“I can sum it up for you in a few words,” my friend, a devout Muslim and an Arab-American from Chicago said to me on the phone the other day during a long talk about the tragedies in New York and Chicago. “They look funny at us now.”
For most Americans the reality of what happened on Sept. 11 is hard to accept. For Muslim and Arab Americans it is doubly so, for in addition to sharing the grief of that day with their fellow Americans, they have to shoulder the burden of being looked at “funny” by them. To be looked at “funny,” that is, to be thought of as “the other,” is to be stereotyped, and to be stereotyped, as African-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans and Japanese-Americans will tell you happened to them at one time or another, is to have your life turned into hell.
Though this reaction against Arabs and Muslims was widespread in the first week after the attacks, with Middle Eastern-looking people becoming the target of insults and violence, including three murders, it has decreased dramatically since.
For this, one has to thank American officials, from President Bush to Attorney General Ashcroft, who were quick to tell Americans, in impassioned tones, that the problem the US has is not with Islam or Muslims, or with Arabs and the Arab world, but with terrorists.
A few days after the attacks, President Bush issued a plea, while on a visit to the mosque at the Islamic Center in Washington, directed at all Americans to refrain from acts of bigotry against their fellow Americans who are of Muslim and Arab backgrounds.
And on Sept. 20, in his powerful speech to Congress, watched by a record number of viewers, he came out strongly against prejudice toward people of the Islamic faith, effectively sending out an unmistakable message to the entire nation that attacks against Muslim and Arab Americans “will not stand in America.” He took pains to emphasize again that the fight was not against the Arab world or against Islam, “a religion of peace.” He added: “No one should be singled out ... because of their ethnic background or religious faith.”
Echoing that sentiment, FBI director Robert Mueller promised swift prosecution of anyone engaged in “hate crimes”. (The agency is currently investigating more than 40 such crimes.)
To their credit, representatives of the media too went out of their way to promote an ambiance of tolerance toward the 3.5 million Americans of Arab descent, four out of five of whom were born in the US, and the 6 million Americans of Muslim faith, a large contingent of whom are black.
Editorials in the print media strongly warned Americans against confusing acts of violence by a few demented individuals with Islam, and the television networks featured Arab-Americans going about their business, like other Americans, equally devastated by the enormity of the atrocities in New York and Washington.
The threat of demonizing the Arab and Muslim minority in the US may not be over, for there will always be pockets of bigotry whose members will carry with them a residue of resentment, born of ignorance, against “Middle Eastern types” who live in their midst. Take the case here of Rep. John Cooksey of Louisiana who told a radio interviewer that anyone wearing “a diaper over his head” ought to be “pulled over” for extra questioning at airports. His remark, quoted nationwide, caused great consternation. The Washington Post’s editorial was typical: “Louisiana voters ought to ask whether a person capable of such a blockhead remark is the best they can do.”
What matters is that the overwhelming majority of Americans have come to realize that to turn on fellow Americans, because of their ethnic or religious backgrounds, is, very simply, wrong. They have come to realize, in other words, that to do that is simply to compound their own hurt.
But make no mistake about it: Resounding through the public debate, at times in stifled allusion, at times in strident expressions of rage, is the dreaded fact that Americans have been wounded at their core. For millions of them, the calendar may have chronologically moved three weeks beyond Sept. 11, when the Twin Towers disappeared from the New York skyline and the Pentagon was assaulted, with a death toll of close to seven thousand, but that day goes on without end. Time feels distorted, and a strangely common feeling of loss, an overwhelming sense of consternation, has made people feel that it is still Sept. 11, part of an endless day of moral scrutiny and grief.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, leaders of countries of the European Union, like their counterparts in North America, also took pains to be sensitive in their public statements, distinguishing between Islam and law-abiding Muslims living in their countries, on the one hand, and acts of violence by renegades speaking in Islam’s name, on the other — except for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a far-right politician with reactionary views that he had made known long before his election last June, who opted to put his foot in his mouth on Sept. 26 with a worthless observation about how Western civilization is “superior” to Islam, and how the “West will continue to conquer peoples, like it conquered communism,” even if it means a confrontation with “another civilization, the Islamic one, stuck where it was 1,400 years ago.”
My, my, didn’t they teach history at the high-school this man attended, say, about how the Renaissance was made possible because of the cultural and scientific effusions transplanted to the European mainland by Islamic civilization, via the Iberian Peninsula, and that Greek philosophy would’ve been lost to posterity were it not for the Muslim translators who preserved it by transferring it into Arabic in the 12th century?
Come to think of it, good old Silvio sounds just like the ideal person, after all, for people to look “funny” at.
