Berkley Center

Duaa S. Hijaz: My friend Bayan introduced me to the MSA. She was really sweet, and she told me, "Hey, why don't you join this club, the Muslim Student Association?" I was like, "We have that here? This is a Lutheran school. What are you talking about?" And she's like, "Well, there's a population of Muslims here, and we wanted to have a safe space and a community space, and we would really like you to join." So I did, and it was really fun. I helped out. I kind of took on responsibilities pretty quickly, and I participated in all club events, and she asked me to run for president. I ran for president, and, alhamdulillah, thank God I won.

So I held events. I held a fastathon. So we kind of celebrated Ramadan at a different time. So that's the month of fasting for us. It was in the summer, but I held an event in October for it to teach students about what Muslims do during that month of Ramadan, and I really liked that. Sadly, this spring, so my second semester, there was a huge shooting in New Zealand at Christchurch in a mosque and several hundred Muslims lost their lives. I was extremely heartbroken. I did not go to the mosque that Friday because I was scared. I didn't go to my Arabic school. I missed my lessons, and I didn't go to the mosque that weekend.

And I was asking around, what could we do to help out? A friend of mine was like, "Why don't you host an event on campus?" And I asked her, "Something like a vigil would help?" In 24 hours, I had called 50 people, rented a room for us. I made a flyer, sent it out. And what do you know? Two hundred people show up for a vigil in order to commemorate all those who lost their lives, all the victims who lost their lives, and it was really touching. I had the Northwest Indiana Times and the Chicago Tribune interview me, and it was really hard for me to keep my cool because that was the first, or second time that I had opened up about my faith to everybody on campus, to the community.

My father always talked about what was happening all over the world. He talked about Syria, he talked about Egypt, he talked about Palestine, he talked about Jordan, all these countries. And whenever something bad, misfortunate would happen to Muslims, he would be like, "These are your people. These are your brothers and sisters." And we always donated to the mosques whenever something bad happened, clothes, food, whatever we could. And we aren't very well off, but whenever we could scrape up, we would give.

So when I heard about New Zealand, there has been so much hate going on in the world, especially right now with the current state and politics, I just thought that that type of damage, that type of hatred, although it's continents away, it could be a ripple effect. And there are people I know around my area that aren't accepting of people who are different. So who's to say that it couldn't happen in Valparaiso, Indiana? Who's to say it couldn't happen in Chicago? And for me, I was just scared that it could happen the next day. I wasn't scared on campus because I had such good support, but I was scared that, I live by three mosques. That could happen to any of them.