Full
transcript, in the original English, of my interview with Bassel Riche, founder of the #Muslims4Lent
campaign. The news piece and video, in Portuguese, are here.
Transcrição integral, no inglês original, da entrevista a Bassel Riche, fundador da campanha #Muslims4Lent. A reportagem e video
estão aqui.
How did #Muslims4Lent start?
I was in
the University of Houston and as part of the Muslim Student Association, every
Ramadan, which is like the “Muslim Lent”, we would have a drive which would
basically encourage non-Muslims to sign up to join us for one day in fasting
and, at the end of the day, we would have a big meal together and talk about
interfaith dialogue, share commonalities and stuff like that.
It was a
very nice experience and a few years later I decided, on a personal level, that
there seemed to be a good amount of people who did things to try and understand
the Muslim community and reach out to the Muslim community, and so I felt that
t was right for us to reach out to the Christian community and show them that
we in turn also have very high respect for them.
On a
personal level I would do it, I'd put up a Facebook status, saying what I was
giving up. Then this year was a little different, I created a group, I took a
picture of myself with the sign, and encouraged others to do the same, and it caught
on.
How many people have joined this campaign?
I wish I
knew. I wish I could see how many times it has been tweeted and retweeted.
Honestly
it is easily in the thousands, but I'm not sure. To go through and count all
the pictures on twitter and on Instagram would be quite a task. But it’s definitely
enough that we feel we have made a big impact and created lots of conversations
around the world.
Is the current climate, with issues such as the
Islamic State and fundamentalist Muslim violence, a factor as well?
Absolutely.
Because people can be so caught up in their routine, understandably so, we are
all busy with work and with our family, and people get into these routines,
sometimes when something is foreign to them it can be perceived as scary.
Right
now, particularly in America, there is a sentiment amongst some that the Muslim
community is that scary variable, nobody really knows much about them, and that
is one of the goals, to put ourselves out there in everyday life, and encourage
the people who might have these opinions to talk to us.
The shootings that happened in Chapel Hill, a few weeks ago, when they studied the person
that shot those people they said that he clearly had racial and religious
prejudice against the victims. Hopefully when you reach out to these people and
engage in dialogue respectfully, it helps curb us away from that sort of extremist
and “us versus them” mentality.
Then we
begin to realise that we have a lot more in common than we will ever have
different, and if we spend the time talking about our similarities, we probably
won't even have time to talk about our differences.
You have also received a fair amount of
criticism, correct?
We have criticism
on both sides.
On the
Christian side we have had people saying that “This isn't actually what Lent is
about, so you guys are missing the whole point of what Lent is”, and they will
explain that giving something up has nothing to do with Lent. And my response
to them would be, that's a good thing to bring up from a knowledge and
understanding point of view, but it still means a lot to a lot of people.
If Lent
has changed in the way it has been practiced over two thousand years, I don't
know, but present day, 2015, this sacrifice of something, is a meaningful
gesture and it means a lot to a lot of people, and the tweets on the hashtag
#Muslims4Lent proves that. So maybe we can do a better job of understanding
what it’s all about, but even something small like this seems to have resonated
with quite a lot more people and it seems that it’s the minority of people who
are against it.
On the
Muslim side there is a similar idea, there are people saying we shouldn't
partake in the religious actions of other religions, we should stick to our
own, and for that I would say that if you are not part of the solution you are
part of the problem.
People
have compared it and said that doing something like this is compromising our
faith, but how? If anything, this is something which is strengthening our
faith, because we are reconnecting and putting ourselves in a position to
receive questions from other people and hopefully that will drive us to
research more and understand our religion better, so we can in turn present it
correctly.
So on
both sides it seems to come from a place of not really understanding what we're
all about, and it seems that you can't please everybody, and most people are
just going to dismiss something that is outside their box of comfort, without
trying to understand it.
Were you born in the USA?
American
born and raised to Lebanese-Syrian parents.
Have you ever been to Syria?
It’s
been a while, but I have, yes.
So it must be particularly painful for you to
see what is happening there…
It’s
painful every day, whenever I talk to my cousins, because of everything going
on... Some of them are my age and they feel that they have been robbed of their
future.
When
they were younger they had hopes, but one of my cousins has been doing her PHD
in Belgium and is set to return to Syria to be a teacher, and even when I talk
to her it’s truly sad, because she had high hopes. She wanted to go and change
the education system, and advance it in Syria, and then all this happened and
now she feels like, who knows? So it is truly sad.
Do you identify as Sunni or Shia?
I don't
identify. I prefer just to identify as Muslim. I think that the sectarian
division in Islam is one of the dark spots in our religion.
There
was no mention of sect in the Koran and Mohammed wasn't sectarian, so I think
it is one of the things, internally in the Muslim community, that I try to push
on and hope that people start following suit and stop putting labels on
ourselves that only serve to divide our own community.
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