{"id":44,"date":"2014-01-20T22:45:49","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T22:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/?p=44"},"modified":"2014-01-20T23:03:44","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T23:03:44","slug":"episode-40-ibrahim-hooper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/episode-40-ibrahim-hooper\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 40 – Ibrahim Hooper"},"content":{"rendered":"

City of Residence:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Washington D.C.<\/p>\n

Occupation:<\/strong><\/p>\n

National Communications Director for Council on American\u00a0Islamic Relations<\/p>\n

Excerpt:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“We saw that there was a need for a Muslim civil rights group in the mode of the\u00a0NAACP, the ADL, even at times the ACLU and that was missing particularly at the\u00a0national level. The Muslim community was very dispirited and was not used to\u00a0victories, it was not used to taking a positive action and having a positive result. One\u00a0of our goals in the beginning particularly in the first years of our organization was\u00a0to give people a demonstration that if you took a positive action even making a\u00a0phone call or writing a letter to a corporation saying that when you fired that person\u00a0for their religious practices and that wasn\u2019t a good thing, she got her job back and\u00a0that showed that a small positive action has a positive result and we built up case\u00a0after case after case like that and gave the Muslim community a sense that if they do\u00a0take individual actions in a positive way, it\u2019s going to have an impact instead of\u00a0saying \u201cOh well, the Middle East situation is never resolved, this situation is never\u00a0resolved, there’s nothing we can do about this or that.\u201d We turned that around and\u00a0said, \u201cYes if you take these individual actions you’re going to have a positive result\u201d\u00a0and we gave them step by step guides.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of Americans are not hostile to Islam but, they may not have\u00a0information about Islam, they may not have interacted with Muslims. And we also\u00a0find that when people interact with ordinary American Muslims, prejudice goes\u00a0down; when they know more about Islam and Muslims, prejudice goes down. So,\u00a0one of our biggest efforts as an advocacy organization is to create opportunities for\u00a0outreach and interaction.<\/p>\n

For me, what was most attractive was the actively anti racist stance in Islam and the\u00a0egalitarian nature of Islam, universal brotherhood and sisterhood. It really is there\u00a0in essential Islam, from the Prophet’s tradition, all Muslims are like the teeth of a\u00a0comb, in other words equal.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Podcast Preview:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Podcast (full length):<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\"Play\"<\/a><\/object>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

City of Residence: Washington D.C. Occupation: National Communications Director for Council on American\u00a0Islamic Relations Excerpt: “We saw that there was a need for a Muslim civil rights group in the mode of the\u00a0NAACP, the ADL, even at times the ACLU and that was missing particularly at the\u00a0national level. The Muslim community was very dispirited and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ep","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/irgmn.org\/muslimexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}