[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 2 (Monday, January 17, 2000)]
[Pages 29-31]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks 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

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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 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 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.

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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, 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, but 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 (formerly 
Room 450) 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.