A Separate Peace

Durriya Syed noticed that some of her Sunday school children at the SALAM Center were unable to talk about the events of September 11 in its immediate aftermath. They had seen the planes crash and burn so many times on television that sometimes they didn’t know whether they were seeing the same tragedy repeated, or new tragedies occurring one after another.

Syed’s 14-year-old son Zaki, and her 12-year-old daughter Tanya sat with their parents in front of the television and cried over the images of the World Trade Center towers, the planes, and the rescue crews. What grieved them the most were the reports of the children who’d lost their parents.

The family also had to deal with the fact that the terrorists were Muslim, and so were they. Though they feared random retaliation, they were determined to do something patriotic that offered peace and support to the people of New York City. And as the families of SALAM began formulating ideas on how to help, the families of Sacramento’s Spiritual Life Center, a Christian-based faith group in Sacramento, began looking for ways to help them.

Before noon prayers one Sunday after the attacks, children and parents from the Spiritual Life Center visited SALAM’s Sunday school. (“Salam” translates as “peace” but also acts as an acronym for the Sacramento League of Associated Muslims). The members of the center brought a small hollow globe covered in hearts and peace signs with Band-Aid over the areas of the world bruised by conflict. There was a Band-Aid for New York, and one for Washington, D.C., and another for the Holy Land. They set the globe, which had been filled with scraps of paper bearing blessings and pictures, into the arms of a Muslim infant lying in its cradle. One of the women of SALAM stepped forward to say that the gesture was all she needed to feel safe in Sacramento.

Syed knew that if local faith groups could comfort one another in this way, SALAM’s children could comfort the people of New York City as well.

A SALAM member had recently found a quilt made up of interlocking diamonds, some of red and white stripes, some of white stars on blue backgrounds and some of plain white, and the Sunday school children began preparing messages they wanted to share with the victims. They stenciled “God Bless America” into some of the white diamonds, and the children filled the rest with their own words: “I feel bad for what happened,” and “God bless” and “United we stand.”

Tanya, Syed’s daughter, remembered her message a year later: “No matter of faith, race or color, we are all united under the American flag.”

The quilt, once finished, was carried to the New York Public Library, where it will hang throughout the month of September. They chose a quilt, said Syed, because quilt-making is an art form in every culture, and is universally a symbol of warmth and comfort. Through formulating their own ideas about the tragedies and sending messages of patriotism and peace, the children had meant to cheer those grieving in New York, but they managed to cheer themselves up as well.

When asked recently how many of them felt better after working on the quilt, almost every child in SALAM’s Sunday school raised a hand.

Though the true victims of September 11 were those who lost their lives, or lost friends and family members in the attacks, or perhaps those on the East Coast living with a kind of walking shell shock for months afterwards, communities in and around Sacramento entered a kind of collective grieving process that seemed to unite them against one enemy: the terrorists.

But the face of the terrorists, for some, resembled the faces of innocent Muslim-Americans, who, even in Sacramento, had to protect themselves against retaliatory aggression. It was sometimes difficult to remember that the Muslims were grieving with the rest of us, even if they weren’t protesting at the Memorial Auditorium or plastering huge American flags on their trucks. It’s true, they were not the most vocal ones crying for vengeance on local radio talk shows or suggesting that America should just bomb the whole Arab world, but that did not mean they were unmoved.

Many Muslims who mourned with the rest of the country slipped out of public view for fear of hate crimes against them. Some simply got on planes and disappeared. Muslims that were here illegally submitted to questioning by the FBI and the INS. Some were ordered deported. Others were asked to become snitches and report back on any suspicious activity within their mosques.

Yet at the same time members of Sacramento’s Muslim mosques got together to donate more than $10,000 to the September 11 Fund, and others donated money privately or gave blood. They published messages of solidarity and grief on their Web sites, held public memorials and worked tirelessly to educate non-Muslims on the peaceful traditions of Islam. Many of them said publicly and loudly that they were proud Americans.

