The Open Center's Catalog: What, No Imams?

The New York Open Center's winter-spring program catalog delights readers with its array of spiritual courses. The catalog covers a huge range of faith traditions: Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Western Spiritual Traditions, African American Culture, Latin/Caribbean Programs, Native American Traditions, Tibetan Studies, and Shamanism.

The Open Center's courses are taught by priests, rabbis, mystics, an initiated elder of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, curanderos, and more.

Hmmmm, one major faith tradition seems to be missing. Now, which could that be?

Islam, of course.

For all its strenuous inclusiveness, the Open Center doesn't so much as breathe a mention of Islam, other than a table of contents listing for "Sufism/Islam." That offering is a course called "The Sufi Path of Self-Transformation: The Teachings of Rumi, Hafez and Attar." The course description says nothing about Sufism as the mystical version of Islam.

Frankly, I'm disappointed that the Open Center couldn't find at least one guitar-strumming, sandal-wearing vegan imam who loves Allah and Gaia and all their creatures and hates the Jews only a little bit to teach a course. Of course that would be a course in "Jihad as Inner Struggle," since it can't mean anything else. There's not a single imam like that, even in New York? Detroit? Copenhagen? Maybe in Berkeley.

Maybe they're all otherwise occupied these days.