Farhana Yunus and Jerry Muscadin
"Leave your religion – it's violent!"
A man yelled those words to Farhana Yunus and her daughter as they were with a Girl Scout troop touring Mount Dora. "Go back to where you came from!" he barked at them.
The caustic words brought Yunus' 10-year-old daughter to tears. With a fearful sob, she asked her mother why the man was yelling at them.
Yunus could have responded to him defensively. She could have replied, "No, Islam teaches peace" – a phrase many Muslims have at the ready to respond to similar outbursts and accusations. They mean it wholeheartedly, but it's exhausting to always be on the defense.
Instead, Yunus tried to move on, replying with a hurried "Have a nice day." But the man shot back, "I'll have a nice day when you leave."
A mother and daughter standing nearby witnessed the incident and made their way to Yunus and the girls to offer apologies. That man didn't represent their community, they told Yunus. Or us.
"They made it a point to say he didn't represent Mount Dora," Yunus says. "It was very endearing to see that, and I was thinking – would we have done the same?"
The recent political rhetoric has been hard on Muslims like Yunus and her family. Rather than shrink into the background, though, she and her husband, Jerry Muscadin, have made it a point to reach out and be more visible in their community. Last month, the Oviedo couple hosted a meet-and-greet barbecue for their neighbors. None of the neighbors seemed hesitant to enter the family's Oviedo home, whose walls are embellished with Arabic calligraphy.
The couple – he's Haitian-American, she's Pakistani – try to live their lives with mindfulness.
On her days off from her job as an optometrist, Yunus teaches Quran studies at local mosques and runs her daughter's Girl Scout troop. The mother of five spends the smidgen of leisure time she has reading – racing her husband to see who will finish the book first – or gardening. She tends fig trees, aloe vera and herbs in their white-picket-fenced yard. On the weekends, Yunus and Muscadin take the kids to the Orlando Science Center or a theme park.
"Yes, I'm Muslim, and I pray – and I go to Disney," Muscadin says with a laugh. He converted to Islam a few years before he married Yunus.
Muscadin is the director of community development for the local Islamic Circle of North America. He oversees the organization's free local clinic, food pantry and transitional housing for victims of domestic abuse. "It's a double reward in the sense that I get paid to do what I do, and I also have the opportunity to change and impact someone's life," he says, noting the time a food-pantry recipient emailed him a photo of her full kitchen pantry, which he says was empty before the Islamic Circle filled it for her.
Although the organization is an Islamic one, Muscadin says, it helps any Central Florida resident in need, regardless of religion.
As for Yunus, she says it's a beautiful thing to help people see. She remembers a time she prescribed low-vision magnification devices to an elderly woman suffering from deteriorating vision. All the woman wanted was to be able to read her Bible.
"I love the fact that I can look into people's eyes, and I see God," Yunus says.
