As a relatively new profession, the North American Muslim chaplaincy (NAMC) has seen significant growth since the mid 1970s the hiring of the first paid Muslim chaplains in the United States approximately twenty-five years ago. There are three observable waves of chaplains to consider as the NAMC has developed: the first wave with the hiring of the first paid prison chaplain; the second with the founding of the Islamic Chaplaincy Program at the Hartford Seminary; and the third which began shortly thereafter as chaplains develop an Islamic approach to pastoral care, create networks, and cultivate a public persona. The Muslim women and men who serve as chaplains in secular North American institutions such as prisons, the military, educational institutions, hospitals, and community centers, among others, have made it their goal to serve Muslims and non-Muslims in these North American institutions. From humble beginnings, this profession grew out of the desire to provide needed services and care to Muslims in these institutions and has evolved into a uniquely North American profession suited to the needs of all religious communities served by these institutions. North American Muslim chaplains represent an Islamic American voice, one that speaks to American cultural and legal norms. To varying degrees, these chaplains have challenged and embraced North American traditions, such as pluralism, interfaith relations, freedom of religion, and non-establishment. In addition, as they move into the third decade of the profession, chaplains have been moving into leadership roles within American communities. These roles have created an alternate form related to, but significantly different from, the role of the imam. This provides a space for a distinctly North American engagement with the Islamic tradition. It has also opened new spaces for women’s leadership within the North American Muslim community, adjusting and reaffirming traditional practice. These chaplains perform their profession, and their “ministry of presence,” in ways closely connected to institutional, regional, and personal contexts. Because of this multitude of sites, identifying points of connection, when desired, can be difficult. As such, there is no monolithic approach to the chaplaincy or how chaplains envision their Muslim identities. This diversity, which extends to a diversity in gender, race, ethnicity, and branch of Islam, is not without its challenges.
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Muslim Chaplains in North America
Harvey Stark
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Islamic Society of North America
Iqbal J. Unus
The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is arguably the most influential of organizations and institutions that represent and serve the interests of the growing community of Muslims in the United States and Canada. ISNA evolved in the early 1980s from the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada (MSA), founded in 1963 by international students on North American college campuses. ISNA has secured its place among Muslim Americans by opening its membership to all Muslim Americans, regardless of ethnicity or sectarian persuasion. Further, its member-elected leadership facilitates timely and relevant responses to the changing civic and political environment. Headquartered in suburban Plainfield, Indiana, ISNA is governed by a board of directors and managed by an executive director as its chief executive officer. As an Internal Revenue Service–designated tax-exempt charity, ISNA is funded by contributions from members and donors and by revenues from its conventions and conferences.
ISNA claims and promotes leadership and service as its guiding principles and draws from those themes for its most visible activities: an annual convention, its flagship bimonthly publication, two annual education forums, and its active engagement with governmental and religious institutions. A vibrant youth program, an inclusive orientation, a stewardship outlook, and membership open to Muslims of all sectarian persuasions have earned ISNA a prominent place in the American Muslim community. ISNA’s comprehensive work in many areas of Muslim-American life has enabled it to initiate and lead collaborative initiatives among Muslim organizations to advance common goals.
Yet, during the nearly sixty years of their existence, MSA and ISNA have endured a few financial and operational challenges. Funding by core supporters and diligence by committed officers helped strengthen ISNA’s resilience and reinforce its ingrained appeal to North American Muslims.
By thoughtfully collaborating with faith-based organizations, civic-minded activist groups, and governmental entities at national levels, ISNA has secured a preeminent position as the representative voice of Muslim Americans. ISNA’s annual conventions and flagship magazine are recognized as significant contributions to the maturity of the Muslim American presence in North America.
