Labor of faith Muslim, Methodist team up for workplace awareness

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Ayse Kaplan spent her summer doing charity work.

The 24-year-old seminary student worked for 10 weeks with the Eastern Maine Labor Council in an effort to make area clergy more aware of issues facing area workers.

Kaplan is a Muslim, and one of the five pillars of her faith is zakat. Usually, zakat refers to almsgiving, but the term also can apply to work done on behalf of a social concern, which is how Kaplan described her summer internship in Maine.

A student at Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn., Kaplan has spent 10 weeks in Brewer this summer as part of a program sponsored by Interfaith Worker Justice, a nonprofit based in Chicago. Each year the organization accepts 35 to 40 Christian, Jewish and Muslim seminary students for internships with labor groups.

The Muslim community and the labor movement share the common goals of social justice, economic fairness and fair treatment in the workplace, according to IWJ.

“It’s very important in our religion for each person to give each year” to charity, said Kaplan, whose first name is pronounced Eye-sha.

Islam’s holy book requires honesty in all business transactions, including how an employer treats an employee, according to Kaplan. Employers have a responsibility to ensure that they treat people with fairness, remembering that all humanity is one.

“In Islam, [worker] justice is very important,” she said. “It is very important to be a fair manager or boss. We believe the unjust leader or boss or manager will have punishment in the afterlife.”

Kaplan, whose father works in a mosque in Turkey, is a Sunni Muslim, the largest branch of Islam. A native of Turkey, she grew up in a religious family and came to the United States nearly a year ago to attend the seminary.

She will return in mid-August to Hartford to continue work on her master’s degree in Islamic and Christian relations.

During her internship in Maine, she learned firsthand how a Muslim and a Christian can work to fulfill the tenets of both faiths.

Emily Harry, a Methodist, has worked for two years with IWJ and also spent her summer working in Maine.

Harry, in her mid-20s, was born in Georgia to a Catholic family. When she was in middle school in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., Harry became a member of a United Methodist church. Volunteer work in a soup kitchen with her church youth group led her to work on social justice issues in college at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va.

“It always made sense to me that there’s a connection between a person’s God-given human dignity and workplace issues,” she said. “The religious community can have something to say about restoring worker dignity. It doesn’t matter what tradition that comes out of.”

Harry and Kaplan have worked side by side this summer.

“Ayse’s been wonderful to work with,” Harry said. “People have been genuinely curious about her. It’s been a great opportunity to show the movement for social justice is broad and needs to get even broader.”

English and American culture have been Kaplan’s biggest hurdles, she said last month in an e-mail. (She said she has found that she communicates her ideas more clearly in writing.) Maine residents sometimes found her difficult to understand because her accent is unfamiliar.

Kaplan said that while in Maine she had not been discriminated against because she is a Muslim woman, but that her long skirts, long-sleeved shirts and the scarf, or hajib, she wears on her head did catch people’s attention.

Donning the shorts and T-shirts Maine residents and vacationers typically wear during the summer would be considered immodest by Islamic standards.

“I think I was the only woman wearing a scarf in Bangor,” she said in the e-mail, “so sometimes I caught people’s strange looks at me in public areas like in a store or while I was driving. Some people … were seeing a Muslim person for the first time [in] their life.”

Her biggest difficulty was being able to eat at community meals or after-worship fellowships. Many Muslims adhere to a set of dietary laws called halal that is similar, but not identical, to those followed by observant Jews.

“The other issue was again about my religious requirement on touching and shaking hands with men,” she said in the e-mail. “When they extended their hands to me, I [would] say that I am not shaking hands with men, it is religious (with a smiley face). After my short and fast explanation, they [would]

say, ‘It’s all right, it is ok.’ They understood that I had not want[ed] [to] hurt or offend them.”

Kaplan also found that people were eager to accommodate her need to pray five times a day – at dawn, at noon, in the afternoon, in the evening and at nightfall.

“At the time of my daily prayer … I asked the people whom I had a meeting with, if I could pray the noon prayer in their places before I [left] there. So I asked them a space for it and they welcomed me and showed me a quiet place in the building. I [carried] a thin mat for the prayer and a compass for the direction of Qibla (for my standing during the prayer toward Mecca) in my purse. Because of this, practicing [my religion] was being easy for me.”

For Kaplan, one of the most rewarding experiences of her internship was giving a short speech at the annual Fourth of July picnic held at the Eastern Maine Central Labor Council Hall in Brewer. She said her spirits were buoyed by the encouragement people gave her.

“The funny thing is that the following weekend, I went to Acadia National Park with my acquaintances here,” she said in the e-mail. “There, I came across a woman and we said hi to each other. She passed [by] me and two seconds later she turned back and told me, ‘Excuse me, are you the person who spoke [on] the 4th of July?’

“I was surprised and said, ‘Oh yes, were you there?’ She answered, ‘Oh yes and I would like to tell you, you did a wonderful job.’ I thanked her. My friends made a joke, telling me, ‘Ayse, you [are] a famous person now.'”