Before coming to NYU, I was often confronted with cautionary advice from family members. My father warned me not to be active in NYU’s Islamic Center. Though I was con-vinced that his worries were borne out of a parent’s exaggerated concern, when I came to New York, any traces of anxiety I might have had were promptly quashed. Yet, as I lat-er learned, the Muslim immigrant’s paranoia is grounded in fact.
The recent revelation that the New York Police Department was monitoring Muslim students’ associations in New York angers me more than it worries me. In a country founded on the principles of religious freedom and nourished by a belief in equal-ity, such an invasive act provokes an unfamiliar sense of activism in me. It is only fair to accuse the NYPD of overreaching — by all accounts, those students had done nothing to warrant such a blatant violation of their privacy. More than that, this suggests a general atmosphere of suspicion surrounding Muslims in America who largely only want to live normal lives.
Although thumping a copy of “1984” may be out of order, ill-informed at-tempts to put Muslim communities under surveillance have been even more recent than the NYPD operation in 2007. In 2010, a San Jose Arab-American found a tracking device placed in his car by the FBI. The year before that, an overzealous undercover FBI agent was discovered after the mosque-goers he had been asked to infiltrate reported his fanatic leanings.
The problem is not that incidents like these are borne out of deliberate prejudice or that it belies a hatred of Muslims — most of us tend to disregard issues such as the controversy surrounding the TLC show “All-American Muslim” or the Quran burning in Florida as narrow-minded farces, unrepresentative of the sentiments of most Americans. The real concern is the straining of this fragile trust of American Muslim communities only plays into the hands of those that the FBI and the NYPD do seek to guard us against Incidents like these only lend credence to the hateful doctrine of Islamist groups.
Ultimately, the decision of whether the threat of future terrorist at-tacks is enough to breach the Amer-ican principles that attract many Muslims to America in the first place lies with the American people. But the question most Muslims are forced to ask is this: Is there not a better way? Having had my preconceived notions challenged by my American peers, I believe that the fault does not lie with the NYPD or the American Muslim community but with human ignorance.
In my Cultures and Contexts class on Islamic Societies, I recall cringing as a student challenged the professor’s statement that the word Fatwa meant “legal opinion” instead of “death wish” as he had previously believed. But later, when I realized that even I had not known what Fatwa literally meant, I came to the conclusion that this thing called Islamophobia is not really based on hatred but on the fear of the other.
Just as the surprise on people’s faces gives way to curiosity and then familiarity when they find out I’m from Pakistan, acceptance of Muslims in America will take time. The reaction of most Americans to the NYPD surveillance fiasco is proof that America is beyond the era of Jim Crow laws and World War II internment camps for Japanese-Americans. Discrimination is far from dead, but conflating that with simple unawareness can only be counterproductive. Rather than being cause for complacence, this vacuum of trust should serve as an encouragement to Americans — regardless of their faith — to make an effort to understand the unfamiliar.