Mohammed Akacem has lived in the United States since 1977. In all those years, the Metro State professor of economics tells me, he has personally witnessed anti-Muslim sentiment only once, and that was more than three decades ago after American hostages were seized during the Iranian revolution.
“Other than that,” says Akacem, a U.S. citizen and longtime acquaintance, “I have never had a problem in terms of being a Muslim or of people treating me differently because I was Muslim.”
You figure a fellow with a name like Mohammed should know something about the Islamophobia that is supposedly sweeping America, at least as Time magazine and numerous commentators see it. After all, this native of Algeria can’t very well fudge his identity.
Akacem is hardly a Pollyanna. Before 9/11, he recalls, he never thought twice about phoning somewhere and identifying himself as Mohammed. But for the past decade “I sometimes wonder what the person on the other end is thinking.” Yet the point is that after those introductions, strangers don’t slip into rude comments about his faith, let alone into anti-Muslim tirades.
He does know Muslims who’ve experienced insults. And he is dismayed at the furor over a proposed Islamic center near ground zero — an issue that “has allowed a lot of people to vent hidden feelings toward Muslims.” But even since 9/11, “I cannot give you one incident in which I have conclusive evidence in which I was treated differently because I was Muslim.”
My sample of one has no statistical heft, of course, but it carries about as much meaning as the data marshaled by Time last week to make its case for “a growing hostility to the religion of Muslims.” Time admitted that violence against Muslims is not on the rise and that “most Muslims feel safer and freer in the U.S. than anywhere else in the Western world.” But it also made a big deal over polling data that are for the most part innocuous.
So what if 46 percent of Americans say yes when asked if they “think Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers”? Why wouldn’t they, given the thousands of terrorist attacks launched against “infidels” in recent years by self-proclaimed jihadists in the name of Islam?
And why wouldn’t Americans be suspicious of what might be taught at an Islamic center given the hateful teachings that have been discovered at a number of American mosques? (See, for example, the 2005 Freedom House report of vicious Wahhabi literature invading some mosques.)
Still, if Time’s rise-of-bigotry thesis is largely rubbish, opponents of the Islamic center deserve pushback, too. It’s not that I like the idea of the center at that site. But what I like worse is the disturbing precedent of a hostile public bullying a house of worship into another location.
Yes, the site is provocative. Yes, it would be helpful to know every source of its funding.
Yes, the “moderate” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal backer of the center, espouses vile opinions about U.S. foreign policy and its alleged responsibility for creating terrorists like Osama bin Laden— although his views, as it happens, are standard fare in non-Muslim leftist circles, too.
In this land of the free, we simply do not impose ideological litmus tests on religious centers.
No, Americans aren’t bigots for resenting plans for an Islamic center near ground zero. But they’ll be shortsighted if they allow their resentment to carry the day.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
