Looking Deeply at a Social Problem
religious
Cutting off the Roots
By Sabrina Bojeh
I vividly remember walking to class after lunch when a guy I didn’t know… screamed “terrorist” at me. That was the start to my hatred and self-loathing towards my religion and culture. I slowly disassociated myself from anything that indicated who I truly was. I never allowed my hijabi mother near me in public as I tried to shy away a couple steps behind at malls and made her drop me off a block away from school. I never hung out with my noticeably Arab dad and lied to anyone who asked me what he did for work as he was the stereotypical Arab taxi driver. I never connected with my identity in any form and as far as I was concerned, I was a white American going as far as telling people that I was white and going to church with my friends on occasional Sundays. I repressed my ability to speak, write, and read Arabic. It even created a disconnect from my family back home in Palestine that called me Americanized and it felt as though I had no where I truly belonged.
The Wolves in Sheepskin
By Ryan Martin
All over the United States, we have wolves dressed up in sheepskin. They portray themselves as innocent, but they are in reality, evil in all their ways. These wolves that I am speaking about are the big baller preachers that are manipulating Christians and teaching them false doctrine.
My Family Has Experienced Islamophobia
By Anonymous
Although I am a U.S. citizen, I often feel that, because of my faith, I am treated as an outsider and held responsible for atrocities made within the United States and elsewhere. This feeling emanates from people asking me whether I supported diabolical acts committed by terrorists or directly being accused of being sympathetic towards such inhumane acts simply because I was wearing a hijab in public, in addition to the fact I had never met the man accusing me of those things. I had to struggle with these thoughts for a long time, and at times almost felt as if people were justified in discriminating against me and people of my faith because they were not aware that the vast majority of Muslims condemn terrorists. It takes a mental toll when every day you have to live as if you do not belong here, are discriminated against and treated as if you are a threat to society no matter how much you contribute to society.
Unmasking the Enemy
By Calvin Harris
I, like many other, had a false sense of skepticism simply based on the name and what Islam was associated with. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The more I studied the religion and read the Qur’an, the more I fell in love with the teachings and decided to convert to Islam. After I said my Shahada, I couldn’t have been happier with my decision. However, in that moment, I was taken out of the Christian majority and I became one of the enemies. As a white American male, people often turn their head in scoff at me when I tell them I am a Muslim as if I have betrayed my country.
One Body
By Anonymous
In my experience, being a Catholic is like being an outsider inside my motherland. I remember those Sundays when my family and I would attend church, we practiced at the Sunday mass under the supervision of the policemen. Besides for the cross, the policemen become an inseparable part of the mass. The Vietnamese government was afraid that the priests may preach democracy and believers would absorb too much Western ideology through the Gospel that was against the communist ideology of the government. As the minority in the society, Vietnamese Catholic people could not protest against the government for their right in religious freedom… On account of my experience of religious discrimination in Vietnam, I pay close attention to the minor religious groups in the U.S. In this paper, I would like to specifically discuss the discrimination targeted towards the Muslim community within the U.S.
Religious Dogmatism, a Challenge to Democracy
By Anonymous
In 1925, citizens of the United States witnessed a groundbreaking trial that would be one of the first to pit science against religion in public education. Garnering massive attention from the nation, Tennessee v. Scopes (1925), otherwise known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, considered the constitutionality of the state’s Butler Act, a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools as it contradicted most of the residents’ beliefs (”Scopes Trial”). Consequently, this trial became a battleground between fundamentalists, those who strictly interpreted the Bible and, thus, rejected the theory of evolution, and modernists, those who advocated for the modifying of the Bible’s teachings to parallel new scientific advancements, therefore, welcoming Darwin’s ideas. Subsequently, the case would not only result in Scopes’ loss, but also in modernism’s failure to triumph over the fundamentalists’ narrowed principles, inevitably contributing to the removal of the theory of evolution across several school curricula in America. While the ruling would later be overturned in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), this monkey trial continues to demonstrate the ramifications of religious dogmatism on both education and society.