The news that the suspect is one of their own brings up familiar feelings. Besides fears of retribution, they’re tired of sensing pressure to apologize for someone else’s ‘maniacal brutality.’
By Duke Helfand and Richard Fausset
The news made Nihad Awad sick to his stomach.
Like the rest of the nation, Awad, who heads the Council on American-Islamic Relations, learned this week that it was a Muslim who opened fire at a U.S. Army base in Texas, killing 13 people and injuring many more. According to soldiers, Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan issued the great, exalting cry of his faith before opening fire:
“Allahu akbar!” God is great.
Hearing the story, Awad, too, would invoke his maker — but with a weary lament that is echoing coast to coast among moderate American Muslims.
“I said, ‘Oh God, here we go again,’ ” recalled Awad. “We know what will come when a Muslim name flashes across the [television] screen. What will come is guilt by association.”
In the wake of Thursday’s shooting, mosques around the country Friday denounced the violence and implemented a range of overt and subtle security measures. In the Los Angeles area, Islamic groups contacted police and sheriffs, who stepped up patrols of mosques and community centers.
Janan Al-Henaid, a USC sophomore, got a call from her mother Friday asking the student to come home to Claremont and to be careful when going out. “And she’s never done that before,” Al-Henaid said.
Muslim groups participated in a conference call Friday with federal agencies — including the Homeland Security and Justice departments — to discuss Muslim Americans’ safety.
Eight years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, mainstream Islam remains a subject of suspicion to some Americans — a perception fueled by prejudice and fear, but also by recent reports of broken-up terrorist plots hatched by homegrown Muslim radicals.
Despite eight years of post- 9/11 education campaigns, the suspicion and the scrutiny remain a source of deep frustration for Muslim American leaders.
Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, said that the massacre would be exploited “by groups like Al Qaeda, that will use it as a card to justify more religious extremism and violence, and by Muslim-haters — who will use it to divide our country and foment fear and hatred.”
Al-Marayati said he first prayed for the victims. Then he offered another prayer.
“We prayed,” he said, “that it was not a Muslim.”
Hasan, a Virginia-born psychiatrist, was in many ways a product of the American mainstream. But among some observers, the rampage freshly stoked long-standing fears about the divided loyalties of even moderate Muslims.
The right-wing news site WorldNetDaily argued that Hasan was “just the tip of a jihadist Fifth Column operating within the ranks of the US military.” Lt. Col. Lee Packet, an Army spokesman, called the assertion “total speculation.”
Muslim community leader Maher Hathout addressed such fears head-on in a raw, emotional sermon at the Friday afternoon prayer service at the Islamic Center of Southern California. Speaking to 2,000 quiet worshipers, Hathout told of a call he had received after the shooting. The caller posed a question: Could any Muslims be trusted now?
“This is the question on the minds of your co-workers, on the minds of your neighbors — this is the trust and we have to do something about it,” Hathout said.
Hathout implored fellow Muslims not to hide in the aftermath of the shooting, but to speak with their neighbors about any lingering misperceptions.
Muslim groups who say they represent the mainstream rushed to denounce the Texas shooting in the most forceful terms — much as they did after Sept. 11 and after the breakup of other foiled terror plots.
Awad’s Washington-based group, known as CAIR, noted that it had launched an anti-terrorism petition drive and a TV ad campaign against religious extremism, and coordinated an anti-terrorism fatwa, or religious ruling, condemning extremism and terrorism.
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