Excerpt:
Ahmad Alsalkhadi, an immigrant from Jordan, has never had a run-in with the police, but he works in a section of Astoria, Queens, that has come under police surveillance in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks because of the concentration of Muslim-owned businesses.
Mr. Alsalkhadi, 39, a butcher at Al-Noor Halal Meat & Groceries on Steinway Street, and others who work in or frequent a bustling area known as Little Egypt or Little Morocco — depending on whom one asks — chafe at what they see as unequal treatment at the hands of the police because of their religion and ethnicity.
"We do not want to feel we are being marginalized because we want to be part of the bigger community and assimilate," said Mr. Alsalkhadi, who spoke in Arabic through a translator. "We live in this country, and we are part of this country, and we are citizens."