A Stronger Voice for Muslims

On Sept. 26, two weeks after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, President George W. Bush met with 15 American Muslim leaders at the White House. The event was a watershed moment. Suddenly, a cause for which the men had long toiled--Muslims' civil rights--had captured the public's attention, and the president was calling on them to help with the national crisis.

Five of the men who attended the meeting--Maher Hathout, Muzammil Siddiqi, Agha Saeed, Salam al-Marayati and Omar Ahmad--are from California. They have started to become familiar as the faces of an emerging American Muslim political movement at a time that one of them describes as a "Muslim moment."

The American Muslim community had already begun to make itself felt as a political presence. As a presidential candidate last year, Bush had impressed many American Muslims when he spoke in inclusive terms about America's religious communities and when he decried the use of secret evidence in deportation cases--a provision in U.S. immigration law that has been employed almost solely against Arabs and Muslims. On the strength of that, Muslim leaders made their first presidential endorsement. Word quickly circulated through the American Muslim community. When election day came, 72% of Muslim voters chose Bush, according to polls conducted by Muslim organizations.

During the Sept. 26 meeting, discussion touched on the need to protect the civil rights of Muslims in the wake of the attacks, and the importance of avoiding insensitive terms when describing U.S. retaliation, said Hathout. "Muslim" need not describe "terrorist," they advised. And "crusade," which was used by the president to describe the U.S. response to terrorism, they pointed out, has a negative connotation for Muslims.

Hathout said the meeting had immediate results. Not only did the language of public statements change, he said, but "we noticed a drop in hate crimes after that."

His take on the meeting's impact might seem overstated to some. After all, in a televised speech, the president had already made a point of distinguishing between the Muslim religion and acts of terror. And White House spokesman Ken Lisaius described Bush's meeting with the Muslim leaders as "routine." Nevertheless, for Muslim leaders, the trip to Washington represents a giant step forward. "It was a meeting of substance," Hathout said in a recent interview. "We have worked years for this."