Putnam Museum opens new exhibit focusing on Muslims in the Quad Cities community

Over the years, the Putnam Museum in Davenport has highlighted the various groups of people who call the Quad Cities home. Its latest exhibit focuses on the experiences of Muslims in the Quad Cities.

“So it's been in the making for a while,” said guest curator Ferdaus Ahmad who explained that she and the Putnam Museum’s Curator of History and Anthropology, Christina Kastell, have wanted to collaborate on an exhibit highlighting the religion for 20 years. “The only change we did to it, instead of doing Islam, which is a global religion, we made it into a community-based [project] – what the Muslims in this community do, how they serve the community, and how they're built into the fabric of this community.”

The project is also being assisted by guest curator Asma Hussain.

“Islam is growing. The Muslims are growing in this community,” Hussain said. “We just want to tell the people how Muslims are useful for the community – what they are doing to make it better. So that is the purpose of us doing the exhibition at [the] Putnam Museum.”

The exhibition features at least seven Muslim residents in interactive portals where they share their oral histories with visitors.

“We'll pull out two, three-minute clips because people's attention span is short. So the clips will be short, but there will be a number of them,” Kastell said about the exhibit which is located in the museum’s World Culture Gallery. “Three huge cases in there will be filled with objects from the community, and we'll be telling the stories of these objects or just little tidbits about the objects.”

Ahmad and Hussain brainstormed how to showcase the many different ethnic origins of the people who live here, stating it’s well over 30.

“They all follow the faith of Islam, and they're Muslims, but they're all different people, [and] they all adhere to one religion,” Ahmad said. “And how they participate, how their everyday lives are here, what do they bring to the city, what do they bring to the people, and how do they make this community stronger?”

Kastell said the Muslim community has received a lot of bad press in the past and that this exhibit will help clarify the actual teachings of the religion.

“There are five pillars of the Muslim faith, one of which is giving back to the community. And that is so important. And that is, I think, something that is completely misunderstood or not understood at all by our communities, is how much our Muslim brothers and sisters are giving to the community,” Kastell said.

Ahmad and Hussain added that Islam teaches people to be better human beings, no different from other religions.

“So the word Islam relates to peace,” Ahmad said. “That's all there is. As Christina said, we're all the same. We're not really different people. We're just how we are. We have inner peace, so we have outer peace, and together we build a stronger community.

“As it's an ongoing thing, we'll add on oral histories because there are histories from the new generation, the pioneers in the community, before there was any mosque here, people who built the first mosque,” Ahmad said.

Anyone interested in participating can contact Kastell or Ahmad at the following email addresses: fahmad29@hotmail.com and CKastell@putnam.org

The exhibit will be available during normal business hours, Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., excluding Tuesday, when doors open an hour earlier, and Sunday, when it is noon to 5 p.m. The curators hope to add more voices to the exhibit over the next year.

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