On Thursday, November 2, 2017, the event, Diversity Within the Muslim Ummah was hosted in the 14th floor conference room of Baruch College’s NVC building. I chose to attend this event not only for this blog post, but also for my sociology class. As the clock hits 6:00 P.M, the event officially begin with Islamic praying rituals. They pray with songs that I never heard of before, but it was every nice. After the praying was done, the first speaker was invited to the stage. He was a very funny guy who talks about how current Muslims are facing so much discrimination that it never happened before.
The next group of speakers represents diversity in profession, which different Muslims from different work setting talk about their life as a Muslim. These guest speakers studied in the fields of health, physiology, and computer science. The question for them was how does their background influence their profession. There were many answers, some said family, and some said belief. The second question was challenges they face in daily life, most of them agree on the biggest challenge was fitting into the community without losing the Muslim identity. So, I though to myself, it is more important to fit in or not losing its own belief. I did not come up with an answer because without either one, is hard to live as a whole in the society, so I admired them for choosing to stay with religion.
By the end of the event, I got a better understanding of the religion Islam and Muslims. I think is unfair for people to think negatively about Muslims because of 9/11 and ISIS. To be honest I think, Muslims are a group of very nice people, they stay strong about their own belief, even when the society is acting poorly on them. I think they have a very beautiful culture, and everyone should respect it.
