Recently Muslim Americans, including Muslim North Carolinians, have felt under attack.
A controversy over a Mosque near Ground Zero has raged for weeks. Certainly there is nothing wrong with discussing, in a civil manner, the best way to develop land near the site of the attacks to avoid division and hard feelings. But many seem to think the debate gives them a right to rail against Muslim Americans in general.
One pastor in Florida now says he plans to burn copies of the Quran. The pastor’s church has only 50 members, and he is certainly a part of the fringes of this debate, but his announcement has earned him nationwide attention — and inspired even more mean-spirited shouting that fails to uphold the American promise of freedom of religion.
Muslim leaders in North Carolina say they have also been targets. Khalilah Sabra, director of Raleigh’s Muslim American Society, said protesters have gathered outside one mosque and another has been vandalized. She also said she has received insulting and threatening calls about a Muslim community center being planned in Raleigh.
Freedom of religion has always been a defining feature of our American democracy, and for centuries now, people from around the world have come to this land in order to practice their religion freely.
But at this particular moment, we may not be living up to our ideals. As Sabra says: “Muslims seem to be going from bad to worse—marginalized by beliefs and religious concepts that do not differ so much from Christianity or Judaism. The law pronounces the Muslim equal, abstractly, but their conditions in social society are still far from equal to those of other faiths.”
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The Muslim community in America is, with notable exceptions, institutionally underrepresented in terms of institutional power and remain politically uneducated, and suffers impediments in access to government and even to the scant social resources available to other minorities . It also suffers from increasing hostility in popular attitudes, discrimination at the hands of law enforcement and other officials, biased educational curricula, tendentious views of history, and the consequences of cultural incomprehension. Although Muslims in America have for the most part remained patriotic and loyal, there is an emerging sense within and outside the community that marginalization and the insecurity born of discrimination could soon result in unmanageable sources of grievance and instability.
Despite the fact that the Muslim population is becoming as significant population in America and greater than that other minorities in certain states-Muslim remain relatively ill-understood. Their predicament is little-known among outsiders and non-Muslims. There is even a sense among Muslim themselves that they do not have a handle on what is happening in the very varied Muslim communities throughout America. This represents a particular blind spot for US security policy.
The overarching goal of the entire society should be to capacitate conditions for peace and security by: creating awareness in the society of factors affecting peace; addressing myths attributed to religious teachings; research and study into communal and sectarian conflicts; capacity building and peace advocacy, especially among youth; and, supporting women’s empowerment.
The first step in interrupting this cycle of inequity is mutual engagement. We will not be able to effectively dismantle systems of oppression-systems of inequity-without working in coalition with one another across lines of difference. Yet because of persistent residential and school segregation, the opportunities young people in the United States have had to interact with those racially, ethnically, or religiously different from them have typically been quite limited. This lack of direct experience means that what one learns about the “other” is based on secondhand information, information too often conveyed in the form of media stereotypes or parental prejudices. Exactly who the”other” is varies, depending on where students have grown up and what their life experience has been. But we can be sure that all members of our campus populations have come to college with stereotypes and prejudices about other segments of the student body. Such preconception is unavoidable when there is so much misinformation circulating. And these biases are a barrier to meaningful engagement across lines of difference.
Why does engagement matter? It should be clear that diversity is not the end in itself. It is not just about being buddies. It is about being allies and becoming effective agents of change. To work effectively as an agent of change in a pluralistic society, it is necessary to be able to connect with people different from oneself.
I guess I missed that memo where the whole “Free Speech” thing is now subordinated to the “don’t say anything that anyone may not like” fetish. Whatever the motivations of that preacher in Florida he was well within his rights to burn a Koran. Since it was his book it was neither illegal nor worthy of news. He did it for the publicity. More troubling than that though was the demand by Muslim groups that government, institutions, and people in a free society condemn and even criminalize that exercise of free speech. Somehow, I don’t see “uniting nc” or it’s members demanding censorship of flag burners as is happening with Koran burners. That we now have a campaign of intimidation and threats to stop people from burning the Koran, the situation is different. If offensive or unpopular speech is to be banned or self-censored so as to not offend Muslims burning a Koran becomes a political necessity to save the First Amendment.