Posted on 10/07/2001 5:15:59 AM PDT by sarcasm
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 Andrea Mohin/The New York Times From left, Fariah Amin, Salam Said and Andira Abudayeh, are juniors at Al Noor School, a private Islamic academy in Brooklyn. |
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 Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Fami Fozi, 17, left, would not fight against a Muslim country. Mazen Kased, also 17, is not convinced that Muslims attacked the trade center. |
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hey are Americans who feel duty- bound by Islam to obey American laws. But some of them say that if their country called them to war against a Muslim army, they might refuse to fight. They cannot be shaken from the conviction that America is intrinsically anti-Muslim. Yet they see it as the one place where Muslims are free to be themselves.
To be young and Muslim in the United States today, to hear students at Al Noor School in Brooklyn tell it, is to be both outsider and insider, to revel in both roles but see neither as the ideal. It is to be consumed by causes abroad and removed from politics at home, to feel righteous and also confused, to alternate between gratitude and resentment toward the world outside their classrooms.
As any parent knows, this is the paradoxical planet inhabited by many teenagers, whether they are Muslim or not. But in a country wounded by terrorists and preparing for war, young Muslim Americans are finding that real life has raised especially acute questions for them about competing values of allegiance and faith.
"We have a burden on us," said Andira Abudayeh, who is 16 and attends Al Noor. "We're Muslims, and we feel like other Muslims around the world do. And we're Americans."
In extended conversations last week, high school students at Al Noor spoke of their empathy for the young Muslims around the world who profess hatred for America and Americans, saying the hostility is an outgrowth of American support for Israel.
They said they did not believe that the hatred extended to them. "Muslims are all one," said Fariah Amin, who is also 16. "They kind of think of us as just living in America."
The students complained that the United States threw its weight around too much in the world, but that it also was not active enough in support of what they called freedom-seeking Muslims in Chechnya and the "true" Muslims who oppose the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
"Isn't it ironic that the interests of America are always against what Muslims want?" said Fami Fozi, a 17-year-old student who said he would rather go to jail than fight in the United States Army against Muslims.
The students also said the Koran, which Muslims consider the literal word of God, provides a perfect blueprint for their lives. Their ideal society would follow Islamic law and make no separation between religion and state.
In the meantime, they said, they want to become doctors and lawyers and teachers in the United States. Even though the American government uses taxes to finance things that are un-Islamic — licensing the sale of alcoholic beverages, for example — they said Muslims here should pay taxes and accept the judgments of secular American courts.
"If you want to survive in freedom, I guess you just have to pay taxes to get the benefits from America," said Ahmad Odetalla, 14. "You know you're not going to be the one who buys alcohol. So as long as you stay away from what is forbidden in religion, I guess we have to pay taxes."
The students at Al Noor may not be a scientific sampling of Muslim American youth. But their comments are similar to those posted by Muslim Americans on the numerous Internet chat rooms and message boards about Islam, and their outlook is similar in some ways to that of other newcomers.
Immigrants and their children often feel the strain between the adopted and the native culture. Their political interests may focus on the topics and debates in their homeland. In the case of these Al Noor students, they are children of immigrants from places like Pakistan, Egypt, the occupied Palestinian territories and Yemen, which have been preoccupied for years by the efforts of Islamic fundamentalist movements to gain power through violence or the ballot box.
Still, some of their comments reflect what they have been reading and exposed to in the United States, where some Muslim clerics say openly what is said underground in Muslim countries: that the United States is to blame for the ills of the Muslim world through its support of more secular Muslim rulers.
Some of the students, for example, said they would support any leader who they decided was fighting for Islam. Among those who do not fit that definition, they said, are the rulers of just about every Arab and Muslim country.
Mr. Fozi, for instance, said that he would support any leader he determined to be an observant Muslim who is fighting for an Islamic cause, and that he would do so even if it meant abandoning the United States. "I would support him with my life," he said. How would he know who is a true Muslim? "I use my understanding of Islam and see what the person is doing," Mr. Fozi said.
Several of the young men said they could fight against a Muslim if they were convinced that the Muslim had committed a crime. They all said they were not convinced that Osama bin Laden — or any Muslim, for that matter — was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, attacks that they condemned as violating all precepts of Islam.
