Who is afraid of the big bad Muslim?

The holy month of Ramadan is approaching and I am nervous.

I’m always nervous when the month comes around. Nervous that I might pass out during a day’s work at the restaurant from lack of food and water during daylight hours. Nervous that I’m going to give in to temptation sometime during the month that seems to last forever. But I’m usually not nervous about what people are going to say.

Oh, people say things, but they usually do it out of intrigue or bewilderment. “How is it possible that you don’t eat or drink anything during the day for a whole month?” “Why are you doing this?” And the one I love the most, “Can’t you eat something?”

However, I am nervous, with the growing hostility towards Muslims these days that the usual innocent fascination that arises during my firm practice will be replaced this year with judgment and fear.

A culture of fear towards Muslims is being created and directed both nationally and internationally. France’s new law against the practice of full-body veiling, which claims to be a law focused on fundamental women’s rights, is clearly based on religious intolerance. It’s fair to say that a woman shouldn’t be forced to wear such garments, but what if she’s forced to not wear something? Especially if she feels that she gives him a sense of community and allows him to express her pity? The notion of making it illegal for a woman to wear something so that she can “break free” is paradoxical to her own “reasoning for her.” The basic principle of choice is being stripped away here and I can’t think of anything more antithetical to women’s rights.

But the cleverly disguised disgust in other parts of the world is much more apparent in our corner of the woods. Just take a look at the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Forida, a church that will host a “Quran Burning” on September 11 of this year. According to the Huffington Post, Pastor Terry Jones claims that people have already begun sending Qurans to the church even as the event was posted on Facebook just over a week ago. The irony here is that these hateful people actually have to buy the Qur’an to send it to the Center.

And what about the protests against plans to build a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero? Opponents of the construction say it would be disrespectful and dishonoring for the deaths of those involved in the 9/11 attacks to have the Muslim place of worship so close to the site. But weren’t there also Muslims killed when the towers collapsed? And how exactly is building a mosque disrespectful to innocent victims? Only if you equate radicalism with all of religion does that start to make any iota of sense.

Thank goodness for people like New York Mayor Bloomberg, who can eloquently remind everyone that this country was founded on the idea of ​​religious equality and acceptance for all. I can only hope that those protesters’ mouths were closed and their ears were opened to hear their moving words and pay attention to the obvious facts. One of the protesters’ banners read “Everything I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11.” If the nation takes this disinformation stance and draws conclusions based on the most extreme views, it will be impossible to extinguish the flames of fear and hatred against Muslims in our country and Islamophobia will spread like wildfire.

I have had to deal with stigma all my life, even as an extremely moderate Muslim. But not since the attacks on the Twin Towers have I ever felt so alienated. And I’m nervous.