A Letter to Mayor Sylvester Turner of Greater Houston Community
The Muslims associated with the Islamic Center of East Bay in Antioch, California, want you to know that we remembered all our fellow brothers and sisters of the Greater Houston Community in our prayers on the eve of our Annual Eidul Adha gathering (a celebration of the Tradition of Sacrifice, set by Prophet Abraham (a), held on September 1, 2017.
In order to give this celebration of the spirit of sacrifice a practical touch, we created a special collection desk for the victims of this greatest catastrophic flooding of Houston. This humble donation of $1,000, we know, is like a drop of relief in an ocean of hardships, but it is an ocean in itself as for as our love and concern for our fellow Americans is concerned. We shall keep doing our bit till every individual of Houston gets rehabilitated.
We want each one of you to know that we stand in complete solidarity with you in every meaning of the word, and we share your pain, and your hardships very strongly. The words of our prayers may be different, but the message of our tears and pangs is the same.
Adversities have always visited humans, and they will keep doing so; what we all need to understand is how we respond to them. That precisely determines what actually we are, and what actually we value most! Indeed, we get tested by these calamities in the real sense. “The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it,” said John Ruskin so beautifully.
It is our conviction and our prayer that our fellow Americans of the Greater Houston Community emerge stronger and better in every respect from this calamity. The spirit of brotherhood and love fostered by this unfortunate catastrophe, we pray, becomes a permanent feature of our character. That is what real America is and what America stands for. It amounts to demeaning ourselves as humans if we begin assigning this task of universal brotherhood to natural calamities. Our deepest regards, and,
Yours very truly,
Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry/President
President
Islamic Center of East Bay
Antioch, CA
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