(Politico) Selaedin Maksut didn’t expect anything specific to come out of his meeting late last year with then-state Sen.-elect Ed Durr after an anti-Muslim tweet of Durr’s surfaced.
But what was initially planned as a meeting to explain Islam to Durr — who in the 2019 tweet denounced it as a “false religion” and “cult of hate” — turned into something more. It made Durr an ally to one of the major causes of the Council on American-Islamic Relations: getting the Islamic holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha officially recognized in New Jersey, just like some major Christian and Jewish holidays.
Maksut, who leads the council’s New Jersey branch, said that during the November meeting, he explained the effort to Durr to give the newly elected Republican lawmaker an idea of what his group does.
