Author: Somini Sengupta
Publication: The New York Times
Date: September 14, 2001
On a quiet block in Brooklyn Heights
yesterday, a small cluster of men and boys gathered inside a mosque for
afternoon prayers. Outside, a man drove past slowly and yelled, "Murderers."
In Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, during
the peak late-morning shopping hours, just a few women visited stores in
their long gowns and veils. Usually, on such a sunny morning, they would
have been everywhere. But word had gone out across the country for women
in hijab, as the identifying veil is called in Arabic, to stay in.
At Bellevue Hospital Center, a Muslim
father from New Jersey trolled for news of his 25-year-old son, last seen
Tuesday morning on his way to work on the 103rd floor of 1 World Trade
Center.
And as a Sikh man was trying to
flee Lower Manhattan on Tuesday, he found himself running not only from
flames, but also from a trio of men yelling invective about his turban.
The lives of ordinary Arab- and
Muslim-Americans and surprisingly, those who are neither Arab nor Muslim
but look to untutored American eyes as if they might be were roiled in
these ways.
American Muslim groups, vastly more
integrated into American society today than they were at the time of the
1993 World Trade Center bombing, were swift to denounce the terrorist acts.
Around the country, interfaith prayer meetings have already been held in
several cities, including one in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, last night, with
Muslim leaders joining other clergy members to voice support for the victims.
A coalition of Muslim advocacy groups
in Washington exhorted Muslim doctors to aid victims and urged Muslim-Americans
to donate blood. They urged mosques to take extra security measures and
encouraged "those who wear Islamic attire" to consider staying clear of
public areas.
Some mosques closed their doors
out of fear. The Islamic Center of Irving, a mosque in suburban Dallas,
had its windows shattered by gunshots. One mosque in San Francisco found
on its doorsteps a bag of what appeared to be blood. And in Alexandria,
Va., a vandal threw two bricks through the windows of an Islamic bookstore;
handwritten notes with anti-Muslim sentiments were found attached to the
bricks.
While Muslims' lives were clearly
changed, also changed were the lives of people who had nothing to do with
the Islamic world but who might appear alien to untutored American eyes.
Indian women chose not to wear their flowing, pajama-tunic outfits. Sikh
men, with their religiously prescribed beards and turbans, reported being
accosted. They said they were apparently being mistaken as followers of
Osama bin Laden, pictured on television with a turban of a different sort.
In Providence, R.I., yesterday, a Sikh man in a turban was pulled off a
Boston-to- Washington train by the police. In Richmond Hill, Queens, one
Sikh man was beaten with a baseball bat; two others were shot at with a
paint- ball gun. Police arrested two men. "Quite frankly, it's worse for
us because they keep showing these pictures of bin Laden on television
wearing a turban," said Mandeep Dhillon, a lawyer in Menlo Park, Calif.,
and an advocate for Sikh rights. "It's making us incredibly vulnerable."
Amrik Singh Chawla, a financial
services consultant who was chased by the three men in Lower Manhattan
on Tuesday, sprinted onto a train and landed in Brooklyn, where he slipped
into a shop, stuffed his turban into his briefcase and wore his hair in
a ponytail for the rest of the day. "I'm like terrified for my life now,
not just seeing people flying out of buildings, but for my own life," Mr.
Chawla said.
In New York, police officers stood
sentry outside many mosques. The most popular Arab and Muslim shopping
strips one along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, another along Steinway Street
in Astoria, Queens were lined with police. Outside a mosque on Steinway
Street late yesterday morning, a man stood with a homemade placard that
read, "Get out of our country." At a makeshift memorial at Union Square,
a spat broke out over a favorable comment about Islam.
Nowhere was the apprehension of
ordinary Arab and Muslim New Yorkers as apparent as it was yesterday at
the offices of the Arab- American Family Service Center in Cobble Hill.
Its executive director, Emira Habiby-Browne, a Palestinian-American, had
yanked the group's name off the front door early Tuesday morning. Yesterday
afternoon, she had bolted all the doors that led to her office and holed
up inside with a legal pad and a telephone. Two kinds of calls came in,
she said. There were threats. One man said, for instance, "You should all
die for what you've done to my country." There were requests for guidance.
An Arab woman called, wanting to donate blood but afraid to step outside
in her traditional hijab.
Another stopped by the office, bewildered
about how to speak to the parents of her son's friends or what to tell
him about how to handle himself. Ms. Habiby-Browne spent much of the afternoon
lining up her staff to head out to schools with large numbers of Arab children.
Even her staff psychologist was wary of coming in. "My concern is the children
when they go back to school," she said. "I don't know if they'll know how
to respond."
Indeed, she was already weary trying
to come up with the right things to say. She had said them all before during
the gulf war, during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in the days after
Oklahoma City. "Has anybody thought about the Arabs who work in the World
Trade Center?" she wondered aloud. "This is a community like any other
community. They vote. They pay taxes." Her throat was running dry at this
point. "Arab-Americans who are here chose to be here."
