OregonLive: Re-emergence of anti-Muslim sentiment worries Oregon family

by Nikole Hannah-Jones, The Oregonian

Wednesday September 10, 2008, 9:07 PM

If Zahra Baloch runs out of ground beef for the keema she plans for dinner tonight, her husband hopes she won’t run to the store and get it.

Not since the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has Usman Mughal asked his wife to stay home for the day. Today, he’s worried the hijab Zahra Baloch puts over her dark hair in public could make her a target.

MOTOYA NAKAMURA/ The OregonianZahra Baloch prepares food for herself and her husband, Usman Mughal, to break the daily fast during the monthlong Muslim religious observance, Ramadan. Daughters Mahin, 7, and Aleena Mughal, 4, have already eaten because they aren’t old enough to fast.

This presidential election, where a candidate with an Arabic name and Muslim relatives leads the Democratic ticket, has reignited anti-Muslim sentiment. In the very year Mughal, a new U.S. citizen, gets to vote for the first time, he’s watched Barack Obama deny — again and again — that he’s Muslim. And he’s read John McCain said — and later retracted — that he doesn’t think a Muslim should be president.

Last week, as Mughal and Baloch watched the Republican National Convention from their Hillsboro living room, a short film with 9/11 clips brought back old fears.

Muslim Americans

 

Estimated U.S. population 2.35 million and 4.7 million 
(no accurate count as the U.S. Census does not ask religious affiliation)
Percent foreign born 65
Number of nations Muslim Americans come from more than 68 
Percent who identify as Democrats 63
Percent who identify as Republican 11
Percent who say they’ve been viewed with suspicion, called offensive names, attacked or singled out by police 33
Percent who say someone expressed support for them 32
Percent of foreign-born Muslims who are Arab 37
Percent of native-born Muslims who are African American 56 
Source: 2007 Pew Research Center report: Muslim Americans — Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream 

 

“They started showing people’s reaction and you could just feel the distrust,” says Mughal of the RNC crowd. “I worry people are going to have a reaction similar to right after 9/11 and act foolish.”

Just as Sept. 11 shattered the illusion of U.S. immunity from big-scale foreign terrorism on its own soil, the day also ushered in a new reality for Muslim Americans.

“Muslims, in general, we were very relaxed and happy with the way things were going,” says Baloch, 32. “After 9/11, we really woke up.”

Mughal, 34, nods. “I never found prejudice until after 9/11.”

The couple’s experience is similar to many Muslim Americans, experts say. Before 9/11, anti-Muslim sentiment would spark up through the years over incidents such as the Iran hostage crisis or clashes between Israelis and Palestinians, but then they’d die down, says Vernon Schubel a religious studies professor at Kenyon College in Ohio.

Muslim Americans were largely assimilated, says Jen’nan Ghazal Read, a Carnegie scholar and Duke University sociologist studying Muslim American politics. They tended to be educated, more affluent and not concentrated in pockets or ghettos such as some immigrant groups.

“Discrimination happens at the bottom rung so nobody really thought about them,” Read says. “They were really an invisible population.”

Settling in Oregon

Mughal and Baloch spent years crafting what they considered a typical American life. Baloch, a Pakistan native, moved to the United States at age 4. Her family settled in North Carolina.Mughal, also Pakistani, came to the states in 1993 as a student and met Baloch at North Carolina State University. The couple got married and moved to Oregon in 1999 when Mughal got a job as an engineer at Intel. They bought a house in the burbs with a station wagon in the garage and a trampoline out back. He’s now a student at Lewis & Clark Law School. She spends too much at Costco and hauls her two girls to gymnastics.

Sitting in her tastefully decorated dining room, Baloch explains that it wasn’t until two years ago after a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia that she started wearing the hijab. She did it as an affirmation of her faith.

Sept. 11, 2001, destroyed that middle-class buffer for Muslim Americans, says Read of Duke University, and life suddenly became tougher. Hate crimes against Muslims spiked and in many minds, Muslim became synonymous with terrorists. Several people thought to be Muslim or Arab were assaulted in Oregon. In 2005, Portland lawyer Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim convert, was arrested and held for two weeks when his fingerprints were mistakenly linked to the terrorist bombings that killed 191 people in Spain.

Non-Muslim friends and neighbors rallied around Mughal and Baloch after 9/11. But Mughal got stopped and searched nearly every time he flew. When his elderly father visited from Pakistan, he was pulled from the airport line for intensive screening. On the day Mughal was to take his oath of U.S. citizenship, he was told he would have to wait for a more rigorous security check.

That check took almost four years.

Unwanted attention

His experience has been shared by many Oregon Muslims, says Islamic Center of Portland spokesman Mohammad Amin Rahman. He moved to Oregon 26 years ago from Bangladesh to attend school. “Before 9/11, we didn’t feel anything,” Rahman says. And now, “I go on trips and I am the last one to board the plane because of my name.”Ugly stares met Rahman’s wife and daughter when they went outside with their head scarves. “The same thing happened to blacks and Mexicans,” he says. “It’s our turn I guess.”

Because she didn’t wear the hijab and speaks without an accent, Baloch escaped much of the open ridicule that Muslim friends suffered right after 9/11. But hearing their stories of the insults hurled at them still stung.

For the first time, Mughal says, he understood how it felt to be judged and mistreated because of how you looked or what you believed.

With each passing year, things got better. Nationally, hate crimes have dropped 68 percent since 2001.

But the 2008 election seems to have stirred those sentiments back to the surface. Obama has consistently denied persistent rumors that he’s Muslim in a way that some say implies there’s something wrong with being Muslim. Some voters have told the media they won’t vote for Obama because he’s Muslim, and bloggers and chain e-mails threaten Obama will bring about jihad if elected.

Experts say some people are uncomfortable that Obama is black, but say they are opposed to a Muslim as president. “After 9/11, Muslims became one group where overt discrimination became acceptable,” Read says.

The idea of a candidate of color running for president had excited Mughal and Baloch. But this election has also been painful. The couple have been surprised by how easily elected officials evoked imagery of terrorism. How people who share their faith have been painted with suspicion. “We talk about equality and any person from any background can take this office,” says Mughal. “Then why stumble when it comes to Muslims?”

But, University of Portland Islam expert professor Will Deming says, in this America, everyone cannot be president.

“Putting the Muslim label on Obama is like saying he’s un-American,” Deming says. “It’s seen as a danger. Islam is not just a religion, it’s perceived as foreign, backward, and associated with things like radical and terrorist.”

In cities such as Portland and Eugene, residents will be more open-minded just like cities in most states, Deming says, but outside of the cities anti-Muslim prejudice is common.

Nineteen Muslims were involved in the 2001 attacks but 1 billion Muslims — most of them neither Arab nor from the Middle East — share this planet. Mughal and Baloch’s religion is Islam but they live an American life. Their daughters, 7-year-old Mahin and 4-year-old Aleena, who love Hello Kitty and Spongebob and keema, have known no other.

“I don’t want them to lose confidence, or think they’re second-class citizens because they’re Muslim,” Baloch says. “People think Islamic values aren’t American values. That’s not true. We want the same thing for our children as they do.”

Yet, Mughal is hopeful. That is something America has taught him. It took 40 years after the civil rights movement to get Obama, he says. In another 40 years, maybe a Muslim will also make history.

He looks to his own neighborhood. When he passed the patent bar exam, his neighbors threw a barbecue for him. They don’t care if he’s Muslim.

And one day, Mughal says, other Americans won’t either.

— Nikole Hannah-Jones; nhannahjones@news.oregonian.com