Some Facts about Muslims
The following was distributed to the people who attended the Allies to Muslims Workshop, led by Azi Khalili and Dvora Slavin, on Zoom, in November 2020.
Here are ten things you may not know about Muslims:
1. Islam has a clear social justice focus. It’s a theology with liberation at its core. The basic elements of social justice in Islam are absolute freedom of conscience, the complete equality of all humans, and the social interdependence of members of the society.
It is an anti-racist tradition. This became clear in the Prophet Muhammad’s last sermon when he said, “There is no superiority between black and white man or Arab over non-Arab. Treat all people with dignity, honor, and compassion.”
Islam stands against corruption and femicide (the killing of females). It strongly emphasizes social and economic equity. It stands against profit and interest. At its core it opposes capitalism.
It is this social justice tradition that has appealed to human rights and civil rights leaders in many places, including Malcolm X in the United States. [Malcolm X was an African American Muslim minister, a human rights activist, and a popular figure during the U.S. civil rights movement. He is best known for the time he spent as a vocal spokesperson for the Nation of Islam.]
2. Islam is 1,400 years old and sees itself as an extension of Judaism and Christianity.
3. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world today. Islam is the second largest religion after Christianity.
4. While many people in the United States and Europe believe that all Muslims are Arabs, only twenty percent of the world’s Muslims live in the Arab nations.
5. Muslims make up a majority of the population of forty-nine countries.
6. Sixty-two percent of all Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region.
7. Forty percent of the people living on the continent of Africa identify as Muslim.
8. Thirty percent of the Africans brought to and enslaved in the United States were thought to be Muslim. The majority of Muslims living in the United States today are of African heritage.
9. Jews and Muslims have lived side by side in many places for centuries. Some of the oldest Jewish communities are in West Asia. The Koran starts with Moses’s story and has a whole chapter dedicated to Mary (a Jewish woman), not as a secondary character to Jesus but rather as a central figure.
10. While many people believe Muslim women are particularly oppressed, fourteen Muslim women have served as heads of state, as presidents or prime ministers.
Brooklyn, New York, USA
(Present Time 202, January 2021)