The controversy over Park51 has reached a fever pitch. Opinions and concerns from around the country have been expressed, with many falsehoods and stereotypes being propagated along the way. We feel that the voices of Muslim women are lacking in this debate, especially the voices of Muslim women who go to Park51, and as such, we have chosen to express our views on the matter.
We have been astonished at how a local community project has suddenly become the focal point of political campaigning, and is now the basis for hate crimes against Muslims. We think it is important to understand the concerns and motives of the community in question, prior to assigning accusations of cultural insensitivity, because we believe that cultural sensitivity should be mutual.
As former residents, students, and employees in Lower Manhattan, we find that the demand for prayer space in this neighborhood is very high. What many around the country do not know is that a local mosque in the area has been renting warehouse space every Friday for some time, simply to accommodate the overflow of worshippers. Due to the high local demand, Park 51 would provide much-needed space and services for the Muslim community in Lower Manhattan and in New York City. The fact that this is a complete interfaith and intercultural community center open to all is an additional benefit that would be an asset to multiple communities here in New York. The center should be built, not only on the grounds of religious freedom, but because the community in this area is in need of a such a space.
Dinu:
Lower Manhattan is the neighborhood where I was born and raised, where I went to school, and where my community had rooted itself for the greater part of a century. As a young student at Stuyvesant High School, four blocks north, I experienced the shock of watching the towers crumble before my classroom window and being evacuated from the area. I had family and community members working at the World Trade Center and in the immediate vicinity. My high school was converted into a triage center, and so we were relocated. When I returned, I continued to deal with the trauma of loss in my community, with the fumes and debris in the air an ever-constant reminder of what we as a country had experienced. With public transportation knocked out that day, I remember sobbing and feeling terrified by the possibility of still being in danger, wondering if anything else was going to fall, if it was all over, and if everyone I knew would make it home safe. In the midst of a steady sea of people heading north, with the swirl of emotions in my head, I also encountered my first taste of being targeted as a Muslim American. I was 14.
Even before I could begin to process bearing witness to this tragedy, my peers and I, as young teenagers, had already begun to experience accusations of perpetrating the very event that had scarred us. Such notions were highly illogical, xenophobic and racist. Every New Yorker knew someone who was directly affected; there were countless Muslims who were killed whose lives have not been honored justly. It is beyond unfair to even contemplate that Muslim Americans reeling from the calamity could be responsible for what happened; indeed, it is immoral. Let us re-emphasize: we were shocked, scarred, and grieving from our own losses on this day, and spoke out loudly against this gross distortion of our faith tradition.
Hena:
In Michigan, I lived amongst a very large Arab-American population, with a third of the students in my high school being of Arab descent. Immediately after September 11 and in the following years, the surrounding Muslim and Arab communities were fearful of being targeted and harassed by federal, state, and local authorities, and for good reason -- this was happening to many families in and around Dearborn, Michigan. As a teenaged Muslim woman in America, I became highly aware in a very abrupt manner of the poisonous political environment seeping across the country that transformed many Americans overnight into the latest demographic threat. This perceived threat, which continues today, included both people visibly presenting as Muslims as well as ambiguously brown-skinned people mistaken for Muslims. As time went on and the War on Terror expanded from Afghanistan to Iraq, and with the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, and racial and religious profiling, I have certainly felt very cornered growing up as a Muslim over the past nine years in this country.
Fast-forward to this past summer in New York City. At different places and across various boroughs in New York, Dinu and I have experienced much Islamophobia. Never have I received as much consistent harassment in one place during one length of time as I have this summer in New York, from a shopkeeper asking in May if I was a suicide bomber, to a man shouting furiously at Dinu and me, "Where's Osama?!" (incidentally on July 4). Those are just a couple of the hateful incidents that have occurred to us as women who wear hijab -- our list also includes times when we were physically and verbally threatened. The unnecessary controversy and debate around Park51 has come to a boiling point with hate crimes against Muslims; just last week in New York, a cab driver was stabbed for being Muslim, and a man entered a mosque in Queens during the Ramadan nightly prayers, yelled at the congregation and urinated in the house of worship. Over the weekend, the site of a new mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was attacked by arson. And then later this week, a shotgun was fired outside of a mosque in Carlton, New York by teens shouting slurs, who also drove their car up against a worshipper. The very next day, a Sikh man working at a 7-11 in Seattle, Washington was mistaken for Muslim and assaulted.
We have to wonder what has led people to commit such racist and hateful crimes. With our critical and unwavering eyes on the mass corporate media, we believe the coverage thus far has been highly irresponsible and biased in its depiction of Park51, starting with calling the center "the Ground Zero Mosque." The media needs to be held accountable to present objective, fair, and analytical coverage, rather than merely creating spectacle and allowing for hate groups to present their propaganda without critique. Moreover, politicians who have harnessed the media to design racist and xenophobic campaigns have been especially irresponsible, and are not only distracting Americans from real issues that affect our daily lives but also ramping up the hate discourse and actions against Muslims across the country.
We are Muslim women who live in New York and who believe in the linkage of all struggles. What we are experiencing at the present time is not new. Many communities in this country have struggled, and continue to struggle, against hate, biases, and stereotypes. We are in solidarity with them and understand that Muslim Americans, and those perceived to be Muslim, Arab, or South Asian, are just the latest groups in recent decades to experience such vilification. This Ramadan, we pray that New York and the larger American society will be as inclusive and welcoming as it is claimed to be, and strive to achieve liberty and justice for all communities.
and the increased violence against Muslims is pure hatred
and intollerance. I understand there were mosques in the
towers, and probably people were engaged in prayer. All
Americans faced the events of 9/11, and we should just focus
on understanding the loss everyone experienced that day.
