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A generation of Muslim Americans has come of age in the shadow of 9/11
amid a climate of paranoia, verbal abuse and vandalism. Anna Fifield
reports
The
sound of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer rang out from the
unassuming mosque on Fifth Avenue, the main drag in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn,
one recent Friday lunchtime. “Hasten to the prayer, hasten to success,”
the voice intoned in Arabic.
Bearded men hurried to the mosque, which opened straight on to the
street, while one woman shrouded in black from head to toe yelled into
her cell phone, also in Arabic. Another, in more colourful hijab,
struggled in vain to divert her children’s attention as they passed a
shop whose cheap toys had spilled on to the road.
With
Ramadan approaching, the local Balady market displayed signs counting
down the days until the holy month of fasting began, as shoppers
navigated their trolleys around towers of imported dates and olive oil.
Nearby, a shop touted “fashionable Islamic clothing” and a restaurant
advertised “halal Chinese” – no pork, no alcohol. The scene could almost
have been one from Cairo or Damascus, except for the shops with ads for
phone cards in Spanish and the fact that the buses ran on time.
Bay Ridge is geographically close to the hipster Brooklyn
neighbourhoods of Park Slope and Williamsburg but could not be more
culturally different. It is a world away from the financial district in
Manhattan, the epicentre of the September 11 2001 attacks. But Brooklyn
is also home to the largest group of people in the US who trace their
lineage back to the Arab world, according to census data. And while the
heightened sense of a threat from Islamic terrorism that existed
post-attacks may have gone, it has given way to a persistent, low-level
paranoia that pervades the everyday lives of the million-plus Muslim
Arab Americans living here and throughout the country.
Islamophobia in the US is becoming entrenched, according to some
Muslim leaders. “We’re living in one of the most hostile civic
environments for the Muslim community,” says Faiza Ali, a community
organiser at the Arab American Association in Bay Ridge. “And it’s
gotten worse since 9/11.”
Hate-crime statistics collected by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation showed a sharp spike in violence against Muslims
after the 2001 attacks, which levelled out until 2009, when it started
ticking up again. There are always problems following events carried out
by Muslims, such as the
Boston Marathon bombings in March.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that in 2011,
21 per cent of the religion-based complaints it received were from
Muslims – although they comprise less than 1 per cent of the population.
Situated in an old doctors’ clinic, the
Arab American Association
provides advice on everything from immigration to health insurance. It
also fights practices it considers discriminatory, such as the New York
Police Department’s surveillance programme, revealed in 2011, under
which agents routinely observe Muslims going about their lives.
“Islamophobia has become institutionalised in New York – by our
police department, elected officials, politicians who are running for
office,” says Ali, a 28-year-old of Pakistani heritage, who became a
student activist after being harassed in the wake of the 2001 attacks.
“The environment is really difficult. It’s as if we are walking in a
city that is our home but feeling like we are strangers,” she says in
her office, where the walls are decorated with signs bearing slogans
such as “Praying while Muslim is NOT a crime!”
Examples
can be seen across the country. In New York, opposition has raged
against Muslim community centres such as the Park 51 centre planned for
near Ground Zero. In Florida, the pastor Terry Jones wants to burn
Korans. In Tennessee, vandalism and bomb threats greeted plans to open a
mosque in Murfreesboro. Then there are the attempts by state
legislators in North Carolina and Oklahoma, among others, to ban
recognition of sharia law.
“I feel like the anti-Muslim feeling has really become more
pronounced in the last few years,” says Moustafa Bayoumi, a literature
professor at Brooklyn College and author of the book
How Does it Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America.
He cites polls from The Washington Post and The Economist that found
that the number of people admitting to negative feelings towards Muslims
had risen from the 20 per cent bracket in 2002 to more than 50 per cent
by 2010.
When his book came out in 2009, Muslim readers told Bayoumi it
painted too positive a picture, so much had the environment changed in
the interim. It has since deteriorated further, he tells me as we sit in
a café selling organic chai lattes in the trendy Brooklyn neighbourhood
of Prospect Park. “It took a while for the narrative to take hold, that
Muslims were the enemy population,” he says.
This is despite the fact that Islamic terrorism is well down the list
of threats to life in the US. Thirty-three Americans were killed by
Muslim-American terrorists between the 2001 attacks and the end of last
year, according to Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the
University of North Carolina. Twice as many – 66 – were killed in mass
shootings by non-Muslims in 2012 alone.
