Misplaced blame puzzles local Muslims
BY LAUREN FITZPATRICK Sun-Times Media September 9, 2011 1:36PM
Maryam Salem was 10 years old during 911, then in an Islamic school in Bridgeview, Il. Now a student at DePaul University in Chicago, she organizes and volunteers. Maryam is on way to class, Tuesday, September 6, 2011. | John H. White~Sun-Times
Updated: May 9, 2012 9:47AM
Maryam Salem, a fifth grader at a private Islamic school in Bridgeview in September 2001, knew something was very, very wrong.
A plane crashed in New York. Police surrounded the Universal School campus next to Maryam’s family’s mosque. Word got out that the hijackers who turned four airplanes into missiles were waging holy war in the name of Islam.
People in big cars started driving around the Universal School honking and waving American flags.
“Ignorant people,” Salem said. “There were Muslims who died that day. I had nothing to do with it. I was 10.”
Salem was too young to know about hate crimes, but she knew her father didn’t want her mother, who wore a head scarf, to go to Wal-Mart by herself anymore. He packed up his wife and eight children to go stay a few days with family friends well outside of Bridgeview, home to a large mosque and the Midwest’s second-largest Arab-Muslim community.
A Pew Research Center study completed in time for the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks showed that the majority of Muslim Americans still say it’s more difficult now to be Muslim than before 2001.
But Salem, now 19, a student at DePaul University, isn’t scared anymore. She volunteers with immigrants rights groups, the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago and at her mosque. She lives out true Islam.
She wears a scarf now, too.
“It only makes you feel stronger,” she said. “I know how to speak. I know how to defend myself. I know the situation enough to know why I’m not at fault.
“I like educating people and telling them Islam is a religion of peace.”
Islamophobia and ignorance in the wake of the hoopla surrounding a proposal to build a Muslim community center a few blocks from Ground Zero in New York prompted Jessica Lowery to pipe up.
And her questioning, patiently answered by the only practicing Muslim she knew — the trainer at her gym — led the Benedictine University student to do something many folks thought was crazy.
She converted.
“I kind of got more intrigued by it,” said Lowery, 22, who as a child was confirmed in the Catholic faith.
So 9/11 for her gets a little complicated. It makes her defend her religion against people who think the men who carried out the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon were prompted by their religion.
Some of those people she must defend her religion against are relatives.
“I almost feel like if 9/11 were never to have happened, I would still have a relationship with my mom now,” Lowery said. “The word ‘Muslim’ is wrapped around 9/11. It’s always going to be incorporated in people’s thoughts.”
That, to Lowery, is hard. And it’s really sad.
“It’s now one of the things people who are against my decision bring up,” she said. “And here I am, a Muslim convert. I shouldn’t have to justify my religion based on what those people did on 9/11.”
“Islam” means “peace,” she says, an idea reflected in the prayer she uttered before speaking at all:
“In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful.”
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