How One Dinner Party Group Is Breaking Barriers by Breaking Bread
The Eat with Muslims project won't solve our country's most pressing problems, but it's a start
(Tasting Table) There’s no denying we live in divisive times. But as two Somali-American Muslim women are finding, one way to confront the country’s ugliest problems is to start with an invitation.
For longtime friends Fathia Absie and Ilays Aden, who, for the past year, have concerned themselves with the fight against intolerance and Muslim stereotypes, the request is simple: Come eat with us.
Absie and Aden cofounded the Eat with Muslims project, a Seattle-based dinner series that gathers groups of open-minded folks of any faith, from any culture, and sits them all down to share Middle Eastern cuisine.
And to be perfectly clear: That’s all it is. There’s no proselytizing. The meals aren’t some kind of Trojan horse to sneak in a lecture on faith. You eat. You examine issues with your dining companions. Hopefully, you laugh. And then, that’s it. You go home.
With preconceptions subverted. Again, hopefully.
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And though Absie and Aden would be the first to say that it would be delusional to think sitting down to a delicious meal is the answer to the country’s most pressing racial and immigration problems, it’s still a start. And both women see it: The idea of breaking bread and having a dinner party with someone can stir a particular kind of closeness, if you let it.
And perhaps that’s enough.
“There’s a Somali saying that goes, ‘You can’t claim to know someone unless you share a meal with them or take a journey with them,’” Absie explains. A filmmaker and the mother of two girls, she was consumed by an urge to do something. So she, with Aden, a recent law school graduate, began hosting the dinners right after the 2016 election. It wasn’t long after their first get-together, hosted in the community room of an apartment building, that they noticed a recurring theme: The dinners represented the first time many of the participants had ever even talked to a Muslim in their lives.
