The secret costs of Islamophobia
Muslims live in fear that they will be attacked. Americans live in fear that Muslims will attack them
Daniel Burke
I am an American, I grew up here. I say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, Aleena Khan told the President. And yet, I am a Muslim.
Which one, she asked, is she allowed to be?
This series will explore the lives of Muslims in the age of ISIS and Islamophobia.
Aleena is 17, with a bright smile and dark hair that sweeps across her shoulders. Her mother is Indian-American, her father emigrated from Pakistan. Aleena and her two sisters have lived in Maryland their whole lives.
Last year, as part of an honors research project on identity crises among Muslim-American teenagers, Aleena spent hours online combing through public comments on news articles about Muslims. What she read shocked her.
Kick them all out and put the rest in detainment camps. Enough with the PC feces, said one commenter.
The only peaceful and moderate Muslims are the dead ones, said another.
The tweet from the man wearing military camouflage was the worst, Aleena said. Hard to tell what we should build first. A border wall or a gas chamber for Muslims.
Aleena sat on the floor of her room, stunned. These people were talking about her mother, her father, her sisters, her cousins, her friends. They were talking about her. If it were just one comment, she could ignore it. But there were so many.
This is what people think about me? she wondered. If I go out and say Im Muslim will my friends still be my friends? Will people like me anymore?
She texted her best friend, Haley, telling her what people were saying about Muslims. People are ignorant, Haley answered.
Its difficult to measure a sentiment such as Islamophobia, the word for hatred and fear of Muslims. But its also hard to escape the idea that living in America today is like watching comment sections spring to lurid life. The anti-Muslim rallies, the vicious hate crimes, the racial profiling, the threats and taunts and questions about divided loyalties.
Scholars say Islamophobia seems to surge after attacks by Muslim extremists and during presidential campaigns, when candidates pledge to get tough on terrorists, often by singling out Muslims. This week, a Muslim man was charged with detonating bombs in New York and New Jersey and another was accused of stabbing 10 people in Minnesota. Shortly after, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump urged local police officers to profile suspicious people, like they do in Israel.
Do we really have a choice? Trump said. Were trying to be so politically correct in our country, and this is only going to get worse.
Even before the recent attacks, American Muslims say they live under a dark cloud of suspicion. In 2014, they surpassed atheists as the countrys least accepted religious group.
An estimated 3.3 million Muslims live in the United States, and between September 11, 2001 and the end of last year, 344 have been involved in violent extremism, according to the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. That number does not include attacks from this year, such as the shooting at an Orlando nightclub by Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people.
Still, violent extremists are outnumbered nearly 10,000 to 1 in the United States, which means that Omar Mateen is not the norm. Aleena Khan is.
Aleena graduated from Northwest High School in Germantown, where she gave tours to guests, was a member of four honor societies and ran the Green Club with her friend Haley, helping the school earn Green Ribbon environmental status a nationally recognized thing, she says with a smidge of satisfaction. One of the few clubs she didnt join is the Muslim Student Association, though she regularly reads the Quran and attends religious classes and Friday prayers at a local mosque. I didnt want to separate myself from the rest of my classmates, she said.
In her free time, Aleena has tutored young children, interned at a Christian clothing website and volunteered for a company that helps poor and abused women sell handmade wares. This fall, she began her freshman year at George Washington University in Washington, where she plans to study public policy. She hopes, one day, to improve the foster care system, a goal inspired by a recent documentary.
But being a Muslim in America hasnt been easy, Aleena says, even before the recent rash of Islamophobia.
Theres the annual Ramadan challenge, which means skipping lunch with classmates and fasting from water during the dog days of summer. Shes doesnt wear shorts, tank tops or bikinis, though many of her friends do. Dating is discouraged, and her parents forbade her from attending the school prom. Friends tried to cheer her up, insisting the dance wasnt that fun, but Aleena saw the pictures, and it sure looked fun.
If Aleena were an Orthodox Jew or conservative Christian, she might yield to similar restrictions and feel like she was swimming against a cultural riptide. But few would question her American identity or allegiance.
Aleena wrote her letter to Obama on February 3, the day of his first visit to an American mosque as President, a date many Muslims believe was too long in coming. She thanked Obama for his faith in Muslim-Americans. It was like an oxygen tank, she told the President, allowing her to breathe a big sigh of relief.
But even with Obamas encouragement, Aleena held some doubts. Will other Americans really accept her, especially when the country seems so anxious and angry?
Muslims live in fear that they will be attacked, she wrote in her honors project. Americans live in fear that Muslims will attack them.
After submitting her letter through the White House website, Aleena felt silly, believing no one would read it. She deleted it from her computer and forgot about it.
So what? Theyre Muslim
Most Americans dont actually know any Muslims at least, not personally.
More than 6 in 10 have seldom or never had a conversation with a Muslim, according to a study conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute. Most Americans also say they know little (57%) or nothing at all (26%) about Islam.
