The Muslim Students Association will be holding an event titled
“Why in God’s Name Did You Choose Islam?” tonight
where Islamic converts tell their stories as part of Islamic
Awareness Week on campus.
Mohammad Mertaban, a fourth-year psychology and French student
and president of the MSA, explained one of the key goals of the
program, like the rest of Islamic Awareness Week, is to deconstruct
stereotypes people might have about Islam.
“It’s our responsibility to demystify those
stereotypes,” he said. “The majority of our events, the
focus is not the Muslim community, the focus is the general campus
population.”
The program will be taking place at 6 p.m. in Young CS76 and
will feature four members of the UCLA community relating personal
recounts of their conversion.
“It’s something different. People don’t
necessarily have to listen to a professional speaker. It’s
more students, people they can relate to,” said Jewelle
Francisco, a fourth-year business economics student, vice president
of the MSA and one of the speakers in the program.
Some of the stereotypes Muslims face in today’s society
are the ideas that all terrorists are Muslim and that Islam
represses women.
Mertaban attributes the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 to
causing a sharp rise in Islamic stereotypes, although he says that
increase has tapered off in recent months.
However, Mariam Jukaku, a second-year computer science student
and managing editor of the Al-Talib magazine, suggests the Sept.
11, 2001 attacks made people more aware of Islam than creating a
backlash against it.
“After 9/11, one of the good things that came out of it
was people wanted to know what this religion was really
about,” she said, pointing out that the Quran, the Islamic
holy book, was a best seller on amazon.com immediately after the
attacks.
There does seem to be a general consensus among MSA members that
most of the UCLA community either misperceives or does not fully
understand Islam.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions, and you
don’t want people to build on those,” said Faisal
Ahmed, a fourth-year biology student and a member of MSA.
Michael Cooperson, a professor of Arabic language studies at
UCLA, says some people regard Islam as “intrinsically
different from other religions.”
Cooperson says too often people attribute an action or mind-set,
such as terrorism, to a “Muslim” mentality, whereas
people rarely blame terrorists because they are Christian.
Mertaban admits these misconceptions are “partly our
fault” for not reaching out to the community.
Francisco says Islamic Awareness Week in the past has been a
success, pointing to an annual rise in MSA membership and increased
interest shown by the UCLA community.
“Islam is such a big part of the world. It’s the
fastest growing religion. Just bringing that to the campus level is
what we want to do,” she said.