Muslims in the West should protest in disciplined formation

You know, with regards to, protests in the West, in The United States, The UK, Europe, anywhere else, it occurs to me that, you know, non Muslims can get up to things that we don't wanna be involved in sometimes. And sometimes maybe Muslims are not going to attend those protests or those rallies or those marches or those demonstrations precisely because they don't want to be involved in some of the things that the non Muslims might get up to or simply because they don't want to be, you know, bumping up against the opposite gender because these are always mixed crowds, know, very crowded and and dense groups of people. So it's very easy to sort of bump into people when you don't intend to. So there's there's some Muslims who have expressed a religious and ethical hesitation about attending those types of events. So I would say that on the masjid level, on the student association level, Islamic center level, you really should be organizing.

You should be organizing your community. You should be organizing your Jamah to where when an event is being held, you can send a Muslim contingent to that event and they can all be together at the event and they can coordinate with each other and organize what event what activities they want to be involved in, what activities they don't want to be involved in and the Muslims can all be together and you can to one extent or another sort of police the borders of your contingent at any rally or event or march or protest demonstration so that you can limit, restrict the extent to which there's going to be mixing between the genders. I talked about this a little bit before when I was talking about the unfortunate incident that happened with Omar Suleiman when he did that that march in, I think, in Texas about the illegal immigrants and the the treatment of of illegal immigrants. And he got himself involved in something that he didn't want to be involved in and it was because I think that he didn't take enough of a leadership position with the Muslim contingent that participated in that march.

So you should be, in my opinion, organizing your people, telling them where you're going to be, where you're going to meet, and what your rules are for engaging in those activities. And everyone should be together, and the Muslim contingent should be together at those rallies and at those marches. So anyone who's uncomfortable with participating in the general crowd and mixing with the general crowd will know that they can be safe with the Muslim contingent and that that Muslim contingent is gonna do their best to safeguard the Islamic protocols in terms of public gatherings and in terms of mixing of the genders. And also to make sure that the Muslims won't be involved in anything that offends our religion. And if you're an activist and you're an organizer and you're invited to participate in a rally or protest or march a demonstration and so on, if you're invited to do that, then you should also stipulate to those event organizers what your rules are and what the rules are for your community, you know, for for your contingent that will be joining that rally or that march or that protest and say this is these are the types of things that we can participate in and that we can cooperate with you over and these are the things that we cannot.

And we expect that our contingent who is participating in the rally will be unharassed and will be allowed and respected to remain within our group inside of that rally, inside of that march or protest or demonstration. You could have for example, if sisters come, sisters can be in the middle and they can be surrounded on all sides by the brothers, and potentially you can have even banners between you if you want to to to further separate that. And that way you can make sure that the sisters are not gonna be harassed and they're not gonna be bumping into people, and you can potentially do the same yourself. So, you know, take it seriously because they are they are, genuine concerns that people have, religious people, who don't want to transgress the boundaries of decency and respect, but who still wanna support the Palestinian cause and who still wanna participate. So organize disciplined contingent of Muslims to participate in those types of functions to make sure that our values and our principles are upheld.

Just a thought.