www.sfgate.com/today/0912_chron_muslims.shtml
People walking by his San Francisco market yesterday afternoon made comments like, "Go back to your country" and "We should kill you all," the grocer said. He asked not to be named, or to even have his neighborhood mentioned, out of fear of retaliation. Yesterday's horrific terrorist attacks in New York and the nation's capital were not just a test of national security, but a test of national tolerance. It was a test of interfaith understanding, a test of whether Americans understand that the average American Muslim does not endorse violence in the name of God any more than does the average American Christian or the average American Jew. Souleiman Ghali, president of the San Francisco Islamic Society, stood in his light-filled prayer hall, begging a reporter not to print the address of his mosque. There had already been a couple of threatening calls, and two police officers were roaming around the third-floor mosque. Religious scapegoating is especially hard on Muslim women who wear traditional Islamic dress, making them easily identifiable on streets, stores and offices in the Bay Area. Amatullah Almarwani, executive secretary at the Islamic Society, was one of only three women attending afternoon prayer services at the San Francisco mosque. She wore the traditional hijab, a long gray dress with a scarf covering her head and clasped beneath her neck. Almarwani is used to taunts and insults, especially after previous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. After learning of the attacks early yesterday morning, she and her husband opted to drive into the city instead of commuting on BART as usual. But she will continue to wear her traditional dress, she said, which is meant to protect her modesty, even though she knows it makes her more visible to passers-by. Many of her Muslim friends had decided they would stay home. Her 11-year-old daughter wanted to wear her hijab to the public school she attends in Alameda, which Almarwani allowed because she wanted things to remain as normal as possible. Omeira spoke to reporters after a meeting with other council members on ways to hold a blood drive for bombing victims. Just hours after news of the attacks was broadcast this morning, Omeira said cars drove past the Granada Islamic School, some blaring horns, a few drivers shouting curses. The school, which serves about 400 students from kindergarten through eighth grade, was closed for the day. Twelve hours after the attack, as the sun went down in the Bay Area, it was still unclear if there was an actual connection to Islamic groups in the Middle East, Afghanistan or anywhere. But that was the implication on TV screens much of the day. There were live scenes of Palestinians celebrating, and they were broadcast next to replays of the World Trade Center attack. There were lives scenes of Muslim clerics at Taliban press conferences, and they were broadcast next to replays of the World Trade Center collapse. There were live scenes of bombs going off in Kabul, and they were broadcast next to replays of the smoke over New York. At UC Berkeley, where the Jewish-Arab conflict has become the most prominent social protest issue in the past year, isolated acts of hostility were directed at pro-Palestinian students, but Jewish and Muslim students seemed united in expressing grief, condemnation of the attacks and a desire to avoiding a worsening of campus conflict. In San Francisco, Sheikh Safwat Morsy, a spiritual teacher at the Islamic Society, was delivering his afternoon sermon. Given the wide scale of the violence on the East Coast, Morsy said he could not avoid talking about the attack. Islam rejects such actions, he told the group of about five dozen people who had gathered for the service. Visitors listened to the translation from the Arabic through headsets. Morsy said he was concerned that the "fingers of accusation" would be directed at Muslims before the investigations had been completed.
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