Why do I think You Should Know?

One only need look to the injustices done to the Muslim community of New York City by the NYPD and others for an example of what the consequences of not understanding a diversity of people for what they are.... Any New Yorker worth their salt understands the importance of Muslims to New York City, to act like because some people from a different country who just happened to have the same religion... only vaguely? committed an act of terror would mean that Muslim New Yorkers liked it anymore than any other New Yorkers did? Yet history repeated itself and Mosques were treated as compounds to be monitored like the US did to US Japanese descendant populations in WW2....

What I mean by that point is that I think right now it is important to understand the nuance to groups that people want us to simplify down to a soundbite that serves as a justification.

The Website I linked is a University Of Michigan curated list of resources to learn about Islam (and I mean that in a very basic sense of learn about the history of it) that is mostly focused on the resources the University provides but is nonetheless a really compact extensive list you can quickly use as a starting point if you want to research something.

This is also a nice simple website I found that visualizes populations of Muslims on earth in a nice easy to understand way.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/muslim-population-by-country

Personally growing up in the US I know until pretty late into my life that I simply had no idea there were so many Muslims on Earth. Living through the post 9/11 years I would often hear statements said about Muslims or people who follow Islam from people who didn't really know any Muslims and the day I learned that there were that many Muslims it hit me as really unintuitive.

~2 Billion people is an incredible amount of human beings, there is no way even if you had infinite lifetimes to try that you could meaningfully reduce that many people down to anything other than the same spirit any human being is born with.

I don't mean this post in aggressive way, I just think genuinely more people should know in Christian predominant nations that when somebody starts generalizing about Islam or Muslims the correct response is to call attention to that fundamental logic error. Sure, criticize Islam, analyze it, talk about the politics of it, but be specific and be curious about the actual nuance to the story!