Being Muslim Research Paper

The media portrays me as a terrorist. After 9/11, being Muslim in America meant that you had to live in fear, conceal your faith, or pay the price of retaliation by someone who reacted out of ignorance. It meant you had to constantly apologize for acts of terrorism committed by criminals that use Islam as a banner to progress their vendettas. However, being Muslim also meant that you could learn self-disciple through the five-daily prayers, patience, and tolerance as I tried to understand the reasons why so many Americans feared Muslims. Unfortunately, I did not see the benefit of expressing my faith until I was much older.
I chose to conceal my faith as I was growing up, allowing friends, teachers, and classmates to believe that I was one of them, sympathetic to the anti-Islamic rhetoric. Being naïve, I believed that if I allowed people to know that I was Muslim then I …show more content…
Turns out that was a bad idea, the first person that I told was a friend and he replied by asking me if I was “the kind of Muslim who blew up people” and if he should be afraid. It turns out that he had never met a Muslim, and feared what he did not understand. I was dumbfounded. I realized that by concealing my faith and not allowing society to see who Muslims truly are, I had allowed the media to portray Muslims as terrorist. I regret not speaking up earlier.
Since then, I have come to realize that expressing my differences allows people to learn about a religion or any other societal difference that they would have otherwise never been exposed too. By concealing my faith, I had given my friends no choice but to believe what the media portrays about Muslims. By allowing my friends, classmates, and teachers to know about my faith, allows them the opportunity to ask questions that they have about Islam and it allows me to represent what Islam is truly about rather than having criminals portray