The purpose of any organisation is debatable. What you think a group of people is supposed to do is representative more of yourself than of that particular organisation. The same holds for any MSA.
These are what I think all MSAs should attempt to accomplish, in order of importance:

  1. Provide a safe space on campus for religious activities for all Muslim students
  2. Do social work with the local Muslim community
  3. Generate positive images of Muslims

As to the first, providing essential services for Muslims, Queen’s University Muslim Students’ Association does pretty well. A few years back, a lot of people, many of them women, would have argued otherwise. It’s gotten better, though. Sure, it’s not perfect and I don’t expect that it ever will be. The one thing I have learned is that there is no such thing as The Association, meaning that there is nothing that defines any organisation, particularly QUMSA. At any one moment in time, an organisation is only ever defined by the people who influence (and who may or may not be on the exec) that organisation. So with a change of administration comes a new QUMSA (to some extent).
Right now, QUMSA maintains a prayer room, where daily prayers are held every day, five times day. Every Friday, Jummah is held in a hall that is usually large enough to accomodate all the attendees. The prayer room and the Jummah hall are in the John Deutsche University Centre, so that it’s conveniently close to almost everyone on campus. (Accessibilty is another issue. The musallah can only be reached by stairs.)
Every weekday in Ramadan, there are Iftars in the the Musallah. The Iftars are cooked for us by the local Muslim community, who look after us very well. On Sundays, a bus rolls by the JDUC to take anyone interested to the Islamic Society of Kingston, the local mosque, for the weekly community Iftar. On Saturdays, you’re expected to fend for yourself.
During Ramadan, the musallah overflows with people and shoes and food. It’s my favourite time of the year, because you don’t often get that sense of community during the rest of the year.
Also, we have our own Frosh Week, designed to fit in with larger Queen’s faculty frosh weeks.

Secondly, does QUMSA have a community outreach program?
No.
This year some of the exec are interested in working with the Ministry of Community and Social Services to provide Islamic services to Muslim foster kids in the Kingston area. Whether or not this works out will depend on whether or not the rest of the exec show a little bit more enthusiasm.
Last year thre were murmurings of blood drives and visiting patients in Kingston General Hospital (which is right on campus) and things of that nature. Invariably, the response was “that’s a good idea, we’ll see.” And then nothing happens. It’s that lukewarm attitude of “do it yourself then” that irritates me.
The thing about QUMSA is that is mostly made of people who are not from Kingston (I, for one, still don’t consider myself a “Kingstonian.”) A lot of them are international students; they leave the country once their program is over. Most of them are from out of town; they don’t even spend their summers here. That’s the only way I can justify the lack of interest in community outreach. I figure that they don’t feel like they have any real connections to this place and so they, quite simply, don’t care. And after all, it’s a whole lot easier to donate money to some charity that’ll help people you’ll never see than it is to actually meet the people right here at home who need that same help. That sense of distance is important to alms-giving, because it helps maintain the idea that the person who gives is intrinsically different from the person who receives; it is assumed that there is power in giving.
Once you remove that distance, things get more complicated. You actually have to meet these foster kids, many of whom may have only grudgingly agreed to meet you. You have to talk to people whose bitterness closely mirrors your own complacency. Whose pride offends your belief in the rightness of your in/actions.
And it requires more effort. From university students at various stages in their education. You’re asking them to take time out from their endless labs and papers and brown-nosing to do things that may not be all the rewarding.

There is a reason I put the anti-racist movement last. I figure that if you do the first two things reasonably well, you’ll have basically covered the third.
Every Ramadan for the last three years now, QUMSA has participated in the national Fast-a-thon, where nonMuslims are invited to fast for a day. On their behalf, QUMSA contributes some hefty sum of money to a local charity. I forget how many people pledged last year, but of them 100 showed up for the Iftar. In turn, we donated $1000 to the university food bank. It was a feel-good event, and we even had a couple people show more than the usual interest in Islam and Muslims afterwards.
Every year we also hold a token Islamic Awareness Week. We put up posters, get a speaker or two, show some movies. Last year’s theme was Diversity in Islam. The timing sucked – it was too close to final exams – and so not as many people showed up for the movies as we would have liked (we showed Malcolm X and A New Life in a New Land).
And that’s the extent of our formal anti-racist efforts.

Again, my opinion is that if we were more attentive to our duties to the needy in our local communities, I wouldn’t feel like such a hypocrite when we put up posters about Islam protecting the rights of the poor and the elderly and such.
That’s not to say that I think the individual members of QUMSA fail in their duties as Muslims; that isn’t for me to judge. However, who we are as individuals and who we are collectively as QUMSA are two very different things. More needs to be done in QUMSA’s name in order to prove that Muslim communities, as opposed to Muslim individuals, are capable of following their own laws. And that’s the thing – up until this point, I never really believed that “communities” existed. I could not see how a group of people was supposed to take on a personality. But once you create an organisation that is supposed to represent a group of people, you are insisting that this community is real.

Near the end of last year, one of America’s more publicised Arab Muslim-haters visited campus. The speaker, who doesn’t need to be named because she was that generic, spewed forth run-of-the-mill hate and blatantly false statistics (Muslims breed at the rate of 50 kids a family). What followed was a flurry of letters to the editor, some from Muslims, some not, some from QUMSA, some not.
I couldn’t help but feel, even in the midst of our righteous raging, that we needed a more consistent anti-racist effort to combat things like this. Two major events a year and a few letters to the university paper just don’t cut it.

So what is the Muslim community at Queen’s like?
If you were an outsider, quite honestly, I don’t think QUMSA could tell you.

I believe in grassroots movements, in people working as individuals. Once you get constitutions and executives and agendas, you lose part of the essence of your movement.
But once upon a time, I was a kid fresh out of high school, and I thought that QUMSA would be my gateway into a whole new revolution. And I suppose it was, but the revolution was far more personal than I’d expected.

I don’t regret joining QUMSA. I’m often frustrated by its members, but that’s a given. I’m often frustrated that I don’t do enough, but that’s given, too.
So I dunno. I’m QUMSA’s Publicity Officer this year. So I suppose this post should have been much more positive. But that would have been lying.

Basit had a post on representing the Muslims of the future. Right now, QUMSA is not the sort of association that thinks that far ahead, and that’s my basic problem with it.
Even more fundamental than that is the suspicion that the failings are all mine. If I were a better person, a better Muslim, a better activist (these things not being exclusive), simply by the force of my belief, things would be better. That’s naive, yes, and egocentric, too. But it helps keep the apathy somewhat at bay.