Ingrid Mattson – Face to Face Islamophobia Pathways to Nonviolence
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
There are approximately,
1,600,000,000
Muslims in the world, representing 22% of the
population of the
earth. Currently, Christians represent 23%
of the global population.
I pointed out that when the Irish republican
army sets off a bomb in Northern Ireland,
we do not blame 1,200,000,000
Catholics.
Islamophobia uses the stereotype the stereotypic tactics of
all prejudices. It holds up one group of
bad actors, and claims that they represent an
entire segment of humanity.
If you listen to Islamophobic
rhetoric,
which is emanating from many of our political
candidates,
and you remove the word Islam or Muslim
and insert the word Jew or Christian or
black or whatever oppressed group concerns you,
it is difficult not to feel troubled.
So then, I dove into,
just some things that
Islamophobic statements you might hear on the evening
news.
Christianity and Islam are entirely separate religions and
have no connection with one another.
The rotary club has a four way test,
and the first test is, is it the
truth? So that was the mantra for my
afternoon dialogue.
And so I asked, is it the truth?
No. Right? So I talked about the texts
and the prophets of Islam.
Prophet of Islam, Abraham,
prophet of Islam, Moses,
prophet of Islam, David,
prophet of Islam, Jesus,
prophet of prophet of Islam, Mohammed,
peace be upon him. To get a step
further,
I talked about the connections between the bible
and the Quran. I explained that 2 thirds
of the Quran, in their chapters, refer to
what Christians call
the bible.
That Adam is mentioned 25 times, Moses is
very popular, a 136 mentions,
Jesus is in 59 times. Now, you can
quibble with the numbers. You can find other
numbers on the internet. But you know what?
I think these are roughly accurate.
And then,
I pointed out that the prophet Muhammad, peace
be upon him, said that of all of
God's prophets, he felt closest to Jesus, the
son of Mary.
I talked about the 5 pillars of Islam,
comparing them to Christianity, because he said, okay,
they have a statement of faith.
There is no god but god. And they're
like, well, you know, they call him Allah.
It's like, okay, Arabic for god. The Christians
and
Arabic Christians call god
Allah.
Shocking.
And then I explained that they do these
things called they pray.
This must be evil. Right?
I explained that I pray quite regularly when
the trustees of Spalding University are inbound.
I explained that they had this concept called
charity.
Isn't that wrong?
But they had actually a more stringent form
of charity. Right? Christians usually think about tithing
10% of their income.
For Muslims, it's 2.5%
of your net worth.
The Muslims fast. I pointed out that some
Christians do,
heed to this thing called Lent.
Now, the Muslims are a little more strict
about it, they don't just give up chocolate.
And then I explained that they make a
pilgrimage to Mecca, and
isn't that a horrible thing? And I said,
okay. There there are books like maybe you've
read the Canterbury Tales. I know they read
the Canterbury Tales because they had to have
their parents sign the permission slip. Right?
Which means there must be something racy in
the book, which means they actually actually read
it. And I said, it's about a pilgrimage.
So then I moved on. Islamophobia
part 2.
The Quran is an inherently violent text full
of hate and cruelty. Is it the truth?
There are 532 passages. Now, this number oh,
by the way, these numbers are all in
the catalog.
They printed,
selections of this speech in the catalog, page
104 to page
106, somewhere around there. So, you
don't need to write these down.
Final passages in the bible, 1320.
Skip through some of this. I talked about
honor killings and that they,
actually originated in Judeo Christian tradition,
not in Islam.
Islam, tends to punish men and women equally.
So I came to another section.
Islamophobia,
part 3. Islam oppresses and subjugates women. Is
it the truth?
Consider female heads of state in Islamic nations.
The largest, predominantly, Muslim nation is Indonesia. It
has been led by a woman.
The 2nd largest, Pakistan, has been led by
a woman. The 3rd largest, Bangladesh, has been
led by a woman. The 4th largest, Turkey,
has been led by a woman.
Women have led in predominantly Muslim nations of
Kosovo,
Kyrgyzstan, and Senegal.
This one, I hope, will surprise even you.
The number of women in national parliaments. The
United States of America ranks 72nd
out of about a 150 nations on the
percentage of women in their national legislatures. I
can hear some of you reading ahead.
19.4%
of Congress is female.
We are behind Afghanistan,
Iraq,
Pakistan,
and Saudi Arabia.
Okay. And then I talked a bit about
women in education
and really pointed out that,
the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, advocated
educating men and women equally.
He said the search for knowledge is a
duty for every Muslim man and woman, and
that women are when women are deprived of
education, it is usually an economic issue.
And in many of the countries, it, the
economic subjugation of the United States and other,
colonizers is at play.
But I will move past that.
I will move past gender equity, because I
want to get to the
next section.
So then, I left Islamophobia proper and went
to the global war on terror.
How many United States citizens have died? How
many Muslims have died?
So I wanted to run up the score
on the US side. So September 11th, I
gave us 3,000 people. I found numbers on
the internet and rounded up the U. S.
Military. I rounded up to 7,000. I rounded
up the contractors to 7,200,
which was surprising to me.
I added in, another 7,000 for folks who
may have died after they came home from
drugs and other trauma.
Eighty 7 were killed in acts of domestic
terrorism. 350 killed as a result of terror
overseas. That's all terror, not just Islamic terrorism.
For a total of I rounded up to
25,000.
If you look at the United States official
sources,
they estimate that the war on terror has
killed
304,000
people.
That's,
10 to 1, if we trust
our own sources.
Neutral sources estimate that the death toll is
between 12,000,000.
Less neutral sources between 24,000,000.
Hostile sources estimate more than 6,000,000.
Now, I went to,
a neutral source that was the
Physicians for Social Responsibility,
Physicians for Global Survival, in an acronym that
I can no longer remember, but the source
is on my slide.
Neutral sources
estimate
that 1,000,000 people have been killed in Iraq,
220,000 in Afghanistan,
80,000 people in Pakistan.
That comes up to a nice round total
of 1,300,000.
That's For every American killed by terror, the
war on terror has killed 52 people. Most
of them, Muslim.
Terror in context, this was in my speech
in December. I did not just add it
for the NRA.
During the time that 25,000
US citizens were killed by terrorist acts,
4 more than 400,000 died on US soil
and non terror related attacks involving firearms.
That's a ratio of 1 to 16.
September 11, 2001, equivalence.
In Iraq, the war on terror has caused
the equivalent
of 333,
September 11ths.
In Afghanistan,
the war on terror has inflicted
the equivalent of 73
September 11th attacks. In Pakistan, 26 September 11th
attacks,
inflicted
not by them,
by us.
It is estimated that 90%
of casualties in the global war on terror
have been noncombatants.
So if you take 1,300,000
as the number who have been killed, that's
1,000,000
170,000
innocent people
who weren't any threat to us at all,
who have died in the global war on
terror.
