(AhlulBayt News Agency) - The Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Tandon School of Engineering under New York University (NYU) continued their fighting against Islamophobia during their rally at the School on Tuesday evening.
Using the same hashtag, #NotOnOurCampus, from their event last week on the Washington Square campus, the MSA held the rally in an attempt to continue the dialogue that started in the wake of the vandalisation of the Tandon prayer room, Washington Square newspaper reported.
Around 100 people attended the rally in the Pfizer Auditorium, fewer attendees than those who went to the event in Kimmel. Various leaders in engineering organizations represented different races and sexual orientations, such as Out in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics, the National Society of Black Engineers and American Blacks in Energy.
Those who attended also came from a diverse range of religious backgrounds, such as Christian chaplain Jason Casper, who serves as a program administrator at the Global Center for Academic and Spiritual Life.
CAS senior and MSA President Afraz Khan helped organize the Kimmel rally last week, and he performed a spoken-word poem at the Tandon rally on Tuesday. Khan said that as the MSA had more time to plan the Tandon rally, it allowed for a more diverse group of speakers and made the experience more impactful for the attendees. “Even though there is a vandalism against the MSA, you heard people tonight talking about undocumented immigrants, people in the queer community, people who are international or black,” Khan said.
“It reminded me that we have a lot more in common with people who we don’t normally interact with.”
Khan said it is unfortunate that a time of tribulation was the unifying factor for such a divisive time, but that it was encouraging how many people came out to support the large number of Muslim students at Tandon. “It’s funny how at Tandon you technically have a lot more, Muslim students, proportionally speaking, than you do at the Washington Square campus, but I think the culture there at Tandon works differently because with these sorts of events, not as many people come out to them,” Khan said. “Making some sort of an effort to bring people together stands out so much more, like ‘wow Tandon has never done stuff like this before.’ So it’s pretty big that that is happening now.”
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source : nyu news
Wednesday
16 November 2016
1:23:46 PM
792320
The Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Tandon School of Engineering under New York University (NYU) continued their fighting against Islamophobia during their rally at the School on Tuesday evening.