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Months After Gunman’s Rampage, Some of Chapel Hill’s Muslims Still Live in Fear
On its surface, the so-called “Research Triangle Region,” formed by North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, seems an unlikely place to find a minority community living in fear. But news of the February 10 shooting deaths of three young Arab-American Muslims moved like an electric current through North Carolina’s Muslim communities. It was a shock for Chapel Hill, a community best known for its university, basketball team, and progressive politics.
Mirroring what groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations believe are national trends, residents I spoke with said that even before the shooting, anti-Muslim sentiment had grown progressively noisier in the Triangle. This was particularly true after Muslims had been invited to host a weekly call to prayer at Duke’s chapel, which was opposed in January by popular Christian evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham. Then, on February 10, Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha—Barakat and Yusor were married; Razan was Yusor’s sister—were shot, assassination-style, inside their apartment by a neighbor, Craig Hicks. Police said the shooting was the result of an “ongoing dispute over parking,” touching a raw nerve among Muslims across the United States.
The news, understandably, hit particularly hard in Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, where members of the Muslim community, which includes Arab-Americans, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans, traded text messages in the aftermath of the shootings. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Barakat was a second-year graduate student, the news was met with horror. At nearby Duke University, where Muslim students and staff had recently been the target of threats, following January’s call to prayer incident, the university’s imam, Adeel Zeb, said security was immediately increased.
Since the shootings, Muslims have looked for ways to honor the legacies of the three young people. Art projects, outreach, and a continuation of the charitable work that Barakat and the Abu-Salha sisters were known to take part in have all been started, including a “Feed Their Legacy” food drive that collected more than 170,000 cans of food and raised more than $20,000.
Beyond tributes, however, lies a new fear for personal safety. Some young men posted on Facebook about the need to keep guns in their homes for personal protection. Other residents told me they have changed their personal routines, such as no longer going out alone after dark. The day after the shootings, some Muslim parents kept their children home from school.
“If I hear somebody behind me, I’ll turn around and see who it is,” said Zeb. He said that, after the shootings, additional campus security was requested for students heading to and leaving from Muslim group events.
Taiyyiba Qutaib, a Triangle-area civil-rights lawyer, said talk about acquiring guns for personal protection is a “natural reaction” to the shootings. “That’s normal that people would want to defend themselves,” Qutaib said. “I’m a little more cautious when I’m getting out of my car, walking to my front steps.”
Dr. Salahuddin Muhammad, an associate imam at As Salaam Islamic Center, a predominantly African-American mosque in Raleigh, said that their members have become more security conscious. He added, however, that his community has been dealing with bigotry for generations. “Muslim brothers and sisters across the country are getting to feel what we’ve been dealing with for a long time,” Muhammad said. African-American Muslims find themselves doubly targeted. Shamira Lukomwa, president of the U.N.C. Muslim Student Association and a Ugandan-American, said she had already been reflecting on bigotry before the shootings, because of racially charged battles over “Silent Sam,” a statue of a Confederate soldier on the U.N.C. campus; the renaming of Saunders Hall, an on-campus building named after a U.N.C. trustee who many historians believe, in the 19th century, was a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan; and “other campus responses to the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner.”
Lukomwa said that, initially, there was wide outrage at the shootings throughout the U.N.C community and a lot of support for the Barakat and Abu-Salha families. But since then, Lukomwa said people have retreated to their previous positions and grown even more hardened in their ideas. “The [U.N.C.] campus is very divided,” she said.
One of the biggest points of division stems from “how to classify the murders,” Lukomwa said, “as a hate crime or an altercation over a parking dispute.” The Muslim community responded to the shootings with anti-Islamophobia events, but these were largely attended by Muslims. Meanwhile, campus Republicans, together with Christians United for Israel and the Young America’s Foundation, invited David Horowitz to speak at U.N.C. in April. Horowitz, Lukomwa said, “further alienate[d] Muslim students.”
“How many people I pass on the street are thinking this?” Lukomwa asked, referring to the anti-Muslim sentiments she reads in online comments. “It makes me very paranoid. How many people, if given a chance, would harm me?”
“You’re almost paralyzed,” said Egyptian-American Nashua Oraby, a graduate of U.N.C. and now the mother of four. For her, the biggest shock was that the shootings happened in Deah and Yusor’s home. “Every time that someone knocks on the door, I flinch just a little.”
Oraby said that she wished her Durham neighbors had contacted her after the shootings. “There was such a silence around me,” she said. “Nobody said anything. In that silence, I felt like nobody cares.”
Oraby, like many, was particularly distressed that the shootings haven’t been labeled a hate crime. “Parking dispute” became a widespread meme, a code phrase for crime potentially motivated by anti-Muslim bigotry.
Qutaib, the civil-rights lawyer, couldn’t say whether the shootings qualify as a hate crime. But the way in which the local police department immediately declared it a parking dispute, taking the confessed murderer’s words at face value, was “not just unprofessional,” she said. “Now you’ve tainted the jury pool.” Yusor and Razan Abu-Salha’s father also stated publicly that his daughters felt uncomfortable around and hated by Hicks. (In an April hearing, a judge ruled that Hicks is eligible for the death penalty. The F.B.I. is also conducting a preliminary investigation into the case.)
Many stressed the need to do more outreach, to combat the growing atmosphere of anti-Muslim bigotry. Members of the Triangle’s different Muslim communities described a surge in small bigotries in the last few months. One resident said a friend was called a “terrorist” at the Crabtree Value Mart, another was told to “go back to where [she] came from,” and still another said she was given dirty looks.
“I hope it’s not the start of something,” Qutaib said. “I know no other place where I would be happy.”
Source: www.vanityfair.com