The year since September 11 has been different for each of them, but in the stories Muslim Sacramentans remember from the past year, patterns emerge, and the most memorable of their experiences seem to align with what Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross called the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.

But the Muslim community was not only grieving for the victims of September 11. They considered their grief three-fold. Like all Americans, they grieved over the extreme loss of life on the East Coast. But as members of a worldwide religious community, they also grieved separately for Muslims who died in the attacks. Thirdly, they mourned for their own lost sense of safety in America. This would prove to be the hardest kind of grief to get over. As the shock wore off, and many people returned to their normal lives, Muslim-Americans remained on alert, their relationships with their neighbors, with the authorities and with their own faith permanently altered.

Denial: Stunned by news of the tragedy, many couldn’t believe that Muslims were responsible for such an unparalleled act of violence.

Many Muslims who discuss the events of September 11 will quickly get around to mentioning Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing, which was, until September 11, the most horrific act of terrorism ever committed on American soil.

The discussion in general may start with stories of women in their hijab (headscarves that also cover the neck and shoulders) perpetually walking in pairs to protect themselves from strangers yelling curses, or it might float into a careful criticism of American foreign policy in the Middle East, but eventually, the conversation will turn to McVeigh, the “blue-eyed Christian,” who was responsible for the deaths of 168 people, 19 of which were children.

Shortly after that act in 1995, “Islamic terrorists” were at the top of the list of possible perpetrators of that crime, and American Muslims found themselves the unwilling peers of an imaginary Middle-Eastern demon. But McVeigh was neither Middle-Eastern nor Muslim, and the Muslim community hoped that this would be the case again on September 11.

Sociology professor Ayad Al-Qazzaz, who teaches at CSUS, tried to explain the connection.

“The Muslim community, in the first three days,” he said, with a characteristic precision, “didn’t really believe in the beginning that it was done by bin Laden or by Muslim groups or by Middle-Eastern groups … the Oklahoma example was behind them, and this is what supported, basically, their denial.”

Some listened to early news reports and were struck by the quick assumption that Muslims were guilty. It provided further evidence that they’d again be the preferred scapegoat. Even when names like bin Laden began to emerge, they simply couldn’t believe that Muslims could have planned and executed such an attack.

“The magnitude of the event itself made many of us believe that this incident is not the product of people of Middle East or Muslim origin,” said Al-Qazzaz. “They don’t have the technical know-how; they don’t have the skills.”

As a sociologist, Al-Qazzaz relies on facts and figures to make his point, comparing bin Laden, “a guy who probably has 300 million dollars” with the U.S. intelligence agencies he had to outsmart, and finding him lacking. “He’s rich, but it doesn’t mean much when you talk of the CIA, which has 40 billion dollars.”

Though one might expect skepticism in the academic community, other Muslims echoed Al-Qazzaz’s sentiments.

Muslims can’t even get to parties on time, one woman joked. How could they manage those attacks?

Secondarily, it was very difficult for Muslim-Americans, who consider Islam a peaceful religion, to accept that one of Islam’s followers could have been so violent. The attacks proved that violent, extremist groups existed, but they didn’t want other Americans to assume that Islam itself supported violence.

“The argument,” said Al-Qazzaz, “is that you are going to find in any religion, every society and every faith, bad apples. They are extremists. Some of them are criminals. Some of them are deviant. But you cannot project [the beliefs of] this small group on the majority of the people.”

But some non-Muslims in Sacramento did just that, leading to the circulation of frightening stories of women in hijab being chased out of malls and driven off the roads.

Reem Awad-Rashmawi, a Sacramento attorney who handles a number of Arab clients, noted that members of her community generally responded to the backlash against Muslims in one of two ways. One group became active advocates, insisting that Islam was a religion of peace. Occasionally they suggested that Arabs wouldn’t have gotten violent if American involvement in the Middle East hadn’t cost so many lives and led to increased instability in the region. This same group may go on to insist that we still don’t know the truth behind the attacks, and that other groups or governments may have been involved, only using Muslim extremists to do their dirty work.

