Muslims You Do Not Hear About
Please do not spit
Should Muslims Not Recite Vande Mataram ?
Do American Jews Suffer More Than American Muslims?
Whenever the U.S. media reports about Muslims - here or abroad - the sole focus is some bastard deed which is committed and representative of only .0001% of Muslims. But constitutes 99.9% of reporting on Muslims.
Muslims are either terrorists, wife-beaters, fanatics or anti-American zealots plotting on foreign soil or in domestic cells to attack innocent Americans and impose Shari'a law. And if not that they are insensitive and Islamic supremacists building a Bin Ladin shrine on "hollow ground".
And even when discussing Muslims the U.S. media rarely invites Muslims to speak on their behalf. Instead the press loves to write about Muslims and make attributing generalizations and statements on Muslims, but Muslims are infrequently allowed to define themselves and give voices to their lives. Is it any wonder many Americans have a false and wary one-dimensional image of Muslims? Is is any wonder that Muslims are de-humanized blobs for many Americas?
People rarely what it means to be a Muslims and an American-Muslim as well.
Here are some Muslims that U.S. media does not write about:
>A Bangladeshi taxi driver in New York City has gone out of his way to track down the person who left thousands of dollars in cash in the back of his cab.
Mukul Asadujjaman, a medical student, drove nearly 80km (50 miles) to an address he found with the money.
He left his phone number when he found no-one at home. The money belonged to an Italian grandmother visiting the US.
Mr Asadujjaman was offered a reward, but he turned it down saying that as a devout Muslim he could not accept it.
Felicia Lettieri, of Pompeii, Italy, and six relatives had taken two cabs on Christmas Eve, Newsday newspaper reported.
Mrs Lettieri, 72, left her handbag behind, with more than $21,000 of the group's travelling money, jewellery worth thousands more, and some of their passports.
Her sister, Francesca Lettieri, 79, of Long Island, said the honest driver had saved her family's vacation.
"We really love what he did," she said.
He's not alone:
In 2007, driver Osman Chowdhury returned a lost bag containing diamond rings worth $500,000 to the rightful owner.
And recently The Economist wrote about one of the most ingenious men in Silicon Valley:
Lastly, there are problems inside the Googleplex itself. The company has lost a number of stars, such as Omar Hamoui, the founder of AdMob, a mobile-advertising company that Google acquired last year
A Google star which the firm is worse off for losing.
And did you know that the CEO of the world's largest mutual fund, PIMCO, with $1.3trillion in assets and headquartered in California, is under the CEO and CIO management of an Egyptian Muslim, who previously headed the Harvard investment trust? Mohamed El-Erian.
Muslims in America are everything from cabbies going to Med school, to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to investors. These are the heart of the Muslim community.
