Silencing the Call to Prayer

At 8:30 p.m. on September 19, 2000, Munir Zilanawala ’01 was walking past St. Paul’s Cathedral on his way back to Dunster House when two skinheads attacked him from behind.

Zilanawala, who was wearing a Kufi, an Islamic prayer cap, said he immediately knew his assailants were interested in something more malicious than his money.

“I took 10 bucks out of my pocket and I said ‘Here—just take it,’” Zilanawala says. “But they didn’t. It wasn’t a robbery-motivated attack.”

Soon after the men left him shouting for help on the church steps, Zilanawala’s friend found him and called the police. Zilanawala was taken to a hospital with deep gashes on his head which needed stitches.

Five years later, Huma Farid ’06 was walking past Lamont when she heard a woman screaming, “You filthy Jew-hater!” The woman proceeded to chase her down the street.

Farid, whose family comes from Pakistan, reported the incident to the Cambridge Police Department, but was later disappointed by what she said she perceived as the College’s nonchalant response.

“No administrator contacted me with the exception of [Director of the Harvard Foundation] Dr. [S. Allen] Counter,” Farid says. No community advisory was sent out by the administration, and for a couple of days after the incident, Farid wore hoodies to hide the head scarf, or hijab, she wears.

Although recent attacks against Muslims on the Harvard campus have not been directly perpetrated by students, Islamophobia exists in less overt forms at Harvard. Many Muslim students have experienced moments when they said they have felt surprised or offended by others’ assumptions about followers of Islam.

A DOUBLE STANDARD

A few months after Farid’s encounter, The Harvard Salient published the now-famous anti-Islamic Danish cartoons. Associate Dean of Harvard College Judith H. Kidd responded with an e-mail to the conservative biweekly warning that “some segments of the campus and surrounding communities may be sufficiently upset by the publication of the cartoons that they may become dangerous.” She later apologized.

In light of the College’s indifferent response to Farid’s verbal attack, Muslim students found Kidd’s original e-mail misplaced.

“When things actually do happen to Muslim students on campus,” Hebah M. Ismail ’06, vice president of the Harvard Islamic Society and a Crimson editor, says, “no one from the administration even contacted Huma [Farid] or other Muslim students.” Ismail adds that Kidd revealed to her in a meeting that she had not even heard of Farid’s incident until reading about it in The Crimson.

A 2004 Divinity School graduate, Wasim S. Rahman, says he sees Kidd’s e-mail as an example of dangerous manifestations of cultural ignorance at Harvard.

“By not contacting the Harvard Islamic Society about the issue, she was accepting that Muslims have a propensity towards this violence,” Rahman says.

Zilanawala says that the administration in general should be more proactive in encouraging dialogue between Muslim students and the student body at large.

“Because the administration’s response to Islamophobia over the past few years has been overall disappointing, it should fight hate speech with more speech,” he says.

DANGER OF MISCONCEPTIONS

According to The Forum Against Islamophobia & Racism, Islamophobia is defined as “alienation, discrimination, harassment and violence rooted in misinformed and stereotyped representations of Islam and its adherents.” Many Harvard Muslims say students have never had a direct confrontation, but others do sense a menacing undercurrent of misconceptions on campus.

“Here we think we know everything there is to know,” Deena S. Shakir ’08 says. “A lot of those misconceptions come out through intellectual or academic windows.”

Shakir, the president of the Society for Arab students, says that Islamophobia—or, by extension, Arabophobia or Middle East-phobia—stems from misunderstandings, not simply lack of information. According to Shakir, Islamophobia is more often projected through intellectual avenues at Harvard.

“It’s not going to be somebody insulting someone on the street,” Shakir says. “It’s going to be an op-ed.”

FREE SPEECH OR HATE SPEECH?

In the spring of 2002, Zayed M. Yasin ’02, former president of the Harvard Islamic Society, planned to give a speech at Commencement titled, “Of Faith and Citizenship: My American Jihad.”

“The speech was about unity between American and Muslim values,” Yasin says.

However, Yasin’s proposed address was met with criticism from a group of students who were concerned that the word “Jihad” would be too offensive to students and family who had lost loved ones in the September 11th attacks. According to a Crimson article published in June 2002, others were also concerned that Yasin had supported the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity which has been accused of channeling funds to terrorist organizations.

The Commencement committee supported Yasin, and he delivered the speech at the ceremony despite protests.

Yasin remembers a girl, whose father had died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, e-mailing him before the ceremony to describe her reservations about his speech. Yasin says, however, that she also objected to the outcry against the speech. Yasin responded by offering to read his address to her before the ceremony.

“I met her in Leverett JCR and told her what I was going to say,” Yasin says. “She responded with ‘That’s beautiful.’”

For Yasin, the incident captured exactly what his intentions were in writing the speech—a call for dialogue between Muslim Americans and other Americans.

“Unlike many of the people who were trying to stop me from speaking, she had a real concern,” he says. “People who had the greatest right [to be offended] by what I was saying didn’t find anything wrong with it.”

LACK OF DIALOGUE

As a researcher at the Kennedy School of Government, Rahman has recently encountered greater numbers of misinformed students assuming they know all about Islam.

“People think they understand Islam through the sound byte culture we’ve got,” Rahman says. He recalls an interfaith discussion group about the Danish cartoon controversy in which some Harvard students asserted confidently that the Muslim theology against representing the prophet Muhammad is a new phenomenon.

“They were trying to tell Muslims—me, other Muslim students—what we believe,” he says. “It’s really inappropriate for someone with a cursory understanding of Islam to tell them what they believe.”

Rahman is concerned about replacing dialogue with columns and e-mail lists.

“Impersonal means of communication aren’t productive to bringing understanding to people,” he says.

Last week, the Harvard Islamic Society (HIS) worked to open up such a personal dialogue by coordinating “Islam Awareness Week.” The organization hosted activities such as an “Ask-a-Muslim” table in Loker Commons, prayer services at Lowell Lecture Hall, and discussion groups. HIS president Khalid M. Yasin ’06 says the week was very successful.

“Our hope is to get out information and to show that there’s no need for knee-jerk reactions,” he says.

Rahman seems optimistic that American society and the Harvard community is tolerant and that dialogue will happen if Harvard students are willing to listen.

“I fear for Harvard students in the sense that we take the knowledge that we get however little we know how to act upon it,” he says. “If that knowledge is incomplete, you end up in a place where you’re wrong.”