Q: What do you think the number one misconception of Muslims is?
A: There are two, right, and they're linked. The most common misconception, and this precedes 9/11, is assuming that Muslims and the Middle East are identical to each other, and that Muslims, the Middle East and terrorism are coextensive — that they go together, that they're identical. That if I say terrorist, right, people tend to associate it with Islam. They tend to associate it with Muslims. If you say the Middle East, you think Muslims. You say Middle East, you think terrorists. These three things go together.
Q: In general, do you see stereotypes as an issue on our campus?
A: The short answer is yes. That's the only answer that I'm prepared to give right now. I know that students struggle with the frame works that they come to school with, and part of the process of education is transformation. And transformation is difficult. And students, believing things that fit with their already kind of given ideas is not a surprising thing, the question is what do they do when they're confronted with the fact that this is not useful information, or that their assumptions are themselves products of bias.
Q; You mentioned that these misconceptions were pre-9/11. After 9/11, how do you think that these misconceptions or perceptions changed?
A: It has intensified, even if you think about just visual vocabularies. We see an upsurge directly in the months after that where males who have beards, males who wear any type of headdress, males who appear to be racially, ethnically, different than so-called white people, are targeted for harassment, for killing, for burning down their houses [and] their places of business. That then means that not just Muslims who are American are targeted but Sikhs, who are a whole different religion.
Q: If there's just one thing that you want people to take away, or just know about Islam, what is one message that you would like to reinforce about Islam, especially the way people in western culture view it?
A: I don't know if I would say one message about Islam, I would say one message about yourself. It's not on Islam to educate you about Islam; it's on yourself to get educated about Islam, and about how we receive messages in our culture.
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