Getting Schooled on Islam

Getting Schooled in Islam

by Jesse James DeConto Prof. Matt Palombo’s Introduction to Ethics class at Minneapolis Community Technical College (MCTC) is discussing Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Kyle Williams, a white suburban kid from middle-class Minnesota, squares off with Khadijah Cooper, an African American who spent childhood summers with her grandmother, a lifelong domestic worker in the Jim-Crow South. Williams can’t understand how Hegel could argue that the slave might be more free than his master, just because he has learned the skills to take care of himself while the master has not.

“If you’re a slave owner, I mean, basically, don’t you still have freedom because you have money?” says Williams, 20.

“I don’t know. It’s sort of confusing me how self-sufficiency is being compared to freedom.”

“If that slave owner didn’t have slaves, he might not be able to plant or whatever because he has people doing that for him,” says Cooper, 28. “You always have to have somebody do it for you because you have no idea how to plant the cotton, take the cotton, make the cotton into clothes.

That’s something that somebody else has always done, so he’s always dependent on that, and that’s not being free.”

It’s just the sort of culture clash Palombo cherishes in his role as a teacher and community activist. In his journey from conservative evangelical to interfaith middleman, Palombo has been shaped by refugees, immigrants, and other minority voices he rarely heard at his evangelical high school, college, or seminary. Now that he’s behind the lectern, Palombo believes that understanding the world requires solidarity with the oppressed, whether it’s a Jim-Crow-era servant or Muslims vilified because of the terrorists among them. A culture of tolerance, he says, tends to critique or romanticize minority groups against a standard of Western values; instead of exploring similarities and differences, Palombo has plunged into cooperative advocacy with the Twin Cities’ Muslim community,

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offering his own Westernized faith up for judgment.

“Any healthy relationship has a deep sense of selfcritique. We are building a relationship where I am allowing you to change me,” he says. “The complete emptying of God in Jesus, to say ‘I am opening myself up to the world. The world that hates me, I love it’—tolerance doesn’t allow you to do that. You cannot build any healthy relationship on tolerance. Healthy relationships are painful, they are risky, they are messy, and that’s what love is built on.”

Conversion: ‘A turning point’ Palombo was two months into teaching at MCTC when President Bush declared war on Iraq in 2003. Fresh out of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Fla., preceded by a conservative Christian high school and college, Palombo had not personally known any Muslims until he encountered his students at MCTC. Minorities make up half the student body, compared to about one-third of American college students overall. One-third at MCTC are black, including African Americans, Somalis, and other recent African immigrants; that’s nearly three times the ratio of black students in the nation’s total student population. The college doesn’t keep statistics on its students’ religions, but much of its immigrant population is Muslim, and students walk the halls in traditional Islamic garb, creating an environment Palombo had never known. What he knew of Islam had come only through evangelical missionaries visiting his church or schools, reinforcing a dualism of Christians versus all non-believers, including Muslims.

“Most of the presentations characterized Muslims as backwards, illiterate, and immoral,” Palombo says. “In seminary, I remember being told that ‘good Muslim Americans’ were actually putting on a front to sneak extremist Islam into America and take over.”

In high school, Palombo had read The Autobiography of

Malcolm X; in the story of Malcolm’s conversion to the Nation of Islam, Palombo found a “heroic” voice for an oppressed people and couldn’t accept the adversarial interpretation of Islam he was being taught. As the media covered the war in Iraq, their depiction of Muslims as “backward, powerless, and uneducated” didn’t represent the students he knew.

“That was a turning point for me: the faces of my Muslim students shattering American stereotypes,” he says.

and even returning to Somalia as teens to fight in the Islamic revolution.

“It’s because they have nothing to do,” says Shaie. “You don’t think about being Muslim. You think about the safety of the community. I don’t want anything to happen to my daughter.”

Shaie began to dream—about an interfaith community center where Muslims and non-Muslims could interact; where Muslim women could swim and exercise in female-only facilities without covering their bodies; and where youth could learn leadership and job skills and find access to medical care, legal advice, and social services.

Muslim alienation: ‘You don’t want to be different’ Palombo had moved to Minnesota to be near family, a move he thought would be temporary. He had answered an MCTC ad seeking an adjunct ethics instructor; before the end of his first semester, the college had hired him full time. The recession of 2001 had eliminated a patronage meant to send him to the United Kingdom for doctoral work, so instead he stayed at MCTC, encountering students like Saccido Shaie, an aspiring teacher and mother of three in her late 20s.

Shaie had come to Minneapolis in 1994 at the age of 12. Two years earlier, violent revolution had forced her family from its rural village in north Somalia. They fled to the capital, Mogadishu, then to Kismaayo in the far south, and finally across the Indian Ocean to Kenya.

“When we left our home, we didn’t take anything. I was just wearing my one dress,” she says. “We thought this was going to go on a couple of days or weeks, and then we were going to come back to our house.”