The US has been through periods of hostility towards ethnic groups
many times before, for example towards German and Japanese Americans in
the middle of the last century. But these have been discrete periods in
history. There is no end in sight for the war on terror.
. . .
For me, this issue is personal. My son was born in America but has an
Arabic surname and is growing up bilingual, although we are not
religious in any direction. He has my lighter hair but his father’s
colouring. Once, in an airport, a woman asked me what he was “mixed
with”. A look that fell just short of horror passed over her face when I
replied, “Iraqi.” I shudder to think of my son being on the receiving
end of that look, just because of his name or the way his skin tans at
the merest hint of summer.
I am one of many parents who worry. Arwa Aziz, a 41-year-old mother
of two boys, moved her youngest son Adam, now 13, from public school to a
private Muslim school in Brooklyn because she was concerned about him
being bullied. “He got so shy as he was growing up, so I just thought he
would be better off there,” Aziz told me while we talked at the Arab
American Association, showing each other photos of our boys. “I tell my
kids that they’re second-generation Americans, I won’t let them make us
feel weak.”
Over
iced coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Fifth Avenue on a hot Saturday
afternoon, Naemah Hegazy and her cousin, Bouchra Tabit, lobbed back and
forth the observations of young women. Tabit joked about how she could
be Miss Morocco, if only she lost 50 pounds, while Hegazy showed her
funny posts on Facebook. When a Justin Timberlake song came on, they
broke out together in an unrestrained: “Cause I don’t wanna lose you
now, I’m lookin’ right at the other half of me.”
Hegazy, an 18-year-old of Egyptian and Moroccan descent, is studying
political science at a college just north of New York City, while Tabit,
two years her senior, has a part-time job at the local police station
but is studying to become a nurse.
Both can rattle off tales of petty harassment – such as being called a
terrorist and enduring “random” searches – that have been a constant
presence in their lives since 2001, when they were just children. “We
are singled out as a race,” Hegazy says, and Tabit chimes in about the
times she has been told to “go back to your own country”. Hegazy bursts
out: “This is not nobody’s country, yo.”
Many of the young Muslim Americans in Brooklyn can recount stories of
public accusations of being a terrorist, rocks being thrown through
their car windows, being targeted for “flying while Muslim”. Many know
someone who has answered a knock at the door and found the FBI.
More than one-third – 36 per cent – of the American Muslim population
is aged between 18 and 29, compared with just 22 per cent of the
general public, according to the Pew Research Center. That means that an
entire generation of Muslim Arab Americans has never known an adult
experience where 9/11 was not somewhere in the backdrop.
Some young Muslim Americans have tried to hide their faith, removing
any outward signs of Islam and changing their names. Mohammeds and
Osamas become Mo and Sam. Some hope people will mistake them for Puerto
Rican.
But academic research – including by Nadine Naber of the University
of Michigan and Lori Peek of Colorado State University – suggests that a
much larger number of young Muslim Americans have embraced their faith
and are standing their ground in the face of widespread hostility.
A Pew Center study published in 2007 found that Muslim Americans
under 30 were much more religiously observant than older Muslim
Americans, a trend that experts say has only become more entrenched.
Hegazy and Tabit are both defiantly proud of their religion. Tabit,
who has heavy black eye make-up underneath aviator glasses, advertises
her faith with a tight black hijab, which she began wearing a year ago.
“My friend’s mother died so I covered my head for the funeral, and I
just never took it off,” she says. “Before I had guys trying to talk to
me but now I don’t get much of that, so to me it’s about safety and
respect.”
Hegazy, who goes to mosque as much as she can and observes Ramadan,
plans to wear a headscarf one day. “I get a lot of questions like, ‘Why
don’t you wear the hijab?’” she says, describing the novelty of being
one of only five Arabs out of 1,300 students at her university. “I feel
like it’s a personal choice and it’s between me and God. When I’m ready I
will put it on but I’m not ready yet. It’s a lot of responsibility.”
. . .
Hegazy
was voted “most likely to have her own TV show” in her high-school
graduating class and dreams of being a political analyst on CNN or CBS.
Holding an imaginary microphone up to her mouth, she does a little
anchor-meets-rapper ditty. “Listen y’all don’t know, but Bill O’Reilly
has to go,” she sings, referring to the conservative Fox News host who
goes on regular rants about “Muslim jihadists”.
