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UNC officials say they have not only the prerogative but the responsibility to open students' eyes to the Muslim religion and culture. Indeed, pundits here on campus say UNC's experiment should be a call to other institutions to follow suit – for the good of the country.

"The question is, what's the big role of the university here?" says Carl Ernst, the religious-studies professor who recommended the book to a selection committee of faculty, staff, and students.

this will be a first step toward understanding something important about Islamic spirituality, and to see its adherents as human beings."

the book about the "early revelations," which includes a CD of reciter prayer, delves into the mystery and poetry of the spoken Koran. It explores how the text has wended its way into the hearts of 1 billion people and deep into the framework of politics and culture in the East.

"The purpose of this book is to promote the Qur'anic message," Mr. Sells writes. "Rather, the goal is to allow those who do not have access to the Qur'an in its recited, Arabic form to encounter one of the most influential texts in all human history in a manner that is accessible."

For the parents of freshman Jennifer DeCurtis of Asheville, N.C., the choice of a book that focuses on a major world religion is appropriate – even during a war with religious overtones.

"I think it will open their thinking up to what Islam is really all about," says dad David DeCurtis. "And I think that's an appropriate role for a school like UNC."

What's more, the ACLU has vowed to oversee some of the discussion groups, which will be led by about 180 faculty volunteers who were trained this summer. School officials say the program will "pass the smell test."

John Sanders, a fellow at the conservative John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, N.C., which has long questioned a variety of university actions, says he wouldn't have a problem if the school was merely urging teenagers to read the text (quran) before they come to school. It's the requirement that rubs.

Still, Professor Fred Eckel says. "It's a positive thing to discuss issues in the Koran, and it may also further discussions that need to be going on within the Christian community."

At its heart, however, the assignment is meant to give insight into why the Koran has such a strong hold on its adherents, UNC officials say. They point out that the book also makes clear that the Koran condemns using the term jihad, or struggle, as a justification for politically based battles.

As author Sells writes: "At the day of reckoning ... meaning and justice are brought together. The Qur'an warns those who reject the day of reckoning and who are entrenched in lives of acquisition and injustice that an accounting awaits them. And in Qur'anic recitation, all Qur'anic passages on alienation between humankind and God are dominated by a tone, not of anger or wrath, but of sadness."

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A New Minority Makes Itself Known: Hispanic Muslims


	A Growing New Minority - Three Hispanic women were among the worshipers observing the end of Ramadan in Los Angeles on Sunday. By some estimates there may now be as many as 40,000 Hispanic Muslims in the United States.

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 15 — They file into the mosque when Sunday school is over and the conference rooms are cleared, staking a small piece of turf in the main hall. For many, Spanish is their only language, and this is a whole new world. They are new immigrants, new to the big city and new to Islam.

Over the last year, the Islamic Center of Southern California has been conducting these weekly 90- minute Spanish-speaking sessions for new Muslims by popular demand. Marta Galedary, who converted after immigrating here from Mexico two decades ago, has helped lead them. She finds that the group, which can include 20 to 50 people in any given week, is intensely interested and a little nervous.

"Something in these Latino meetings that we keep telling people," Ms. Galedary said, "is that you don't leave your culture because you convert to Islam. You have to continue to be proud of whatever part of Latin America you are from."

They come from all over. Each week, immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru and Costa Rica — just a handful of the countries represented — come to the Islamic Center, relieved to find that they are not alone. Far from it. In recent years, Latino Muslim groups have formed in most large cities in the United States, stretching from New York to Los Angeles. Latino Muslim groups have also formed in smaller cities with large Spanish- speaking populations, including Fresno, Calif.; Plantation, Fla.; and Somerville, N.J. Though exact figures are hard to come by, since people tend to drop in at mosques and may not appear on any membership rolls, the American Muslim Council, an advocacy group in Washington, estimates that 25,000 Hispanics in the United States are Muslims.

It is a small fraction of the nation's Muslims — estimates of the total number range from 4 million to 6 million — but a figure that appears to be growing by the year. (Several Latino Muslim organizations say the number is closer to 40,000, with the largest Hispanic Muslim communities in New York City, Southern California and Chicago, where Hispanics and Muslims are plentiful.) Indeed, Spanish-speaking immigrants, the nation's fastest-growing minority, are converting to Islam to such an extent that a national organization, the Latino American Dawah Organization, founded in 1997 by a handful of converts in New York, now claims thousands of members in 10 states.

Why Islam, a religion cloaked in mystery in Latin America — as it was in this country before Sept. 11 — is attracting so many Latino converts has several answers. For many women who attend the Islamic Center of Southern California here, the path is a relationship with a Muslim man. Many others say they chose Islam because they preferred a religion without the trappings of a vast hierarchy or the complicated dogma that they saw in the Catholic Church.

For new immigrants, Latino Muslim leaders say, the close-knit Hispanic Muslim community is also an attraction, helping Latinos understand the society as the Latinos help Muslims become more mainstream.

Religion scholars say that Islam also attracts those who prefer a more rigorous way to worship than what they find here in the modern Catholic Church.

