The fire department called before dawn. Daoud Abudiab and his 13-year-old daughter were already awake, so they got in the car quickly. From about a mile away, Abudiab saw a plume of black smoke rising above the low skyline and started getting nervous. He thought back to the arguments over whether to mark the Islamic Center of Columbia, Tennessee, the only mosque in the hundred-mile stretch between Nashville and Huntsville, with a large sign or a small, unassuming one. They had opted for a large one.
Abudiab and his daughter could feel the heat of the fire when they stood at the yellow police tape. A black swastika was spray-painted on the mosque’s facade. Flames pushed out from the burst windows and up through the collapsed roof. Abudiab’s wife arrived with the rest of the kids, followed by other congregants and their families.
Abudiab looked at the women and all he saw was headscarves. “Go home,” he pleaded. “Don’t go out. Don’t go to Walmart. Don’t go anywhere.”
The ringleader of the band of white supremacists who burned down the mosque with Molotov cocktails justified the act by saying, “What goes on in that building is illegal according to the Bible.” This was February 2008. The theory of Barack Obama’s crypto-Islamism was faint chatter on the fringes. But in the years after Obama's election, Tennessee became a key battleground in a national anti-Muslim movement whose influence has culminated, for now, in the presidential campaigns of Republican frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, both of whom are being advised by people whose views on Islam were once considered too extreme for mainstream politics.
Abudiab and his daughter could feel the heat of the fire when they stood at the yellow police tape.
Tennessee, like much of the South, was once a friendly place for Muslims to live. Abudiab and his family had been in Tennessee and Arkansas for more than two decades, and they’d felt at home in the Bible Belt — glad, like many Muslims they knew, to raise their children among People of the Book, people they could count on to share many of their values and who, by and large, welcomed them.
The firebombing blindsided Abudiab, but it seemed like a terrible, isolated incident, after which life would go back to normal. Over the next few years, though, Abudiab came to look back on this as the opening shot in an ongoing, ever-intensifying, hostile campaign playing out in Nashville and the surrounding small towns and suburbs. His kids were bullied more often in school, and he became the target of violent online threats. Many of Tennessee’s legislators fell under the sway of conspiracy theories about Islamist infiltration of government and schools, and the state became a testing ground for campaigns to curtail the building of mosques and the resettlement of refugees. The pulpits and radio airwaves were filled with vitriol, and more mosques were vandalized.
Today, Abudiab says, he can’t leave the house in the company of his wife — a white convert who wears the hijab — without feeling viscerally uncomfortable. His 9-year-old son has started asking when they’ll need to leave the country.
“It’s never been like it is now,” Abudiab says.
Daoud Abudiab in his home in Tennessee.
Nathan Morgan for BuzzFeed News
Abudiab, a broad-shouldered, jocular man of 48, left Jerusalem to go to college in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1985. He left behind an urban, comparatively liberal family: His father was a labor organizer, and some uncles on that side belonged to the Marxist-Leninist bloc of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
But largely due to his mother’s influence, Abudiab grew up living a pious life — to this day, he has never had a drink. In Little Rock, he was in some respects the cosmopolitan outsider, unable to find stores that sold the trendy American clothes he used to buy in Jerusalem. But he was also more traditional than many of his classmates, who drank heavily and dated casually. He didn’t shun them, but neither was he tempted to join them.
Abudiab met his future wife at a Halloween party at BJ’s Honky Tonk in Little Rock. Robin was dressed as a French maid and undergoing a crisis of faith. She came from an observant evangelical family, but had struggled to find a church in Arkansas while she studied nursing. “My friends, who were considered good Christian people, were out partying, out doing drugs, out sleeping around,” she says. “And that just wasn’t the lifestyle I wanted or cared for.”
The two had many long conversations after that night. Robin liked everything she heard about Islam, particularly the clarity of its instruction on daily existence. “This is a religion you can live,” she thought. When that first Ramadan came around, she fasted for two weeks without telling Abudiab.
Robin Abudiab
Nathan Morgan for BuzzFeed News
For the first few years after she married Abudiab, Robin was too afraid of losing her family to tell them she had converted. She finally forced herself to have the conversation when she was pregnant with their first child, a daughter. At first, her parents were bewildered and hurt. Her father, who was embarking on a second career as a Methodist preacher, told her that Abudiab was perfect for her in every way, except he was a Muslim. Robin responded that it was his Islam that made him “perfect.”
“Well, maybe you’re right,” her father said. Over the years, Robin’s parents saw that she was raising their grandchildren much as if she had never left their evangelical fold.
In 1998, Abudiab, who had studied health care administration in Arkansas, moved the family to Columbia, Tennessee, to run a medical office. At the local mall, Robin met a group of Egyptians who owned a clothing store. Abudiab began joining them to pray amid shoeboxes stacked in the back of the shop. Then they got a larger group of local Muslims together to rent a strip mall auto garage without carpets or heating. “It was a cold Ramadan,” Abudiab says.
