The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
An excellent and very lengthy piece from Buzzfeed. Some harrowing stuff in here. The entire thing is well worth your time, trust me
http://www.buzzfeed.com/davidnorieg...-a-nightmare?utm_term=.lbea5nlgVg#.ydmgyzrxRx
http://www.buzzfeed.com/davidnorieg...-a-nightmare?utm_term=.lbea5nlgVg#.ydmgyzrxRx
Mohyuddin is far from alone in her affection for the South. In Journey Into America, a study of Muslims across the United States, anthropologist Akbar Ahmed notes that “the Muslims we interviewed in the South say they were by and large happier than those living in places like New York City.” Much of this sentiment comes from the harmony between the social conservatism of Islam and evangelical Christianity.
Tennessee developed its first substantial Muslim enclave in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration admitted thousands of Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime and resettled them in Nashville. Today, the city is home to the largest Kurdish population in the United States.
The Nashville area — which has a plethora of Christian educational institutions and, by some measures, the highest number of churches per capita in the nation — proved a suitable home. Nawzad Hawrami, the president of the Salahadeen Islamic Center, notes that Middle Tennessee’s climate is oddly similar to Kurdistan’s. He recalls taking his wife to the hospital to give birth to their first daughter only days after arriving as refugees. Hospital staff brought them flowers and balloons.
When he started sending his kids to public school, Hawrami found a twofold comfort in the fact that many of their teachers were likely to be conservative Christians who were nevertheless bound to let the children practice Islam in peace. At Christmastime, Hawrami instructed his daughter to tell her teachers: “I’m Muslim. I don’t eat pork, and don’t call on me to sing ‘Jingle Bells’!”
In the early hours of February 8, 2008, Eric Ian Baker and two friends drank 40s of malt liquor and hatched a plan to burn down the mosque on Main Street. Baker had no substantive ties to broader white nationalist movements, according to one of his prosecutors. Instead, he spent his days drinking beer and listening to neo-Nazi hardcore with lyrics about lynchings. After his arrest, investigators discovered a notebook in his trailer with a detailed organizational chart for an army to fight in the impending race war.
Baker was charismatic enough to have gathered around him a coterie of impressionable young men, and he gave his group the aspirational name Aryan Alliance. It was with two of his proteges that Baker drove his ’83 pickup to a gas station shortly before 5 a.m. and filled two empty 40 bottles with gasoline. He then drove to the Islamic Center, where the three men smashed the glass of the rear door. While Baker spray-painted swastikas and white power slogans on the outside, the other two brought a lighter to the rags of their Molotov cocktails and hurled them inside.
In 2012, Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Haslam, appointed a young lawyer named Samar Ali to the state’s economic development agency. The hiring caused a furious backlash, with several local and national figures claiming Ali had been brought on to make Tennessee “Sharia-compliant.” Many of the accusations came from the Center for Security Policy, a major anti-Muslim group run by former Reagan-era defense official Frank Gaffney. A resolution to condemn Ali’s hiring was pushed by Kevin Kookogey, who was then the chairman of the Williamson County Republican Party and is now the Tennessee chairman of Ted Cruz’s campaign. Gaffney is now one of Cruz’s foreign-policy advisers.
The furor gave Ali a sharp sense of whiplash. She was born and raised in Nashville, the daughter of Palestinian and Syrian immigrants, and she describes her childhood as “almost Pollyannish.” She considered herself a patriot. “I took an oath of office to uphold the U.S. constitution,” she says. Yet there she stood, publicly accused of belonging to a jihadist fifth column. “It was a very painful experience.”
After serving in Haslam’s government for less than two years, Ali decided to stay in Nashville. She had previously lived in Washington and New York, and to this day friends ask her why she didn’t go back. Pointing to Gaffney and his cohort, she explains: “A lot of this, especially the financing, actually came from the Northeast. I think it’s really important to understand this. I don’t see it as a Southern problem.”
Daoud Abudiab and Sabina Mohyuddin both testified against the anti-Sharia bill before the legislature. Hundreds of Muslims showed up to the statehouse in protest, and the bill that eventually passed was significantly watered down. This mobilization was organized, in large part, by TIRRC and other civil- and immigrant-rights groups. While Abudiab and Mohyuddin welcomed the alliances, many other Muslims felt forced into them by circumstance. Ossama Bahloul, the imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, recalls feeling deeply uneasy when LGBT groups expressed their support during the campaign to stop the building of his mosque; recently, he declined to support one of these groups in return.
“You might find it very confusing,” Bahloul says. “Politically, how am I going to support someone who is against my personal values? Because he supports my existence? And the very conservative person shares with me the same values — but he is against my existence.”
When Mohyuddin’s speech turned to the subject of Islamophobia and hate crimes, she mentioned the firebombing of the Islamic Center of Columbia and showed a slide of the building’s charred, collapsed husk. The crowd immediately erupted into cheers. “Shame on you!” Mohyuddin said, prompting even louder clapping and whooping.
At that moment, Abudiab was standing just outside the conference room, getting a cup of coffee at the refreshments table. He could hear everything. When he heard the cheering, his mind went blank, and he briefly forgot what he was doing. He shook his head and put down the cup of coffee. He couldn’t bring himself to walk back into the room and face the crowd.
By now, Abudiab is accustomed to the rhetoric, especially coming from high places. But sometimes it gets more personal. In February 2014, Abudiab and his family moved one county north. He learned that he was living in the same town as Victoria Jackson, the former Saturday Night Live actor turned Christian conservative activist. Jackson had recently moved to Tennessee and was running for a seat on the Williamson County commission, partly on a platform of fighting Islamic infiltration.
Abudiab posted something on Facebook about his move and Jackson’s campaign. In response, Jackson published an article on her website accusing Abudiab of conducting “stealth jihad,” then put a link on Facebook that read: “This Muslim posts my name and location on his FB and says he just moved to my neighborhood…” (Abudiab had not posted Jackson’s address, only the town she lived in, which she had discussed publicly.)
The post drew hundreds of comments, many of them violent: “Shoot the muslim,” “Bomb his house,” “Smear your ammo with lard, Ms. Jackson.” Several of Jackson’s fans asked her to post Abudiab’s address. “I have weapons and will travel,” one wrote. Another: “He’ll be gutted and fed to pigs with all his family.” Some were unsettlingly specific: “Get a big gun and some wasp spray it will shoot about 30’ and put his eyes out.”
Robin’s mother recently posted a meme to Facebook that characterized Muslims as inherently bloodthirsty and warlike. It came as a surprise to Abudiab and to Robin, who says her parents long ago accepted her and her family’s faith. But lately they’ve been spending more time in the living room with Fox News on the television — “swimming in that fluid of meanness,” Robin says. This made Robin realize what Abudiab is up against in his interfaith work. Is personally knowing and loving a Muslim not enough to counteract the messages of fear and hatred? “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “I can’t move them any more than just being me.”
Lately, Robin has wondered whether she should stop wearing the hijab. “I’m tired of the questions, I’m tired of the looks,” she says. “I’m tired of what wearing a hijab means to other people — that I’m oppressed, that I don’t have choices. And I’m tired of being associated with terrorists.”
“Sometimes I think if I took it off it would make the kids’ lives easier. It would make everybody’s life easier,” she says. “But I would be giving in.”
