Bay Area Muslims Struggle Against Bias: Keeping the Faith

By Carol Hess
San Francisco Examiner

Every Friday at 1:15 p.m., Shahed Amanullah slips away from his job as a San Francisco Muni project engineer to join hundreds of his fellow Muslims in an hour of prayer.

No minarets or gilt adorn the mosque where he worships on Jones Street just off Market. Only the words Masjid Darussalam, and Islamic Society of San Francisco, painted on the glass front announce its presence.

Like the Bay Area's sizable Muslim population, the mosque is virtually unnoticed except at times like these, when a foreign policy crisis thrusts them into the spotlight.

And then, the attention often comes in the form of messages on the mosque answering machine saying things like, "We're going to kick your jihad butt back to Afghanistan," according to Souleiman Ghali, the Islamic Society's executive director.

But Amanullah and Ghali are among a growing number of Bay Area Muslims who are working to make their community more visible, and to break down the misconceptions many Americans have about people of the Islamic faith.

"When Americans personify the Muslim world by a few people like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, I say, "Wow, you don't know what being Muslim is, that they are millions of peaceful people trying to make good lives for themselves and have a lot of respect,'" said Amanullah, the 30-year-old American-born son of Indian and Pakistani immigrants.

Most people don't know that the Bay Area is home to 150,000 Muslims, and that's a conservative estimate, according to Maha ElGenaidi, executive director of the Islamic Networks Group, an educational organization in San Jose.

In the United States, there are 6 to 8 million Muslims; worldwide, Islam is the second-largest religion, with 1.2 billion adherents, second only to Christianity at 1.9 billion.

Where most Americans think of Muslims as people of Middle Eastern descent, the countries with the largest Islamic populations are Indonesia, India and Pakistan.

And many are Americans of other faiths who converted to Islam, not only African Americans who sought out their roots in Islam beginning in the '60s but also Latinos, Chinese and whites.

At the San Francisco Muslim Community Center on Divisadero Street, where 75 to 200 show up for Friday prayers, cable car operator Darrell Abdul Rahman said he had been raised Baptist in the Bayview but had converted to Islam in high school.

"I liked the principles of Islam," he said. "It made more sense to me than the Christian faith based on one man and a miracle that happened to him."

Now 45, a Municipal Railway employee for 15 years, he said, "It's helped me to be more productive and to stay away from drugs and crime. It's helped me raise three kids and give them strong values. And they all practice Islam, on their own."

ElGenaidi said Muslim ethnicities were equally divided among those of Arab, South Asian and African background. They live everywhere, with clusters in Silicon Valley, where nearly 1,000 high-tech businesses are Muslim-owned, she said; in the East Bay, from Fremont and Hayward up through Berkeley; and in San Francisco, where an estimated 75,000 reside.

"We have several other races that are European, a whole Bosnian community in San Francisco and San Jose, a whole refugee community from Iraq and Somalia, a Turko-Tatar community form the southern part of what used to be Russia," she said. "We have Malaysians, Chinese. We have a huge Persian community in Marin County."

What unites them, besides American misperceptions of them as monolith, is a religion that is often misunderstood.

Educational mission

Ghali, who owns a copy shop in the Mission and lives in South San Francisco, hears it all the time when he goes to schools and colleges to educate Americans about the Muslims among them.

"They don't know Islam believes in one god, and believes in Jesus as a messenger of God," Ghali said. "Some of them think we worship rats, snakes, even kangaroos."

In fact, Islam believes that Jesus was one of many prophets sent by God to deliver revelations, and that the Prophet Mohammed was the final one, delivering the Koran to the people in the 7th century.

"American values are, by and large, very consistent with Islamic values," Amanullah said, with a focus on family, faith, hard work and an obligation to better self and society. Islam prohibits the use of alcohol and drugs, and outlaws sex outside of marriage.

Thirty mosques in Bay Area

The Bay Area is home to about 30 mosques, five in San Francisco alone. The Muslim Community Association mosques in Santa Clara draw up to 4,000 people to prayers on special holy days.

About 1,000 children are enrolled in 10 private Islamic schools, with a new one planned in South San Francisco. And there are active Muslim student associations on every college campus in the Bay Area, ElGenaidi said.

San Francisco now boasts at least two butchers who sell halal, meat slaughtered according to Islamic rules, which are very much like Jewish laws for kosher meats.

At the corner of Geary and Jones in San Francisco, Salama Halal Meat sells lamb, chicken and even Harris Ranch beef.

"Customers come from as far away as Concord," said owner Mohammed Hebbar, a Pacifica resident who arrived 12 years ago from Algeria. "Many of my customers are not Muslim, but come because they know the meat is the best."

The Black Muslim bakeries may be the most obvious signs of Muslim cuisine in the Bay Area. But there's even an Internet web site that reviews dozens of halal restaurants, from Chinese to Mediterranean.

Still, being a Muslim here isn't always easy.

