We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders by Linda Sarsour

Author:Linda Sarsour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

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The real struggle began when we lobbied the New York City Department of Education to formally recognize Islam’s two holiest days by closing school on those days, in the same way that schools were closed on Christian and Jewish holidays. We quickly learned that New York City schools were closed on those days not because of the number of Christian and Jewish students in the public school system, but because of the number of Christian and Jewish teachers. Rather than being worried about students missing classes, the Department was concerned about having to find substitute teachers on those days when Christian or Jewish teachers stayed home. Ultimately, officials had decided that it would be more cost-effective to simply close school on those days, rather than go through the headache of hiring and paying substitute teachers.

Since very few of the city’s teachers were Muslim, it became clear that our campaign would have to be based on the number of public school students who identified as Muslim. The problem was that city officials held the impression that most Muslim children attended Islamic schools and were not under their jurisdiction. In fact, 95 percent of Muslim children in New York City attended public school, and one of every eight students was Muslim.1 In other words, roughly 13 percent of the New York City public school population observed the Islamic faith.

Education officials then raised another concern: the dates of our Muslim high holy days were generally based on moon sightings. Indeed, many imams didn’t announce when the Eid holiday would fall until a few days beforehand, based on the report of some man in Saudi Arabia who climbed on top of a building and looked at the moon. “Our academic calendar is set a year in advance,” one official told us. “We can’t wait till the last minute to tell our teachers and students, ‘Oh, don’t come to school on Tuesday, because it’s an Eid holiday.’ That’s just not going to work.”

Our solution was to hire an astronomer to calculate twenty years’ worth of dates for Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr, so that the Department of Education wouldn’t be tasked with having to figure that out. We did not foresee that our decision to scientifically determine future Eid dates would lead to tension within our own community. It took some persuasion to get imams and Islamic scholars to sign off on the idea of setting the dates based on astronomy calculations and not on real-time observation of the moon’s phases. We explained how critical it was that we present a united front, and that without the help of an astronomer, Muslim school holidays would never be adopted.

Simultaneously, we were working to expand our coalition to include non-Muslims who supported religious freedom. Faiza Ali and Aliya Latif, as representatives of CAIR, had settled on three words to define the campaign: recognition, inclusion, and respect. They chose those words because their promise was universal—every community wanted to be recognized, included, and respected. Based on

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