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15 May 2011: Muslim Women Speak
On vacation on the Jersey shore off-season--well, the water's a bit cold, but the price is right--I took a day off to work, that is, write about a near-by community, which had recently seen the construction of its first mosque after some amount of dispute among residents.
Some who lived near the proposed site, which had been unoccupied for 20-25 years, feared losing their children to drive-by shooting as they frolicked in their backyards.
Others feared other forms of terrorism, which they associated with all Muslims. The curse of 9/11 still weighed them down heavily. Approximately 75 percent of the community was white; 10 percent were black, 13 percent Asian, and 2 percent Latino, so diversity itself was not the problem in that affluent community, where the majority earned $60,000 or more a year.
A zoning meeting brought out a variegated group of Catholics, other Christians, Jews, Quakers, Buddhists, and Muslims.
Said the latter group, a small minority, 9/11 was a wakeup call to their largely immigrant communities to emerge from their isolation, of necessity, to let the outside world know that terrorism comprises a scant majority among them--people who commit hideous atrocities in the name of their religion, whose bottom line is peace, compassion, and love of fellow humans and God. Islam reveres Moses and other Hebrew prophets as well as Jesus, and all three religions look back to Abraham as their common father.
"There is an onus on our generation as spokespersons for all our people in the United States, a scant 1 percent of the population, to solve its problems. We are all ambassadors for Islam," said one young woman.
All those at the meeting agreed that there was a need for outspokenness--all American Muslims should stand together and proclaim loudly their opposition to terrorism, so that once and for all they can be dissociated from it.
"Personally, I'd be scared to death of speaking out," murmured one older woman, a non-Muslim. "What if there was a terrorist cell nearby?"
"My young son gets bullied for being Muslim," said another woman. "He's always trying to dissociate himself from those awful people. He, above all of us, has to speak out all of the time."
All those at the meeting agreed, whatever their other fears, that that situation had to stop.
The upshot was that the small group of Muslims were finally allowed to build their mosque. I saw a picture of it. It lacked a minaret, but I was told that this wasn't uncommon. The good news is that a second mosque was built soon after that.
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The young woman who told me this story was from Pakistan. Her family had emigrated when she was very young. She is involved with an organization that builds schools for girls all over her native country. She is a volunteer fundraiser. Her organization, Your Developments in Literacy (YOUR DIL), which was founded ten years ago, also trains teachers and develops their curriculum to be less rote than what the children are used to. One of their models involves U.S. curricula.
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