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“Our religion was hijacked that day”: Mahoning Valley Muslims describe post-Sept. 11 climate
By Sarah Lehr
YOUNGSTOWN
A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, Dahoud Rasu’s professor at the University of New Orleans asked him to stay after class.
The professor knew Rasu was Muslim and wanted to make sure his student was OK.
Fifteen years later, Rasu, now an Austintown resident, said he’s still touched by his professor’s concern.
May Samad of Liberty and Janan Niser of Warren, both Muslims, said teachers and coaches approached them during the days after planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City to offer support. Samad was attending Youngstown State University at the time of the attacks, and Niser was attending Sunset Senior High School in Miami, Fla.
As the nation marks the 15th anniversary of 9/11, the Mahoning Valley’s Muslim residents describe a complex mixture of emotions.
They talk about mourning the lives lost during the attacks while also dealing with increased suspicion because of their religion.
“Let’s be honest,” Rasu said. “Before 9/11, our religion and our way of life were never questioned.”
All area Muslims interviewed for this story said that, while they’ve noticed Islamophobia festering in the national discourse, Valley residents generally have been accepting.
Ashraf Salman of Liberty described the Valley as a “melting pot” and said, in his experience, most non-Muslims do not combine the beliefs of the majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims with those of terrorist extremists.
When Salman was growing up in the Valley, his mother attracted attention because she wore a head scarf or hijab. Still, Salman said he never feared for her safety as a visible Muslim, even immediately after 9/11.
Several Valley Muslims spoke of hostile comments, though they characterized those remarks as outliers.
Gulay Yazar of Canfield is a nursing student at YSU, head of the YSU Muslim Student Association and mother of three.
Yazar, who was born in Turkey and immigrated to Queens, N.Y., when she was 12, spoke positively of her fellow YSU students and her neighbors in the Valley.
The United States, she said, is a pluralistic country, where people must coexist with those who have differing religious beliefs.
“I think America is the best place to live, and Americans are the best neighbors,” she said. “If we were all the same, the world would be unbearable.”
Still, one recent incident unsettled Yazar.
Her 13-year-old daughter came home in tears after mentioning to a friend that her uncle would be visiting from Turkey. The friend replied she hoped the uncle wasn’t a suicide bomber, Yazar said.
Another Valley Muslim, Dr. Ahmad Amireh of Austintown, said he was treating a patient when the patient’s mother noticed his foreign-sounding name and asked, “Why do you hate America?”
Muslims interviewed for this story say they commonly field questions, including: “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” “Why are you here?” and “Why do you hate us?”
Salman said he doesn’t mind responding to these questions. Most non-Muslims are just curious, he said.
“My answer is we are ‘us,’” said Salman, who was born in Youngstown to Palestinian parents. “We are U.S. citizens. We were born here. We raise our kids here. We work here. We stand up for the Pledge of the Allegiance.”
Islam teaches tolerance, patience and peace, Niser said. That’s why she doesn’t mind educating others about her faith and why her mosque has an open house each year.
Niser similarly acts as an ambassador through her work as executive secretary of the Youngstown Arab-American Cultural and Educational Center. Though the center is a nonreligious organization, many members are Muslim. Members are also Christian, agnostic or atheist.
There are two mosques in the Youngstown area.
Roughly 57 percent of Youngstown’s population identifies as religious, according to Sperling’s Best Places. The largest religious denomination is Catholic at close to 32 percent.
Though Muslims make up slightly more than one-tenth of a percent of Youngstown’s population, Salman said he’s never felt alienated because of his faith.
“That’s the beautiful thing about the Valley: I personally never felt as a minority,” he said.
Muslims make up 0.9 percent of the U.S. population and 1 percent of the Ohio population, according to the Pew Research Center.
While Muslims interviewed say they feel secure in their daily lives, they also have followed with trepidation news of incidents such as that of the imam and his assistant who were shot and killed while leaving afternoon prayers in Queens, N.Y., last month. Multiple Muslim groups have labeled the deaths as a hate crime.
Bureau of Justice Statistics studies found hate crimes reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation dipped from 5,928 in 2013 to 5,479 in 2014. Reported hate crimes against Muslims rose from 135 in 2013 to 154 in 2014. Data are not yet available for 2015.
Amireh believes that, in recent years, fear of the self-described Islamic State have provoked anti-Muslim sentiment in the same way that fear of Al-Qaida provoked backlash after 9/11.
People forget that, on a global scale, the majority of ISIS’ victims are Muslims, Amireh said.
Several area Muslims say anti-Muslim sentiment during the current presidential election cycle has been greater than the anti-Muslim sentiment immediately after 9/11.
Notably, in December 2015, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
“It’s basically given people a free card to say whatever they want whether on social media or to your face, and they think it’s justified because a person who’s supposed to be leading the country is separating us,” Niser said of Trump’s campaign.
Trump’s popularity in the typically Democratic Mahoning Valley has garnered national media attention. The Vindicator reported in April that more than 6,000 Mahoning County Democrats switched their party affiliation to Republican. Local party chairmen said most did so to vote for Trump.
Though Gov. John Kasich won the Ohio Republican primary by 11 percentage points, Trump beat him by 13 percentage points among Mahoning County voters.
It gives Niser pause when she drives through her neighborhood and sees Trump yard signs. Niser said she’s unsure whether the Trump supporters she encounters share his views on Muslims or whether they’re motivated by other factors, like his stance on the economy.
Amireh described similar feelings of unease, adding he views Trump as hostile to a variety of groups not limited to Muslims, including women, Latinos and the disabled.
The 15th anniversary of 9/11 falls less than two months before the general election. It also happens to coincide with the week of the Muslim holiday Eid-al-Adha, also known as the feast of sacrifice. The holiday begins today.
Muslim scholars set the date each year based on the lunar calendar. Eid-al-Adha marks the end of Muslims’ annual pilgrimage to Mecca and honors the willingness of the prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son to God.
Salman said he is concerned some people in the U.S. will misinterpret Muslims celebrating Eid-al-Adha as Muslims celebrating 9/11.
“We will be gathering with our friends and family to celebrate the holiday,” Niser said. “But, at the same time we will be mourning 9/11 just like everybody else.”
Like many Americans, Niser recalls exactly where she was on Sept. 11, 2001. CNN footage of planes hitting the towers interrupted the televised morning announcements at her high school. She remembers students crying amid a general sense of confusion. Niser didn’t hear until the following day that the attackers had cited Islam as their inspiration.
Fifteen years later, Niser said that, while the immediacy of the attacks has faded, the nation is still grieving.
“We all have our scars,” she said. “This generation is never going to forget. The pain is always going to be under that scar.”
Samad visited the national 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center last year. She described being choked with emotion as she walked around the reflecting pools, read the names of the dead and thought about their families.
“Our religion was hijacked that day,” she said.