Two Muslim Teens On Navigating Girlhood And Islamophobia In Their America

Welcome to ”The Story We Share,” a series of Q&As that profile two people with similar identities ― but who live in very different places. As part of HuffPost’s Listen To Americatour, we’re exploring how people’s lived experiences overlap and diverge depending on their zip codes. What is the “American Experience?” It depends where you look. 

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Along with the growing pains that typically mark the transition from girlhood to adulthood, American Muslim teen girls also face the challenge of dealing with discrimination because of their religion.

This added layer of vulnerability became apparent during Ramadan this June, when a 17-year-old teen girl named Nabra Hassanen was abducted and killed while walking near her Virginia mosque. The tragedy hit close to home for many young Muslim girls. Like their peers around the country, Hassanen and her friends had left their mosque to eat suhoor, a pre-dawn Ramadan meal, at a fast food restaurant. The joyful nature of that treasured Ramadan ritual was shattered that Sunday morning in Virginia ― and the effects were felt across the country.

Hundreds of miles away, in Florissant, Missouri, 17-year-old Salsabel Fares learned about Hassanen’s death through her friends and from her parents ― and not through social media, where she typically gets her news.

The murder stunned her. She told HuffPost she nearly broke out in tears when she heard about it.

“I was so incredibly upset,” she said. “It just scared me reading it. Because of my religion, I fear for my safety and I fear for my life.”

MOHAMMAD FARES

Salsabel Fares is a 17-year-old from Florissant, Missouri.

In Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, Arshia Hussain, another 17-year-old Muslim girl, echoed Fares’ words.

“That could have happened to any of us, to any Muslim girl,” Arshia told HuffPost. “There are so many Muslim girls thinking that it could have happened to them.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST 

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When Muslims come to the Jewish-Christian table

(RNS) — I spent the 16th anniversary of 9/11 at the 16th annual meeting of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, held under the joint auspices of the Union and Jewish theological seminaries in New York City. Appropriately, the central question before the group was how best to expand long-standing Jewish-Christian interfaith encounters in America to include Muslims.

My assignment was to discuss the use of “Judeo-Christian” language to reinforce the idea of a clash of civilizations. As in when Tony Perkins said on the Family Research Council’s “Washington Watch” in 2014, “We are a nation that was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, that’s the foundation of our nation, not Islam, but the Judeo-Christian God.”

Or when, last year, retired Air Force Col. Tom Snodgrass, a contributor to a website called Right Side News, referred to “the overt and covert war being conducted by the political forces of Islam in order to subjugate the Judeo-Christian religions and their societies.”

A fellow panelist was Columbia’s distinguished Middle East historian Richard Bulliet, who spoke about his “Islamo-Christian” conception, first published in 2004 as “The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.” Bulliet’s idea is that theologically, doctrinally, and historically, Islam and Christianity have far more in common than most adherents of either faith tradition realize.

FULL ARTICLE FROM RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE 

Two Muslims walk into the Emmys…

Two Muslim men, on prime-time television, clutching shiny metal objects close to their black garments amid an unsuspecting crowd.

No, this wasn’t an episode of “Homeland,” and those weren’t weapons.

It was the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards, where actor Riz Ahmed and actor-writer Aziz Ansari won two top categories for shows that exploded stereotypes and made history in front of an audience too dazzled by all the other history-breaking moments that evening to notice.

 

There were so many firsts in L.A.’s Microsoft Theater on Sunday night that the oversight was understandable. The evening’s swag bags should have included tally sheets to keep track of the multiple barriers being broken.

 

Donald Glover, creator of FX’s “Atlanta,” became the first African American comedy director to be so honored; “Master of None’s” Lena Waithe the first black woman to win the prize for writing on a comedy series. Streaming service Hulu broke network and cable TV’s monopoly on the top Emmy, outstanding drama series, when it won for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE LA TIMES 

Read George W. Bush’s “Islam is peace” speech, delivered days after 9/11

It has been 16 years since New York City woke up to a terror attack that changed America and the world.

Less than a week after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, US president George W. Bush, a Republican, gave a notably compassionate speech about America’s “Muslim brother and sisters”:

Read the text of the speech below, as reported in the White House Archives:

Thank you all very much for your hospitality. We’ve just had a wide-ranging discussions on the matter at hand. Like the good folks standing with me, the American people were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday’s attacks. And so were Muslims all across the world. Both Americans and Muslim friends and citizens, tax-paying citizens, and Muslims in nations were just appalled and could not believe what we saw on our TV screens.