"There are those in the Roman Catholic tradition who are somewhat discontent with the modernizing trends of the Catholic Church," said Wade Clark Roof, chairman of the religious studies department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "To those people," Mr. Roof said, "a religious tradition such as Islam, that attempts to maintain a fairly strict set of patterns and practices, becomes attractive."

For Nicole Ballivian, 27, an aspiring film producer from Falls Church, Va., whose mother is Bolivian and father Armenian, Islam was a natural progression from Catholicism.

"I loved religion," said Ms. Ballivian, who converted to Islam eight years ago in Virginia and now practices in Los Angeles. "I was very religious in Catholic high school. I told myself that I would study philosophy and religion. I remember getting in trouble in Catholic school for debating things like the concept of original sin at a really young age. When I actually studied Islam, it made it all simple."

Ms. Ballivian, who has been working on a documentary on Latino Muslims, sees two distinct groups of converts. One is composed of new immigrants, poor and usually with little education, who come to Islam out of an emotional connection. The second, she said, is made up of young, usually first-generation, middle-class, college-educated Americans of Hispanic descent who make a deliberate, well-researched conversion.

"We actually have a lot of women who convert because they're married to a Muslim," said Ms. Ballivian, who married a Palestinian Muslim two years ago.

Like Ms. Ballivian, Juan Galvan, 26, a senior at the University of Texas at Austin, came to Islam in a deliberate way. One of eight children born and raised in a strict Catholic household, he remembers never being truly comfortable with some of the church's tenets and hierarchy.

"When I was growing up in the Texas Panhandle, I read a lot, and even then I had a lot of questions," Mr. Galvan said.

"I was a very strong Catholic," he said. "I did all my sacraments and I lectured as a Eucharistic minister. But even when I was young I had a lot of problems with the Bible, ideas like original sin. So coming to Islam solved a lot of problems for me."

Three years ago, as he began seriously questioning some Catholic doctrines, he came across a man praying on campus. "I asked him his name and I could not believe it when he said his name was Armando. What was this Hispanic guy doing praying to Allah? He told me some things about Islam — how Spain had been Muslim for 700 years, how so many Spanish words had come from Arabic."

Mr. Galvan, president of the Texas chapter of the Latino American Dawah Organization — dawah, he said, means education in Arabic — has found that it is sometimes lonely being a Muslim. He connects with other Latino Muslims, including Ms. Ballivian, through e-mail and Web sites like www.latinodahwah.org. "Sometimes it feels like I am in the wilderness," he said.

For many Latino Muslims, the hardest part of converting is handling the reaction of relatives. Ms. Galedary, 45, a nurse from a particularly religious Catholic family — one of her sisters is a nun — had to convince her mother that she had not joined a cult. "I told her to ask her priest about Muslims," she said, "and she did, and he told her that it was a good religion. That's what I recommend to people — to ask their family to ask their priest, because they know since they've studied comparative religions."

Latino Muslims — before and after Sept. 11 — said they have been confronted by peers who ask how they could trade in their culture for another. "I've been asked why I adopted an Arab culture," Ms. Ballivian said. "That's just a lack of knowledge about Islam."

Even for longtime Muslims, there are challenges. Vita Abdelmohty of Miami, who goes by her Muslim name, Sister Khadija Rivera, converted to Islam in 1983 in New York City. She helped found a Latino Muslim women's organization and is preparing a radio program that will help people understand that Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity. Is is to be broadcast on a Spanish-language station in Miami.

"Islam is still a mystery to most people, and we want to reach out so people understand, especially that it is an Abrahamic religion," said Ms. Rivera, who wears the traditional Muslim head scarf. She said that like other Muslims, she has been harassed since Sept. 11. "I was insulted in the supermarket, on the street. I would be waiting for a bus and people would see me and just yell obscenities. I have had dirty looks from Latino people, too."

Ms. Rivera, like many others who came to Islam from a Catholic background, said that as a girl she was not always comfortable with the teachings of the church.

"I always wanted to read the Bible and learn more, but it was all about the catechism," she said. "You just have to believe it, not understand it. For me, Islam gave me answers, made sense."

Islamic convert says Quran offers 'strong challenges'

Texas native tells WVU audience to keep an open mind and heart

Even with his cleric's beard and more than passable Arabic, Sheikh Yusuf Estes still looks like a fun-loving guy from Texas.

That's because he is a fun-loving guy from Houston -- one who just happened to embrace the Muslim faith 11 years ago, capping off a life that included stints as a laborer at NASA, the owner-operator of a chain of successful music stores in the Southwest a nd a prison chaplain (of the Christian variety).

Estes ambled into WVU's Clark Hall on Wednesday night to talk about Islam as part of the university's "Discover Islam Week," presented by the Muslim Students' Association on campus.

He even recorded his remarks for broadcast on his "Islam Today" radio show, which airs every Friday at 2 p.m. on the Washington, D.C.-based Islamic Broadcast Network, which was launched in January 2001.

