The organizers of an international conference on violence, peace and religion set the tone of their recent meeting well in advance, when they chose the location: Oswiecim, Poland, or as it was known when it was the site of a Nazi death camp, Auschwitz.
The setting conjured up the ancient hatreds of Christians and Jews, the modern horror of the Holocaust, and the recent attempts of the Roman Catholic Church to address its role during World War II and its responsibilities now.
So what was African-American Muslim leader Wallace Deen Mohammed doing there?
“When I got there, I was kind of wondering too,” Mohammed said last week, after he returned to Chicago from an extended trip abroad. “But as a Muslim I felt very comfortable there.”
The fact that interfaith dialogue–a phrase that for so long meant Christians talking with Jews–is now frequently trialogue or multilogue says something about how serious its promoters are in their quest for understanding. Scholar Martin Marty, the other Chicagoan at the Oswiecim conference wrote that the presence of Muslims there offered proof of progress in itself.
The fact that African-American Muslims, converts who were not quickly embraced by the wider Islamic world, now sit at that table speaks further about the barriers that have fallen.
The conference was sponsored by the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding, at Sacred Heart University, in Fairfield, Conn. It was attended by 32 religious leaders and scholars from around the world.
But Wallace Mohammed’s trip says more about him and the movement he leads than it does about his hosts. Wallace Mohammed was the son of Elijah Mohammed, founder of the Nation of Islam, an American religion that mixed
some tenets of Islam with a new, exclusionary theology based on race. Wallace Mohammed chafed at those beliefs.
“It was the universal message of Islam that caught my attention even when I was a teenager,” he recalls. “That was what I wanted in my heart–not to work with a few people, but to help all mankind.”
As he grew, he preached that message occasionally within the Nation of Islam. Then, when his father died, he decided to become an orthodox, Sunni Muslim. Louis Farrakhan ended up with the name Nation of Islam and the racist theology, but Wallace Mohammed ended up with most of the following, which quietly created a new world of Islam in America during the 1970s and 1980s.
African-American Islam naturally focused inward during its early years, learning the faith and establishing the community. Moreover, since most convert Muslims were working-class people, there was not a lot of time beyond worship and feeding the family to do outreach work.
But Mohammed never lost his universal outlook. He began to take part in interfaith dialogue in the United States, and he soon moved to the world stage. In 1996, he met with Pope John Paul II.
Now he finds himself preaching in three directions. To his own followers, he continually talks about the need to become part of a broader world.
“The great majority have accepted universal Islam and are very happy and relieved that the burden (of isolation) has been lifted,” he said. “We do have among our leaders a troubling number of them who are foot-dragging, but I hope we will have more fresh minds coming into leadership positions. I try to allay their fears.”
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To the rest of the Islamic world, he tries to convey a sense of Islam’s historic openness and peacefulness, traits he believes were badly eroded by the Crusades and Christian-Muslim tensions in the centuries that followed.
“Some leaders have a view that Islam is to conquer all other religions. That’s what those bad instances in our history breed,” he said. “But that’s what’s causing some Muslims to miss the real beauty of Islam, which is its universality.”
And to other faiths, he talks about the need to hold onto what they share, even as they pick through the issues that divide them. That is what he told the religious leaders in Oswiecim.
“The mission of the major religions– Judaism, Christianity, Islam–is very much the same on this Earth: obedience to God, an ethical and moral society, sacrifice for others,” he said.
“I spoke on our differences and how our differences can be accepted and appreciated if we also understand our oneness. Our oneness is that we are all human beings, people of faith believing in one God.”
Wallace Mohammed had never been to Auschwitz before last month. Its history and people are a world away from his. But he already understood the message of the place.
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