Al-Qazzaz would probably fit into this category.

“Don’t you wonder,” he asked, “why we haven’t had an open hearing?”

The other group, Awad-Rashmawi noticed, are so grieved by the attacks and so fearful of a backlash that they not only deny any connection to extremist Muslim groups, but by altering their actions or their appearance, they deny having any connection with Islam at all.

Those who were very proud of their identity as good Muslims began to reassess the messages their appearance sent to their non-Muslim neighbors. Some stopped going out in traditional clothing. For women, the hijab was the ultimate sign of a good and modest Muslim woman. Not to wear it was a very serious and sobering statement.

“Some people are trying to become more American,” said Awad-Rashmawi.

Al-Qazzaz knows of one man who changed his name to something less Middle-Eastern, and some Mulsims even stopped attending their mosques for fear of looking suspicious. As a sociologist, Al-Qazzaz understands the difficulty of their positions.

“The new reality,” he said, “whether we like it or not, is that people are going to suspect people of Middle-Eastern origin, people of Muslim faith … a lot of law, that’s supposed to be directed to everybody, is going to be applied especially to them.”

As the months passed, and Al Qaeda became the focus of a worldwide investigation, even those who had denied Muslim involvement in the first days had to face that this was not another Oklahoma City.

Anger: Many of Sacramento’s Muslims were furious at the attackers and at the tragic loss of life, but some of their anger was reserved for those in the non-Muslim community who blamed all Muslims for the acts of a few.

On September 11, Basma Marmosh, the secretary of California State University, Sacramento’s (CSUS) Muslim Students Association (MSA), was surprised when her father told her that she would not be going to school that day.

“Something’s happened,” he said.

Chilled by the terrorist attacks, Marmosh quickly remembered the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. She’d been walking through the mall back then, dressed in hijab, when a stranger approached her.

“Go back home, terrorist!” he yelled. “We don’t need your type here!”

Marmosh, shocked and deeply confused, retreated quickly into a store and called her father. He had used the same phrase: Something’s happened. He said he would come and pick her up. She was not to leave the store.

On September 11, the cursing and the yelling began again. For some grieving Americans, anyone with dark skin could be labeled a terrorist.

Marmosh blamed the media and blockbuster action movies for offering up nothing but stereotypes that suggested all Muslims were equally violent. Not only did this mindset devalue the grief of Muslim-Americans, it also threatened to ignite violence against them.

Look how Muslims are portrayed, she said. “They’re stupid, they love to play with bombs and kill people in God’s name … Allah. When people hear that word, that’s the first thing that comes to mind.”

Realizing that non-Muslims needed a quick debriefing on the beliefs of Islam, Marmosh and the MSA became increasingly active on campus, trying to dispel myths about Islam as they cropped up.

During an on-campus art exhibit, where she and three of her male Muslim friends were answering students’ questions, a white woman in her 30s approached Marmosh and asked her whether it was true that all Islamic men were rapists.

The three Muslim men next to Marmosh were stunned into silence. She tried to explain that whatever the woman had heard in the media about one Muslim wasn’t necessarily true of all of them. The woman apparently accepted this explanation and then asked a second question: Is it true that all Muslim women go through genital mutilation?

People can’t distinguish between religion and culture, said Marmosh. It’s one of her biggest pet peeves. Islam, as a religion, is shared by many different cultures. There are African-American Muslims, South Asian Muslims from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and Arab Muslims from the 22 Middle-Eastern countries that make up the Arab world. A separate group define themselves as Iranian Muslims.

Marmosh has heard the refrain many times from white Americans ignorant about the Middle East: We should just bomb them all.

Sympathetic towards the families of the dead and the firemen and policemen who gave their lives, but unapologetic, Marmosh said she’s tired of hearing that every Muslim should feel some kind of personal responsibility or some guilt.

