City of Residence:
Washington D.C.
Occupation:
National Communications Director for Council on American Islamic Relations
Excerpt:
“We saw that there was a need for a Muslim civil rights group in the mode of the NAACP, the ADL, even at times the ACLU and that was missing particularly at the national level. The Muslim community was very dispirited and was not used to victories, it was not used to taking a positive action and having a positive result. One of our goals in the beginning particularly in the first years of our organization was to give people a demonstration that if you took a positive action even making a phone call or writing a letter to a corporation saying that when you fired that person for their religious practices and that wasn’t a good thing, she got her job back and that showed that a small positive action has a positive result and we built up case after case after case like that and gave the Muslim community a sense that if they do take individual actions in a positive way, it’s going to have an impact instead of saying “Oh well, the Middle East situation is never resolved, this situation is never resolved, there’s nothing we can do about this or that.” We turned that around and said, “Yes if you take these individual actions you’re going to have a positive result” and we gave them step by step guides.
The vast majority of Americans are not hostile to Islam but, they may not have information about Islam, they may not have interacted with Muslims. And we also find that when people interact with ordinary American Muslims, prejudice goes down; when they know more about Islam and Muslims, prejudice goes down. So, one of our biggest efforts as an advocacy organization is to create opportunities for outreach and interaction.
For me, what was most attractive was the actively anti racist stance in Islam and the egalitarian nature of Islam, universal brotherhood and sisterhood. It really is there in essential Islam, from the Prophet’s tradition, all Muslims are like the teeth of a comb, in other words equal.”
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