Although Amna and Ashley both live in Staten Island, unless they bumped into each other at the Staten Island Mall, the probability of their meeting one another would have been extremely remote.
The rolling hills and attractive shoreline of Staten Island have long been the home of generations of mostly middle-class native New Yorkers, but within the last 20 years, groups of immigrants, including Albanian Muslims, have crossed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to make the community their home. As mosques have popped up next to churches and temples, neighborhoods have changed, and hate crime rates have been on the rise.
Amna attends the Miraj Islamic School and Ashley is a member of the Staten Island Teen Federation, a program of the Catholic Youth Organization. Their paths crossed when ICNY brought them together with other teens from the Teen Federation and the Miraj School to learn about each other’s religious traditions through a grant supported by the GHR Foundation. Not all the parents were happy about the teens mixing, as many were suspicious of the Muslim community and denied the reality that Muslim New Yorkers, too, had lost close friends and relatives on 9/11. Thanks to the students’ persistence, however – and eventually with the full support of their parents – the teens not only met to study together, but chose to work jointly on practical projects like sprucing up St. Joseph’s Church and the Miraj School and co-sponsoring a food drive for Project Hospitality, an interfaith program that feeds the hungry, shelters the homeless, and cares for people with HIV/AIDS.
Both the Church and the Mosque welcomed the students warmly. Imam Tahir Kukiqi, who serves as Imam of the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center and as an Islamic Studies Teacher at the Miraj Islamic School said that “just getting the youth together either in the Mosque or in the Church was a very good achievement. None of our students gave an inch from their religion, nor did the CYO students give an inch from their religion. What happened was that their faiths grew stronger.”
Another outcome has been that Amna and Ashley became good friends. And they’re not alone in having formed strong bonds. Both groups have experienced the reality that being Catholic or Muslim is no barrier to building friendships, and that what counts most is working on practical projects that also touch people’s minds and hearts.
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