MSA Celebrates 50th Anniversary

It was the kind of event that reminded Imam Syed Z. Sayeed how old he is.

Sayeed has been a part of the Muslim Students Association for 37 years, first as a member and now as the group’s chaplain, a position he has held for about 10 years.

He and more than 100 other students, faculty, and administrators gathered in Roone Arledge Auditorium in Lerner Hall on Sunday night for the MSA’s Eid dinner, a celebration of the group’s founding and of the end of Ramadan.

A consistent theme throughout the night was maintaining a community despite the impending speech by David Horowitz, CC ’59, a controversial conservative author who will speak on campus on Friday as part of Islamo-Fascism Awareness week.

The group will not officially protest Horowitz’s talk, though many students hoped that holding events like Sunday’s dinner would send a signal to the author that his words would not divide the Columbia community.

“We try to engage these people on an academic level,” Omar Siddiqi, CC ’09, said. “We’re really taught to ... counter this type of dialog in a higher way.”

From International Issues to Our Backyard

Columbia’s chapter of the MSA was founded in October of 1956 with a charter from the University Chaplain about eight years before the national organization began, Sakib Khan, SEAS ’07, said.

According to the yearbook from that year, the group aimed to serve as a place for services for the 200 Muslims on campus, he said. Initially, the group served as a home for mostly older, international students. When Sayeed joined the group in the 1970s, though, the organization was made up primarily of graduate students like himself, who were interested in addressing problems that affected Muslims around the world.

Now the group faces issues much closer to home, he said. “During the 1970s, we were more preoccupied with international issues,” he said. “The present generation is worrying about what is happening here in this part of the world. I can assure you there is a very critical need.”

Still, the MSA remains one of the most diverse groups on campus, with members from several countries, schools at the University, and community members.

“The MSA plays a critical role in the Upper West Side,” University Chaplain Jewelnel Davis said, noting that many Muslims in the area attend the groups’ prayer sessions and other events.

Responding to Politics and Coming Together

It is a refrain that has been echoed several times by Muslim students in the past several years. The MSA coordinated and hosted events in the days and weeks after Sept. 11 and leading up to the Iraq War. They also held events during the MEALAC controversy in the 2004-2005 academic year, when several Muslim students on campus felt very alienated by the discourse, Khan said.

“The MSA is always an actively religious group,” he said. “Politics kind of pop up as needed in reaction to specific issues.” At Sunday night’s dinner, the theme was unity between the Association, other student groups, and the administration.

Comparing the MSA’s semicentennial anniversary to a marriage between the group and the University, Adil Ahmed, CC ’09 and current president of the MSA, said, “Our presence has been a long struggle. We’ve grown, but we’ve also sacrificed.”

Ahmed said that the group’s goal for the year was to build bridges with other University groups.

“We want to reach out and work with other groups ... and make sure other groups know we are there to support them,” he said.

Sometimes, he said, groups don’t realize the MSA’s membership includes graduate students and community members as well as undergraduates. He voiced his hopes that this year, campus groups with a variety of interests will reach out to his constituents.

“We’re a big group,” he said. “We have so many people. Campus issues [that one student group chooses to focus on] apply to someone in the MSA.”

Muslim students on campus have also struggled at times to earn recognition from the University, he said.

A handful of prominent administrators attended the dinner last night, including Davis, Barnard President Judith Shapiro, and Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs.

Several student groups also participated in the event, reading statements of solidarity with the MSA towards the end of the night.

“We wanted to show that we stand united with Muslim students and that we support them and promote tolerance,” said Josh Rosner, CC ’08 and president of Hillel.