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A LongRange Process Of Making America Muslim, All Of America Muslim

Sharifa Alkhateeb (1946–2004) was a Muslim writer, researcher and teacher on cultural communication and community building for Islam and Muslims in the United States. She was involved in feminist causes, domestic violence prevention, as well as interfaith and educational organizations. She founded the first nationwide organization for Muslim women in the US and was the first woman to receive the Community Service Award from the Islamic Society of North America.

Sharifa Alkhateeb was born on June 6, 1946 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father was Yemeni and her mother was from the Czech Republic, then part of Czechoslovakia. After finishing high school, Alkhateeb continued her education, receiving her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. During her time at the University of Pennsylvania, she joined the feminist movement of the 1960s, never feeling that there was a conflict between her religious convictions and feminism. After completion of her undergraduate degree, she earned her Master’s in Comparative Religion from Norwich University, in Northfield, Vermont and in 1977 edited a translation of the Qur’an published by Marmaduke Pickthall.

Between 1978 and 1987, Alkhateeb and her husband, Mejdi Alkhateeb, lived in Saudi Arabia, where she worked as a journalist for the Saudi Gazette and taught at both a Saudi university and in private schools. In 1988, the couple returned to the United States, locating in northern Virginia, and Alkhateeb worked as a diversity consultant with the Fairfax County Public Schools in Fairfax, Virginia, producing a television program called “Middle Eastern Parenting,” which aired from 1993 to 1997. In the early 1990s, she became managing editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS) and she co-wrote the Arab World Notebook, a social studies text used throughout the public school system in the United States. From 1989 until her death, Alkhateeb served as president of the Muslim Education Council, a regional organization focused on teaching administrators about Islamic culture.

In 1992, she founded the North American Council for Muslim Women (NACMW) and served as its first president. NACMW was the first national organization of American Muslim women. She followed up with the establishment of a consultative database for organizations addressing the needs of Muslim women and created the first crisis hotline for them. In 1995, Alkhateeb served as Chair of the Muslim Caucus at the Fourth World Conference on Women convened by the United Nations in Beijing, China. In 1998, she established the Peaceful Families Project in conjunction with the Department of Justice, to analyze violence in the Muslim community. The resulting survey, was the first nationwide inquiry on domestic violence within the community.

After the attacks of 9/11, Alkhateeb coordinated efforts of an “interfaith consortium of synagogues, churches and mosques to facilitate dialogues and understanding.” She became the Middle Eastern/Muslim Team Leader for the Community Resilience Project, which was funded by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as a crisis counseling center in Northern Virginia after the attacks. In September 2004, she received the Community Service Award from the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), becoming the first woman to ever receive the honor. One month later, on October 21, 2004 she died due to cancer of the pancreas, at her home in Ashburn, Virginia.

Since her death, several efforts continue to honor her legacy. Among these are the Peaceful Families Project, the Sharifa Alkhateeb Community Service Award given annually by the MAS Freedom Foundation, and the Sharifa Alkhateeb Memorial Scholarship of Fairfax County Public Schools.

Controversy

A C-SPAN video of Sharifa Alkhateeb speaking at the Muslim Americans Political Awareness Conference on August 5, 1989 was made public in May 2019 by conservative musician Ted Nugent who posted the video to his Facebook page, in the process misidentifying Sharifa Alkhateeb as “the new congresswoman from Michigan” — apparently having confused Sharifa Alkhateeb with Rep. Rashida Tlaib. In her address Alkhateeb said: (Emphasis Mine) has

“‘While our objective, our final objective, is not just to become part of the system that we experience now and that we see, our final objective is to create our own Islamic systems, and not only create Islamic systems for Muslims but to look at all the other people who are sharing this country with us as potential Muslims. And if we look at them as potential Muslims, and if we feel that we have the obligation, which Allah has told us, to try and bring them into the same style of thinking and the same way of behaving and the same objectives that we have then we need to have some way to communicating with them, and someway we can work with them. And in that long range process of making America Muslim, all of America Muslim, we have to have some actual short range goals. We have to have so e way of dealing with them, and know how to deal with them, and be very calculated in our approach.”

The video of Alkhateeb — a writer, scholar and founder of the North American Council for Muslim Women — is from the August 1989 Muslim Americans Political Awareness Conference. The full video of the conference is available on C-SPAN.

In the video, Alkhateeb advocates for her peers to “look at all of the other people who are sharing this country with us as potential Muslims” and refers to a “long-range process of making America Muslim, all of America Muslim.”

The video has garnered nearly 100,000 shares and 2.8 million views.

Long Range Process Of Making America Muslim, All Of America Muslim.