There are definitely cultures and cultural practices where women
are oppressed. But it’s very hard to distinguish between culture and
religion, and it’s especially hard to defend your religion when you
don’t know everything about those cultures. i’ve been to egypt, but i
haven’t been to iran or Afghanistan or saudi Arabia. i know in saudi
Arabia women can’t drive, and that’s wrong because women and
men are supposed to have equal rights, to be equal, in the Qur’an.
But i couldn’t tell you why these practices exist. As a muslim, people
always expect you to know why.
it is unthinkable to most Christian Americans that they would be asked
to denounce injustices committed in the far corners of the world in the
name of their faith. yet as natasha’s quote indicates, muslim Americans are
regularly expected to explain (and to apologize) when wrongs are associated
with islam.
even more nuanced educational materials were not necessarily successful
in breaking down negative constructions of islam. iffat, a native of new york
City, described what happened to her after her ninth-grade class watched a
film on female circumcision:
i remember there was one time in ninth grade, the year we were
learning about the whole world, the middle east. We were learning
about female circumcision. We watched a tape about it. After the
52 / Chapter 3
class, a girl was like, “Have you been circumcised?” i was like, “What?
no!” i’m thinking, we just watched this whole tape and it said not all
muslims did this and this was a ritual thing; some people in Africa
do this. i don’t understand; was she not paying attention during the
tape? people still think things. i explained it to her. That’s a ritualistic
thing. it has nothing to do with islam.
The muslim women were obviously aware that they were widely seen
as passive, at best, and totally mindless and oppressed, at worst. The men
also recognized these gendered stereotypes, and they understood that,
by extension, they were viewed as the oppressors. interestingly, the men
were more likely than the women to acknowledge patriarchy in islamic
communities. They argued adamantly, however, that gender inequality
emerges from cultural differences or limited educational opportunities
rather than from something endemic to the faith itself. Hassan, who was
raised in a household where his mother was the primary breadwinner and
decision maker, emphasized this perspective:
it strikes a nerve when you know people see you as against women,
antiwomen. my mom’s a nuclear engineer. she works and travels. We
moved to Washington because of her work, even though my dad did
not have a job yet. it’s very normal. it really isn’t something to do with
the religion. it’s something to do with the culture and how people are
brought up. you would find that people who are less educated may
oppress women.
Another young man, Ali, echoed Hassan’s point and added, “people believe
we have four wives, we mistreat our wives. i remember guys would ask me
whether it was true that islam says you can do this or do that with women.
it’s actually really offensive.”
The muslim men were painfully aware that members of their sex and
faith are stereotyped as rigid, intolerant, and inherently prone to extremism.
Just as muslim women tend to appear in the news only when a story can
be told about their real or perceived oppression, muslim men are almost
always portrayed as violent and fanatical. in cartoons, it is easy to spot the
caricature of the muslim man: He is the one with the wild eyes, crooked
nose, unruly beard, and turban who is yelling “Allah Akbar!” and toting
a gun or a bomb—or both.23 muslim men are depicted as villains in an
alarming number of Hollywood films and television shows.24 And, since the
early 1980s, the Western media have regularly reported on the misdeeds of
muslim men throughout the islamic world.25 These stories rarely offer any
Encountering Intolerance / 53
demonize and to dehumanize all muslims.
The men who participated in this study recalled a number of early
encounters with peers and adults who knew little about islam beyond its
association with terrorism. Bombings, hijackings, kidnappings, and other
key events associated with muslims or Arabs reinforced the most negative
visions of the islamic faith. One interviewee, shadi, who immigrated with
his family to the United states from yemen, did not identify a specific
incident that made him feel like he was being stereotyped. instead, he spoke
of “people” looking at him as if he were a terrorist. This general sense of
being viewed as a violent extremist made him wary of identifying himself as
a muslim. He said, “since we were kids, it’s been false things. When i came
to this country, it was troubling just to say i’m a muslim. people looked at
you like you were a terrorist.”
