Award winning journalist Laila Al-Arian, Tayseer Seminary scholar, Ustadha Zaynab Ansari, and activist-journalist, Hena Zuberi joined Salaamedia’s Roundtable Discussion
Johannesburg – The new year brings new things to look forward to. The Muslim ummah (community) and the world has many challenges of oppression they face and must conquer.
Laila Al-Arian, an award-winning journalist and executive producer on Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines, talked about how they managed to get Brandon Jackson freed from prison after he spent more than 25 years in jail. Jackson was sentenced to life in prison by a non-unanimous jury. Al- Arian explains as meaning “only nine or ten people had to convict someone in order for them to go to prison as opposed to a whole jury of 12 people”. She says these “are actually racist laws” and the constitutional convention “explicitly said that it was to help maintain the supremacy of the white race”.
Anchor at Muslim Network TV and Chief editor at Muslim Matters, Hena Zuberi, brought attention to the plight of the Muslims in India regarding the hijab ban. She spoke of two apps created “where women activists [who] were active in India, journalists, were put on auction and they were being sold on this website”. Her nephew was “incarcerated for six months because he participated in a protest outside his university and recited a poem there”.
Ustadha Zaynab Ansari, board member at Tayseer Seminary, focuses on the “the rise of the far-right governments and their activity and organizing along with Islamophobia”.
“Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán recently just made a very shameful remark about accepting Bosnia into the European Union saying that the problem was its two million strong Muslim population. So, this open islamophobia, this open bigotry…. we know that the previous [American] administration, the previous president had openly praised the Hungarian prime minister.”
She also touched on the issue of France and their banning of the hijab as well as watching India and the persecution taking place there. Ansari feared the “previous president [of America] is going to attempt to run again and his supporters are going to call for the nullification of any results that don’t go in their favour. So, we’re going to see, I think some, contraction politically speaking along with increased societal acceptance of vastly changing morals around gender and sexuality.”
On the positive side of things, Ansari believes the world will see more American Muslims standing up for those who are oppressed throughout the world.
“We will see increasing advocacy amongst the American Muslim ummah when it comes to standing up for Muslims whether in India, whether the Uyghur Muslims, whether they’re Palestinians and other oppressed groups.”
Evidence of this is in Zuberi speaking about how they managed to get the Montgomery County Model (MCM) successfully kicked out of their county. The MCM, according to its website, “is an early-warning system targeted towards the intervention and prevention of violent extremism”. Muslim and Christian mothers “who were worried about how mental health services in the county were being enrolled upon by counter-violent extremists” got together to kick out the programme.
The most shocking part about it all, said Zuberi, was it was being run by “a woman by the name of [Dr] Hedieh Mirahmadi”. Mirahmadi went on to leave the community and “joined the Trump administration’s America’s First Coalition and now she’s denounced Islam.”
Ansari raised concerns of the government’s hypocrisy in sentencing those who stormed the Capitol Building. “If a native American group, a Latino group, Black Lives Matter or a Muslim group had shown up at the Capitol Building and done that just imagine for a moment the response. The astonishing hypocrisy of the whole thing…”
Zuberi, Ansari and Al-Arian say they are a few women amongst many who are raising their voices for American Muslims and Muslims all over. They hope and pray the struggles American Muslims face after 9/11 will not be forgotten and that the current young generation will continue to strive for the freedom of those wrongfully imprisoned and for the oppressed.
Listen to the Roundtable Discussion with El-Hajj Mauri Saalakhan and his guests on “What stands out for you in 2022”:
