On March 21, Shaima Alawadi was found in a pool of her own blood inside her home in El Cajon, California–not far from San Diego. Attacked for being Muslim, our religious community shuddered: Muslims would suffer violence on a scale yet unseen. However, Maryland’s Muslim community refused to be victimized. Instead, they rose in Ubuntu to the occaision.
San Diego has a burgeoning and very active Islamophobia movement. In 2010, a Muslim cab driver in the city was brutally beaten while completing his afternoon worship in a public park. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of anti-Muslim hate groups in the U.S. tripled last year, following a strong push by David Yerushalmi to bar Sharia across the United States.
Shaima died three days later, and in fact doctors never expected her to live; during the violent attack on her life, she was repeatedly bludgeoned by a tire iron. She was discovered unconscious by her eldest daughter Fatima, 17. She has five children in all. Next to her body was a note. “Go back to your country,” it read, “You’re terrorists.” The Alawadi clan was one of 40,000 Iraqis in El Cajon who had fled to America to escape the terror of Saddam Hussein’s rule of Iraq.
Following Shaima’s death I realized that Islamophobia had reached a new fever pitch. Last year in January, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head during a constituency visit. 17 other people had been shot, including a chief judge of a Federal District Court, John Rolls. At the time, an Arizonan police official attributed the shooting in the most serious terms to the “absolute vitriol’ that was dominating the public sphere across the country. Shaima Alawadi’s murder was the evolution of that vitriol from political to racial and prejudicial; anti-immigrant hysteria and the hatred of Islam had now long last become institutionalized amongst bigots.
Muslim Maryland–rumored by some to be 300,000 strong (I put the numbers considerable lower, at 225,000 ) needed to respond. Belonging to over 70 major ethnic & lingual groups, this was going to be no easy task. However, within an hour of sending out a mass e-mail asking for each major mosque, Islamic, and Muslim organization in the state to coordinate efforts for a press release, nearly ever major Muslim organization in the DC area responded that they were on board to take part in a historical move: a united public position condemning both Antisemitism and Islamophobia. Within 24 hours, I organized a phone conference with nearly all the community’s stakeholders, and by the end of third day, Syed Hamza Zaidi and I had drafted a press release. Our press release eventually became the standard template used by over a dozen Muslim organizations and college associations nationwide. You can read more about the resulting press coverage here.
What really impressed me was that the participating organizations were as diverse as our community: political organizations, non-profits, and religious institutions belonging to both the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam. Ten years ago, bringing together so many diverse groups from within our religious community would have taken weeks, if possible at all. Instead, within 72 hours, Maryland’s Muslims had responded with a unified front to bigotry and hate violence. That’s an achievement I take great pride in having organized.
