Islamic Billboard campaign in Orlando aims to remove misconceptions about Islam

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.

Thursday 03 Dec 2015 - 10:56 Makkah mean time-21-2-1437 Orlando, Florida (IINA) - American Muslim citizens in the Orlando area have turned to towering billboards to try to dispel what they see as widespread misconceptions about their faith and culture, The News & Observer reported. A new Interstate 4 signage campaign, launched by a Longwood group in partnership with a national organization, aims to combat myths about Islam by spreading messages of peace and inviting questions from those unfamiliar with its precepts. "Muhammad always taught love, not hate; peace, not violence," one message states. Chairman of the American Muslim Community Centers of Longwood (AMCC) Atif Fareed said his group sorted through about 30 messages and chose six that captured what members wanted to express. "The message is that Muslim Americans are your neighbors. They're your doctors. They work in the community. They pay taxes. They are part and parcel of American society," Fareed said. The signage campaign has been in the works for some time and was not in response to the terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in Paris last month. Mosques and Muslim Americans have become targets of vandalism, threats and hateful messages in the wake of the attacks. Fareed said some local Muslim Americans have experienced some ugly backlash. But he says anti-Muslim sentiment isn't widespread in the Orlando community. "That's the 1 percent of ugliness that's everywhere in the world," he said, adding that local Muslims have also "had an incredible amount of good people reach out to us." During the next month, drivers will see eight billboards in the Orlando area and two near Daytona Beach as part of the outreach by AMCC and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). Similar signage campaigns have come to major cities throughout the U.S., including Boston, New York City, Denver, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. The AMCC is paying for the billboards with a budget of about $10,000 raised to spread positive messages about American Muslims. Some of the billboards going up around Orlando pose questions. Others deliver short statements about the faith. "Muhammad believed in peace, social justice, women's rights," one states. Jim Coffin, executive director of the Interfaith Council of Central Florida, said the interplay between gender and religion is debated across a variety of faiths, including Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. Critics of a faith's practices should recognize that they're coming with an outsider's perspective, he added. SM/IINA