Muslims Wake Up and Vote

Zen S. Bhatia

If the news is correct, about six million Muslims live in this country and represent almost all the 53 Muslim nations of the world. Also, more than one million Muslims are eligible to vote in the coming national and state elections. Needless to say, the elected candidates will become our future political, economic, religious and social decision makers. If working for a living is important, voting for the right candidate is more important. Thus, we have to act responsibly while casting our votes. We should frame certain guidelines for fulfilling this responsibility.

• We must get involved in the political process and attend political meetings. We should ask reasonable and simple questions during these meetings, talk attentively with due politeness with anyone who visits our homes or makes calls to get our votes. For local elections, our questions should be limited to local issues; for the state elections, we should ask questions pertaining to the state welfare programs and policies We should not be afraid of asking questions or making complains relating to our religion or race. We should make the candidate aware of our concerns so that he/she may do his/her best to resolve our problems in the coming years.

• As far as the national election is concerned, we should ask the prospective candidate if he/she is going to show respect to our religious feelings and religion, Islam, as he/she does to his/her own religion and other religions. As Muslims we would like to resolve our social and religious problems within our constitutional rights and wish that political problems of Muslim nations and groups, including Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran, Kurds and others are resolved in a just, fair and unbiased manner, based on international principles. It is simply not right to brand Muslim nations as supporters of terrorism and all Muslims as terrorists. We should ask why the American foreign policy is not balanced but always tilted towards Israel at the cost of the Arabs and the Muslims. We should also wear our traditional dress during voting to show our numbers and to present ourselves as a highly civilized segment of the US population.

• It would be much better if we take uniformly similar decisions paying due heed to the views of the Muslim State and National Political Action Committees which are trying to guide us as to who are the best candidates to vote for. It would be worthwhile to pool our donations and make them available to the Muslim Political Action Committees rather than sending them directly to the candidates. Dr. Maher Hathout and brother Salani al-Marayati are doing excellent work for our community in this regard and they deserve our fullest cooperation and help.