Minute with a Muslim #370 – My Hometown Helped Me Appreciate Islam

So I grew up in Audubon, New Jersey. And Audubon is a very small town, kind of like in the Philly metro area. It's a working class, Irish and Italian sort of town. And the interesting thing about that part of the country or that area is that you have a lot of small towns that are all right next to each other, run up against each other. And they all sort of have very different identities. And so we're very close to Camden. And Camden is predominantly Latino and African American,

generally lower income. And then we're also not very far away from that and field and had field as like very high income professional class, you know, this sort of thing. So, it was interesting, because I was able to see, I think, from a young age that everybody kind of boxed themselves in, into this, I should say, some people boxed themselves in and other people are boxed out, right, when it comes to access to resources when it comes to

Yeah, I mean, every single one of those little towns, they have their own police force, they have their own fire department, they have their own school system, etc, etc. You even though it's a tiny geographical area, and so everybody's kind of concerned about, you know, their own small community and preserving that, but there's not a whole lot of collaboration

across the aisle, so to speak. And despite that, I was able to have a lot of different experiences with different people in that area, we used to play basketball, like street ball, you know, and a lot of folks from Canada would come to Autobahn to play. And so that was really beneficial experience. And then sometimes we would go to other towns to for this, that the other reason, but I guess all of that kind of set me up to really appreciate Islam, because Islam has a very, very egalitarian nature to it, and a very egalitarian ethic to it.

And very much advocates for,

you know, the sharing of resources, the cooperation, mutual cooperation, mutual aid, and not kind of just building up the silos so that nobody else can benefit. So my perspective, with that kind of background, I come to see a lot of North American Muscle communities and you got the inner city of mesquite that has a certain demographic, and then you got a suburban mystery that has a different demographic. And it's, it's the same thing that I grew up with, it's this group over here, this group over there, and there's no cooperation, there's a very, very thick wall that separates the two, when it comes to resources when it comes to opportunities, etc, etc. And that's what makes me

so happy to be in the place that I'm at, in the unit commissioners, because it's a very, very rare situation, where we have a ministry that serves both folks, it's in the city, right, it's in one of the poor neighborhoods in the city. And so it's accessible to lower income folks or a certain demographic, but yet people come here and, and are very active in the community who are also from the suburbs, the more upper classes and the more professional classes and things like that. So it's a really a very rare opportunity to kind of reconstruct that Islamic ethic, right, one less cheat for everybody. Doesn't matter. The color of your skin doesn't matter. Your income doesn't matter,

your profession or what you do, you know, this mess she has for you.

And that's a project that I'm just very proud to be a part of, and to try to try to make it work because from the beginning,

from the beginning, I've been kind of sensitive to those sorts of issues.