Waco's Baylor University: Up the Road from Brownwood's HPU and Lubbock's Tech

Muslim BU student: Need for greater tolerance is crucial

Friday, April 07, 2006
By Terri Jo Ryan
Tribune-Herald staff writer

A 20-year-old Baylor junior from Bedford, Texas, who wears an Islamic head scarf on the campus of the world’s largest Baptist university knows all about standing out.
“You can spot me from a mile away,” said Hoda Said.
But as an American and one of about 600 Muslims on campus, she says she has a right to go to any university she wants to — and the international studies major wanted to go to Baylor for its pre-medicine curriculum.
Most of the 14,000-strong student body are “friendly, even nice,” respectful and tolerant, she said. But a handful have made her time there miserable — and she’s not staying silent about it anymore.
“I was too quiet,” she said this week, “and this is the result. The more quiet we are, the more it will empower the bullies who think they can get away with it.”
Said is referring to Saturday night’s assault of her friend and fellow Baylor student, Nohayia Javed, reported to authorities Sunday.
Javed, a Chicago-born Muslim of South Asian heritage, said she was jumped from behind as she walked from the Student Union Building to her dorm room in Dawson Residence Hall. A large man grabbed her hijab, or head scarf, and pulled her to the ground, all while making anti-Muslim and ethnic slurs.
Despite a death threat to keep silent, Javed screamed. Her attacker responded, she said, by slapping and kicking her multiple times in the ribs before running away.
Javed, a 19-year-old senior, is recovering from the attack at her family’s home in Tulsa. Although Javed said she believes her assailant came from off campus, Said claims both women have been subjected to harassment by Baylor students based on their appearance.
To battle such attitudes, leaders of Baylor’s student government and various campus organizations conducted a candlelight ceremony Thursday night in front of the Bill Daniel Student Center, close to where Javed said she was attacked Saturday, to highlight the need for tolerance.
Said, who at one point spoke to the crowd of about 250 and read an e-mail from her friend Javed, wasn’t alone in her beliefs Thursday night. Several girls held signs that read, “Islamic Center of Hewitt: Freedom of Religion.”
The attack has sparked concern among local Muslims as well as the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose officials convinced the FBI to assist Baylor’s Department of Public Safety in investigating the assault as a hate crime. CAIR is holding a press conference in Waco this morning to promote racial and religious tolerance.
‘Like a trophy prize’
Said and Javed say they have experienced difficulties on campus based on their appearance, faith and ethnicity. Last semester, Javed said, two men managed to pull her scarf off, spit in her face and run away waving it “like it was a trophy prize.”
A year ago, Said recalled, she was hit by a full bottle of water dropped on her head from the balcony of Waco Hall in the middle of a chapel presentation. It followed two sessions of unknown persons throwing paper wads at her, which she had tried to ignore.
“When the bottle hit my head, the girls behind me laughed,” she said. “It hurt my feelings; it hurt my pride. And I had to wonder, what are they going to throw at me next?”
Baylor’s immediate reaction was to close off the balcony for several weeks, she said, and Dub Oliver, Baylor’s interim vice president for student life, recommended she reduce her exposure by sitting in the back of the auditorium.
Oliver said Thursday that he also asked chapel assistants to be more vigilant — and that to help Said feel safe in that environment, he offered to sit with her, off-stage, during chapel.
‘Diminishes Christian witness’
“It breaks my heart that something like this (ethnic intimidation) could take place here, particularly at Baylor,” Oliver said. “It diminishes the Christian witness of the entire university” when such actions are taken.
“Jesus crossed social and religious and racial differences in his own time, and we should do the same,” Oliver said.
And what is alleged to have happened to Javed on Saturday, he added, “clearly is horrible. We need to speak out against violence in all its forms, against any student, as unacceptable here.”
Baylor spokesman Larry Brumley said ethnically abusive behavior isn’t worthy of a world-class, faith-based institution such as Baylor and that officials are dedicated to ridding it. But realistically, he said, Baylor has students from every state in the nation and many countries. Not every student who comes here has developed an appreciation for ethnic or religious diversity.
“It’s a part of our job as a university to help these students be respectful and tolerant of differences,” he said.
Brumley said Baylor encourages interaction among “our international and domestic students” by hosting cross-cultural events on campus.
Faculty and staff have worked hard, he said, to weave students of different faiths, creeds and colors into the fabric of university life, raising their public profile and helping them feel at home at Baylor.
tjryan@wacotrib.com
757-5746

source: http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2006/04/07/04072006wacislamicbaylor.html
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Terrorists not only ones with closed minds

