Imam Seeks ‘Real Connections’

Poised to become the leader of the city’s most prestigious mosque, Shamsi Ali presses interfaith dialogue.

Imam Shamsi Ali: High marks from Jewish leaders.

by Walter Ruby
Special To The Jewish Week

The times appear to be a-changin’ at New York’s largest and most prestigious mosque, the green-domed Islamic Cultural Center of New York, located at 96th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the then-imam of the mosque, Muhammad Al-Gamei’a, lost his position there after stating in an interview that the Jews were responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and guilty of disseminating “heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism and drugs.”
Gamei’a’s successor as imam, the Palestinian-born Omar Abu Namous, was considerably more conciliatory, initiating a public dialogue with Rabbi Marc Schneier of the New York Synagogue and joining together with Rabbi Schneier and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons in sponsoring the first National Summit of Imams and Rabbis last November. Yet

Imam Abu Namous also jarred Jewish sensibilities in his first public dialogue with Rabbi Schneier by declaring that a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was preferable to a two-state one.
By comparison, the mosque’s present interim imam, Mohammed Shamsi Ali, declared in a dialogue with Rabbi Schneier at the New York Synagogue earlier this month that it “cannot be accepted to deny the existence of Israel” or to deny the Holocaust. Appearing last week at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Imam Ali delivered a special sermon during Mincha services in which he urged Jews and Muslims to revisit “problematic” passages in the Koran and Torah. Those passages buttress bellicose stances against other religions by understanding them as having been written in earlier times, and not necessarily relevant to today’s world.
Imam Ali also urged his listeners to “look beyond what is presented in the media” about Jewish-Muslim relations in order to create “real connections” based on trust and affection. “Once you get to know Muslims,” he said, “you will ask them, ‘Are you really the people I see portrayed [negatively] on Fox News?’”
Key Muslim leaders in New York praise the Indonesian-born Ali as a charismatic and compassionate leader whose embrace of interfaith dialogue represents “mainstream” opinion within the Muslim community.
Yet everyone seems aware that a test of the viability of Shamsi Ali’s moderate line within the Muslim community will come in September when the Islamic Cultural Center’s Board of Trustees, headed by the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United Nations, Abdullah Al-Murad, and including the UN ambassadors of many other Islamic countries, will vote on whether to hire Ali as the mosque’s full-time imam. (The Kuwaiti Ambassador holds pride of place on the board of trustees because his mission covers the lion’s share of the Islamic Cultural Center’s operating budget today. The mosque itself was built during the 1980s with funds provided by the UN missions of Muslim countries.)
According to Khurshid Khan, president of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), one of the most prominent American Muslim organizations, “Imam Shamsi Ali is very well known in the Muslim community as an advocate of interfaith dialogue, so if he is appointed [permanent] imam at the Islamic Cultural Center that will be a clear indication that the board wants to promote dialogue.”
Khan, who calls Imam Ali, “one of our community’s top leaders” and a knowledgeable imam who takes a balanced and truly Islamic approach,” acknowledged, “There are definitely Muslims who don’t like the direction he is taking. Yet it seems to me they are not the people who count in the community, since, if they were, [Ali] wouldn’t be as successful in his work as he has been.”
The 40-year-old Ali has certainly risen rapidly since arriving in New York in 1996. Born on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, Ali is said to have memorized the entire Koran by the time he was 11 and received a scholarship to study at an Islamic university in Pakistan before taking a teaching position at the Islamic Educational Foundation in Saudi Arabia. Yet in an interview, Imam Ali, a slight, soft-voiced man with a gentle air that belies his ability to mesmerize listeners with sermons in fluent, lightly accented English, said he decided to leave Saudi Arabia and come to New York to serve as imam of the small Indonesian Cultural Center in Astoria, Queens.
“I didn’t feel I had the freedom to speak my heart and mind [in Saudi Arabia],” he said. “While America is not a Muslim nation, we can practice Islam more freely here. My vision of Islam has always been a tolerant and inclusive one.”
