Muslims in America: When Bullying Meets Religion

By Sabrina Holcomb

Debate team champion, Autena Torbati, lives by her words. So the day a 
debate teammate announced to the class he would have “liked Hitler better if 
had he killed all the Muslims, instead of Jews,” Autena’s blood ran cold. 
“Remember,” says the Oklahoma high school student, “the Holocaust started 
with words before ending in gas chambers.”

In Autena’s case, bullying has been confined to verbal taunts, threatening 
gestures, and an anti-Muslim opinion piece in the school newspaper. But for 
other Muslim students, verbal assaults have escalated into physical abuse, 
as anti-Islamic sentiment sweeps the nation. In Texas, a Muslim student was 
brutally beaten and thrown into a dumpster, while in Minnesota, Muslim girls 
were chased by classmates who shoved raw pork in their faces. Following 
relentless beatings from middle to high school, a Muslim Staten Island teen 
finally resigned from school.

Bullying is an equal-opportunity crisis, affecting students of every age, 
race, and creed. The dimension that makes the bullying of Muslim students 
particularly disturbing centers around the open prejudices and fears of 
adults, giving the green light to non-Muslim children that it’s okay — even 
patriotic — to discriminate. Muslim students report that an administrator at 
one school screamed at a 13-year old to remove her hijab (religious head 
scarf) until the girl broke down in tears. A guest speaker at another school 
handed out literature demonizing Islam in a social sciences class. When 
adults, especially educators, join in the bullying, it’s not only hurtful, 
say students, it’s a betrayal of trust. But educators have found that when 
just one caring adult supports a student, it can make a world of difference, 
creating a positive ripple effect that goes beyond one student and one 
classroom.

A Perfect Storm for Bullying

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reports the number of 
bullying incidents against Muslim students has spiked in the wake of a 
perfect economic and political storm: severe economic distress and 
anti-immigrant sentiments, continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 
conflation of Islam with terrorism, even the misidentification of President 
Obama’s own religion. Add to the mix the tragic memory of 9/11 and a 
proposed Islamic center near Manhattan’s Ground Zero, and you get children, 
many just babies on September 11, 2001, indicting their classmates as the 
enemy.

How do rising tensions affect the nation’s Muslim students, the majority of 
whom attend public schools?  School-related civil rights violations have 
increased by 31 percent in just one year, according to a 2009 CAIR study. 
The study also found that a student’s ethnicity/ religion, a 
“Muslim-sounding name,” or the wearing of hijab were some of the primary 
factors triggering discrimination. A separate study by Wayne State 
University in Michigan found that 43 percent of Arab-American teens in the 
study were depressed. 
“Although many Muslim students have good relationships with their non-Muslim 
classmates, almost every child I’ve spoken to says they’ve had a hostile 
interaction with someone,” says Ibrahim Ramey, Human and Civil Rights 
Program Director for the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. The 
most common epitaphs Muslim students hear, he says, are “Terrorist,” and “Go 
back where you came from!” The irony is their tormentors are often insulting 
a third-generation American, a scenario painfully familiar to the Omeira 
family.

“I raised my son to be a proud American,” declares Abdul Omeira, whose son, 
Hashem, changed almost overnight from a sunny-natured 12-year-old to a grim 
recluse who stopped eating and socializing and started locking himself in 
his room. What his parents didn’t know at the time, says Hashem, a 
native-born Californian, is that after his teacher showed a movie widely 
criticized for its negative portrayal of Islamic culture, his classmates 
started a relentless campaign of abuse — cursing Hashem, his religion, even 
his parents.

Thankfully, Hashem’s high school experience is worlds apart from middle 
school. The difference? An enlightened school climate, says Hashem. When one 
of Hashem’s teachers heard some students categorizing all Muslims as 
extremists, he launched into a lesson on Muslim Americans, informing the 
class that extremists were a small group who didn’t represent the majority 
of Islam’s followers.

How Educators Can Lead the Way

“Some teachers do a wonderful job of teaching acceptance to their students,” 
reports Saadia Khan, Civic Outreach Coordinator for the Muslim Public 
Affairs Council (MPAC). Kahn is invited to classrooms about a dozen times a 
year to talk candidly with students about Islamic culture. “I encourage the 
students to ask no-holds-barred questions — whether they’re about terrorism 
versus jihad or women’s rights under Islam,” says Khan. It helps to dispel 
myths and stereotypes when I can give them accurate information.”

