Muslim Inaugural Fete Looks to a New Era
Roll Call Staff
Kenny Cather stood out at the Muslim Inaugural Celebration on Monday night. Tall and blond-haired, he was the first to admit he looked a little out of the ordinary at such a gathering. But that didn’t matter to him. This wasn’t the first time he had been a minority.
Cather spent several months last year in Youngstown, Ohio, canvassing for Barack Obama’s campaign. The Rust Belt city has a large black population and is plagued by high crime and unemployment, he said, and people didn’t welcome him with open arms when he first knocked on their doors. Once they found out he was stumping for Obama, though, it was a different story.
“I got hugged. I got invited to dinner,” he said. “One woman said to me, ‘I never thought I’d see a day when a white man was campaigning for a black man to be president,’ and she had tears in her eyes when she said it.”
The Obama love was flowing so freely in Youngstown that local gang members even escorted Cather door to door to make sure he was safe, once they found out why he was in the area.
But his dedication to Obama’s candidacy wasn’t the only thing Cather brought to urban Ohio. After converting to Islam from Christianity in 2004, Cather said he became “more aware of the prejudices against Muslims.” In Youngstown, he broke through stereotypes by showing people he was a white man who not only supported a black candidate for president, but was Muslim as well.
“I would be talking to people and it’s like, ‘Oh, those crazy Muslims live over there,’” he said. “Well, no, they live here, too. You just never see them, never talk to them.”
So it was doubly sweet for Cather to be gathered Monday at the Thurgood Marshall Center on 12th Street Northwest for the Muslim Inauguration Celebration. For Cather, it was an opportunity to welcome Obama’s impending inauguration as well as what many see as the dawning of a new era for the Muslim community.
Obama’s election has “opened the dialogue a lot already,” Cather said. “It’s humanizing Muslims.”
Cather wasn’t the only one struck by the moment. The campaign volunteers, imams and even Congressmen gathered at the celebration spoke of the hope Obama’s victory had given them, that rather than being a marginalized group, they would be equal in American politics and society.
“Let tomorrow be the change that includes our community in the greatest of ways, inshallah,” said Imam James Yee, a former U.S. Army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, during opening program remarks.
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) — who was introduced by fellow Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) as “the pride of Islam and the pride of the United States Congress” — paid tribute to the historic nature of the event but also encouraged people to act for peace on their own accord, not to “look to a president to inspire you to make change in the world.”
He’d likely be making a similar statement even if Obama had not been elected.
“I hope there would be this event regardless of who is president,” he said in an interview before the celebration. “The idea is that no matter who is in the White House, all communities need to be active and engaged in this government.”
Holding events such as this one and being involved politically “is just consistent with the American idea that we should have active citizenry,” Ellison said.
Guests mingled throughout the Thurgood Marshall Center, chatting over a buffet dinner that included chicken, rice and pasta, and listening to live music and poetry between guest speakers such as Imam Dawud Walid and Dr. Ingrid Mattson, the first female president of the Islamic Society of North America.
The party was hosted by the Muslim Social Network, the Washington Academic Leadership Institute and the Congressional Muslim Staff Association.
“People have a feeling that there’s something more to this presidency. People really want to believe in this president,” CMSA President Assad Akhter said. “It has a lot to do with who he is and the campaign he ran. He involved different groups, and they feel they had a part in this.”
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