CAIR-Chicago Banquet, A Success. Thank You! [PHOTOS]

Dear CAIR-Chicago Supporters,

On behalf of our chairman, Dr. Mazen Kudaimi, the board, staff, and volunteers, we wish to thank you for making our 7th Annual Banquet a memorable and enjoyable event.

Please take a look at a slideshow of the evening and our beautiful, powerful community.

Over a thousand were in attendance, underscoring the broad support CAIR-Chicago continues to receive by the grace of the Almighty.

What’s even more telling than the large number of guests was the diversity of the audience that came from all across Chicago and the tri-state area, in terms of ethnicity, age, gender, and profession. We were grateful to see every Mosque and every Chicago Muslim organization with significant representation.

We are grateful to Sh. Kifah Mustafa of the Mosque Foundation for fundraising. He has been our fundraiser every year and always delivers inspiring words that move the community. We are grateful to you for responding with your generosity. We were able to meet our fundraising goal for the banquet.. (Help us meet our year’s goal by donating online today).

Our speakers this year delivered powerful and moving words, standing up for the ideals of religious pluralism, tolerance, equal rights, and mutual understanding, ideals that CAIR-Chicago continuously strives to live up to in our daily work.

We wish to thank Reverend Jesse Jackson, the iconic civil rights hero, for delivering the key note address. Jackson movingly related the struggles of Muslim Americans fighting for equal rights and acceptance to that of other minority groups throughout U.S. history.

We wish to thank our Courage Award recipients, Jerome McDonnell of Chicago Public Radio, and Dr. Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, as well as our Public Service Award recipient Habeeb Quadri of the MCC Full-Time School.

We wish to thank the 22 public officials who sent us letters of support this year, and those who attended our banquet.

We wish to thank the countless volunteers who worked incredibly hard to present the community with an evening befitting of its stature.

Lastly, we wish to thank you all once again. Our work could not succeed without your support. You came in large numbers and showed why Chicago’s Muslims are a proud, strong, united community.

Thanks to you, we are now ready to begin another phase of our work. Our promise to you is that you will continue to see concrete results that further raise the bar, as well as a few surprises we are sure you will like. Please stay tuned to our website: www.cairchicago.org.

The CAIR-Chicago Team

Photography by Fahad Sami, Nadia Khan, Jumana Azam, Mohamed Abdelati, and Naoufal Elhajjami

Copyright © 2011 CAIR-Chicago

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