"It comes down to the proof," said Mazen Kased, 17. "If you prove a Muslim did it, that's a different story."
Another 17-year-old student, Ammar Arif, agreed. "If you prove it's Osama bin Laden and I was in the Army, I would go to fight," he said. "That's my duty to my country and my religion as well."
The students at Al Noor are reluctant to accept that the terror attacks were carried out by anyone of their religion. They draw on their deeply felt belief that Americans are biased against Islam and Muslims and that Muslims are victims of a prejudiced news media. Like many Muslim Americans, they said they believed that non-Muslims did not understand them and their choices.
These are also children whose parents made a conscious decision by sending them to a private Islamic school to shield them, at least during the school day, from the secularism of their adopted American culture. Girls at Al Noor must wear a loose- fitting robe and a tight-fitting scarf to cover their hair and necks. Except for the youngest children, boys and girls are separated during the school day.
They feel their separateness keenly. Since Sept. 11, rumors have raced through the school that Muslims have been shot and beaten in Brooklyn, and that it is not safe to walk the streets because of revenge attacks by Americans against Muslims.
They believe the rumors — which have not proven true — because they said it fits with their experience of seeing negative images of Islam in films and articles that they find disrespectful of Islam.
"A lot of newspapers write negative things, and we get so upset," said Mona Widdi, 16.
But few students said they thought that newspapers should be forbidden to write things about Islam, the prophet Muhammad or the Koran, topics that writers in most of the Muslim world stay away from out of fear of offending Muslim clerics.
"America does have freedom of speech, and it's one of the basic things," Miss Amin said. "I was taught about it since kindergarten. You can't tell someone that they can't write that. But if they can't prove it, they shouldn't put it in the paper as some kind of hatred against us."
None of the students said they had experienced any harassment since Sept. 11. Their school has received offers of guidance counselors from local hospitals, visits of support from state education officials, offers of interfaith exchanges from nearby Catholic schools and a constant stream of calls offering assistance from political figures in Brooklyn.
The principal, Nidal Abuasi, acknowledged that the students' assumption of a backlash might be misplaced.
"Maybe," he said, after recounting the number of calls from the neighborhood expressing good will, "we are too paranoid."
We can't have a fifth column of millions of Muslims living here whose allegiance is to other places and other people. They are not grasping the horror and tragedy of what happened.
Where did you come up with that statistic? Since the majority of Muslims in this country are black Americans,I find this VERY hard to believe. Are we REALLY supposed to believe people like Louis Farakhan and the "Nation of Islam" voted for Bush?
Have you noticed that all the male population of Iraq look exactly like Sadam Hussein? (Maybe the women too ... maybe that's why they're required to keep their faces covered at all times.) But, what I'm getting at is why not just capture Sadam and shave off his mustache. If we did this, the male population of Iraq would bleed to death in their haste to shave off their own mustaches. This would make genocide unnecessary. The CIA considered using this method on Adolph Hitler, but unfortunately his mustache was so stupid looking that nobody chose to copy it. Besides, who would take the 'Master Race' seriously if everyone looked like Adolph Hitler?
The next step would be to capture Yo Momma Bin Laden and shave off his beard. The Islamic fundamentalist extremists would expire in a puddle of blood just like Sadam's zombies.
Seriously, though, I think the 'gene pool' may be a key to understanding the absurd aspirations of the Muslim world. What is absurd about their aspirations? Well, the way I see it is here they are, about one billion strong. Their enemy, the infidels, are four billion strong. Afterall, Christians and Jews are not the only ones who 'corrupt the earth'. The Hindus, Buddhists, and the hundreds of other religions existing in the world are also 'unclean' in the sick minds of the Muslim clerics. Their chances of succeeding in killing all of the infidels is a long shot at best.
Oh yes, the gene pool. Because the Muslims have lived in closed societies for about thirteen centuries, is it possible that too much inbreeding has affected their minds? Is their irrational hate of infidels inbred? Are they passing on a mental illness to their children? From all that I have seen, this is the most plausible explaination I can come up with.
But genocide? No.
It's not a statistic. It's a estimate based on personal observation. Prove me wrong.
Ah, Einstein's formula. If I recall correctly Einstein was not a moslem. In fact, I do believe he was Jewish!
Imagine their chagrin at being reduced to foul vapors by "The Jew Bomb"!
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