So I got this from one of those
disreputable sources. It's Forbes Magazine,
which estimates that we have spent
$1,700,000,000,000 on the war on terror. I call
your attention to fiscal year 2008, when the
US economy was tanking.
We spent $195,000,000,000
that year on the war on terror.
That equates to
534
$534,000,000
a day
on the war on terror. We've cut back
74,000,000,000
last year. That's $202,000,000
a day.
So
then I needed to end my speech, and
I'm 45 seconds over, so I better get
on with that.
And I thought I would turn to Dwight
David Eisenhower
for my,
end because I needed a good republican
who isn't, isn't against our troops,
And, I will let the gentleman behind the
scenes turn on some audio for you.
Address of the president. Yep.
A burden of arms, draining the wealth and
labor of all people,
a wasting of strength that defies the American
system or the Soviet system or any system
to achieve true abundance and happiness
for the peoples of this earth.
Every gun that is made,
every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense,
a theft
from those who hunger and may not be
fed,
those who are cold
and are not put.
This world in arms is not spending money
alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
The cost of 1 modern heavy bomber is
this, a modern rich school in more than
36.
It is
2 electric power plants,
each serving a town of 60,000
population.
It is
2, 5, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete
pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with
a half 1000000 vessels a week.
We pay for a single destroyer with new
homes that could have housed
more than 8,000
people. This is, I repeat,
the best way of life to be found
on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at
all
in any 2¢.
Under the cloud of threatened war, it is
humanity hanging from across the vine.
So this end is just for you. We
can't just talk to each other and think
we're making progress. We've gotta cross the street
and talk to people who are not prepared
to listen. So, thank you.
Alright.
Well, good afternoon.
Nice to see you all again.
So when we talk about I'm I'm just
still I'm a little bit speechless
from this
presentation. Thank you so much for that. It's
really
it's really moving.
In in the United States, Muslims are less
than 2% of the population.
There's just no way we can make any
progress without allies,
without,
you know, people who are
who are going to to speak with us
and and on behalf of us and to
our neighbors.
Connecting with people,
I really believe, is the most effective way
of overcoming the fear that people have
of Muslims,
but the numbers are very difficult.
Right? It's just really very difficult, which is
one of the reasons why
we need
allies. We need friends. We need our neighbors
to say, hey. I know a Muslim,
and, they're nothing like, you know, what what
you say.
We live in a time certainly where there
are no naive encounters
between Americans and Muslims.
I don't know if there ever were. I
mean, as adults, we know that we spend
our whole
lives
constructing
and then deconstructing what we know.
You know, we it seems like we we
grow up and we learn.
And,
we learn so many things and then we
question them and start unlearning them. And it's
just this constant process of trying to
make some order of the world
and then realizing that our perspective is limited
or wrong or skewed.
And that's why I
I do agree with,
the Dalai Lama that it's so important that
we understand our minds, and we understand the
way,
that that
our attention works, why we pay attention to
some things and not others,
how we make risk assessments,
how it's very easy for us to be
manipulated.
And and the reality is that we will
always remember traumatic,
upsetting, disturbing images. That's a survival mechanism for
humanity.
We could see,
a 100 pictures
of Muslim teenagers planting trees or Muslim families
sitting and having dinner.
We could even see the women being elected
head of state,
but we're not going to remember those images.
We're gonna remember the images we see of
violence and trauma.
I asked many
audiences
not only
about heads of state, how many, you know,
Muslim women have been heads of state, but
how many how many Muslims have won the
Nobel Peace Prize?
It's a lot
in the last dozen years.
And just,
there have been 3 women
in the last in the last dozen years.
And many
people remember
Malala,
Yousafzai, and they remember her because she was
the victim of violence.
She's a person who was a victim of
violence, but also, you know,
you
tremendously articulate, charming, you know, advocate for education.
But what about the other 2 women who
weren't victims of violence?
Tawakkad Karaman, who led a nonviolent,
peaceful
political revolution in Yemen, which is one of
the most conservative,
you know, tribal
Arab Muslim societies. And the pictures of her
leading men and women and her husband
at home with the kids and bringing the
kids down to her tent in the middle
of the square where she was leading this
peaceful revolution.
I've yet I've yet to,
be in a general audience
and,
had anyone say they remember her or know
her.
So we have this problem. We have a
knowledge based problem. We have a perception based
problem.
That's not counting down. Do I okay.
Alright.
I started public speaking,
probably in the late nineties,
regularly giving talks to,
civic organizations, churches, synagogues.
And I really did notice the shift
in about the mid 2000s. And it was
during when the Iraq war really got going,
when the occupation of Iraq and all the
violence got going there,
that,
audiences I encountered
no longer had any sense of openness.
Before, I would be invited and say, well,
we don't really know that much about Islam.
We don't really know anything about Islam and
Muslims. So, you know, we'd like you to
give a presentation.
After about 2,004, 2005,
everyone in the audience was convinced that they
knew what Islam was and what Muslims believe.
And it it was,
I I realized that I couldn't just
give information because it was it was being
filtered away from from a very strong,
conviction that they knew what Islam and Muslims
were. And, and it's even more so now.
Now now the case is why is that
again? Is it something that's just
been,
happened,
sort of passively
For many people, for many ordinary Americans, it
is
it's the water we're swimming in. Right?
And,
it's making people afraid and terrified.
So terrified that when I was in the
the Flint airport a few weeks ago,
and you know, when you go to the
airport, you have a certain amount of tension,
like, oh, I'm gonna get there on time
and the TSA line and, you know, and
then you finally get to the gate and
you relax. You're sitting there. Okay.
And as I just got in the gate
area
and I relax and I'm pulled out my
phone and I'm scrolling through my emails
and
suddenly someone just came right in my face.
This woman came in my face
and
said, you're being brainwashed. You're being brainwashed.
You don't have to wear that. You don't
have to wear that. And I was just
so shocked and she was so frantic. She
was so
upset, she was so nervous.
And
I
just after I you know I was I
was
shocked because I didn't it was really out
of nowhere
and then I'm trying to say okay. She's
so upset. How do I relax her? I
said
no. You know, what do I say? It's
okay.
So I'm trying to calm her down
and I stood up
so I could talk to her and she
just started she started running away and I'm
like, wait.
Don't run.
Check my website
out.
Ingridmatson.org.
M a t t s. I didn't, you
know, how am I going to
I and and I just I felt so
bad for her
that she's walking around in this
state of
of just fear.
So
it
it it needs a lot of compassion but
it is a very difficult problem. And the
question is,
you know, I think the answer is that
that
why it's happening and why it will continue
happening is in those
numbers.
You only care about others. You know, it
it is.
It's a number, but it's also the money,
and they always say follow the money.
Why? I just want to really, we just
have to think. Sometimes it's just common sense.
It's just basic common sense.
Why did Glenn Beck write a book on
Islam?
What does Glenn Beck know
about Islam?
What did he get? You know?
