What is it like to hold a crossroads within your body? For many American Muslims, our identities have become a crossroads between familiar and foreign. Between safety and danger. Between belonging and othering.
In the years prior to 9/11, people were ignorant of Islam. There were opportunities to inform and people would listen. There were discriminatory policies like secret evidence that was rampantly used by former President Bill Clinton’s administration but at least we were on the verge of change. That is, until 9/11.
As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approached, as an American Muslim, I noticed anxiety creep up within me. As the date got closer, the anxiety was replaced with dread because I knew that the narratives we have constructed about 9/11 and what followed lack the complexity required of such a deeply impactful event. Narratives that erase the impact for American Muslims.
Safety and security
Americans were willing to accept the subjugation of an entire group of people under the guise of safety, but the resulting impact of the policies and practices of the post-9/11 environment led to an unleashed security apparatus that has never been held accountable. It has also led to the strengthening of local policing norms that are just as destructive as the federal ones.
As former FBI agent Mike German writes in “Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy:” “With the encouragement of Congress both the Bush and Obama administrations, the FBI transformed itself into a domestic intelligence agency of unprecedented power that operates primarily in the dark, all but immune from traditional methods of oversight. This unconstrained and highly secretive FBI predictably turned its sight on those it has always viewed as most dangerous to the established order: minority communities, immigrants, and those agitating for political, economic, and social change.”
What this meant locally for Oregon’s Muslims can be understood through two stories.
Oregon Attorney Brandon Mayfield understands the destructive power of the FBI and local law enforcement very well because he was a victim of it. Back in 2004, in the wake of the Madrid commuter train bombings, several fingerprints were discovered. The Spanish National Police shared the fingerprints with the FBI and it returned 20 possible matches. Brandon’s prints were flagged, because of his prior military service. Even though the Spanish National Police found that his prints were not an identical match and communicated this to the FBI, the FBI still went after him. They began sifting through personal life to find out that he had converted to Islam, he represented defendants in national security cases and he worshipped at a mosque frequently surveilled by the FBI.
The complexity of what 9/11 meant and continues to mean has been replaced with a singular demonstration of patriotism. A patriotism that forces us to think in binaries: good or bad. A patriotism that is both the cause of and a result of American imperialism. A patriotism that demands loyalty without complexity. You’re either with us or you’re against us.
However, the FBI did not have probable cause for a criminal wiretap, so they applied for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant and said that Mayfield was acting on behalf of a foreign terrorist group, thus the FBI went around the 4th amendment. As the FBI broke into his law office and his home, they researched his web searches. The FBI never found anything in all of their searching, but they still believed Mayfield was responsible and jailed him for two weeks. The Spanish National Police insisted that Mayfield had nothing to do with the bombings and the targeting of Mayfield by the FBI only ceased when the Spanish Police identified an Algerian national.
Yonas Fikre understands Brandon’s plight because he too lived through the FBI’s harassment. In 2010, Yonas Fikre went on a business trip to Sudan where he hoped to set up a business. He had already been to the embassy once to develop commercial contacts, when they invited him back a second time for a briefing on a security situation. This time, two FBI agents from the Portland field office who were members of Portland’s Joint Terrorism Task Force pulled out their badges. The FBI agents then attempted to coerce Fikre into becoming an informant through stating that he was being placed on the no-fly list but he could get removed and earn substantial compensation if he became an informant in a mosque that the FBI has persistently targeted. Fikre refused.
After deciding that Sudan would not be a good place for his business, Fikre went to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and established his business there. After a few months the UAE police apprehended him. They too had questions about the same Portland mosque that the FBI had asked about in Sudan. The UAE was now doing the FBI’s bidding. Months of interrogation and torture followed, despite Fikre repeatedly asking for an attorney.
In 2015, Fikre detailed that torture to The Guardian:
“I refused to answer questions. That’s when the beating started,” he said. “They started with punches, slaps. They got tired of that so they brought water hose. There’s the hard ones, the black ones, and there’s the soft ones. The soft kind they would use for strangling. When I refused to answer, they put that thing on my neck. They had me lay down and beat me on the soles of my feet. They beat me on the back constantly.
“If they weren’t beating you, they made you stand for eight hours with your hands raised. The beating was much better than the standing.”
The torture continued even when he was alone in his cell at night.
“I was sleeping on tiles, very cold tiles. They put on this AC so it was very cold. The body can’t take this cold on top of the beating,” he said. “That’s when I decided to answer their questions.”
Fikre would eventually make it back to the U.S. and his case against the U.S. government is still pending. He’s being represented by Brandon Mayfield and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Fikre and Mayfield’s stories show firsthand the impact of the unchained FBI. As Mike German also says: “Suggesting the FBI is ‘lawless,’ as this chapter heading does might seem hyperbolic, but it is literally true in two important respects: First, Congress has never passed a legislative charter establishing and circumscribing the FBI’s investigative power. Second, the FBI has often taken the position that traditional constitutional and legal restraints on its criminal investigations do not apply to the secretive intelligence activities it undertakes for the purposes of national security.”
