On the morning of September 11, my upstate campus was turned upside down. It felt as though all of SUNY Geneseo was huddled around the TV in the library café, watching in silence the never-ending replay of airplanes hitting the World Trade Center.
I’m from Queens, so I ran to the library’s computers to e-mail my friends and family in the city. My frazzled thoughts were in a feverish hurricane.
As part of the steering committee for the International Relations Club at my school, I tried to come up with a coherent idea of what an appropriate response should be to this attack. I kept thinking, “Oh, God, please don’t let there be panic. More innocent people will die.”
Attacks Reported
But people still lashed out. The next day, there were reported attacks on Arabs throughout the country.
My friends at the Inter-national Relations Club and I soon began talking about organizing a panel discussion about understanding the nature of Islam. About two weeks and a flood of e-mails and meetings later, over 300 people gathered in the Union Ballroom, one of the biggest auditoriums in my school.
There were three speakers: Dr. Mohammed Shafiq, the executive director of the Islamic Center in Rochester; William Gohlman, a professor of history at Geneseo with a specialty in Islamic History, and Rizwan “Rizzy” Qureshi, a Geneseo junior who’s the first-generation American son of Pakistani immigrants. At 14, he visited refugee camps in Palestine.
A Religion of Peace
His family has also had to deal with bias attacks. His sister was verbally harassed not long after September 11. She was so scared that she stopped wearing her traditional veil.
Islam’s relation to terrorism has been one of the main sound bites blaring all over the news. The major message of the panelists, however, was that Islam is a peaceful religion. There’s nothing in the Quran, Islam’s holy book, that condones suicide and murder.
But, as with other religions, Islam has different interpretations. Terrorists believe that the Quran commands them to kill Americans, much like Christian fanatics believe that blowing up abortion clinics is something that God commands them to do.
A Different ‘Jihad’
Osama bin Laden has said he’s waging a jihad upon the U.S. “Jihad” is usually translated as “holy war,” but “jihad” also means to struggle for something you believe in. As Rizzy said, anything can be a personal struggle.
For example, for him, coming to speak at the panel was his own jihad. It had nothing to do with murdering thousands of innocent people.
There was also much talk about U.S. foreign policy. The panelists explained how the U.S. is often perceived in different parts of the world as a hypocritical, dominating force, imposing its Western values on other cultures. That seemed to be the dominant opinion among those who spoke from the audience as well.
Hope Lives
Helping to organize a conference where Islam could be discussed calmly and rationally made me feel hopeful, even now, that we’ve started to attack Afghanistan and run the risk of straining our ties with other Muslim countries.
The fact that we, students at a state university in the middle of nowhere, were able to organize a panel discussion about Islam, that we tried to educate people, and that so many people came, shows our hope-hope in human reason, in human capacity to understand each other, and to make a mental leap between how the world is, and how it could be.