Khan cautions that “misinformation contributes to misconceptions about 
groups, which in turn, can lead to bullying.” To help counter the negative 
narratives, she says, schools should facilitate conversations among 
educators, organizations like MPAC, students, and parents. “We have to teach 
children it’s okay to have disagreements as long as you engage in respectful 
discussion, and educators can be responsible facilitators of these 
discussions,” says Khan, who believes that cultural awareness training for 
educators should be required by all school districts. Khan also proposes 
using social media as an educational tool to counter cyberbullying, 
“Students with blogs can tag each other on positive news items and YouTube 
clips. It’s a nuanced and cool mechanism for teaching students how to 
exercise free speech responsibly.”

Public school demographics are changing so quickly, say community activists, 
cultural misunderstandings are unavoidable. The harassment of Muslim 
students, for instance, is often fueled by multiple factors: language and 
race, as well as religion, can make students a target. Darker-skinned Somali 
students comprise 10 percent of the student population in St. Cloud, 
Minnesota. Mocked as “sand n-gers” and “camel jockeys,” they reportedly face 
more discrimination there than other Muslim youth. Still other students are 
discriminated against because of their perceived ethnicity or religion: many 
Sikh Americans, though not  Muslim, are targets of anti-Muslim bias.

Taking the extra steps to educate students about other cultures can ease 
cultural tensions and curb bullying, says California teacher Ari Jacobs, 
who’s seen the benefits at his own school. (According to one CAIR study, 
California leads the nation in the percentage of anti-Muslim civil rights 
complaints.)  Jacobs designed a World Issues unit for his 11th-grade 
students, examining various aspects of world religions and human behavior, 
and a special unit for his seventh-grade social studies class, who explore 
bullying and Islamaphobia through the lens of “upstanders versus 
bystanders.”

The study of medieval Islam is required curriculum for 7th-grade students, 
says Jacobs,  “but ancient history doesn’t allow them to process what they 
see on Fox and CNN,” so Jacobs extends the unit to explore current events, 
drawing modern-day connections between the curriculum and students’ lives.

Not long after the school year started, Jacob’s class watched news clips of 
Florida pastor Terry Jones threatening to burn Qurans on the anniversary of 
9/11.  A discussion about the role of book burnings and bystanders during 
the Holocaust led to the focal question of the entire lesson. “Are you an 
upstander or a bystander?,” Jacobs challenges his students, whom he’s just 
shown a 60 Minutes story about a teenager who peered over a bathroom stall 
while doing nothing to stop his friend from killing a young child. “I tell 
my students at some point in our lives — in a cafeteria line, riding a school 
bus, or on Facebook — we’re all peering over that bathroom stall,” with the 
power to say, Stop!”

But the most insightful moment for his astonished students, says Jacobs, was 
absorbing the tale of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. A visibly emotional 
Muslim student told her classmates, “This is exactly how we felt about the 
people that brought down those planes on 9/11. They don’t represent me or 
Islam, just like Timothy McVeigh doesn’t represent all White people or 
Christians.” They got it,” says Jacobs. “You could just see the light go 
on.”

An Eye-Opening Lesson

Jacobs’ students say the lessons they’ve learned have 
made them realize that appreciating other cultures requires work and doesn’t 
happen on its own. The combination of frank discussion, role playing, and 
powerful media images is opening students’ eyes: parents have sent thank-you 
letters, and students being picked on have told Jacobs their schoolmates are 
no longer silent bystanders.

Yet, most Muslim students, having internalized the message that “Muslims are 
fair game,” suffer in silence, bearing the brunt of anti-Islamic fervor in 
an adult world. Although the overall number of reported anti-Muslim hate 
crimes has decreased in the last year, school-related incidents have soared. 
The recent spate of “bullycides” has focused national attention on the ease 
with which harassment can slide into tragedy, leading a Muslim educator to 
ask, “Do we have to wait for a Muslim-American child to commit suicide or be 
killed by a bully” before we take the bullying of Muslim students to heart?

Many Muslim families still believe in the power of education to change 
attitudes and the potential of public schools to teach tolerance on a 
national scale. The lessons can come from teachers, from students, and 
sometimes from the ones being bullied, say Hashem and Autena, who, having 
been targets themselves, speak from personal experience. They found that 
speaking up — educating other students — brought unexpected consequences.

After Autena took a classmate to task for making obnoxious comments about 
“sand people,” the classmate publicly apologized, telling everyone who had 
heard his remarks, “What I said wasn’t cool.” As for Hashem: Not long after 
he started high school, a cocky kid got in his face and told him to go “back 
where he came from.” “I told him I was born in the U.S.A.,” says Hashem. 
“That I have nowhere to go. So here I am.”

Now they’re friends.