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New College Teaches Young American Muslims (Barbara Bradley Hagerty, 9/08/10, NPR)

Catholics have Notre Dame, Jews have Yeshiva University and Evangelicals have Wheaton College — but until now, Muslim Americans didn't have their own liberal arts college. And then there's the appeal of the two founders, Imam Shakir and Sheik Hamza Yusuf, who are celebrities by preaching an Islam that resonates with young Americans.

"They're better than rock stars," Knight says, laughing, "because they're real people with real morals that you should actually look up to and admire. They're like the best of us."

Knight says that "thousands, maybe millions" of teenagers around the world follow Shakir and Yusuf on YouTube, and their live speeches fill college auditoriums. Her age group relates to these two men — who were born in the U.S. and converted to Islam — much more than to, say, a cleric from Saudi Arabia.

"We want our American Muslim scholars because we're Americans and we're Muslims, and that's how we identify ourselves," she says. "We want to learn from people who look like us, talk like us, think like us, eat like us. It's only natural — it's just human."

And increasingly, American Islam looks and sounds, well, American. A third of all Muslims in the U.S. were born here, and half a million of them are converts like Jamye Ford. Ford says that as he thought about changing religions, he realized he needed to overcome a philosophical hurdle, especially challenging right now.

"So often, the way the idea is portrayed is there's a dichotomy: There's being American and there's being Muslim, and these two must necessarily be at odds with one another," he says. "And it was clear to me that these two things don't have to exist separately."

The idea that their faith can be woven into an American lifestyle rather than skew it plays out in several ways at Zaytuna. Yes, most of the women wear headscarves, but that's a choice; there is no dress code. Men and women sit next to each other in class, they chat easily and share meals when they break their fast — things that would never happen in an Islamic school overseas.

Yusuf says Zaytuna has a deeper motive than just making the students feel at home. He wants to tease apart the religion of Islam from the customs and ideas of the Middle East. He's learned this from personal experience. He says that during his 10 years studying abroad, he imbibed ideas that had nothing to do with Islam, such as anger at U.S. foreign policy.