women who were visibly muslim. Their religious dress, dark complexions,
100 / Chapter 4
or associations with islamic organizations allowed bigots to identify and then
to subject them to hateful treatment. indeed, those who were recognizable as
muslim were more likely to be verbally abused, stared down, discriminated
against, profiled by police, or physically attacked. The visibility factor also
helps explain why other minorities who fit the stereotypical image of “what a
muslim looks like” were targeted after 9/11.47
Those muslims whose faith was not as readily apparent were less likely
to experience anti-islamic bias at work, in the street, or in myriad other
public spaces. This does not mean, however, that those who could pass as
non-muslim were left unscathed by the backlash. By virtue of their faith
alone, these individuals felt vulnerable to being swept up in the Bush
administration’s terrorism investigations and were fearful of additional
hostile repercussions against the entire muslim American community. in
addition, less-visible women and men became witnesses to discrimination as
they observed overtly biased acts waged against other muslims.
in the aftermath of 9/11, prejudiced individuals felt free to communicate
their anti-muslim perspectives in front of others whom they imagined would
share their views. Kamilah, a university student from new york, described
her confrontation with a classmate:
When i came back to school, i was going to class. There was an
African American female commenting about muslim women. she
said something completely disgusting. she turned to me and said,
“Don’t you think? Don’t you think they should all just die?” i laughed
and said, “That’s funny.” she said, “yeah, you know, they should just
all die.” And i said, “you know, then i’ll have to die.” i looked at her
and said, “i’m muslim. you need to choose your words wisely.” i got
up and left. i haven’t been back to that seminar. i couldn’t believe
something like that could be told to my face. you automatically
assume because i don’t cover, that you would think that i would be
one of those ignorant people who think all muslims should die?
Kamilah was aware that, because she was indistinguishable as a muslim,
the young woman felt comfortable making hateful comments in front of her.
Kamilah verbally confronted this woman and revealed her faith identity.
Although she felt good about responding proactively to the situation,
Kamilah was so demoralized by the confrontation that she dropped the class
so she would not have to “deal with” a similar situation again.
many Americans have proven amazingly resistant to understanding
that muslims can be of any race, ethnicity, or nationality. This confusion
is likely a consequence of pop-culture representations that conflate brown
skin, Arab ethnicity, and muslim religiosity. such misperceptions prompted
Backlash / 101
some people to say biased things in front of persons whom they assumed,
because of their racial identity, would not be muslim. Jinan recounted one
such experience that happened to her father, an African American convert
to islam:
my father was telling me about one time he was with one of his
co-workers. They were driving past a mosque. The co-worker said
something like, “i wonder why someone hasn’t gone and blown that
up yet?” He had no idea that my father was muslim. my father was
like, “yeah, you know, i’m a muslim.” But when people do that, when
these kinds of things come out, you start to wonder. you don’t want
to do that, but you wonder, what are they really thinking?
The uncertainty that Jinan expressed as she questioned, “what are they
really thinking?” was quite common. When bigots made vicious remarks,
unaware that a muslim was in their presence, it left muslims feeling that the
prejudice against them may have been even more widespread than what they
had initially imagined.
some muslims chose to remain silent after they witnessed anti-muslim
acts or overheard hostile comments. Jasmir, who had been hired at an
investment firm just prior to the 9/11 attacks, wanted to confront the muslim-
degrading. yet he feared that if he spoke up, he would be ostracized and
might even lose his job:
i work as a consultant at a pretty high-profile investment firm.
listening to very educated people with master’s degrees from ivy
league schools stereotyping, it just really made me feel very sick that
people could be educated yet ignorant. it made me feel like i’m going
to have a very hard time, even though i’m trying to stay away from
all the negativity and just be very optimistic. i want to tell them i’m
a muslim, just throw it out there, just so they know, but i’m scared
to do so. i’m sick and tired of hiding to go to prayer every day. At
lunchtime—i’m fasting right now—i don’t make plans to go out for
lunch. i’m a very social person, too, but i just can’t let these people
know. i’m sick and tired of keeping it down. it’s blatant in the work-
place. people talk about islam in such a negative manner.
