Editor’s Note: This week, we are delighted to collaborate with Jenny Bender and Amanda Herman, two active community members (one writer, one photographer) who set out this past year to do a citizens’ oral history project on our Muslim friends and neighbors. This article features several stories from the series, which Bender and Herman treat as an ongoing project and look forward to sharing and exhibiting in the coming months. — Hunter Styles
For six months, Amanda Herman and I photographed and interviewed Muslims in Amherst, Northampton and Springfield. We asked participants four central questions: What is most important to you about your faith? What is your understanding of the role of women in Islam? What is it like for you to be a Muslim in America today? And lastly: what would you like non-Muslims to know about your religion?
The responses of the Muslim men, women and children with whom we spoke offer a stark counterpoint to the distorted media coverage of Muslims today.
I am reminded of when Naz, a woman we interviewed, said: “I think the most important thing for non-Muslims to do is to make friends with a Muslim.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.”
What other hope do we have but to connect, human to human? — Jenny Bender
