Boston, USA - An increasingly prominent group of Muslims and former Muslims in the United States -- ranging from soft-spoken Islamic scholars to outspoken intellectuals and professionals -- are defying death threats and ostracism to campaign for changes in the way their religion is practiced.
In the process, they are directly challenging the virtual monopoly on interpreting Muslim traditions that has been held by conservative clergy for 200 years.
Much attention in the media and the non-Muslim community is being directed at critics such as Irshad Manji, a brash Muslim lesbian author who is a fellow at Yale University; and Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-born psychiatrist in Los Angeles whose recent condemnation of Muslim attitudes toward violence on the Arabic satellite station Al Jazeera created an international furor.
Within the Muslim community, a larger, more cautious group is also speaking up: people who remain devout even as they call for a reexamination of subjects ranging from the role of women to national loyalties to the governance of mosques.
One of those people is in the middle of the biggest controversy over Islam to arise in New England. Ahmed Mansour, a scholar and refugee from religious persecution in Egypt, was recently sued by the Islamic Society of Boston over his attacks on anti-American and anti-Semitic statements he said he read and heard inside the society's mosque.
Others include Ebrahim Moosa, who fled radical Islamists in South Africa and now teaches at Duke University, and Radwan Masmoudi, a former worshiper at the Islamic Society of Boston's Cambridge gatherings who now heads the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington.
''There is an effort afoot to create more harmony between American democratic values and Islamic values, and to teach and preach that to Muslim youth," said Marc Gopin, director of the Center on Religion, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. ''We are seeing a struggle to bring together foundational virtues of democracy and Islam."
Reasons for this movement include the seemingly unending stream of crises besetting the Muslim world, the heightened fear and anger directed at American Muslims after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the realization that Muslims in the United States are freer to organize and to debate their issues than most other Muslim communities in the world.
Masmoudi, who attended Islamic Society prayer services on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus while earning his doctorate in robotics at MIT, gave up a highly paid career in private industry in 2002 to work full time on modernizing and democratizing the practice of Islam.
Raising funds and attracting members was tough in the early years, he said, but more recently his center has been able to expand its staff and scope of activities.
'People in other countries have reason to be afraid" if they openly question longstanding practices, Masmoudi said in a telephone interview. ''They could lose their jobs, they could be thrown in jail, they could even be killed. We American Muslims are finding that we must lead whether we want to or not. We have the freedom, we have the resources, we have the experience with democracy."
Mansour, who earned his doctorate in Islamic studies at Al Azhar in Cairo -- perhaps the most prominent university of the Islamic world -- has experienced both worlds. He was jailed and fired from the faculty of Al Azhar for expressing unconventional ideas about traditional practices and theories.
For example, he asserts that the hadith, or sayings of the Prophet Mohammed on which large parts of the tradition are based, are unverifiable and should be set aside in favor of a concentration on Koranic values of peace, tolerance, and democracy.
He fled Egypt after the appearance of fatwas -- religious decrees -- that made him fear for his life. In 2002, he was granted political asylum in the United States.
The following year, while working as a visiting scholar in the Islamic law project at Harvard Law School, he went to prayers at the Islamic Society and was shocked by what he heard.
''It astonished me, after my escape from Egypt, to find the same kind of ideas and the same kind of people here that I was struggling against in Egypt," he said in an interview last week in the downtown Boston office of his lawyer.
Literature and speakers in the mosque said ''America is the enemy of Islam, America is killing Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. They said that the Jews are enemies of Muslim people and are conspiring against Muslims with the Americans. . . . To be a good Muslim, you have to defend America," he said, ''because this country defends the Islamic values of democracy and free speech."
Mansour joined Citizens for Peace and Tolerance, a group formed to raise concerns about the Islamic Society's fitness to develop a big new mosque on a prominent site in Roxbury, and spoke out against the sentiments he said he found inside the group's Cambridge center.
The mosque project ran into financial difficulties after the Sept. 11 attacks, and allegations in the media that some Islamic society leaders had ties to terrorist organizations and criticisms from the citizens group plagued the society. Last November, the Islamic Society sued the Boston Herald, WFXT-TV (Channel 25), and numerous individuals and organizations, alleging an illegal conspiracy to block the mosque project.
Initially, only Christian and Jewish leaders of Citizens for Peace and Tolerance were accused, but early last month Mansour was added as a defendant.
Lawyers for the Islamic Society did not respond for calls to comment on their allegations against Mansour. The complaint, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, alleges that Mansour is ''a biased and nonauthoritative source on matters relating to the Islamic faith" who made false statements to aid the conspiracy against the mosque project.
Ebrahim Moosa, a Duke professor who fled Cape Town after radical Muslims bombed his house, says the new assertiveness of Muslim scholars in the United States is actually a return to a 1,000-year tradition of debating and updating Islamic practice in response to changes in time and place -- a tradition that was put about 200 years ago in the face of Western colonial threats.
''There is no statement in the Koran that says a woman cannot be a prayer leader," he said, citing a role for women that would be unthinkable to most conventional Muslim authorities.
Peter Skerry, a Boston College political science professor who is writing a book on Muslims in America, said the effort of US Muslims to embrace democratic values and find commonality between those values and Islam is at least in part related to President Bush's statements on democracy and Islam.
''It is in the wind in a way it wasn't before," Skerry said. ''It is on the agenda, and Muslims, like earlier groups of immigrants, are learning to take their cues from the society around them."