Convert and immigrant Muslim parents both struggle with raising their children in America. These children grow up in America without the experience of either choosing Islam as the convert parents did or of coming from a Muslim country the way most immigrant parents did.
This 2007 article from Gulf News talks about hajj for this second generation of Muslims in America.
Mina: The 20-year-old American tells his Haj stories a mile-a-minute, his hands moving in excitement about how he arrived in Makkah days ago, lost amid the massive crowds, and saw a man drop dead while circling the Ka’aba.
“Dude, I saw it, the guy had the most peaceful smile on his face,” Adil Muschelewicz, performing the pilgrimage for the first time, said on Sunday.
The young man from Easley, South Carolina, had arrived alone in Makkah because of a travel agent mix-up that prevented his family from catching up for three days. He was with hundreds of thousands of others circling the Ka’aba, when he saw the elderly man fall dead. The body was quickly lifted out of the crowd.
Muschelewicz didn’t know the cause of the man’s death exhaustion maybe, he said but it became one of the many powerful religious moments that have shaken him during the trip.
“I looked at his face and I looked at the Ka’aba, and it was like he was happy, he’d gotten close to God. It just went boom, like this deep bassline in my heart,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Umm Umar 
