Each member of Southern California-based Muslims for Progressive Values has a story of faith almost lost and then found again.
For Ani Zonneveld, 51, a Los Angeles singer-songwriter who founded the left-leaning religious organization eight years ago, the story began when Muslim music store owners refused to stock a CD of Islamic pop music she had recorded – just because she is a woman.
For Erica Bashaw, 25, a Chapman University law student who grew up in Mission Viejo and converted to Islam after college, the moment of clarity came when she visited her boyfriend’s hometown mosque and was told she could not pray with the men.
For Omar El-Hajoui, 26, a production coordinator at Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, the story has been lifelong. El-Hajoui is gay and described growing up at a Los Angeles mosque as an experience of “great anxiety and dread.”
These and more than 3,500 other members of Muslims for Progressive Values around the world have stories that all end with the discovery of an organization dedicated, in Zonneveld’s words, to “gender equality, LGBT rights, freedom of expression” and the conviction that Islam is wholly compatible with modern Western values.
Though even the name Muslims for Progressive Values conjures ideas vastly different from the popular image of American Islam as a religion of strict traditional values and practices, the group’s mere existence signals a coming of age in a faith growing beyond its immigrant roots.
From its beginning in Zonneveld’s living room in 2006, the organization has expanded to chapters in six U.S. cities and “I have no idea,” she said, how many additional members in Australia, Canada, Chile, France, Malaysia, South Africa and several Middle Eastern countries.
In December, Muslims for Progressive Values was recognized by the United Nations as an official nongovernment organization, enabling members to attend U.N. meetings and work with U.N. member nations.
In Los Angeles, the local chapter meets a few times each month for Islamic cultural events and informal prayer services at which members of both sexes mingle, take turns leading prayers and sing Muslim hymns in English, some written by Zonneveld.
By some measures Islam is America’s fastest-growing faith, its numbers in the U.S. expected to double to 6 million by 2030, according to the Pew Research Center. Roughly 40 percent of Muslims in the U.S. are American-born, according to Pew, a number expected to rise as the children of immigrants grow up and move into positions of leadership at mosques and other Muslim organizations.
Already the growing number of American-born Muslims and the religion’s increasing prominence in American public life are bringing the faith into contact with broader social debates that have long roiled larger, more established faiths such as Christianity.
Suhail Mulla, assistant imam at the Islamic Society of Orange County mosque in Garden Grove, said imams at a regional religious leaders’ meeting in January discussed a newly pressing issue: How to handle homosexuality at mosques.
Mulla said traditional Islamic teachings about sexuality are clear: “The proper expression of sexuality is to be between a married man and a woman. So no same-sex marriage or premarital relations.” And yet, Mulla said, in recent years he has been approached by members of his mosque who say they have “engaged in homosexual acts and ‘I have these tendencies ... what do I do?’ ”
Parents have sought advice from imams after their children come out as gay or lesbian, Mulla said.
“The tide (of cultural change) is so strong out there,” he said.
Mulla said imams at the January meeting agreed that, while they will not modify traditional Islamic teachings on sexuality, they do not want to drive gay Muslims away from mosques.
“Our conclusion is that we’re going to accommodate those individuals as much as possible,” Mulla said. “We’re not going to shun people from our community. ... But there would be an effort to try to correct that person’s understanding.”
A 2011 report on homosexuality in Islam prepared by the faith-based New York City nonprofit Intersections International noted the existence of gay Muslim organizations in the U.S., Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Indonesia and Malaysia. The report called the notion that there is little to no incidence of homosexuality in Islam a “myth.”
Zonneveld, now president of Muslims for Progressive Values, said her organization aims not just for accommodation of nontraditional views but for Muslim religious leaders to acknowledge that their stance on issues such as sexuality and women leading prayers are not supported by the Quran or by Islam as it was originally practiced.
“The first woman imam was appointed by the Prophet Muhammad,” said Zonneveld, who was born and raised Muslim in Malaysia. “No LGBT person was persecuted during Prophet Muhammad’s time, and people converted in and out of Islam freely then.”
She said that while to an outsider mosques can appear rigidly traditional, in fact, Muslims are hugely diverse in their approach to faith.
Zonneveld said she started Muslims for Progressive Values as a group on the website meetup.com and quickly found like-minded Muslims throughout Southern California. Through social media, “We discovered there were pockets throughout the U.S.,” she said.
Bashaw, the Chapman University law student, said she found the group two years ago after searching for a religious community that her Muslim boyfriend could join. At the time, Bashaw was not a Muslim, though she was drawn to the faith of her boyfriend, Jim Ghaznavi, a psychiatry resident at UCLA.
Ghaznavi, disturbed by terrorist attacks and the second-tier status of women in some Muslim-majority countries, “was having a crisis of faith,” Bashaw said.
“I wanted to support him and find people who think like him and are progressive-minded and reject extremists,” she said. “And I wanted to find a place for myself where it was OK if I wasn’t or was a Muslim.”
The couple began attending Muslims for Progressive Values prayer services. Encouraged by the group’s insistence that “the more progressive interpretation (of Islam) was the more traditional interpretation,” Bashaw converted.
She said she was struck by the contrast in worship style when she attended Ghaznavi’s hometown mosque in Oklahoma City during a family visit.
“I couldn’t sit by my boyfriend,” she said. “In the mosque it’s gender-segregated and I didn’t like being in a separate room just for women. I felt like I was at the back of the bus.”
El-Hajoui, who is now outreach director for Muslims for Progressive Values, said he was “a little taken aback with how casual it was” the first time he attended one of the group’s prayer services at the Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles.
“All of us in a circle, no segregation of the sexes. I didn’t know what to make of it,” he said. “But I felt immediately comfortable … I felt immediately acknowledged and respected.”
Most of all, El-Hajoui said, he was at last able to practice his faith as a gay Muslim without fear of rejection by God or religious leaders.
“I was made by God the way I am,” El-Hajoui said. “That’s what I believe. That’s what drives my work in the community and my desire to see a change.”