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On the positive note:
There are encouraging stories of Muslims finding friendship and acceptance in communities throughout the country. The congregation of Jersey City’s Tawheed Islamic Center lost their mosque to a devastating fire in February this year, but congregants have been holding Friday prayers at The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints. The city helped secure the Sip Avenue church, less than one-half a mile away, where the Islamic Center congregation now hold Friday afternoon prayers.
In Nashville, more than 200 members of the Temple Congregation Ohabai Sholom and members of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro shed the perception for a few hours that Jews and Muslims — locked in decades of bitter strife — can only be enemies. Yet it was outrage that drew the groups together. After hearing the heated public opposition to the Murfreesboro mosque, Temple Rabbi Mark Schiftan reached out to ICM Imam Ossama Bahloul and organized a trip to see the mosque and learn more about Islam. Bahloul and three busloads of ICM members returned the favor, giving Schiftan and Bahloul a chance to field questions from each other’s congregations about faith, Scriptures and the future for each religion. “We went because the level of xenophobia against the Muslim community, particularly in Murfreesboro, was so high in terms of religious intolerance and bigotry,” Schiftan told the Tennessean. “We went really on the grounds of another minority community of faith, to stand in solidarity with the Muslim community in the affirmation of the protection of First Amendment rights.”
Los Angeles celebrated this July as Muslim American Heritage Month. California is cited as having the largest Muslim community in the United States. It is also estimated that a majority of the Muslim population resides in Southern California. California is home to more mosques than any other state (except New York) in the U.S. The Los Angeles City Council adopted a resolution in June last recognizing the contributions and activism of the Muslim American community and declared July 2014 as Muslim American Heritage Month. The resolution notes that the celebration "will promote and encourage awareness of the significant contributions made by the city's Muslim population in culture, social services, education, politics, business, technology, and the arts." Los Angeles is the second city to officially have a Muslim Heritage Month, according to Najee Ali, the founder Project Islamic Hope . Washington, D.C. is one of the first cities to have adopted Muslim Heritage Month.
Muslim holidays
Fulfilling his election promise, the New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in February to close schools on Islamic holidays. In a TV interview the Mayor declared that he planned to move forward with closing schools for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, as well as for the Lunar New Year. Muslim families in New York City have been calling for the official recognition for Islamic holidays in public schools for years. The New York City Council approved a measure in 2009 that would have added both of the Muslim holidays to the public school holiday calendar. But the outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg opposed the idea. He told the New York Times then: “If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” he said. “Educating our kids requires time in the classroom, and that’s the most important thing to us.” An estimated 100,000 Muslim children are enrolled in New York City schools, about 10% of the enrollment. New York City schools close on major federal holidays, as well as the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. School recesses are scheduled during Christmas, Good Friday, Easter and Passover. City schools permit children to stay home on days when they are celebrating a religious holiday.
In May, Muslim community leaders in Montgomery County (Maryland) asked that the Islamic holy day of Eid al-Adha be given equal billing as the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur on Montgomery’s 2015-2016 school calendar. They described the issue as symbolic but important. In 2015, both holidays will fall on Wednesday, Sept. 23, but a calendar draft does not give them the same weight. Yom Kippur — for which county schools will be closed — is listed beside the date. The Muslim holiday is included in a parenthetical notation: Eid al-Adha also falls on this date. Muslim leader Saqib Ali asked at a school board meeting that the calendar be changed to say: Yom Kippur/Eid al-Adha. “We need to see equal treatment,” Ali told the board.
Muslim community leaders in several states are pressing for closing of schools on the two Islamic festivals of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. Several school systems across the United States, including Dearborn, Mich., and Cambridge, Mass., close for the Islamic holidays. Dearborn has closed its schools for about the past 15 years.
In January, a petition started by three middle-school students asking for recognition of Muslim religious holidays in public schools failed to garner enough signatures by its deadline. In December last, three Virginia teenaged girls - Sumayyah McTaggart, Iman Hazer and Fatimah Dandashi - posted the petition on WhiteHouse.gov's "We the People" page, asking for the recognition of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. The petition called on the president to embrace “inclusiveness” by supporting the call for the recognition of Islamic holidays. The three students wrote the petition for a civics class assignment. The petition received more than 63,000 signatures before it expired.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America
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