Ten years have passed since terrorist attacks struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, a field near Shanksville, Pa., and the country’s sense of security. However, Americans continue to distrust Muslims and Arabs, said one Ohio University professor.
The backlash following the 9/11 attacks prompted Muslim and Arab students at OU to take action to protect themselves and their families, said Robert Glidden, OU’s then-president.
“A lot of our Muslim students were graduate students with families, and they were really scared,” Glidden said. “I made contact with them and … encouraged everyone to be considerate of them and recognize they were not the people responsible for this. They had taken their children out of school by noon that day because they were very fearful about what other students would do to their kids.”
Loren Lybarger, a professor of classics and world religions, said those preventative reactions were common for Muslims after 9/11.
Lybarger was in Chicago during the attacks and observed the way Americans’ reactions began to affect the Arab community in Chicago, particularly at the city’s Bridgeview mosque.
“The white community in the suburbs — not everyone, but elements of the white community — marched on the mosque, chanting various slogans that targeted Arabs as a class and demanding that they leave,” Lybarger said. “The police had to intervene. It was a really tense time.”
Lybarger described law enforcement crackdowns that began to take place. In many parts of Chicago and throughout the country, Arabs are still targeted by law-enforcement officials.
“It’s a continuing reality, and 9/11, in a sense, hasn’t stopped for Arabs and Muslims in this country,” Lybarger said. “Ironically, the events of 9/11 have created a state of homeland insecurity for Arabs and Muslims in this country, and it’s an ongoing struggle for them.”
This struggle recently has been highlighted by the controversy associated with plans to build a Muslim community center several blocks from the ground zero site. Although plans for this center began without much response, publicity from Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, the founders of Stop Islamization of America, brought national attention and criticism to the plan last summer.
“It’s a manufactured controversy, a controversy manufactured in order to whip up support for certain agendas in this country,” Lybarger said.
The nationwide celebration that followed news of Osama bin Laden’s death in May also projected a negative image to Muslims, Lybarger said.
The “flag-waving” and cheering that was seen nationwide the night bin Laden was killed and the days after indicated the continuation of a dangerous pattern: that “true” Americans are white and non-Muslim, Lybarger said.
“In reality, what it means to be an American is so far more complex,” Lybarger said. “We live in a culture and a society now that has become … intensely multicultural and multireligious. The Islamophobic backlash, in a sense, functions as a way to deny that multiculturality, to define Islam and Muslims, in particular, as non-American, as other-than-American.”
The solution, Lybarger said, is to adopt the attitude and goals President Barack Obama outlined in his June 4, 2009 speech in Cairo asking America to extend understanding toward Muslims.
“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world: one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition,” Obama said.
There is no way to change the fact that thousands of people died on 9/11 and in the resulting wars, Lybarger said, but Americans can move forward if they seek the goals Obama outlined. The best place to foster this change, he added, is on college campuses.
“I’d argue the best way to honor those deaths is the insistence that we share a single human world,” Lybarger said, “and that the rights that we claim for ourselves are also rights we should seek and defend for others.”
rm279109@ohiou.edu