The people that Jasmir worked with were highly educated and held
degrees from some of the most prestigious universities in the nation. in
light of their background, Jasmir was especially disappointed that they acted
in such overtly prejudicial ways. The stress that Jasmir felt emerged from
102 / Chapter 4
overhearing hateful comments and from having to hide a core aspect of his
identity from his co-workers. Four months after 9/11, Jasmir began searching
for another job, and he eventually left the investment firm. His new job paid
less, but the environment was less stressful. Jasmir told me that although he
had to struggle a bit more financially, the emotional trade-off was “definitely
worth it.”
The women who did not cover their hair were particularly attuned to the
hostility that their muslim sisters who wore the hijab faced after 9/11. ni’ja
was one of the few women among her peer group who chose not to wear
the headscarf. As she traveled around new york City with her friends, she
saw how often they were subjected to hateful stares. she explained one such
incident that happened to her best friend, Tisha:
Things didn’t happen to me, because i don’t cover. But my friends
who wear veils, every day i would see them getting glared at. Just
to give you an example: The other day, i saw this woman smiling at
her little girl. Tisha walks by, and she was wearing a full veil. This
woman, one minute she was beaming at her child with so much love,
and the next minute she turns to Tisha and glares at her with so much
hate. i feel so bad for the girls who are getting glared at. it has just
been so disturbing.
ni’ja was so upset about the hateful treatment that she witnessed
repeatedly after 9/11, she seriously contemplated beginning to wear the
headscarf. she ultimately decided not to do so,
as she felt that she needed to
make the choice “for the right reasons.”
in sum, in the wake of 9/11, muslims personally experienced, heard about
from others, or observed first-hand several different types of discrimination,
which ranged from hostile stares to physical attacks. The severity and
duration of the backlash exacted a heavy emotional and physical toll on
muslim men and women. The next chapter takes up this issue and explores
the many costs of discrimination.
5
Repercussions
The day after the most deadly terrorist attacks in the nation’s history,
the New York Times attempted to capture the collective mood and
communal response in the city at the epicenter of the disaster:
A sense of shock, grief, and solidarity spread rapidly through the
city. There was the expectation that friends and relatives would
be revealed among the victims. schools prepared to let students
stay overnight if they could not get home, or if it emerged that
there was no one to go home to.
There was also the fear that it was not over: stores reported a
run on basic goods. And there was the urge to help. Thousands of
new yorkers lined up outside hospitals to donate blood.
As in great crises past, people exchanged stories of where they
were when they heard the news.
“There is a controlled professionalism, but also a sense of
shock,” said mark G. Ackerman, an official at the st. vincent
medical Center. “Obviously new york and all of us have experi-
enced a trauma that is unparalleled.”
“i invite new yorkers to join in prayer,” said Cardinal edward
m. egan as he emerged from the emergency room of st. vincent’s
in blue hospital garb. “This is a tragedy that this great city can
104 / Chapter 5
handle. i am amazed at the goodness of our police and our firefight-
ers and our hospital people.”1
The newspaper report depicted a number of fundamentally human
responses—the solidarity, a sense of collective suffering, the sharing of
personal stories, the desire to help, and the strength and kindness of people
on the ground—that have been replicated time and time again after disasters
have struck small towns and large cities across the United states. indeed,
the creation of a “community of sufferers” is a phenomenon that has been
repeatedly observed in the aftermath of natural disasters and other extreme
events that have caused widespread social disruption.2
Charles Fritz, a pioneer of disaster research, contends that the community
of sufferers develops in three distinct stages.3 First, the emergent community
begins to take form after the survivors experience firsthand or learn of
the disaster and begin to communicate about it. neighbors and strangers
describe to one another where they were when the disaster struck, what
happened to them and their family members, the feelings they experienced,
and what they lost.
second, the integrative stage emerges from the widespread sharing of
danger, loss, and deprivation that accompanies all disasters. survivors of
these events subsequently experience a strong sense of mutual suffering
and an intimate, primary-group solidarity that occurs as a result of “having
been there.” The emotional climate of the postdisaster community, which
Fritz refers to as a therapeutic social system, elicits selflessness, generosity,
friendliness, cooperation, and consideration. information about the needs
of community members is widely shared, and consensus is rapidly reached
regarding actions to be taken to meet those needs.4 in large-scale disasters,
the therapeutic community response may persist for several weeks or even
months, and one’s personal identification as a disaster survivor may continue
for much longer.5
The third and final stage marks the disintegration of the therapeutic
community. This stage occurs as people return to everyday life and is
evidenced by a growing concern with private interests. As the disaster-
stricken community begins to feel “normal” again, the system swings back
toward more common self-oriented behaviors.