And why are people buying
his book on Islam? Why would they consider
him
an authority
on Islam?
So here, we've clearly got some people
who are taking advantage of the situation
for
monetary gain.
They're making a lot of money.
There are people we saw the money that's
being spent spent on the war on terror.
Some of those peew I I that probably
doesn't even include the self style experts and
the people if you go on Amazon and
they claim to be experts on Islam and
they're about how selling books about how horrible
Islam is. So there's a lot more money
being made there. Think tanks popping up all
over the place,
strategic this and,
you know, analytic critical this and security this
and
and putting forth packaging people to come and
and further this message that Muslims are scary,
Muslims are terrifying, and they're not telling you
the truth. And this is really the most
insidious part of it,
because I've been told by audiences
that I don't understand Islam.
Just think about that for a minute
or
that I'm not telling the truth.
Right?
And
there is a and I'm going to
focus on this because it's really important, and
it's going around more and more. And it's
something I heard, unfortunately, from someone,
with a religious education
in a government appointed position
who,
you know, even I it's I I feel
I always feel like I'm beyond being shocked,
but then something else happens, and I'm just
shocked again,
who said to me,
okay. You've explained these things. You've written a
book on the Quran where you've put put
the verses about war and peace in context,
and you've explained to us certain things about,
for example,
the moral trajectory of the Quran, how most
Muslims
don't want to relive the 7th century, but
we wanna take
the the values,
the principles. Of course, our our ritual life
is based on
on the teachings of the prophet Muhammad. May
god's peace and blessings be upon him. But,
I mean, for the vast majority of us,
except for those utopian fundamentalists,
we're not interested in, you know, reproducing, like,
some kind of,
weird, you know, play
the 7th century.
Right? We we we want to work towards
the increasing
liberation of humanity,
etcetera.
And, he said to me, well I have
to ask you a question.
How can we trust anything you say when
we know that Muslims
are,
have a religious
what did he call it, like a religious
precept
that you're supposed to lie about your faith.
And he said, it's called Taqiyah.
So they know nothing
except for this thing.
So this taqiyyah means dissimilation
or concealing.
And,
so what what he said, and this is
an educated person in government position saying that
Muslims are concealing
the truth about the religion behind this, which
is then if you look at imagery about
Islam and Muslims, it's all about
being hidden.
Right? So I I'm I mean, honestly, I'm
so tired of voyeuristic metaphors behind the veil,
beneath the veil, unveiling,
lifting the veil, peeking behind the veil. What's
behind you know, I it's just it's really
just so overdone.
But but you'll see the the the images,
it'll always be someone with a masked face.
Right? Someone so we don't really know who
these are, and this is a this is
a very significant,
very old accusation about Muslims.
So,
in the time I have, let me just
tell you what this means.
Muslims,
if they're being tortured,
if they're being
at risk of having their life taken away,
it is allowed for them to say, no.
I'm not a Muslim.
What did this
how do we know this? Where did this
happen?
I mentioned this morning about Ammar, Sumayya, and
Yasir.
Ammar and Sumayya, slaves in Mecca who were
were tortured
unto death,
Sumeya being sexually violated,
in the torture
before being killed
for being a believer
in Mecca.
Their son, Ammar,
was tortured with them and watched this happen
to his father and to his mother.
And the torturers said to him,
renounce your faith, renounce God,
and we'll let you free.
And the trauma
and the terror
of what was happening to him made him
at that point renounce God. And he went
to the prophet Muhammad crying,
weeping.
He said, I've been ruined, absolutely ruined.
And he explained what happened.
And the prophet Muhammad, may God's peace and
blessings be upon him, said,
if they come to you again,
say the same thing.
Because God knows what's in your heart,
and he was not in a state where
he should
lose his life in this horrible way for
this.
So, you know, I think I think the
beginning of perhaps
a truly
fascist state in the sense of,
well, a totalitarian
state in the modern world, I think the
seeds of it really came in under the
inquisition in Spain,
when it wasn't enough
for the Jews and the Muslims
to, under
threat of force and persecution and torture or
being banned when they gave up their faith
and they said we're Christians
because the inquisition said, no, they aren't really,
and used honed all of the instruments of
torture and terror
to try to find out what they really
were.
And and is this is how we'll find
out who's a Muslim when we decide to
ban Muslims
from the United States? I don't know.
But
in that context,
there were those, both Jews and Muslims, who
concealed their faith, hoping that eventually, they would
be freed from this tyranny, freed from this
oppression,
and one day being free to have their
faith.
And the idea of the perfidious Jew, the
Jew who is lying and sneaky, and the
Muslim
who conceals
his or her faith and doesn't show your
true face became a dominant,
a dominant
trope
in Western literature
that then continue to characterize
who are these,
Semites until today.
So that's the reality of the situation. And
so
this idea of don't trust the Muslim has
very deep
insidious
and and
very disturbing
roots
in,
our culture,
and we have to be extremely,
careful about it.
I think I'm gonna just end with that.
Good. Thank you. Thank you.
May peace and blessings be upon you all.
I'm very grateful and honored to be in
the space, and to be with all of
you for a second day,
and more humbled and honored to be on
the stage with,
Tory and
teachers and luminary leaders
in the Muslim American community. Some of the
people that are the most highly esteemed in
our community. So I want you to know,
whose space you are sharing. So I'm grateful
to be here.
So I'm I'm not a theologian or a
scholar as I told you yesterday. So I
wanna talk to you as an American Muslim,
as an activist, and someone who works every
single day, in Muslim communities across the country,
but more specifically,
in New York City. And I wanna talk
to you about now,
and what Islamophobia actually looks like, what Islamophobia
means and how it impacts your Muslim neighbors,
your Muslim teachers, doctors, social workers, cab drivers,
restaurant workers,
Muslim children, and school children across the country.
You know, we're living in very crazy times,
and I think that it's important to hear
the voices of those in the communities that
are most directly impacted.
And while I will share with you some
difficult things,
I I will say for myself and for
my Muslim sister and brother who are on
the stage that we still are and will
always be unapologetically Muslim in the United States
of America.
And I dares thank you.
And I personally have been reflecting a lot
lately on kind of the rhetoric and the
things that are happening around us, especially in
the context of this election.
And what's been interesting to me is, I've
been taunted by a lot of people. About
a year ago, I said, look, everybody needs
to wake up.
This is a dangerous
rhetoric. We've seen it happen in other places
before and we can't just sit back and
say, oh, don't worry about it. It's gonna
be all right.
And people said, do you think do you
think we in the United States of America
will allow a man like this
lead our country? Linda, you're cray like, this
is
what's wrong with you? I said, okay.
So I was silenced
up until about a few weeks ago, and
I emerged again very confident to say, I
told you
so. And what was interesting for me is
the past few months, people heard things like
we're going to register the Muslims in a
database, and people were outraged.
Not in our country. We would never do
that. We're not gonna allow that to happen.
Ban Muslims from coming to our country.