Tabit is assertive in other ways. She ticked the “African American”
box on her college application form because her family comes from
Morocco. “They told me I wasn’t black,” she says, giving a shrug.
Tabit’s mother Amina, who does not cover her hair, worries that her
daughter will only suffer more discrimination as a result of her
appearance, especially when she tries to get a job. “When she put on
hijab, I was scared. I worry it will create problems for her,” she says.
Amina’s fears are rooted in reality. Saher Selod, a sociologist at
Simmons College in Massachusetts, has done research on the
“de-Americanisation” of Muslims. “Women in hijab are more likely to be
targets for anti-Muslim ire, while it’s not usually until they give
their name that the questions start for men,” Selod says. “People start
wondering about their religion and what associations they might have.”
The prospect of being judged on their names plays on the minds of
Nasr al-Zindani and Oaday Musallam, hanging out at the Stadium hookah
lounge further up Fifth Avenue on a Saturday evening. Both sport
painstakingly styled beards and smoke a hookah or shisha water pipe
while watching
Prison Break.
“My name is Oaday!” exclaims Musallam, a 22-year-old of Palestinian
extraction who is now at business college and dreams of owning his own
company “so no one can boss me around”. He shares his name with one of
the sons of Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator. “I used to get a
lot of trouble for that in school. Lots of ‘Are you Saddam’s son?’” he
says.
In this environment of persistent unemployment, where there are many
times more overqualified candidates than job openings, they worry that
their names will count against them, that they won’t even get to an
interview.
“Yeah, I worry about that sometimes, that they’ll see my last name
and wonder about what connections we have,” says Zindani, who is 21 and
whose parents come from Yemen. “It’s all about security. That’s what we
love in America, that’s how it is.”
Zindani, who has just finished a degree in criminal justice, hopes to
get a job in law enforcement. “I want to be a cop,” he says between
puffs on mango-and-strawberry-flavoured tobacco. “I just want to get out
on the streets and clean the bad guys out.”
Both
men go on to recount a litany of occasions when they have been called
terrorists or “Ay-rabs”, or been “jumped” while on the street, or
verbally abused while working the counter in a deli.
Like Hegazy and Tabit, they don’t hesitate to defend themselves. “We
feel like it’s right, when they talk about our religion and our beliefs,
to defend ourselves, especially to people who we don’t know,” says
Musallam.
They take an equally pragmatic approach to the suspicion that they
automatically fall under. “There could be a lot of cops watching. They
could be watching us right now. But I don’t pay any attention to that.
If they do, they do. It’s not like I’m doing anything bad,” he says.
Like Musallam, Sadam Ali, who became the first Arab American to
represent the US in the Olympics when he boxed in Beijing in 2008, also
knows about having a difficult name.
“I like it because it’s a name that people don’t forget. I say, ‘Like
Saddam Hussein and Muhammad Ali’,” he says as he play-spars with his
five-year-old brother Adam at the boxing gym he started on Fifth Avenue.
“I wouldn’t change my name for the world. You shouldn’t be judged on
your name,” says Ali. “No matter what race you are, you can be
successful when you work hard for something.”
. . .
Although many of the young people of Bay Ridge profess pride in their
religion, the climate of suspicion about Islam is taking its toll on
young Muslim Americans. Research by psychologist Mona Amer of the
American University in Cairo and Joe Hovey of the University of Toledo
has found elevated levels of depression among Arab Americans, most of
them Muslim.
A quarter reported moderate to severe anxiety as a result of racial
profiling and discrimination, according to a study published in the
journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. The results were
especially striking given that admitting to mental health problems is
generally considered taboo in Muslim culture.
Sami
Nijam, a 15-year-old of Palestinian heritage, regularly gets called
“Bin Laden junior” or a “terrorist” at his Brooklyn high school. “It’s
supposed to be a joke but it gets to me a lot,” he says between shooting
hoops with his friends. “People want to think we’re all the same [as
the 9/11 bombers],” he shrugs.
For many in the post-September 11 generation, this suspicion about
Islam has coincided with the period in their lives when teenagers are
typically questioning their identity anyway. “There are a lot of
negative feelings in the air. How do you reconcile all of these things
about who you are suspected of being with who you know you are not?”
asks Bayoumi. “That’s a difficult environment for anyone, let alone a
14-year-old, and it certainly contributes to their sense of frustration,
or alienation.”
