Muslims have same growth issues as all Americans

By Yasser Arafat

Mus­lims have been a part of the fab­ric of this great coun­try for a long time. Some might think Mus­lims only immi­grated to this coun­try a decade or two ago. That is com­pletely untrue.

We don’t have to go far to find that out. Just read the diaries of John Sevier (1745–1815), the first gov­er­nor of Ten­nessee and his story of meet­ing Mus­lims in the Ten­nessee Val­ley. Moor­ish Mus­lims, his­tor­i­cally, were here before Colum­bus even set foot in the so-called New World.

Mus­lims in Ten­nessee, as in the rest of the U.S., are mixed between locals and immi­grants. Today, out of every 10 Mus­lims in the U.S., there is a doc­tor, an engi­neer or a pro­fes­sor con­tribut­ing to the bet­ter­ment of this soci­ety. So when we say that Mus­lims are a part of the fab­ric of this soci­ety, it should come to mind that they are one of many com­mu­ni­ties mak­ing up this fab­ric. As such, they are sub­ject to grow, and their need for big­ger facil­i­ties to accom­mo­date that growth becomes imminent.

As many of you have heard, Mus­lims in Mid­dle Ten­nessee have been going through this grow­ing phase. The Mus­lim com­mu­nity in Brent­wood tried to estab­lish a cen­ter to suit their needs and growth, but after much strug­gle and oppo­si­tion ended up drop­ping the project for now. Another com­mu­nity in Ruther­ford County has been try­ing to build a cen­ter to accom­mo­date their growth. Unfor­tu­nately, they also are faced with oppo­si­tion that is based on igno­rance and pos­si­bly hate. In Nashville, we have over 25,000 Mus­lims; con­se­quently, the grow­ing cycle neces­si­tated the need for big­ger places. Just as churches and syn­a­gogues are impor­tant to Chris­tians and Jews, mosques and Islamic cen­ters are nat­u­rally very impor­tant to Muslims.

Our mosques are very small and crowded, mostly in small stores or ware­houses. The com­mu­nity has out­grown these places, and the facil­i­ties are in no way near what our youth need. We ended up hav­ing youth involved in gangs, some­thing that we as a com­mu­nity couldn’t accept. For the rea­son of growth and to save our kids from gangs and even extrem­ism, we had no choice but to put our heads together and to find a place such as the the­ater in Anti­och as a pos­si­ble site for a new center.

Mus­lims are Amer­i­cans, with the same rights as any Amer­i­can. Amer­ica is the land of all faiths; any­one that has a prob­lem with that needs to ques­tion his/her inten­tions. Mus­lims are not ter­ror­ists, and they do not use their houses of wor­ship for such a thing. None of the 9/11 hijack­ers were from the U.S. and even if they were, it would be unjust to stereo­type or gen­er­al­ize the action of a few over the rest of the pop­u­la­tion. If we did, we would have blamed Chris­tian­ity for the Okla­homa City bomb­ing or Judaism for the killing of Yitzhak Rabin.

For those who play the fear card for polit­i­cal rea­sons, my mes­sage to them is, “You call your­selves patri­ots? Dream on, for the true face of Amer­ica is rep­re­sented by the hun­dreds who came July 14 march­ing in silence for the sake of peace, love, respect and coex­is­tence, not hate.’’

The rope of hate is always short, and this coun­try did not become great because of hate. It became great because the val­ues that it upholds.

-- Yasser Arafat is vice pres­i­dent of fundrais­ing for the Islamic Cen­ter of Tennessee. Source: blogs.tennessean.com