The title of his talk, "Islam and the Final Revelation," was weighty enough, but Estes managed to have fun with his remarks -- without losing the reverence of the faith that the self-described "good ol' boy from Texas" converted -- or "reverted" to, as the Quran says -- in 1991.

Before the 120 or so people who had filed into a classroom on the first floor of the building that houses the chemistry department, he held both the Quran and the Bible, and quoted freely from both.

Sometimes he talked about Allah, sometimes God. No matter, he said. They're both one and the same. And just as Christianity is built on the tenets of unconditional love and faith in God, so too is Islam, he said.

And while he was able to offer detailed interpretation of the Quran, he didn't always speak like a scholar. He spoke like a human being trying to make sense of it all.

Islam isn't a religion of murderers and terrorists, he said. It's a gentle, loving faith, even if the Quran does deliver some "pretty strong challenges," he said.

"God is saying, in effect, 'I created you to worship me alone, no more, no less,'" Estes said. "That's the purpose of life right there. The Quran is making some strong challenges. If you really recognize that there's a God, why not do what he asks?"

For the non-Muslims in the audience, Estes said to keep an open mind and heart, while also reading a good English translation of the Quran.

Take some time, he said, and reflect and pray.

And realize you aren't perfect, he said, especially in a post-Sept. 11 world, where distrust, hatred and violence against others runs rampant.

"As we go through life we're going to make mistakes," he said. "There's always going to be lying, cheating, stealing and killing. You can't undo things, but you can stop, can't you?"

"Discover Islam Week" concludes today with a 7 p.m. lecture in Hodges Hall, Room 259 by Dr. Ahmed Saifuddien: "The Image of Muslims in the U.S. Media."

Muslim women regaining voices

WVU speaker traces oppression in Islamic and Western cultures

Danya Welmon, a Syracuse, N.Y., resident who converted to Islam in 1992, compared the state of Western and Islamic women Sunday to kick off WVU's "Discover Islam Week."

Danya Welmon grew up in a household where her parents showed her the Christian way in the 1950s and '60s.

Through much of her life, Welmon studied the Bible and taught Bible classes at a Methodist church.

On Sunday night, however, the Syracuse, N.Y., resident stood before a small audience at the WVU Gluck Theatre in a hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women, including a veil that only exposed Welmon's eyes.

Welmon offered her views during a lecture, "The State of Women in Western Civilization versus Islam," in the first night of "Discover Islam Week," sponsored by the WVU Muslim Students' Association.

Welmon, who converted to Islam in 1992 (her husband and three children converted shortly thereafter), compared women's roles in both cultures and poked some holes in stereotypes about female oppression in Islam.

"How many people have looked at a Muslim woman and thought, 'That poor, oppressed woman. I feel sorry for her,'" Welmon asked the audience Sunday. "I thought that 10 years ago. Then I knew nothing about Islam. I was totally wrong."

Welmon, who's spent more of her life as a Westerner, said that three concepts have shaped the Western woman -- Greek/Roman ideology, Christian faith and the feminist movement.

"Aristotle and Plato first debated if women were even human," Welmon said. "Women in these cultures were looked down upon and these ideas were carried into the early Christian tradition. I grew up as a Christian and I can remember Bible verses that were negative toward women."

But in the 1900s, women organized efforts to free themselves, Welmon said. Gender roles today can be interchangeable.

"Western women have gone from one extreme to another, where they have some rights, but have lost their personal identity," she said.

During Islam's "Golden Age" (the sixth-12th centuries), women enjoyed the same rights as men.

"(Muslim) women excelled in all areas like math, astronomy, religion and medicine, unlike their counterparts in Europe at the time," said Welmon, a medical technologist.

Welmon said more people correctly interpreted the Quran during this era. It states that men and women should not submit to one another, but submit equally to God, she said.

After the 12th century, changes in Islamic leadership led to the downfall of female equality, Welmon said. Now Muslim women are engaged in a "reform period," as their voices re-emerge.

But women have a long way to go, Welmon said. Women will not have equal rights "until Muslim societies go back to the true teachings of Islam."

Though she admits that the state of women in Islam is far from perfect, Welmon said that the Western media helps little by skewing the public's perception.

"The Western media latched on a few unjust countries and branded Islam as a backward religion," Welmon said.

Welmon claimed that "Islam is the only religion that gave women rights."

Studying for a bachelor's degree in Islam, Welmon came under fire from a few audience members when she said that Western women are more prone to rape, sexual harassment, "latchkey kids," AIDS and pregnancy.

"Rape is a crime of violence," one attendee said. "Your garb will not protect you from a rape."

Welmon said the veil provides a Muslim woman with modesty, honor and integrity.

She became intrigued by the religion while working for a Muslim doctor.

"I was impressed that he would stop five times a day to pray and showed a great deal of respect for everyone," Welmon said. "I asked him about his religion and he gave me some books. I got answers to my questions that no one else was able to answer. Islam answered questions for me, and then reason and heart came together in harmony."

Discover Islam Week continues at 7 p.m. Tuesday with "The Concept of Jihad in Islam," at Room G21, White Hall.