Editor’s Note: As Islam continues to grow and is more prominent in the public’s eye, The Daily Orange took a look at Muslims and Islamophobia at Syracuse University.

In the summer of 2013, then 18-year-old Sabreen Mere was at work when a man approached her and asked her where she was from. He wanted to know if she was Greek.

Mere, now a junior policy studies major at Syracuse University, hadn’t began wearing a hijab then — she started regularly covering in December 2014 when she decided she needed to “show a different face” — so there was no hint that she might be Muslim.

She told the man she was Palestinian, and she said his whole attitude then changed.

The man threw a slew of anti-Muslim comments at her — accusing her of belonging to terrorist organizations and storing a bomb in the cash register.

Now that she regularly wears a hijab, Mere said people stare at her everywhere she goes. But she’s gotten used to it, she said, because “you kind of get over it.”

Mere is an American citizen from Syracuse. She grew up around Christians and Jews, and yet, she said, when Muslims are stereotyped, the immediate response of bystanders is to be silent.

“It’s the same thing as racism,” she said. “If somebody was being racist toward someone who’s African-American or African and you didn’t say anything, you’re basically perpetuating that ignorance. So there’s nothing you can really say to those people other than that, ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’”

The idea that Islamophobia is rooted in racism is not exclusive to Mere. Several members of SU’s Muslim community said race and religion intertwine in the American public’s perception of Islam.

This silence may be attributed to a failure of self-criticism, which is a big problem in American culture, said Ahmed Abdel Meguid, an assistant professor of religion at SU who researches Islamic philosophy and theology of the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

“I think this is one big problem in American culture, is that there’s always the assumption that American culture is the end of history and it is the absolute ideal,” Meguid said. “That’s a big problem. And whoever is different is the enemy.”

As someone who studies philosophy, Meguid said he sees that people have completely lost track of the role that Islamic civilization played in the world. He said there is no awareness at all about the intellectual history of Islam, adding that there is an assumption that Islam is an Orientalist civilization rather than a global one that the West was a part of.

 

In reality, Meguid said Islam spanned big parts of both the West and the East and changed the contour of Europe between the 12th and 17th centuries. Unfortunately,  he said, Europeans did not decide to include the influence Islam had on modernity and the European Enlightenment.

“So sometimes I cannot blame students, but sometimes it’s depressing when you even see faculty members who do not understand that because of the way education is structured in the West, you can go and get a Ph.D. in humanities without realizing the importance and the formative role of Islamic civilization,” Meguid said.

Meguid said this type of discourse heavily influences the conception many Muslim students in his classes have of themselves, which is a product of the “Orientalist, colonial perspective.”

These misconceptions about Islam and its history are also perpetuated by many ignorant and ill-educated academics, he said.

General ignorance and misconceptions about Islam have been around since before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said Zainab Abdali, president of SU’s Muslim Students’ Association and a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.

“People think all Muslims are Arabs, people think all Muslims speak Arabic, they’re all from one country or they’re all from the Middle East, and then they think the Middle East spreads all over Asia,” Abdali said. “It’s just really confusing. So it’s often not hostility but it’s just like, people have no idea.”

Abdali, who was born and raised in Pakistan and speaks with an accent, said she is sometimes asked if she’s from the United States before she opens her mouth to speak.

It’s a fair question, Abdali said, since she isn’t from the U.S., but she added that many Muslims at SU are American, and are still asked where they are “really” from.

“When somebody asks them, ‘Where are you from?’ and they’re like, ‘New York City,’ and they’re like, ‘No, where are you really from?’” she said. “I think that’s definitely a part of Islamophobia because if you’re wearing a hijab it’s like, ‘All right, you’re not from here.’”

Although there are Muslims of every color, Abdali said people continue to see Islam as a race. She said it’s “bizarre” that white Muslims are often seen as people of color because they’re Muslim.

Abdali said a fair-skinned, Arab MSA member who “could pass as white” and did not regularly wear a hijab got looks from people the day she did wear a hijab, “like, ‘Who is this person?’”

A main problem with Islamophobia, Abdali said, is that some people don’t know any Muslims or know anything about Islam. Those people, she said, see Muslims as foreigners or people who speak Arabic and belong to another country.

She said that although Muslims aren’t one race, Islamophobia is often racist. She called Muslims “the very visible other.”

Islamophobia doesn’t just affect Muslims, either, said Mere, the SU junior who said she was harassed at work with Islamophobic remarks.

 

Mere said Islamophobia can affect “anyone who doesn’t fit the stereotype of a white Christian” — including Sikhs, who she said are targeted by ignorant people even though Sikhism and Islam are completely different religions.

Another issue, she said, is the equation of Muslim to Arab to terror. Mere said Christian and Jewish Arabs are still ostracized on the basis of their Arab names. Her friends who are Christian Arabs, for example, get asked if they follow Islam, even though they go to church and believe in the Bible, she said.

“Even being Muslim has nothing to do with religion. It’s just the label at this point,” Mere said. “No one cares about your religion. They don’t care to know anything about Islam. They just know that if you’re Muslim you’re automatically a threat and that’ll be it.”

Although Mere said she has encountered “very open-minded” people at SU, she said she often feels undermined during class discussions when she tries to bring up something political. She said it’s in American culture to hear something but not go into detail about it.

Mere said she wishes there were mandatory classes about global politics at SU, because people will inevitably work with people who are different than them.

If there’s anything she wants people to know about Islam, Mere said it’s that Islam is a peaceful religion. She said the purpose of Islam is to be knowledgeable and try to understand what God is telling you.

Groups like the Islamic State and the Westboro Baptist Church, she said, take the literal word of religion and force their own agenda onto it. In 2016, she said, not everything in religious texts written thousands of years ago can be taken so literally.

Mere added that Muslims are focused on making the word of God fit their lifestyle. She said Muslims don’t just speak to God in the prayers. They have to be open and be educated and do something with their lives, she said.

Islam teaches its followers values of trustworthiness, truthfulness, kindness and charity, said Ahmed Malik, Muslim chaplain at SU. Malik said he wished people understood that Islam is a religion based on teachings of connecting to God, and a religion that at its core is no different in form than Judaism and Christianity.

“So you have here a group of people who respect and revere the prophets and the previous revelations, and they’re being targeted as the other,” Malik said. “So what I would wish that people would understand is that Islam is not the other.”

Published on February 10, 2016 at 2:21 am

Contact Alexa: atorrens@syr.edu