Maybe we'll let in the Christian refugees, but
not the Muslim ones. People said, Linda, that's
just all talk. That's not something we'll we
do here in this country. We'll never allow
that to happen.
Patrol Muslim neighborhoods.
What Muslim neighborhoods? Our Muslim neighbors live in
all cities across the country. We don't patrol
neighborhoods based on people's faith. We just don't
do that in this country.
Linda, we're never gonna let that happen
And I was watching people and I was,
you know, I was feeling good that people
were outraged. I wanted to see the outrage,
but I was waiting for the punch line.
Right? I was waiting for it. And I
said, you're outraged
because you have no idea that these are
things that are already happening
to Muslim communities across the country.
So when people talk about
registering the Muslims,
in 2003 when the Immigration Naturalization
Services
changed over to become the Department of Homeland
Security, this was in 2003,
the US government started a program called Special
Call in Registration.
The acronym was NSEERS, the National,
Security
Exit and Entry Registration System. And what they
did was is they called on males over
the age of 16 who were not US
residents, who are here on visas, business visas,
visitors' visas, other types of,
immigration statuses that were at, you know, permanent
statuses.
And they made a list
of 29 countries of origin, all of whom
were majority Arab and Muslim countries of origin.
People were so scared. They didn't know what
that meant. Did that mean that they were
gonna round up these men away from their
families? Were they were gonna put them on
camps? Were they gonna detain them? People had
no idea what was gonna happen.
So about 180,000
Muslim men in this country,
complied with this program
and about 10% of those law abiding people,
they hadn't done anything wrong, some of them
may have overstayed a visa,
were deported, were put on deportation proceedings.
And the the idea of the program was
we were trying to find terrorists.
We found 0 terrorists from this program,
a waste of our taxpayer dollars
to criminalize,
to target,
and to profile
our neighbors just based on their national origin
or perceived religion. When we talk about the
patrolling of Muslim neighborhoods, I'm from New York
City,
and I come from a community that based
on leaked documents from the New York Police
Department was is continues to be under unwarranted
surveillance. Our religious leaders,
our 250 mosques, bookstores and cafes, our Muslim
student associations.
So when I hear people
say that they're outraged
and as if that we live in a
country where bad things never happened, it really
bothers me. It makes me feel like we're
not operating from a place of reality.
And, you know, we and I understand my
history very clearly that we live in a
country that was,
for some people founded on religious freedom, but
for others, it was founded on the genocide
of indigenous people,
the slavery of black people
who some of whom about 25% were Muslims.
And we say we won't ban people from
coming to this country in a country where
we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act
and in a country where young black men
and women can be killed by law enforcement
officials
where no one's held accountable.
We live in a country where really horrible
things have happened,
and I ask people to understand that Islamophobia
is just another
ism on a on a long list of
isms that have directly impacted people in very
horrible ways.
I think of my own children who are
17,
15, and 12 years old,
children who only grew up in a post
911 America. They don't know what it feels
like to be a Muslim before 911. They
have no idea.
They live in a country
that all they know is that someone tells
them that they don't belong here,
that they're just not enough for this country,
that the faith that they follow is the
wrong faith.
They live in a country that time and
time again, their faith is labeled suspect.
They live in a country where policies are
made to criminalize them and target the communities
that they love and live in.
They live in
a country where every time they turn on
the prime time television or any news station,
they see images of people who don't look
like them, who are committing acts of violence,
and someone's telling them that those people somehow
are connected to them, where their religion, their
profit are vilified
everywhere they look.
They are living in a time where those
vying for the highest office of this land
are mulling their future in this country,
where our children are uncertain about the place
that they were born and raised in, the
only country that they ever knew.
This is all they know in this country.
And these feelings are not new feelings. Muslim
children are not the first children in this
country to feel this way,
And I connect our struggle to the struggle
of our Japanese American sisters and brothers
who have experienced
a form of
ism and phobia
in much more horrible ways than we have.
I remember recently, I went to Ohio State
University to do a lecture
and there was a question and answer portion
and a young
Muslim brother about 19 years old stood up
in this pretty diverse audience and he said,
sister Linda, I have a question to ask
you.
I said go ahead brother. He said I
want to know
who who lived in this country at the
time of Japanese internment?
Who were those Americans that allowed their
Japanese neighbors and their children be hauled away
to camps in this country? Who who were
those people? Who lived here?
And I don't know, sisters and brothers, if
he was looking for an answer. I think
he wanted to ask that question out loud
and when I left there for days days
after, that question haunted me at night,
and I too asked myself, who were those
people who allowed that to happen to our
American sisters and brothers on this US soil
that was created for people to come and
experience freedom and democracy.
And
American Muslim communities
are genuinely afraid.
Not because we live in a country where
we're confident that we're going to be okay,
where we live in a country where we've
seen very bad things happen.
The question for me here when we think
about Islamophobia,
and I wanna take it a step further,
that Islamophobia
really needs to be called anti Muslim racism.
Because this is not about I'm not afraid
of the individual, you know, Glenn Beck. So
I'm not afraid of the individuals on the
street who tell me to go back to
my country.
That's part of the problem. But the bigger
problem here is state sponsored Islamophobia,
the institutional
systemic racism against people who are Muslim and
those to be perceived
Muslim.
And let's remember that our 6 sisters and
brothers who are not Muslim
are probably
more targets
in this war against Islam or Muslims in
the United States of America.
And what has humbled me the most about
the experiences of our community is our 6
sisters and brothers who have never once said
we are not Muslim.
They have never,
in this context, threw us under the bus
and said we are not them.
They consider themselves our sisters and brothers and
those struggling against the racism and isms that
are impacting our communities every day.
And people say, how do we combat Islamophobia?
How do we address Islamophobia?
And for me,
I think it's important to educate people about
Islam. But for me, as an activist, it's
more important for me for people to experience
Islam
and the way I have,
tried and
and I hope that,
that I'm pleasing my Lord in the process
is by allowing people to experience the
the justice and the compassion of Islam
and that has been in the formation of
me,
and others that are like me including Imam
Zayed and Doctor. Ingrid and many other young
people in the Muslim community who are at
the forefront of major civil rights movements in
this country right now, including
Black Lives Matter, including climate justice, including,
fights against income inequality,
and allowing people to experience that the reasons
why we stand,
at those picket lines, the reasons why we
are being arrested in civil disobedience is because
our religion teaches us to do so. And
I wanna give you one quick story.
In light of the murder of Eric Garner,
a brother, a grandfather, a father in Staten
Island who was choked by an NYPD police
officer.
I've I organized with a group in New
York City called the Justice League NYC. It's
a group of young people, some of whom
are formerly incarcerated individuals, activists and artists and
others.
And these young people came to us and
said, we wanna do a
a march from New York City to Washington
DC. I said, do you know that New
York City is 250 miles away from Washington
DC?
They said, we don't care.
