Under suspicion: American Muslims search for identity 10 years after Sept. 11 - The Washington Post

 

 

His anger, he says, would have “taken control of me.” He would have challenged the woman to consider if she could be strong enough to wear such an evident expression of faith.

Still, Moiz’s impulse to defend his wife is tempered by his American practicality.

“Islam has flourished for 1,400 years because it fits into every society and adapts to it,” he says. “So those people who would require women to wear the hijab, or men who say you have to grow your beard out two fists long, are making life more difficult for their children if they take such a rigid approach.”

The blame for Americans’ suspicion toward Muslims, Moiz argues, lies mostly with his fellow Muslims, especially those who refuse to adapt to the culture of their new home.

 Moiz, an American-born child of immigrants from India, is a devout Muslim who spent years studying the Koran in Syria before beginning his legal career in the Washington area. Ask Moiz about Islam, and his answers often cite the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.

“We have to figure out what’s right for Islam in this country,” he says. “It’s like in the law — you have your Scalias who strictly construe the Constitution and you have your Justice Kagans, who ask how we can interpret those texts for today. We know we have to emulate the prophet, but does that mean we have to have a long beard? Do we have to look like him or is it more important to understand him?”

Moiz clerked in Prince George’s County for Maryland’s first Muslim judge and then worked for a time on discrimination claims made by American Muslims. He left that job believing that too many of his fellow Muslims — such as the worker who complained that his employer wouldn’t give him Fridays off to pray, when he really needed only an hour — are too quick to take on the victim label.

The Islam that Moiz has chosen is traditional in some ways yet markedly American in others.

“I don’t wear the traditional garb,” says Moiz, who has on a tennis shirt and chinos. “But I believe the way I dress is Islamic” because it is simple and modest.

Moiz’s ability to adapt his faith to his country has turned him into a hot commodity at his mosque, the 5,000-member All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Sterling. At ADAMS, some immigrant parents ask Moiz to mentor their teenagers, who sometimes frighten their parents by retreating into their rooms to commune with the Internet, where radical jihadist preachers aim their videos at young Americans.