Islamic society grows in central Jersey
BY CHRIS STURGIS
SOUTH BRUNSWICK — Dalya Youssef wants her son, Yousuf Abdelfatah, to feel more confident about practicing the Islamic faith than she did when she attended public schools.
The Franklin Township mother, who is also a lawyer, remembered feeling timid about doing her midday prayer ritual in school when she was growing up in Monroe Township.
She said she didn’t begin the Muslim practice of covering her hair with a headscarf known as a hajib until her freshman year in college. The practice of covering oneself usually begins at puberty.
“I delayed it because I didn’t have enough confidence,” she said.
Therefore, she and her husband sent their son to Noor-Ul-Iman School on the South Brunswick campus of the Islamic Society of Central New Jersey, which has a full-time parochial school covering pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. Enrollment at the Route 1 school was 480 last year and is expected to top 500 in September.
Now Youssef’s son prays alongside his classmates, not in isolation, as she did.
“Plus, I think he gets an excellent education,” she said.
Earlier this month, the society broke ground on $5 million of infrastructure improvements to be followed by the building of a new, two-story 70,000-square-foot school, which will have the library, auditorium and gymnasium the school now lacks.
More critical, though, is that the license from South Brunswick to use modular buildings for the school expires in December, said Islamic Society president Aly Aziz.
“We have to show the township we are working on permanent facilities,” he said.
The infrastructure, consisting of water lines, electrical cables, a detention basin, new street entrances, a 600-car parking lot, and a concrete platform for the school building, is literally laying the groundwork for a much broader expansion plan that will take years to construct, he said.
South Brunswick has approved a master plan for a new mosque and an income-generating office building on the 16-acre campus. Four Rutgers University graduates seeking a sense of belonging founded the society 40 years ago.
“I’m pretty excited about it,” Youssef said. “I would love to see my son have a real high school with all the facilities.”
Another mother, Heba Macksoud, said she sent her twin daughters, Jenna and Jada, age 7, to the society’s preschool, but has since put them in public school. They come to the Islamic society for weekend religious education classes, she said.
Macksoud, a former vice president of marketing at MTV, said she loved the school’s attentive atmosphere, but hated paying tuition for substandard facilities.
“It’s a huge investment,” she said. “I’d rather save the money for college.”
Macksoud, a native New Yorker who first came to the Islamic Center at age 8, said the new school shows the Islamic community can sustain a parochial school system like other religions.
“We will soon have something that my kids can be proud of that is beautiful and institutional, rather than something slapped together from trailers,” she said.
School principal Janet Nazif said the new school will be more spacious and comfortable for students and staff. The essence of the program won’t change because it is the dedication of the teachers and the parents who support their efforts.
She started as a teacher with the school founded 16 years ago. There were only 27 students in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first grade. The school expanded by a couple of grades per year, until six years ago when the first class of high school seniors graduated.
“When it started, there were a lot of naysayers, who said we wouldn’t be able to help these children succeed, but they have been proven wrong,” she said.
All of the high school graduates have been accepted to college, including some Ivy League institutions, she said.
There are 220 Islamic schools in the U.S., including 17 in New Jersey, according to the Islamic Schools League of America based in Falls Church, Va.
The schools are growing the fastest in areas with large Muslim populations, including New York State, Michigan and Washington, D.C., according to the organization, which formed 11 years ago to help new schools benefit from the experience of established institutions.
Yet, as the Muslim community gains prominence in American society, members say they are unfairly associated with Middle Eastern terrorism.
Macksoud said terrorism comes from uneducated, unemployed youth who can be convinced the U.S. is the source of their misery.
By contrast, the Islamic Society of Central New Jersey comprises well-educated professionals with successful careers, she said, noting her pride that the society donated statutes to adorn the entrance to the South Brunswick Public Library.
“It shows that we love our community and want to get involved every which way,” she said.
The society includes immigrants from 20 nations around the globe and first-generation Americans like herself.
Aziz said the diverse 2,000-member society counters prejudice by issuing statements condemning terrorist acts.
He said Islam is at its essence a peaceful religion. Muslims greet each other with the words, “Assalamo Alikom” meaning “Peace be upon you.”
The response is to say it in reverse, “Alikom Assalamo.”
“We do not consider (terrorists) Muslims because Islam is a religion of peace,” Aziz said.
This article originally appeared in the Times of Trenton (NJ) on June 28, 2009 and was posted on the affiliated website, NJ.com.
Pagans celebrate equinox in Burlington County
Pagans celebrate spring equinox with ceremony in Burlington County
By Christina Sturgis/The Times
BORDENTOWN — Easter is a time of rebirth not only for Christians, but for pagans too.
