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  ALICE LAM Third-year cybernetics student Zain Husain donates blood Saturday during the blood drive that was held by many Muslims in the L.A. area for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

By Michaele Turnage

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

About 100 Los Angeles area Muslims donated 75 pints of blood Saturday in a show of their solidarity with the rest of the nation in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which has left more than 6,000 people missing or dead.

Besides helping victims of the attacks and helping to replenish the nation’s depleted blood supply, organizers wanted to send a message against hate.

“We had so many people of Muslim and Arab descent who were being attacked that we wanted to make sure we could do something to make them feel that they were part of the solution and not part of the problem,” said Lynn Salahi, a ’01 UCLA alumna who serves as the office manager of the University Muslim Medical Association’s Free Clinic.

The UMMA Free Clinic is a UCLA Community Programs Office project that operates in large part through the volunteer efforts of about 40 UCLA students each quarter.

The $25,000 emergency blood drive, held at the UMMA Free Clinic in South Central, was sponsored by UMMA, Kaiser Permanente and more than a dozen Muslim organizations, including UCLA’s Muslim Students Association and Al-Talib newsmagazine.

According to SIM NOW, an international mission organization, Muslim students form the largest group of international students in North American universities. It also said that Islam, with an estimated 1.2 billion adherents, is the fastest growing religion in the world.

“We are here … and we, too, share in the mourning, as well as the healing process,” said Yasser Aman, UMMA Free Clinic director. “The healing process requires all Americans to realize that in order to heal, you have to understand who the true enemy is.”

He said the blood drive is an expression of the clinic’s mission to serve those in need. The clinic, the acronym of which means “community” in Arabic, usually serves African Americans and Spanish-speaking Latinos of the immediate community.

Raziya Shaikh was among the many who endured the heat and the hour-and-a-half wait to give a pint of blood.

“I wanted to make a statement by giving blood at a Muslim clinic,” said Shaikh, who drove from her home in San Diego to come to the event.

For some, the blood drive was also a call for the backlash of hate crimes against Muslims and Arab Americans to stop.

“I do feel threatened, but at the same time I look at it as an opportunity for the country as a whole to learn more about Islam and realize that it’s not a terrorist religion that people portray it to be,” Shaikh said.

Abdeen said she was trying to continue to live life normally and help her mother, who wears the hejab, to feel safe. The hejab is the clothing – a scarf or garment that fully covers the body – Muslim women wear as a sign of modesty and to protect them from being exploited for their bodies.

“We’re condemning all the actions that were done,” she said. “These were actions against humankind.”

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating reports of hate crimes.

“The people who are attacking Muslims – they’re terrorists themselves,” Shaikh said. “They’re trying to instill fear in a group of people themselves, and that’s what makes you a terrorist.”