Those numbers have barely budged in 30 years, even after 9/11, two American-led wars in Muslim-majority countries, local and national outreach campaigns by Muslim mosques and organizations, dozens of terrorist attacks worldwide, high-profile congressional hearings and copious media coverage of Islam. All of which suggests that Americans are not just widely ignorant about Islam and Muslims, they are also oddly incurious.
Few things are more frightening than ignorance in action, to paraphrase a German poet.
Muslims have been shot and killed, execution-style, in their living rooms and outside of their mosques. They have been fatally stabbed on their way home. They have been beaten in their stores, in their schools and on the streets. They have been kicked off airplanes, egged outside Walmart, scorched with hot coffee in a park, shot in cabs and punched while pushing their children in strollers. Their clothes have been set on fire and their children have been bullied. Men have come to their door and told them that they would burn down their house if they did not move away. They have been fired for wearing hijabs and for praying. They have seen their cemeteries vandalized and their Quran desecrated. A Muslim congressman has received death threats, and business owners have posted signs advertising Muslim-free zones.
Heavily armed men have protested outside mosques in Texas and Arizona, arguing that its their patriotic duty to protect the country from Islam.
People have covered the doors of a mosque with feces and torn pages of the Quran, left a severed pigs head outside a mosque, firebombed mosques, urinated on mosques, spray-painted the Star of David and satanic symbols on mosques, carved swastikas and crude drawings of penises into signs at mosques, set fire to mosques, threatened to blow up mosques and kill you Muslim f****, fired rounds from high-powered rifles into mosques, wrapped bacon around the door handles of mosques, left hoax bombs and fake grenades at mosques, threatened to decapitate congregants at mosques, sent suspicious substances to mosques, written notes saying, We hate you, We will burn all of you and Leave our country to mosques, rammed a tractor-trailer into a mosque, thrown bricks and stones through the windows of mosques, pelted Muslims with rocks as they left mosques and stood outside mosques shouting, How many of you Muslims are terrorists?
American Muslims have been told that a mosque, unlike churches and synagogues, cannot serve as an election polling station. Dozens of communities have fought to keep Muslims from building mosques in their neighborhoods, sometimes threatening violence.
From 2001 to 2014, there were 2,288 anti-Islamic incidents targeting 2,745 Muslims, according to the FBI. Statistics for 2015 will not be released until November. A study conducted by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, however, projects that anti-Muslim hate crimes surged nearly 70% last year, reaching a level of violence not seen since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. And many Muslim activists believe hate crimes are underreported by victims and not pursued vigorously by police and prosecutors. This year, the FBI has begun counting anti-Arab incidents as well.
Politicians have claimed that 85% of mosques are controlled by Islamic extremists and that Islam is a political system, not a religion, and thus not protected by the First Amendment. They have threatened to arrest every Muslim that comes across the state line and pledged to bar Muslim refugees from the country. They have sanctioned spying on mosques without warrants and the racial profiling of Muslim communities. They have accused Muslims of launching a civilizational jihad and called Islam a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out. They have shut down schools over lessons on Islam and called innocuous school materials dangerous propaganda. More than 30 states have considered bills to protect their civil courts from Islamic law, and nine states (Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee) enacted the bans. They have said Muslims cannot be president of the United States. They have said Muslims should not be here at all.
Challenged about Trumps proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States, his spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, said, So what? Theyre Muslim.
A coterie of well-funded pundits and self-proclaimed experts encourage Americans to fear all Muslims and the creeping influence of Islamic law in the United States. They cast Muslims as enemies among us, Trojan horses for an insurgency that will topple the republic and conquer its citizens.
Even many liberal politicians, while insisting most Muslims are peaceful, only mention Islam when speaking about national security and countering violent extremism.
Islam is not thought of as American religion, said Zareena Grewal, a professor of religious studies at Yale University, however much Muslim-Americans wish that to be true.
In 2011, more than half of American Muslims under 30 said they had been treated with suspicion, called offensive names, singled out by law enforcement or been physically threatened in the preceding year alone, according to a Pew Center report.
Asad Tarsin, a writer and doctor, lives in California with his wife and three young children.
I know that they will be integrated in America and fully accept their American identity. My question is whether America will fully accept them.
The Mohammedan world
Islamophobia didnt start on September 11. Its intricately entwined with Americas oldest idea: that this land is, and should always be, a white Christian nation.
Well before the Pilgrims landed in New Jerusalem, Columbus had set sail on a mission to find riches to retake old Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire. Centuries later, when Colonists sought to unite the states, anti-federalists railed against the Constitution. Nothing in the new document, they fumed, would prevent a Muslim (or a Catholic) from becoming president.
The first Muslims to arrive en masse came in chains. Scholars estimate that some 10,000 to 20,000 slaves from West Africa were Muslims. A few were granted preferential treatment because they could read and write Arabic, and looked whiter than other slaves. They were paraded across the country like prized pets, until they started advocating for their emancipation.
Such is the bloodthirsty, tyrannical Mahometan negro, who is now travelling himself and suite, up and down through the free states in pomp, with the Presidents passport in his pocket, snarled one Southern newspaper about a Muslim slave freed by President John Adams. CNN
