It’s insane how hard it is to find media that shows Islam in a positive light.
During my public speaking class last semester, I was piling together research for a persuasive speech to argue that people of Muslim faith are by no means extremists. While looking up sources, I would google phrases like “Muslims who are persecuted.” Though the first five links were related to my search bar and seemed helpful to the project, the rest of the page listed links such as:
- “Muslim Persecution of Christians”
- “9 of 10 Worst Countries for Persecution of Christians”
- “Myth: Muslim Persecution at Mecca: How many Muslims really died from Meccan persecution?”
On top of this, only four of the five links that were related to my search bar actually addressed the issue of Muslims being persecuted. One was just a link to a wikipedia page that informed the reader what the persecution of Muslims was and didn’t refer to any kind of current events of Muslim persecution.
When I would google “Islam the religion of peace,” there weren’t even five links before what I was reading started to become the inverse of my search bar. One line down, there was a link that led to myths about Islam’s peacefulness, and the line after it was a link that said “Ten Reasons Why Islam is NOT a Religion of Peace.”
It was my belief that our generation had a hand gripped firmly around the internet’s wrist. I believed it to be a generation known for it’s open-mindedness, and willingness to let all minority groups be seen in equal light. So it was baffling to believe that Google, one of the most used search engines, was polluted with such hateful images of Islam, and such selfish
perspectives of non-Muslims. I didn’t understand why enormous amounts of content wasn’t being created that didn’t persecute Islam.
I asked Dr. Mohamed Daadaoui, an Associate Professor of Political Science here at Oklahoma City University and a practicing Muslim, why it was important for OCU students to be active in regarding Islam positively. His response was this: “Muslim Americans are an integral part of our society: they are professionals in different areas. They are doctors, engineers, professors, cab drivers, and business people. What we see overseas with radical Islamist groups is a betrayal of the principles of the faith, not an affirmation of it. The religious texts clearly forbid the killing of innocent people, and severely proscribe the conduct of Muslims even in the context of defensive wars. In Islam, killing one soul is tantamount to killing all of humanity”
In reality, religion is not reflected by the man or woman who practices its ways. People are reflected in the way that they abuse their religion. What many people fail to understand is that Islam, like Christianity, cannot be pinned down to one group of people who wish harm to the rest of the world. Muslim Extremists don’t own their religion. No one can. There are so many instances that involved Christian extremists that we tend to forget, the Ku Klux Klan being one example. Other countries don’t cower in fear and hatred of Christians because of the tragic misdeeds of one extremist group who abused that belief system. This is why it’s baffling that there are people in America who do this with Islam.
I asked Dr. Daadaoui what OCU students could do to change the general view of Muslims in the United States to a positive one. He replied: “One of the most important things OCU students can do is to reach out to their Muslim peers here. They do exist, and they are the best and immediate representation of Muslims and Islam we have . . . Our students can . . . make an effort to attend the different events organized by Muslim students on campus. These are cultural events, which aim to introduce our students to facets of the Muslim culture, unbeknown to them. We also have classes at the university on Islam and Islamic history, and I encourage our students to entertain the idea of taking some of them. This will enable them to develop an informed scholarly view of the religion and its adherents, and differentiate between the mainstream Muslims and the radical extremist ones speaking erroneously in the name of the religion”
We might have a long way to go before the United States can say that we see ourselves on equal footing with every minority in the world, but lets hope, as the next generation, that we start talking to our Muslim peers on campus, pour all the inclusive content into the internet that we can, and find a positive view of Islam.
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