On Monday, May 16th, graffiti was found on the walls of restrooms at Evans Park in Adel. As a Muslim and also an exchange student from Pakistan, people asked me how I felt about it. Honestly, I feel bad for the people who are so ignorant of my religion.

There are more than 1.6 billion muslims in this world and out of all those there are 0.00006625% who are making Islam look bad and the people who are  uneducated about other religions thinks that all muslims are involved in extremists groups.

A lot of people get information from media which is not correct all the time because I have experienced it by myself. Before coming to America, I thought there would be big cities like Chicago and New York everywhere and high school was going to be like the one high school in ‘Mean Girls’ or ‘High School Musical’,but we all know very well that was totally opposite from what I expected. I had this image of America because it was what media showed me. Due to that I don’t blame anyone for thinking about my religion or my country the way they are because that is what media is showing them but people should not be so judgemental and try to find more information about every religion and country before assuming that every Islamic country has something to do with ISIS or every muslim is from an extremist group.

People should understand the real purpose of every religion. I don’t think there is any religion out there in the world which encourage terrorism and killing innocent people. Once prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said that: ‘He who is not merciful to others, will not be treated mercifully’ so how can all those extremists say that they are going to heaven by killing people, this clearly means that extremists have no religion. We should stop putting the label of Islam on terrorism because every religion, every country and every region in this world has bad and good people. So why not we should all stand for humanity instead of blaming any religion for being the cause of all the terrorism which is going in this world.