Sidewalk paint upsets students

At a school where diversity is touted, beliefs are being stepped on. \nMembers of IU's Muslim community said they are offended and puzzled that someone painted the sacred phrase "In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful" on sidewalks across campus.\nThe phrase is one of the most holy in Islam, and students said it should not be written on a place where thousands of people walk every day.\n"This symbol is a very dear saying to Muslims," said President of the Muslim Student Union Shahaab Uddin. "To see it on the ground and stepped on hurts."\nDevout Muslims speak the phrase, called the bismillah, before most religious actions, and both the reading of the Koran and the five daily prayers begin with it.\nThe drawing's detailed Arabic script and green ink suggests to some Muslims that whoever made the symbol has some knowledge of Islam. That's what makes its placement on the ground so confounding, Uddin said. \n"I would doubt it was a Muslim," Uddin said, "but if it was, it's a very un-Islamic action." Green is often considered the symbolic color of Islam.\nThe drawing's presence across campus was reported about two weeks ago to IU's Religious Bias Incidence Team. \nThe team contacted IU's Physical Plant and the IU Police Department, who removed most of the symbols. But even now some still remain.\n"These need to be systematically searched for and removed," Uddin said. "It hurts they haven't done more."\nMelanie Payne, a member of the Religious Bias Incidence Team, said they don't know who created the symbols.\n"It's hard to investigate who did an anonymous writing," she said. \nThe bismillah was drawn in ink rather than chalk, making it difficult to scrub away with water, she said. \nPayne said people should know that this action was insensitive and hurtful. \n"This script is held in extremely high regard, and it isn't something you would write on the sidewalk for someone to walk on," Payne said. "By doing so, it was defiling Islam."\nFour anti-harassment teams exist at IU: religious, racial, gender and the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender team. Whenever an incident of harassment occurs, the teams collect data, provide support for victims and seek resolutions.\nAlthough the racial, gender and GLBT teams are each more than five years old, IU did not create a separate religious team until this year. In the past, religious incidents were handled by the racial team.\n"We were getting enough reports of bias-motivated incidents dealing with religion that we thought we should split them out," said Bill Shipton, co-chair of the religious incidence team.\nShipton said the team has responded to more than a dozen incidents since the start of the fall semester. Several investigations handled reports of swastikas drawn on dry-erase boards and dorm walls.\n"We're concerned about any incident that targets a student because it does seem to us that the number of reports on religious bias have increased," he said.\nShipton said the increase may be due to students feeling more comfortable in coming forward with complaints. \n"We should never let our guard down," Shipton said.\nUddin said the sidewalk symbols are a very serious thing to Muslims on campus.\n"It's nothing to be taken lightly," he said. "Stepping on any holy book is wrong, and that's what it signifies."\n-- Contact General Assignments Editor Adam VanOsdol at avanosdo@indiana.edu.