The group grew steadily, showing clear demand for a proper Islamic center to serve the rural counties south of Nashville. In 2000, they pooled their money to buy a modest one-story building on Main Street. One day Abudiab got a call from Robin, who said she had gone to the grocery store wearing a hijab. Abudiab hadn’t expected this of her. “We didn’t really talk about it. I didn’t grow up with it, and I had some biases against it,” he says. “For me it wasn’t the educated, it wasn’t the elite, it wasn’t the urban. But it was something that grew on me.”
This was a few months shy of September 11, 2001. Muslims in Middle Tennessee typically describe feeling a jolt of fear after the attacks. Many anticipated a backlash and avoided going out in public. As they emerged, they were instead surprised by the goodwill they encountered. Robin says a stranger approached her in a parking lot in the weeks that followed only to tell her she had nothing to be afraid of. Muslims who were visible in the community, including Abudiab, started getting requests from local churches to deliver short lectures on Islam.
Over the years, Robin’s parents saw that she was raising their grandchildren much as if she had never left their evangelical fold.
There were, of course, moments of ugliness. Abudiab recalls stopping at a gas station on the way to work in Pulaski and seeing a newspaper announcement for a sermon series at a megachurch in Nashville titled “Islam ... The Evil Religion.”
“I didn’t care,” Abudiab says wryly. “You’re in a church. You’re already Christian. I have no plans to convert you. So you’re going to think Islam is not for you — big deal.”
The congregation of the Islamic Center of Columbia grew to a peak of nearly 50. There were immigrant doctors who drove in from small towns dozens of miles away, and there were black converts who had grown up in Columbia. At least once a month, they would gather at the mosque on weekends for potluck feasts.
“That felt good,” says a congregant who asked to remain anonymous so as not to draw attention to his family. “It was our home.”
On one of their visits from Jerusalem, Abudiab’s parents gifted him with a large, ornamental Qur’an to use as the mosque’s Ramadan prayer book. Abudiab was proud. “You know,” he says, paraphrasing Muhammad: “For those who establish a mosque, God will establish a house in heaven.”
Daoud and Robin Abudiab and their son Saif, age 9.
Nathan Morgan for BuzzFeed News
A new generation of Muslims began arriving in the United States after immigration laws were loosened in 1965. Because new visas went mostly to professionals, this group was distinctly educated and affluent. “They came with Ph.D.s, with M.D.s, with master's in engineering,” says Edward E. Curtis IV, author of Muslims in America: A Short History. Many chose to settle quietly in far-flung suburbs and small towns. “They became the eye doctors and surgeons for underserved rural areas, and they provided essential services to the corporations and the factories."
Sabina Mohyuddin’s parents were among them, having moved from Bangladesh to Massachusetts before settling, in the 1970s, in Nashville. Mohyuddin is 44, with a sweet demeanor that belies a sharp mind and a pugnacious self-confidence. In seventh grade, she decided to start wearing a headscarf. “A lot of people assumed I had just come to America and didn’t know any better,” she says. “They didn’t understand it was a choice.” Mohyuddin’s closest friends in school were pious Christians. “When you don’t date, you connect with other people who don’t date for the same reasons.”
While studying at Vanderbilt University, Mohyuddin married a Bangladeshi immigrant who was finishing his medical residency, and years later they moved to Tullahoma, a small town in the wooded hills near the Alabama border. In the mid-2000s, Mohyuddin decided to educate her children at home, and she asked to join a Christian homeschooling cooperative. Some families threatened to leave the co-op if it admitted a Muslim family, but they were overruled by the families who threatened to leave if they were rejected.
“In a world where secularism is the norm, and being religious is actually sometimes looked down upon, finding someone who is religious is comforting.”
One day, a mother at the co-op vented to Mohyuddin about how her teenage daughter had confessed to liking a boy. She was willing to let them go on a date, as long as they took a chaperone.
“I was like, ‘Wait, that’s what we do!’” says Mohyuddin.
Mohyuddin is far from alone in her affection for the South. In Journey Into America, a study of Muslims across the United States, anthropologist Akbar Ahmed notes that “the Muslims we interviewed in the South say they were by and large happier than those living in places like New York City.” Much of this sentiment comes from the harmony between the social conservatism of Islam and evangelical Christianity.
Tennessee developed its first substantial Muslim enclave in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration admitted thousands of Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime and resettled them in Nashville. Today, the city is home to the largest Kurdish population in the United States.