So we
we wanna do something drastic. Maybe somebody will
pay attention. So I'm gonna make a long
story short.
I was the co chair of the march
and we, had to sleep every night
somewhere at a church, at a community center
and I hooked up with a mosque in
Philadelphia,
a beautiful mosque called Al Hidayah Center and
I welcomed these 100 marchers, many of whom
were not Muslim, about 95% of them were
not Muslim, and we went to this mosque.
And the imam came out of the masjid,
and he welcomed them in. He said, you
know, peace be upon you. We welcome you.
This is your home.
They fed us.
They housed us. They gave us a place
to sleep.
And about 11 o'clock at night, these young
people came to knock on the sister section
where we were sleeping, and they said, sister
Linda, where are the people at the mosque?
I said, what do you mean? I said,
he they said, where did they go? I
said, well, it's 11 o'clock at night. They
went home probably to sleep with their families.
They said, what do you mean? You mean
to tell me that these people left some
100 strangers in this beautiful mosque and they
just left us here? I said, do you
remember what the imam told you when you
got here? He said, this is your home.
This is a house of God. You are
all the creations of God, which means that
this is your home. So tonight, while these
people are not at this mosque, this house
is or the security of this house is
in your hands.
The empowerment that these young people felt, some
of whom have never set foot in a
mosque before, locking the doors, sweeping outside, things
that had nothing to do with us, that
were there before we got there.
And in the morning, about 5:30 in the
morning, the imam came back, and he started
doing the call to prayer that everyone heard
on the loudspeakers. The kids came to me
again and said,
what is that sound?
I said, that's a call to prayer. It's
time for us, you know, for the Muslims
to get up and and pray the morning
prayer. And this young,
maybe 17 year old young man said, you
know, I never heard a sound so beautiful,
so moving. I don't even understand what the
guy is saying.
And, anyway, we'd left the mosque, and these
young people were so moved by this experience.
The imam never explained to them the 5
pillars of Islam. He never sat them down
and lectured them. They experienced love and compassion
and
these doors that opened
at a mosque who told them that you
are marching for the right cause, a cause
that we support as Muslims and that for
them was enough to understand who and what
Muslims were in America.
And that for me is my
process of what it looks like to combat
Islamophobia in this country. And I'll say this,
amidst all of these things that I told
you today,
I still find courage. I find courage, in
my community, I find courage in my faith,
I find courage in allies and sisters and
brothers of other faiths.
And I sometimes think that the word that
we have as as Muslims and allies is
and what Tory has is not only is
it courage, it definitely is courage, but it's
also audacity,
that we are so audacious that have the
audacity to believe that we have the power
to to to to make our country the
greatest nation on earth, that we have the
audacity to believe that we could welcome people
here of all faiths, that we are all
equal, that we are all deserving
of dignity and respect,
that we have the audacity to believe that
black lives matter and that when black life
matters in this country, all of our lives
will matter in this country.
I have the audacity to believe in our
collective power that we can stand up against
fascism
and nativism
and racism and Islamophobia
and all the phobias that we know that
unfortunately are diseases,
in our country.
And I shared this quote with you
yesterday as we think about what it looks
like to fight against all these racist all
this racism and Islamophobia and what and all
these other really horrible things with sexism and
misogyny and patriarchy. I could have gone on
here for another 30 minutes.
As again, I leave you with this quote,
that really is so meaningful me meaningful to
me in how I approach my work in
the movement and approach my work, in social
justice
by an Aboriginal
woman in Australia named Leila Watson and I
I want everyone to like have it around
your house and just remember this, when
you stand up courageously against,
tyranny and dictatorship and all these other really
bad things And it says, if you have
come here to help me, you are wasting
your time.
But if you have come here because you
believe that your liberation
is bound up with mine, let us work
together.
I hope that we leave spaces like this
united
and steadfast
and courageous.
I hope that we leave here
ready to organize like our lives depended on
it because for some of us, our lives
do depend on it. Thank you very much.
Now we will hear some poetry
from Anna Rollater.
Welcome everyone.
I'm actually here to share some poetry from
Rumi,
which has been translated by,
my beloved teacher and our local sheikh Khabir
Helminski who led the Sufi
practice this morning.
And I just wanna thank our sisters and
brothers for such an inspiring
talk so far. So I hope this adds
another dimension.
I think Rumi speaks to the
crucible
aspect of Islamophobia in our time. That was
the basis of the selections I made.
Don't go.
Come near.
Don't be faithless.
Be faithful.
Find the antidote
in the venom.
Come to the root
of the root
of yourself.
Molded of clay
yet needed from the substance of certainty,
a guard at the treasure of holy light.
Come,
return to the root
of the root
of yourself.
Once you get a hold of selflessness,
you'll be dragged from your ego
and freed from many traps.
Come,
return to the root
of the root of yourself.
You are born from the children of God's
creation,
but you fixed your sight too low.
How can you be happy?
Come,
return to the root
of the root
of yourself.
Though you are a talisman protecting a treasure,
you
are also the mine.
Open your hidden eyes
and come to the root
of the root
of yourself.
You were born from a ray of God's
majesty
and have the blessings of a good star.
Why suffer
at the hands of things that don't exist?
Come.
Return to the root
of the root
of yourself.
And one more
about
a poem that I think sums up
a very deep level of devotion.
If you fall in love with me,
I will mess you up.
Cultivate little
or I will ruin you.
If you make 200 homes like the bees
do,
I will make you homeless as a fly.
If you intend to bewilder people,
I will make you drunk
and dazed.
If you are a mount cough,
I will set you in motion like a
millstone
and spin you like a wheel.
And if you are a play doh
or a Lukman in knowledge,
I will turn you unlearned
with a single look.
You are in my hand like a dead
bird
and I am a hunter.
I'll make you a bait for the
birds. If you are slumbering on a treasure
like a serpent,
I will make you writhe
like a wounded snake.
Whether you bring reason or not,
I will make you the convincing proof
in your reasoning.
How long
would you remain captive to this
or that?
If you come out of this,
I will make you that.
Oh, shell,
when you come to our ocean,
I will make you a pearl maker,
the mother of pearls.
No sword would be able to cut your
throat
if I sacrifice you like Ishmael.
You are like Abraham.
Have no fear of fire.
I will make a 100 rose gardens from
the fire.
Hold on to our sleeve
if your own sleeves are stained,
so that I may make you a shirt
shining like moonlight.
I am the bird of paradise
and if I cast a shadow over your
head,
I'll make you the king of kings
and the sultan.
Take care,
Read less.
Keep silent
so that I may recite
and make you
a living
Quran.
And now we will hear from Imam
Zayed Shikhar.
Which means peace upon you
in the mercy and blessings
of God.
Before starting,
I guess I'm starting,
I was reflecting on, something
that Doctor.
Mattson mentioned.
When, the lady
was in her face, you've been brainwashed!
And then when doctor,
Ingrid stood up,
She's very intimidating
when she stands up.
