Sarwat Husain, founding president of the San Antonio Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was the featured speaker recently at a luncheon meeting here of the Texas Democratic Women, Hill Country Chapter.
Husain’s topic was “Islamophobia,” and she supplemented her talk with a Power Point presentation.
She publishes Al-Ittihaad Monthly, the largest American-Muslim newspaper in Texas and is sometimes a guest columnist for the San Antonio Express-News. She was introduced as working to encourage political engagement in Texas; and being involved in interfaith dialogue and offering diversity trainings on Muslim beliefs and practices at businesses, universities, churches and law enforcement agencies.
Husain said the CAIR organization is the largest civil rights organization in the United States and Canada; and after she defined “Islamophobia,” said she would outline the challenges to their members, adding, “It’s getting worse.”
Non-Muslim Americans should question if Islam is responsible for all things the media reports have attributed to them, including the night-club shootings in Orlando, Fla., and the French deaths by a truck driver, she said.
“The killing of innocents is the most opposed act in the Muslim faith,” she said, adding people need to consider if the acts grew from politics or money or people with unstable minds.
“It’s not Islam we need to be afraid of,” she said. “The perpetrators of those acts were not faithful Muslims. Practicing Muslims have to remember God in every breath and act; and try to do everything that is right for all and everything in the universe. We can try to strive for that.”
Part of her work is confronting non-Muslims’ fear and she sees the impact of “Islamophobia” getting worse.
“Islamophobia” is close-minded prejudice against or hatred of Islam and Muslims, she said; and an “Islamophobe” is an individual who holds this view of Islam and promotes prejudice against or hatred of Muslims.
Husain said as a Muslim, she didn’t wear the “hajib” head covering before the Sept. 11 events, and described herself as a long-time activist.
She told of going to the rescue of another Muslim woman in a store, who had been chased by a threatening man into a restroom where she locked the doors and phoned for help; and of an airplane trip Husain made.
She was flying on a smaller jet with two seats on either side of one aisle; and took an open aisle seat next to a good-looking, seemingly unthreatening man in the window seat. He looked at her, and she felt she could greet him, so she said, “How are you?”
The man looked away as the flight took off, and then turned back to her and said, “If this window were a door, I would have pushed you out of it.”
Husain said she replied with the first thing she could think of – “I would have taken you with me.” (This drew applause from the TDW audience.)
“He made assumptions and he knew nothing about me except I was a woman wearing a hajib,” she said.
She said most Muslim women are highly educated. Husain holds a master’s degree in nutrition from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.
“But,” she added, “we still have no woman president in our country (Pakistan). Half of the world’s population is still dependent on men for everything.”
She came to America at age 17, and has lived here 40 years.
She also defined the problem of “closed-mindedness” saying it comes from ignorance and some have a narrow vision and don’t want to change.
She said even her own son, born in the United States, believed the bad stories about Pakistan, the poverty and food shortages, before she took him to visit there. “It’s sad that Americans believe the stories about other countries. And the politicians and media have their own agendas;" and recounted bumper stickers she saw after 9-11 that said, “I learned all I need to know about Muslims on 9-11.”
She showed photos of anti-Muslim protest signs, especially happening in Washington, D.C., and since Donald Trump became President. “We are told to go back home, but where is home?”
She challenged the TDW members to go online and learn it all, the good and the bad, saying most people don’t do even that much. But she called America “the most beautiful country in the world,” though most Americans never visit much of it beyond their homes.
“We’re a minority, but you realize if we combine all the minorities, then we’re the majority.
“To fulfill the phrase, ‘make America better’ means doing it with education, and laws and without guns.”
She said this needs to be taught in the schools, but even in San Antonio there was an incident of a school teacher physically bullying children including a Muslim boy whom she asked if he had a bomb in his lunch bag; and the teacher injured him at school.
“His parents were afraid to talk to that principal, and pulled their boy out of that school. They asked me to go in their place to the school office,” she said.
On world politics and policies, Husain said the anti-Muslim campaign is coming “from an extremely well-funded ‘image’ and national foreign policy.” She said it’s in U.S. policy to go to resource-rich countries claiming the residents are bad people.
“Was Saddam Hussein bad? Yes, probably. But we were told gas prices would be less. And I was invited to a meeting of oil executives in Houston who mostly discussed, in front of me, how they were going to be getting rich over it.” She added, “The U.S. wars in the Mid-east have taken most of the land anyway.”
Husain called it “a convenient explanation” and said it directly increases violence and terrorism, fueling the rhetoric about Muslims being on the front lines of terrorism instead of treating Muslims as fellow citizens.
“Violent extremist groups are shaping the coverage,” she said.
She showed graphics of Islam activities on U.S. television news based on “visibility and tone of coverage on CBS, NBC and Fox News” ranging from international terrorism and conflicts to domestic security and policies as topics, compared to “protagonist” groups ranging from Al-Qaeda, Morsy, Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban, to Shias, Sunnis, “Islamic organizations in general” to Al-Nusra.
The chart said, “For years, Islam has been portrayed as a security risk in the first line. Religious life, Islamic holidays or the social role of Muslims did not rank among the top issues in the news about Islam.”
She said politicians are exploiting fear; supported by a well-paid “Islamophobia network” whose inner core organizations and leaders got more than $205.8 million between 2008 and ’13. She said this network includes at least 74 groups; and its inner core of at least 33 groups has a primary purpose to promote prejudice or hatred of Muslims.
She also claimed the top earners are in the White House now and train others.
She cited outright anti-Islam legislation in almost two-thirds of U.S. states (including Texas).
Husain called one widely reported shooting incident in California “an employment dispute;" and said pressure cookers, while used as part of some bombs, also are in every Muslim home to cook meat. She does, too.
“When the shooters are sought for arrest, they are killed in every case and cannot say why they did it,” Husain said.
She said she’s found all Democrats have changed their attitudes about Muslims, but none of the Republicans. She didn’t specify if she meant politicians and elected officials and/or general citizens or who in particular; and no one in the audience asked.
An attendee asked about the widely reported long wars between Sunni and Shite peoples; and Husain said those were “amplified” in U.S. news but most get along fine, in her experience.
She said CAIR’s vision in America is to look toward a time when being Muslim carries a positive connotation and Islam has an equal place among many faiths in America’s pluralistic society.