Loading ...Young Muslim Americans Are Feeling the Strain of Suspicion
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
Hebh Jamal does not remember the Sept. 11 attacks. She was 1. Growing up in the Bronx, she was unaware of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and was mostly insulated from the surge in suspicion that engulfed Muslims in the United States, the programs of police surveillance and the rise in bias attacks.
But in the past year, especially in the past several months, as her emergence from childhood into young womanhood has coincided with the violent spread of the Islamic State and a surge in Islamophobia, she has had to confront some harsh challenges of being a young Muslim in America.
Instead of occupying herself with a teenager’s normal concerns, like homework, clothes and hanging out with friends, she said, she has had to contend with growing anti-Muslim sentiment, adjusting her routines to avoid attacks and worrying about how she appears to the rest of society. And she has repeatedly felt compelled to justify her faith and to distance herself from terrorists who murder in the name of her religion.
“I have to sit down and study more and think more, and the idea of thinking more is really tough, because as a 15-year-old, you don’t want to think more,” Ms. Jamal said in an interview last week. “I feel like the past two months have probably been the hardest of my life.”
Ms. Jamal is part of a generation of Muslim Americans who have grown up amid the fight against terrorism, in an America in which anti-Muslim hostility, by many measures, has been historically high.
Young Muslim Americans, on top of the usual trials of adolescence, have been forced to grapple with profound questions of identity, society, politics and faith in a country that has had an ambivalent relationship with Islam. The complexities and pressure have left many young Muslims feeling isolated and alienated, if not unwelcome in their own country.
These challenges have only multiplied in the past year as violent events around the world have fueled or reaffirmed anti-Muslim feelings in the United States and elsewhere: the terrorist attacks in Paris; the killings of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, N.C.; the San Bernardino, Calif., killings; and Donald Trump’s proposal to block the entry of all Muslims into the United States.
Muslim children and young adults have been buffeted by prejudice and politics, much of it playing out on social media, and parents and counselors have grown concerned about the toll this has taken.
Farha Abbasi, assistant professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University and an expert in Muslim mental health, said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, young Muslims in the United States have dealt with “chronic trauma” from the constant stress of anti-Muslim sentiment.
“On top of that, you have acute stress since the Daesh attacks started, and all the frenzy,” she said in an interview, using the Arabic name for ISIS.
Should the backlash against Muslims persist at or near current levels, she warned, “in the next few years we will realize how harmful and detrimental that’s going to be.”
The world’s Muslim population, an estimated 1.6 billion people spanning continents and cultures, defies generalization. So do the experiences of Muslim Americans who have lived most, if not all, of their lives since Sept. 11.
But a body of scholarship that has emerged in the years since then has described the extraordinary challenges facing the youngest members of the Muslim American population as they navigate complex identities while their communities are scrutinized as potential terrorism threats.
Source: www.nytimes.com