Making assumptions about someone or a group of people most of the time leads to misjudgment. In this blog, I will focus on lesson seven in from our OLEAD commentary, particularly Islamic life. I choose to focus on this topic because I learned many new things about Islamic life that I was never able to understand. While taking this class, and reading this lesson I learned that we sometimes make judgments on others without knowing their story. We learn at a young age that it is not good to judge a book by its cover, so why do we judge one’s entire culture based on a mistake that one person/group of people made?
I was very unfamiliar with Islamic life until the tragic incident that occurred on September 11, 2001. After that, all the stories I heard about Muslim’s were negative and most of them started by stating that Muslims were terrorists. It is sad to say but even to this day, when Muslims get on an airplane a lot of people are afraid of what might happen. What people fail to realize is “the religion of Islam actually teaches peace and tolerance just like most other religions around the world” (PSU WC, 2019, L. 7, p. 2).Which means they are normal human beings, they are not robots programmed to kill.
Could you imagine being an Islamic person at that time? What makes things worst the current president of the United States has always made negative remarks about Muslims. Ten years after the tragic incent, “In an interview with Fox News, Bill O’Reilly asks Trump if there is a “Muslim problem” in the world. Trump responds, “Absolutely. I mean, I don’t notice Swedish people knocking down the World Trade Center. There is a Muslim problem in the world, and you know it and I know it” (MPower, 2018). I agree there is a “Muslim problem”, they are not being treated fairly!
In conclusion, lesson seven reminded me of ethnocentrism, which we learned about in lesson two. “Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s culture is better than others’ simply because one cannot see the world from the other culture’s viewpoint”(PSU WC, 2019, L. 2, p. 5).In other words, if people were able to put themselves in the shoes of an Islamic person, there would be less judging, people would understand how they feel, and maybe that would change the world.
References:
MPower. (2018). 86 Times Donald Trump Displayed or Promoted Islamophobia. Retrieved from https://medium.com/nilc/86-times-donald-trump-displayed-or-promoted-islamophobia-49e67584ac10.
Pennsylvania State University World Campus (2019). OLEAD 410 Lesson 02: Introduction to Culture. Retrieved from
https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2008449/modules/items/27026951
Pennsylvania State University World Campus (2019). OLEAD 410 Lesson 07: The Middle East: Focus on Saudi Arabia. Retrieved from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2008449/modules/items/27026982
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