For a teen aspiring to be president, being Muslim is a hurdle in post-9/11 America

posted on: Sep 26, 2015

Aya Beydoun wants to be president of the United States. On paper, the 17-year-old already is not an implausible future occupant of the White House.

She’s an ambitious, articulate, near straight-A student, planning to use a college law degree as a stepping stone to politics. She already chairs her high school politics club.

Her problem – at least according to Ben Carson, one of the leading presidential candidates in the current Republican field – would be that she is Muslim.

Aya’s voice quivers when she mentions Carson, a former paediatric neurosurgeon who studied at the University of Michigan just a few miles from her home.

The teenager was at home last Sunday, watching the TV with her mother, Wanda, whose parents came to America fleeing the Lebanese civil war in 1970, when the pair heard Carson’s incendiary remarks.

In his trademark quiet, civil voice, Carson, who is currently trailing only Donald Trump in the Republican polls, said on NBC news on Sunday that Islam is incompatible with the US constitution and he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation”.

Beydoun said: “I see a lot of awful things in the media; people dying, discrimination, politicians being disgusting, but this really hit home because that was me he was talking about.”

“I’m educated enough to know that what he’s saying is absolutely against the constitution, but what about all the kids in my area who don’t know that? Now they’re going to think that maybe they have to lie or keep their religion a secret, maybe they can never fulfil their dreams.”

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Hussein Murray, 15, poses for a photo with his mother Nisreen Murray and father Moheeb Murray on Wednesday in their Rochester Hills, Michigan home. Photograph: Bryan Mitchell for the Guardian
Post-9/11 demonisation hasn’t slowed
Carson’s comments did not emerge from a vacuum. They marked just the latest example of an increasing tolerance for Islamophobia in the Republican presidential race, as views historically associated with the Tea Party fringe have been thrust to the mainstream.

Just days earlier, at a rally in New Hampshire, for example, Trump declined to challenge a questioner who claimed Muslims had created secret training camps in America and added: “When can we get rid of them?”

“We are going to be looking at a lot of different things,” Trump replied.

Others in the Republican field distanced themselves from Carson and Trump, but only grudgingly.

For Muslim Americans who have lived through 14 years of post-9/11 demonisation, the remarks were salt in an already open sore.

Dearborn, Aya Beydoun’s hometown, has grown accustomed to a pervasive climate of Islamophobia. The small Detroit suburb has a population of 96,000, a third of whom are Arab Americans.

Many are descended from workers who migrated to the city to work in the automotive industry in the early twentieth century. Others, like Beydoun’s family, arrived fleeing war, including Republican president George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

The suburb, home to the largest mosque in North America, provides a window into how radically the relationship between Muslims and Republicans has changed in recent years.

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Like the majority of Dearborn’s resident’s, Beydoun’s mother, Wanda, 46, voted for Bush in the 2000 election, attracted to the GOP’s appeal to family conservatism.

Bush took the city with 54% of the vote that year. Four years later, after the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act, and start of the Iraq war, Bush lost vast swathes of the Muslim vote.

In 2004, following the invasion of Iraq and the imposition of the Patriot Act he lost it in a 14% swing to the Democrats.

Still today, Bush remains the only sitting president – of either party – to have visited a Mosque on American soil. Meanwhile Dearborn, due to its large Muslim population, has become the bête noire of Christian and conservatives radicals, caricatured as a city living under Sharia law or a hotbed of terrorist activity. Neither is even close to being true.

In La Shish, the beloved local halal restaurant where Wanda Beydoun has worked a minimum wage managing job for 16 years, these stereotypes are a source of amusement.

The outside is decorated with giant pumpkins in preparation for Halloween, as lofty stars and stripes flutter in the wind. The premises next-door is a strip bar.

A newspaper stand outside offers free copies of the Arab American News, which leads with a headline “Time For Tolerance – The Clock That Changed The Narrative”, and a beaming photograph of Ahmed Mohamed, the Sudanese-American 14-year-old who was the other major controversy in news of Islamophobia this month.

Mohamed, from Irving, Texas, was arrested last week on suspicion of creating a bomb after he brought a clock to school to show his teacher. His case has come to embody the pervasive discrimination faced by many young American Muslims; in an act of conciliation he was invited by Obama to visit the White House.

Muslims, like African Americans and Latino communities, increasingly feel drawn toward Democrats – and away from Republicans.

“It was a big mistake,” Wanda Beydoun said of her vote for Bush in 2000. She said the city was more tolerant toward Muslims back in the 1970s. “People used to ask where I came from, what the food was like. They accepted us for who we were,” she said. “Today, unfortunately, they don’t.”

Source: www.theguardian.com