by ABC News
(EVERETT POST) (DEARBORN, Mich.) — Twenty years and 600 miles from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, the nation’s largest Arab Muslim community is still quietly reeling from the 2001 terror attacks and a psychological blow dealt to Islamic American identity.
“This is, perhaps, the unspoken tragedy of what happened two decades ago,” said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The group of terrorists who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam, taking nearly 3,000 innocent lives, set off a wave of Islamophobia in America that many peaceful and patriotic Muslims said still reverberates years later.
“People associate people who look like us with an event that we didn’t create,” said Rima Imad Fadlallah, a Michigan native and co-host of the Dearborn Girl podcast exploring Arab American female identity. “We, quite frankly, shouldn’t be made to feel like we’re apologizing for others.”
Over the past two decades, Muslim Americans have reported in public opinion surveys a near constant scrutiny of their religion and skepticism of their patriotism that’s triggered a quiet struggle over the meaning of citizenship, faith and belonging.
“Ours is a community that continues to be ‘otherized,”” said Petra Alsoofy, who studies public opinion of Islam with the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonprofit group created in Michigan in 2001 to help combat misconceptions about Islam.
“Are you American? Are you a Muslim? Is there a conflict between these identities? Actually what the research shows,” said Alsoofy, “is the stronger the religious identity, the stronger the American identity.”
ABC News Live traveled this month to Dearborn, Michigan, home to thousands of American immigrant families from Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, to hear directly from residents and community leaders about the lasting impact of the 9/11 attacks.
