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How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress

December 19, 2018Yaqeen Institute

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
Salamualaikum. Good evening Dallas. It's amazing to be here with you. I am so honored, so proud to be here supporting the Yaqeen Institute. And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to be very personal with you in my remarks today to explain why I think Yaqeen is such a critical institution and a critical organization for the Muslim community. I was born in Cairo, Egypt and I came to the United States when I was five years old with my family. I was raised a Muslim in a Muslim household in Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was one of maybe three Muslims in my high school of 2,000 people. I basically grew up alone. And growing up in that environment, I was influenced by a lot of different ideologies, especially ideologies that dealt with social justice. I considered myself someone who was dedicated to fairness, to justice, to liberation of humanity. And it was through this prism that I was now critically looking at my faith. And I had a lot of questions. I had a lot of challenges with what I understood from my faith and I had nowhere to go. And I really went through a period of doubt as a teenager, trying to find answers to my questions. And honestly, there was literally nowhere that I could find to get those answers, to get those questions answered. And it was only until much later that I met people that could engage these questions with me in a way that I was satisfied.
I get messaged about every other day on one of my social media platforms from someone across the world who has these exact same questions. Young women who have been told things about their own faith that makes them doubt. Young men who are questioning the fairness of hellfire or not understanding slavery in Islam, not understanding apostasy. There's so many misconceptions among Muslims about Islam. And now, today, unlike before, I consistently have a place to send them. And I send them to the Yaqeen Institute website and every single time they come back and tell me how it's exactly what they needed. It's exactly what they were looking for. Now I tell you this because I'm also a researcher. And what I've been researching for almost 20 years is the American Muslim community and Muslims globally. And along with that research, I've been studying Islamophobia. Islamophobia, I used to think, I thought, targeted primarily non-Muslims to make them hate Islam or to make them have a negative opinion of Islam. Of course, that's partially true. But what I recently realized is that the primary target of the Islamophobia industry, and yes, it is an industry, are you and me. The primary target of the Islamophobia industry are you and me and our young people and our minds and our hearts. Making us doubt, making us hate ourselves is the primary objective of this industry.
And I will give you a very simple way, if you don't believe me, I'm going to give you a very simple example. When the Islamophobia industry convinces Joe Blow on the street, any common person who doesn't know a Muslim, that Muslims are bad, does that person get a book deal? Does that person get on primetime TV? Do they even care to elevate and amplify that person? Do they celebrate that person for being convinced that Islam is bad? The answer is no, they don't even care. But when they get a Muslim to hold those views, to leave Islam, to speak about Islam in Islamophobic terms, is that person amplified? Is that person celebrated? Is that person getting a book deal? The answer is of course. So yes, that is their primary target and that is the crown on their head when they get a Muslim to buy into it. And oftentimes it's working. At the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, where I direct research, we do something very different from Yaqeen. We don't touch theology, we don't touch Islamic law, we don't study Islam. We study the Muslim community as social scientists. So we know what Muslims are thinking. We know the challenges that they're dealing with in America. And you know what we discovered, brothers and sisters, in our last nationwide survey? Muslim young people, many of them have internalized Islamophobia.
Did you know that Muslims in America are as likely as white evangelicals to say that they believe Muslims are more prone to violence than other people? Muslims are as likely as white evangelicals and more likely than the general public. So they're equal to white evangelicals and higher than the general public in the view that Muslims are more prone to violence than other people. A view that is empirically false, empirically false. With numbers I can prove to you it is not true. But Muslims are as likely to believe this as a group that is hostile toward our community. Now you may ask why. The answer is this. Studies have shown that groups who see negative media against their own group, okay, will become even more negative about their own group than members of a different group will about that group. So let me explain. When African Americans watch negative media about African Americans, they will become even more negative about their fellow black Americans than will a white person watching that media. We are more hard on our group when we see images that are negative of them. And when you look at the media, the latest studies showed that 90% of media about Muslims and Islam is negative. And we are consuming this media and it's impacting us. So what is the solution? What is the solution to this internalized Islamophobia?
And I, with complete confidence and sincerity, say the solution is the Yaqeen Institute. It's truly the only one taking on these challenging issues head on. And not doing it by reinventing Islam to just like make these things sort of like disappear. But by dealing with it authentically. And then not only just dealing with it authentically but dealing with it accessibly in a way that people can understand. Taking it to the people through videos, through infographics, through conviction circles. And it's exactly for this reason that when ISPU wanted to find a partner to combine empirical research on Muslims and their challenges and marry it up with authentic Islamic teachings and then take it to the people in the form of a khutba toolkit or a talk toolkit, we went to Yaqeen and asked for this partnership. And they were incredibly collaborative. If you, you know, here's my advice to folks in the room who are thinking about philanthropy. Give your money to the most collaborative Muslim organizations because then you know that it is having the best impact. Folks who want to work with other Muslims who see their competition as the problem that they're trying to solve, not other people trying to solve the same problem. These are the people you should be giving your money to because it will go further and it will make a greater impact. And that's what Yaqeen is doing.
So their willingness to collaborate, to find complementary partners, make them a resource for every single organization in the United States. And I'll close by saying this. Studies have shown that the Islamophobia industry, whose goal is doubt in the hearts of the Muslims, has access to more than $200 million between 2013 to 2015. $200 million. And now we have an organization that's standing up to them.
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