Rutgers Islamic Student Center Vandalized During Eid Al-Fitr

The chair of the student center’s board said the vandalism was “undoubtedly fueled by Islamophobia.”

An Islamic student center at Rutgers was broken into and vandalized early Wednesday morning, and the intruder or intruders smashed religious items and TVs and ripped down a Palestinian flag, according to a chaplain at the school.

A video of the damage, shared with HuffPost, showed broken glass covering the floor of the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, or “CILRU.” The break-in occurred on Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan and began Tuesday night.

“This is a day in which we keep saying Allahu Akbar, ‘God is greater.’ So someone might want to trash our building, but they can’t trash our will or our hearts,” Kaiser Aslam, the Muslim chaplain at Rutgers, told HuffPost over the phone Wednesday. “We’re grateful no one got hurt in this incident, and we’re going to build back in a better way than it was.”

Aslam said the vandal or vandals destroyed religious items, including a plaque with the phrase Masha Allah — Arabic for “by the will of God” — but also that televisions in the building and even Star Wars figurines in his office had also been destroyed. Though most destroyed items were left on the floor, he said he had still not been able to find a Palestinian flag that had been ripped off of a flagpole inside the building.

An email alert from Rutgers University said campus police were investigating “a burglary, criminal mischief, and bias crime,” which reportedly occurred overnight, around 4:30 a.m. Wednesday morning. Jonathan Holloway, the university’s president, said in an email to students that the incident was “an affront to our values as a community.”