Muslims in Alaska

[kaima]

".... an active leader in Anchorage’s Muslim community. He said that Alaska is the most accepting state in this country of Muslims.

“People are independent thinkers here,” he said in between some bites of food he took to break his fast. “The same feel for this place is like the pioneering spirit of the 1800s, everybody comes here with a story. There’s no tribal mentality here because everyone can appreciate where you’re coming from.” "

No Mosque?

My journey to Anchorage began in early July. I attended the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention in Chicago, where I met Lamin Jobarteh, another stalwart of the community. I told him about the 30 Mosques roadtrip and stayed in touch with him since then to facilitate the visit. He told me there’s not a single mosque in the entire state and I was eager to learn what life is like without one.

Lamin has lived in Anchorage for about 17 years. He runs a halal meat shop in the city and described what life was like back then as he prepares a gyro sandwich for a customer.

“In the Muslim community, you could count each other,” he said . “There had to be less than 100 people.”

Now the community is rapidly growing. New opportunities in fishing and the oil industries have rapidly grown the Muslim community in recent years from 100 to around 3,000 today. The community rents out a storefront for prayer space as they try to build a mosque. It’s been a struggle though.Why? The desire is there but apparently there aren’t many wealthy Muslim doctors/lawyers/engineers (basically the major three stereotypes for most Muslim) to finance the project, Lamin said. I had to do a double take when he told me that, not many Muslim doctors, lawyers and engineers?

Can’t Fight the Moonlight



Lamin hails from the African nation of Gambia. Beneath his mustache is his subtle smile that oozes comfort when you’re in his presence.
I picked his brain with more questions I was dying to find the answers to. Muslims determine their prayer and fasting schedules based on the positions of the sun and moon. Since it seems like the sun is shining constantly during the summertime in Alaska, how on Earth do they figure out how to fast?

The answer isn’t so simple because there are two answers to this that are both right. During Ramadan, there are some Muslims in this community that fast according to Alaska’s local time, meaning a fast from sunrise to sunset could be anywhere from 19-22 hours. But most Muslims here follow Saudi Arabia’s schedule, which has prayer and fast times that are reasonably spaced apart like the rest of the U.S. I was curious to see what it was like to do a 20-21 hour fast so I decided to pray and fast according to local time. So as everyone was breaking their fast at the mosque Monday at around 7 p.m., I sat in the corner staring at the clock knowing I had at least 4-5 hours to go before it was time for me to do the same.

But going without food is no big deal for me. What was tougher was how alone I felt in such a welcoming gathering. Not only could I not enjoy the food prepared by the people here, I sat in the back of the room as everyone prayed shortly after because technically it wasn’t time locally for me.

I kicked back with a man named Reggie, an African American man who embraced Islam recently while stationed at a military base here.

Last year was his first time fasting and decided to follow local time.”It was brutal,” he said as he shook his head with a chuckle.

I told Reggie going the extra hours without food wasn’t the tough part for me. It was sitting there and not being able to pray alongside my fellow brothers and sisters. I felt like a little kid at a birthday party that was sitting at the table by himself while everyone else was having a blast beating up a pinata.

“Man, I feel you,” he said. “Last year I had to do the same thing. I’d sit back and just wait as I watched everyone eat their food and pray. I ended up just going home each time to do my prayers. It just didn’t feel like I was getting the whole Ramadan experience.”

Lamin said the whole local vs. Saudi time could have potentially been a divisive issue in the community but he and several other leaders were careful not to let that be the case.

“We are not stopping anybody that comes to the mosque to do (prayer),” he said. “The door is always open, no matter what time you want to do the prayer or the fast.”

I don’t want to dwell on this whole prayer/fasting time thing too much, but it is something that I haven’t really seen before in any community. It gets better though. To determine the beginning and end of Ramadan, it is required to spot the moon, whether it be spotted in the local community or on a broader geographical area done by ISNA or Saudi Arabia. What’s interesting to me is the people who pray and fast according to local time, have no problem determining the start/end of Ramadan by having ISNA or Saudi Arabia spot the moon.

The full story is at
30mosques.com/2011/08/yes-there-are-muslims-in-alaska/

[kaima]

Alaska's first Muslim Halal grocery opens in Midtown
ISLAMIC DIETARY LAW: Butchers follow strict Quaranic guidelines.

The Associated Press

(01/19/10 15:42:51)

On an icy winter day when the sun barely rose higher than the peaks of the Chugach Mountains, one store in a strip mall near the airport was abuzz with activity. The hand-lettered cardboard sign outside told the story: Alaska's First Halal Grocery.

Inside, owner Lamin Jobarteh was pricing bottles of bright orange palm oil, a product he was sure would fly off the shelves as soon as he called the Nigerians in town to let them know it had arrived. A group of Somali women in brightly colored head scarves looked through a gleaming white freezer for cubed bone-in goat meat.

Anchorage is now home to nearly 4,000 Muslims, up from a hundred or so when Jobarteh, who hails from the West African nation of Gambia, arrived in Alaska to attend graduate school in the 1990s.

For years, he watched as the growing community ordered bulk shipments of Halal meat and specialty groceries from Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, the nearest cities where they were available.

"I've seen the demand for a long time," he said. "Muslim people cannot live without Halal food, and it's expensive to ship it up."

Halal, meaning "lawful" or "permissible" in Arabic, is a term for food that is prepared according to Islamic dietary law. Animals must be slaughtered following Quranic guidelines and in the name of Allah.

In December, Jobarteh left his career as a business banker to open Alaska Halal Grocery at 401 W. International Road, No. 23.

The white-walled shop carries familiar products like Cheetos and Heinz ketchup, but also sells roti bread, fufu flour (a West African cassava-based staple used to make a starchy, dumpling-like dish), and soft Indian paneer cheese. You can get whole cardamom pods and spices for Bombay biryani, a famed Indian dish, along with a Big Texas brand cinnamon roll or a root beer.

Aside from the stocked goods, Jobarteh drives to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough to preside over the Islamically correct butchering of animals at a slaughterhouse in Palmer once a week or so. His shop features a gleaming stainless steel kitchen in the back room where he can prepare custom orders of meat for families.

"I had no experience in butchering or being a grocer before," Jobarteh says. "This is all a new skill for me."

MOSQUE PLANNED

Anchorage's Muslim community is growing in number as well as visibility, said Regina Boisclair, the Cardinal Newman Chair of Catholic Theology at Alaska Pacific University. She has tracked religious diversity in Anchorage for years.

Thirteen years ago, the community was small and fractured into two factions that were barely speaking to each other. But in the past few years, the Muslim community has gained strong leadership and has "come into its own."

Across the parking lot from Alaska Halal Grocery is the Islamic Community Center of Anchorage, a small rented space where prayer services, classes and lectures are held.

That won't be home for long, Jobarteh says.

In 2007, the community paid $600,000 for a 70-acre parcel in South Anchorage on which they plan to build the state's first mosque. They raised nearly $1 million from their own community and other U.S. groups -- some were surprised to hear there were any Muslims in Alaska.

They plan to break ground on the first phase of the planned mosque, school and educational center this summer, an effort that received attention on international news network Al-Jazeera.

Boisclair says the Halal grocery store and the planned mosque "will solidify the community."

WELCOMING TOWN

Alaska's isolation leads to diversity you might not find in other communities, Jobarteh said. The Anchorage masjid, or place of worship, draws people with roots in Albania, Somalia, Gambia, Mali, Pakistan, Palestine, Bangladesh, American converts and others.

"In other places you'd have a Somalian masjid, a Pakistani masjid, and on and on," he said.

Jobarteh, who left Gambia after a military coup destabilized the country, said Alaska Muslims -- some resettled by refugee programs, some drawn to high-paying science and engineering jobs -- have one thing in common: They want to raise families in a safe, free place.

For many of the Alaska Halal Groceries customers, who have left places with oppressive regimes, Alaska is a breath of fresh, cold air.

Along with a sense of safety, Jobarteh said that Alaska Muslims have been largely welcomed by the community at large, a situation that hasn't always been the case for some members who've lived in other American cities post-9-11. Alaskans seem to value a live-and-let-live approach, Jobarteh said, and that includes religious tolerance.

More visible signs of the growing Muslim community -- like the construction of the new mosque -- could test that tolerance. Jobarteh saidthe community plans to be proactive: Part of the long-range plan for the mosque is to build a community education center where non-Muslim Anchorage residents, especially soldiers from the two military bases in town that frequently deploy to Muslim countries, can learn about Islam.

"No place is perfect, but you can be safe and comfortable and raise your family here," Jobarteh said. "You can express yourself."

[kaima]

Arctic
Midnight sun makes Ramadan fasting difficult for Arctic Muslims

Friday sees the arrival of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, when Moslems are supposed to fast from sunrise to sunset.

But that's a bit difficult up in the North.

There are at least half a million Moslems in Sweden, and one of the five pillars of their religion Islam is the daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

Observers are not allowed to eat, or to drink, even water, between sunrise and sunset.

