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Altering perceptions

Muslims across America have faced increased discrimination against their culture since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. | Daniel Cubillas/Wikimedia Commons

Muslims across America have faced increased discrimination against their culture since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. | Daniel Cubillas/Wikimedia Commons

It was a normal, early morning when 20-year-old Shuruq Gyagenda, a Muslim UH sophomore majoring in creative writing and journalism, was traveling from Houston to Atlanta with her family. While they stopped by a gas station to fuel up on gas and perform morning prayer, they were quickly struck with fear when a US soldier, in uniform, yelled obscenities towards her and her family followed by several teasing, yet threatening antics using his giant pitbull. She recalls the confrontation as scary, and recalled the soldier as being emotionally driven.

“I assumed that the soldier’s attitude stemmed from his own personal experience with fighting in Iraq,” said Gyangenda. “I feel that if he knew that I take pride in being an American, then I don’t think he would act that way.”

Members of the UH Muslim Student Association said that even with experiences like this, in the 10 years since the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, the discouraging outlook on Muslim and Muslim faith has died down.

“I think the negative perception of Islam and Muslim people has subsided greatly, especially in areas of great diversity such as UH and Houston as a whole. I do believe that Muslims coming out of their shell and promoting the true image of Islam. Relations have gotten better. Image has gotten better,” said Imran Ghani, a business supply chain management senior and President of the MSA. “However, I’m not entirely sure about other areas in America that are without a diverse culture.”

Some areas of the US have yet to find a common ground with those who choose to practice Islamic teachings and beliefs. In a 2009 FBI report of anti-Islamic hate crime statistics, it shows that there have been 107 incidents, 128 offenses and 132 victims of hate nationwide, an increase from the year before. In Staten Island, N.Y., Fox News reported last March of a 12 year-old boy who had been accused of harassing a classmate who was Muslim and then arrested on hate crime charges.

Umer Arie, a biochemistry senior at UH, said that the mindset of skeptics and extremists have given up trying to comprehend and understand, opting instead for plain rudeness.

“Some people ask me questions just to be offensive. If they wanted to offend me, I wouldn’t answer them because my answer would be negative towards them no matter how I answered,” said Arie.

In addition to the bitterness and violent action towards Muslims, racial profiling has also seen a spike in occurrences, especially in airports. Psychology sophomore Bailee Schuhmann said that she knows of at least one incident concerning friends and family members of her Muslim boyfriend.

“He has a cousin who is from Sweden,” Schuhmann said. “It took him 3 hours to get off of the plane because security wanted to double check him. Another friend of my boyfriend was completely strip searched because she had a child and the undergarment she was wearing was used to help carry her child. They strip searched her because the security thought she was carrying something dangerous on the plane. She felt really embarrassed.”

Many UH Muslim students feel that the best way to help skeptics and extremists to see the Islamic community in a brighter light is to defend their beliefs with pride. For Aman Ali, a Muslim comedian and writer who wrote recently wrote a guest opinion article for CNN, the defense of Islam doesn’t mean begging the rest of America for forgiveness after what happened 10 years ago.

“Why are mainstream American Islamic groups like the Islamic Society of North America, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Public Affairs Council still condemning the attacks and just about any other act of terrorism that pops up in the news? Weren’t we clear before how we feel about terrorism? If people didn’t understand us for the past 10 years, what makes Muslims think they’re going to understand us now?” Ali said in the CNN article.

The Muslim Student Association continues to do its best to educate the uneducated. While the group provides a website full of information about the organization and the various events they host each semester, ultimately their goal is to reach out to the public. The group uses their voice and knowledge of Islam to not only express themselves even more freely than ever before, but to also show the fact that the attacks on 9/11 is highly looked down upon in Islamic society — they want to show that an act committed by a few does not necessarily represent the views and beliefs of people as a whole.

The President of MSA cites a movie, “Khuda Kay Liye,” that describes the story of two male Pakistani singers who traveled to the US to study music, but separate down the line and lead different lives, one being a terrorist that moved back to Pakistan, the other a husband to a white, Christian woman. Because of 9/11, the one who stayed in the US ended up being severely interrogated by the FBI to the point where he received brain damage and was deported back to Pakistan. Ghani feels that the movie is used to ultimately deliver this message:

“I do not hate Americans just because of their injustice on me. I am not going to hate an entire people. I can only hope that American people do not hate all Muslims just because of the actions of a few Muslim people.”

19 Comments

  • "In addition to the bitterness and violent action towards Muslims, racial profiling has also seen a spike in occurrences, especially in airports."

    Gosh and I wonder why this is the case?

    Hmmm….might it be that almost every single incidence and attempted incidence of airport/plane terrorism is connected to Muslims? Gee, ya think so?

  • Page 1.

    "… the defense of Islam doesn’t mean begging the rest of America for forgiveness after what happened 10 years ago."

    If 9/11 were an isolated incidence it WOULD be a crime if Americans had/have become suspicious of Islam, but everyone with a brain knows 9/11 is anything BUT an isolated incidence.

    In fact according to the website "The Religion of Peace" There have been 17,000+ incidences of Islamic terrorism since 9/11. Most of these have been small, but many have involved the death of hundreds of people.

