NEICC INTRAFAITH DIALOGUE WORKSHOP PROGRAM

NEICC volunteers met on September 29th, Saturday at TCC Wayne. Besides their own presentations there were two guest presentations. The program started at 10:30 with breakfast sponsored by Unsal LLC. Lunch was sponsored by Tughra Books/The Fountain Magazine. We thank our sponsors.

Volunteers were age-diverse, some were as young as Edep Academy students (8 graders) to Veterans of volunteers who has been in US since 1980s. First guest was Imam Muhammad Ibrahim who is Chaplain at Bergen County Sheriff’s office, President of Islamic Chaplaincy of NJ, and Resident Scholar at Al Minhal Academy in Sewell, NJ and founder of BeMercy.org, among other titles. While he was telling his life story in short, we learned that he started leading tarawih as early as age of 9. Which was an inspiration to our young ones. The main theme of his talk was the proverb which has the following abridged meaning: ”A society and a community shall grow mighty and great, when its members like you and me shall grow trees, knowing very well that we will never ever see them flourish no grow, however all the while we would have a deep conviction in our hearts that one day a child from the progeny of this nation will play in the shade of that tree, and that is sufficient for our motivation”. He left the land of Majesty because Muslims there were very sectarian. And because of this and indoctrination without reasoning, He said lots of young Muslims hate Islam nowadays. This should be a lesson for us. He continued his talk with Ayahs and hadiths mentioning young ones. So they are the ones who will bring change and improvement not the ones with gray hair. So among lots of proverbs and quotes from the wise this was the most important Imam Muhammad said, and should be the take of the day: “ Aspire to inspire before you expire!” The second party of guests was Annette Rotter and Cigdem Dogan from sisterhood of Salaam Shalom (www.sosspeace.org ) . They told that each of the sist erhoods chapters are made of equal number of Muslim and Jewish ladies. They told some of the good projects they were doing, including fund raisings for the needy refugees in Greece. And finally, they asked our volunteers to apply due to the diversity they need in Muslim sisters. There were very few Turkish sisters in their chapters. Program ended at 4 pm with planning of next meeting.