They spent nine months in a tent city set up for Somali refugees by the Kenyan government, her older brother mending from a car crash during their escape that had put him in a coma. The US government brought them to Atlanta, where they spent a year before Shaie, her mother, and young siblings followed some older sisters to Minneapolis where they had found work. Shaie arrived just in time for middle school, speaking little English and wearing the hijab on her head. At a pool party, Muslim modesty forbade her wearing a bathing suit like everybody else “I remember just putting my legs in the water and watching everybody else swim,” she says. “When you’re that age, you don’t know what’s Muslim or what’s Christian. You know what’s okay in your community, but you don’t want to be different.”

Shaie came to respect her Muslim identity, with its head coverings and long, loose-fitting robes. But she watched many of her peers perceive their differences with shame, turning to gangs and violence, becoming vulnerable to sex traffickers,

Interfaith partnership: ‘We eat together’ Meanwhile, Palombo was seeking out Charles Amjad-Ali, a Pakistani Anglican and one of the world’s leading scholars on Muslim-Christian engagement. In 2006, Amjad-Ali became his mentor in a PhD program at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn.

“He knew that he needed some serious work in Islam because he had Muslim students and he had no work on it,” Amjad-Ali says. “It is not good enough to say, ‘I feel good about them.’ You cannot love your neighbor as yourself without knowing who they are.”

Shaie met Palombo at a student organizations fair, where he was staffing an Oxfam International booth and promoting the Center for Civic Engagment, which he and other faculty and staff members founded in 2007. Shaie soon enlisted Palombo as secretary for a new organization, Somali Youth Action, which has since been renamed the Ummah Project, signifying a wider sense of community. They aim to raise nearly $50 million to purchase about five acres of land in the city and build 120,000 square feet of space, plus a parking deck, for Minneapolis’ 150,000 Muslims, many of them from Somali refugee families. Shaie says it would be the only facility of its kind in the Western world, providing separate swimming pools, cardio, and free-weight areas for men and women. Organizers hope it will be a place where Muslims can be themselves but also interact with people of other cultures.

“We’re trying to show people from other faiths, this is how Muslims practice and this is how Muslims want to live,” says Ibrahim Mohamed, a Muslim student from the minority Oromo group in Ethiopia. “People praying is not a problem.

Sisters wearing the hijab is not a problem. We’re all human beings, and we’re all going toward one end.”

Observing Muslim piety and hospitality, Palombo felt his own faith transforming. For his doctoral work, he studied Arabic at the newly opened Islamic University of Minneapolis. The rhythms of prayer punctuated the entire campus schedule, causing him to reflect on both the struggles of his Muslim

Living in a pluralistic society demands a much higher price—and offers much greater rewards—than merely accepting those who are different from us.

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“You cannot build any healthy relationship on they are risky, they are messy, a students to practice their faith in a secular setting and his own desire for Christian liturgy to shape his life. He arranged a meeting with Islamic University President Sheikh Farok Hamod Asamarai, seeking support for the Ummah Project, and there found a table spread with food and circled by half a dozen Muslim sheikhs. A professor translated into English a conversation about recent earthquakes that they believe may signal Mohammed’s warnings about the end times.

“I haven’t experienced this kind of hospitality from a president and a vice president of a university before,” Palombo says. “This community is interpreting the world now as if the eschatological end is coming, and they’re just trying to hang on and meet it. Things are happening in the world that are really destructive, and yet we eat together and you’re welcomed here.”

Theological implications: ‘God is coming back to the West’ Palombo sits in his windowless office on the fourth floor of MCTC’s downtown campus, where he teaches and coordinates a half dozen other philosophy faculty. The end of the semester is almost here, at which point he’ll start a year-long sojourn in South Africa, where he’ll study under renowned Muslim scholar Farid Esack. Taped on his door are photographs of Muslims and Christians acting as human shields for one another during the recent revolution in Egypt.

Palombo chats with his colleague Nadia Mohamed, an Egyptian who teaches world religion and global studies. Mohamed talks about her culture shock when a teenaged friend told her she couldn’t wait until she turned 18 so she could move out of her parents’ house; Mohamed insists that her own children should stay at home until they marry, because they need guidance in handling money and other adult responsibilities.

“There is a verse in the Koran that says you have to take care of your parents, especially when they get old,” Mohamed says. “Don’t huff and puff at them, because when you were young, they used to change the diapers off of you.”

“I think there’s a commandment like that in the Christian Bible, that says something like that as well: ‘Honor your parents,’” Palombo says, laughing.

While the vast majority of Christian and Muslim moral teachings overlap, Palombo says, Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Cross clearly don’t. But for Palombo, that’s not the point. He is building an argument that interfaith dialogue has to start not with theology but with a common pursuit of justice. He grounds his approach not in Father Abraham or in Jesus as a Prophet of Allah, but in the

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book of Revelation, which he reads as St. John’s account of a threatened community resisting the political power of a great empire. He points out that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all emerged in resistance to political power. He views Mohammed as a true prophet of God “It’s not fundamentally about your view of the Trinity, but it’s more fundamentally about, Are you on the side of the oppressor or the oppressed?”

