This past Sunday, Oct. 28, was the most important feast on the Muslim calendar, Eid al-Adha festival, the Feast of Sacrifice. By commemorating this event, Muslims are following the footsteps of prophet Ibrahim, who showed willingness to obey Allah (God) in everything, even if he was to slaughter his own beloved son.
What a great privilege it is to feed and help the needy and make them all equally happy and joyful on this day! The Ole Miss Muslim Students Association (MSA) hosted the festival and invited everyone in Oxford to eat, play games and enjoy each other’s presence in the Grove Sunday afternoon.
I got the chance to join the Eid al-Adha festival in the Grove; this was my first time participating in a Muslim activity. They provided delicious food for everyone and an inflatable amusement park for kids. I really enjoyed it. I chatted with a lot of people, had fun with a lot of cute kids and ate delicious BBQ chicken legs, wings, hotdogs and traditional Muslim desserts, such as basbousa.
However, something happened two days before the event. The MSA students put up their posters on the bulletin board in the Student Union on Friday morning. Several hours later, they found one of their posters torn into pieces. This really hurt Muslim students’ hearts. The president of MSA collected the poster pieces. They made a lot of effort to host this event. They were looking for donations and had been preparing this event for a long time.
“We want people to know that we are the same, we live the same life as you, we are the same human beings,” Adham Hagag, the president of MSA, said. “We don’t want to put religious things in it, we just want everybody to have fun together.”
If the whole world had only one race, one skin color, belonged to one ethic group, spoke only one language shared the same culture, believed in the same religion and lived in the same country … then would the world not have war? Would there no longer be any discrimination? Would there be no religious conflicts?
If that day really comes, that would be the end of the world, of human beings, of human society. How does human society move forward? Human society cannot develop without the diversity of its culture and ideas. No diversity, no conflict, no development. We are here because we are different. We are different, so we have different ideas. Those different ideas push human society to move forward.
Copernicus doubted the temporal authority, Aristotle’s geocentrism theory, with his heliocentrism theory. He was the first modern European scientist to propose that Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. The Copernican model was contrary to common sense of the time and contradicted the Bible. Thus, he was put to death by the king. From a modern point of view, although the heliocentrism theory was also not correct, it was a big step for human society, which is why Copernicus is regarded as the father of modern astronomy.
What makes the United States such a rapidly developing country? The answer could be any number of things, but its diversity is an important part. The United States is a multi-ethnic country — Latino, Asian, Muslim, Black etc. There are lots of immigrants with their own cultures, own beliefs and own languages that come from almost everywhere in the world. This makes the United States outstanding. Although there are conflicts among different cultures, they still seek common ground while reserving their differences in order to live together. These conflicts push the society of the United States to move forward in all aspects.
Therefore, we should respect difference and diversity. Without diversity, any species would become extinct, would die out. The human species is not excluded.
We cannot live without diversity.
Wanfei Wu is a second-year graduate integrated marketing communcations student from Yunnan Province, China. Follow her on Twitter @WanfeiWu.
