By: OnIslam & News Agencies
Source: OnIslam
Offering a role model for patriot Canadians, a group of Muslims in Halifax city in the eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia have volunteered to show their love to their community by removing piling garbage from one of the city’s most scenic parks.
“We clean up to keep the place pure; it’s a pristine place,” Abdelkader Tayeb, imam of Ummah Mosque, told CBC on Monday, June 8.
“We are helping animals avoid eating garbage. [It] is really very harmful to them because they don’t know what they’re eating.”
About 20 members of Ummah Mosque and the Maritime Muslim Academy gathered on Monday night to pick up trash from Herring Cove Provincial Park.
Putting gloves in their hands, volunteers held garbage bags to clean the park.
The move, according to Tayeb, was inspired by Islamic instructions on reserving environment and animals.
“We believe [animals] praise God in their own way and it’s just a matter of reconnecting with that other aspect of the environment that we live in,” he said.
One of the volunteers, Hasan Ali, said he enjoyed working by the ocean at the park.
“I think it’s a perfect opportunity for us to show, as a community, that we come outside our own narrow surrounding and help the outside community,” Ali said.
Welcoming volunteers, Tayeb said that similar events as planned by Ummah Mosque to clean-up other parks throughout the summer.
Muslims make around 1.9 percent of Canada’s some 32.8 million population.
Their number has increased dramatically over the last decade and Islam has become the number one non-Christian faith in Canada.
A recent survey showed that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are proud to be Canadian, and that they are more educated than the general population.