A plea for Muslims to seek justice

By Lauren Textor The Daily Pennsylvanian Muslim Americans should serve more actively as leaders for social justice in their communities, Islam Awareness Week speaker Intisar Rabb said last night. Rabb, a Princeton graduate student, said the events and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are an example of a time when the Muslim community could have helped more. According to Rabb, Katrina brought social injustice against poor blacks into the public eye. "Katrina has everything to do with race and poverty in America," she told the Logan Hall audience of about 30. "Katrina dredges up these problems from the mud of invisibility." Rabb said she is disheartened a year after Katrina as the ongoing humanitarian crisis no longer receives attention from politicians or the public. There was an attitude among citizens and politicians, Rabb said, that "once the aid is delivered, the job is done." "But the predicament persists," she said. "While we spend our precious resources abroad, we do so without taking care of our problems at home," she added. Muslim Americans especially, Rabb said, should urge the public to address problems at a local level. She cited Muslims' devotion to charity and justice as the reason that they must do more in cases such as Katrina. Americans have always had a tradition of civic action, and that Muslim-Americans should be leaders in continuing this tradition, Rabb said. "Muslim-Americans have not done an adequate job," she said, adding that Islam does not advocate helping only Muslim orphans or the Muslim poor but instead calls upon Muslims to practice generosity regardless of faith. All Americans must do more to promote positive values and to consciously "do democracy," Rabb said. Wharton junior Skye Gilbert said she had never thought of Katrina in the context of Muslim Americans before. "Both Americans in general and Muslim Americans have traditions of social justice that are conceptualized differently," Gilbert said, adding that, while she was "shocked by the delay in the response to Katrina," she was heartened by the response from students who went afterward to New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity.

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