altmuslim
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Telling the stories
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It started out not much bigger than the average family home, there aren’t many actual ancient artifacts on display, and it’s located in relatively small Jackson, Mississippi, but that hasn’t stopped the new International Museum of Muslim Cultures – America’s first museum devoted to Islam – from being a success. “People are quite surprised. Mississippi? The South?” says Okolo Rashid, the museum’s director. The museum was planned before 9/11 and almost fell through after that tragedy. “We just thought we were in trouble,” recalls Rashid, “that everybody’s going to stop coming.” The museum got its start when Jackson’s small Muslim community asked a traveling exhibition on Spain whether it would cover Spain’s 800 years of Muslim rule with its advances in science and culture. “The answer was no,” said Emad Al-Turk, chairman of the Muslim museum. “We felt obliged to try to have a companion exhibit.” So the community put together an exhibit on Islamic Spain, and the rest is history. Today, the museum boasts support from local, state, and federal government sources, as well as non-profit foundations and corporate sponsors (in fact, more than half the funds come from non-Muslim sources). Jackson’s tourism industry promotes the museum, and Bill Clinton and family have been recent visitors. Attendance is expected to reach 50,000 annually when the next exhibition, “The Golden Age of Africa and Its Legacy to Islamic Influences in America,” opens in early 2004. The exhibition will focus on the life of Ibrahim, a West African Muslim prince who spent 20 years as a slave in Natchez, Mississippi. (An explorer who passed through the town recognized Ibrahim as the son of the king who saved his life, and spent another 20 years working to free Ibrahim, who returned to Africa.) In 2005, a traveling exhibition that will launch in Chicago’s DuSable Museum will take the exhibition to major North American cities.
Shahed Amanullah is editor-in-chief of altmuslim.com.
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