Some Stand with Ahmad
Economist: AN OUTSIZED Stars and Stripes; a giant car park; a children’s playground prettily flanked by hayfields, whitewashed clapboard houses glistening nearby. Ossama Bahloul’s building has many of the regular accoutrements of southern houses of worship. On his desk inside there is another, miniature, American flag, alongside a Koran. The conspicuous patriotism seems not to have helped the Islamic Centre of Murfreesboro, Tennessee (ICM) and its admirably phlegmatic imam. Dealing with abusive e-mails, Mr Bahloul says, is “part of the daily routine”. At least the bomb threats and arson have abated.
The long campaign to prevent the ICM’s construction, in which its opponents argued that Islam should not be considered a religion, was settled only after the federal government intervened. The battle was one of the most egregious recent episodes of American Islamophobia, a phenomenon highlighted again by the arrest of Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old inventor who brought a home-made clock to his school in Irving, Texas (earning a consolatory invitation to the White House and a sympathetic Twitter hashtag, #IStandWithAhmed). Mr Bahloul fears that this prejudice, particularly acute in the South, may worsen. The killing in July of five servicemen in nearby Chattanooga, Tennessee by a gunman who may have had extremist leanings, hasn’t helped; nor has an attempt by students from Mississippi to join Islamic State. But bigger drivers of enmity, says Mr Bahloul, are foreign woes, such as the nuclear deal with Iran, and the domestic electoral cycle. The anti-Islamic witterings of some Republican presidential candidates support that analysis.
Categories: Accepting Islam, Americas, Answers to Anti-Islam, United States