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American
People Must Embrace Unity Along with
more than 7 million American Muslims, I stand numb. I prayed that the
events of Sept. 11 were just the remnants of the Tom Clancy novel I had
recently read. They were not. The 40,000
St. Louis-area Muslims and 7 million American Muslims stood in utter
disbelief as the events transpired Tuesday. We had experienced this
nauseating feeling before. For the
first 48 hours after the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City was bombed in 1995, the FBI was looking for Arab Muslim males.
The backlash against American Muslims was severe. Our
mosques were vandalized, our scarved sisters
assaulted and our sense of security was completely
compromised. As a Muslim
and as a St. Louisan, I stand in the strongest conviction and say
that the terrorists' acts were no more Islamic than Tim McVeigh's actions
were Christian. There are over 1 billion Muslim adherents on this beautiful
Earth. To stereotype or generalize about any group endangers the balance
of the freedom that Americans so strongly cherish. Tragedies
always remind us of God's majesty. As my Christian brothers went to
church and my Jewish sisters went to synagogues on Tuesday night, I went
to my beloved mosque. There we prayed for the victims of
this ungodly act, prayed for our children and our
human brothers. In addition
to sadness, anger reared its ugly head. Every major network showed
the same group of Palestinians celebrating and dancing. The media were
not only portraying Muslims as condoning this behavior, but were compromising
the security of every American Muslim. I looked at those few people
on television, and I was angry at their ignorance. They were as wrong
as the media moguls who broadcast them to us emotionally
charged Americans This
travesty calls for unity. We cannot afford to lash out at other Americans
while we have this enigmatic foe to defeat. The fact that the terrorists'
names happened to be Muslim does not mean that Islam or the 40,000
St. Louis Muslims support such savage behavior. That was not what our
beloved prophet Muhammad and our Holy Quran have taught us. We, the
people of the United States, must stand together in this time of human
sorrow. The Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Mormons,
Jains and all people of faith must create a chain of hope, diversity
and faith to overcome this test. We must be an example of strength and
love to those who exemplified the meaning of the word
"cowardice." Arsalan Tariq Iftikhar is executive director of the St. Louis chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) |