This July, it will have been seven years since I converted to Islam. Looking back to when I made the decision to take my shahadah, or declaration of faith, those many years ago, I didn’t anticipate that I would be spending the rest of my life apologizing for the actions of so-called Muslims I’ve never met or constantly defending my faith to people who can’t even name one of the five pillars of Islam. As an African-American raised by a Jehovah Witness mother and a Muslim father, I’ll be the one of many to tell you that Muslims are not a monolith and Islam cannot be defined by one specific race or ethnicity or be judged by blanket statements the media loves to hold us to.
In the United States alone, Muslims are one of the most diverse religious groups, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. With Islam also being the fastest growing religion, according to a 2001 study written by Ihsan Bagby, an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky, 64% of converts are African-American, 27% are White, 6% are Hispanic and 3% of other ethnicities. It’s important not only to recognize that Islam has followers of many different races and ethnicities, but that we are also all individuals with our own personalities, strengths, weakness, backgrounds and goals in life.
If you asked me what “home” meant to me, I’d probably recall eating my mother’s homemade lemon pound cake, hanging with my friends at a sketchy Waffle House in downtown Atlanta in the early mornings or even right here in Alabama because that’s where most of my family and I was born. I would argue that with all the many different sects and interpretations of Islam, I would say what truly unites Muslim-Americans is not that we are Muslims, but that we are Americans. There are Muslims that are congressmen, teachers, police officers, rappers, Olympic fencers, ballerinas, boxers – you name it. Like myself, most Muslims don’t seek to change America or wish for everyone to adapt to their way of life, rather we are thankful that we have the same right to freely practice our religion just akin to everyone else, a freedom not many outside the States have.
When it comes to politics or the media, no one is willing to listen to what Muslims have to say – if anything, it’s as if we don’t exist. When presidential candidate Donald Trump is discussing how he thinks “Islam hates us,” exactly what Muslim did he have this conversation with? How did he come to this conclusion, being that Islam is not a person? When he calls for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslim immigration, how precisely does he plan on doing that?
The majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims aren’t even located in the Middle East (a plurality actually lives in Indonesia), and we don’t all wear hijab or speak Arabic, therefore a lot of us aren’t initially noticeable as Muslims. I recall my father, a Marines veteran, bonding with my Saudi fiancé over the times they had spent in the industrial city of Jubail, Saudi Arabia; my dad talking about all the kind people he met there while serving in the Gulf War and my fiancé talking about his experiences going to college in that area. Both are Muslim, but with two very different stories.
It’s imperative to erase the stigma of both native and foreign Muslims and to cease the dangerous rhetoric going around throughout this election cycle. In order to do so, both non-Muslims and Muslims need to continue telling their stories and speaking out against Islamophobia and the individuals who seek to pigeonhole us. And above all, we simply need to get to know one another.
Nakia Moore is a senior majoring in general business.
