[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[January 10, 2000]
[Pages 18-20]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a Celebration Commemorating the End of Ramadan
January 10, 2000
Thank you very much. Eid Mubarak, and welcome to the White House.
Naimah Saleem, you did a fine job for a 14-
year-old--or a 24-year-old or a 44-year-old. I thought she was terrific.
Thank you very much; thank you. And Imam Hendi,
thank you so much for your words, your prayer, and for serving as the
first Muslim chaplain of my alma mater, Georgetown University.
Congratulations. We're glad to have you here. Thank you, sir.
I'd like to welcome others from the administration who've joined us:
our National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger; Assistant Secretary of State Harold Koh. We also have a White House Fellow here, Khalid Azim; and Dr. Islam Siddiqui, the
senior adviser to the Secretary of Agriculture and the highest ranking
Muslim in the Clinton administration. We thank him for being here. We
have a Muslim Army chaplain, Captain Muhammad. We thank him for being here, and the other Muslims
who work here in the White House--they are all particularly welcome--and
all the rest of you who have come here. Let me say welcome to you.
[Applause]
My friend Rasheed, thank you for
leading the applause there. I always try to have someone in the audience
there who is pumping the crowd at the right time. [Laughter]
Let me also say a special word of welcome to you from the First
Lady. Hillary has done this
celebration for the past several years; many of you have been here with
her. And she had to be out of the city today, and that's the only reason
she's not here, because this means so very much to her. And I want to
welcome you here on her behalf, as well.
Over the weekend, along with Muslims all over the world, you
celebrated the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The month of daily
fasting is not only a sacred duty; it is also a powerful teaching, and
in many ways a gift of
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Islam to the entire rest of the world, reminding not simply Muslims but
all people of our shared obligation to aid those who live with poverty
and suffering. It reminds us that we must work together to build a more
humane world.
I must say, it was, I thought, especially fitting that we celebrated
the Eid at the end of the first round of talks between the Syrians and
the Israelis. And I thought it was particularly moving that Imam read the passage from the Koran that said that Allah
created nations and tribes that we might know one another, not that we
might despise one another.
There's a wonderful passage in the Hebrew Torah which warns people
never to turn aside the stranger, for it is like turning aside the most
high God. And the Christian Bible says that people should love their
neighbor as themselves. But it's quite wonderful to say that Allah
created the nations and tribes that they might know one another better,
recognizing people have to organize their thoughts and categorize their
ideas, but that does not mean we should be divided one from another.
It has been a great blessing for me, being involved in these talks
these last few days, to see the impact of the month of Ramadan and the
Eid on the believers in the Syrian delegation who are here. It was quite
a moving thing. And I hope that your prayers will stay with them.
Let me say, also, that there is much that the world can learn from
Islam. It is now practiced by one of every four people on Earth.
Americans are learning more in our schools and universities. Indeed, I
remember that our daughter took a course on
Islamic history in high school and read large portions of the Koran, and
came home at night and educated her parents about it and later asked us
questions about it. And of course, there are now 6 million Muslims in
our Nation today. The number of mosques and Islamic centers, now at
1,200, continues to grow very rapidly.
Today, Muslim Americans are a cornerstone of our American community.
They enrich our political and cultural life; they provide leadership in
every field of human endeavor, from business to medicine to scholarship.
And I think it is important that the American people are beginning to
learn that Muslims trace their roots to all parts of the globe, not just
to the Middle East but also to Africa and to Asia and to the Balkans and
other parts of Europe. You share with all Americans common aspirations
for a better future, for greater opportunities for children, for the
importance of work and family and freedom to worship.
But like other groups past and present in America, Muslim Americans
also have faced from time to time--and continue to face, sadly, from
time to time--discrimination, intolerance, and, on occasion, even
violence. There are still too many Americans who know too little about
Islam. Too often, stereotypes fill the vacuum ignorance creates. That
kind of bigotry is wrong, has no place in American society. There is no
place for intolerance against people of any faith--against Muslims or
Jews or Christians or Buddhists or Baha'i or any other religious group--
or ethnic or racial group.
If America wishes to be a force for peace and reconciliation across
religious and ethnic divides from the Middle East to Northern Ireland to
the Balkans to Africa to Asia--if that is what we wish--if we wish to do
good around the world, we must first be good here at home on these
issues.
I ask all of you to help with that, to share the wellsprings of your
faith with those who are different, to help people understand the values
and the humanity that we share in common and the texture and fabric and
fiber and core of the beliefs and practices of Islam.
Children do not come into the world hating people of different
tribes and faiths. That is something they learn to do. They either are
explicitly taught to do it, or they learn to do it by following the
example of others, or they learn to do it in reaction to oppression that
they, themselves, experience. And those of us who are adults have a
responsibility to change those childhoods, to give this generation of
children around the world a different future than so many have played
out tragically in the last few years.
I think it is quite ironic that at the end of the cold war, when a
system of atheistic, controlling communism has failed and been rejected,
our latest demon seems to be the old-fashioned one of people fighting
each other because they are of different religious faiths or racial or
ethnic heritages. We know that is not at the core of any religious
teaching. We know it is not at the core of Islam.
So I ask you again to rededicate yourselves in this coming year to
making sure that others in this country truly understand and appreciate
the faith you embrace, its practices, its beliefs,
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its precepts, and its inclusive humanity. [Applause] Thank you.
The Koran also teaches, in addition to the fact that we should do
unto others as we wish to have done to us and reject for others what we
would reject for ourselves, that we should also make a commitment to
live in peace. There is a new Moon that has risen at the end of Ramadan
and a new millennium marked in many nations. And again, I say to you as
we leave, in addition to your prayers and work for peace and
understanding and reconciliation within the United States, I ask
especially for your prayers for the current mission of peace in the
Middle East.
We are on a track in which the Israelis, the Syrians, I hope soon
the Lebanese, and already the Palestinians have committed themselves to
work through these very difficult, longstanding issues over the course
of the next 2 months--the longstanding commitment between the
Palestinians and the Israelis to resolve their business by next month.
So this will be a time of great tension, where all people will have to
search for wisdom and understanding, where there will be great
reluctance to open the closed fist and walk out into a new era.
And I think that the prayers of Muslims, Jews, Christians, and
people of good will all over the world will be needed for us to get
through these next several weeks. But for you, I hope it is an immense
source of pride that you live in a country that is trying to make peace
in the land where your faith was born.
Thank you.
Note: The President spoke at 11:30 a.m. in Presidential Hall in the
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In his remarks, he
referred to Naimah Saleem, who introduced the President; Yahya Hendi,
chaplain, Georgetown University; and Capt. Rasheed Abdul-Muhammad,
chaplain, USA.