Mohammed Lat will pray for the victims of the September 11 terror attacks during his daily visit to the mosque Wednesday — but he will also offer up a little prayer for himself and the way things were.
An Indian Muslim, the 38-year-old software engineer thought he had left ethnic and religious intolerance behind him when he moved here from his native Gujarat nine years ago.
”I felt comfortable and safe … I admired many of this country’s good qualities,” Lat recalled with something approaching nostalgia.
But the September 11 attacks last year changed all that, unleashing a wave of public revulsion and anger at the 19 hijackers that found its expression — in part — in attacks on American Muslims and Arabs who shared the same faith as the al-Qaida operatives that hijacked the planes.
And while Lat escaped the worst excesses — the jibes, the taunts, the dreaded ”profiling,” at airports or border checkpoints — the rash of hate crimes recalled the religious strife between Muslim and Hindu in his native India, and still eats away at his peace of mind.
His colleagues at the multinational software company where he works are ”very nice to me,” Lat says, but he cannot help wondering if privately they don’t regard him with suspicion.
”In civilised society, one doesn’t talk about such things, but I wonder what they are thinking.”
Other Muslims have little time for such introspection, shrugging off suggestions that the attacks drove a wedge between the majority of white Americans of European descent and newer immigrants from Arab or Muslim countries.
”It’s not an issue about Muslims, or Catholics, Hindus or Jews,” said Mohammed Khan, a Muslim grocery store owner for whom September 11 will be business as usual.
”It’s about the loss of life. People of all religious and ethnic groups died in New York. There were plenty of Muslims in (New York’s) World Trade Center.”
”It hurt us too,” said Abraham Arman, a businessman who runs a jewelry store on Chicago’s Devon Avenue, the hub of a bustling South Asian community in the northwest of the city.
But this Palestinian American has more pressing worries these days.
”I’m worried about my family back home,” he says. His father, 100 and ailing, lives close to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah, in the West Bank, and because of recent operations by the Israeli military has found it difficult to get the medical services he needs. – Sapa-AFP