Executive Director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Jaylani Hussein joined the Hamline community for a keynote speech on Islamophobia and the history of Islam in America on Friday Mar. 9. This speech was one of the various events held during Hamline’s Islamic awareness week.

Hussein holds a degree in community development and city planning from St. Cloud State and a political science degree from North Dakota State.

Hussein has also worked as the community liaison officer at Metro State University and as a planner for the Minnesota department of agriculture. He has presented on the Somali culture to diverse public and private organizations across the U.S. specializing in urban planning, community development and youth development.

Beginning his speech with a video presentation on recent research, Hussein showed a startling increase in America’s unfavorable attitude towards Muslims.

“In 2006 roughly 21 percent of Americans viewed Muslims as unfavorable,” Hussein said. “This number has been on the rise reaching as high as 63 percent in some surveys.”

Hussein then spoke about how these numbers are directly correlated with the media.

“The media plays a big role in America’s Islamophobia,” Hussein said, when the video ended. “This fear of Muslims has been founded on films, news reports and books that problematize Muslim subjects and emphasize Islam as violent, backward and oppressive.”

He also began sharing that today’s media airwaves are dominated by civil societies that are using a toxic mix of Islamophobia, racism and anti-immigrant xenophobic rhetoric in the hope of capturing seats of power.

Hussein also shared a report that exposed the funding sources behind groups that used sophisticated strategies to associate Muslims with violence and acts of terrorism in the media.

“This Islamophobia industry is committed to the systematic demonization of Islam while collapsing a diverse 1.4 billion people into a single undifferentiated threatening class,” Hussein said.

The speech moved from identifying the issue onto the pertinent and necessary question of how to address the fear that’s become inherent.

“How do we reverse the narrative? There is no straight forward answer,” Hussein said. “Although it is our responsibility to be open-minded. It is our responsibility to ask questions in hope to better understand one another.”

Nur Mood, Coordinator of Religious and Spiritual Life Programs at Hamline University sat down for a brief interview to share his thoughts on the keynote speaker Hussein’s speech.

“Jaylani is a great speaker,” Mood said. “In my opinion his speech has provided the Hamline community with a sense of awareness on the issues at hand. I can see both student and faculty benefiting from his speech.”

Bashir Imady, a political science student at Hamline University was eager to express his opinion on Hussein’s keynote speech.

“Wallahi, everything he said was important,” Imady said. “Hopefully one day we can move past all this hate.”