“Difficult and Painful at Times”

A Converts Story

by SARAH HULETT

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Christina Rountree was a junior in high school when the two hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center. And she says, like most Americans, she was flabbergasted and angry.

“And it came out in the news that this was done by Muslims. So I asked my Muslim friends…why would these people do this in the name of Islam? That’s your religion, right?”

Rountree says her friends told her: those people are crazy. They don’t represent Muslims. Islam is a religion of peace.

But Rountree wanted to know more. So she started reading about the faith, and in college she joined the Muslim Student Association on campus.

Rountree says she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, and she decided she wanted to help other non-Muslim Americans understand Islam.

“They were getting the wrong information about Muslims, and that worried me,” says Rountree. “Because as an African American, I know what it’s like to be judged just by the way you look.”

But Rountree says she didn’t know if anyone would listen to her. And she shared her doubts with a friend.

“And she said ‘Well, Christina, wouldn’t you think it would be even cooler to be an example of what a Muslim really is and not spend your whole life talking about what they aren’t?’” Rountree remembers. “And when she said that, it just clicked. And I got chills and I cried, and oh, it was such an emotional moment.”

Rountree says she believed in the prophet Muhammad and all the good he had done. She liked the structure Islam offered, and the fact that she could look to the Koran to answer everything she needed.

Rountree converted to the faith on November 17, 2006. That means she made her proclamation of faith – that there’s no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. That’s the first of what are called the five pillars of Islam.

Rountree says she felt like converting to Islam was something God wanted her to do.

But it definitely wasn’t something her mom wanted her to do.

“My mom completely flipped out, she said I was doing it because of guys, cause I’ve always been into Middle-Eastern or Indian-looking guys,” she says. “But I didn’t have a boyfriend at the time, so she couldn’t play that card on me. And my dad said: do whatever makes you happy. Do whatever makes you think that you’ve found God.”

Rountree says her mom has come around some since then, and has even gone to a service with her at her mosque.

But the experience of being a Muslim convert has also been difficult and painful at times.

She says the attempted airliner bombing near Detroit on Christmas Day was a huge step backward for Muslims everywhere.

“It wasn’t even two steps, I would say it was like a thousand steps back,” she says. “Because we had just gotten to the point where you could talk about Islam in a positive way, and not seem like some kind of traitor, and then that happened.”

To make matters worse, Rountree is a flight attendant. And soon after the terrorist attempt by the young Nigerian Muslim, she was on an airplane, getting ready to board passengers, when a fellow attendant who was on that Christmas Day flight started talking about it.

“And him and the pilot were going back and forth about: these Muslims shouldn’t be in America, I hope they do all die, and they just kept going on and on about it,” she remembers.

What she was hearing were exactly the kinds of ideas about Muslims she’d hoped to counter by example. But Rountree says she kept quiet, didn’t tell them she’s a Muslim.

She says it was just too charged a situation for that conversation.

But she says she hopes more Americans will do what she did — and learn about Islam for themselves.

“We as Americans are so quick to ask questions about everything, she says, “except for this.”

Rountree says she has a lot still to learn about her adopted faith. She doesn’t wear hijab – or the head scarf – because she says it’s not something she’s earned. But she says she hopes and prays that one day she will.

Contact Sarah Hulett at sarahhu@umich.edu

Source: Muslims in Michigan

School Bullying At a Whole New Level

Bullying has been a problem forever, but today it’s worse. Kids now have more than one way to hurt each other, whether its through text, facebook, twitter, formspring, etc… It’s sad that kids do this to one another:

Bulllying in School: What can be done about it?

By NANCY GIBBS Monday, Apr. 19, 2010

Adolescence, that swampy zone between safety and power, is best patrolled by adults armed with sense and mercy, not guns and a badge. That’s one of many reasons the awful story of Phoebe Prince leaves me so uneasy.

The tragedy is now a global parable: a cute Irish girl moves to a new town — South Hadley, Mass. — and starts dating a popular football player. Other girls, alpha girls, get jealous. They taunt her, cross out her picture on a student-body poster, fling abuse on Facebook. It goes on for months; her mother tries to get the school to do something. Finally, on Jan. 14, after a day when she was allegedly harassed in the library, in the hallways and on her way home from school — a canned drink thrown at her, and the words “You Irish slut, you Irish whore” — Phoebe Prince went home, picked out a scarf her sister had given her for Christmas and hanged herself in a stairwell. Her sister found her. The mean girls? They logged on and mocked her death.

These dismal stories have grown familiar, but it is what happened next that tangles our instincts. When district attorney Elizabeth Scheibel charged nine students in connection with Phoebe’s suicide, she forced us to explore the line between the cruel and the criminal.

