Students Learn About the Diversity of Local Islamic Life
Service-learning class connects students to the local Islamic community

By James Todd

Friday, May 13, 2005 -- On a recent Saturday morning, sophomore Jordan Kyle drove to a health fair in Raleigh, where she signed in people who wanted to get their cholesterol and blood sugar levels checked.

The procedure for processing patients was a typical one, except for one wrinkle: In observance of an Islamic custom, men and women waited in separate lines to be seen by a nurse of the same gender.

That was one of the few clues that the health fair was sponsored by the Raleigh Islamic Center; the other, more obvious one, was that nearly all of the women wore head scarves or veils.

Kyle was volunteering at this Muslim health fair as part of the "Local Islams" course she is taking this semester with Ellen McLarney, assistant professor of the practice of Asian and African languages and literature. In addition to regular reading and writing assignments, students in this class take field trips to local Islamic centers, mosques and schools, volunteer with one of these community groups and complete field research projects.

"One of the reasons I wanted to teach [the course] this way is because people’s sense of Islam is so abstract," McLarney said. "I wanted [the students] to have an opportunity to interact with ... Muslims as human beings, as neighbors, as fellow citizens, as ... a large component of contemporary American culture -- and one of which I think a lot of people are unaware."

McLarney is assisted in the course by Nasser Isleem, a fellow Arabic instructor at Duke who also teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill and Meredith College. Originally from Palestine, Isleem has lived in the Triangle since 1992 and is the former principal of Raleigh’s Al-Iman School. He acts as a liaison between the class and the local Muslim community.

McLarney said she is able to teach the course because Duke’s home city of Durham, along with the surrounding cities of Raleigh and Chapel Hill, have a Muslim population sufficiently diverse to illustrate much of the practice, belief and culture of Islam. With about 5,000 adherents in the area, the main strains of Islam are represented: Sunni, Shia, Sufi and Nation of Islam, as well as the traditionalist Salafi movement.

McLarney asks students to research aspects of Muslim life that are distinctive from mainstream American culture. She encourages students to submit their findings to The Pluralism Project, an initiative at Harvard University to document religious diversity in America.

For one assignment, Kyle visited a used car dealership in Raleigh run by Omar Asharkasi, a Muslim man from Jordan. Kyle wrote about how the business seeks to honor the Islamic proscription against charging interest. "Classic Performance Auto offers a financing option for customers without interest," she wrote. "This allows customers to pay for their cars at a fixed monthly payment, but the total of all the monthly payments must equal the price of the car as marked on the lot."

Two other students in the class, Cate Mills and Valerie Varnell, joined with three Muslim students at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health to investigate the possibility of opening a health clinic for Muslim women. Mills, a graduate student in religion, and Varnell, a sophomore, researched existing women’s health services in the area and presented the idea to at least three Islamic community groups to solicit feedback.

"It’s not totally different than what all women want" from a health clinic, Varnell said about the requests they heard. However, a few features would distinguish a Muslim women’s health clinic: the staff would be all female, a small room would be set aside for keeping the five daily Muslim prayer times and no one would seem out of place wearing a head scarf.

The class has discovered other practices that distinguish the Muslim community: adherents are buried -- after their corpses are ritually washed and without a casket or being embalmed -- on their right side, facing Mecca. Islam also has dietary rules called "Halal," similar to Jewish Kosher laws, that prescribe how animals should be slaughtered and what meats are forbidden, such as pork (stores in Raleigh and Cary sell Halal meat).

Seeing the Muslim community from the inside, students said they have been struck by its diversity.

In public discourse, Kyle said, "We focus a lot on interfaith dialogue but don’t really pay attention to the discussion within a religion, like Islam." For example, she said, "There are a lot of different viewpoints about whether women should veil even within a mosque."

Isleem, the Arabic professor who has made many of the introductions to Muslim groups, said he has been pleased to see students finding the local Islamic community welcoming.

"I believe that [the students] have seen the other side that Muslims are open to others," he said. For instance, he said, some students were surprised to learn that the Islamic Al-Iman School in Raleigh has non-Muslim as well as Muslim teachers.

McLarney said her approach to teaching the course is a natural outgrowth of her own education, which included study in Tunisia, Egypt and Jerusalem, as well as two years of Peace Corps service in Morocco.

"I really learned Arabic in Morocco, and it’s become my career," she said. "And I felt like similarly they could really learn about Islam by interacting with the Muslim community.

"I think as a teacher you end up teaching how you learned -- for better or worse."