I agree with the headline of this article. For many Muslim to try to belong in America will be exhausting. The same thing goes for many blacks.
They come to him — students, co-workers and congregants alike, sometimes in tears — with their questions: What should we do, Imam Zaid? What should we do about the suspicion, about the hatred, about the second glances and the threat of confrontations on the street?
What should we do about Donald Trump and his rhetorical attacks on Muslim immigrants? And how do we process the deadly attacks by people who invoked our religion? Should we return to our ancestral home countries, hunker down in the shadows?
Zaid Shakir, co-founder and faculty member at the nation’s only Muslim liberal arts college, and a 59-year-old Air Force veteran widely regarded to be one of America’s most influential Islamic thought leaders, has his answers ready.
He tells those who have come seeking his counsel in a hard time that, for now anyway, there’s not much they could, or should, do but be themselves. Live their lives just as they did the day before San Bernardino, or Paris, or the Twin Towers.
