Is awareness of religious and ethnic diversity trickling down to a broader segment of American society?
I think the trickle down effect was pretty rapid after September 11. People who had been relatively unaware of all the Muslims and mosques in their neighborhoods now became aware of them, wondered whether they were the very mosques where the terrorist hijackers had prayed and mingled in the community. But the interesting thing is that in those days right after September 11, mosques all over America had open houses. There was a call out to open the doors of the mosque and invite neighbors to come in. It happened in my neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And on a Sunday afternoon they had something like 700 people show up. And similarly, I was reading a story from the Austin American-Statesman in Texas. A woman at that mosque-someone who had never been to a mosque before-was interviewed by the paper and said “The time of not getting to know each other is over.” Now I think that is a really profound statement that we can carry around as a slogan for the times. We can’t afford the le
