Muslims

Bigots to People are as Vaccines to the Body

Leave a Comment / Understanding Islam and Muslims / By

Bigotry, extremism towards other’s concepts or cultures, serves as emotional, intellectual and citizenship vaccines to people. A vaccine, injected into a body, gets the immune system alerted and instructs cells to fight back to defend the body. At the end, the body becomes healthier, and more immune from disease, while the vaccine cells are consumed and flushed out.

This is in short the essence of the analogy, and my prediction of the outcome from the last two week’s events that were inflamed by the crude, less than amateur, and profane video on Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him (PBUH). In the global village we are living in, the resulting inflammation will heal to better multi-cultural understanding, while ideological extremism and its promoters will run down into the history drainpipes.

To support my hypothesis, in this post, I’ll address the stimulus, the reactions, what would Prophet Mohammad do if he was present, the rationale behind these frequent disturbances, combating extremism at grassroots, how to talk about Prophet Mohammad, and conclude with how bigots helped the world get better.

The article in PDF format could be found here Bigots to People are as Vaccines to the Body.

On the 11th Anniversary of 9/11, Islam & Muslims: An Overview

6 Comments / Understanding Islam and Muslims / By


Eleven years ago, the world was shocked seeing planes flying into the World Trade Center towers. The chaos was overwhelming. People jumping out of top floor windows, in hope to escape imminent death to end up facing the same destiny, was nerve breaking. The shock of the 9/11 tragic events was startling. It was unbelievable, and irrational.

In this post, I would like to share with you some of our personal experience in the aftermath of the event. For the following weeks, I spent long hours into the late night, till my head drops, researching, verifying, compiling and annotating the text in a power point slides to create my first presentation to fellow Lucent engineers in Indian Hill campus in Naperville, IL. I wanted to give a digestible, without too much details, end-to-end picture on understanding Islam and Muslims. It covers, as much grounds as possible, the essential and typical questions people ask. Over the following years, I revised the presentation, and would like to share with you today…”Islam and Muslims: An Overview,” in power point show format, and have it also in native (.ppt) format.

At St. John’s College Residence

2 Comments / My American Experience / By

[Continued from “Winterpeg“. This is the last post under “Coming to the New World … America“. Shows how language misalignment and unfamiliarity with culture could be viewed with a mindset that could be totally unrelated. Reaching out and willing to lean will tear down inaccurate perceptions.]

In my first day in Winnipeg, I was getting myself situated as a full time student at the University of Manitoba, and finding a place to live in. There were several accommodation options on and off campus. I was looking for the closest building to the University where I could walk door-to-door with the least exposure to the climate I’m not accustomed to, while staying within my scholarship budget. 

St. John’s College Residence seemed to meet these requirements, but I wasn’t sure how would the life in the seminary residence would be. I didn’t know if religious services at the dorm would cause me being in a state of discomfort.