Contributors

Saturday, October 09, 2010

Hope After All

Most of the time we don't like feel good stories. We'd rather have people dying or yelling at each other. It's more exciting, right? But this one made me proud to be an American.

The story of Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq should be told everywhere and often. The two men set out to visit 30 Mosques in 30 days travelling around 13000 miles across our great land and asking, is America a tolerant place? The answer was yes.

The fisherman in Montana became the embodiment of their trip -- Ali and Tariq were embraced nearly everywhere they went, from a Confederate souvenir shop in Georgia to the streets of Las Vegas, Nevada, to the hills of North Dakota where the nation's first mosque was built in 1929.

For Ali, his favorite moment was Ross, North Dakota, a blip of a town with a population of 48 people. He knew little of the town's rich Muslim history, and it was difficult to try to find someone in the town who did.

A pastor directed them to a woman, who kindly pointed them down a dirt road to where the nation's first mosque once stood. It's no longer there. It's been replaced by a tiny cement block mosque, complete with a gold dome. Nearby, there's a cemetery marking the pioneering Muslims of America, with birth dates of 1882, 1904, 1931.


Ali stood in awe. As he approached the mosque, his heart pounded. "I knew our roots went deep in this country, but it was great to truly experience it. Praying in there was like hopping in a time machine," said Ali, a 25-year-old Muslim who was born in Columbus, Ohio. "I literally felt like I was plummeting and falling."


Indeed, Muslim roots are very deep in this country which many people do not know. What Ali and Tariq found was an America that is much more tolerant than the media make it out to be.

It's a small but vocal group of Americans in this country pushing this anti-Muslim rhetoric," Ali said. "And unfortunately in our society, whomever shouts the loudest is going to get the most air time.

Once again, I'm happy to be wrong! Check out their web site located here for more details of their trip and their upcoming plans.

1 comment:

White Racists said...

It's interesting how you felt "overwhelmed by guilt" at Wounded Knee, due to something done by people you never knew, dead long before you were born, and probably completely unrelated to you. And yet, while you are "happy to be wrong", you apparently feel no sense of shame at all the times you have blandly assumed that anyone who disagreed with your views on _____ must obviously be prejudiced against Muslims (or X other group), even though this very post argues that chances are better than even of that assumption having no foundation in fact.

Atrocities over a century ago, as a product of a clash of cultures neither of which you are competent to understand, leave you overwhelmed with guilt. But knowledge of your own casual slanders leave no mark on you at all. You are truly a piece of work, Mark.