A group of American Muslims is closing in on a goal to raise $100,000 to help African American churches impacted by a rash of arsons that raged through the South last month following the tragic murder of nine black worshippers in Charleston, South Carolina.
On Thursday, the Muslim nonprofit Ummah Wide announced that they have accrued almost $90,000 from fellow believers to assist several African American churches that fell victim to fires last month — some of which are suspected to be cases of arson. Ummah Wide is one of three Islamic groups helping coordinate the online fundraising effort, which began during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
“We must always keep in mind that the Muslim community and the black community are not different communities,” the fundraising website reads. “We are profoundly integrated in many ways, in our overlapping identities and in our relationship to this great and complicated country. We are connected to Black churches through our extended families, our friends and teachers, and our intertwined histories and convergent present.”
The website also urges fellow Muslims to hold teach-ins on how to protect houses of worship, as well as sign a petition asking President Barack Obama to reconvene the National Church Arson Task Force — a defunct government initiative originally set up in the mid-1990s, when a dozens of churches were burned in less than two years.
Although $100,000 won’t be enough to rebuild any of the churches, it can lend a helping hand, and it’s an especially impressive figure given that American Muslims only make up less than one percent of the U.S. population. By contrast, a separate interfaith campaign organized by dozens of churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship has raised around $200,000 for rebuilding efforts.
“Too often cowards inflict us with a crippling fear, but with encouragement and support from likely and unlikely places fear cannot stop us,” reads the website, which also cites several passages from the Qur’an that call on followers to exhibit compassion.
Imam Zaid Shakir, co-founder of the Muslim school Zaytuna College, is quoted on the crowdfunding webpage as saying that “the American Muslim community cannot claim to have experienced anything close to the systematic and institutionalized racism and racist violence that has been visited upon African Americans.” But American Muslims — like other religious minorities in the country — are also painfully familiar with violence enacted against sacred spaces. Muslim houses of worship have been repeatedly attacked over the past decade and a half, with vandals defacing property, shooting bullets through windows, and even burning mosques to the ground in suspicious fires.