15 years after 9/11, local Muslims cope with suspicion, internal debates

“Nobody wants your evil cult in this town,” the man said to a mixture of jeers and applause in a video that generated national headlines. “I will do everything in my power to make sure that does not happen. Because you are terrorists, every one of you are terrorists, I don’t care what you say. ... Every Muslim is a terrorist, period.”

That, of course, isn’t true, though the Islamic State wants you to believe it is, said Zulfi Khan, a Henrico County businessman who helped organize a volunteer effort by local Muslims to feed the needy at the Salvation Army downtown during the holy month of Ramadan this summer.

“They do not want my support,” Khan said of the terrorist group also known as ISIS or ISIL that has proclaimed a new caliphate in war-torn portions of Iraq and Syria it has conquered and is attempting to hold.

“ISIS wants the rest of the world to label every Muslim as a terrorist. They do not represent our religion, and that is what we need to take away from them. That is the real fight. All Muslims have to tell the whole world that.”

For some local Muslims, there is much to grapple with 15 years after Sept. 11, 2001. Internal debates often focus on how they fit into American society and culture, how to combat extremism and how to dissuade their youth from the allure of groups such as ISIS, which has claimed a string of carnage over the past year, from the shootings and bombings that killed 130 people in Paris in November to the shooting rampage that killed 49 people in an Orlando, Fla., gay nightclub in June.

“No doubt there is all over a sense of anxiety, a sense of unease,” said Imad Damaj, a professor of pharmacology at Virginia Commonwealth University and founder of the Virginia Muslim Coalition for Public Affairs, a Richmond-based nonprofit. “No doubt life changed for many of the Muslim community after 9/11, not necessarily for the better.”

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In March, then on his way to locking up the GOP presidential nomination, Donald Trump told CNN that “I think Islam hates us.” He has also proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S. and taken President Barack Obama to task for his reluctance to use the phrase “radical Islam.”

“Many of the principles of radical Islam are incompatible with western values and institutions,” said Trump, who is lauded by supporters for bluntly stating a threat other politicians are too politically correct to explicitly acknowledge. “Remember this: Radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-American.”

In June, Obama derided Trump and other conservatives’ argument as a “political talking point” and not a strategy. He has also called Trump’s mindset dangerous, noting that the killers in the mass shootings in Orlando, San Bernardino, Calif., and Ft. Hood, Texas, were all U.S. citizens.

“Are we going to start treating all Muslim-Americans differently?” Obama said. “Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith?”

The debate about the connection between Islam as a religion and the terrorists who kill in its name is a fraught one, with those who choose to see the religion as the threat and those who insist that “true Islam” and the jihadist variety are mutually exclusive attempting to oversimplify the issue, scholars and locals say.

No one knows this better than Princeton University scholar Bernard Haykel, who was quoted in a much-debated article on ISIS in The Atlantic last year as saying that Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion.”

“Some people thought that I was saying that ISIS is Islam,” Haykel said. “I tried to explain that this is a form of the religion. ... It’s not the mainstream form. It is rooted in texts.”

Though he maintains that branding ISIS and related groups as “un-Islamic” is inaccurate, Haykel says Obama’s distancing of ISIS from Islam is politically prudent.

“We should encourage Muslims to debate these issues and hopefully the liberals ones will win out,” he said.

Scott Atran, an anthropologist and adjunct professor at the University of Michigan, director of research at France’s National Center for Government Research and an author who has interviewed terrorists, said discussing the Islamic roots of ISIS and other terror groups is a “worthwhile debate,” but one that aligns with ISIS’ goals.

“By arguing that this is fundamentally tied to Islam, you’re doing ISIS’ work,” Atran said. “Is there in Islam this kind of rhetoric? There is, at least the seeds of it. Could Islamic leaders and scholars and youth organizers do more to end this scourge? Well, yes they could. Why aren’t they? They feel threatened everywhere.”

Atran says more engagement of Muslim youth in the United States and the much-more marginalized communities in European countries is necessary to counter the genuine appeal of jihad that is too often disregarded and misunderstood.

“They don’t want this gender-less, multicultural, everything-is-possible society. They want clear lines,” Atran said of some who fall under the group’s sway. “To just say they’re a death cult or that they’re nihilist is just willful ignorance. It just masks the danger and makes it all the more threatening.”

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There have been moments of solidarity across the state, including when members of interfaith groups rallied last year in support of local Muslims at the Islamic Center of Virginia, the largest mosque in the Richmond area, in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino killings.

But there have also been moments of tension and questions of discrimination, such as the decision in April by the Culpeper County Board of Supervisors to deny a permit for a new mosque and the roadblocks raised for mosques that were ultimately approved in Henrico over the past several years.

In 2013, when relatives were searching for a place to deposit the body of slain Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, it wasn’t just local, non-Muslim residents wary of his burial in a private Islamic cemetery near Doswell.

“The mainstream Muslim community didn’t want to have these people buried in their cemeteries,” Damaj said. “There is always this fear that the acts of the few will define the majority.”

Charles Turner, 27, is an adjunct political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who grew up in Prince George County, converted to Islam and now works as the Muslim-life coordinator at the University of Richmond. He often is asked to speak at local churches and fields questions about terrorism, violence and Sharia law, treatment of women and other issues.

“You can’t say that Islam has nothing to do with what’s going on. These people are very convinced that they’re doing this in the name of religion,” Turner said.

At the same time, refusing to consider other factors, such as U.S. foreign policy decisions over the past 20 years, “is an oversimplification with the intention of bringing to the forefront Islam, to foster that fear and bring the support of people who are suffering from that fear,” he added.

“I try and reassure people that if a religion of 1.5 billion people promoted violence, then the world would be a lot more violent than it is already. Usually the best tactic I’ve relied on is to (help others) realize that most Muslims have the same problems as every other American: make our rent, make our mortgage. We’re just like everyone else. We really don’t have time to commit to some mass conspiracy to submit everyone to the Sharia law.”

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Debates are taking place locally, said Turner, with an increasing cognizance of the importance of “challenging the conservative voices in our community.”

“It’s usually in things that have to do with relationships and culture,” he said. “Some of the more conservative elements try to develop this dichotomy between Americans and Muslims.”

However, one frustration for Islamic communities is that no matter how much they condemn what terrorists do in the name of their religion, there are limits to their ability to change perceptions.

“I don’t think there’s really much we can do besides keep an eye on our youth, engage our youth,” Turner said. “Our youth are in a very precarious situation. They’re stuck in this world between their immigrant parents and their American peers.”

Despite what he calls a “toxic” current political environment for American Muslims, Damaj, the VCU professor and interfaith organizer, remembers when he first came to the United States 25 years ago after growing up in Beirut and spending time in France. Now, as then, he remains impressed by the constitutional protections that enshrine religious tolerance here and is optimistic that “we do have a future together and common sense will prevail.”

“There is always a tension between their observance and living in a pluralistic, diverse society,” he said of young, marginalized Muslims who may be attracted to what ISIS is selling as an “ideal” society. “My understanding of the Islamic traditions and teaching is that we need to understand how to live to together.”