Muslim Student Groups Turn to Jewish Organizations for Inspiration
Cash-strapped Muslim student groups learning about fundraising from Hillel.
Aug. 8, 2007 — -- An interesting alliance has budded on two Michigan college campuses: Muslim student organizations, cash-strapped and unable to finance their religious activities, have turned to the world's largest Jewish campus organization for help.
Muslim student associations generally do not have the money to pay for their own places of worship, often leaving them dependent on their universities and at the mercy of advocates for a strict separation of church and state.
This became national news recently when two public Michigan universities — the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Eastern Michigan University — decided to install footbaths in a few bathrooms for use by Muslim students before prayer, drawing fire from bloggers and advocates who said tax dollars were going to fund religious activity.
Seeking better organization and fundraising methods, Muslim groups in Michigan have informally begun to turn to Hillel, the global Jewish organization with a $66 million budget, as a prototype.
For these groups, Hillel may represent the ideal: It owns houses of worship near campuses across the country, and by funding itself privately it sidesteps many of the church-state controversies Muslim groups face today.
At Dearborn, which recently announced it would install two footbaths at a cost of $25,000, the Muslim student organization runs on a shoe-string budget of about $3,000 to $5,000, and operates out of a small cubicle it gets as a student group, according to Farhan Latif, its campus adviser who also served as president three years ago.
He said the footbath controversy is fundamentally one of finances: "It's more of a funding issue that needs to be addressed," he said. "This is not a religious accommodation."
But without the money to fund the footbaths, much less private property to put them in, the group depends on the university for that funding.
To try to change this, Latif said he turned to Hillel. Impressed by its organization and structure, he researched the group's organization and read its literature, learning a number of helpful best practices that could be applied across the MSA.
