I heard this story a while back… of a smart bunch of university students in one of the Universities in the United States who were part of the Muslim Student Association.

Now they understood that ignorance was the biggest enemy and that most of the people who where showing hostility toward the Muslim students at the university where just ignorant of the Religion of Islam, or worse… they believed what the media was saying.

Now I don’t know if this was after 9/11 or not but it was after a wave of hostility toward Muslims had washed over the US… so what they did was that they printed some T-Shirts out that said something along the lines of … Stop me if you want to know more about islam.

They gave the t-shirts only to those members of the MSA who had a good amount of knowledge in the Deen and they set them free.

This method was immensely successful, so much so that those students where getting stopped so often that they were missing classes and going late to others. So they thought of something else. They figured the T-shirts where a good way to attract someone’s attention… but then if they student was late for class he would give the person asking the question a small business card that had a number that they could call to get their answers about islam…

That solved the problem and the Islamic Information Hotline was a huge success. I pray that Allah accept this student’s actions and that hopefully by telling their story I can inspire others to setup a program just like theirs. Ameen.

October 4, 2010