Kristen Gilbreth
Issue date: 10/25/01 Section: Opinions

While at a local coffeehouse sipping a latte and reading “The Never Ending Jihad” by Jeffery Goldberg, a writer for New York Times Magazine, I began to comprehend the magnitude of foolishness.
In March 2000 Goldberg was accepted into a madrasa, a Muslim religious seminary, in Pakistan. The insights he brought back were chilling.
The Jewish American journalist interacted with young boys who despised everything he was. They spent most of their days sitting cross-legged on hard wood floors memorizing the Holy Koran. Most of the students knew the words by the age of nine and could quote them with perfection. Their teachers indoctrinated them on how to interpret what they read. And that’s the scary part.
To arm a child with words is meaningless, but to turn those words into a mission is murderous. There are more than one-million students studying in these Islamic radical schools. Taliban leaders were once young boys among the graduates and now we’ve all seen the harsh interpretation of Islamic law they practice as men.
They don’t learn history. They don’t learn math. They learn a sheltered worldview. They learn to hate Americans.
We are the infidels. We are those who seek to pollute holy lands and tarnish Islam. We are the enemy of Allah. They call us Satan.
Their perception is their reality. These impoverished young men, many of them orphans, sit barefoot with a turban on their head as they are educated from one book.
I was trying to imagine what it would be like to grow up in a place filled with such brainwashing, when two young Texas Tech students interrupted my imaginary picture of myself in a burka with their quoting of the Bible. The most outspoken boy was quite impressed with his vast knowledge of scripture. As I eavesdropped, I realized that his entire life revolved around this book. I wondered if he really knew what he was saying. Had he ever really thought about it? Either way, he was armed with a mission.
My thoughts quickly flashed back to my philosophy class at the private Christian university from where I transferred. While the textbook would question religion, at the end of a debate the professor would always interject, “BUT...Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.” The students at my school were simply a different breed of sheep than those in the madrasas. They were brainwashed by choice.
And my, were they armed with a mission. A mission to convert. A mission called the Great Commision. Their “mission trips” took them as far as China to go from village to village to bring souls to God.
I once sat passively silent as my Christian friends harshly told exchange students who barely understood English that they would go to Hell if they refused to accept Christ.
My friends thought they were doing a favor to these foreigners by arming them with the truth. But, something in me knew it wasn’t right.
I also dated a fundamentalist Christian man who told me the 70 percent of the world that are non-believers in the gospel were simply damned to hell.
“It is Biblical,” he said.
When I questioned this, he told me we could not be together because I was so arrogant to think I could pick and choose what I wanted to believe in God’s word.
He scorned me for questioning God’s wisdom.
The truth is he was the arrogant one. And I wasn’t questioning the wisdom of God. I was questioning the wisdom of man.
One day we were talking about WWII and the atrocities of Hitler and I asked him if he believed all of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were now in Hell because they had not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.
He said only God knew.
But, if you really get down to the core of belief if you call yourself a Christian, you define yourself by the moment you accepted Jesus as your savior. You define yourself by your mission to save others. You define yourself by the afterlife and the glory of your eternity in Heaven, while you define the fate of others as separation from God forever in a place the Bible calls Hell.
When I listened to Billy Graham preach on the National Day of Mourning, I heard something that most American’s didn’t. He said “some” of the people who died on Sept. 11 are now in Heaven and would not want to come back to this earth. It was a beautiful sentiment until I realized where he clearly thought the other people were.
And this is exactly why we have difficulty having “diversity without division.”
In our contemptuous confidence we condemn.
In his controversial book, “Why Christianity Should Change or Die,” Bishop John Sprong said, “We must lay down the primitive claims we have made for our religious traditions. None of them represents the only way to God. None of them can be used legitimately to coerce or compel another to belief. All evangelical and missionary activities designed to convert the heathen are base born. They are the expressions of our sense of superiority and our hostility toward those who are different.”
Blood on the hands of the fanatically religious did not end with the Crusades, the Inquisition, or WWII. And it won’t end with ridding the world of current terrorist groups. As Goldberg pointed out, millions are being raised to carry the torch.
Bernard Russell once said, “The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people are full of doubts.”
We have freedom of choice in America. We can choose to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. We can choose to have a worldview that is neither foolish nor fanatical. We can choose to be wise.
Kristen Gilbreth is a senior communications studies major from Brownwood. She can be contacted at kristengilbreth@aol.com.

source: http://www.dailytoreador.com/media/storage/paper870/news/2001/10/25/Opinions/Terrorists.Not.Only.Ones.With.Closed.Minds-1272765.shtml