Muslims reach out to help with blood drive at UMD

Source: MENAFN

Sep 17, 2011 (Duluth News Tribune - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- An effort to collect 10,000 units of blood in September as a statement against terrorism is well along the way, a local organizer said on Friday.

M. Imran Hayee, director of graduate studies in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota Duluth, wrote about the "Muslims for Life" campaign in an opinion piece in Sunday's News Tribune.

Forty-three people signed up for a blood drive Friday in conjunction with Memorial Blood Centers on the UMD campus, and several others came as walk-ins, Hayee said. Another blood drive at UMD last week brought

30 units of blood. Several would-be donors were turned away for medical reasons.

Two more blood drives are scheduled for September in UMD residence halls as part of the drive, Hayee said.

It's a small part of the national "Muslims for Life" campaign that

already had resulted in more than 7,000 units of blood given as of Thursday, Hayee said. The target of 10,000 should be reached soon, he added.

That amount of donated blood could save 30,000 lives, a means of honoring 3,000 victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Hayee said.

"We want to show that Islam stands for peace and life, not for death," Hayee said. "We categorically reject all kinds of terrorism."

But it's not just a campaign for Muslims, he said, because people of all faiths are united against terrorism. He was in Minneapolis for a blood drive on Sunday. The oldest donor there was a 72-year-old Christian woman and the youngest was an 18-year-old Muslim woman. The two donated side by side, Hayee said.

Ironically, Hayee isn't able to donate blood himself. He was in Pakistan last December, and under U.S. guidelines has to wait a year before donating blood. Likewise, natives of the Indian subcontinent who have been in the U.S. less than five years are ineligible. That rules out many Muslim students at UMD.

One of those is Waqas Ahmad, 28, a graduate student who was volunteering to help with Friday's blood drive. The Pakistani native began studies at UMD in 2007, but is still just short of being eligible to donate.

Nonetheless, he was happy to help where he could, saying it was a good way to reach out to American students. "We tell them about Islam and how we love the sanctity of life," Ahmad said.