And the lady ran away.
Instead of, Go to my web site,
I was thinking she should have yelled out,
You've been brainwashed.
It's
it's all good. So we've heard we've heard
facts and we've heard,
experiences and,
deep insights,
from both Tori,
who's good at throwing things,
and we've heard from my 2 oppressed
Muslim sisters,
who aren't good at being oppressed.
Perhaps that's why they're so powerful and moving.
And may God bless all of them, all
3.
So I wanna start
again
on a on a personal note that
many of the figures whose faces would
adorn
a Mount Rushmore
of Islamophobes
have described me as a stealth jihadist.
Seriously.
As a,
a violent extremist,
as a,
let me see on my notes
in case I missed something.
Oh, a Sharia supremacist.
A Sharia supremacist
also.
And, you know, the sad part about that,
there are a lot of folks who would
believe those characterizations,
and on the basis of those characterizations
would hate me.
And the reason for that is
ignorance
and fear
are
probably the most fertile breeding grounds for hatred.
And those who profit from hate
are the merchants of ignorance.
So I want to speak probably to the
Tory's 6 friends
who might be scattered
about the audience.
And I'm looking forward to my copy of
Glenn Beck's book.
Actually, I already have a copy.
So who am I? You know, I've been
every time I go to Egypt, I become
a Palestinian. They look at my name, Zacek.
Yeah, there's some Philistini.
Like, that's a Palestinian
name. So I I try in my very
best
American English to convince them I'm not a
Palestinian.
I am not a Palestinian.
Ain't a Philistini.
No. I'm not a Palestinian. Listen, Babe Ruth
hits 714
home runs.
Would a Palestinian
know that?
You know, Hank Aaron broke his record with
755
home runs. Would a Palestinian
know that?
And Barry Bonds
broke Hank Aaron's records, but no one wants
to acknowledge it because he allegedly let it'll
use steroids.
Would a Palestinian
know that? And they look at me and
scratch their heads, nah, anti Palestinian.
You're still a Palestinian.
So I I want to tell you, I
am the grandson
of Lorraine
Spence
and Richmond
Whittaker
of Harris County,
Georgia.
And
both of their all of their grandparents,
my grandparents'
grandparents
were born into and lived their entire lives
as slaves.
And
so
that's on that side of the family.
Rich and I know the paternal grandfathers,
Rich Eubanks
and
Will Spence.
Rich Eubanks on my grandfather's side, hence his
name, Richmond
Richmond Whittaker,
and Will Spence,
hence my grandmother,
Loreleene
Spence.
On my father's side, somewhere about 4 or
5 generations back, there's an Irishman.
And I haven't been able to locate
his records,
but his last name was Mitchell.
And he was the father of math Matthew
Mitchell,
who was the father of John Mitchell, who
was the father of Donald
Mitchell, who was my father.
So
those are my roots
as far as I can
locate them.
Now
there's mystery. I don't know
that Irish, and I don't know
Will Eubanks. I don't know,
Will Spence. I don't know anything about their
lives other than
their names
and the names of their children
and the names of their children's children.
That's all I know about.
Their lives are closed,
clothed rather,
in mystery.
But I'm sure,
and I think epigenetics,
who I was something I was introduced to
by another oppressed
Muslim woman, a world class geneticist
by the name of doctor Fatima Jackson,
formerly of University of Maryland and University of
North Carolina. It's an amazing woman,
who fails and refuses to recognize her oppression.
But she told me something about epigenetics
and how trauma
can be passed
on genetically
for 4, 5, or 6
generations.
And so
I'm sure that
a lot of what my ancestors
experienced
in mysterious ways affects
who I am and what I do
and what I stand for.
At the end of the day, though, I
refuse
to accept or capitulate
to the base caricature of myself
that's presented
by those individuals
who never
bothered to reach out to me, never
have spoken to me,
never even sent me a text message.
They don't have your phone number.
That's what
you think. They're like Ma Bell.
They know how to reach out and touch
people.
They prefer to do it via the Internet
in devious ways.
But if they won't give me their courtesy
of
speaking to me,
asking me what I really believe or think,
I won't give them the courtesy of believing
anything they say about me.
We're in this season of graduations.
Shift gears a little bit.
And usually, somewhere, somehow,
it's trite
to some,
appropriate to others. Someone's going to hear
if by
Rudyard Kipling.
He of take up the white man's burden.
That's another point.
I like it though.
And we we
most of us have, memorized, we've heard it
so much, the the first line,
if you can keep your head
when all about you, those are losing theirs
and blaming it on you,
very appropriate for these times. But the next
line, I really I like more than the
first one.
If you can trust yourself
when all men doubt you
yet make allowance for their doubting too.
Further on in the poem, he goes on
to say,
this is something
both Linda and doctor Matson can relate to.
So can I?
If you can see the truth you've spoken
twisted by knaves to make a trap for
fools.
That's very appropriate
in these days of Islamophobia.
But in all seriousness,
that line, it makes me stop. If you
can trust yourself
when all men doubt you yet make allowance
for their doubting too.
It's a personal challenge,
and it makes
me go back and consider
maybe some things I've said in the past
once said in the wisest way,
the most appropriate way.
Maybe they once said, considering
the sensitivities
or the ignorance,
which I've talked about, of those who might
hear them.
And perhaps
given the opportunity in the future, things could
be
worded better. That's a personal challenge,
but
our nation is also challenged.
In these days and times of flawed and
imperfect,
America is challenged. Can it trust itself?
Can it trust the course is charted
since
events like Brown versus the Board of Education.
Around that time, the
lynching of Emmett Till
and the circumstances
around that gruesome murder and the consequences
of it.
Civil rights
era
ushered in to a certain extent by the
heroic
stand,
or should we say the heroic seat taken
by Rosa Parks.
All of these events
and many, many others,
other communities,
the work of the likes of Cesar Chavez,
the lower squirta, and others,
have led us or pushed this country down
a course.
And that course is now challenged,
perhaps more than that
any other time in our recent history.
Will the country
trust itself
or will it doubt itself?
Will it,
continue down the path
towards greater inclusion,
greater understanding,
more justice,
more opportunities
for all,
or will it doubt that course
and allow
the ship of state,
fitting
metaphor,
to run aground
and be torn apart
on the reefs
of bigotry,
xenophobia,
hatred, racism,
all of those things that that Linda,
mentioned. Militarism,
greed.
These are the threats
that we face today,
and these threats
constitute
the skeleton
that the putrid
flesh of Islamophobia
is draped
over.
As people of faith,
we must lead the way forward.
We must continue to trust
in the course we've entered upon
as a nation.
If pragmatic
politics
is predicated on compromise,
True religion
is predicated
on principle.
We have to hold on
to our principle in saying that
I'm not just talking about
Christian principles,
Jewish principles, Buddhist principles.
I'm talking about Muslim principle
principles also.
And this is something the architects
of Islamophobia
don't want the average American to know.
