Hawzah News Agency- In many years of being American-Arab-Muslim, I never thought the day would come where being Muslim would be seen as being somehow other, un-American, and foreign.
But it’s happening today and it’s a challenge to our national identity, to the freedoms guaranteed to all by the First Amendment, and to our national security.
It happened in California, where a woman screamed anti-Muslim slurs and tossed hot coffee at some Muslims when she saw them praying in a public park: “You are very deceived by Satan. Your mind has been taken over — brainwashed — and you have nothing but hate, nothing but hate.”
It happened in New Hampshire where a state legislator, Republican Ken Weyler, argued that “giving public benefits to any person or family that practices Islam is aiding and abetting the enemy. That is treason.”
Such hate speech is happening at a rate nearly three times greater than in previous years — and it’s unacceptable.
It’s not who we are.
Islam arrived on our shores perhaps as early as 1619 when 20 African slaves were delivered to Jamestown by a Portuguese slave ship. Overall, it’s estimated that perhaps 20 percent of the slaves brought from Africa to America were Muslim, many sold into slavery by other Muslims.
Those slaves, delivered to “Christian” slave owners so that their labor could be exploited to work the land that white Europeans had stolen from the indigenous peoples of the hemisphere, were the first of generations of Muslims who came to these lands we today inhabit.
Islam is one of the world’s three great Abrahamic religions, all of which worship the same One God. Today, America embraces more than 3 million Muslims, among whom are descendants of African-Americans and immigrants who’ve been peacefully living, assimilated, among us for generations. Muslims did not just happen, like “Topsy,” on 9/11.
On 9/11 America was attacked by people they didn’t know speaking the language of a religion they knew nothing about, by terrorists who claimed to be acting in the name of God. In the aftermath of that horror, many Americans became, with some justification, fearful and distrustful of the other and it took hard work and belief in the fundamental goodness of humankind for Americans to find commonality of interests and be able to move beyond that tragedy. Muslims and non-Muslims, religious and secular, together worked to build community; interfaith projects were initiated and common ground was established.
What we’re witnessing today, however, in the public square in 2016 is different than what we saw in 2001. Today, America’s being swept up in a virulent wave of Islamophobia that has nothing to do with religion; it’s about demagogues manipulating public sentiment for personal power, privilege and profit, and for the presidency.
Cotton Mather would be so proud!
To my mind, much of the current political rhetoric directed at Islam and Muslims recalls the Know-Nothings of the 1840s and 1850s who, driven by similar bigotry, demagoguery and xenophobia, at that time directed at Catholics, rioted, burned churches and even tar-and-feathered a priest in Maine.
Today, many Americans believe that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed in America, that if here they should be registered and monitored and, indeed, many believe that American Muslims shouldn’t even be allowed to practice their religion.
It’s ugly, it’s unfair and it’s contrary to American security interests.
I know that most Americans aren’t haters, even those who’re still fearful. I know most Americans aren’t responsible for the ignorance and invective that today resonates in so many public spaces.
I want to be party to engagement, healing and understanding between communities and to that end I’ve been invited to speak at an open forum at the Interfaith Campus of the Etz Hayim Synagogue and the Church of the Transfiguration, Derry. The format will be “Ask a Muslim Anything.” I invite all to ask whatever questions you have, political, theological, social, and I will endeavor to answer as best I can from my experience. Nothing is off the table.
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