by Jane Eesley
When Khalil, a Muslim man in Brooklyn, N.Y., and his brothers began to observe daily prayers and attend mosque on Fridays, Khalil’s supervisors told other employees, "They being taught to become terrorists." Khalil and his brothers were fired after nine years of employment.
This is just one of many stories that raise important questions:
Consider two recent examples of anti-Muslim media coverage and popular culture:
In this climate of mistrust and fear, Muslim workers, like Khalil and his brothers, often experience harassment at the workplace, especially if they observe daily prayers or wear hijab -- traditional dress for women, covering the head and the body.
Ghada Talhami, Ph.D., Pearsons Professor of Politics at Lake Forest College, in Lake Forest, Ill., argues that anti-Muslim language and images have been building over the years:
"It increases as the community becomes more visible. Muslims are more in the mainstream, which arouses fear and suspicion."
She is especially concerned about the impact of negative images on children.
"Children are unsuspecting consumers," she said. "Adults can filter out images they know to be untrue or distorted, but young people can’t discriminate."
In such a context, Christians of conscience must be vigilant in speaking out against discriminatory images and practices, especially as children are exposed to them.
Anti-Muslim sentiment is dispelled as Christians learn to differentiate Muslim extremists from mainstream Muslims. While mainstream Christians easily disassociate themselves from fringe groups that call themselves Christian -- such as the Ku Klux Klan, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians or Christian militia groups -- Christians have rarely made similar distinctions among Muslim groups. Charles Kimball, Ph.D., professor of religion and chair of the department of religion at Wake Forest University in Wake Forest, Winston-Salem, N.C., writes:
"The vast majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims are as offended by a violent act carried out in the name of Islam as most Christians are horrified by atrocities perpetrated by Serbian Christians or the Real Irish Republican Army."
Within the evangelical Christian community, increasing concern is being raised about persecution of Christians overseas. While cases of persecution should always be investigated seriously, Muslims fear that such cases are not being placed in their sociopolitical context. Faiz Rehman, editor of Pakistan-Link newspaper, said:
"We’re heading in the direction of saying Islam as a faith is what we have to fear. We have a double standard. If a Christian country does something wrong, we don’t blame Christianity. We dropped the bomb in Hiroshima. Was that a Christian bomb? Absolutely not. But it came from a Christian country, or at least a country where Christianity is the predominant faith."
Increased focus upon religious persecution may well be an excuse for Muslim-bashing, as John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., has suggested. Ms. Talhami points out that the Muslim extremist persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt has been denounced strongly by the Egyptian government and by Muslim intellectuals, but these denunciations are rarely covered by the media.
One complicating factor in the demonization of Muslims is the tendency to use the terms Muslim and Arab interchangeably. Although Islam was born in the Arab would and the Holy Qu’ran is in Arabic language, the majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims are not of Arab descent. The country with the highest number of Muslims -- 183 million -- is Indonesia.
The twinning of Muslims and Arabs in popular culture is an outgrowth of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. Because U.S. foreign policy has favored Israel over the Arab nations in Arab-Israeli disputes, anti-Arab sentiment facilitates the implementation of U.S. policies. Witness, for example, the relative lack of concern about Iraqi casualties during the Gulf War in 1991.
The effects of anti-Muslim rhetoric should not be underestimated. Muslims in the United States experience a variety of civil-rights violations from verbal harassment to violent hate crimes. The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ 1998 annual report on the state of civil rights for Muslims in the United States showed an 18 percent increase in total cases and a 60 percent increase of reports of discrimination, especially in the workplace.
Perhaps the most disturbing example of latent prejudice against Muslims emerged in the aftermath of the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City. Immediately, the perpetrators were assumed to be Muslim, and Muslims throughout the country found themselves under attack. Such attacks were spurred by news reports, such as that by CBS Evening News, April 19, 1995, the night of the bombing. Steven Emerson, a featured expert, said:
"The bombing was done with the intent to inflect as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait."
On The Bob Grant Show on WABC radio, April 20, 1995, one caller complained that the media were speculating about Muslims even though no suspects had been sighted. Bob Grant replied:
"In the Oklahoma case...the indications are that those people who did it were some Muslims terrorists. But a skunk like you, what I’d like to do is put you up against the wall with the rest of them, and mow you down along with them."
The next caller agreed with Mr. Grant, "I’d like to be standing right beside you when you do it, Bob."
Such incendiary language had predictable -- and tragic -- repercussions. In the first few days after the attack, more than 200 incidents against Muslims were recorded by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. An Iraqi refugee miscarried her near-term baby after windows were broken in her home and unknown assailants pounded upon her door, screaming anti-Islamic epithets. Drive-by shooting shattered the mosque and community center in Stillwater, Okla., and Islamic centers in High Point, N.C., and Springfield, Ill., were burned.
A language-arts teacher in Torrance, Calif., included "bomb" in a vocabulary list and provided the illustration, "Muslims bombed Oklahoma City because Allah (God) told them to do so."
After this class, a seventh-grade Muslim student was slandered and physically attacked by his peers. Despite these sufferings, Muslim groups donated blood for bomb victims and raised money for the Victim Relief Fund.
There are hopeful signs that U.S. Christians are awakening to Islam bashing and are taking steps to redress these wrongs. In 1996, Hillary Rodham Clinton welcomed 200 Muslims to the White House to celebrate Aid al-Filr, the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Ms. Clinton wrote a follow-up commentary:
"People who find spiritual guidance and sustenance in Islam represent all walks of American life. They range from well-known celebrities such as Houston Rockets star Hakeem Olajuwon to community leaders such as Dr. Laila Al-Marayati, a California physician who served on the U.S. delegation to the women’s conference in Beijing, to Chaplain Abdul-Rasheed Muhammad, the first Islamic chaplain in the U.S. Army, who offered a prayer at the White House ceremony."
The revised trailer for The Siege is another sign of hope. Corporations that had previously discriminated against Muslim workers are developing fairer policies, such as American Industry in Nashville, Tenn., which has instituted a floating break so Muslim workers may attend Friday prayer at a nearby mosque.
Jane Eesley is associate pastor of Community United Methodist Church in Naperville, Ill. She serves on the Northern Illinois Conference Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns and was a mission intern in Arab East Jerusalem in 1990-1991.