Press Room

AAI in the News

Muslims feel sting of distrust

By Gregg Krupa
The Detroit News
Posted on Friday September 8, 2006

Many have sense of intolerance by the way society views them, mixed with a feeling of uncertainty.

Siham Awada Jaafer is American, through and through. Born and raised in Metro Detroit, she and her husband are proud citizens, living red, white and blue lives of aspiration and duty.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Jaafer was angry at the terrorists who attacked her country. Her resentment has only grown.

“I was angry at first because it occurred on our turf, in our country,” said Jaafer, an Arab-American. “Now, we are in danger because of the terrorists, and we are also suspected of being them.”

Local Muslims and Arab-Americans hoped that, by now, discrimination and harassment would have ebbed. Instead, they say, things have only gotten worse. Each new event involving extremist Muslims—like the recent terrorism charges in Great Britain and the Israeli war against Hezbollah—increases misgivings about local Muslims. From hassles at the airport, to delayed citizenship, to verbal taunts, local Muslims, including South Asians and Arabs, say they feel increasingly segregated.

They remind people that almost 300 Muslims also died in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and wonder when will it be time for followers of Islam and Arab-Americans to be fully accepted as Americans?

“There is a deep sense of uncertainty that faces the community,” said Saaed Khan of Rochester Hills, an adjunct professor of Near East Asian studies at Henry Ford Community College. “Many Muslim Americans feel a double sense of siege, one by the terrorists and the other is the way the society views them.”

Intolerance hasn’t ebbed

Evidence of intolerance abounds. A Quinnipiac University poll Aug. 29 revealed that American voters say, by 60 percent to 30 percent, that authorities should single out people who look “Middle Eastern” for security measures. Only 6 percent of Americans have a positive first impression of Muslims, according to a poll conducted last year for the Council on American Islamic Relations Research Center, and about 20 percent admit to being intolerant of Muslims.

Anecdotes also are plentiful. Taxi drivers of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent in Metro Detroit describe the scorn and derision of passengers, who sometimes holler epithets at them and refuse to pay fares.

“Nothing in the centuries before or in the centuries to come will impact us as much as 9/11 did,” said Abed Hammoud, a local activist. “It made the average American—who is my friend, who likes me—look at me and say, ‘You know, that is a nice guy, but I am surprised that he can support terrorism.’”

Those who study Muslims and Arab-Americans say that even the efforts by President Bush and others in the wake of Sept. 11 to proclaim Islam a religion of peace and tolerance seem to have backfired.

“If they don’t constantly go around and say they love America and hate Osama bin laden, then people are suspecting them,” said Ronald Stockton, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. “The Islamic Web sites are just constantly renouncing the people who do these terrible things, and yet the average person just doesn’t know that, and they keep saying, ‘Why aren’t the Muslims denouncing these things?’ ”

At the Islamic Center of America on Ford Road, Imam Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini frequently reminds congregants that Muslims are freer to practice their religion in America than elsewhere, and that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance in which the terrorists have no place. Qazwini calls the attacks “barbaric by all standards.”

But he also says he is concerned that America may be losing some of its values and freedoms, especially with the calls for the wholesale deportation of Muslims when surveys suggest that more than 50 percent of them were born in the United States.

“It is their soil,” he said. “It is their country to which they pay allegiance and which they adore.”

And when it comes to complex international affairs, like supporting the plight of the Palestinians and reacting to what many call Israeli aggression in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories, Muslims and Arab-Americans feel that their positions are discounted amid taunts that they are allied with terrorists.

But there remains some cause for encouragement. New alliances with other communities, in politics, in the media and among advocates for civil liberties are hopeful signs that provide some degree of confidence.

“You feel the goodness of the nation there,” said Imad Hamad, regional director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “I believe this goodness will prevail. But sometimes my heart is heavy.”

Trying to overcome bias

Hamad and other Arab-American and Muslim leaders say that if the attacks had occurred a decade or two earlier, the emergent Arab and Muslim communities may have been decimated. Instead, they have benefited in five years from strong social and political organizations and from outreach.

“I agree that 9/11 created problems for the community and law enforcement over-reached, I think,” said James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute. “But because we’ve matured and have developed relationships we are not alone in facing those challenges.”

And the challenges are likely to continue for some time. Many say all they hope for is good will from fellow Americans.

“I think the media after 9/11 was obviously concentrating on the threat of terror,” said Tarek Baydoun, president of the student government at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. “But a lot of our leaders did get exposure and were able to reiterate that Muslims and Arabs in America and around the world don’t support terrorism.

“I just don’t know if that can counteract the whole bias against the community. When there is a threat, people are more willing to stigmatize.”