On February 7, the Johns Hopkins University Muslim Association (JHUMA) hosted its annual Muslim Mosaic, which presents the various regional and cultural diversities of Islam. The event showcased cultural delicacies, clothing and music from around the Muslim world and attempted to expose Hopkins students to the heterogeneity of a little-understood — yet global — religion.
This page emphatically supports JHUMA's efforts and praises Muslim Mosaic for offering a necessary forum for Hopkins students.
With the first anniversary of the Arab Spring fast approaching and the pro-democracy movement still attempting to gain a foothold in Syria, it's become clear just how important the Muslim world really is.
Knowledge of that portion of the world, however, is disappointingly lacking in the United States. Although almost two billion people identify themselves as Muslim, a Pew Research poll released in 2010 shows that 55 percent of Americans "do not know very much" about Islam and 25 percent "know nothing at all." Many in the West seem to view the Islamic nations as distant and uniform, and all too often throw blanket assumptions over them, overgeneralizing their ambitions and desires. But Islam, as Muslim Mosaic shows, is anything but uniform. It is, rather, an amalgam of varying beliefs and sects, which often affects the western world in unanticipated ways.
The current sectarian conflicts raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, between Sunni and Shia Islamists as well as among Pashtuns and Tajiks, speak to the diversity of the Muslim world, but also to its relevance to Americans. While we might try to distance ourselves from the conflict and violence in the Middle East, we are inextricably bound to its implications. Whether it be the fate of American aid money, the lives of American troops or the status of international security, America's condition is contingent upon the status of Islam and the Muslim world.
To this end, JHUMA's task is both noble and necessary, especially here at Hopkins, which espouses the concept of the University — of building connections in a world of diversity. To understand the truth of Islam is to break the barriers of parochialism. Confined and defined by merely self-referential and nationalistic knowledge, there is little the University can offer to ambitious and insatiable minds. Enlightened and educated by the spirit of the world, however, there is little it can't provide.