Ramadan shifts every year, moving about 11 days earlier, and this year it starts on July 20th. In the Middle East, where Islam arose, the hours of daylight don't change that much during the course of the year. But it's a completely different story up here in the North.
Living above the Arctic Circle

In Mecca on Friday people will be fasting between around 6:00 AM and 7:00 PM. Compare that to Kiruna, a Swedish city above the Arctic Circle, where the sun is going to go up on Friday around quarter to two in the morning, and won't set until after 11:30 PM.

Some kind of adjustment is needed, but opinions vary among the learned in the Islamic world. Some say that everyone should use Mecca time, but others disagree.

Amer Alramahi lives in the city of Luleå, which like Kiruna is above the Arctic Circle. He tell us that, like many other Moslems up there, he'll follow sunrise/sunset times from farther south.

"I'll follow the times in Stockholm or Uppsala", he says, "where there's more time to get enough energy and nutrition. So I'll be breaking my fast at around 9:30 PM."

Mohamed Amri, an imam up there in Luleå, follows the guidance of an international meeting held every year in Europe.

There, he tells us, it says clearly you should follow the times in the closest city where you can see a difference between day and night.
Different solutions

The problem is working out what city you should use. In Luleå, they look to southern Swedish cities like Stockholm and Uppsala. But in the town of Boden, which is even farther north than Luleå, local resident Abdel Ahmania tells us, they choose the times in the city of Malmö, which just about as far south as you can get in Sweden.

"We had no choice than to use Malmö time, he says. What are we supposed to do? In July the sun really never sets here, it goes down and comes up a quarter of an hour later. What can we do?"

Omar Mustafa, the head of the Swedish Islamic Association, says different imams and institutions have come up with varying solutions to the problem, and it's being discussed within the European Council for Fatwa and Research.

But Professor Jan Hjärpe, perhaps Sweden's foremost expert in Islamic Studies, says he doesn't think that even the most learned within Islam can reach agreement on the issue. He says a tradition is going to be developed on its own up here in the North, as people influence each other and arrive at some kind of consensus.

Amer Alramahi up in Luleå points out that the most important thing for believers is not what times they fast, but why they are doing so.

"You have to understand the meaning of the fast, he says, that it is to get us to think about others who are suffering."

This story is posted on Alaska Dispatch as part of Eye on the Arctic, a collaborative partnership between public and private circumpolar media organizations.

www.alaskadispatch.com/article/midnight-sun-makes-ramadan-fasting-difficult-arctic-muslims

[RabiaMuweis]

Thank you for this topic,to define the Muslims of Alaska.

I don't know if in some countries mosques Pakistanis or Somalis or ......any , but as far as I know, I live in a multinational country, and there is no mosques for people of a particular nationality, there's only mosque comes every people of every nationality, really did not hear about mosques belonging to particular nationality!!!

I would like to post this article is about the meaning of fasting in Ramadan :

During the month of Ramadan, the believers learn to curb their desires and check them against transgression, extravagance, and the yielding to the lower desires, all of which degenerate man and bring him to the pit of self-destruction and annihilation. Fast fosters a strong will, teaches patience and self-discipline, the ability to bear hardship and tolerate hunger and thirst. In short, it brings about a clear victory over one's illicit desires and selfish impulses. It regulates and systemizes the energies of instincts. It trains the body to submit to lofty spiritual impulses. It safeguards the body's health by protecting it against extravagance. It grants its organs a respite so that they may be ready to resume their activities. As medical science has proved, it is a medicine for many bodily and nervous ailments. It is a moral education, a nourishment of supreme virtues. It teaches the believer to abandon vices, to control emotions and instincts, to curb the tongue against saying what is wrong or inappropriate and the conscience against contemplating upon wrongdoing or subversion. It promotes the spirit of unity among members of the fasting commu- nity; it teaches them humility and humbleness and instills within them the feeling of equality before Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. The rich have to observe it as well as the poor, the women as well as the men, the influential and powerful as well as the weak and downtrodden: they all have to observe the fast. It promotes the spirit of charity and compassion towards the poor and the needy, and it reminds each believer of the needs of other believers. Muslims share with each other Allah's blessings unto them. The believers strengthen their ties with the Almighty, since they express through fast a continuous desire to obey His Will and carry out His commandments. They also strengthen their ties with one another, since the month of Ramadan is the month of giving. It is the month for productive social inter- activity. Islam places a great deal of emphasis on moral excellence during this holy month. The holy Prophet of Islam (pbuh) has said,
One who, while fasting, neither guards his tongue from telling lies nor refrains from doing bad deeds does not respect his fast, while Allah does not approve of mere abstention from food... When you fast, you should not speak ill of anybody, nor should you be boisterous or noisy. If anybody speaks ill of you or tries to pick a quarrel with you, do not respond to him in the same manner; rather, simply tell him that you are fasting.

www.al-islam.org/beliefs/practices/fasting/4.html.