When considering prospects for postdisaster recovery and healing, it is
important to acknowledge that the types of interaction that the community
of sufferers adopts offer a number of social and psychological benefits to the
survivors. A sense of common danger draws people together and allows them,
even if only temporarily, to resolve past conflicts and to work together for the
common good. in essence, the shock of the disaster serves to shake people
loose from ordinary concerns. “in everyday life many human problems stem
Repercussions / 105
from people’s preoccupation with the past and the future, rather than the
present,” Fritz argues. “Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the
worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and the future
because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate
moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs.”6 This shift in awareness, Fritz
adds, speeds the process of decision making, facilitates the acceptance of
change, and motivates individuals to take action to begin the long process of
restoration in the disaster aftermath.
The therapeutic community response also leads to a breakdown of
barriers to intimate communication and interaction and subsequently
opens up opportunities for collective grieving. When norms that typically
discourage emotional expression are lifted, members of the disaster-affected
community have the opportunity to publicly mourn, to weep, and to
comfort one another. rather than suffering privately and in silence, as so
often happens to individuals in our society, the postdisaster context actually
encourages survivors to share their stressful experiences.
enhanced social cohesiveness and emergent norms that promote positive
coping behaviors offer much-needed sources of physical and emotional
support for disaster survivors. yet in their quest to emphasize “the good
news about disasters,” researchers have too often overlooked the fact that
social divisions and patterns of unequal treatment persist alongside altruism
and heroism.7 Consequently, we know very little about the social forces that
might prevent interaction among those most affected by disaster. We know
even less about what happens to individuals or entire groups of people who
identify as disaster victims but are excluded from the emergent community
of sufferers.
What is clear is that the “city of comrades” did not open its arms to the
men and women who shared the same faith as those who brought down the
Twin Towers and punched a hole in the pentagon on 9/11.8 in this chapter,
i argue that the sudden and severe onset of the post-9/11 anti-islamic
backlash—the hate crimes, discrimination, and civil-rights violations—set
muslim Americans on a fundamentally different emotional and behavioral
response trajectory than the wider U.s. population. This particular trajectory
has been marked by a gamut of stressful responses, which, in
turn, manifested
themselves in ways that inhibited the ability of muslims to collectively grieve,
restricted their freedom of movement and speech, and resulted in conflict
and other forms of distress within muslim households.
The Initial Impact
As muslim Americans received news of the hijackings and the explosions at
the World Trade Center and the pentagon, they, like most other Americans,
106 / Chapter 5
reacted with some combination of shock, disbelief, confusion, anger, and fear.
selma, a twenty-six-year-old yemeni American who witnessed the second
plane crash on television, described the emotions she felt that morning as she
watched the disaster unfold a thousand feet above ground: “i was definitely in
shock. sometimes it just takes you a little while to digest something. my mind
just couldn’t take it the first few minutes. it really was like i was in denial. i
was thinking it was a movie. i must have just watched something out of a
movie. i was definitely shocked.”
When comparing the destruction to something out of a movie, selma
was searching for a frame of reference to help make sense of the horrific
spectacle in lower manhattan. Hamad, who lived in Colorado in the fall of
2001, learned of the attacks while listening to the radio. He reacted with a
sense of disbelief and therefore initially assumed that what he had heard over
the airwaves must have been a fake news broadcast:
i woke up that morning, and i began ironing my shirt and pants for
work. i turned on the radio, and the radio announcer said, “please
send your prayers out. There has been an attack on the World Trade
Center.” i said to myself, “really? is this serious?” i just couldn’t . . .
do you remember that story where, over the radio, where the guy said
that there was an alien invasion, and everybody went nuts? you know,
“War of the Worlds?” That is what i was thinking to myself: “This is a
joke. nah, they are just playin’ around. This cannot be real.” But then
i remembered that they made a law that you can’t do that, you can’t
make stuff up and put it on the radio. it was then that i realized that
they were not playin’ around. i ran downstairs and turned on the Tv.
That’s when i saw the towers burning.
For many who were watching news coverage at the time of the second