The Nashville area — which has a plethora of Christian educational institutions and, by some measures, the highest number of churches per capita in the nation — proved a suitable home. Nawzad Hawrami, the president of the Salahadeen Islamic Center, notes that Middle Tennessee’s climate is oddly similar to Kurdistan’s. He recalls taking his wife to the hospital to give birth to their first daughter only days after arriving as refugees. Hospital staff brought them flowers and balloons.
When he started sending his kids to public school, Hawrami found a twofold comfort in the fact that many of their teachers were likely to be conservative Christians who were nevertheless bound to let the children practice Islam in peace. At Christmastime, Hawrami instructed his daughter to tell her teachers: “I’m Muslim. I don’t eat pork, and don’t call on me to sing 'Jingle Bells'!”
Sentiments like these are nearly uniform among devout, first- and second-generation immigrant Muslims in Middle Tennessee.
“In a world where secularism is the norm, and being religious is actually sometimes looked down upon, finding someone who is religious is comforting,” Mohyuddin says. “Even if they’re not of your faith.”
Sabina Mohyuddin in her Tullahoma home.
Hollis Bennett for BuzzFeed News
In the early hours of February 8, 2008, Eric Ian Baker and two friends drank 40s of malt liquor and hatched a plan to burn down the mosque on Main Street. Baker had no substantive ties to broader white nationalist movements, according to one of his prosecutors. Instead, he spent his days drinking beer and listening to neo-Nazi hardcore with lyrics about lynchings. After his arrest, investigators discovered a notebook in his trailer with a detailed organizational chart for an army to fight in the impending race war.
Baker was charismatic enough to have gathered around him a coterie of impressionable young men, and he gave his group the aspirational name Aryan Alliance. It was with two of his proteges that Baker drove his ’83 pickup to a gas station shortly before 5 a.m. and filled two empty 40 bottles with gasoline. He then drove to the Islamic Center, where the three men smashed the glass of the rear door. While Baker spray-painted swastikas and white power slogans on the outside, the other two brought a lighter to the rags of their Molotov cocktails and hurled them inside.
Within 24 hours, all three were arrested and confessed to the crime. Baker explained that he aligned himself with the Christian Identity movement, which holds that Aryans are the chosen race, Jews are biologically descended from Satan, and the rest are “mud people.” One of the accomplices, who was 18 at the time, explained that Baker had awarded him two “stripes” for the arson, and Baker gave investigators the line about Islam being “illegal according to the Bible.”
In the meantime, Abudiab was trying to make sense of things. He watched two of his close friends and fellow congregants wandering dazed through the ashes, picking up stray, scorched pages of the Qur’an and small plastic furniture they had put there for the children. “I don’t know why, but to me, they seemed broken,” Abudiab says.
When she said that American Muslims regularly condemn terrorism, one man repeatedly shouted out, “Taqiyya!” and “You’re a liar!”
Arson investigators brought Abudiab a plastic bin with the decorative Qur’an he had received from his parents. It was badly damaged, but much of it remained intact. The only proper way to dispose of it was to finish what Baker and his friends had started. After holding on to the book for a few weeks, Abudiab burned it in the fire pit in his backyard.
Some months before the firebombing, in late 2007, Abudiab had found himself conversing more and more frequently with friends about the anti-Muslim rhetoric cropping up in the presidential primary campaign. Now he wondered whether something new and dark was afoot. The Abudiabs couldn’t dispel their fear. Robin talked about getting a guard dog. Abudiab was relieved by the arsonists’ prompt arrests, but he remained apprehensive. He testified at the arraignment and forced himself to make eye contact with the perpetrators. “It didn’t last long,” he says. “I was afraid.”
Bill Williamson, a Presbyterian pastor, raised $1,800 from his flock and offered to let the mosque’s attendants pray in his church. Other scattered members of the community reached out; many were already figures in the interfaith world, and very few were from Columbia itself.
One of the first calls Abudiab received was from the Nashville-based Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, which offered to help put together a vigil. Abudiab resisted them at first. “A lot of us in the Muslim community, we don’t think of ourselves as immigrants. We’re different than the Mexicans,” Abudiab says. “Particularly the Arabs. We have this elitist view of who we are.” Still, Abudiab noticed that TIRRC was the only organization that didn’t pressure him or tell him what to do. Another group, for instance, had immediately proposed replacing the mosque with a multi-faith prayer center. Abudiab felt this idea missed the point entirely.
So Abudiab agreed to the vigil. He even agreed to let members of The Farm, a notorious hippie commune near Columbia, join in with a drum circle. Still, Abudiab couldn’t shake the feeling that this warmth was manufactured, external — that Columbia’s silence was hiding a deeper mistrust. “There were no fundraisers, no lunches, no fish fries,” Abudiab says. “But we made it look pretty. We put lipstick on the pig.”
Courtesy Daoud Abudiab
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1Tur33A
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