As Tory mentioned in those areas she was
focusing on,
there's so much in common.
In terms of principles, Muslims believe that
I, we are our brothers and sisters' keepers.
We believe as our prophet reminded us,
peace be upon him,
that we should love
for our brother and love for our sister
what we love
for ourself.
The Quran and the prophetic teachings emphasize that
life
is sanctified and murder is an abomination.
That love and charity
are amongst the greatest
of all virtues.
In fact,
we can't get into paradise
if we don't have the ability to love.
You will not enter paradise
until you truly believe.
And you will not truly believe
until you love one another.
This is what the prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him,
taught us. And some people would say,
people like
Tory's
6
friends.
Oh, that's loving
your fellow Muslims.
No. He didn't say love your fellow Muslims.
He didn't teach us to just be merciful
to our fellow Muslims.
There's a lot more I wanted to say.
I could scroll down for a couple minutes.
I'll turn off the iPad and I'll say
this. In terms of
loving
and being merciful
to those outside of our community.
The prophet Mohammed,
he once said to,
peace be upon him, a group
of his assembled companions
that
you will not enter paradise until you are
merciful.
Until You are merciful to each other.
And they said, all of us are merciful,
O Messenger of Allah.
You Rasulullah.
We're all merciful.
He said,
I'm not talking about the mercy one of
you shows to those closest to you.
The father, the parents to the children, the
children to the parents, the neighbors to the
neighbors, the relatives to the relatives.
I'm not talking about that.
What I'm talking about is the mercy
to
the generality
of people, the general public, the mercy to
all of humanity.
So
there are people who
are going to do what they do.
There are warmongers out there. There are hate
mongers out there. There are fear mongers out
there.
But if we do
what people of faith
have been inspired
by their respective prophets, or their respective teachers,
or their respective scriptures to do,
we shall prevail.
It might take time, but in the end,
we shall
prevail.
So I was gonna ask this first question
later on, but I'm gonna start with this
one because I'd like a little bit of
audience participation.
If you feel like you're knowledgeable enough about
the subject of Islam
that you could defend it at just an
average,
dinner party conversation, raise your hand.
And,
Give yourselves a hand. Yeah.
And so I want to ask our,
speakers today
for the folks who weren't able to raise
their hand,
what advice would you give them?
Get to know a Muslim.
I'd say it's really important,
to,
not impose
a
fundamentalist hermeneutic on the Quran. Meaning that,
there are some Quranic
fundamentalists in the sense of people who take
scripture completely out of historical
context versus out of context,
but the vast majority of Muslims
interpret the Quran through a complex
set of tools, understanding the history, the society,
the relationship of verses
to the exemplary behavior
of the prophets.
You do that with your own scripture. The
vast majority of you do that with your
own scripture,
and that's what Muslims do as well.
It made me, think about a correction I
wanted to make to my own remarks. The,
originally, when I spoke to the Rotary Club,
I'd only found, like, 300 passages in the
Quran that were violent, and the Glenn Beck
guy was like, it's 500. And and and
then he tried to divide the number of,
words in the book and convinced me that
and I was just like, okay, enough.
But the
those passages
to to come up with that number are
all taken out of context.
They're all taken out of the historical grounding,
both in the reading of the Old and
New Testaments and in the reading of the
Quran. So you you're taking the most cynical
and sinister reading
to get those passages to be violent. As
Karen Armstrong wrote in the Charter for Compassion
that,
readings of scripture that promote violence are are
she did said it more eloquently are are
are most often taken out of context.
Can I explain why I said get to
know a Muslim?
I want to explain this to a story.
I'll try to be brief.
I have a friend in Suburban Indiana,
Indianapolis
rather, I'm sorry,
Suburban Indianapolis. I won't say which suburb.
And they're of,
South Asian origin,
and their mother, the
father's mother
came to visit from that South Asian country.
And,
they had to the family went to a
a Muslim conference, and the mother-in-law
the mother doesn't know English,
so she stayed back.
And when when they came back, she was
running out of the house with a pot
of
food. And, where are you going? To the
neighbors,
we're we're exchanging dishes.
And in their absence, she had gotten to
know all of the neighbors. She couldn't speak
English.
And so, they were communicating, and they were
exchanging food, and she was cooking for them.
And she was just doing what she did
at home back home in in her village,
you know. Everyone knows each other, they share
dishes and food.
And so she had broken down,
walls of misunderstanding
and that her English speaking,
children and grandchildren
couldn't do. They were shocked like, oh, these
are the neighbors. We just we say hi
and bye, and
that's it. And you're going into their houses
and you're bringing them food.
And so if you get to know Muslims,
you'll get to know that we we have
wonderful cuisine.
Listen,
if it here in Louisville, I know, no,
right or wrong all of you, what do
you call a person from
Louisville? Not a slugger. A Louisvilleian.
Louisvilleian.
If if it got so bad that they
were running around, it's like putting em on
Muslim shops. They'd pass over Safir's restaurant.
I know it. Good. Because where else would
you eat lunch at?
I'll just briefly add. I think I think
oftentimes we get caught up in the, defense.
You know, I don't know enough, so I'm
just gonna be silent. And I think that's
that's the that's for me the fundamental problem
that because we don't feel like we're equipped,
we allow people to say very hurtful and
nasty things that we know in our hearts
and don't believe that are true, but we
don't think that we're prepared to defend ourselves.
And I'm just asking you that I'm not
asking anyone to be a theologian or to
defend any specific tenants of Islam or any
verses of the Quran because I wouldn't be
able to do that about the bible or
or or the Torah. I'll just be honest
with you. But I know what I could
do. I will never allow
anyone to make anti Semitic statements in front
of me or to be,
you know,
a sexist or a homophobe or
a racist in front of me. And I
don't need I don't necessarily need the particulars
of of any faith or any particular knowledge.
I just have my humanity.
I have courage. And I think what we
need in this room is
I think it's just very simple. It's about
finding your moral compass, your moral courage to
stand up to someone and say, you know
what?
I don't like what you're saying.
It sounds really hurtful.
I have Muslim friends or even if you
don't have Muslim friends, the idea that we
can't allow people to generalize any group of
people and for us to be able to
stand up and have the moral courage. And
I think if more Americans in our country
had the moral courage to stand up against
these isms, we would not be in the
situation that we are in.
So I've come prepared with lots of other
questions, but I'd like to turn it over
to the audience for at least one, and
then I'll steal it back.
Right there. Yes. Yes. Hi. I'm from a
little community in Southeast Alabama.
And, I lead or facilitate an interfaith group,
that includes
many religions.
And we're thankful for that group. It's
about 5 years old.
When we go back,
this Sunday,
we will be celebrating at the local mosque
that's going to be opening, opening.
And, they've invited our whole group to come
and celebrate with them as they open their
mosque and they thank us for standing with
them,
at a city commission meeting,
letting them know how they were valued and
loved in our community.