Imam Ali first received notice in the wider community in 2001 when he was selected as the Muslim representative to speak at a memorial service for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, reading reflections from the Koran on human tragedy, brotherhood and peace. That year he became an assistant imam at the Islamic Cultural Center, and in 2004 he cemented his position as perhaps the busiest imam in New York by signing on as imam at the Jamaica Islamic Center in Queens, while retaining his positions at the other two mosques. In 2006, Imam Ali was the only Muslim figure cited by New York magazine in a 2006 article that profiled the most influential religious figures in the city.
Despite his seeming heavy workload, Imam Ali finds the time to give guest Friday sermons at other prestigious religious centers like the Islamic Center of Long Island (ICLI) in Westbury. Its president, Habeeb Ahmad, said, “Shamsi Ali is much in demand for Friday sermons because he is a serious scholar who always backs up his arguments with Koranic citations. His positions are very moderate and acceptable to everyone.”
Well, not everyone. A shadowy Queens-based militant group known as the Islamic Thinkers Society has attacked Imam Ali on its Web site as an “FBI mouthpiece” and “moderate Uncle Sam Muslim” who has corrupted young people at his mosque in Jamaica by allowing them to have “access to guitars and drums.”
Imam Ali said that the group attacks him “for giving Muslim youth good values,” and he makes no apology for his cooperation with the FBI and New York City police. “We understand the job of law enforcement [in the post-9/11 situation),” he said. “I myself have said publicly that if anyone [in the Muslim community] sees something suspicious, he has an obligation to report it to the police. At the same time, law enforcement must be careful not to overreact and create a situation where there is an interruption of basic American values when it applies to Muslims.”
Over the last several years, Imam Ali has focused much attention on opening interfaith dialogues with Christian bodies like the National Council of Churches as well as Jewish ones like Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and JTS. Recalling a recent two-day program of “dialogue, religious community, and interfaith learning” between students from HUC-JIR and the 96th Street Mosque, HUC-JIR Vice President Rabbi Aaron Panken said, “It was a wonderful opportunity for students from both sides to learn from each other and to realize the many similarities in prayer and textual teachings between Judaism and Islam.”
Rabbi Panken said Imam Ali comes across as “a warm and genuine religious leader who is doing a lot to create opportunities for friendly and thoughtful dialogue between Muslims and Jews.”
Rabbi Burton Visotsky, a professor of midrash and interfaith studies at JTS who welcomed Ali to that institution before his sermon last week, remarked, “Shamsi Ali speaks to the Jewish community in a frank and straightforward manner, saying that while it is true that we have differences on the Middle East, we also have many strands in common and much we can do together. He and I see the world in very similar way.”
Rabbi Visotsky said that JTS and the 96th Street Mosque have agreed to a joint social action program that will include students from both institutions volunteering together in a soup kitchen at the Broadway Presbyterian Church near Columbia University.
For his part, Imam Ali believes that American Jews and Muslims should build a relationship “that is more influenced by religious commonalities than by political differences. We cannot deny the emotional impact of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, yet we need to ensure that our relationship is not determined only by that.” He added, “We also should remember that there have been bright times in our relationship as well, such as the cooperation between Muslims and Jews in Andalusia during the Middle Ages.”
Asked whether his interfaith outreach efforts are a tactical campaign to improve the image of Muslims in New York, Imam Ali responded, “No, I don’t see interfaith outreach as a tactic, but rather as an Islamic mission, something that is just and right.
“It is true that there are some people in my community who look at my efforts with suspicion, but a lot of members [of the Islamic Cultural Center] are very supportive. They believe that this is a time when Muslims must open to other faiths.”
Asked if he is concerned that his interfaith activities might influence the board of trustees of the Islamic Cultural Center not to appoint him as permanent imam of New York’s most important mosque when they meet in September, Imam Ali replied, “I have faith in the path I have chosen and will continue to follow it whether or not I am chosen as imam.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization