Today, I am a Muslim Too

Keeping with my recent stint of protests and rallies, I attended yesterday a mass gathering at Times Square entitled "Today, I am a Muslim Too." Organized in response to the nationwide trend toward Islamophobia, and in particular toward U.S. Representative Peter King's proposed hearings on the radicalization of Islam, labeled by many as a McCarthy-style witch hunt, the rally aimed to collapse for the span of its duration distinctions between faiths, cultures, and races, and mobilize populations against a common oppressor.

Ironically, the actual rhetoric of the rally, for all of its power, proved less effective in creating a sense of unity than the torrential downpour that erupted twenty minutes in. Umbrellas sprouted by the hundreds, one after the other throughout the tightly-packed crowd, a kaleidoscope of colored fabric embodying the very rainbow effect that the presenters aimed to bestow on their audience. Muslims who'd brought their umbrellas welcomed into their spheres of dryness Jews who'd neglected to do so. Buddhists spread their canopies for bedraggled Christians who stood soaked at their shoulders. When the presenters hit their cheer-marked peaks and the crowds screamed in response, the person cheering next to you was not merely a co-attendee of the rally, but your umbrella-mate, your fellow refugee of cloudbursts joined to you by a four-foot diameter of shelter.

Among others, presenters included Daisy Kahn, Executive Director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, entrepreneur Russell Simmons, and Imam Shamsi Ali of New York's 96th Street Islamic Cultural Center, whom I've met with on several occasions, and who provided me with valuable assistance in the development of my book.

The ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa helped to provide the rally with both its charged undertone and its sense of immediacy, and if I had any major reservations about the affair, it pertained to the failure of any of the presenters to draw parallels between the world-wide tumult and the active attempts of American conservatives to exacerbate the oppression of women. I can only hope that the matter was at least on the minds of the attendees, affecting, as it does, over half of the nation's people.