But our community is
very conservative
and, most doctor's office, lawyer's office, accountant's office,
anywhere you go, you're gonna be watching Fox
News as you wait.
These are people we love dearly.
How do we tell the story
of our interfaith group and
the relationships we've made
in that environment so that it doesn't put
their their community in any kind of danger
of any, of unwanted attention?
I think,
the most powerful tool that we all have
is our own personal experiences and personal stories.
I think that oftentimes we
try to,
do things in a in an intellectual
context, and I think that that's not what
works for ordinary people. And I think being
able to share your experiences,
in this in interfaith group. And sometimes, believe
it or not, just inviting people somewhere saying,
you know what? You know,
on Thursday night, we're gonna go visit this
mosque in Ramadan, and we're gonna break fast
with them. Wanna come? And you would be
you wouldn't believe the people that you would
you would assume wouldn't wanna come might actually
take you up on that invitation. And understanding
that people's understanding
is is evolution there's an evolution. Like, I
I don't expect people to hate Muslim and
then love us tomorrow. I think that it
requires a a a longer opportunity
of education, but really it's about you're the
better messenger than I am. And I think
your personal experience with Muslims are going to
be able to enlighten others to say, wait
a minute. You went to their mosque and
nothing happened to you? Like, you didn't get,
you know, kidnapped or
tortured or anything? I mean, not that I
think people think it's that bad, but you
know what I mean? Like, this just being
able to use your own personal experience and
say, oh, they were wonderful. They were hospitable.
We ate together. We did this. And people
say, you know, maybe I'll try that next
time. So don't underestimate your power as an
individual with your own personal stories and experiences.
I think though, I think also it's important
to emphasize that at a certain point
you have to take risks, and at a
certain point you can't hide.
And that
if the struggle of Muslims to overcome this
current climate is going to be
the next chapter in an ongoing series of
struggles?
And I personally, I share Linda's
dislike for the term Islamophobia.
And one of the reasons I do is
that it it tends to cut Muslims off
from the struggles of others who have experienced
racism, and bigotry,
and violence, and exclusion in American
society. This is just the latest chapter
in an unfortunately
book, a book that's unfortunately much too large.
And at a certain point,
there are risks that have to be taken
if we're going to educate, and if we're
going to
begin to tell our own stories, and if
we are going to go out there and
fully engage
with our communities.
Doctor King I'm sure would have liked to
have remained anonymous,
and Medgar
Evers, or Ida B Wells, or any of
these people who at great risk
made the sacrifices necessary
to advance the cause of their people.
So it's not going to be any different
for Muslims at a certain point. I'm I'm
worried about opening the floor to any more
questions. I think we're out of time.
I'd like to give our,
panelists,
sort of a moment to wrap up of
any final thoughts if you
have some.
It's important for us to,
to be realistic
and
resilience comes from
many places, but one of the places is
realism.
People get very,
demoralized
and disconnected from the political scene because they
they they think that their
salvation
is in politics. It's not. Politics is what
we need
to to organize power in our life, but
it's it's, you know, it's not the messiah.
And
when we look at our relationships or community
relationships
look. Muslims are like other human beings. There's
really super
Muslims, and there's really annoying Muslims.
Like, you are going to go you know?
And some of your interfaith work or some
of your neighbors are going to be
really annoying.
They're gonna be bad neighbors. Some of them
aren't gonna live up to their faith.
You know, we all deal with that. So,
to the extent that Muslims should have rights
as other human beings do and have the
right to to not be
dehumanized. And it's really about dehumanization
saying that these people are so different.
Everything they do is so different, and we
use, like, these Arabic terms to describe everything
they are. Now, what's that thing on your
head? I say it's a scarf.
Like, it's just it's just clothes,
you know, like it's clothes. That's it. So,
we we have to as we go forward
and build this, we have to be
strength to go forth in the long run
because this is a long term
project
of uplifting all of us in human dignity
and equality.
Yeah. I'll say quickly. Number 1, just keep
smiling.
Muslims I mean, you if you had an
assembly like this of Muslim,
voice from
Trump.
And so I I usually start talks recently
just say, everyone, take a moment to smile.
I think it's like the bell,
and people, like, everything just becomes refocused.
And and secondly,
that whoever you are, and I also say
this to Muslim audiences,
you can't allow yourself to be dehumanized,
by what people are saying about you. You
can't allow yourself to
lose your sense of value and self worth
based on your relationship
with, nasty people
and how they see you. Your self worth,
your value is based on your relationship with
your creator.
And if you're right with god, you're right
you're right. And if you're right with god
and you
reflect that and radiate that through your life
and your being, eventually, you'll be right with
the people. So just make sure you're right
with God and keep smiling and everything
sooner or later. There's some hard times ahead.
We'll be alright.
I think
I think what doctor Ingrid said is is
right that we,
politics isn't everything, but I just can't help
but feel like right now,
it's a we're at a crossroads when it
comes to politics and democracy in our country,
and and maybe I'm just a little paranoid.
But I think one of the,
one of the things that has been,
used to,
otherwise Muslims is this idea of patriotism. Right?
So I how can I be a patriot
American patriot if I criticize the American government?
How can be I how can I be
a patriot if I'm a Muslim? Like, as
if my patriotism or I can't be a
patriot because of that. And I I'm
constantly the Islamophobes say that I'm a lot
of things, but one of the things that
bothers me the most of all the really
bad things they say about me is that
I'm un American,
that I'm not a patriotic American. And I
ask you all this room to really reflect
and redefine
what patriotism is and what a patriot is.
And I think for me, a patriot is
someone who loves their country so much
that
we are willing to do everything that we
can to make sure that we live in
the greatest country on on earth and that
we continue to push our country to be
in inclusive
to,
eradicate all forms of racism and systemic
discrimination
against any group of people.
And I ask you that to to believe
that we live at a time where our,
morality as a country,
is is hard to find. And I think
that we have the responsibility
to be the people and bring our hearts
to
bring back that moral compass for our fellow
Americans,
so that we don't get into
those very hard times that that that Imam
Zaid Shakh is talking about because, my children
are very afraid of what those times could
be. And our Muslim children in this country
that when you're talking about Islam, I want
you to talk about the children.
Children who were born and raised here, who
are second, 3rd, 4th, maybe 10th generation Muslims
who believe that they belong here, that this
is their country, that they deserved our children
deserve to go to public school and feel
safe, that they deserve to walk in the
streets and feel safe. So please think of
our children when you are,
doing the work that you do, then you
are in these circles, when you are with
your congregations,
that the Muslim children in this country are
counting on you.
And the person in the room for whom
I felt most,
compassion
was a young man who'd just been, he's
in the military and he'd just been called
back up,
and he had to watch that.
And at the end of the the talk,
I pointed to the American flag, which was
just right there,
and I said, this flag means something to
me.
I rode across the ocean with this flag.
We're supposed to be the good guys.
I think I think we need Jonathan.
You have a