American Muslims Watchful After Tape

Dec. 14, 2001 -- As the grainy, close-captioned tape of Osama bin Laden rolled on TV sets across the country on Thursday, many Americans confessed to getting so mad, they wanted to reach into their televisions and smash the man chuckling over the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

A day after the White House released the incendiary amateur videotape, some American Muslims worry that anger against the terrorist mastermind might be directed against them.

It's apparently not an unjustified fear. In the week following the Sept. 11 attacks, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations received 960 complaints by people who said they were targeted because of their ethnicity, or because they appeared to be Middle Eastern.

"One has to be concerned about a potential backlash especially since we are already suffering from the effects of the backlash after Sept. 11," said Hussein Ibish, a spokesman at the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (ADC), a Washington-based civil rights group.

At the Masjidat-taqwah, a mosque in Brooklyn, New York, that has followers of Arab, Asian, African-American and Caribbean descent, security officials and community leaders were taking no chances.

"Anything can set peoples' minds off," said Abdul Karim, a follower who also handles security at the mosque. "If there's already a prejudiced mindset, it could bring about a backlash. We just have to be prepared because in Islam, you have to be prepared."

Red Alert, Yellow Alert

But while Karim admitted the Masjidat-taqwah was on "security mode," he hastened to add it was just on "yellow alert" not "red alert."

By "red alert," Karim meant increasing the number of security personnel at the mosque as well as making provisions to grant temporary refuge and escorts for followers who felt threatened.

The Masjidat-taqwah was on "red alert" for weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, but three months after the worst terrorist attacks on American soil, the situation for American Muslims had improved, Karim added.

Weathering the Worst

The mood in the American Muslim community seems to be watchful but not unduly alarmed. But for many Arab-Americans, the comparative sense of calm this time around is not so much the effect of a sensitization process as a hardiness that has emerged from weathering the worst.

"This tape will wash," said Khateja Shakoor from Queens, N.Y. "After what I went through, it will wash."

An immigrant from Guyana, Shakoor wears a hijab, the Muslim woman's traditional head covering, a garment that has put her in several hairy situations for the past three months, the worst of which came immediately after the attacks.

On Sept 11, while she was struggling, along with other New Yorkers to get home, Shakoor was violently pushed by a man on the subway platform who continued to curse her until he was stopped by fellow commuters.

After a harrowing journey punctuated by abuse and threats of physical assaults, when she finally made it home, she simply stayed there for days. Nothing anyone did or said could convince her to leave her Queens apartment for four days.

A volunteer for a Muslim women's help network, she says it's still too soon to tell if there will be backlash after the videotape was aired, she was confident that "nothing could be more hurtful than Sept. 11."

More Awareness

At the Islamic Circle of North America, executive director Mohammad Tarik Rehman shrugged when asked if he feared a backlash after the airing of the homemade bin Laden tape.

"I don't think that at this point it makes any difference," he said. "The backlash continues to this day."

Since Sept. 11, the ADC has confirmed 520 violent incidents directed against Arab-Americans ranging from simple assault and battery to at least six murders. Although the reports of violent incidents have been steadily declining, reports of employment related discrimination and "airline racism" as the ADC terms it, have been increasing.

For James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute, there's more hard work ahead.

"Our polling shows us that three-quarters of the American population wants more information about Islam," said Zogby. "While the attitudes towards Islam are largely positive, it is incumbent on us to provide a more informed view of Islam especially in the light of such an exceptionally vile tape that showed Osama bin Laden cavalierly stroking his beard and reveling in the silly praises bestowed on him over a so-called successful performance."

Nevertheless, Zogby supports the release of the videotape. "I think the tape will serve to increase the distance between these terrorists and ordinary Muslims," he said. "There's nothing in the tape that connects them [bin Laden and his associates] with American Muslims or Arab-Americans. And that's something we can feel comfortably secure about."

While Zogby said he wished the Bush administration had not talked in detail about the tape before releasing it, thereby giving skeptics a chance to denounce the tape before it was even released, he maintained the overall effect of broadcasting the apparently amateur video could only be salutary.

"After carefully cultivating an image of a hanif [ascetic], a sort of prophet in the desert, to see him [bin Laden] as such a silly, vain man now completely shatters that illusion."