- published: 11 Nov 2015
- views: 169464
Cultural Muslims are religiously unobservant, secular or irreligious individuals who still identify with the Muslim culture due to family background, personal experiences, or the social and cultural environment in which they grew up. Cultural Muslims are found across Europe, Central Asia, North America and parts of South, Southeast and West Asia.
In Central Asia and in former communist countries the term "Cultural Muslim" came into use to describe those who wished their "Muslim" identity to be associated with certain national and ethnic rituals, rather than merely religious faith.
Malise Ruthven (2000) discussed the terms "cultural Muslim" and "nominal Muslim" as follows:
David Ernest Duke (born July 1, 1950) is an American white nationalist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, far-right politician, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. A former one-term Republican Louisiana State Representative, he was a candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1988 and the Republican presidential primaries in 1992. Duke unsuccessfully ran for the Louisiana State Senate, United States Senate, United States House of Representatives, and Governor of Louisiana. Duke is a felon, having pleaded guilty to defrauding supporters by falsely claiming to have no money and being in danger of losing his home in order to solicit emergency donations; at the time, Duke was financially secure, and used the donations for recreational gambling.
Duke describes himself as a "racial realist," asserting that "all people have a basic human right to preserve their own heritage." Duke also speaks against what he describes as Jewish control of the Federal Reserve Bank, the U.S. federal government and the media. Duke supports the preservation of what he considers to be Western culture and traditionalist Christian family values, Constitutionalism, abolition of the Internal Revenue Service, voluntary racial segregation, anti-Communism and white separatism. He has been accused of supporting Holocaust denial and opposes what he considers to be "promotion of homosexuality" by Jews.
Suhaib Webb is an American Muslim imam who is currently the imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC).
He was born William Webb in 1973 in Oklahoma to a Christian family, including a grandfather who served as a preacher. At age 14, he lost interest in religion, going through a self-described spiritual crisis. He also began engaging in delinquency by joining a local gang and became a local Hip-Hop DJ and producer, making records with various artists.
After converting to Islam in 1992, Webb left his career as a DJ and studied at the University of Central Oklahoma, where he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Education. He also studied privately under a Senegalese Sheikh, learning enough Islam and Arabic to become a community leader in Oklahoma City, where he was hired as Imam at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City. He simultaneously started teaching at Mercy School, an Islamic K-12 school in Oklahoma City.
Webb is an active member of the Muslim American Society and its youth department and has been so for the last ten years. It is through the Muslim American Society's scholarship program that he was sent to Egypt to attain fluency in Arabic and focus on Islamic studies. Webb frequently hosts lectures and posts articles offering Islamic perspectives on modern-day issues such as community involvement and social relevance.