As some of you know, I’ve been studying Arabic for the past year or so. Right now my teacher is a woman from Egypt, and this past week she invited my class to attend a service for Eid al-Adha in the HUB this past Thursday.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Islamic holidays, Eid al-Adha literally means “Festival of Sacrifice.” The holiday centers around the story of Ibrahim, who was told by Allah to sacrifice his son, Ishmael, to prove his devotion to the almighty. Rather than listen to the devil, who tries to tempt him into disobeying God by suggesting he spare Ishmael, Ibrahim goes about preparing to sacrifice his son. However, just as he was about to kill Ishmael, God appeared and gave Ibrahim a lamb to slaughter instead. The story is meant to demonstrate how Ibrahim’s devotion to Allah past the hardest test, and was rewarded. The tale is told in a similar fashion in both Christianity and Judaism (Telegraph).
Traditionally, a lamb or goat is slaughtered on this holiday to recreate the scene, and Muslims stay home from work and school. Here in State College, over 650 Muslims from around and off campus gathered inside Alumni Hall and had a service, the likes of which most would only be able to witness on the inside of a Mosque (at least in America). Observing this event was a fantastic spiritual experience for me. I’m not a religious person, but you could feel the unity and sense of community in that room, even with many of the people having only met each other for the first time that day. People of all ages, dressed in all kinds of clothes walked inside as one group when the prayer call sounded. Women came up to each other smiling, kissing each other four times in greeting. Children worked to imitate their parents’ form while praying, and some passed around candy. I felt so welcome–much more than I’ve ever felt at a Christian service. It was a peaceful, comforting feeling.
So it made the experience I had the very next day that much more jarring.
I was doing some Arabic homework around a few of my friends. Arabic looks a lot different from English, so it often catches the eye of the people I’m working close to. This time it was a friend of mine who asked what I was writing. I told him and he immediately made a face. He then went to ask why I’d want to study such “barbaric,” “evil-sounding” language. I was somewhat shocked and feeling a bit defensive, but I still told him the truth: that I wanted to work in Arabic-speaking countries so I could help them create more functional governments and education systems, and to improve their issues surrounding human rights. At this my friend essentially told me that I was wasting my time; that it’d be easier for America to just use their military to scoop out every corrupt or weak government in the area and replace it with a democracy we put together for it. He “couldn’t understand” why America hadn’t done this yet. By the end of his spiel he had explained how he was worried that if the U.S. didn’t intervene with force, that the region might be beyond any help at all. He then implied that the only thing to do would be to nuke entire trouble-making countries.
I feel like I need to say that this boy is not a bad person. He’s one of the most kind-hearted, generous people I’ve ever met, and spends several hours each week volunteering around the community. So I was shaken to hear these opinions, because they are, quite bluntly, extremely uninformed and quite prejudiced. He suggested wiping out an entire country, but when I suggested we help in a nonviolent way by working to alleviate something like the refugee crisis in Europe, he claimed that America “didn’t have the means.” So we have the means to overthrow and create multiple governments in our image, but we don’t have the means to help people who risked their lives trying to get their families away from war, violence, and oppression (Note: we actually do have the means (Taub))C? Are our options as the most powerful and 7th richest country in the world (Tasch) really so limited that the only way we can make a difference in the war-torn Arabian Peninsula is to kill and displace more Arabs?
My friend is not the only one who feels that it is. The Arab American Institute found that, since 2010, American opinions of Arab-Americans had dropped from 43% to 36%. The favorability of Muslim-Americans has taken an even sharper nosedive, opinions dropping from 36% in 2010 to 27% in 2014 (Arab American Institute). This decline has mostly to do with the recent news about ISIS and the Syrian crisis in the news, among other stories (Siddiqui). However, it is extremely unfair to judge Arabs or Muslims as a whole based on the actions of these extremists. In fact, one of the main tenets of Islam is known as the Way of Peace, placing mercy and kindness above all other virtues (Mission Islam). It’s also good to remember that no one religion is worse than any others. Christians who accuse all Muslims of being evil, immoral, or barbaric would do well to remember how millions upon millions were slaughtered in the name of Christianity, resulting in more deaths than Islam has ever come close to. Many nations under Christianity during this deadly time period were also much younger and had extremely corrupt governments. In essence, they were in a very similar situation as the Arabian Peninsula is now.
What I told my friend after he finished his little tirade, was that while it might be appropriate to respond to a threat with force, there is never any reason to act as if the lives of those creating the threat don’t matter. What does it mean for us to be completely indifferent about wiping out an entire ethnicity? I don’t even want to think about it.
But what I do want to start thinking about are ways to get more people educated about Arab and Muslim culture; information that goes beyond the horror stories we see on the news, that shows the same peace and community I witnessed this past Thursday. We can’t settle to live with this single story of the Middle East and its people. America is better than that.
Arab American Institute. Arab American Institute, 29 July, 2014. Web. 28 Sept., 2015.
“Basic Principles of Islam.” Mission Islam. n.p., n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.
Siddiqui, Sabrina. “Americans’ Attitudes Toward Muslims and Arabs Are Getting Worse, Poll Finds.” Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc., 29 July, 2014. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.
Tasch, Barbara. “The 23 Richest Countries in the World.” Business Insider. Business Insider Inc., 13 July, 2015. Web. 29 Sept, 2015.
Taub, Amanda. “Europe’s Refugee Crisis: Explained.” Vox. Vox Media, 5 Sept. 2015. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.
“What is Eid al-Adha?” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited, 24 Sept. 2015. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.
Tags: Islam, the Middle East