She asked: Did we decide all Christian males were terrorists after Oklahoma City?

Bargaining: Faced with the fear of random retaliation against their mosques, families, themselves, Muslims began to offer up their religious practices for scrutiny, hoping to defeat the ignorance that threatened to lead to violence. They also offered themselves up to the authorities.

A dozen women lined up in their stocking feet, as they do five times a day, facing a plain, nondescript wall. Shrouded in dark clothing, topped by multi-colored scarves, they stood shoulder to shoulder and bowed in unison. Through a speaker bolted above, a deep, slightly raspy voice melodically recited in Arabic: “I bare witness. There is only one God, creator of heaven and earth.”

In a larger room, just on the other side of the wall, perhaps 50 men faced the same direction, towards the city of Mecca.

All together, they lowered themselves to their knees and touched their heads to the floor, prostrating before God.

Before September 11, few non-Muslims had observed such ceremonies locally. But after 9/11, the mosques opened their doors to anyone who was curious.

“It is not permissible for a Muslim to have estranged relations with his brother beyond three nights,” said a poster on the wall. “The better of the two is one who is the first to give a greeting.”

Brother Farouk Fakira, the president of Masjid Annur Islamic Center, sat in a sparse back room of the center. In a voice so measured and warm it was almost hypnotic, he said graciously, “We are really at fault to start with.”

This one statement seemed to reference the lack of knowledge behind the few threatening phone calls the mosque received in the first couple months after the attacks.

“We’ll burn you, burn your mosque, burn your families, burn your houses, kill your kids,” Fakira quoted a caller.

“People have this ignorance about us,” he said, “because we just never thought that it was important for us to say, ‘Hey, come here. Join us. Welcome. Come and have barbecue with us.’ …We didn’t go out of our way to destroy that mystery.”

In a time when many Muslims were still praying at home, saddened and afraid that their mosques would be targets of violence, Fakira chose to put ads in the daily newspaper and invite all Sacramentans to observe as his congregation bowed to the wall and recited the prayers that bound them daily to Allah—the same God that Christians and Jews worship.

What the visitors found, according to Fakira, was a very peaceful scene. That was his favorite word to describe prayer services: peaceful.

The mosque has since been something of an educational center for non-Muslims. Students from the colleges have come to gather material for their papers, and television crews have brought their cameras in to film. The mosque has held three open houses, and a fourth is planned for September 11.

At the price of autonomy, the mosque has bargained for a safer, more integrated presence in its surrounding community.

Awad-Rashmawi, a local attorney, has seen a different kind of bargaining going on. In her practice, she often defends Arabs who have lost their immigration status.

She gives as an example a man who came on a student visa, completed his education and then accepted a job without ever being asked about his status. Another person, she said, worked for a company that didn’t know it had to renew his work visa. Yet another person didn’t know the ins and outs of immigration law and had filed too late for asylum. Another hadn’t reported his change of address, which was now, possibly, a deportable offense.

Their fear of being labeled terrorists made them sitting ducks. When asked to come in for questioning by the FBI and INS, at least half a dozen of her Arab clients waved their right to have an attorney present during questioning. Otherwise, it might have looked as if they had something to hide.

The same clients described to her a process in which the FBI or CIA asked them to identify the Middle-Eastern men in a few pictures. They were asked where their money went and how they earned it, and they were asked to turn over any information they had regarding suspicious activity in their communities—sometimes in exchange for adjusted immigration status. Even though some of her clients are willing to bargain, she says they have nothing to offer.

“Everyone who called me says, ‘I have nothing to tell them. What am I supposed to do? I’d love to have my immigration papers fixed, but, you know, there’s nothing going on.’ ”

Depression: [While adjusting to a new reality, post-September 11, many in the Muslim community showed signs of depression and malaise.

