How did Muslim and Muslim community in the USA respond to the 9/11 terrorist attack? What were the impacts of media’s framing that the terrorist are Muslims jihadis to the Muslim communities in the USA?
As part of our efforts to describe plurality of Islam and Muslim in the USA and their responses to and impacts of the 9/11 terrorist attack on them, I and a friend of mine, Samsul Maa’rif, did a fieldwork in 1995, profiling 10 mosques/islamic cenhtres in Miami South Florida. The research was funded by the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Below is the snapshot of the project:
Further detail at:
http://www.pluralism.org/affiliates/student/maarifandmuttaqin/index.php
Ahmad Munjid’s article “Thick Islam and Deep Islam” (The Jakarta Post, Aug. 16, 2009) was responded to by Hilman Latief’s “Cosmopolitan Muslims: Urban vs. Rural Phenomenon” (the Post Aug. 29, 2009).
Many people assume local culture is the symbol of backward, barriers for development and in contrast to modern culture. To be a modern (rational, engaged in secular institutions, and disenchanted of the world) one should drop all that connected to the local. Through their purified wings, world religions in fact involved in negating –or even destroying– local cultures, blaming them as unauthentic and source of heresy.
Although Marx, Freud, and Weber had predicted religions would progressively disappear from society for the expansion of modern institutions, we watch not only religions that reject to away from society but also see the emergence of novel sensibility of religions and spirituality in late modernity. ‘Why should this be?’ ask Giddens who then finds Durkheim’s affirmation that religion has ‘some thing eternal’ namely ‘symbol of collective unity’ (Giddens, 1992: 207).
