For airport screeners, more training about Muslims

Say you're a security screener at the airport. You notice a large group of people wearing white robes, speaking a strange language. The women have head scarves and the men long beards. They look nervous. One of them is holding a Koran. Another appears to be praying. What do you do?

According to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), simply assume they're devout Muslims returning from the annual hajj in Mecca.

During the next few weeks, as many as 20,000 American Muslims will be returning to the United States from their pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. The TSA has ramped up cultural-awareness training for all 43,000 of its screeners. The goal: to remind screeners what to expect from devout Muslims and how to go about screening them so it's in concert with their religious beliefs.

Arab-American and Muslim-American leaders are applauding the effort. But they say it's part of a much-needed larger cultural and political conversation about Islam and Arab culture that can help the nation as it heals from the aftereffects of 9/11.

"Their efforts are a modest but important beginning," says Jack Shaheen, professor emeritus of mass communications at Southern Illinois University. "But until such time that we react to the vilification of and discrimination against Arabs in the same way we react to the vilification of others like Jews, blacks, and Hispanics, I'm not going to go dancing in the streets."

The 9/11 attacks ushered in a new era for the nation's Arabs and Muslims. Many of the almost 7 million who have lived in the country for years, if not generations, suddenly felt suspect simply because of their religion or the way they looked. A poll conducted last year by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that almost half of Americans have a negative view of Islam, even though 60 percent say they're not knowledgeable about it. More than 1 in 4 believes such statements as: "The Muslim religion teaches violence and hatred."

And it's at the airports, with the intense focus on security, that many American Muslims and Arab-Americans say they are more keenly aware of those misperceptions.

"After 9/11 things were bad, but they weren't as bad as they are now," says Rafat Arain, a dentist and mother of four from Brookfield, Wis.

Dr. Arain, who's lived in the US for 30 years, wears a head scarf known as the hijab. Every time she's flown in the past five years, she's been taken aside for extra screening, whether she was traveling to Europe, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia for the hajj. She believes, in part, that's because of her head covering. Immediately after 9/11, she says, she understood the extra scrutiny: The country had been traumatized. Now, she's simply come to expect it.

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