Noorideen Durkee

By John P. Egan

Noorideen Durkee, a strikingly tall man with a red beard and powerful green eyes, flips through a thick loose-leaf binder, stopping here and there to display articles written about Dar al-Islam (Abode of the Faithful), the American Muslim community center in northern New Mexico which he co-founded and directs.

Dar al-Islam was established, he says, "because the founders were aware of the desperate need of the children for Islamic education." Although it is a unique experiment in Islamic living within a truly American environment, Durkee, a former journalist, is cautious about publicity.

"We don't want national media attention, because the national media's only interested in sensationalism," he says. "Walter Cronkite wanted to do a story on Dar al-Islam but we said no thank you. However, local regional television shows have done wonderful, positive features" about the project and how it relates to its neighbors. He also is pleased with articles about Dar al-Islam in the Denver Post, Geo magazine, Progressive Architecture, and other newspapers and magazines.

Who is Noorideen Durkee? What is Dar al-Islam? Answers to these two questions are intertwined.

Born of American parents in upstate New York shortly before World War II, Durkee attended Catholic schools in New York City for 12 years. "New York being what it was," he says, "I ran into a whole host of -isms: communism, socialism, Freudianism, existentialism, and so on." This exposure was supplemented with a rigorous, questioning education. "The director of my school was responsible for converting theologian Thomas Merton from communism to Catholicism," Durkee says with a smile. But the New Yorker himself finished high school with more questions than answers. Thus he began his quest.

In 1964 Durkee moved to New Mexico and became involved in community work. For nearly a decade, he worked as an editor for various magazines and journals. Then a major American book publisher sent him to Jerusalem. His assignment: talk to residents of the Holy City—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—to find out what Jerusalem meant to each of them. Take lots of photos. Try to bring Jerusalem—its history, its diversity, its color, its awesome ambiance—home to Americans. How does tradition coexist with modernity? How does each group work out the vexing issues of ordinary life?

In the course of conducting his interviews, Durkee spoke with a Jerusalem qadi. This religious judge was able to resolve all of Durkee's unanswered questions about life and the scheme of things. So satisfying were the qadi's answers that after Durkee converted to Islam, 10 of the other 12 people working on the project also converted!

For several years Durkee studied Arabic and Islamic law in Saudi Arabia, where he met Sahl Kabbani, a Saudi Arabian who had studied engineering in the United States. They agreed to work together to establish in America an indigenous Muslim community incorporating American traditions and customs and existing in harmony with the indigenous people and their sensibilities. The architecture and even the building materials must also be locally rooted. There would be no importing of architectural styles or materials from overseas. Bit by bit their vision took shape: The buildings and mosque at Dar al-Islam were constructed of adobe mud brick, one at a time, as finances allowed.

"There is a saying by the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, that God is beautiful and loves beauty, and so we have tried to build beautiful buildings," Durkee said. "It cost us more to do this, but it's worth it. The buildings were built by American Muslims and by local people—Hispanics, Indians, Chicanos. That's how they learn about Islam, and that's how we make friends with our neighbors."

After two years of planning and construction, Dar al-Islam opened its doors in 1982. Situated on a two-square-mile plot of land in northern New Mexico, Dar al-Islam began with 10 students and one full-time teacher. Now, four years later, there are seven full-time teachers and nearly 60 students, and Dar al-Islam has expanded to 10 square miles. Durkee said the project began as "a one-room school-house in which the students studied the basics of English, mathematics, and the Qur'an."

Although Muslims and Islam are routinely, and sometimes unconsciously, denigrated by US political leaders and the US media, Dar al-Islam has good relations with its neighbors, and receives widespread and positive media coverage. The reason, Durkee believes, is that Dar al-Islam "accentuates those values that people can understand. Classes from every public school within a 50-mile radius have visited our community. We're a resource for students on Islam and Arabs."

And, Noorideen Durkee believes, if young people are encouraged to explore new horizons, and to reach out and understand alternate ways of life the way he did when it was a child, tolerance will replace some of the prejudices that make our world so dangerous today. Inshallah.

John P. Egan is managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.