Students, faculty and members of the Bloomington community discussed Islamophobia Wednesday evening as part of the 2016 Elimination of Prejudice Week.
The discussion was the product of a partnership between Pi Lambda Phi fraternity and the IU Center for the Study of the Middle East. Elimination of Prejudice Week is a national event for all chapters of Pi Lambda Phi, and this is the second year the IU chapter has brought it to campus.
By the time guest speaker Zaineb Istrabadi began, all seats in the lecture hall had filled. The audience quieted, anticipating the insight of a four-person panel of Muslim women.
Istrabadi, an IU senior lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, began the evening with a personal history of discrimination she has faced.
“I am a Muslim, and I am a decent human being,” she said. “I am Islamic, and I am decent.”
She said she is an Iraqi, a towel-head, a camel jockey, and a dirty Arab, and she is decent.
Despite Istrabadi’s 1973 IU lab partner, who said the only good Arab is a castrated one; despite a series of political figures who insinuated Muslims are violent; she said she is decent. But the outside world is not.
She said she wonders every day if her students have been attacked or chased across campus or if someone has tried to damage the mosque, as was attempted a few years ago.
Sherouk Ahmed, an Egyptian-American doctoral student of criminal justice, said she was unsure if she wanted to speak at the discussion.
“Do I really want to depress myself on a Wednesday evening?” Ahmed said. “Because I do get attacked.”
But she did speak, saying she felt isolated but never faced attacks as a child. However, when she began wearing a hijab, people began treating her differently.
“When people started screaming profanities at us from moving vehicles, when some guy swung his fist at me in a court room and nobody did anything, when people spit at me, that’s when it really sunk in,” Ahmed said.
Ahmed said that was when she realized she would never fit in, that her Americanness would be debated, that she would be dehumanized.
She said she wakes up every morning, hit with the question of whether or not her life matters.
“I didn’t sign up for any of this,” she said.
Ahmed just wanted a simple life, but now she feels she has to be an ambassador to protect her entire community. So she spoke, beginning with her childhood.
Sabren Abdulwahab, the third speaker, began similarly. Now a sophomore in international studies, she has faced discrimination as long as she can remember.
She began wearing a hijab when she moved schools in third grade. She remembered a teacher telling her class that all Muslims are terrorists, and she could barely process the statement.
Freshman Sarah Kawamleh, the final panel member, recalled a teacher who asked her if she could speak English. After answering in the plainest, perfect speech, he responded as though she could not understand him.
As a Syrian-American Muslim, Kawamleh said she has always struggled with identity.
But Kawamleh found herself in Muslim Youth of North America, an organization with which she and many others once traveled to Chicago and handed out roses with positive messages.
The reactions she saw in the recipients, she said, she’ll never forget.
“This is why I have hope in humanity still,” she said.
Kawamleh said student organizations can work against Islamophobia by collaborating with the IU Muslim Student Association.
“I can’t pass out roses alone on the streets,” Kawamleh said. “But if I have 400 fellow students passing out those roses with me, we can make a difference.”
Istrabadi recommended everyone try getting news from international sources.
“Give hope, please, to those of us who feel unwanted, unappreciated, unheard, biased against and vilified, by speaking up for us, by defending us as fellow human beings,” Istrabadi said. “Silence is not an option.”
