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San Francisco Chronicle - Sept. 10, 2004 SF Chronicle: Muslims experience 9/11 backlash For Muslims in the Bay Area, life presents a dichotomy, according to San Francisco Chronicle. In an article entitled: Muslims find Bay Area leans toward tolerance, but even here, many experience 9/11 backlash, the paper said: Like other residents, they enjoy the prevailing atmosphere of tolerance and political openness here. Sparked by opportunities that didn't exist 20 years ago, they've created local organizations and expanded them nationwide. Because of recent immigration, the Bay Area's Muslim population has swelled to more than 200,000. Dozens of new mosques and Islamic-oriented schools have opened. An increasing number of local companies set aside rooms for Muslims to pray. Yet many Bay Area Muslims -- especially those who "look Muslim" -- complain of job discrimination or of being unfairly targeted by law enforcement. Some say they've changed their day-to-day habits, including how they dress and what they say in public, to avoid possible harassment. On the three-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Bay Area Muslims are conscious of the advances they've made as a community, but they also worry that some non-Muslims still see them as outsiders. Violence in the Middle East often leads to an increase in hostile actions against them. "The Bay Area, overall, is one of the best places to be in the country, but that doesn't mean the Bay Area doesn't have its bigots," says Souleiman Ghali, president of the Islamic Society of San Francisco, as he sits on a couch in a classroom area of the society's Jones Street building. "We get hate letters. I get death threats. I've had people on the street shouting at me, 'Go back to your country.' " In the three years since Sept. 11, the Northern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has logged more than 50 cases of Muslims who say they've been threatened or harassed or discriminated against. In that same period, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's offices in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland have received 95 work-discrimination complaints from Bay Area Muslims and Arabs. All 95 complaints fall under the category of "9/11 backlash," the council reports. A South Bay journalist says she started wearing her Muslim head scarf called a hijab in a less traditional style in the past year. "I was on a bus and some kids got on, and they started calling me a terrorist," says Yasmin, who doesn't want her last name used because of that experience. "They asked if I was going to blow up the bus." Now, she says, "I don't wear a long, flowing head scarf. I wear it in a bun, so it looks more like a wrap or a fashion statement. That allows me to blend in a little more." Yasmin is one of scores of Bay Area Muslims who've been interviewed by the FBI since March, when the agency started doing "informational" interviews with selected Muslims who have traveled abroad, especially to the Middle East and Pakistan. Some Bay Area Muslims begrudgingly welcomed meetings with the FBI that were done in a group environment (at mosques or other Muslim centers) as a way to diffuse tension with the agency and to prove they have nothing to hide. Still, Yasmin calls her FBI meeting at her home "very intrusive."… Bay Area Muslims who adhere to the Islamic commandment to kneel toward Mecca and pray five times a day say they are sometimes the subject of stares and derisive comments when they pray in public. But an increasing number of Bay Area corporations like Oracle and Cisco Systems have set aside rooms for their Muslim employees to pray. And on a recent Saturday afternoon at Civic Center plaza, in front of San Francisco's City Hall, the Muslim call to prayer could be heard as the Pakistan Association of San Francisco celebrated Pakistan's independence…. The size of the Bay Area's Muslim population has mushroomed in the past 20 years, pushed higher by immigration waves of Afghans (the Bay Area has the largest Afghan population in the United States -- 12,000 according to U.S. census data);Iranians (32,000); South Asians (many of whom are educated professionals drawn to high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley -- according to census data; Pakistanis (6,000);Bosnians and others from outside the Arab Middle East…. The exact number of Bay Area Muslims is a question mark. No formal studies have been done, and the U.S. Census Bureau doesn't use religion as a category. UC Berkeley's (Hatim) Bazian says between 300,000 and 500,000 Muslims live in the greater Bay Area -- a number that is based, he says, on extrapolating attendance figures at Bay Area mosques. Helal Omeira, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Northern California office, says the figure is closer to 200,000. Even if this lower number is used, the Bay Area's Muslim population has grown 10 times since the early 1980s, when the population was about 20,000, Bazian says…. Some local Muslims have run for office. In 2002, when Abu-Ghazalah ran in his first congressional race against Lantos, other Muslims told him to print campaign literature without "Abu" in his name because they thought it was too Muslim-sounding. Abu-Ghazalah, who came to the United States in 1979, after being raised in the West Bank and Saudi Arabia, rejected the advice…. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/archive/2004/09/10/MUSLIMS.TMP |