Muslims find many ways to reach out for Ramadan
The COVID-19 pandemic means local Muslims this Ramadan can’t invite their interfaith neighbors to large celebratory meals to break their fast each night, but area faith leaders say they’ve found other ways to build connections with the community.
Ramadan, which begins Monday, is a holy month during which Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. Community iftars – the meals that break fast – are a way to invite others to learn more about Islam and build bridges through eating together, said Imran Malik, spokesman for NOOR Islamic Cultural Center, a mosque in Hilliard.
“The pandemic has restricted some activities,” Malik said. “But it has replaced them with other forms of acts of kindness and acts of spirituality.”
During Ramadan last year, Malik noticed more people were volunteering and helping their neighbors, an important tenant of many religions.
NOOR also hosts a class called “Islam 101” that is open to the public every week. Though in-person classes were suspended due to COVID, the mosque has been hosting virtual classes, Malik said.
Another area organization, Ask A Muslim, offers people the ability to ask questions about Islam to Muslims and learn about the religion through a hotline, social media and a 24-hour live chat function on its website, ask-a-muslim.com.
“If you want to know about Islam, you’d ask a Muslim,” Dr. Marwan Mohammad said. “We want to be that individual.”
Each year at Ramadan, the organization puts billboards up around the city talking about the commonalities between faith traditions.
Mohammad started the organization, now with a national presence, a few years ago when he realized that despite the large number of mosques in Columbus, there wasn’t an organization solely focused on telling people about their Muslim neighbors.
He’d seen many people talking, especially on national news channels, about Islam when they weren’t Muslim themselves, and knew they were spreading misconceptions about his faith.
Mohammad began Ask A Muslim so
people would have a place to go to learn about Islam that wouldn’t spread fear or misconceptions. Now, the organization also has a food pantry, called Ohio Serving Humanity, on the Northeast Side.
“We are part of the community,” Mohammad said of Muslims. “We are your neighbor, we are your doctor, we are your engineers. We’re the people you see at the cash register. We’re around you, we are part of the society.”
Though it is hard to count the number of Muslims because the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t collect data on religion, estimates show there are about 110,000 Muslims in Franklin County, said Abdi Soofe, New American Initiative coordinator with the city of Columbus’ Department of Neighborhoods.
The large population is due in part to Columbus being the U.S. city with the
second-largest population of Somali immigrants, many of them Muslim. The estimated 50,000 Somalis in Columbus are second to the Minneapolis-st. Paulbloomington area, where Somali leaders estimate there are as many as 80,000 from the African country.
Islam is a widespread population across the world. Globally, Islam is the second-largest religious group with an estimated 1.8 billion people, representing 24% of the world’s population, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center report.
In the United States, Islam is the third-largest religion after Christianity and Judaism, but the population continues to grow, according to Pew. In 2020, Pew estimated there were 4.89 million Muslims in the country, with that number expected to exceed 10 million by 2050.
Ask A Muslim also creates literature for distribution used in mosques around the country and makes educational videos. Almost 2.5 million people follow Ask A Muslim’s Facebook page.
Karen Dawson, president of the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio (IACO), said the organization has an “Introduction to our Faith Traditions” booklet. It gives a brief description of several faiths, including Islam, and offers important information on that faith.
Dawson said organizations like Ask A Muslim are important.
“It’s very powerful to say to any group, any community, ‘We love to answer your questions. You’ve probably got a lot of question about us … here’s an opportunity to ask us questions and we’ll answer them,’ ” she said.
IACO’S vision is for central Ohio to become a “vibrant interfaith community … based on understanding, friendship and trust,” Dawson said.
An important way to do that is through education on different faith traditions, she said, like area Muslim associations are doing with Islam.
Another way is through finding similarities between faiths, Malik said.
For instance, many monotheistic religions practice fasting, which is a commonality people can begin to build mutual understanding around, he said.
“Faith is a very personalized kind of sentiment in the current global arena, so the whole idea is we have to find similarities through our cultures, through our traditions as human beings,” Malik said. “It’s important for Muslims to create a different narrative of community building and creating different conversations about Islam.” dking@dispatch.com @Danaeking