SOUL FOOD:

Muslims living here are, for the most part, not going back to where they came from. In fact, 35% of them didn’t come any farther than from their mother’s wombs right here in the United States.

So those of you who wish they would or who think they should pack up and get back to the place you imagine was their birth place, get over it. Along with your illusions, you might consider getting over your small-mindedness, too, hard as that might be.

I’m rarely surprised by the responses I get to this column. Do this long enough and you come to fancy you have as good as heard it all.

Some of the e-mail I received after writing recently on Muslim women and their rights simply floored me, though.

Name-calling and blatant bigotry doesn’t bear repeating; no one needs to add to that. But I will tell you I had readers insist my head was in the sand if I didn’t realize that, on the whole, Muslim women cannot vote, cannot drive and cannot even leave their homes without a male escort.

Muslim women, I was informed, are kept pregnant and in the kitchen, hopeless under male domination. Here in our community, those women who for religious reasons cover themselves head to foot “look as if they are in Halloween costumes,” one reader wrote. “It does not do anything in trying to understand them.”

She asked me not to bore you with any more such columns. But I’m telling you as I told her, I can’t do that.

Since living for a year in Israel then traveling in Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, I have long been frustrated by our Western stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, and by our ignorance of Islam.

In the years since Sept. 11, 2001, that has only increased to my chagrin.

While one in five people in the world is Muslim nearly three of every five Americans still say they know little to nothing about Islam. They persist in thinking all Muslims are Arabs.

Yet according to a 2007 Pew Research Center survey, in the U.S. more Muslims are black and from South Asia. In this country 26% of Muslims are black and 20% are Asian, while 38% are white.

There’s an increasing number of Latino Muslims (4%) and another 12% categorized in the Pew survey as “other.” Most U.S. Arabs are Christians.

It can be hard, though, never to generalize. During a recent “webinar” I attended on reporting on Islam, one speaker gave some guidelines for interacting socially with Muslims.

Because of modesty etiquette between genders, he warned, you should not expect to shake hands with a Muslim of the opposite sex. Yet in many situations, this has not been my experience.

In Jordan, a Muslim Palestinian Arab guide at times walked comfortably with his arm around my shoulder. I, too, was comfortable since he was young enough to be my nephew or my son; this wasn’t flirting.

In Turkey, our Sufi Muslim traveling companions — men and women all much younger than us — were at ease with bear hugs. And the Turkish Muslim men and women of all ages we met along the way shook hands.

In a mosque, when I momentarily forgot to remove my shoes and visibly embarrassed myself, the caretaker took my hand and squeezed it. It was an act of forgiveness and comfort in a universal language, a gesture I will never forget.

But generalizing about a handshake is different than generalizing about Islam as a violent religion. Or about Muslim women being dominated by men.

Islam as much as any religion (or more, I’d say) is not monolithic. It includes people from myriad ethnic backgrounds.

The 10 countries with the largest Muslim populations are Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, Nigeria, Iran, Algeria and Morocco. Ask someone to name five countries with vast Muslim populations and see how many countries named are these.

You will not find an Islamic equivalent of the Pope. There are Sunni Muslims, estimated to be about 85% worldwide and in the United States.

There are Shiite Muslims and Sufi Muslims and what are often called Wahabi but are better called Salafi Muslims, who teach a very strict Islam based on a very literalist reading of the Qur’an. Less than 5% of Muslims worldwide follow this branch of Islam and of them far less than 1% embrace religiously based violence.

Yet this is the practice of Islam I find non-Muslims often have in mind when I talk to them about Islam, whether we are talking about Sunnis, Shiites or the highly mystical Sufis.

It is important, even critical, to know these differences. It’s important to distinguish politics from theology; enculturation from doctrine; and people from ideologies.

For all that has been said and written about Muslims and Islam following that signpost day in September 2001, we seem to remain entrenched in our fear, bias and ignorance. Though we can scarcely afford to be.

Every bit as much as global warming, the coexistence of Islam with the West and the integration of Muslims living in the West will shape the future of our globalized world. How well that we manage both of those depends on our knowledge and acceptance of complex truths.

As I write this I am about to attend an Amnesty International meeting on understanding Islam and human rights. The organization is screening the PBS “Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet.”

I want to extend a challenge to you. Do something yourself to learn more about Islam. Do something to see Muslims in a fresh light.

Read a Muslim magazine. Visit a Muslim website. Read the Qur’an or, if you’ve read the Qur’an, read the Sayings of the Prophet, the Hadith. Visit a mosque or a Muslim community center.

Better yet, get to know a Muslim in Huntington Beach. Then tell me about your experience. What happened? What did you learn?

If you don’t know where to start, e-mail me. I have lots of ideas.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].