ahlysunnat

 A practicing Muslim walking through some of the student encampments for Palestine that have spread across the country might be dismayed by what they encounter. Blaring music, people lounging with their dogs, and the faint smell of weed are common. Read the various signs at some of the encampments and you will find rainbow flags and messages calling for queer liberation. Many practicing Muslims don’t feel welcome in an environment that departs so strongly from their values. As a result, their first trip to an encampment will often be their last. When Muslims avoid participating in the encampments—or other sites of political activism—a downward spiral ensues where the space caters less and less towards Muslims, driving even more Muslims away.

My call to Muslim youth is not to run away from this challenge but to face it head on, to step up and help lead the movement to end the Zionist occupation of Palestine once and for all. The time of being a bystander or letting others silence us is over. Ending the Zionist occupation is a Muslim issue and an Islamic issue, no matter who tells you otherwise.

Regrettably, even some of the most famous spokespeople for Palestine are guilty of anti-Islamic sentiment. A number of these spokespeople have argued that Palestine is not a religious issue but a human one, or that making it an Islamic issue benefits the Zionists. They are wrong, horribly wrong. At best, these takes are based on false dilemmas; the occupation of Palestine and genocide of the Palestinian people can be a human issue, a religious issue, and an Islamic issue all at the same time. At worst, taking Islam off the table is part of the colonization of Palestine and the Muslim world. Here I mean not the formal colonization of territory but the mental colonization that dictates how the occupied can or should resist. This is not to say that people with different beliefs or practices are not welcome to participate in a movement reenergized by Muslim leadership. We recognize that people with whom we disagree are moved by the unspeakable suffering of our brothers and sisters; however ,this does not mean that the central Islamic values of this cause can be stripped of the movement and undermined under the guise of "tolerance." Forced accommodation of values hostile to our own is not tolerance at all, but rather another site of recolonizing our struggle.