LOSING MY RELIGION A Call for Help

LOSING MY RELIGION A Call for Help LOSING MY RELIGION A Call for Help Dr. Jeffrey Lang Crucial to the vitality of any religious community is its ability to attract and engage descendants and converts. By this measure, notwithstanding the proliferation of mosques and Islamic organizations, the Muslim community in America is not doing at all well. This rather sober assessment motivates Dr. Lang to address, in this book, the alienation from the Mosque of the great majority of America’s homegrown Muslim. He asserts that to effectively respond to the general malaise of American-born Muslims, the Islamic establishment in America needs to be willing to listen to the doubts and complaints of the disaffected. This entails engaging in open discussions on issues with which many in the Muslim community will be uncomfortable, but Lang avers that such open dialogue will be of more benefit to young American Muslims struggling with their faiths than the covert and uniformed discussions that often take place or no discussion at all. As the title suggests, the main aim of this work is not to dissertate on Islam but to share with the reader a perspective to which he became privy and that pertains to a crisis of major proportions in the American Muslim community. The conspicuous and continued near total disconnect of native-born Muslims from the Mosque thwarts all attempts by Muslim activists to establish a viable, self-sustaining, Islamic community in the United States. It is an attempt to share with other concerned believers the content of the communications Dr. Lang has had with members of this population. 4