Students tour Muslim world
A group of Americans sought dialogue in nine countries, hoping to improve Western-Islamic relations.
from the April 19, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
Anti-Americanism has spread in the Muslim world even as American Muslims see signs of growing "Islamophobia" in the US. The young people who signed on for the trip were personally committed to finding ways to cut through such depressing news and improve understanding.
Mr. Martin's family was living in Kenya when the US Embassy there was bombed in 1998, spurring his need "to figure out what was going on." Hadia Mubarak, a Muslim American of Syrian-Jordanian background, hoped "to bridge the two worlds" that she feels a part of. Ms. Woldt felt it was "the duty of my generation to understand and do something about [the situation]."
What most surprised the students was the strong consensus they found in every country visited – from Turkey to Indonesia – on what people saw as "the No. 1 problem facing the Muslim world." In every case, the answer was "Western misperceptions of Islam."
"They think Americans just don't care [about understanding Islam] and think all Muslims are evil or terrorists," Martin says. "They say, 'We get your media and see how you view Islam, but you don't get our media.' "
Wherever the group traveled, adds Jonathan Hayden, a University of Alabama graduate and assistant to Ahmed, "Fox News was on, and you'd see Ann Coulter calling people 'ragheads' over and over, or Glenn Beck on CNN."
The sense that they are not understood – or being deliberately misrepresented and maligned in Western media – intensifies frustrations Muslims already feel over the failings of their own governments and the impact of Western-style globalization.
Many Muslims feel threatened
"Many see a corrosion of their own society and feel very threatened," Woldt says. For example, young women they met in Damascus were happy that Syria had recently gotten cellphone service and Internet access. But they also were upset about children now glued to video games and young men sending pornographic images via cellphones.
The widespread sense that Islam is under siege and being wrongly defined by Westerners also showed up in questionnaires the group gave to youths in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Qatar, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. (Egypt was the ninth country visited.)
RSS feed
