Muslim in America – Voices

There is a base understanding of Islam in certain subcultures in America. In highly educated circles, whether that’s elite private colleges or just well rounded public schools, world religions are covered and explored with more knowledge.

I think we need more mandates that encourage learning about other religions besides Christianity. You can’t learn about Islam in a non-biased way from your bible teacher. That will help in diminishing the prejudice and ignorance that exists in most of America.

America is afraid of Islam because it’s foreign and there is a large amount of violent extremists currently active within that religion. Education has the ability to decrease that fear.

Another method would be to show the numerous examples of the non-extremists in Islam. Publicizing how those people live and that they live in America all the time without blowing people up is necessary to eliminate prejudice.

It’s not just important to note that every religion has violent people because there is a disproportionate amount of violent people claiming allegiance to Islam in the world.

The message that needs to get across is that being of that religion does not necessarily cause that. The news mostly highlights negative things in all aspects of world events. That is a larger problem within the way we produce informational media, and it has the unfortunate side effect of only presenting the violent extremists that are Muslims. Good Samaritan Muslims wouldn’t make good headlines.

On a societal level, I’m sure Muslims are discriminated against because people have such negative opinions overall about the religion. However, I don’t know if they are discriminated against in terms of the judiciary system or if they are given sub-par housing options like African Americans have often been.