Muslim Americans Fight Fear and Misunderstanding

        Recently, six Muslim imams were removed from a US Airways flight headed for Phoenix before take off from Michigan, where they had attended a conference. The facts related to the event are in dispute and under investigation, but what is beyond dispute is that these six men aroused the suspicion of airline employees and passengers before boarding. They took actions after boarding that led the pilot (whether justified or not) to have them removed from the plane. They were held and questioned for six hours before being allowed to board a later flight to Phoenix.

        Of course, the event is still in the news here, and local Muslim-American organizations are complaining that the men were persecuted out of ignorance or worse. The president of the Islamic Social Services Association, who teaches at Arizona State University, writes in today’s paper that education and understanding can dissolve the fears that led to this incident.

        She is entirely correct that non-Muslim Americans need to learn more about Islam, but Muslims must understand the issues that have led us to the climate of fear in which we live today.

        Heinous crimes against humanity are being committed daily by people who don’t merely belong to their religion, but who commit these abominable crimes in the very name of their religion. Furthermore, men who profess to be teachers and leaders of their religion urge their followers to kill Americans and other westerners. Their places of worship are used as bases to recruit impressionable young Muslims to commit horrible crimes.

        Against such a background, it is not nearly enough for Muslim organizations tell the rest of us that they don’t support the terrorists; it is helpful but not sufficient for them to teach us about Muslim rituals and culture. Instead, they must go to extra lengths to denounce, often and passionately, those among them who have hijacked their religion. But above all, they must understand that non-Muslim fear and distrust of them and their religion in such a climate is not abnormal. Rather it is a natural reaction to horrible acts and should be accepted as justified, at least to some extent. It is not Asian Buddhists nor blonde Christians who strap explosives to themselves and detonate them in crowds, who hijack airliners and fly them into office buildings. It is people who profess to be Muslim, to be doing the work of Allah. Real Muslims cannot be content merely to protest our distrust of them. They must demonstrate to the rest of us that they are trying to take back their religion from the monsters who seem to have control of it now.