Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (52 page)

Lack of knowledge about Islam and the Middle East ensured that twentieth-century media coverage of major news events involving U.S. interests in the region portrayed the Muslim world as the inevitable adversary of the West. These include the 1973 oil embargo; the 1979–80 Iranian Revolution and seizure of American hostages; the 1983 car bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut with the death of hundreds of marines; the hijacking of a TWA flight to Beirut; the murder of Leon Klinghoffer during the seizure of the
Achille Lauro
cruise ship; and the First Gulf War of 1990–91.
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Adding to this steady stream of images of anti-American violence in the news, according to
Jack Shaheen, were hundreds of American movies depicting Arabs negatively, mostly as terrorists.
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As Shaheen asserts, Hollywood has “indicted all Arabs as Public Enemy #1—brutal, heartless, uncivilized, religious fanatics and money-mad cultural ‘others’ bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners, especially Christians and Jews.”
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Television also promoted the story line of American Muslims as enemies within.

This negative imaging did not begin with 9/11.
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After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, one poll found that 43 percent of Americans defined their fellow Muslim citizens as “religious fanatics” and associated them with violence.
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It is therefore not surprising that in 1995 most Americans assumed the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma that killed 168 must be the work of foreign Muslims. The devastation was, of course, perpetrated by two white, homegrown American terrorists. One,
Timothy McVeigh, was associated with the white supremacist “radical Christian Identity Movement,” but there was no backlash against Protestant Christians as a result of his violent acts.
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In contrast, after 9/11 American Muslims “immediately feared for their lives.”
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Not without cause.

Days after the 9/11 attacks, three murders prompted by hatred for Muslims occurred. On September 15, 2001, an American Sikh, who wore a turban as a sign of his faith, was wrongly identified as a Muslim and shot dead in Mesa, Arizona. On the same day, an American Muslim citizen of Pakistani descent was gunned down in his own store in Dallas by a white supremacist. Incidents of physical and verbal
violence against other American Muslims mounted in the days that followed.
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On September 17, President
George W. Bush spoke to the nation, declaring that “Islam is peace” and attempting to end the violence by affirming that “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country.”
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But his words did not stem the tide of intimidation felt by American Muslims throughout the country.

Two days after President Bush’s speech, an American Muslim of Yemeni descent fleeing an attacker in Lincoln Park, Michigan, was shot in the back. In early October 2001, the Indian American owner of a gas station was shot in Mesquite, Texas, by the same white supremacist who had a month earlier murdered an American Muslim in the Lone Star State.
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In 2001, anti-Islamic hate crimes reported to the FBI numbered 546, a huge spike from the previous year’s thirty-three.
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Between 2001 and 2006, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division investigated seven hundred cases of crimes motivated by religious bigotry against Muslims, Sikhs, Arabs, and South Asians. Federal courts tried twenty-seven cases, while local law enforcement pursued 150.
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Beginning in the fall of 2001, the FBI and other law enforcement authorities held “voluntary” interviews with almost eight thousand young Muslim men with student or visitor visas throughout the
country. Faced with the unannounced interrogations, none dared refuse to answer questions focused on their religious and political views. None of those interviewed would be accused of any tie to terrorism. Seven hundred immigrant Muslim men were arrested while trying to register under the new National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. There followed detentions without cause, and for those with visa infractions, deportations. In addition, three American Muslim citizens, including one captain in the U.S. Army, were “arrested, held in solitary confinement for weeks, and labeled ‘terrorists.’ ”
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Eventually, all three would be exonerated, but the American Muslim community at large would grow suspicious of their own government.

The 342-page USA
PATRIOT Act (H.R. 3162), hastily passed by Congress and signed into law by the president on October 26, 2001, provided the government unprecedented powers to monitor all American citizens. Intended to “deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes,” the law actually targeted the American Muslim community directly, despite its disclaimer that “Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and Americans from South Asia play a vital role in our Nation and are entitled to nothing less than the full rights of every American.”
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What most security-conscious Americans have failed to appreciate, however, is that these laws also may be used against non-Muslim citizens as part of any investigation in which the possibility of terrorism is alleged. In this way, too, the civil rights of American Muslims serve to test those of all Americans.