Many young Muslims have responded by seeking solace from their peers.
There has been a sharp increase in Muslim students’ associations at
universities, such as the Brooklyn College Islamic Society, which was
targeted by the NYPD. Membership has doubled to almost 1,200 in the past
three years. “They use the associations to find out who they are, a lot
of that borne out of anxiety about being seen as unhuman,” says
Bayoumi, who has become something of a one-man complaints department for
Muslim students at the college.
. . .
The huge, four-storey Muslim American Society in Bensonhurst, an old
wedding hall located between a police station and a playground, has also
seen an increase in membership in recent years. The centre was a hive
of activity one recent weekend. There was a big pre-Ramadan celebration
on Saturday night, with a packed schedule of speakers and a dinner, and
on Sunday the hall on the fourth floor was being festooned for a bridal
shower.
Next
door, a bunch of women were jumping and kicking their way through a
boot camp class, enjoying the opportunity to shut the door and take off
their headscarves. In the basement, a group of teenage boys were busily
repainting the classrooms where Arabic and Koran lessons take place
under the tutelage of Mohammed Almathil, the centre’s executive
director. The noticeboard in the lobby advertised karate classes,
football leagues and Girl Scouts.
The number of people attending Friday prayers at the centre has risen
from about 200 at the beginning of 2011 to as many as 330 by the end of
last year, according to Almathil, a Yemeni American who wears a short
beard and a kufi, a small skullcap. Almost all of the increase has been
driven by university students and young professionals. “The number one
reason is that people are coming together for the comfort and
spirituality, to help them deal with their daily stresses,” he says.
Almathil, who has a degree in psychology, says that institutionalised
Islamophobia is causing some young Muslims to lash out on social media,
while others respond by cutting themselves off from society. “They feel
like they are being put under a lot of pressure so they are isolating
or restricting themselves somehow,” he says.
Aber Kawas is a member of the Muslim Students’ Association at City
College in Manhattan but calls the Muslim American Society her second
home. “Young people feel like they are being attacked, like people don’t
understand their way of life. Muslim kids become more into their
identity in college and they flock together,” she says. “That happened
to me. I would go to the MSA because it was comfortable.”
Kawas, known as Abby, is the American-born daughter of Palestinian
immigrant parents, whose life was turned upside down after the September
attacks. Her father got caught up in the law enforcement authorities’
terrorism fishing expeditions, leading to him being deported – even
though he was never found to have been involved in anything related to
terrorism.
Yet Kawas seldom stops smiling out from her tightly wrapped red
headscarf. At her house, she tells me how she loves Jane Austen. She has
read
Pride and Prejudice more times than she can remember, not
to mention watching the screen adaptations. “It’s just like our lives –
we have social interaction but there’s no dating,” she says. “I feel
like a Muslim Elizabeth Bennet.”
Then,
down at the Muslim American Society, she invokes another British period
drama to explain why she feels so comfortable there. “It’s just like
that scene from
Downton Abbey,” she says. “You know, when the
rich people were sitting around with each other and they said, ‘Isn’t it
so much easier when you don’t have to explain yourself?’”
Community organisers such as Faiza Ali have noticed that the climate
of intolerance has essentially led young Muslim Americans to put
themselves in self-imposed quarantine. They fear the impact that this
will have on the development of civil society. “It’s scary when you
think about the impact that this is going to have on future generations
of activists,” Ali says. “If people are afraid to speak out now when
they are in high school or college, what does this mean for the social
justice movement?”
Others fear that society’s alienation of young Muslim Americans will
contribute to some going off the rails. No one is drawing a direct line
between membership of community organisations and young people being
radicalised. But some wonder whether the alienation of a whole segment
of society will tip those prone to radicalisation over the edge.
Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington
think-tank, says the climate of suspicion creates a risk of instilling
an “us and them” mindset in young Muslims. “What does all this do to
their development and psyche, if they’re thinking, ‘They don’t want me
here?’” he adds. A Maronite Christian whose family comes from Lebanon,
Zogby has been the subject of headlines intended to associate him with
extremists.
For her part, Kawas is conscious of the need to become part of her wider world, not just her
Downton Abbey
equivalent set. As we climb the stairs at the Muslim American
Association, she looks at me and says: “If we all stay together all the
time, people will never get to know us.”
