Between cultures, student searches for identity
By Beth Slater
The Herald
February 11, 1998
On a campus of 5,500 students, Rudy Sagastume `00 often feels all alone.
Even at a school with a reputation for a diverse and liberal student body, Sagastume stands out -- he is the only Latino Muslim at Brown he knows.
"People look at me and think I'm joking when I say I'm Muslim because I'm [also] Latino," Sagastume says.
Growing up first as a Latino and as a Muslim in a predominantly Italian and Roman Catholic neighborhood often left Sagastume on the fringes of cultural and religious communities, caught in between the two.
"Philosophically, how I think about God, I'm a Muslim. But culturally, I'm still Catholic. I think Catholic [because] I was brought up like that for so long."
Most of Sagastume's friends at Brown are Christian, as they were in high school. And as in high school, Sagastume still feels different from others because of his unusual status as a Latino Muslim. He often leaves in the middle of some social activity to go and pray, as the Islamic tenets proscribe a Muslim must do five times each day.
At home, Sagastume says that "there was nowhere I could have turned to because nobody that we knew in East Boston was Muslim. That was unheard of -- especially kids my age for that matter, in high school." His friends, both past and present, respect his religious choice, Sagastume said, but cannot share in it.
Sagastume converted to Islam in high school and for the subsequent two and a half years, he learned, practiced and held his faith in Islam constant in private and without any outside guidance.
He knew that there was a mosque nearby in Cambridge, but says, "I never wanted to go [to a mosque] because I never felt like I would fit in. I thought I would be too ignorant of the proper way to act."
As a sophomore in an East Boston public school, he had first learned about Islam when a friend recommended that he read the autobiography of Malcolm X. He did, and Sagastume said that "just through reading about how [Islam] changed [Malcolm X's] life when he was in prison to when he became a preacher, I just had an idea in my head that if [Islam] changed him, then maybe it could do something for me."
Sagastume was not searching for a new religious faith when he picked up the book. Instead, he started reading "to learn more about [Malcolm X]" because as a minority, Sagastume empathized with Malcolm X's strong sense of anger.
"I think there's a time in every minority person's life when they start really getting angry...when they start learning about what happened in the past and then they relate it to how they felt on some personal level, which is what I was doing, every minority goes through it and that's when you get angry," Sagastume said.
But it was the Nation of Islam that caught and held Sagastume's attention. Where he had found dissatisfaction in Martin Luther King Jr.'s tenets in combating racism, Sagastume identified with the Nation's belief that minorities do not need white people and that "if the system if wrong, build your own system."
According to Hythem El-Nazer '00, a member of the Brown Muslim Students' Association (BMSA), the Nation encompasses only about 2,000 people. This is barely a fraction of the approximately 6.5 million Muslims in the United States. Approximately a quarter of a million Caucasians have converted to Islam over the past decade, according to El-Nazer.
While El-Nazer said that Islam is currently the fastest growing religion in both the United States and the world, El-Nazer also says that most Muslims do not consider the Nation of Islam's members to be true Muslims. El-Nazer said that the Nation, which uses religion to further its political desires, has a corrupted view of Islam.
Sagastume agreed with El-Nazer to some extent. Mirroring Malcolm X's own religious path, Sagastume also ultimately renounced the Nation in favor of mainstream Islam. Meanwhile, as the anger faded, he found a religious philosophy that satisfied both his intellect and his heart, and he became eager to know more.
Sagastume's mother, a devout Roman Catholic, knew of her son's interest in Islam and gave him her support.
"My mother had a friend in her work who was from Sudan and she invited him over the house one day and through him, over a series of two or three weeks I converted to Islam," Sagastume recalled. His mother's friend provided Sagastume with his own copy of the Koran, the Islamic holy text, as well as several pamphlets. And with them came the means to look for answers to his questions regarding God.
At the invitation of a friend in the Brown Muslim Students' Association, Sagastume went to a mosque for the first time.
"It felt good," he said. He added that the other students there "felt like a close knit group."
The BMSA on campus is only one chapter of more than 600 chapters throughout North America that provide a place for Muslims to practice Islam and also educate Muslims and non-Muslims about Islam. Despite their warm welcome, though, Sagastume said that initially, "[I] didn't think I belonged there because of my culture, regardless that we're all Muslim and I didn't think I was adequate enough.
"I didn't know all the rules because they were all brought up with them. I don't feel that I am as knowledgeable as they are in the faith for me to become active [in the MBSA]...I think I still have a long way to go."
For instance, Sagastume feels as though he is the only student who does not know the Arabic during readings of the Koran.
Following his mother's faith, Sagastume had grown up as a Roman Catholic, attending Sunday school and serving as an alter boy at his church, though he was never confirmed. Sagastume adds that "as far as me being a devout Catholic, I wasn't, not at all. Not many people were where I was from. People went to church on Sundays but that's all."
Even from an early age, Sagastume had doubts concerning some Christian precepts, which Islam has answered for him. He also says that he sees in Islam the philosophy of "practice what you preach" that he felt was lacking in Catholicism.
However, converting to Islam has not yet erased the influences of growing up in the Catholic tradition for most of his life. At times, Sagastume acknowledges that "if I feel guilty about something there's a thought in me that I want to go confess my sins to a priest."
Sagastume continues to harbor doubts about his own place within the Muslim community. As a Latino and a Roman Catholic by birth, he feels that "my language is culturally different than their language."
He says that he often instinctively reacts to things based on such an upbringing. Islam, though, continues to underlay his everyday actions and constitutes his "fundamental beliefs that [he] could never change" about Allah -- God -- and life. As he continues to reconcile the differences inherent in his religious faith and cultural experiences, he has remained steadfast in his belief in Islam and notes that "now I feel comfortable that I can just go and pray" with other Muslims at Brown.