense devotion - as well as the larger script of the Muslim faith - is still something of a mystery to the broader populace of Hernando County.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the subject of what it means to be a Muslim is being asked more frequently than ever. The underlying concern - not always voiced - is whether the hijackers of 9/11 were crazed fanatics or whether Islam contains some sort of hidden justification for their actions.
Some local Muslims welcome the questions; some despise them. Others are too fearful to discuss it. Regardless of where they stand, their faith is being tested.
Worship practices rich with meaning
The mosque on Barclay Avenue - like the people who worship within it - does little to attract attention. About a mile south of Brookridge, it is a modest structure that easily could be confused with any of a million beige-colored, block homes in Florida.
Unlike the ornate mosques of the Middle East, it has no gold domes, no towering minarets. Inside, there are no archways and no tapestries; it is basically empty.
Upon arriving at the mosque, worshipers take off their shoes.
They leave them in racks or piles just inside the door. The idea is to leave the filth of the world outside, away from a place where they come and place their foreheads on the floor in submission to a God who is pure.
Purity is a recurring theme for Muslims.
Women are taught not to enter the mosque when they have their menstrual periods, a custom also scene in Jewish Levitical law. Most will even forgo daily prayers while menstruating.
Nearly one-third of the mosque's space is devoted to washrooms that worshipers use to cleanse themselves before prayer. They splash water on their face, hair, neck and feet. Some go so far as to snuff water into their nose to clean out nasal impurities.
During a visit last year, the Rev. Dwight Lee Wolter, pastor of Spring Hill United Church of Christ, observed the washing rituals and came away impressed.
"I thought there was a respect for the sacred," he said.
Men sit in the front of the mosque; women in the back.
The geography is strongly emblematic of the Muslim concept of modesty. Men and women go to great lengths to remain separate when mingling outside their immediate families. It is a practice observed at picnics and banquets. And never do Muslim adults swim with people of the opposite sex who are outside their family.
Part of it goes to the belief that when an unmarried man and a woman are alone in the same room, only the devil is there with them.
It also is a pragmatic way of acknowledging how Muslims pray - on their knees, their foreheads on the floor and their posteriors in the air. In such a position, it would be distracting to the men if the women were praying in front of them.
"It has nothing to do with superiority," said Ghada Eldin, a Spring Hill mother of three. "It's just kind of a respect to the woman's body."
Even so, women in the mosque are left with an obscured view of the service. A partition that splits the front of the mosque from the back leaves the women with such a limited view that, at most, only three or four women can actually see the speaker. The rest look at a wall.
During most days, the mosque draws only a few worshipers. A few more show up at night for the final prayer of the day.
The largest gatherings of the week occur at the Friday afternoon jumua service, when attendance is required for men but left optional for women. It typically draws 40 to 45 men, but only four or five women.
Kelly McElmurry, an American-born Muslim convert who served in the Army, says men receive the most blessings while attending the mosque; women while serving in the home.
Eldin says it is something more simple than that: "Most of the ladies here are so busy."
Indeed, as the jumua begins, most of the women in the community are outside in the parking lot collecting their children, who have just arrived on a bus from Tampa, where they attend classes at a Muslim school.
Fostering belief in the "exemplary'
Those who attend the Friday service acknowledge God with their own silent prayers, then take a seat. After the call to prayer is spoken, most often by Indian-born physician Syed Ali, someone stands to deliver a short speech.
Islam tends to downplay the role of clergy, and there is no equivalent to a full-time pastor or priest. In Islam, learned men are supposed to serve as prayer leaders, or imams. A handful of men take turns delivering the Friday sermons. Dr. Ghiath Mahmaljy, chief of medicine at Oak Hill Hospital, frequently delivers the Friday speech and is as close to an imam as you will find in Hernando's mosque.
Mahmaljy, who grew up in Syria, has memorized much of the Koran and recites it well. He has spent considerable time studying the life of Mohammed and his sayings. He even writes poetry in Arabic.
But Mahmaljy says he has no formal schooling as a spiritual leader. His understanding of Islam has been a matter of personal effort.
Like most other local Muslims, Mahmaljy was born to an Islamic family in an Islamic country.
"From the time I grew up, my father was one who regularly went to the mosque," he said. "While I was watching TV, he would be sitting in the corner reading the Koran."
Imad Tarabishy, an orthopedic surgeon from Syria, also delivers Friday messages. In addition, the list of teachers includes cardiologist Adel Eldin, physical therapist Ihab Amin and neurologist Mohamad Saleh.
The sermons are delivered from a niche in front of the east-facing windows, with the speaker usually standing on a green prayer rug.
The teachings are based on the Koran, which is the Muslim holy book. They also draw from a collection of Mohammed's sayings known as the hadiths, and a collection of anecdotes about the life and deeds of Mohammed known as the Sunna.
Sentence by sentence, words from the sacred texts are first spoken in Arabic and then translated - as best they can be - into English. In conversation, local Muslims use the terms God and Allah (pronounced ah-LAH) as interchangeable names for the same deity.