Enduring Harassment
such stereotypes as those described above are not only demeaning to muslim
Americans; they are also dangerous. stereotypes may lead to many damag-
ing effects, especially when the targeted group is marginalized in the larger
cultural context. The persons whom i interviewed recognized that their status
as religious minorities, combined with the many negative images and miscon-
ceptions of their faith, left them vulnerable to harassment. Ameena, who was
of southeast Asian descent, emphasized the pervasive threat of mistreatment
that she felt when growing up: “you always have that threat of being the tar-
get. you can get looks. . . . i’ve gotten looks ever since i was young.”
in this research, i defined harassment as any nonverbal, verbal, or physical
incident carried out with the intent to threaten, to intimidate, to harm,
to offend, or to otherwise ostracize on the basis of the person’s perceived
minority religious or ethnic identity. Harassment thus encompassed many
different acts, ranging from threatening stares to verbal taunts to physical
altercations. Of the 140 persons whom i interviewed, just over 70 percent ( n =
99) reported that they had been harassed in the pre-9/11 period. (note: Given
the relatively young age of the sample population—eighteen to thirty-five
years—the probability of experiencing harassment throughout one’s lifetime
is possibly even higher.)
When the respondents were in elementary and high school, harassment
most often took the form of teasing and name calling. students would also
tell jokes about Arabs and muslims, which usually drew on the most common
stereotypes about Arab people and the islamic faith. rais noted, “every
muslim, every Arab has to live with the kidding around in school . . . [being
54 / Chapter 3
called] camel jockey, sand roach, this kind of stuff.” muslim women who did
not wear the headscarf would be asked such questions as “When is your dad
going to make you put on the veil?” Those who did cover remembered being
mocked for “wearing a tablecl
oth” on their heads. Other students frequently
ridiculed Zoya, who was one of the few pakistani American youth in her
hometown in new Jersey, while she rode the bus to school:
i lived in a mostly white town where people were pretty racist against
me, especially on the school bus. every day all the guys would call me
“dot head” and “towel head” and all these things. i was always like,
“you know, islam is a religion. Go and educate yourself.” They would
make fun of me, call me all those names because i’m darker, because
i was a different religion, because i dressed differently.
This quote highlights the fact that muslims may be mistreated due to a
complex array of factors associated with their religion, ethnic identities, and
cultural practices. Zoya realized that she was being made fun of based on her
status as a religious outsider and because of her dark skin and the clothing
that she would wear. By calling Zoya such names as “towel head” and “dot
head,” the children on the school bus were invoking stereotypical terms used
to disparage and to marginalize. (“Dot head” is a derogatory reference to the
bindi or forehead “dot” that many Hindu women and some Hindu men wear;
For decades, the mass media has presented the Arab and muslim
worlds overwhelmingly in the context of political violence and conflict.
Consequently, Americans are accustomed to seeing images of war-torn
regions throughout the middle east and to hearing stories about extremists
committing atrocities in the name of islam. it is no surprise, then, that the
respondents were subjected to the most severe harassment when violent
incidents that were associated with Arabs or islam were covered widely in the
media. marwan discussed how the 1988 bombing of pan Am Flight 103 over
lockerbie, scotland, which was perpetrated by a libyan intelligence officer,
resulted in a string of hostile comments from his classmates: “in grade
school, it would be like, ‘Don’t mess with him; he’s a muslim and he’ll blow
up your house.’ This was around the time of lockerbie, the plane coming
down, terrorists and all that stuff. i remember even in sixth grade, the other
boys would say, ‘Don’t mess with him, he’ll blow up your house.’”
The first palestinian intifada against the israeli occupation began in
1987 and led to anti-muslim and anti-Arab incidents in the United states.
Farook, who was from Colorado, had a part-time job in a middle eastern
grocery and takeout deli at the time of the uprising. He described several
negative encounters with persons who would enter the store just to make
Encountering Intolerance / 55
hateful remarks: “The deli, it was owned by palestinians. We have always
dealt with people coming in and talking crap about islam—this is way before
9/11—people coming in saying, ‘i hope we give nuclear arms to israel so they
can nuke the palestinians’ [or] ‘Go back to the middle east.’”
some of the people i interviewed were younger than Farook, and thus they
did not recall the first intifada as vividly. However, they clearly remembered
and were affected when the second palestinian uprising began in the fall of
2000. As palestinian-israeli violence intensified, so, too, did tensions among
muslim American youth and their Jewish American counterparts. A woman
in Brooklyn discussed the conflicts that emerged on her college campus:
When the intifada in palestine started last year, problems broke out
on campus between palestinian and israeli students. A few muslim
students—there was this whole issue where some muslim students
were harassed by some Jewish students. Then they were both ripping
down each other’s fliers [that were advertising events on behalf of
israel or palestine]. We had a meeting with [the dean] on what we
could do to prevent from being continually harassed.
