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BY JULIAN CHENDER

In print | March 20, 2008

At the end of last year, members of the Muslim Students Association sat down with Dean for Multicultural Affairs Darryl Smaw to discuss how the year went for the Muslim students of Swarthmore. It had been a rough one. They felt marginalized, Humzah Soofi ’10 recounted, thanks in part to the Phoenix printing an advertisement that equated the crescent with the swastika.

The students wanted an advisor, someone to stand up for them and to help them navigate the difficult channels of Swarthmore’s bureaucracy. How about an Imam? After all, the other monotheistic groups - and only the monotheistic groups - had religious advisors. Dean Smaw supported the idea, and all agreed to pursue it further in the fall.

According to Dean Smaw, religious advisors exist at Swarthmore “to help maintain the religious traditions that many of the students bring to the campus and also to guide them in the questions and the answers, and in the programming.” An Imam in this capacity, it seemed, would fulfill MSA’s needs.

Currently there are three advisors on campus: Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. Though they receive the majority of their salaries from outside sources, the College does chip in. Furthermore, Swarthmore furnishes the religious advisors with offices, supplies and access to students. The school exchanges these carrots for control over “how religious groups should or should not act on campus,” requiring the religious advisors to meet regularly with the deans.

When MSA reconvened after summer break, the students voted unanimously against adding an Imam to the roster of religious advisors. They realized that they weren’t looking for spiritual guidance or clarification on religious doctrine, but someone to help them nurture the Muslim community and defend it against an irresponsible editorial board and grotesquely one-sided lecturers on the Middle East.

“The Phoenix ad had just been printed and Nonie Darwish spoke on campus. We just really felt like we needed support and someone who could stand up for us,” Ailya Vajid ‘09 explained. "We later realized that an Imam was not that person, and now we’ve finally come to see that we support one another and that we ourselves need to stand up for MSA."

This sense of community and personal responsibility pervades MSA and makes it a role model for religious groups on campus. The students refused the offer of an Imam because such a person would undermine this fundamental aspect of their group.

Religion can serve a central role in the lives of college students, who, having moved away from home, look to forge their own identities. For members of the MSA, questions such as “What does it mean to be Muslim in this world, at Swarthmore, at this age?” receive significant attention. For questions like these, there are as many answers as there are people asking.

In finding one’s own answers to such questions, discussion is invaluable. Members of MSA come together to talk about their experiences as Muslims and share their views on various issues concerning their religion. In this way, they explore these questions together, from many different angles. They feared that having an Imam, a religious figurehead, would take away from the community effort on which all college religious groups should base themselves.

MSA found the external help it needed in Muslim faculty. The students have received a lot of help from Assistant Professor of Religion Tariq al-Jamil, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Farha Ghannam and Professor of Engineering Faruq Siddiqui, who helps the students lead their weekly prayer meeting. Arabic Lecturer Yamine Mermer has become the group’s unofficial advisor. She leads the weekly Qur’anic Circle, which Arabic Lecturer Sawsan Abbadi hosts at her home.

With this network of faculty and the continued support of Dean Smaw, MSA has gotten the help it needed without sacrificing the integrity of the group. These faculty members nurture the students and provide logistical support, while the students themselves can stand up for the group.

This raises an interesting question: If MSA doesn’t need a religious advisor, then do the Catholics, Protestants and Jews? And if they do, then don’t the Hindus, Bahá‘ís and Pastafarians need religious advisors too? Also, how come other groups on campus don’t have advisors? I’d love to meet the Boy Meets Tractor comedy guru.

The college and its religious community benefit greatly from Protestant religious advisor Joyce Tompkin’s interfaith advising. She provides all religious groups with the nurturing and logistical support that MSA found in the Muslim faculty and Dean Smaw. Perhaps she could become Assistant Dean for Religious Affairs and work further on cultivating a strong interfaith community.

Julian is a junior. You can reach him at jchende1@swarthmore.edu.

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