As Islam Awareness week comes to a close, the Muslim Student Association put on its fourth event of the week. Students, staff and faculty gathered together to celebrate around food and culture at the “Taste of Islam” banquet Thursday evening in the Briscoe Student Activity Room.
Fundraising Chair junior Arisa Hussain, one of the main coordinators and organizers for this event, said the organization did something similar last year but this was the first year MSA organized this large of a banquet.
“This is the first year that we’re doing something of this scale,” Hussain said. “Last year we had a fastathon. But this year we had a little bit of a different idea to kind of showcase the different cuisines and stuff from Muslims around the world.”
The banquet’s goal involved sharing the diversities of food within the Muslim culture, and shared a variety of dishes from hotspots around Bloomington including Taste of India, Anatolia, Samira and Turkuaz, according to the MSA Facebook page.
Junior Samira Naderpoor is the inspiration for the name of the Samira restaurant downtown off the square. Naderpoor’s father named the restaurant after her and it has been a family business since. Naderpoor said she has worked at the restaurant on and off for four years in various positions. She said the restaurant’s most popular dish is the lamb kebabs.
“The restaurant has impacted me in a weird way,” Naderpoor said. “Like everyone knows who I am because of the restaurant. Well, everyone in Bloomington.”
Naderpoor said the restaurant is like a second home to her and provides her with feelings of familiarity and comfort.
“The restaurant is always going to be like my home,” Naderpoor said. “It’s like my second kitchen, so if I’m hungry, I just go there.”
Samira, an Afghan restaurant, is only one of many places offering a plethora of different foods served in countries with high Muslim populations available in the Bloomington culinary realm. Hussain said this variety of choices is one of the reasons the MSA wanted to organize an event like this in the first place.
“There’s so many different cultures in Islam,” Hussain said. “I think when people think of Muslims, they think of like the stereotypical, like maybe Arabs or like people who wear hijabs, but there’s so many different kinds of Muslims. So that’s one of the reasons we wanted to have this banquet, we wanted to show that there are so many different subcultures within Islam and that we’re not just a homogenous kind of people, and what better way to show that than food?”
The event was open and free to all who were interested. Representatives from the IU administration attended, including Associate Dean of Students Carol McCord and Steve Veldkamp, assistant dean of students and director of student life and learning. After an introduction from the MSA board members, McCord said a few words about her appreciation for the events MSA had this week.
Senior Danielle Quinn said she came to the banquet as a fulfillment of a class assignment to attend a cultural event. Quinn said she was looking forward to trying all the dishes from the restaurants that contributed to the banquet this year.
“I’m most excited about learning about new cultures and also meeting new people and experiencing different foods from around the world,” Quinn said.
