“Well, I’m actually an angel sent by God, and I’ll meet you on Judgement Day.”
That’s from someone who came to the Dawah table my friend Mouctar and I set up on campus. This was our last dawah day of the school year, and it was by far the most memorable. This was a Christian man on a bike who retorted with that after we dealt with most of his arguments, who needed to make a getaway right after. I overheard him after I was done talking to a former Navy Lieutenant Commander-turned-lizard people truther who revealed to me that the Nazis built lizard statues in Norway that reveal the truth about the world. College campuses are amazing.
I set up our dawah early in my freshman year. I joined a vacant spot on our MSA Board and got quick to work on establishing a Dawah presence on campus. I still remember the first day I went out there. I had a folding table, a box of Qur’ans that my Imam from back home gave me, and a few pamphlets lying around my house from the previous year’s ICNA convention. There was no tablecloth, no signs. Just me, a cheap table, and some literature. It was a great first trial run. I think I talked to maybe 7 people in the hour I was there, and I tried to stick to the famous “GORAP” method taught by iERA.
I wanted to start the dawah on our campus because college campuses are an untapped goldmine for reaching out to non-Muslims. Most college kids know little to nothing about Islam, and many are at an age where they are searching for who they are and what they want to do with their lives. It was this same state of youthful flux that led me to explore Islam myself. I grew up in a non-practicing Christian household and when I was around 14 years old and began searching for meaning in life and moral clarity. It was during this time that I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and was blown away by his story of coming back from the lowest of the low, transforming his life through Islam, and the lives of so many others even today. But it was one of the final chapters, “Mecca”, that stood out to me most. Malcolm describes the Muslims he saw during hajj:
“During the past seven days of this holy pilgrimage, while undergoing the rituals of the hajj [pilgrimage], I have eaten from the same plate, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God—not only with some of this earth’s most powerful kings, cabinet members, potentates and other forms of political and religious rulers —but also with fellow‐Muslims whose skin was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, and whose hair was the blondest of blond—yet it was the first time in my life that I didn’t see them as ‘white’ men. I could look in their faces and see that they didn’t regard themselves as ‘white.’
Their belief in the Oneness of God (Allah) had removed the ‘white’ from their minds, which automatically changed their attitude and behavior toward people of other colors. Their belief in the Oneness of God has made them so different from American whites, their outer physical characteristics played no part at all in my mind during all my close associations with them.”
Reading this description moved me. Not only because it represented a massive moment of moral maturity and the separation of Malcolm from his old Nation of Islam views, but because it illuminated to me something that I wasn’t even sure could exist: a white Muslim. Malcolm’s description of the Muslims he saw matched mine so well, that it almost felt like he was describing me. I had always thought of Islam as this far-off, alien, oriental religion for Arabs and brown people, but reading Malcolm’s description opened a possibility that I would have never considered: I could be Muslim.
When I did become Muslim, the impact it made on my life was immense. I felt true gratitude for what I had, and I finally had a coherent moral framework that I had been looking for. But most importantly, Islam gave me a sense of grounding because now my life has an ultimate goal: to please the one who created me.
I mention my story because, while everybody is unique, much of what I sought from Islam are concerns that many young people share, especially on college campuses. The post-9/11 era is ending, and the negative sentiments that “Muslims are crazy terrorists,” are not as common in my generation. Additionally, the loss of general religiosity, disenchantment with the world, and the rise of a sense of meaninglessness are increasing exponentially. Yusuf Ponders from Sapience Institute recently wrote an excellent book on this subject titled “Islam & Nihilism: My Poison & My Cure”. In it, he explores (in a more academic, philosophical sense) the rise of nihilism in the West and how we got to this point, while later elaborating on Islam’s role in curbing it.
It is against this backdrop that I feel that increasing our dawah efforts to non-Muslim college students and young people more generally is both needed and has the potential for great success. People are looking for a higher purpose in this life and a way to make sense of the chaos of the world, especially recently, and Islam provides that closure and grounding that we so desperately need. Recognizing this challenge, I’ve started catering much more of my dawah towards the pragmatic truth of Islam. We are more often asked the question “How does faith impact your life?” in its various forms than asked anything about terrorism, violence, or the age of Aisha. I believe that a part of this is because people, psychologically, look for reasons to want to do something, and then come up with rationalizations for why it’s true. It’s for this reason that when I center my arguments around easy-to-grasp points about Islam making a person better, they often come away much more interested in learning more compared to people to whom I have just given some abstract argument about a controversial issue. My friends who are the most interested in Islam are attracted to its strict adherence to traditional values, its strong grounding, and its ability to aid people in a way that other faiths don’t seem to do. While the philosophical arguments commonly used in dawah are useful for people who want to engage in higher-level discussions about the existence of God, morality, etc. (and I’ve certainly had some awesome conversations in this regard), the average young person who just wants to learn about Islam from scratch probably won’t benefit much from that. This is also where answering the question of the purpose of life holistically is extremely important. I always emphasize that while the purpose of life is, as Muslims, to worship God, worship is a holistic concept that can incorporate any action so long as the intention is to please the Creator and that this can even include mundane things such as studying or eating. It’s in this way that dawah almost becomes like sales –– I explain why Islam makes sense, but more importantly in the eyes of others, what that does for the person. After all, many things are true, but why does it matter that I believe and follow these ideas?
Campus Dawah is extremely simple to set up. I have been doing it with a table at the same location for over a year now, and while we’ve upgraded from my original setup to a custom tablecloth, brochure holders, and a whiteboard, there’s still not much to it. One of the unique opportunities for it is that when people do end up taking shahada, which, in our case, has been 2, one student, one outsider, they already have a community to become a part of on campus. This is in stark contrast to many others who embrace Islam on their own, where it can be extremely difficult to find other Muslims around you when it’s not a part of your everyday life. This was a problem I dealt with when I first accepted Islam. There were no practicing Muslims in my high school, so I had to find my own community to be a part of, which, after a year of being Muslim, I finally did.
All in all, college campuses are a largely untapped gold mine for dawah, and if you are a college student reading this, I urge you to start the initiative, even if it’s just a few Qur’ans and an old table. If you do take it up, I urge you to find a friend to do it with you. You’ll earn the reward together and will motivate each other on days when you don’t feel like going out there. My dawah partner and I have become extremely close friends, and our energy feeds off each other to make our dawah much more effective (seriously, I can’t emphasize this point enough, get a friend). It’ll take time to grow, but if you’re consistent in your efforts, it will be incredibly beneficial and full of barakah.
The gold is out there, all you have to do is mine it!
David Williamson is the Founder and lead Narrator at AudioIlm, an Islamic audiobook production company. Check out his website audioilm.com. If you have any questions about setting up dawah at your school, or about anything else, email him at [email protected]