A group of Unitarian Universalists met this week to celebrate the vernal equinox and look ahead to the joys of spring — not just natural things like planting herbs and flowers, but anticipation of that all-American rite of spring – the new baseball season.
Joan Spengler, a coordinator of the nature-based spiritual group, the Dorothea Dix Unitarian Universalist community of Bordentown, lit a bunch of herbs and tossed them into a cauldron, before calling on the four points of the compass.
“Spirit of the east, spirit of air, of morning and springtime, be with us as the sun rises,” she intoned before passing round a “talking stick” — a decorated tree branch. As each member clutched it, he or she spoke of their hopes for the new year. Some wanted to plant flowers, others looked forward to baseball starting up again.
But these pagans are not evil, so there were no curses put on the Yankees.
As if to show their similarities with Christianity, the score or so members even had an Easter Egg hunt. Spengler noted that although eggs were associated with Easter, they were also a pagan symbol of fertility. Legend had it, she said, that painted eggs were laid by chickens that had been captured by a goddess.
Pagan practices are now acknowledged by a number of mainstream institutions. The state of New Jersey includes Wicca or witchcraft holidays on its list of religious celebrations for which children may be excused from school. Pagan practices have been incorporated as Christian cultural customs, including decorating an evergreen tree at Christmas and hiding decorated eggs.
Spengler’s Bordentown group took its inspiration from a meeting before the full moon last month in a religious education classroom at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton.
The fluorescent lights were turned off, a candle was lit, and a man tapped out a rhythm on a hand drum as the group formed a circle around the altar — a table holding a tree branch about two feet long, a crystal ball, a candle and photographs of nature scenes.
“Anybody planning to ground?” asked Ann Hirschman Schremp. “I’ll do that.”
Schremp led the group through a guided imagery in a low steady voice, inviting them to feel energy flowing down through their bodies and rooting them to the core of the earth.
So began the February spirit circle of the Evergreen Chapter of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, a national UU affiliate that honors “goddess-based, earth-centered, tribal and pagan spiritual paths.”
The group has its modern roots in liturgical reform the Unitarian Universalists began in the late 1970s, “in response to a growing feminist awareness that much of the imagery of Woman in this liberal denomination was actually rather illiberal,” its website says. Its practices now focus on “earth-centered religious experiences” tied to pre-Christian pagan beliefs.
At the circle last month, that meant the group discussed the way the movement of the stars signals the changing of the seasons and astronomical discoveries that have changed the Zodiac. They passed around a “talking stick,” taking turns sharing the month’s triumphs and troubles in the manner of a support group.
Schremp, a nurse practitioner and Princeton resident, said she grew up in a Jewish family that did not keep kosher. When she married a Presbyterian, they found the Unitarian Universalist faith as a place where they could send their children to Sunday School without continually explaining practices they weren’t going to do, she said.
She described paganism as a religion without a sacred book like the Bible, Torah or Koran. At the gathering last month, there were no restrictions on the spirits summoned to the circle. One member called on Sunna, the Norse goddess of the sun, and another invited Ganesh, the elephant-like Hindu god believed to remove obstacles and ensure success
Another member of the circle, Alice Deanin, a mathematics professor who lives in Princeton, said she grew up in a Jewish family with a Marxist-atheist bent. She married her Protestant husband in the UU church, hoping to avoid family disapproval with a compromise.
“Instead, we made everyone angry,” she said.
She became acquainted with paganism through a religious education course at the Princeton UU congregation called “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven,” on the concept of female divinity. She said she wants pagan practice to be egalitarian, even though there are more women than men in the Princeton group.
“We don’t want to make the men feel as bad as we did for so many years,” she said.
Spengler, who is a member of both the Princeton and Bordentown groups, said paganism gives a name to feelings she always had. A working mother with three children in college, the Hamilton resident said she had a crisis of faith as she cared for her mother, who died from Alzheimer’s disease after five years of decline.
Spengler said she could not reconcile her mother’s suffering with the concept of an all-powerful, loving God. She found solace instead in the ever-changing seasons and constant renewal of nature, she said. Daily walks in the woods and meadows, often recording the splendor with her camera, helped her feel whole again.
She prefers to think of herself as a druid because of the emphasis on nature, rather than goddesses, she said. Druids were ancient Celtic priests who were said to have studied the natural sciences.
“This life,” she said. “This is what happens. Deal with it. Mother Nature is not always the nice lady you see in the margarine ads.”