In the Friday sermons, the name of choice is Allah.
Yet in the mosque - and throughout this community of Muslims - Allah is a faceless god.
That's because Muslims make no attempt to draw or paint the divine likeness. They consider doing so akin to creating an idol. The same goes with important figures such as Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed, whom Muslims revere as the last in a long list of divinely inspired prophets.
Even without a face to visualize, the hand of God is never far from guiding the Muslim's daily life - as is evident from the teachings at the Friday jumuas.
In the past year, Muslims were taught to be chaste and charitable, to keep their promises and to perform their five daily prayers on time. They were told to be humble and eager to reconcile disputes, willing to give a helping hand and to point others toward good works.
They were told to be patient, hold their tongues when angry and show thankfulness to their parents; to give to the poor and go to the mosque, to repent of their sins and to love one another - always striving to build a cohesive community.
They heard about the importance of greeting each other with peace and about giving sincere advice; about blessing sneezes and accepting invitations. They were taught to visit the ill and go to funerals, earnestly praying that God would forgive the sins of the dead - one last favor a person can do for a friend and an important gesture that can help the deceased on their difficult transition to the afterlife.
Along with the dos, the sermons covered plenty of don'ts.
Muslims are not to fornicate, commit adultery or engage in homosexuality - the latter being considered a highly egregious activity that makes the heavens shake.
They should not hate "or envy" or backbite. They should avoid the temptation to take vague or misleading passages from the sacred texts to support their own opinions. Rather than argue, it is better they give up and walk away - a concession said to earn the gracious a big house in paradise. They should not be arrogant or greedy, waste food or be miserly. They should not call each other names or look for faults in others. They should not worship idols or eat pork in any shape or form.
Overall, there is extraordinary attention paid to personal perfection. And believers are frequently reminded of the scorecard God is keeping - the one upon which their good deeds and bad are being tallied for a final day of reckoning.
"A Muslim," said Mahmaljy during one of his Friday speeches, "should be an exemplary human being."
Faiths share some common ground
In many ways, the setting in the mosque is academic, which puts it in line with the advanced educational level of the audience; 90 percent of those who attend are physicians.
The services generally last about 45 minutes, and attire is casual. Some of the doctors show up in blue surgical scrubs.
Aside from the melodic prayers, there is nothing in the mosque akin to music. And there are no jokes in the sermons; laughter from the listeners is extremely rare.
"We have the rest of the week to joke," said Mohammad Shuayb, a 34-year-old dentist who was born in Syria but grew up in Hernando County. "We can come here and be sincere."
And so it is that, aside from the frequent chirp of doctors' pagers, the worshipers sit in silence.
In contrast to all this studious listening is the behavior of the children, who come and go during the service with reckless abandon.
As the sermon is delivered, they run through the middle of the crowd of seated men. They laugh and talk loudly in the back where the women sit. Only their most boisterous behavior draws even a gentle admonition to be quiet.
The men say the permissive attitude toward kids is drawn from the example of the prophet Mohammed, who advised gentleness in dealing with the young.
To new students of their culture, local Muslims are eager to note that their religion shares the same family tree as Judaism and Christianity; Abraham is the father of their line, too.
They frequently point out that Adam, Moses, Abraham, Solomon, John the Baptist, Mary and Jesus are all mentioned in the Koran. And these characters turn up periodically in sermons at the mosque.
Even so, Jews and Christians would not recognize the Koran's version of their exploits.
Muslims are taught that Abraham's favored son was Ishmael, not Isaac as the Bible describes. Muslims hear that Jesus was not the son of God because God doesn't beget children.
Instead, they believe Jesus was merely one of the prophets - that it wasn't Jesus who died on the cross, but someone made to look like him. As such, they don't believe he was raised from the dead, as the New Testament teaches.
Mahmaljy says the scriptures that preceded the Koran - specifically the Old and New Testaments of the Bible - were not preserved in their totality.
Muslims believe that the Bible's veracity was compromised through repeated translations; some even pin the blame on the apostle Paul.
That said, local Muslims downplay these differences and espouse their appreciation for what the Koran calls "the people of the book" - Jews and Christians. They say there is no reason Jews, Christians and Muslims cannot peacefully co-exist.
Ali Ben Haloua, a local Muslim originally from Tunisia, considers the distinctions among the faiths to be "small details."
"Why look for something deeper you cannot explain?" Haloua said. "Leave it to God."
Violence of 9/11 not rooted in Islam
As for 9/11, a few local Muslims aren't convinced that Muslims or Arabs were responsible for the terrorist attacks. They simply doubt the evidence left behind and the government that claimed Islamic terrorists were behind the hijackings.
More common, though, is the belief that the Sept. 11 hijackers were fanatics acting on their political beliefs rather than something espoused in Islam.
To kill an innocent person, they note, is like killing all humanity. Terrorism, they say, is utterly inconsistent with the faith.