    Furthermore all one needs to do is read a paper every now and then to see that Muslims are wreaking havoc in many places throughout the world.

      • It's an oft-repeated cliche that counts every attack of the Iraqi civil war as "Islamic terrorism." As in, every Sadrist, Fedayeen, Sunni/Shia/whatever action of violence that occurred over nearly a decade now. Also, it counts every other act of political violence committed by a Muslim, regardless of motivation. It counts inter-ethnic feuds in Nigeria, all violence in Dagestan and other Caucasus republics, and even the murder of two American hikers in Afghanistan by unknown assailants. In other words, it's a worthless metric.

  • Page 2.

    1) Continued genocide in southern Sudan (the job is done in northern Sudan)
    2) Continued anarchy and violence in Somalia.
    3) The Arab Spring resulted (and continues to) in thousands of deaths and the outcome suggest Islamists will come to power, not anything approaching a democracy as our airhead main stream media suggested would happen.
    4) There have recent Islamist attacks in Russia and China.
    5) Christians throughout the Islamic caliphate are being persecuted, raped and killed. Kidnapping Christian children and women is common place.
    6) The drumbeat of war against Israel is quickening as Egypt becomes radicalized by Islamists and Turkey quickly changes from a "secular" Muslim country towards another Islamist Muslim country.
    7) Buddhists are being killed by Muslims all the time in southern Thailand.
    8) Hindus are being killed all the time by Muslims in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
    9) Black Africans are being killed throughout northern and central Africa by Islamists.

    These are just some of the reasons some Americans do not fully trust Muslims. It is NOT Islamophobia but a common sense reaction to a real phenomena.

    • 1. Which is also partially a race and cultural war, a divide between Arab Sudanese and the non-Arab. See: Arabs attacking the Muslim Fur and Masalit tribes of Darfur.
      2. Complex, complex, complex. It is inter-tribal, Bantu/tribal, foreign intervention and a thousand other complex factors.
      3. The outcome suggests Islamism? Bull. Please source this.
      4. True. But they are also an extension of heavy state repression in Chechnya and Dagestan (Grozy was decimated by the Russians and a puppet, Kadyrov, was put in place, who fancies disappearing people) in Russia and Xinjiang in China, where ethnic Turkic people have been historically repressed by the PRC.
      5. What is the Islamic caliphate?
      6. More complex. Erdogan is hardly an Islamist.
      7. Yes, there is an insurgency there.
      8. Part of a broader conflict. Kashmir is not a one-sided dispute, you know.
      9. And animist Africans are being slaughtered by the Christian child soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army in the Great Lakes. But we must not fault Christianity necessarily, because as with all the conflicts above, religion is not the major or sole motivating factor.

  • Unfortunatly, while it is true that "Americans" ought to trust each other, the fact remains that 9/11 was a watershed event and has and will continue to taint our cultural perceptions about Musilims and terriosts for some time to come. American Germans went through it in WWI, and Asian Americans went through it (were forced into detention camps) in WWI. American Vietnamise experienced it, during the Vietnam war. No it may not be fair, but I'd take a strip search over forced detention and relocation any day. (we've gotten nicer in our meanness.) Eventually the scales will balance again; they always do. But during the pre-transition period, Americans can seem cruel.

    • So you're saying racial oppression is right of passage?

      Can we imply from this that slavery and Jim Crow were just friendly transitions.

      You need to realize that racial oppression is always destructive and always unwarranted and has always been bad. It was never excusable and never is.

  • This is crazy and arrogant of the leader of the Muslim Student Association to pretend like 9.11 was an isolated incident. Why do so many Muslims asked to comment on the lives of Muslim-Americans and Muslims in America do this?

    9/11 was the biggest attack but there have HUNDREDS of gruesome attacks carried out by Muslims both in the U.S. and overseas.

    Does he know that the World Trade Center was attacked prior to 9/11 by Muslim terrorists?

    What about the Beltway Sniper? The attacks on recruiting stations? Daniel Pearls taped beheading or the beheading of several other people in Iraq and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia?

    What about the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000 or the the attack on the Jewish Center in Seattle? What about all the Muslim-Americans who have been caught making death threats or trying to go kill American troops
    and non-Muslims overseas?

    What about 7/7 in London, the Madrid bombings, the botched Glasgow airport attack? What about Mumbai?

    Or the recent attack in Germany? The beheading of Theo Van Gogh, the Suicide bomber in Sweden, the attacks on Christians in Iraq and Egypt and Pakistan….

    What about the Fort Hood shooter right there in Texas? Nidal Hasan.

    He's now been followed up by ANOTHER Muslim-American who said only a year ago that Islam was misunderstood and that Americans were prejudiced and needed to learn more about his peaceful religion.

    That was Nasser Abdo.

    • Constantinople,

      As a Muslim-American who upholds both American and Islamic principles (there is no contradiction btw), I am trying to convey the message that the terrorists who claim to be Muslim are NOT representatives of Islam. Would it be fair for me to ascribe the actions of the KKK to Christianity?

  • @Constantinople.
    Bro chill out, LOL! There are many bad people, it's an evil world.
    I go to UH also and it would be a dismal shame if we as colleagues (assuming you go to UH)
    could not get along.

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