Madison Avenue, New York, NY
Posted on 03/29/2017 4:33:43 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In hiring Kaiser Aslam as a full-time Muslim chaplain for the community, Rutgers became the first public University to offer this type of spiritual guidance to Muslim students. Aslam’s position provides a combination of advising and counseling, and his services are open to all students.
Immediately after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Kaiser Aslam said he was mortified about the social implications of praying in public at an airport. Now, he is worried about the legal ramifications of simply boarding a flight.
As Rutgers’ first full-time Muslim chaplain, Aslam is tasked with providing spiritual guidance to thousands of Muslim students on campus.
Although he acknowledged that it is a “scary time” for many Muslim-Americans nation-wide, Aslam said his new position requires him to distinguish between irrational and rational fears for the sake of the students he now serves.
“If there is going to be a place in which Muslim students can feel at home without being vilified, without feeling pressured to defend their Muslim identity, it would be on campus,” Aslam said.
Karen Smith, a University spokesperson, said there are an estimated 5,000 Muslim students on the three Rutgers campuses, including about 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students at Rutgers—New Brunswick.
“It’s almost like this weird paradoxical thing because it is so late in the game,” Aslam said. “But then on the flip side, we are the first ones in the country to have a full-time Muslim chaplain at a public university.”
He said his primary responsibilities include counseling students, advising student Muslim organizations, offering guidance to University faculty and staff on Muslim topics, partnering with the Rutgers and New Brunswick police departments to discuss incidents of anti-Muslim bias and acting as the University’s chief Muslim liaison with outside groups.
Aslam noted that over the last decade, the University’s Muslim community has found itself embroiled in a number situations where having an established chaplaincy would have been beneficial.
These include rifts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims students, a 2012 Associated Press report that found that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had conducted anti-terrorism surveillance on various Muslim student groups at Rutgers and other college campuses in the Northeast, tensions with the Jewish campus organization Rutgers Hillel and protests against the University’s decision to invite former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to serve as the commencement speaker in 2014.
Right after his arrival at Rutgers in August of 2016, Aslam said he reached out to Muslim alumni who were in school when the monitoring by the NYPD was revealed to gauge how they fared during that period without a Muslim chaplain. There was a volunteer and part-time Muslim chaplain back then, but he was based in Newark, New Jersey, and only came to New Brunswick once a month.
“All they described was that they were super confused as to what to do,” he said. “They didn’t know who to talk to. They didn’t know whether they should go to the (University) administration.”
Despite not being present for those situations, Aslam has had to deal with multiple events and issues that have alarmed the University’s Muslim community during his short tenure as chaplain.
After the presidential election last November, Aslam said many concerned Muslim students found support in the study circle he hosts every week. He called some students who were afraid to leave their residence halls to try to reassure them.
“It’s scary when you feel like you as a group are being targeted,” he said. “But, for some students, this is also a time to become closer to the community.”
When President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order barring immigration from seven predominately Muslim nations on Jan. 27, Aslam’s office — which is part of the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University (CILRU) — brought some immigration attorneys to offer legal advice to students planning to travel abroad.
In February, Aslam also had to respond to an incident in which a flyer by a white supremacy group that said “Imagine a Muslim-Free America,” was posted on the wall of the Paul Robeson Cultural Center, which is home to a Muslim prayer space.
Aslam said his office will tackle these issues and challenge today’s political discourse around Muslim people by making its services accessible to students, having more direct communication with the University’s administration and by cultivating a dialogue with other faith groups. He said he is already meeting with heads of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish chaplaincies at Rutgers to discuss interfaith initiatives once a month.
Hamna Qureshi, a School of Environmental and Biological Sciences senior and a member of Rutgers’ Muslim community, believes the chaplain’s arrival comes at a very opportune moment. She said the marginalization of Muslim Americans has become more salient in recent times.
“There’s been support on campus for Muslims, but having a Muslim chaplain would bring that to the next level,” she said.
Because he has had to spend a considerable amount of time on campus as he establishes the young chaplaincy he hopes one day will serve as a blueprint for future projects at other universities, Aslam has brought his 9-month-old daughter to Rutgers on various occasions to make sure he spends enough time with her.
“The students are telling me that she is not my baby, that she is now the University’s baby,” he said.
The will rue the day they instituted this.
Madison Avenue, New York, NY
Any thing for attention.
They should try using academic excellence for attention. Bunch of idiots.
We are f’ed!!! How come they can congregate out in the open throw themselves on the ground stop traffic without even a permit and get away with it? If Christians were to get together and get on their knees and pray during rush hour I guarantee you the police would be out in force dragging their butts to jail! This is getting really scary and very upsetting! When I see them praying out in the open like that it is them giving us the middle finger in our faces and saying we’re here to stay and conquer whether you like it or not and there ain’t chit you can do about it!
Rutgers isn’t known for much in the way of legitimate scholarship, so there’s this.
Butts up for allah.
Translation: Rotgutgers is officially on the way down.
As with most other schools, the admin group is competely without balls.
Or brains.
Cancerous cells metastasizing across our country, infecting all segments of our society.
We just have to accept that Islam is a done deal in America.
There is nothing we can do about these vicious monsters.
Per usual, islams showing their anuses to normal people. Deplorable and disgusting filth that is islam.
“Cancerous cells metastasizing across our country, infecting all segments of our society.”
By far the most apt analogy. I have viewed them precisely that way for years.
Just wondering: apparently, Rutgers - a public university - now has paid chaplains for at least four faiths. Wouldn’t the ACLU object to that? Am I missing something?
So much for Jersey.
Ask the mooslims if they will submit to the US Constitution and condemn the pedophile Moohamhed. If they say no, ship these mooslim invaders out of the US.
I just have to say there is little reason for a public school to hire and fire chaplains. Its an area they should support but not control. If they can’t even have a cross on campus how can they hire a priest.
Two decades after the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton University) was established in 1746 by the New Light Presbyterians, ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, seeking autonomy in ecclesiastical affairs in the American colonies, sought to establish a college to train those who wanted to become ministers within the church.[21][22] Through several years of effort by the Rev. Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1691–1747) and Rev. Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh (1736–1790), later the college's first president, Queen's College received its charter on November 10, 1766 from New Jersey's last Royal Governor, William Franklin (1730–1813), the illegitimate son of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.[21] The original charter established the college under the corporate name the trustees of Queen's College, in New-Jersey, named in honor of King George III's Queen consort, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744–1818), and created both the college and the Queen's College Grammar School, intended to be a preparatory school affiliated and governed by the college.[22] The Grammar School, today the private Rutgers Preparatory School, was a part of the college community until 1959.[22][23] New Brunswick was chosen as the location over Hackensack because the New Brunswick Dutch had the support of the Anglican population, making the royal charter easier to obtain.
The original purpose of Queen's College was to "educate the youth in language, liberal, the divinity, and useful arts and sciences" and for the training of future ministers for the Dutch Reformed Church[22][23][24] The college admitted its first students in 1771—a single sophomore and a handful of first-year students taught by a lone instructor—and granted its first degree in 1774, to Matthew Leydt.[22][23] Despite the religious nature of the early college, the first classes were held at a tavern called the Sign of the Red Lion.[25] When the Revolutionary War broke out and taverns were suspected by the British as being hotbeds of rebel activity, the college abandoned the tavern and held classes in private homes.[22][23]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutgers_University
What about separation of church and state?
Islam is a war plan.
I know there is nothing in the constitution about separation of church and state, just throwing this back in the face of leftists. But it does seem to be leftist government establishment of an official religion.
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