Basma Marmosh remembers the eerie sorrow that settled on the community after September 11. People didn’t go out as much, she said. She knew lots of people who had family in New York City that they worried about, friends in D.C. who might have been too close to the Pentagon.

“Have you heard from so and so?” she remembers people whispering. “I’m worried,” they would say.

A few female Muslim students simply left their college classes and did not return.

Other Muslim-Americans bowed to public opinion and accepted the detainments and deportations. If he worked for the FBI, said one member of Masjid Annur Islamic Center, he would respond the same way the FBI did. The community should simply submit to any investigations and try to understand.

Some of those who were ordered deported simply left, even when, according to attorney Awad-Rashmawi, their circumstances might have allowed them to stay if they’d submitted to a hearing. Considering two weeks or more of mandatory detention before the hearing, they simply didn’t have the heart to try. It was too humiliating.

Not knowing how bad the backlash would be, Muslim-Americans attended forums where members of the Japanese-American community encouraged them to know their rights and be prepared. Their families had been interned during World War II, they warned, and it could happen again, this time to the Muslim-Americans.

Trying to leave the event behind them, some Muslim-Americans avoided reporting hate crimes. “I don’t want to feel like a victim,” said one high school boy who chose not to submit to a formal interview.

Younger children were affected as well. A solemn middle school boy named Mayer who attended SALAM’s Sunday school told the story of a boy he knew named Osama. The boy’s birthday was on September 11, said Mayer sadly, and the kids in his class teased him. Even a year later, Osama is very frustrated whenever he thinks of his birthday, said Mayer.

To be linked to the terrorists responsible for so much sadness was one of the hardest parts for Muslim-Americans and brought its own sadness.

Acceptance: Even as they adjusted to a new fear and a new grief in their lives, Muslim-Americans began to count up the number of positive messages they were hearing from the community. Like the SALAM children, they began to work with other groups to build better friendships between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Rashid Ahmad, the former President of the Muslim Mosque Association, remembered people gathering at his mosque on V Street the day of the attacks.

On that same day, said Ahmad, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department called a meeting and explained to Muslim leaders that the officers would do anything necessary to protect them. From that day forward, said Ahamad, a sheriff deputy or policeman was posted outside the mosque 24 hours a day to ensure its safety.

He also remembers approaching a middle-aged Caucasian woman who was walking around in front of the mosque one weekend morning, peering in with curiosity and strolling back and forth on the sidewalk.

Are you waiting for someone, he’d asked her.

No, she replied, I just came here from Davis to watch over the mosque and make sure nothing happened.

It was these positive responses from the community that started to heal the potential rift between Muslims and non-Muslims in Sacramento.

Brother Fakira, who remembered receiving maybe five threatening phone calls, also remembers receiving about three times as many calls offering support.

At SALAM, neighbors offered to stand outside the door during prayers so that the members could worship without fear.

The Islamic Speakers Bureau, headed up by Nasreen Aboobaker of SALAM, received over a hundred invitations to speak at schools, at other churches and at community groups like the Soroptimists and the Lions Club.

Aboobaker was glad to accept the invitations, but she did more than introduce the non-Muslim community to the five pillars of Islam. Look at me, she would say, touching her short uncovered bob while speaking to people who insisted that Muslim women were oppressed. Do I look like an oppressed woman?

She made sure she did not.

You will have to change your views of what a Muslim woman is, she would say to audiences kindly. She then encouraged them to read up on their history.

In the new reality post 9/11, a few Muslims are still scrambling to fix their immigration status and maintain good relations with the federal and local governments that both protect them from hate crimes and look at them with some suspicion.

But the Muslim community has benefited, as has the rest of Sacramento, from a more open and cooperative relationship with their non-Muslim neighbors. This matches perfectly what a young SALAM student identified as the main lesson from September 11.

Sitting amongst his peers in a SALAM classroom a year after the attacks, a boy named Hareem looked up solemnly, shy but sincere, and said simply, “We should try to make peace in the world.”