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Muslims and Education in North America
May Al-Fartousi
Although some research mentions the diversity of Muslims in terms of their religion, culture, and race—and the need to be aware of this diversity in order to understand Muslim students’ experiences—the focus is usually on the boundaries that exist between the social world of Muslims and that of non-Muslims . Specifically, most North American research that examines Muslims’ experiences in schools addresses the hidden practices that influence this diverse group to fit in among Canadian and American societies. Some of those hidden practices—which are internalized by individual acts toward minority Muslims or by institutional racism—are part of an ideology connected to historical settler colonization in which religion and race are interconnected and contribute to viewing other religions as inferior or to political agendas represented through the media. Notably, the Islamophobia discourses that have been occurring in light of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) attacks in the West influence the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims who live there. Given global Islamophobia and the increasing numbers of Muslim youth refugees due to ISIS, research and guidelines have emerged emphasizing the psychological impact of the political and social pressure on Muslim youth as evident in mental health issues related to trauma, anxiety, and depression affecting Muslim youth’s sense of belonging in their schools. In some discussionsrelated to the development of Muslim political identities, both internal and external factors contribute to placing Muslims in vulnerable positions and feeding us-versus-them binary discourse, which adds more injustice for, and discrimination against, minority groups. With such diverse discourses that tackle Muslim experiences within different spaces, there is a need to thoroughly investigate how Muslim educational experiences of everyday religion, with internal personal values and external societal values, are negotiated with the hope of eliminating the misunderstandings that may emerge due to the complex diversity of this group and their different levels of acculturation.
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Debate in the Tibetan Tradition
Jonathan Samuels
“Debate” (Tibetan: rtsod pa), in the present context, refers to a uniquely Tibetan method of structured analysis and discourse conducted between two (or more) parties on matters pertaining to religion. The practice is extremely technical and has traditionally been the province of monks. It has medieval roots, and it references logical principles derived from the Indian Buddhist pramāṇa system. Debate is also closely aligned with the tradition of commentarial writing, in which the evaluation and critiquing of earlier interpretations of Indian-origin Buddhist works has long been standard. A custom among Tibetan religious writers has been to deal with “rival” interpretations in a truculent fashion, redolent of an actual confrontation. There is also much in the dialectical approach, analytical process, and language that can best be described as shared between the literary and oral spheres (with frequent crossover and borrowing). But debate is primarily to be understood as a face-to-face practice, distinct from what is represented in the written medium, and only truly comprehensible in terms of the institutional context of its performance. Furthermore, while inspired by Indian scholastic traditions, this kind of argumentation is peculiarly Tibetan in its formulation.
The practice of debate is especially associated with the largest school of Tibetan Buddhism, the Geluk (dGe lugs). In the school’s major scholastic centers, which were, for a number of centuries, the largest monasteries in the world, debate was employed as the primary tool of education, with those trained in the scholastic tradition, including its most prominent figures, such as various Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas, having been required to master it. Academic understanding of debate relies heavily on analysis of the so-called Collected Topics (bsDus grwa) works, primer materials, chiefly composed of sample debates, from which students (and academics) learn about the logical principles, basic taxonomies, and informal “rules” that structure debate.
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Monastic Education in Contemporary Asia
Thomas Borchert
Education is a central component of Buddhism and has been since the start of the religion. The forms of Buddhist education are diverse, including the education and training of monastics and laypeople, men, women, and children from early ages through university and continuing and adult education. The training of monastics is simply one, albeit, important subset of wider systems and practices of Buddhist education. Monastic education exists in multiple forms, including those associated with apprentice or situated forms of learning, and curricular forms in schools, primarily secondary and postsecondary institutions. Contemporary forms of monastic education are entangled with and shaped by discourses and practices of modernization, dynamics of gender in Buddhist societies, and debates about the role of religion within given societies across Asia. These debates become visible in attending to the goals of education, the multiple motivations of monastics for their education, as well as those of other educational stakeholders. Although it may be tempting to see monastic education as a distinct phenomenon, it should be viewed within a wider pedagogical ecosystem within the nation-states of Asia.
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The Construction of Muslim Families, Interfaith Marriage, and Religious Education in Mexico
Ruth Jatziri García Linares
Fieldwork conducted in the Islamic Center of the North (Centro Islámico del Norte, or CIN) in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, between 2015 and 2017, yielded several findings. First, it examined the reasons for women’s conversion to Islam; second, it looked at the ways these women and their husbands raise their children under Islamic religious precepts. Thus, the author seeks to shed light on how this conversion and child-rearing take place within both Muslim and interfaith homes, dividing her discussion into three parts. The first contextualizes the women and men who make up these families and households and also discusses the Muslim community settled in Monterrey, of which they are members. The second provides an outline of interreligious and Islamic marriages, as well as what Islam has to say about marriage between Muslims and people of other religious faiths. The last section consists of a series of examples taken from interviews with Muslim women who are members of the CIN in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. The narratives provide insight into how religious values are transmitted to children and young people, as well as the ways in which marriages initially considered interreligious sometimes become completely Islamic.
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The Sangha as an Institution
Thomas Borchert
Along with the buddha and the dharma, the sangha is one of the “three jewels,” the core aspects of Buddhism in which a Buddhist “takes refuge.” The sangha is responsible for taking care of and propagating the dharma, the teachings of the buddha. It can also be considered more broadly as the Buddhist community, which in turn can be thought of as the group of people who either take refuge in the three jewels or follow the teachings of the buddha. Given this, the sangha has generally been conceptualized in two ways. Most often, it refers to the community of men and women who have been ordained as monks and nuns under the auspices of Buddhist disciplinary teachers. At the same time, it can sometimes refer more broadly to the four-fold community of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen.
While the sangha may be discussed in the singular, generally speaking it is appropriate to think of sanghas in the plural. In this sense, the term refers not to an ideal community that maintains the teachings of the buddha but rather to the communal and institutional structures through which people define themselves as Buddhist and maintain their Buddhist identities. A particular sangha is revealed by interrogating the linkages (i.e., lineages) between different Buddhists, the kinds of educational structures in place to train adherents, the ways that Buddhists discipline themselves (for example, through the vinaya rules), and the ways in which external governing bodies seek to regulate Buddhist communities.
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Islamic Bioethics: Bioethics in Malaysia
Salilah Saidun
Islamic bioethics in Malaysia must be examined in terms of deliberation, legislation, and education. Shariʿah and social and economic state factors in Malaysia must be considered alongside the local and global implications of the bioethics issue. Civil and criminal law in Malaysia are under the Federal Government’s legislative authority, while Islamic affairs are under the regulation of the state governments. Several government agencies, non-governmental organizations, research institutions, and universities contribute to the development and dissemination of Islamic bioethics in Malaysia. Islamic reflection on bioethical questions in Malaysia must constantly keep up with rapidly progressing scientific developments.
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Martin Luther’s Influence on Legal Reforms and Civil Law
John Witte Jr.
The Lutheran Reformation transformed not only theology and the church but law and the state as well. Beginning in the 1520s, Martin Luther joined up with various jurists and political leaders to craft ambitious legal reforms of church, state, and society on the strength of Luther’s new theology, particularly his new two kingdoms doctrine. These legal reforms were defined and defended in hundreds of monographs, pamphlets, and sermons published by Lutheran writers from the 1520s to 1550s. They were refined and routinized in hundreds of new reformation ordinances promulgated by German cities, duchies, and territories that converted to the Lutheran cause. By the time of the Peace of Augsburg (1555)—the imperial law that temporarily settled the constitutional order of Germany—the Lutheran Reformation had brought fundamental changes to theology and law, to church and state, marriage and family, criminal law and procedure, and education and charity. Critics of the day, and a steady stream of theologians and historians ever since, have seen this legal phase of the Reformation as a corruption of Luther’s original message of Christian freedom from the strictures of human laws and traditions. But Luther ultimately realized that he needed the law to stabilize and enforce the new Protestant teachings. Radical theological reforms had made possible fundamental legal reforms. Fundamental legal reforms, in turn, would make palpable radical theological reforms. In the course of the 1530s onward, the Lutheran Reformation became in its essence both a theological and a legal reform movement. It struck new balances between law and Gospel, rule and equity, order and faith, and structure and spirit.
