A Muslim's Jihad
by Michael Penn MA'97

For one irrational, indescribable, insane moment on the afternoon of September 11, while people grappled with fears about terrorism and national security, Ayman Kotob had a more elemental problem. He was afraid to enter his apartment.

Like most everyone during those first harrowing hours after the terrorist attacks, Kotob had been banging discordantly through the full scale of emotions. A sophomore who was born in California but grew up in Kuwait, he felt the horror of watching footage of the attacks. There was the adrenalized panic that the attacks might not yet be over. There was the worry that the perpetrators might be Muslim, like him. There was anguish about the ocean that separated him from his parents. There was the tone of caution that tempted him to swallow his thoughts, lest he be labeled as pro-terrorist or anti-American. There was the unexpected relief of having a lecture hall full of students applaud him when he did finally try to articulate his feelings. Disgrace and gratefulness churned around like oil and water, creating that numbness and confusion that come when the data don't add up.

And there was fear. When Kotob returned to his apartment that afternoon, the door stood slightly ajar - leaving just enough space for his imagination to fill in all kinds of scenarios for why it wasn't closed. Someone's in the apartment, someone's waiting to do something to me, he thought. Although he hesitated only for a moment, the day's events had made him wary of backlash.

"I thought, 'Oh my God, this is going to hurt us so much. This is going to hurt Muslims,' " Kotob says. "I'm kind of angry at myself for thinking that, because this is not Islam that I thought that. This was me as a human being."

As campus percolated through those first few days, many Muslim students experienced similar worries. In the month following the tragedies, campus officials collected anecdotal evidence of fifteen instances of harassment against foreign and supposedly foreign-looking students. Despite more-numerous demonstrations of kindness and support, those reports were enough to put UW-Madison's Muslim community on guard. "A lot of us weren't going anywhere alone," says Hiba Bashir, a senior. "We always went in groups, for fear that something would happen to us if we were alone." Along with the doubt and worry brought on by terrorism, Muslims felt the doubt and worry of counterterrorism, that they and their religion had suddenly been cut from the herd of American experience and were now being scrutinized.

"September 11 for us was a kind of double jeopardy," notes Ahmed Ali, director of Madison's Islamic Center, "because not only are we suffering personally to cope with those horrible acts, but Islam is on trial because of them."

For anyone who knows Islam - and thus knows the futility of trying to color the attacks in shades of mainstream Islam - the notion of the world's second most-practiced religion on trial may be intensely frustrating. The 99 percent of the world's one billion Muslims who lead peaceful lives and abhor violence should be evidence enough that Islam is a defendant falsely accused. But just as the justice system gives the innocent a chance for defense, the events of September 11 have created a perverse opportunity - a stage for educating a suddenly receptive public about the tenets and customs of Islam and its followers, what they are, and what they aren't.

Before September 11, for example, many people probably never noticed the white stucco building behind Taco John's on North Orchard Street that houses Madison's Islamic Center and a mosque for campus-area Muslims. When the directors held an open house there last year, seven people attended. But following the attacks, non-Muslims began to turn up at the Friday noontime congregational prayer, when it is obligatory for all Muslims to pray at a mosque. Someone posted a large sign on the door, expressing the neighborhood's support and solidarity. The center's most recent open house, held a month after the attacks, drew more than six hundred visitors.

"People are being more open about Islam and are questioning a lot more about Islam than they used to," says Asif Sheikh x'03, president of UW-Madison's Muslim Students Association, which has about two hundred members. "Unfortunately, you can say that it's [a] good [thing about September 11]."

The university, too, has seized the opportunity, putting on a medley of events, panels, and discussions. The first of those, a teach-in on Islam held eight days after the attacks, featured ten faculty, as well as two scholars from the community, with expertise in Muslim traditions and cultures. It was attended by nearly seven hundred people, who quickly filled the seats of the Humanities Building lecture hall and spilled over into the aisles. The mood during the nearly three-hour talk reminded some on the panel of the days before the Vietnam War, when serious-minded people came together to talk about a part of the world many knew little about.

The crowd, which ranged from students to retirees, came with a spirit of inquisitiveness, asking probing questions about concepts like the fatwa and jihad, the vexing new vocabulary of our political dialogue. They heard straightforward answers from people such as Joe Elder, a professor of sociology who was born in Tehran and has lived in Afghanistan; David Morgan, who has researched the origins and history of the Taliban; and Charles Hirschkind, who has spent the past few years in Egypt listening to audiotapes of the Qur'an and other Islamic texts to understand how Islam is communicated in the Middle East.

It was a night for administrators to relish, because very few universities in the United States could match the breadth of experience on the panel. "This is certainly as large, if not a larger, nucleus of people than I think you could find anywhere in the United States," says Charles Cohen, UW's director of religious studies, who organized the event.

And, in another irony of September 11, the teach-in also represented a coming-out party, of sorts, because at least three of the panelists wouldn't have been there - and the panel might not have convened at all - if the university had not been in the midst of building up its resources in Islam and Middle Eastern history. Religious studies didn't exist as an official major until this fall. As recently as four years ago, the school's Middle Eastern studies program was so understaffed that Michael Chamberlain, in one of his first acts as director, recommended disbanding it. "We've gone pretty quickly from a position of relative weakness to one of relative strength," says Chamberlain. "And I think we all feel pretty fortunate for that now."

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