A white woman walks up to a hijab-clad one, standing at the gate of an Islamic school in New Jersey and asks her, “Where do you have the bomb-making class? In which grade do you start to teach them to be a jihadi?”
This is not a hyperbole or an amplification of a speculative mind. These are actual questions that many Islamic schools in the USA are subjected to. But this scrutiny is nothing compared to what Muslim children have to deal with in public academia. The level of discrimination in such institutions is uncanny and shameless. Even the community outreach programmes are not helping much to lessen the “Islamophobia” that has put a pall on the psyche of common Americans. But the problem is much broader and scarier.
Special programmes on prime time television like Fareed Zakaria’s “Why They Hate Us?” highlights the marginalisation of Muslims from the rest of the USA. By referring to us as “they” Muslims are being ostracised like the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. While all of them were hand-plucked from homes and sent to concentration camps, Muslim communities are being strategically weeded out from the good graces of everyone around them. Zakaria’s documentary showed how America has been a long-standing ally to the Muslim world, providing military support and helping local governments to maintain a stronghold over conflict-ridden regions. A few quips from radical Islamists spewing hatred against America and justifying their mindless killing were the highlight of the documentary.
What the documentary failed to show was that every story is two-sided. While “blood must not have blood” yet the grievances always have a prologue, some substructure, where it rests and festers into a gaping wound. If Americans are still thinking of suing the perpetrators of 9/11 attacks after more than a decade, consider the innocent man who lost his entire family in a drone attack that was carried out by US military to flush out insurgents in some remote mountainous regions of Pakistan or Afghanistan. What would convince such a man who weeps for his loved ones who became the collateral damage in this war against terror? While he may never have set foot on US soil, glimpsed at the high-rises in Manhattan, or hitched rides on the fabled Six-flags of America, but the one thing that affixes him to this part of the world is his hatred for those who took away the laughter in his life. I understand that life is not black and white, and is rather a complex mix of grays, and that an “eye for an eye” never justifies the method or the means. However, these underlying resentments need to be addressed as they are of paramount importance in understanding the essential nature of “contempt” and hatred that is brewing in this part of the world.
US-born Muslims, on the other hand, are in the direct crosshairs of this verbal and physical animosity. While their allegiance is to the country of their origin, they are still being alienated on the basis of their religion. Mosques are perceived as the breeding ground of jihadism, and clerics are viewed as the harbingers of the shariah law. No other doctrine in the history of the USA has ever felt the walls close in as the current time signifies. A call to ban all Muslims from entering this country, and to monitor their religious institutions has turned even the most patriotic of American Muslims into wary souls. An anxious foreboding is on the rise, and those who actually try to be an integral cog of the system have sceptical misgivings.
Sure, scars run deep but so does religious persecution. This may not be the Salem witch-hunts of ol’, but the country seems to be heading down the very path of condemnation. I do not profess to claim how this cataclysmic tide would turn out; whether the media interpretation of events would sway the public in an antagonistic way; or would the US-Muslims be shunned by their own neighbours, and forced to live in fear for their loved ones. While Islamic teachings are manipulated for cause and effect, we, the Muslims in America, are under direct line of fire. When We become They… That is how a society collapses into a vast abyss of nothingness.
The writer is a freelance columnist and a translator