These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.

The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.

FULL ARTICLE FROM QUARTZ 

A Sinner in Mecca review – Islam, homosexuality and the hope of tolerance

Parvez Sharma is a proud gay Muslim whose first film, A Jihad For Love, was the first ever made about Islam and homosexuality. It made him the subject of death threats throughout the Arab world.

Gay Muslim film-maker receives online abuse for hajj documentary

Nevertheless, the power of his faith and his curiosity as a journalist propelled him to take the Hajj pilgrimage of to Saudi Arabia – a journey that also became a film – even though he knew if he was identified at the border his punishment would almost certainly be a beheading.

“Immense faith had brought me here,” he writes. “I was obeying my highest calling as a Muslim.”

Somehow, the name on his Indian passport did not set off any alarm bells. The result is the first book about the Hajj from a gay perspective, written by a man with a deep knowledge of Islamic history. This pilgrimage is the centerpiece of his book, and he recounts it with courage and fierce emotion.

Part of Sharma’s compulsion to find his spiritual salvation at Mecca was a need to prove to himself that despite his sexual orientation, he was still holy enough to be worthy of this journey. It was far from a casual decision. As a child, a medical issue prevented him from having the required circumcision. To reduce one major risk during his pilgrimage, when he would be forced to wear an ihram, two seamless pieces of white cloth with no underwear, he had to have the operation as an adult.

In my nightmares, my ihram would fall off in Mecca, subjecting unsuspecting pilgrims to my un-Muslim penis

Parvez Sharma

He writes: “In my nightmares, my ihram would fall off in Mecca, subjecting unsuspecting pilgrims to my un-Muslim penis.” His grandfather had told him how after the partition of India and Pakistan, his two best friends were stripped and identified as Muslim by their genitals. They were then hacked to death.

Sharma’s struggle to reconcile his faith with his sexual orientation leads him on a search for the essential humanity of the prophet Muhammad. “Scholars learn to question faith,” he writes, “while believers just accept it. My adult self seemed to possess both abilities.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE GUARDIAN (UK)

Evangelicals fear Muslims; atheists fear Christians: New poll show how Americans mistrust one another

Evangelicals look down on atheists’ values. Nonreligious people fear that conservative Christians want to limit their freedoms. Republicans worry that Muslims pose a threat to their physical safety.

In short, many American identity groups are awfully concerned about one another. That’s the takeaway from a new survey, released Thursday morning by Baylor University, which polled Americans about their perceptions of their fellow citizens.

Part of the study, called “Fear of The Other,” examined negative attitudes toward four groups — atheists, conservative Christians, Jews and Muslims — and found that Americans generally harbor fears and judgment about all four. What those fears were, however, differed by the group.

“People think atheists have terrible values, but they’re not a physical threat. They think Muslims have inferior values and are also a physical danger,” said Paul Froese, the sociologist at the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion who led the survey. “People make distinctions between ‘you’re a deviant person’ versus ‘you’re a dangerous person.’ … Over one-third of Americans don’t fear their safety when it comes to conservative Christians, but think they’re out to limit their freedom. You have that interesting dynamic: different kinds of threats.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST 

Everyone in Michigan should read this new report on the state’s Muslims

We’ve recently seen the results of a new study called Muslims for American Progress. Commissioned by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, the study is considered the first of its kind, offering a broad look at Muslim contributions to the state of Michigan. It examines the ways Muslims have improved Michiganders’ lives over the last five years in such areas as engineering, civics, economic development, medicine, philanthropy, arts and even sports.

The study found that Muslims constitute about 1 percent of the U.S. population, and about 2.75 percent of Michigan’s. Given the community’s small size, another key finding is understandable: Most Americans say they don’t know a Muslim. And when media content analysis reports that more than 80 percent of U.S. media coverage of Islam and Muslims is negative, the report says this “opens the door for a narrow media image to distort public perceptions of this diverse community.

That’s where this study works to correct many of those misperceptions, especially in our state. In fact, the study’s findings demonstrate a wealth of contributions to the economic, cultural, and political life of Michigan, which has been a magnet not just for Muslims from the Middle East, but from South Asia, West Africa, and Muslim communities from around the world.

FULL ARTICLE FROM METRO TIMES (DETROIT)