Pakistan is in ICU numbering the days of its existence. Stop the US ais and it will collapse like a house of cards. India is emerging world power and POTUS cautions Americans to study hard or the Indians will overtake them.
This is your job and you better do it and do it fast, before the world reacts with anger. There is no point in getting angry. You can see that there is a clear perception in the Christian West, Hindu India and Buddhist China that the followers of Islam are neither productive nor peaceful. To be blunt, they are not simply wanted as a minority. Muslim world should take steps to remove the perception by reforming the religion and effecting changes in the conduct and behaviour of muslims. Whether the perception is real or not, that is a bigger debate; but the fact is it is there and real. Till then arguing on first amendment and fundamental rights will be only be academic ande will not change the ground reality of adversarial reaction to the followers.
http://www.outloudopinion.com/2010/09/06/inconvenient-truth-10-times-more-hate-crimes-against-jews-than-muslims/
I have friends who wear the hijab and a few who wear the niqab and have read so many comments here about how they're obviously forced to do so because no one would do that willingly and it always makes me shake my head because my Muslim women friends are some of the strongest and most outspoken women I know.
After 9/11, my friends from Lebanon had their store windows broken and someone tried to set their store (with their home on top of it) on fire. People spray painted vile messages on the brick walls and even though the whole neighborhood came out to help them and helped fund the repairs, they just couldn't go on with their shop. This family was one of the kindest in our area. The day I moved in to my home, I ran down to their shop with my infant son in tow and grabbed diapers, milk and about $30 worth of cleaning supplies only to discover that I'd forgotten my purse and brought the diaper bag instead. The owner laughed and told me to take my items and bring the money when I got a chance. He'd never seen me before but he trusted me to return. To see what his family would go through was devastating and so ugly and unfair.
> Gujarat riots were an act of constructive retalliation to what muslims did in Godhra. 800 muslims and 250 Hindus died. You forget how Islam caused the disappearance of entire Hindu population in Pakistan and Bangladesh..
> There is only one self earned billionre in dollares in the world. He is an Indian and we are proud of him. Abul Kalam was the Prsiedent of the country.We give credit where it is due.
> Yes, there are violations of rigthts of women. We create measures to ensure that they do not happen and suitable punishment for those who cause the violence.
> See what happens to this Hindu girl in Pakistan. Better than Dinu.
"Karachi, Sept 15 (ANI): In the latest development in an incident involving policemen refusing to register a case of forced religious conversion of a 13-year-old Hindu Dalit girl in Lyari Town of Pakistan, the first information report (FIR) has now been registered in Chakiwara police station.
Buzz up!The girl's father Dahrho Mal lodged FIR No 244/10 under section 361, against the kidnappers and the main accused- former UC Nazim Baber Sultan, the Daily Times quoted the duty officer at Chakiwara police station, as saying."
http://news.oneindia.in/2010/09/15/firlodged-against-former-nazim-for-forcibly-convertingh.html
These two wonderful women are representative of Muslim women around the world and if you widened your horizons, you would know that.
Yes, the things you speak of happen in some fundamentalist countries, just as they happen here among some fundamentalist religions. (are you aware that Mennonites don't have to send their kids to school or educate them past grade 8 in most places they live?)
What has happened to America? This isn't the America my father came to, to escape fascists and to try and give me a better life, this is turning into what he ran from in the first place! And why do I feel as if I have to HIDE the fact that I am half Pakistani out of FEAR, again? Is this the new way in America? So where are we suppose to go now?
If Western societies objectify women, Islamic societies commoditize it.
As I'm hearing it, many Muslims say that Western societies treat women as mere sex objects via entertainment, fashion, advertising, public decency, and courtship customs.
They say their custom of "modest" dress takes a woman's looks "off the table", and requires men to value her for her personality, skills, and intelligence.
It seems to me that all "covering/modest dress" does is take away from her, or lessen the power of a woman's availability and desirability as a mate, and give it to her father. The father controls her availability by severely limiting who is attracted to her and who is candidate for her mate, via her unattractive public appearance. (Or, in the case of the burka, "disappearing" her altogether)
This is an ancient dynamic in which marriage is more about strategy than anything else. Marriage was about creating of alliances between two patriarchs; the combining of wealth, or the potential for increasing wealth and power.
Plus...since the Roulette wheel of genetics pays no attention to power and wealth when it bestows good looks or ugliness, covering/modest dress takes that uncertainty off the table, too, or at least lessens it.
So....if we objectify it, you commodotize it.
Which is worse?
I'll take the one I have more control over, as a free American female, thank you.
I'm not really sure what your points are, but here goes a reply anyhow:
a) I don't really care what goes on in "the Muslim world". In Muslim majority countries or Muslim theocratic regimes, as long as they don't make trouble for me and my country, they can do what they want within their own borders.
b) Peer pressure and influence from society and fashion is in no way equivalent to coercion upon pain of familial banishment, shunning, religious excommunication (or whatever Muslims call getting kicked out of Islam), or worse.
c) As long as so many American Muslims---practice such coercive tactics regarding Muslim female dress, the popular perception that Muslim women are forced to wear hijab/"modest dress"/burka will be prevalent, and in large part, correct. Under present conditions, I would never assume every girl or woman wearing a hijab or other headgear actually chose to "take a stand in the country they love".
Oh...and btw, I, too, would be horrified to hear of a teen undergoing cosmetic plastic surgery, unless it was for the correction of functional deformities or injuries. Since the parents are in charge until age 17 and someone had to pay for such work, it could be considered child abuse or medical malpractice. If true, depending on details, it may be a case for courts.
That's what so nice about America, wouldn't you agree? Though imperfect, we do have a secular judicial system to deal with such matters.