Earlier this month, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested and questioned by Texas police after his own high school reported him for bringing in a handmade clock they mistook for a bomb. The incident caused international outrage, with critics claiming such drastic treatment would never have occurred had the teenager not been Muslim.  Mohamed’s tale rings all too familiar for Muslim Americans who grew up in the aftermath of 9/11 and have to reconcile a multiplicity of identities on a daily basis.  Young Muslim leaders who have been shaped by the political response to the 9/11 attacks talked to the Guardian about their work, and what made them choose their paths.  When Mark Crain is not working his day job as digital strategist with MoveOn.org, he can be found on the west side of Detroit, boarding up houses, helping rehab others and creating what he calls a healthy community.  Crain converted to Islam while a senior in college in Chicago. He found the concept of God and the way in which he was invited to ponder the world around him made more sense in Islam than it did in Christianity.  For someone trying to create positive change by centering his life around black people and politics (his two passions), becoming a Muslim made a lot of sense. “Islam provided something of a solution to the ‘race problem’ for me,” he says.  Crain is active with Dream of Detroit, a Muslim-led initiative pouring money, sweat and effort into a marginalized neighborhood with a 30% vacancy rate. The chosen area is set to be a place where Detroit Muslims can come and find community.  “The idea was to combine community organizing with the unique housing and land situation in Detroit,” Crain says, referring to the tens of thousands of empty homes and lots in the city. “We are helping bring resources to a neighborhood that has faced a lot of divestment over the years.”  Non-Muslim neighbors are included in the project – for example, volunteers mow everyone’s lawns, no matter the owners’ faith.  The endeavor has gone down well among locals, and is connecting Muslims from the suburbs – many of whom are of Pakistani descent – to black American Muslims living inside the city.  There is very little tension in the 83% African American city surrounding Islam, Crain says. “We are contributors to Detroit’s survival. We have a long history here,” he says. “Here in particular, Muslims are a known entity. The Nation of Islam [founded in Detroit] did a lot to establish respect in the black community,” he says, adding the estimated number of Muslims in the Detroit area, including non-black Muslims who tend to live in the suburbs, is around 400,000.  Black American Muslims are often overlooked in popular media narratives surrounding Islam in the US, Crain says, despite constituting a third of America’s Muslim population overall, with traces back to slavery. If black Muslims, many of whom can trace their American ancestry back decades, if not centuries, are ignored, you have erased a part of the Muslim population whose American citizenship cannot be put into question.  “You can’t make us be foreign,” Crain says.  Fahd Ahmed remembers the days and months after 9/11 vividly.  Witnessing how Arab and South Asian communities were targeted in response – based on little else except for national origin and supposed religious belonging – was a defining turning point, Ahmed says.  At DRUM, an organization that was barely a year old in 2001 and set up to cater to low-wage immigrant workers from South Asia, Ahmed says worrying calls and reports started coming in.  “Community members were calling to say their husbands had left for work and had never come back. Families were reporting men being taken from their homes and no one knew where they went. Workers were saying they were seeing friends being picked up off the street.”  In the immediate 9/11 aftermath, at least 1,200 men of Arab and South Asian origin across New York and New Jersey were picked up by US authorities. For days, sometimes weeks, families were left in the dark. Panic penetrated communities – particularly immigrant, working-class ones – as they wondered who would be taken next.  Related: For a teen aspiring to be president, being Muslim is a hurdle in post-9/11 America  “The men were literally disappeared,” Ahmed says.  In a 2004 report, the American Civil Liberties Union called the sweeps a “secret roundup”, the “first large scale detention of a group of people based on country of origin since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II”. The ACLU, along with other organizations seeking to obtain information about the reasons for arrest and location of detention, were met with “a wall of silence”.  Ahmed and fellow organizers established a 24-hour hotline for community members, and eventually detainees, to call. The phone hardly ever stopped, he says.  While the sweeps led to no criminal arrests and uncovered no terrorist plots, a majority of the men picked up were eventually held on immigration violations, which in turn led to their mass deportation.  By September 2002, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System had started nationwide, calling on non-American men over 16 years of age from a list of 25 “suspect countries” (24 of which are majority Muslim), to register with the government.  While tens of thousands of registrants thought that adhering to the policy might help their immigration status move forward, the opposite turned out to be true. Reports from the time consistently show around 84,000 registrants in the initial six months, 12,000 of which were deported on immigration – not terrorism – grounds.  Meanwhile, Ahmed’s community started realizing that mass surveillance was well and truly under way, with undercover officers and informants popping up in meetings, including at DRUM, and during prayer.  