Wrenching time for American Mulsims

Published : 8 Sept 2010, 05:30 AM
Updated : 8 Sept 2010, 05:30 AM

These are wrenching times for American Muslims. Being a Muslim myself, I cannot escape the anti-Muslim hysteria being whipped up by the controversy over the proposed Islamic Centre in downtown Manhattan.

Although we live in the suburbs of Washington DC, a largely peaceful, tranquil neighbourhood, where we do not encounter angry protests against Muslims as opposed to those who live in New York City, I must confess that the atmosphere all over America is getting increasingly belligerent and worrisome.

The great mosque debate seems to have unleashed a spate of vandalism and harassment directed at mosques: construction equipment set afire at a mosque site in Tennessee; a plastic pig with graffiti thrown into a mosque in California; teenagers shooting outside a mosque in upstate New York during Ramadan prayers.

But what got most attention was the knifing of a Bangladeshi-American cab driver in Manhattan last month by a young white American who stabbed him repeatedly after he said he was a Muslim.

These incidents are eerily familiar with the anti-Muslim vicious campaign launched in the immediate aftermath of the Sep 11 terrorist attack in 2001.

The difference between now and then is that although the rising hate crimes against Muslims were quickly brought under control by the prompt intervention of President George W Bush, there is no sign this time that things are going to improve soon. Indeed, there is growing fear that the situation could worsen in the build-up to the Sep 11 anniversary, especially after the declaration by a church leader in Florida that he would burn copies of the holy Koran on the day to highlight a point that Islam preaches hatred and animosity against non-Muslims.

The proposed Koran burning is most likely to trigger a backlash in the Muslim world, heightening further tension all across.

The danger is not lost on the American Muslim leaders. This perhaps explains why two prominent Islamic organisations — Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America — have appealed to the American Muslims not to react to the event and simply ignore it as the work of a fringe group.

Hopefully, the proposed Koran burning episode will pass off without any serious incident. But the growing cacophony against American Muslims have led many believers of the faith to ask if all their efforts after Sept 11 to build bridges with rest of the Americans, especially whites, have been a total waste of time, energy and resources.

They also wonder why this time no influential American figures, including President Bush, have not come forward to defuse the situation as he did in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks nine years ago.

Many Muslims believe their situation was more precarious now — under a president who is perceived as not only friendly to Muslims but is wrongly believed by many Americans to be Muslim himself — than it was under President Bush.

Eboo Patel, a young Muslim activist told the New York Times, "After Sep 11, we had a Republican president who had the confidence and trust of red America, who went to a mosque and said, 'Islam means peace,' and who said 'Muslims are our neighbours and friends,' and who distinguished between terrorism and Islam." Now, unlike Bush then, the politicians with sway in red state America are the ones whipping up fear and hatred of Muslims, Patel said.

There is no doubt that politics has something to do with the current anti-Muslim campaign, which the Republicans appear bent on using to gain back control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections set for November.

But the question is whether the wave of hate campaign will die down after the election, which is widely predicted to see the Republican majority in Congress.
Some commentators draw on history to assert that the hysteria against Muslims would eventually taper off as it did in the case of believers of other faiths like the Catholics, Mormons and the Jews.

Nicholas Kristoff, a New York Times columnist recently wrote: Screeds against Catholics from the 19th century sounded just like the invective today against the Not-at-Ground-Zero Mosque. The starting point isn't hatred but fear: an alarm among patriots that newcomers don't share their values, don't believe in democracy, and may harm innocent Americans.

Followers of these movements against Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese and other immigrants were mostly decent, well-meaning people trying to protect their country. But they were manipulated by demagogues playing upon their fears — the 19th- and 20th-century equivalents of talk show host Glenn Beck.

Most Americans stayed on the sidelines during these spasms of bigotry, and only a small number of hoodlums killed or tormented Catholics, Mormons or others. But the assault was possible because so many middle-of-the-road Americans were ambivalent.

Perhaps the closest parallel to today's hysteria about Islam is the 19th-century fear spread by the Know Nothing movement about "the Catholic menace." One book warned that Catholicism was "the primary source" of all of America's misfortunes, and there were whispering campaigns that presidents including Martin Van Buren and William McKinley were secretly working with the pope.

Similar suspicions have targeted just about every other kind of immigrant. During World War I, rumours spread that German-Americans were poisoning food, and President Theodore Roosevelt warned that "Germanised socialists" were "more mischievous than bubonic plague."

Anti-Semitic screeds regularly warned that Jews were plotting to destroy the United States in one way or another. A 1940 survey found that 17 percent of Americans considered Jews to be a "menace to America."

The Chinese in America were denounced, persecuted and lynched, while the head of a United States government commission publicly urged in 1945 "the extermination of the Japanese in toto." Most shamefully, anti-Asian racism led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. All that is part of America's heritage, and typically as each group has assimilated, it has participated in the torment of newer arrivals.

"But we have a more glorious tradition intertwined in American history as well, one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse." Kristoff said.