These kinds of individuals and organisations need to be exposed.
Dalia Mogahed had the audacity to post a clip during the last day of Ramadan to ask the Muslims to send money to her organization, called the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU); telling us that their mission is to safeguard the truth, and to actively counter misinformation about Islam. She said that a diabolical network of powerful entities with a budget of $200 million is behind the calculated misrepresentation of Muslims in order to advance discriminatory policies and promote war.
So, I looked at ISPU’s website to see what they do.
Aside from gibberish about providing “strategic visioning”, they claim to produce an annual survey analyzing the views of and about Muslims and Islam in America, they host debates and lectures, and they publish a bibliography of books dealing with Muslims in the US.
Now, let’s break this down.
The survey they produce is actually carried out by another organization, the debates and lectures take place in conferences arranged and sponsored by other Muslim groups, and the bibliography is a list of other people’s books which anyone could search for on Google or Amazon. Besides these activities, Dalia Mogahed and a few others write articles that occasionally get published, and they sometimes appear on television.
So, please tell me for what exactly they need funding?
The website has a list of “experts” associated with ISPU, sometimes with no specified area of expertise mentioned, and what precisely these people do is unclear. Apparently, it is all about promoting a positive narrative about Muslims and Islam in America; that is an important sounding, but conveniently vague mission. Thousands of Muslims do that every day, millions in fact; just through their interactions, their behaviour, and their own personal social media activity, blogs, and submissions to print and online media; and no one pays them for that. Why should we pay Dalia and her organisation?
Why should their own self-importance be subsidised? So they can think of themselves as great thinkers and leaders for writing Op-ed pieces?
We are a very supportive community, and any hustler claiming to serve the Ummah knows they will get a certain level of automatic, unquestioning support. Islamophobia has created another niche for these types; and I am sick of it.
I have been around a while, interacting with Muslim organisations and so forth, for the better part of 20 years; I was around when a lot of these groups were just starting out, and I have seen individuals move from one “Islamic” project to another, basically because they do not want to get real jobs or are not qualified for real jobs, and they know the Muslims will just be happy with anyone who claims to be doing “Islamic work”. But they are grifters, parasites, primarily interested in their own financial interests; with few exceptions.
If any of them did so much as lay one brick on top of another in the construction of a masjid, it would be far better than what they are doing.
So, Dalia, and the rest of you, be like the rest of us: serve Islam, tell the truth, spread knowledge, correct misconceptions, give advice; and don’t ask us to pay you for it.