The PATRIOT Act’s Section 213, for example, eliminates previous legal requirements that a warrant be provided to the owner of any home or business at the time of a search. Instead, legal authorities can “sneak and peek” without informing the subject until weeks or months later.
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Although the Supreme Court has ruled that such secret searches violate the
Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” the act “has discarded this interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.”
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Section 215 allows the government, all without probable cause, the right to seize any document or record of any individual suspect being investigated for criminal activity. These materials include e-mails, computer records, and medical and education documents, as well as credit and bank statements.
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Legal experts have noted that the provisions are particularly damaging to the rights of Muslim
immigrants with legal visas and green cards. Section 412 states that these would-be citizens may be indefinitely detained, jailed, or deported, whether or not charges of terrorism are ultimately substantiated.
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As the sociologist
Lori Peek asserts, the PATRIOT Act’s provisions have led to the “systematic erosion of civil rights for all Americans but have been especially devastating to Arab and Muslim communities.”
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In addition, American Muslim citizens have been subject to religious profiling at airports. (Enterprising young Muslims created T-shirts that read “
FLYING WHILE MUSLIM—IT
’
S NOT A CRIME
.”)
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Special surveillance of mosques continues, and not until recently has the FBI’s infiltration of Muslim Student Associations in New York and New England colleges in 2005–6 been made public.
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Such policies have resulted in no convictions but have very effectively emboldened those inclined to suspect their fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim, as well as fortifying the stereotype of a religious minority as an enemy within.
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Some American Muslims have responded by redoubling their efforts at public education and forging closer ties with Jewish and Christian organizations.
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Young American Muslims have undertaken campus outreach, including comedy tours attempting to neutralize bigotry with humor.
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There have been those among the young for whom 9/11 permanently confirmed a sense of alienation and exclusion, as was the case of one young man interviewed in 2003: “I look different from them. I believe different things. I think that is when I figured out that to be American was to be Christian and Jewish. To be Muslim and brown was to be not American.”
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Still, despite experiencing prejudice, many American Muslims have seized the opportunity for greater civic engagement at the local and national levels, including running for public office. Such political involvement has been identified as an important alternative path for the frustrations that might have led to domestic terrorism.
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Yet Muslims remain underrepresented in American politics, even as they are called upon to run in order to “defend” the community’s civil rights and to “consolidate the sense of ownership and belonging of this vulnerable minority.”
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But those who answer the call often face an intensified version of the hostilities directed against the community. The election of the first American Muslim congressman, while cause for communal celebration, also resulted in an unprecedented demonstration of anti-Islamic bigotry.

Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an made headlines in the twenty-first century resting beneath the hand of the Democrat Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress. Ellison’s election in 2006 and his decision to use Jefferson’s Qur’an in his private swearing-in ceremony in January 2007 stirred a controversy in which American ideals about universal civil rights clashed with long-held anxieties about American Muslim citizens as the “distrusted Other.”
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Ellison’s election was answered with “hostile phone calls and e-mail,” along with “some death threats.”
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Republican congressman Virgil Goode Jr. wrote a letter to constituents in Virginia warning that Americans must “wake up”; otherwise, there might “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”
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The Virginia congressman failed to remind those he represented that Ellison’s use of the Qur’an had followed a formal pledge of allegiance to the Constitution, the only form of oath he was obliged to take. For Ellison, the Qur’an was optional and private, but also personal.
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Why, after all, should he swear upon a religious text in which he did not believe? Ironically, Representative Goode’s district included Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home, the site near where, in 1776, this Founder first quoted John Locke: “[He] sais ‘neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor
Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’ ”
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Congressman Keith Ellison taking the oath on Jefferson’s Qur’an in 2007. (
illustration credit 7.2
)

Goode’s alarmism failed to consider that Ellison’s election had been the result of a democratic process in which the candidate’s civic virtues mattered more than his creed, a possibility first predicted by the Federalist Samuel Johnston of North Carolina in 1788: “Another case is, if any persons of such descriptions should, notwithstanding their religion, acquire the confidence and esteem of the people of America by their good conduct and practice of virtue, they may be chosen.”
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Another faulty assumption on Goode’s part was that Ellison as a Muslim must be “foreign,” as betrayed in his warning, “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.” Ellison, an African American convert to Islam, explained that his ancestors had resided in North America since 1742.
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Indeed, his conversion may well have been a reversion to the Muslim beliefs of his West African ancestors. Ellison was also Minnesota’s first African American congressman, but it was his religion, not his race, that his critics seized upon.

Dennis Prager, the conservative columnist, talk show host, and President George W. Bush’s appointee to the Holocaust Museum Board, insisted that Ellison’s swearing-in on the Qur’an should not be tolerated “because the act undermines American civilization.”
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He asserted, “The centrality of the Bible as a repository of our values is the main issue,” arguing that “if you are incapable of taking an oath on that book [the Bible], don’t serve in Congress.”
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His assumption contradicted recent American political practice. Democratic congresswoman
Debbie Wasserman Schultz had sworn her private oath of office upon a Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, termed by Christians the Old Testament. As a Jew, she found the New Testament represented no repository of sacred truth. Why, as the Baptist evangelical John Leland had once asked in the eighteenth century, should anyone of any faith be forced by their government to swear upon a text whose truth they rejected? Such would amount not only to coercion, but also to hypocrisy. Indeed, considering that the Constitution explicitly forbade a religious test, why should an individual be condemned for using or not using any sacred text?