Praying Out Loud

THE ISLAMIC RELIGION has not, historically, been welcome in these United States. That assesssment seems indisputable, considering verifiable reality in the land of religious freedom and tolerance. Muslims, Moslems, regardless of spelling, have traditionally been crowded together by choice and by social circumstances in northern American cities, and almost entirely absent in the southern part of the country. In the United States, any ethnicity and religiosity other than W.A.S.P. has found it difficult to participate in mainstream culture without suffering rejection, exclusion, and often persecution, so, the fact that members of the Islamic faith have often considered themselves safest and happiest within their cloistered demographic, seperated from the mainstream, is easy to explain. The United States is a minority rich country, but not an especiallly minority friendly culture. Non Christians, or even nonconformist cristians, such as Mormons, have been victimized by white protestant rejection more often than not. One of the largest Islamic communities in America is in Minneapolis, and traditionally the call to prayer, an event which occurs five times a day, has in the city been rather subdued, quietened down, confined to the actual house of worship. Until now. Now, the call to prayer, that eery, hauting, evocative, alluringly transcendant sound is being heard widely throughout the city, and, unsurprisingly, not everyone is happy about it. The unhappy consist largely, again unsurprisingly, of W.A.S.P. conservatives, who traditionally and currently, in many cases, consider alternative forms of religiosity to protestant Christianity undesirable. Those of a certain age can remember when John F. Kennedy was burdened by his Catholicism when running for president, to the extent that he felt forced to assure the American people that if elected, he would not be taking orders from the Vatican. Minneapolis, like all American cities up north, are famouslly liberal and thus accepting of religious non conformity; one might have to strain to hear a "call to prayer" in, say, Ft. Worth, Texas. Nobody knows for sure exactly how many different religions there are in the world, but everyone knows, or should know, that the number is in the thousands. Within the Christian faith itself there are hundreds of denominations, more coming into existence constantly, as churches fragment and new ministers hang out their shingle. Is there any reasonable alternative to societal acceptance of all religious belief? Is it even unreasonable to make any conclusion other than that the actual number of religios in the world is exactly equal to the number of humans, since, at bottom, everyone has his own religious beliefs? Goethe said it best: "When I realized that everyone invents his own religion, I decided to invent mine." That Muslims in Mineapolis at long last feel sufficient self confidence to allow their beautiful call to prayer to echo across many neighborhoods in the city five times a day can be seen as a positive sign, a sign of enhanced religious toleration in a culture whose founders insisted on it, but has not normally demonstrated it.