Mahmaljy likens the hijackers to people who convince themselves that bombing an abortion clinic is a righteous cause. Theirs was not a religious act in a holy war but a murderous response to America's unbending support of Israel in its dealings with the Palestinians.
Local Muslims sympathize greatly with the Palestinians, whom they see as a people driven from their rightful land when Israel was created in 1948.
But Mahmaljy said such sympathy does not justify what happened on Sept. 11.
Americans have become familiar with the term "jihad," which is popularly defined as some type of Muslim holy war.
But local Muslims say jihad means something much different than a call to violence.
Mahmaljy said one aspect of jihad can indeed refer to fighting to defend one's homes or property from religious persecution. But he says these fights are purely defensive, and they cannot be arbitrarily called by a single person; they must be declared by a nation.
Dr. Allam Reheem, an anesthesiologist originally from Egypt, said jihad can also be applied in much the same way Americans talk about a war on drugs, a war on crime or a war on illiteracy. But it most often refers to a personal battle within oneself.
"Jihad is fighting for the good, and not in a sense of a sword or gun, but in your desires," said Dr. Mahmoud Nimer, a Muslim cardiologist originally from Palestine. "It is like telling the truth in the face of a tyrant."
Reheem said jihad is about developing self-discipline.
"When a student works hard and stays up nights to do his or her homework - that's a jihad. When you discipline yourself to do everything right and overcome your shortcomings - that's jihad," he said. "Anything worthwhile or worth doing requires self-discipline."
One religion with many differences
The disciplines of the Muslim faith reveal themselves in other ways, too.
During the month of Ramadan, Muslims abstain from food, drink and sex from dawn to sunset. And it is during Ramadan that they most often open up their wallets for charitable donations.
During the hajj - the pilgrimage to Mecca that all able Muslims are to perform once in their lives - they endure several days of exhausting rituals. They spend a night in the desert, a day praying on a mountainside and make repeated forays into the vast throng of humanity that walks in a circular path around the Kaaba - the place where their prayers have been directed for a lifetime.
Among all Muslims, the essential issue of belief is that there is only one God and that Mohammed was his final prophet.
Under that grand tent, Muslims have carved out differences on peripheral issues.
The greatest division - between Sunnis and Shiites - relates to the interpretation of who was the rightful heir to lead the faithful after the death of Mohammed.
Nearly all the Muslims in Hernando County are Sunnis, a term that Americans hear about mostly in connection with the Sunni triangle - an area that has been particularly troublesome to the coalition forces occupying Iraq.
Mohamad Saleh, a local neurologist, says the troublesome nature of the Sunni triangle has nothing to do with the Sunni branch of Islam and everything to do with the political perks the people there enjoyed during the reign of Saddam Hussein, who grew up among them.
Regardless of differences, Saleh says Muslims should pursue a middle road, not embrace extremes. The Sunni-Shiite division doesn't play a major role in the teachings of Hernando County's mosque, which was established in 1986.
The mosque was founded by a group of the first Muslim doctors - including Nazir Hamoui, Husam Shuayb, Mahmaljy and Tarabishy - who contributed the funds to get it built.
Shuayb owned the property for a time, but eventually donated it to the North American Islamic Trust, which owns mosques and Muslim schools around the country.
Local Muslim leaders say the trust insulates the mosque from radical influences that might try to take it over and corrupt its moderate teachings. Otherwise, they say the trust's influence is nonexistent.
Even so, the leader of the trust's parent organization paid a visit in December.
Sayyid Syeed, secretary general of the Indianapolis-based Islamic Society of North America, said his visit was a thank-you to Muslims here for their financial support last year of a conference of Muslim educators.
Syeed conveyed a message of tolerance that local Muslims applauded. He also sought to distance the Islamic Society from its past financial backing by people in Saudi Arabia - a practice he says ended more than 10 years ago.
This is important, local Muslims say, because they do not like their version of Islam to be identified with the type of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.
Known as Wahhabism, the state religion of Saudi Arabia is a much more rigid, and some say intolerant, version of the faith, particularly with regard to the rights of women.
Hamoui said that while the Hernando mosque identifies with what he considers the progressive philosophies of the Islamic Society and the North American Islamic Trust, the local mosque stands on its own teachings apart from any outside influences.
Clearly, those teachings make it abundantly clear that a Muslim is responsible for his own actions.
Satan and hell and a day of judgment are as much a part of the doctrinal conversation in the mosque as in any Baptist or Pentecostal church in the county.
Believers are warned that life on Earth is short and that they had better be living it to serve others.
Delivering a sermon last summer, Tarabishy told his community that even their smallest acts of good and evil are being counted for the final judgment. Malice and ill-spoken words count against a Muslim. But even smiles and hellos are credited to them.
So is each letter they read from the Koran.
And so are their visits to the little mosque on Barclay Avenue.
"With every step you take toward the mosque," Tarabishy said, "your reward in heaven increases."
- Times researchers Caryn Baird, Kitty Bennett and Jenny Lichtenwalner contributed to this project. Robert King can be reached at 352 848-1432. Send e-mail to rking@sptimes.com
