After 9/11, these words have been connected to Muslims and misinterpreted all over the world.
College students attended “An American Jihad” Tuesday night at DePaul University to listen to speakers discuss these and other struggles of Muslims in America.
United Muslims Moving Ahead, DePaul’s Muslim Student Association, invited Laith Al-Saud, an Islamic world studies professor at DePaul, and Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of CAIR Chicago, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, to voice their opinions of Muslims in America.
“I think this event has a brilliant title. It’s very controversial but not all controversy is bad. It makes people want to talk and challenge what the term means,” Rehab said.
Al-Saud discussed different peoples' hyphenated identities such as Muslim-American, Italian-American and Jewish-American. He said we invoke the American identity to protect legal rights while our ethnicities and races define who we are as people. The American identity ensures freedom to practice Islam, just as it does the freedom to be Christian or Jewish.
“We have a very superficial sense of spirituality,” Al-Saud said. He said that there are responses and actions by Muslims to represent their religion such as the hijab, the headscarf. Women wear the hijab to be judged by society for their mind and spirituality, not their physical features.
“The hijab is a highly distinctive piece of garb which identifies a Muslim, but I don’t think it does much more then that,” Al-Saud said. He believes that the hijab in America has become a consumer item that goes with the flow of being American.
“We have become obsessed with products that identify American culture,” Al-Saud said addressing Muslim-American students. “But the American culture has yet to be defined. As Americans, you will have a very important role in defining it.”
After Al-Saud concluded his speech, Wasila Diab, a student and the historian of United Muslims Moving Ahead, presented a video that was created by students to find out whether or not non-Muslims knew anything about Islam.
There were giggles among the crowd as it heard answers from DePaul students to questions such as “Do you know the five pillars of Islam?” Many of the answers were similar and along the lines of them believing Muslims worshipped the Prophet Muhammad and not God.
The second speaker, Rehab, emphasized two things: the meaning of jihad and the five pillars of Islam.
Rehab stressed the meaning of the word jihad, which means a struggle towards bettering oneself. People often assume that jihad is an act of terrorism or violence. Seeing evil and then empowering it with goodness is jihad, Rehab said.
“Each of us has a personal jihad … a cause,” Rehab said. “I see discrimination and a lack of dialogue about the meaning of Islam.”
He also added that his personal jihad is civil rights and that he wants to better Americans' perceptions of Muslims. Rehab strongly believes that every Muslim’s jihad is to struggle to make a difference.
“God has empowered us to make a difference,” he said. “We have the ability to change things.”
“This event really made me realize that we are struggling within our own religion, and we need to fix ourselves and our reputation in America,” said Marwa Abed, president of United Muslims Moving Ahead and student at DePaul.
Part 1 of "An American Jihad" video
Part 2 of "An American Jihad" video
Part 3 of "An American Jihad" video
Part 4 of "An American Jihad" video
Laith Al-Saud
Ahmed Rehab
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