‘Meet a Muslim Family’ campaign wildly successful

A Muslim Islamic movement in Canada has launched a campaign to connect Canadians with fellow Canadians of the Muslim faith. The aim is to introduce people to diverse Muslim families so they can get to know their traditions and cultures, but also ask questions about Islam.

Given the recent terror attacks in Canada and around the world, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Canada community felt it was time to offer Canadians a chance to meet average Muslim families.

‘This is not the Islam that we practice’

“Flip open any news channel, any newspaper and there will probably be a story about some violent extremist group committing terror in the name of Islam,” says spokesman Safwan Choudhry.

“Surely, given the dynamic we’re going through, surely there must be a lot of questions on fellow Canadians’ minds, as there certainly are on Canadian Muslim’s minds…that this is not our faith. This is not the Islam that we practice,” says Choudhry.

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The community set up a website called “Meet a Muslim Family” where people can provide their basic information and be matched with a family living close to them. Meetings have occurred in homes, in coffee shops and some people have requested visits to mosques.

Response ‘overwhelming’

Organizers have been overwhelmed with requests from across Canada, and contrary to what they expected, many have come from small towns. A Twitter feed was set up and has been trending.

The program was supposed to run from March 1^st to the 14^th but may be extended to the end of the month to accommodate all the requests, and rather than be an annual campaign, it may become biannual.

“The biggest thing that we see any of these terror groups trying to commit is fear and divide,” says Choudhry. “And we want to make sure that they do not succeed in that.”