When the first persian Gulf War began in the fall of 1990, negative
opinions toward Arabs and muslims were widespread. One national poll,
which was conducted in February 1991, found that 41 percent of Americans
had a low opinion of Arabs. in that poll, a majority of Americans said the
following terms applied to Arabs: “religious” (81 percent), “terrorists” (81
percent), “violent” (58 percent), and “religious fanatics” (56 percent).26
After the start of the first persian Gulf War, the respondents in this
study recalled being taunted at school about iraq and saddam Hussein, who
was president of the country at the time. Karima, who attended a large and
diverse high school in michigan, described how other students, as well as a
close friend, made comments to her after the outbreak of the Gulf War: “i’m
sure people had it worse than i did during the Gulf War. i would mostly get
teased about saddam Hussein being my uncle. One of my friends who i knew
really well even asked me, ‘Are you related to saddam Hussein?’ Things like
that. i guess it depends a lot on what’s going on in the world in terms of what
people are thinking and what they see in the media.”
The teasing was sometimes more insidious, and, as a result, the
participants felt that their patriotism and allegiance to the United states was
constantly being questioned. One man, who was only ten years old when the
Gulf War began, said he asked his mom to sew a yellow ribbon on his coat.
He hoped that wearing that particular symbol would prove to his classmates
that he did indeed support the American troops.
The interviewees tended to dismiss name calling as “stupid” or “childish”
56 / Chapter 3
behavior. This allowed them to forgive their peers and others for being
insensitive and saying hurtful things. However, the harassment escalated at
times, subsequently leaving the muslim men and women feeling scared or
depressed. latifah, who grew up in a small town in the midwest, depicted
the environment where she lived as “vicious.” some people in the town
treated her as if she were going to hell because she was not a Christian,
and one of her high school teachers made improper and bigoted statements
about islam in front of the entire class. in the end, latifah could not wait
to move away:
At times it was sad to see how ignorant people were about islam,
about anything different. you really saw how afraid people were of
something different. Other places embrace and respect differences,
but in small-town America they’re fearful of it. Being muslim, people
would think that i was going to hell because i didn’t believe that
Jesus was the lord and savior. it was really vicious. even though i
would try to talk about how there are so many similarities between
Christianity and islam, one literally evolved from the other, they
didn’t care. They didn’t want to hear it. They would dwell on the little
differences. Then they would think it’s a terrorist religion and say
things like, “The angels of satan came to muhammad and that’s how
the Qur’an came about.” A teacher would say this. my history profes-
sor said this to our class. What that d
id for me was make me want to
leave as soon as i possibly could. i understand how ignorant people
can be, even people that are nice people by nature—these people can
still be so ignorant and hateful.
Amani attended a school where she remembered the other students as
mostly friendly and accepting toward her and her faith. When she was in
public, however, it was a different story. Because Amani wore the headscarf,
she realized she “stuck out like a sore thumb” in her home community in
southern Colorado. she was frequently stared at and pointed at. And, after
receiving numerous hostile comments, she eventually stopped going to
certain places at night where she tended to feel unsafe:
i got a lot of stares, a lot of negative comments before 9/11. i won’t
go to [the main shopping district] in the evening as a rule, because i
have had comments there, and when i do have to go, i go during the
day and i don’t window shop. i go straight in to where i am going,
and i go straight out and go to the bus or whatever. i think it really
depends on how much you show up as a foreigner, or as appearing of
middle eastern descent or as a muslim. i have always stuck out like
Encountering Intolerance / 57
a sore thumb, because i wear a scarf. Therefore, people judge me by
that, and people react to me like that.
several of the interviewees not only were verbally harassed but also
were subjected to unwelcome physical contact. The women who started
wearing the headscarf in middle school or high school were the most
likely to remember being bullied by their peers, which was undoubtedly a
consequence of their visibility. nearly half the young women noted that they
had their headscarves yanked or pulled off by other students. Alisha, whose
family immigrated to the United states from syria when she was an infant,
was kicked the first day that she wore the headscarf to high school: “i wore
it, and i went to school—the first time i was getting a drink of water—and
this guy kicked me. That was my first kind of experience with the scarf that
i really remember.” The boy who kicked Alisha was suspended from classes
for a week. Alisha was grateful that the school took swift disciplinary action
against him, as she believed it may have stopped other students from “picking
on” her.