In 2011, a series of groundbreaking Associated Press reports confirmed these suspicions of wholesale surveillance by the NYPD and the FBI.  In 2013, Ahmed and fellow organizers won a partial victory when they managed to have an inspector general position overseeing the NYPD for increased transparency and auditing of internal practices. Now the trick is to try to make the inspector general actually do what it was created to do, Ahmed says.  Ahmed stresses that while the post-9/11 climate is what made him a dedicated organizer, those events are not necessarily on the minds of many of the thousands of working-class South Asian members he works with today. Priority areas today are immigration worries, followed by work, education and policing issues, including racial profiling.  But there’s no denying America’s reaction to 9/11 has radically changed the way Muslim communities are perceived, Ahmed says.  “What we are seeing is an increasingly racialized Muslim identity,” Ahmed says, “with every day assaults in the way in which media and presidential candidates can talk about Muslims without any consequence.”  “But the history of racism and bigotry is long in the US,” he continues, “and in that way, we are really only joining other communities in that history.”  Like many other Americans, Zahra Billoo has a strong memory of 9/11 and its impact on her country. But what the California native remembers most clearly are the ensuing anxious calls from her father.  “I have memories of being awoken by frantic calls from my dad, worried that I would go outside wearing the hijab and be attacked,” she says.  From there, she also remembers the amping up of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Islamophobia that began to brew.  “Perhaps most vivid in my memory is seeing dozens, sometimes hundreds of people lined up in front of government buildings,” she says, referring to the men adhering to the “special registration” calls between 2002 and 2011.  She was involved as a volunteer in a human rights observer program through the Muslim Public Affairs Council at the time, taking note of the names and contact information of the men queueing up, so that if they didn’t come out, there would be a sense of who the missing people were.  “People who looked like me were going into government buildings and potentially not coming out,” she says, referring to deportations.  These events led her to become a civil rights lawyer, with the training and ability to be outspoken on issues she says have been worsening in the last decade and a half.  Today, at just 31, she is the executive director of the San Francisco chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), where her hands are full tackling issues like employment discrimination (“are people free to practice their faith at work without fearing losing their job?”), and racial profiling cases.  “The FBI routinely visits Muslim families in their homes and questions them without grounds,” she says. “Our responsibility is that ordinary Americans know what their rights are, and know what they should and shouldn’t do when these visits occur.”  Shahana Hanif embraces a number of different identities. If people do not think those are compatible, that’s their own problem, she says.  “I am a woman. I call myself Muslim. I call myself Bangladeshi. And I will continue to call myself this no matter what people say,” Hanif explains.  Hanif, who says writing, organizing and performing are all critical elements to her life, experienced a political awakening when she was diagnosed with lupus as a teenager – a condition that led her to be hospitalized for months at a time, undergoing tough physical transformations including weight gain and hair loss, as well as two hip replacements.  Chronically ill, she found herself looking back at her Brooklyn Bangladeshi community in both grateful and critical ways.  “The sickness radicalized me,” she says. She wondered what place there was for a woman who had lost her outside physical desirability – something dearly prized within her own community and beyond. She wondered where the narratives by chronically ill South Asian women were.  She started writing and speaking up.  One of Hanif’s stories is a South Asian rendering of the Vagina Monologues, in which she describes the experience of sexual abuse as a child in brutally intimate and heartbreaking detail, bringing us back to the present day where she reflects on the effect lupus has had on her vagina. It is an undoubted act of immense courage.  But speaking up against sexual abuse does not mean turning her back on her people, she says. Part of Hanif’s job is communicating with Bangladeshi community members in New York and helping them fight unlawful housing discrimination practices, accelerating as gentrification creeps further out.  Today, years after the initial onslaught of sickness, the lens that lupus gave her has stayed.  “I often like to relate everything back to lupus. My sole purpose here is to survive and to help in the survival of other marginalized groups,” she says.  Young Muslims like her, she says, have a lot to think through and discuss, but are often worried about doing so for fear of retaliation.  The Muslim Writers Collective, founded at the beginning of 2014, aims to create a space and provide an open mic for young Muslims to come and read pieces in a way that feels open and unthreatening. In New York alone, the event series draws crowds of over a hundred every time a meeting occurs.  “There are a lot of writers who are afraid to read their work. There’s a lot of fear,” she says.  Here, she explains, a safe environment is key. “We’re not here to impress anyone, or break the narrative necessarily. We’re here to share our stories.”
Four young, active Muslim community leaders talk about their work, after growing up in a climate of Islamophobia in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks