NEW YORK – Students from several US Islamic schools are visiting their neighbors in an outreach effort planned by America’s only accrediting agency for Muslim schools, with the aim of easing fears about the religious minority.
“Sometimes Muslims in today’s society are afraid of other people judging them,” Laiba Amjad, a 19-year-old senior at MDQ Academy Islamic school in Brentwood, New York, said during the visit to Saint Anthony’s High School in nearby Huntington.
“Other people are also afraid,” she said, referring to non-Muslims. “They’re thinking, ‘What if that person is an extremist?'”
Amjad is one of a group of two dozen Muslim students who visited Saint Antony Roman Catholic high school in New York’s Long Island suburbs earlier this month.
During the visit, the Muslim students knelt and prayed while teens in uniform blazers from the host school looked on.
The initiative will be adopted by nearly 80 US Islamic elementary, middle and high schools starting in the fall to give Americans a better picture of US Muslims at a time when many feel targeted by rhetoric and policy adopted by President Donald Trump’s administration.
They hope it will bring Islam closer to Americans, some of whom have never met Muslims before.
Students from the MDQ Academy Islamic School participate in daily prayers while students from Saint Anthony’s High School observe during a field trip at the Roman Catholic school in Huntington, New York. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
“I hadn’t really interacted with many Muslims before this,” 17-year-old Chris Beirne said while he and fellow Saint Anthony’s seniors ate lunch with the visiting Muslim students.
“Muslims typically today are put into this one group with extremists,” Beirne said. “I think the solution to that problem would be having events like this.”
The visits are part of the new outreach initiative led by the Council of Islamic Schools in North America, the nation’s only accrediting agency for Muslim schools.
Changing its curriculum, the council will ask its 78 accredited or member schools, located across 24 US states, to arrange meetings between their own students and those at other, non-Muslim schools.
The Council is also asking its educators to launch more volunteer projects outside the Muslim community, attend local government meetings and create a database of alumni to track their graduates’ success.
“People in this country, they want to know about Muslims, they want to know what’s going on inside Islamic schools,” said CISNA Director Sufia Azmat.
As the details of the US Islamic schools’ new curriculum are still being hammered out, Azmat said the purpose is to “be open to outsiders.”