Seeking to clear a path between yoga and Islam

Some yoga teachers have added both shalom and amen to the traditional sign-off of namaste

As a community activist in Queens, Muhammad Rashid has fought for immigrants held in detention, sought the preservation of local movie theatres, and held a street fair to promote diversity. But none of those causes brought him anywhere near as much grief and controversy as his stance on yoga.

Rashid, a Muslim, said he had long believed that practicing yoga was tantamount to “denouncing my religion.” “Yoga is not for Muslims,” he said. “It was forbidden.” But after moving to New York in 1997 from Bahrain, he slowly began to rethink his stance. Now Rashid, 54, has come full circle: Not only has he adopted yoga into his daily routine, but he has also encouraged other Muslims to do so – putting himself squarely against those who consider yoga a sin against Islam.

In New York City, where yoga has become as secular an activity as spinning or step aerobics, the potential sins of yoga are not typically debated by those clad in Lululemon leggings. But in some predominantly Muslim pockets like Jackson Heights, in Queens, yoga has been slow to catch on, especially among first-generation immigrants, newly arrived from cultures where yoga is considered Hindu worship.

When Rashid, who also tutors children, had his students learn yoga to help improve their concentration, three Muslim students quit after a few yoga sessions, he said, in part, he believed, because of their families’ stance toward the practice. “I am putting them in something extra that is not in the Muslim religion,” he said. “The parents did not accept it.”

In India, near-annual pushes by members of Parliament to make yoga compulsory in schools have riled Muslim parents who feel it bridges on indoctrination. When a member of Parliament proposed to insert yoga into most curriculums in 2010, wording was included to exempt things like madrasas, or Islamic schools.

Four years ago, a council of Malaysian Muslim clerics issued a fatwa against yoga, declaring it ‘haram,’ or forbidden by Islamic law. The ruling followed similar edicts in Egypt and Singapore, where one of the earliest bans was issued in the early 1980s.

The fatwas typically cited the Sanskrit chants that often flowed through yoga sessions, and which are considered Hindu prayer by some Muslims. According to H Kumar Kaul, who has written numerous books on yoga, yogic principles were first described in the Vedas, the Sanskrit scriptures that form the backbone of Hinduism, and are considered to be more than 10,000 years old. Even the word “namaste,” which is often used to open and close a yoga session, invokes the divine.

Given that cultural history, it was understandable that when Mohd A Qayyoom, an imam who runs the Muhammadi Community Center of Jackson Heights, joined a large yoga demonstration at an open-air interfaith festival last summer, it would not go unnoticed.
His participation drew instant reproach from the community, he said. “As soon as we finished our event, they said, ‘Imam, what is that, why are you doing that?”’ he said. “‘This is not within our Islam.”’

But Qayyoom said he had come to believe that Islam and yoga could be compatible if the Sanskrit benedictions are left out, he said, and women’s skin-tight yoga gear is traded for more conservative garments. “Reformed, it will be more popular” among Muslims, he said. “It will not contradict with Islamic religion.”

Less convinced

Others are less convinced. Anwar Hassan, 27, who is from Bangladesh and works in a grocery, says yoga’s roots are irreconcilable with his faith. “When I came here, I see there is yoga and everything, but we don’t go,” Hassan said. “A lot of people, they are new to it so they think it’s a gym class, or something. But Hindu people started it, and I think it’s Hindu religion, so I don’t go.”

When Dr Alex Eingorn prescribed yoga recently to a Bangladeshi woman who came to him with spinal pain at his chiropractic clinic, “she looked at me in horror,” he said. “She said, ‘I’m a Muslim, I can’t practice a different religion.”' Eingorn persuaded her to try it, he said, by saying that in New York, it is viewed as a secular, or at the most, spiritual practice.

Mimi Borda, 46, who runs Mimi for Me Yoga, a tidy and serene studio in Jackson Heights that is one of the area’s only yoga centers, has had to make similar allowances. “If there is a little chanting going on, right away this is a turnoff” for some of the Muslims who sign up for her sessions, she said. “Often they won’t come back.” In response, Borda has tailored certain classes, cutting out Sanskrit chants if she thinks it will upset certain students. “Emphasising the physical, they’re kind of cool with it,” she says. “They feel safe.”

For Borda, who has taught yoga to a variety of audiences, including Hasidic women, it came as a shock, when shortly after opening a studio in the area eight years ago she was approached by a Muslim student who voiced concerns with customary chants like “ohm.” She found herself fielding questions like “Is ‘ohm’ God? Is ‘ohm’ Allah?” she said.

Borda adapted her classes for her new clientele, either omitting chanting, or adding both “shalom” and “amen” to the traditional sign-off of “namaste,” to indicate that a plurality of religions were being represented.

“A lot of us in the western world, we look at it as anything that is going to enhance the way we look aesthetically,” she said. She said that some Muslim students were “not looking at the physical aspect, they’re looking at the spiritual aspect.”

(Some religious Christian students have also expressed discomfort, she said. A similar debate is happening in some Christian sects. One widely publicized clash came in 2010, when R. Albert Mohler Jr., an evangelical leader and the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, declared the practice of yoga blasphemous because of what he said were its pantheistic roots.)

For many immersed in a culture where vinyasa yoga is more readily associated with a New York sports club than a Hindu temple, the origin matters little. And for some of the devout living here, the U.S. conception has overridden the beliefs with which they were raised. When Rashid finally took up yoga, he said there were more similarities with his faith than contradictions. In “salat,” the five-times daily Muslim prayers, which entail a meditation like centering of focus and several kneeling bows, he felt there were echoes of yogic poses.

“I discovered whatever I’m doing in yoga, I’m doing five times a day in prayer,” Rashid said. During the daylong yoga class at the festival that Rashid helped organize in last summer, classes were halted for salat. Qayyoom and others performed those prayers on their yoga mats. It dawned on him then, the imam said, that many Muslims, in a sense, practice yogic postures several times a day. “Maybe they’re getting that same benefit in their prayers,” he said. “Maybe they don’t need to do yoga.”