How is your experience of Islam at your university - as in Muslim student organizations? Can you relate to anything the article below has been talking about? I don’t think my undergrad institution had any problems with Sunni-Shiite issues, but we did have issues with girls in leadership positions, which spurred the girls to start their own organization (interestingly, most muslims including guys joined the ladies’ organization). I think I knew only one Shiite kid on campus and he was in grad school, but I remember him telling me he didn’t care about the Sunni-Shiite divide. He just wanted to socialize with muslims.
The story below worries me. Is extremism and intolerance now being adopted by students too? I always thought the young ones were more tolerant.
im pretty hazy about this but as far as I recall MSA does have an anti-shia bent as a national organization. there was some political upheavel in USC where a very anti-shia guy was replaced eventually by a more inclusive person. local stances/interactions depend on the people managing it, but the cross-university stances were definitely sectarian.
My campus had/has a very small Muslim students population. At the end of my freshman year, two other students and I decided to form a club for Islam awareness and support for Muslim students. The person whose idea it was became President, the other guy became VP, and I took on Secretary/Treasurer. Perhaps because the Muslim population was so small, there were no sectarian issues at all, just people getting together to celebrate and learn about the religion, rituals, and related cultural issues.
The next year I took on Presidency, along with another female student. Things went fine. There were no concerns about females leading, but there also weren't a lot of very "conservative" Muslims there.
It's never been a recognised issue as far as my uni experience in London is concerned. I wouldn't be very surprised if it's escalating now though. Divide and conquer is their rule And, more often than not, we hand them the knives and the serving plates... If it's emerging more now then we should take action to try and bring people together... This isn't the time for division in any way, shape or form.
my undergrad years there was a rift between shias and sunnis and they both wanted the other group to be in the back during jummah. I and a few ppl decided to walk and for the rest of our time there never went back. In hindsight I think it was people like myself walking away rather than speaking up that prolonged the issue. finally those ppl graduated and some normalcy returned.
there was a huge muslim population at my grad school and there ws no issue.
sad to say the issues in my undergrad were caused by arabs, desis were not involved iin it for the most part.
I forgot to add the first almeness I saw was when a student editor wrote something about the fatwa against rushde and whether muslims really took that fatwa seriously. in response a muslim student sent him a threatening note..fairly serious one at that. I was in student govt then, it became a huge issue, this dude was a GA/TA and working on his PhD. We were able to resolve the situation and prevent the moron from being kicked out, the editor also decided to cooperate and not ruin this guy's career. it was ugly.