Scheibel had to be creative to find charges that fit. Seven girls were charged variously with stalking and criminal harassment, civil rights violations and assault by means of a dangerous weapon (the drink). Two boys were charged with statutory rape (sex, even consensual, with someone under 16). The town now turns on itself: Is this who we are? Who is to blame? The alleged accessories to the crime range from the teachers who overheard the abuse and did nothing, to the adults who appear just as cowed by the powerful kids as their peers are, to the technologies that give new meaning to mean.

“The kids have a way of communicating with each other without us knowing about it,” superintendent Gus Sayer told the Boston Globe. “They really have their own world.” But Facebook is accessible to adults too, and the prosecutor called the bullying “common knowledge” around the school and the inaction of officials “troublesome,” though not criminally so.

Forty-one states have laws against bullying, and Congress is debating various federal versions. But it’s unclear whether lawmakers are stepping in because bullying is more common or just more conspicuous. The circle is literally vicious: one study cited during a House hearing last fall found that 27% of girls who were bullied online became bullies themselves. Lawmakers draft laws as memorials to the fallen, like HR 1966, the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, named for the 13-year-old Missouri girl who hanged herself after being tormented by her (fake) MySpace friend Josh. Megan’s Law would make it a federal crime to send a communication intended to “coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress to another person.”

This brings us into slippery realms. “When a bully beats up a smaller student and the smaller student goes home, gets on the Internet and says the playground bully is mean, ugly and stupid,” said Texas Republican Louie Gohmert in a hearing, “it’s the smaller student victim that has now probably committed a federal felony under this proposed law.”

Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How “substantial” does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal? Severe enough to interfere with schoolwork? Or only if it drives the victim to suicide? The attacks on Phoebe were orchestrated and unrelenting; they “far exceeded the limits of normal teenage relationship-related quarrels,” Scheibel charged. But ultimately it was Phoebe’s response to the abuse that gave definition to the crime.

We want laws to be applied predictably. The boys charged with statutory rape are probably not the only seniors having sex with freshman girls. At what point did the girls begin behaving in some fundamentally different way than other obnoxious kids? They created a toxic culture that poisoned a classmate. But was the line they crossed visible to all, or blurred and subject to interpretation?

It’s easy to criticize Scheibel for overreaching, but her defenders argue that she was forced to act by the craven failures she saw, just like the prosecutors who have charged kids with sex crimes for forwarding naked pictures of their girlfriends. If you don’t police this, we will, they declare — a warning aimed at the abdicators as much as the perpetrators. Parents who imagine they can escape the implications of this might want to spend some time clicking through the virtual playground where their children live.

Source: Time Magazine

Work

“It is not work that kills men, it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more on a man than he can bear. But worry is rust upon the blade. It is not movement that destroys the machinery, but friction.” -Henry Ward Beecher

Deentight

So if you came up to me a month ago and asked me what is “Deentight,” I would have no idea what you’re talking about. Last week, Stony Brook MSA had a screening of a documentary called Deentight directed by Mustafa Davis. The documentary has muslim rappers, dj’s, poets, break dancers, graffiti artists, Ustadh Usama Canon and much more! The documentary was great mashaAllah, it had an interesting edge to it. At first, there were many who weren’t very happy with the documentary-ok I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really feeling the documentary at first. But you need to take a step back and understand the whole picture. It talks about those who converted to Islam and how they felt when they came to this deen and what attracted them to the deen. Although we may not like to hear anything negative, it’s interesting to see how they feel and how other Muslims make them feel. I feel that this documentary does a good job with bridging gaps between the American culture of Islam and all the other cultures. I’m doing a pretty bad job with describing this documentary but go to their site, or better yet juss go watch it! Watch it with a group of friends and discuss it, I know that sounds pretty corny and boring but it really is important to discuss it. My friends and I discussed this for a good amount of time and it’s interesting to see the different points from everyone’s side and then to finally make a decision for yourself about how you feel about it. So go watch it before Spring Breaks over! Check out the trailer below:

Stony MSA had Amir Sulaiman, Mustafa Davis and Anas Canon there and they answered questions from the audience. All very well spoken and it was a nice way for the audience to learn more about them. Amir Sulaiman presented a poem, watch it below: (sorry about the angle, I was thinking that I could somehow rotate it like when you do it with pictures but eerrr yeah didn’t work, juss close your eyes and listen if it bothers you or pick up your laptop and tilt it)

Take care inshaAllah and enjoy the pretty weather that we’re finally getting before it disappears again.

Du’as for all.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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