A while back I wrote a post about what seems to be a growing global epidemic of anti-Muslim prejudice, in the context of how Baha’is view Islam. But a recent experience got me thinking about this issue in a new light.

My wife and I recently visited Boston on vacation, and stayed in a hotel in the area. The first morning we went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, and were waited on by a middle-aged blonde lady with an Eastern European-sounding accent. She had pale blue eyes and fair skin, with a wide smile that revealed a mouth full of straight, slightly yellowed teeth. She gushed over our kids and told us about her own son, now a teenager, who’d come to the US with her as a toddler about a decade ago. As we chatted, my wife spotted the tag on her lapel, “Enisa”, which sounded curiously close to the Arabic name of my wife’s late grandmother, who was from Iraq. It turned out the two names were, in fact, the same. Our blonde, blue-eyed waitress, as it turned out, was a Muslim woman who’d escaped Bosnia during the war in that country in the 1990s.

This encounter got me thinking about how many Muslim people we interact with in our everyday lives without so much as a thought about their religious background and upbringing. I wonder how many people who harbor ill-will and suspicion towards Muslims truly understand that, in all likelihood, they’re probably already friends with some Muslim person they regularly encounter at their office, their neighborhood cafe, their dry cleaner’s, or wherever.

The ultimate, slap-you-in-the-face example of this here in America is the popular medical advice guru and daytime TV heartthrob, Dr. Oz. I have no idea whatsoever as to Dr. Oz’s personal life or religious beliefs. But how many middle-aged soccer moms watching TV at home know that Dr. Oz’s first name, Mehmet, is the Turkish form of “Muhammad”? And if they did know, what exactly would it change?

Prejudice is easy when we assume the people we dislike are somewhere else. But more often than not, they live, work, and play right next to us. In fact, they may already be our friends.