As we navigate this time of heightened bigotry and tensions, there is a bright spot: Muslims and Jews are growing closer and finding new avenues for interfaith exchanges and new ways to support one another. At Cordoba House, we believe these exchanges are very important!
New Study Shows that University Students Are Interested in Interfaith Engagement
A new study on religious expression and interfaith engagement in higher education reveals that first year college students enter university with high expectations about religious tolerance and dialogue, but are often disappointed by the opportunities and level of openness present at their universities.
Macy’s Introduces a New Muslim Clothing Line
In a nod to diversity, Macy’s will introduce a new clothing line aimed at Muslim women. The new brand, called the Verona Collection, launches on February 15 and will feature more modest clothing options, including fashionable hijabs. The launch of the Verona Collection comes at a time when more clothing brands are seeing the value of offering options to Muslim shoppers, such as Nike, which introduced its sports hijab late last year.
The First East End Temple Khutbah
On Friday, February 9, 2018, Imam Feisal delivered his first khutbah at the East End Temple (EET), which has begun hosting Cordoba House Jumu’ah prayers. Cordoba House is actively seeking new khatib participants for this weekly program. The February service followed a class the previous evening at the Temple, taught by Imam Feisal and EET’s spiritual leader Rabbi Josh Stanton, on Jewish-Muslim relations. The rabbi and other members of the synagogue community attended the Jumu’ah service.
Imam Feisal spoke from his vision of a new, multi-faith community of God-believers that promises to emerge from the EET Jumu’ah services. To start, it will be a community of Muslims and Jews. Accordingly, the khutbah embraced both Jews and Muslims in its address, and its call to assimilate into ourselves the presence of God. Cordoba would like to encourage members of the Interfaith community to participate in future Jumu’ah services.
Imam Feisal quoted a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad in which he analogized prayer to bathing in a clear stream: imagine how clean we would be if we bathed five times a day! Similarly, if we bring our full attention to our prayers, we rid ourselves of spiritual stain. Or rather, we make of our prayers a means for God to purify us.
In the end, Imam Feisal reflected, everything comes from God, even our acts. We select from a menu of acts that God supplies. Once we’ve chosen, God energizes those acts into being. It’s really a partnership. And it goes the other way, too. God states in the Quran that He and the angels perform salah on the Prophet, and commands us to also do salah on the Prophet. When we pray, we’re adding our prayer to theirs, since the salah on the Prophet is part of the five-time daily prayer. God also states in the Quran that when we hymn His praises, He does salah on us to exit us out of darkness into light.
Muhammad himself models for our new, multi-faith community. Beyond being Muslim, we’re called to be muminun—believers. That means we’re committed to having iman—faith—in our hearts. And out of faith, mercy, and compassion for each other naturally flow. Like Muhammad, we are to be a mercy to the worlds, beyond our own faith community, beyond even the human community, towards the animals who share the planet with us.
Imam Feisal concluded with thanks to God for the opportunity to begin forming a new multi-faith version of the Cordoba community, and with prayers for blessing on Rabbi Josh Stanton, spiritual leader of EET, and his community. Cordoba House invites more interfaith participants to take part in this weekly Jumu’ah prayer service.
Imam Feisal concluded with thanks to God for the opportunity to begin forming a new multi-faith version of the Cordoba community, and with prayers for blessing on Rabbi Josh Stanton, spiritual leader of EET, and his community.
Cordoba House Members Meet the East End Temple Community
Something new is afoot at Union Square in New York City. Union Square is the home of East End Temple (EET), a Reform synagogue that has begun hosting Cordoba House Jumu’ah prayer every Friday. EET has already been renting space to the Cordoba House Sunday School, but the relation between the two communities—one Muslim, the other Jewish—is evolving into much more than a landlord/tenant agreement. We have embarked on a journey of mutual discovery, towards a future together that is still to emerge. Part of that journey has been a combined course in Judaism and Islam, taught together by Imam Feisal and the spiritual leader of the East End Temple, Rabbi Josh Stanton.
The two-session class met on Thursday, February 8 and February 15, 2018. About twenty participants drawn from both communities gathered for the evening classes at EET. Rabbi Stanton observed about Thursday that, of itself, it carries no special significance for either faith tradition, but the Jews and Muslims gathered together on those two Thursdays sanctified the day by their intention to welcome each other into their hearts. And, so they did!
The two spiritual leaders wove together a tapestry of friendship between Islam and Judaism. Judaism would never have survived, commented the Rabbi, had the medieval Muslim Abbasids not hosted centers of Jewish learning in Baghdad; to which the Imam rejoined, Muslims would never have had their workable regimen of prayer had not Moses advised Muhammad, during the Prophet’s Night Journey, to recommend to God five-times daily prayer, over the 50 God had at first commanded. The teachers commented on ways Judaism and Islam reflect each other and affirm the validity of other faiths.
Students and teachers together plumbed deep questions about the afterlife, why we suffer in this life, and the one God of all religions overseeing this life and the next. In the warmth of the exchange, the classes foretold a new and evolving community of God-believers of all faiths.
