al-firaushah

On Da’wah in the West

The following is a comment I wrote to Emmanuel, a Catholic Malaysian blogger, who was responding to a post written by MENJ regarding South Korean missionaries who are being expelled from Afghanistan.  After posting this comment, I thought I would cross-post it onto this blog and some others.

Emmanuel: Da’wah, as practiced by Muslims in the West, is almost invisible. I do not say this negatively, merely as a statement of fact. In the US (at least), da’wah to non-Muslims is rarely done face-to-face, unlike, say, the Mormons or JWs. We don’t ride around the neighborhood on bicycles in white shirts and dark ties, asking people to convert. We also don’t pass out cartoon tracts like Jack Chick’s or booklets like the JW’s, leaving them lying around for people to read (although I will say I don’t think badly of the JW booklets). In fact, the only Muslim da’wah group I’ve ever met members of face-to-face were only interested in meeting other Muslims, trying to get lax brothers and sisters to become more devout. Certainly no one ever came up to me and asked me to become Muslim, which is more than the Christians (including some members of my family) can say.

But far too many Christian missionaries use underhanded tactics in trying to convert people. Unlike MENJ, I do think it is constructive, both in the long- and short-term, to ban missionaries. Read the famous article, The Stealth Crusade, published in Mother Jones magazine four years ago, and you’ll begin to understand some of our concerns.

Muslims Across the U.S.

This is an interesting map that I came across just a few minutes ago (the map is part of a Daily Kos diary, “So…where are all the Jews?”. This map shows, on a county-by-county basis, where the American Muslim population is located as a percentage of the total resident population of the U.S. The data comes from the 2000 census. There are some fairly large populations of Muslims in places where I would expect (Michigan, Metro NY and DC), and a few where I wouldn’t have expected (NW Ohio, NE Oregon (?), and two counties in New Mexico (??)). Also nice to see is that there is at least one county in every state that is shaded yellow (0.1 to 0.7% of the population), even in the upper mid-west and Alaska, where you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find large numbers of Muslims. Of course, we have a long way to go before the map starts turning more yellow or, insha’allah, orange or brown.

For a listing of all the various maps for different religions practiced throughout the US, see here.