Do you personally know a Muslim IRL?

[Former President tack50]

Wow a 2016 bump. Either way yes, I do. Not super well or anything but I have known muslims irl. In my time in college I've had 4 muslim classmates.

3 were hijab-wearing women, with whom I barely talked. They spoke Spanish decently but with a very heavy Arabic accent. Of the 3 women; I lost track of 2 of them, though 1 did end up graduating alongside myself. From what I've heard they were fairly average students.

I do remember a "horror story" where one girl ended up having to do a group project with the 3 of them, with the 3 speaking Arabic and doing nothing while that lone Spanish girl was tasked with doing everything lol (I actually came close to being in that spot but somehow I dodged a bullet and instead ended in a group where I was the one who did little)

The 4th and final muslim student was a man, and was the one I interacted with the most since I shared many classes with him. This still only means fairly standard and mundane class interactions as he wasn't really among the group of "college friends" I had; but still. He spoke better Spanish and had a less noticeable accent (though it was still there). He was a fairly good student (better than the 3 women) and also graduated alongside myself.

Either way, none of these were particularly close relations or anything so it didn't really change any perceptions I had. If anything that "horror story" from a friend (yes, anectodal evidence) plus the fact that they all had heavy accents slightly lowered it (however iirc they all were people who were born and raised in Morocco and moved here for college; so I didn't really care about the accents since it was 100% understandable). Like someone else said on the thread you should not judge big groups of people based on interactions with a handful of people.

For some reason my college classes had a fairly large amount of non """ethnically""" Spanish students; I also had 2 black classmates (both from Equatorial Guinea iirc) and 3 Latin American classmates at the same time; and my college classes were actually very small at only 20-30 people. Granted it was rare for all of those to be together at the same time; since not everyone in college has the same classes, people often end up droping out, etc.