Article By: Alex Pearlman

Hossam Al Jabri believes that America is unique as a country because it is unfamiliar with Islam. While the rest of the world has, over the past few millennia, become familiar with the religion and the culture that surrounds it, America is still young.

“But the integration of community is what America does best,” said Al Jabri at last week’s first annual Muslim Student Association (MSA) Fall Dinner. He added to the Muslim students in attendance that the best way to integrate into a community and be accepted is to “be out there,” reaching out to others, learning from them, and letting them learn from you.

This was the theme of the dinner, which took place in the Donahue Café on Nov. 5: allowing Muslim students a place to gather while integrating their non-Muslim friends into their religion and culture.

Sophomore Salaheddin Litim, President of MSA, hosted the event, along with his E-board.

“We’re trying to remove all stereotypes of Muslims,” Litim, who is originally from Algeria, said. “Get to know us, then judge us.”

MSA, formerly the Islamic Student Society, was formed because a number of Litim’s Muslim peers felt out of place on campus.  “We wanted to give them a place to feel comfortable.” But it was also a way to educate others at Suffolk about Islam.

“We want to educate those who know nothing about the Islamic religion. Hopefully this will help them understand the beauty of Islam and allow them to look at it in a whole new perspective,” reads the MSA website. “Inshallah (hopefully), we can have some successful events that will allow us to get our messages across to individuals who are willing to learn.”

The event was a nearly three-hour-long dinner and discussion with guest speaker Al Jabri, a local Imam and Suffolk alum, with traditional Middle Eastern fare provided by Falafel King. Nearly fifty students both Muslim and non-Muslim attended, catching up with old friends and chatting over dinner about Islam in general.

Fatima Litim, sister of MSA President Salaheddin, showed sophomore Gian Carlo Paredes how to perform woudu, a ritual cleansing before prayers, and a number of other students pitched in to help explain the process before the congregational prayer began.

Sophomore Abdul Aziz Al Kaabi called for the prayer to begin and nearly twenty students, both male and female, moved to the front of the room to pray the last prayer of the five per day required by Islam.

Al Jabri then began the talk, beginning with a short autobiographical narrative. He spoke of how his search for God was a three-year journey that began when he was “around college age.”

“Islam views itself as the religion of all the prophets – it means ‘submission to God’ – who sent all the prophets over the ages to explain himself,” said Al Jabri, beginning “a quick overview of Islam.”

“There are 23 prophets mentioned in the Koran, and most of them are mentioned in the Torah and the Bible as well. And there have been 14,000 prophets sent to earth since the beginning of time to be role models for humans.”

Al Jabri also stressed that Muslim students use their time in college to learn the truth about their religion.

“Make sure you learn from authentic sources so that we can learn moderate Islam, not either extreme of the spectrum.”

The event wrapped up with a question and answer session with students shouting out questions they had about Islam for Al Jabri to answer.

Some included basic, easy facts like “how many Muslims are there?” (The answer is about 1.2 billion in the world, 6-8 million in the U.S. and 70-100,000 in Boston).

But other questions were more difficult, existential ones to answer. Junior Hallah El-Khair asked the Imam why some Muslim countries force gay people to live together, ostracized from society, or even kill them.

Al Jabri answered, “I think that putting homosexuals to death is an extreme. Its not something that’s appropriate from a Muslim perspective.”

El-Khair, who joined the club as a freshman, didn’t like it at first. “It wasn’t very welcoming,” she said. “Now it’s more fun. I feel like it’s more of an Arab gathering than a religious thing.”

She thought that Al Jabri was a good speaker as well. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

According to University Chaplin Amy Fisher, there are close to 200 Muslim students on campus, although that is an estimate. There are just over thirty official members of MSA.