Over the last year, we have seen Black Lives Matter protesters beaten and gassed by local police. We’ve read about the unconstitutional surveillance by Department of Homeland Security officers. We’ve seen over 6,000 uses of force by the Portland Police Bureau. All of this is the result of enabling without any slight chance of accountability and oversight.
When the FBI is allowed to falsely identify, coerce and torture without any accountability for more than 20 years, we should not be surprised when local law enforcement proceeds to act the same way. We should also not be surprised at the long lasting traumatic impact that these events have upon people.
Mental health
The subjugation of an entire people by the state, empowered people interpersonally to hate Muslims. Islamophobia had far-reaching consequences within airports, schools and even worse at home.
Bullying
Islamophobia has made its way into our schools. In a 2018-2019 CAIR California survey, 40% of respondents reported that students at school were bullied for being Muslim in California. In a similar study from CAIR Massachusetts in 2021, 61% of respondents reported being bullied for being Muslim in school. In a 2017 report by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, 42% of the Muslim sample reported having children in K-12 who experienced bullying. This stands in stark contrast to 23% of Jews, 20% of Protestants, and 6% of Catholics. A school official was reported to be involved in one out of four bullying incidents reported.
Muslim youth, many of whom have only known a post-9/11 world, have been subjected to emotional and physical assaults on their Muslim identity and personhood. The mental health outcomes of being bullied include depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, as well as lower academic performance, according to papers by Sansone and Sansone, 2008; and Turner, Lynn Exum, Brame andHolt, 2013. Bullying during important developmental milestones informs where we think we belong, where we feel safe, and how we come to view ourselves. During an exciting, confusing and important time in their lives, American Muslim youth are contending with added pressures that can impact their functioning, happiness and future.
Trauma
Discrimination, bullying and hate are traumatic and can cause the same symptoms as we would expect to see as a result of any other trauma. Trauma affects an individual’s worldview and how they view themselves in the world. For American Muslims, trauma comes from both within the United States, as with the bullying but also through employment discrimination or hate crimes, and outside of the United States as they witness the outcomes of American imperialism.
Vicarious trauma
The consequences of discrimination, hate, and violence are not contained to the people directly impacted. Vicarious trauma is the impact of hearing and being witness to other people’s trauma stories, Laurie Perlman and Karen Saakvitne found in 1995. In a 2018 study that looked at vicarious trauma in American Muslims conducted by myself and Sylvia Nassar, more than one in four respondents (27%) had significant disruptions to their feelings of personal safety and the safety of their loved ones.
Bearing witness to our community member’s pain is an important aspect of healing and collective care. When exposed to these trauma stories, however, we see ourselves in them because they could happen to us and so we are impacted. In this way, hate and discrimination act as collective trauma for American Muslims.
20 years
Islamophobia post-9/11 has had real consequences for American Muslims. Twenty years later and we struggle to hold the complexity of all that the day means for us. Complexity is a concept we have a hard time holding. Our collective difficulty with this was evident as we approached the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
The complexity of what 9/11 meant and continues to mean has been replaced with a singular demonstration of patriotism. A patriotism that forces us to think in binaries: good or bad. A patriotism that is both the cause of and a result of American imperialism. A patriotism that demands loyalty without complexity. You’re either with us or you’re against us.
And the reality is that 9/11, what led to it, and what has come since, is complex. What we have constructed in the United States, however, is a narrative that exceptionalizes the lives that were lost that day and simultaneously devalues the millions of lives lost around the world since the inception of the “war on terror.” We all lost someone or something twenty years ago.
For Oregon’s Muslims, this has meant a loss of safety, belonging and community. As a mental health professional, I see the outcomes of 20 years of rampant Islamophobia and the “war on terror” both in my communities and my practice. Outcomes include grief, anxiety, feelings of loss, anger, and sadness. Coping with these requires energy and resources, which can be limited, thereby impact our goals, dreams, and functioning.
Since the launch of the war on terror, 910 to 2,200 innocent civilians have been killed via drone strikes since 2001, and 283 to 454 were children, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. You might ask, why are there no exact numbers? The answer lies in how honest we are about the damage American imperialism has caused and is causing. Were their lives worth less than American lives? Is the collateral cost of warfare acceptable to us when the war is not being fought in our backyards?
The very real, complex, outcome of all this is collective trauma. We have become so inured to ‘threats’ and ‘tragedies’ that we don’t blink an eye when something happens. That isn’t an excuse, though, for waking up. For rejecting the narratives. For thinking critically about who has the most to benefit from these common narratives. And who has the most to lose.
Collectively, we all lose. The relative comfort and safety we’ve been told we have distracts us from questioning and sitting with the discomfort of how we have contributed to the narrative. A narrative that has created a crossroads within American Muslims that they have been left to grapple with, which was never theirs to hold in the first place.
Dr. Anjabeen Ashraf is a mental health counselor and educator in the greater Portland area. Dr. Ashraf’s work centers on trauma in Muslim communities and deconstructing systems of power that impact our mental health.