Take praying for instance.

"There are five daily prayers that we try to adhere to," Amanullah said, shortly after sunrise, around noon, in the late afternoon, one at sunset and one before you go to sleep. Praying means kneeling and bowing your forehead to the floor in the direction of Islam's holiest city, Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

"In the Bay Area, that's north-by-northeast, over the pole is the shortest distance," he said.

Carries a prayer rug.

His wife, graduate student Hina Azam, 28, carries a small prayer rug around in her backpack. Amanullah is lucky. His Muni job is close enough to the Darussalam mosque that he can go there to pray.

"It's a kind of a reality check,: said Amanullahk, who lives in El Cerrito. "you pause what you are doing and remember why you're here, what your purpose is and who to be thankful for."

Fridays are to Muslims what Saturdays are to Jews and Sundays to Christians, the holy day of obligation, with hour long juma prayers at 1:15 p.m. in every mosque.

Amanullah does what many do to attend: takes an extended lunch hour. So many Yemeni janitors work in the downtown San Francisco highrises and hotels that they won a provision in their union contract allowing them prayer time, according to Ghali.

But other Muslims run afoul of less accommodating employers.

At Friday's prayers at the Darussalam mosque was Salal Aineb, 35, a Sunset resident who lost his job as a room service waiter at a prestigious San Francisco hotel over the issue. For 6-1/2 years, he'd worked an early or short shift on Fridays but was forced out when a new manager insisted he work from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. He has filed a complaint with the Equal Economic Opportunities Commission.

"This is a problem for a lot of working people here," Ghali said.

Women's attire

One practice that can draw sometimes unwanted attention is Muslim women's practice of covering their hair, for modesty. Some, like ElGenaidi, wear the full hijab, loose clothes that come down to her wrists and ankles.

"People when they first see you, they look away. Nobody ever looks you in the eye until I open my mouth," she said. A lot of people think I'm a foreigner, and that when I speak I will have an accent. They probably think I am quite passive or submissive, too."

But she loves the freedom she says it gives her.

"I don't want to attract attention in any way that's sexual," said ElGenaidi. "I want to be respected for my intellect, my spirit and my behavior.

"Plus I don't have to worry about makeup, and I don't have any more bad hair days," she added, recalling the facials, expensive clothes and self-consciousness of her past life as a marketing analyst.

While some countries have extreme laws governing their women, Saudi Arabia, for instance, doesn't let them drive, the Koran actually calls for equality of men and women; many Muslim women are, like her, highly educated, professional, and assertive.

"Some guy in Stanford University, of all places, came up to me and asked me what's with the towel on my head," she said. She set him straight about how one could be an American and still be different.

ElGenaidi didn't always take pride in being different, though.

While born into Islam of parents driven from Egypt by war when she was 7, she said growing up Muslim in the United States was tough.

"I was learning about who I was from school textbooks, from the media, from news reports and from Hollywood movies that consistently stereotyped the bad guys as Arabs or Muslims," she said. "It was very difficult for me, especially because there were not very many Muslims around, and we didn't have these communities."

Inspired by Koran

Six years ago, she read the Koran and refound her faith. She now works full time organizing the community through the Islamic Networks Group. She has married in her faith; her husband, Azmat Tanauli, is an electrical engineer at the Oracle high-tech firm in Redwood City, which has a prayer room set aside for use by Muslims as well as all others.

"I think it's different for Muslims now," said ElGenaidi, who lives in Santa Clara.

Making some of the difference are people like Amanullah, one of the new generation of Muslims who were born in America. His parents arrived from India and Pakistan with the first wave of Muslim immigrants in the 1960s.

"This generation of kids has a pretty unique kind of outlook on things," he said. "They are totally American, having been born and raised here. For many of us, English is the only language."

When his parents' generation arrived, they were strangers in a new land. They built mosques and socialized only among themselves, but didn't interact much with the American community, he said.

Amanullah went to UC-Berkeley, where there is an active Muslim group.

"Our generation is very involved," he said. "We participate in all parts of life."

Where Muslims of his parents' generation hide away when the crises like last week's U.S. missile attacks hit, "People like myself feel more comfortable speaking, and saying, let's calm down and get some understanding and find non-violent ways to stop terrorism," he said.

And, just as Americans have many misconceptions about Muslims, Muslims in other countries have distorted ideas about Americans as nothing but drugged-out and sexually depraved criminals, he said.

"We feel like we can bridge this gap," said Amanullah.

This article, Bay Area Muslims Struggle Against Bias: Keeping the Faith, by Carol Hess, appeared in the August 23, 1998, San Francisco Examiner. Permission has been obtained for republication/translation of the text (including for IIP's home-page on the Internet) by U.S. Embassy Public Affairs and press outside the U.S. On the title page, credit author and carry: "(c) San Francisco Examiner 1998." PLEASE NOTE: For Web site please include a reference to other examiner articles at WWW.Examiner.Com.