Islam versus the West is today’s supreme cultural dialectic, and Palombo is seeking a Hegelian synthesis. Unavoidable is the question often condemned by pundits following the 9/11 attacks: What did we do to make Muslims so angry with us? His answer: We’ve colonized Muslim lands, exploited resources, and exported a culture of greed, covetousness, and extravagance all over the world. Muslims, he says, make Americans uncomfortable because they literally wear their faith on their sleeves, practicing public prayer and living with a strict morality that eschews common Western liberties like premarital sex or lending at interest.

“Islam is the most powerful critique of the West that is out there,” he says. “I think God is coming back to the West through Islam. God is in the faith and actions of Muslim people, and we see that when they challenge the ungodly actions of the West.”

Significantly, Palombo sees Islam’s critique not in the substance of the faith itself but in its outsider status. Muslims around the world are relatively poor and lack global political power; terrorism, he says, is an extremist reaction to the oppression of the West.

“Talking about someone’s class and economics is at the same time talking about Islam,” he says. “You don’t necessarily see wealthy CEOs in their plush houses talking about the end of the world. It’s a way that poor and oppressed communities can try and use religious symbolism and teachings to confront the empire. It’s Daniel and the lion’s den. You’re living in empire, and somebody is not bowing, and the Muslims are not bowing. That’s where Jesus goes, that’s where God is—at the most extreme critiques of power and empire. I don’t want to say that the West will be okay in its empire-building. God is mighty to change that.”

Palombo has worked to bring Muslim voices, including his colleague Mohamed’s, into Solomon’s Porch, the emergent church he and his family attend in Minneapolis. He says even in a liberal congregation like this, some are antagonistic toward Islam. Some of his Sufi Muslim friends left the church after a visiting missionary described Muslims as illiterate, backwards, and hostile. Three years ago, he offered a four-week

n tolerance. Healthy relationships are painful, and that’s what love is built on.” study on Islam in his home, but a few of the participants repeatedly “slandered” Muslims and disrupted the conversation.

“Finally, I asked one to leave when she wished death on the early Muslim community,” he says. “I have not had a study since.”

Doug Pagitt, the founding pastor, says the congregation includes many schoolteachers who interact with Muslim children on a daily basis, and Palombo helps members overcome their fear of offending people who seem so different.

“Our people and a lot of urban, 21st-century people are just nervous about being cultural idiots,” Pagitt says. “You don’t want to be insensitive, and that blocks a lot of opportunities for people to connect. Matt says, ‘Get over it. You can make a mistake. There’s nothing wrong with blundering something.’ Matt’s a normal guy. He’s not a big deal.

It’s totally doable.”

Shaie says Palombo’s strength is in his simple humanity. “Regardless of where he’s from or his religion, we’re all people,” she says. “If you cut your skin, you’re going to bleed. He knows all the issues, and so he knows all the time he puts in here is worth it. It’s something that makes a difference for people.”

Palombo agrees that it’s not his expertise in philosophy and religion that enable his partnership with Muslim students but his willingness to submit to their authority.

“I am in a situation of being the minority and allowing veiled Muslim women to direct what I do, to lead me,” he says. “When you’re going to critique the Muslim world on things like equality or democracy, they trust you because you have led up to that with severe criticisms of the West.”

Palombo quickly magnifies their debate to the scale of geopolitics. “Have you ever heard people say, in a global context, that America is an irony, here? Because it heralds freedom as the most important thing, but it becomes more and more dependent, more and more of a slave to the rest of the world,” he says.

“It’s just like when a teenager becomes an adult,” says Cooper, a descendant of slaves, echoing Nadia Mohamed’s earlier critique of American autonomy. “‘Oh, I’m 18 now. I’m an adult. I’m so free.’ But then there’s rules and regulations.

You’re free, but you can’t go rob a bank. You know what I mean? Yeah, you’re free, but you’re really not free.

“Freedom is only in relation to others. It’s not separat-

Professor Matt Palombo joins his Muslim students in Friday prayer at

A different sort of freedom Minneapolis Community Technical College.

Back in his ethics class, Palombo’s Muslim influence comes through. Williams had been speaking as a young man who lost his father at 18, worked throughout his teenage ing yourself,” says Palombo. “It’s developing healthy relationyears, aspiring to a law-enforcement career and dreaming of ships with others. the financial freedom he saw in his first job as a caddy at That’s the sort of freedom Palombo strives to foster a local country club. Cooper has been speaking as a latein his classroom, his church, and his scholarship, and in comer to higher education, a waitress throughout her 20s Shaie’s dream of a Muslim community center in middle who had watched her grandmother live with dignity, working America. as a domestic servant and commuting by bus from her home in rural North Carolina. Cooper was hoping just to take care of herself and her family with a career in community health Jesse James DeConto is a writer and musician in Durham, education; Williams wants something more—the freedom to do N.C. Find more of his work at JesseJamesDeconto.com and what he wants when he wants.

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