Matthai Chakko Kuruvila
Chronicle Religion Writer

Sunday, September 3, 2006

 One in an occasional series of articles related to the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

 As the war on terror heads into its sixth year, a new racial stereotype is emerging in America. Brown-skinned men with beards and women with head scarves are seen as "Muslims" -- regardless of their actual faith or nationality.

 Law enforcement measures, politicians, religious leaders and the media have contributed to stereotyping Muslims as a race -- echoing the painful history of another faith.

 "Muslims are the new Jews," said Paul Silverstein, an anthropology professor at Reed College in Oregon who studies the intersection of race, immigration and Islam. "They're the object of a series of stereotypes, caricatures and fears which are not based in a reality and are independent of a person's experience with Muslims."

 The Muslim caricature has ensnared Hindus, Mexicans and others across the country with violence, suspicion and slurs. And it has given new form to this country's age-old dance around racial identity.

 With fair skin, green eyes and brown hair, Dailyah Patt is white. But when she puts on a head scarf, Patt has discovered, people see her as something altogether different.

 The Modesto-born convert to Islam has had people categorize her as Palestinian, and she's been told: "Go back to your own country." So Patt removes the hijab, as the head scarf is commonly referred to, when she goes to job interviews or has to fly.

 "I can pass as Christian," said Patt, 27, a Palo Alto resident, who was frustrated by repeated airport security interrogations until she stopped wearing a scarf. She feels "oppressed" for feeling forced into shedding a required article of the faith.

 Nida Khalil, on the other hand, is Palestinian, spent many of her teenage years in the West Bank city of Ramallah, and deeply identifies with Palestinian politics. A nonpracticing Muslim, she doesn't wear a head scarf. People tell her they think she is Latino.

 She can't think of a single instance in the past five years when she's felt harassed for looking like someone from the Middle East.

 "I feel really badly for women who have to live in the U.S. that do wear hijab," said Khalil, 26, a San Mateo resident. "I can't even imagine all the snickers or stares ... or the disrespect they get from Western fanatics."

 Patt and Khalil's experiences show how race works, say scholars who study the phenomenon: People often project their assumptions onto others based on physical characteristics, even ignoring their own experiences.

 Caricaturing a faith as a race poses particular problems because there is no set of shared physical characteristics. For example:

-- Most Arabs in the United States, such as Ralph Nader, are not Muslims.

-- Many Palestinians are Christian.

-- Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country, but its residents don't resemble the stereotype.

-- African Americans make up more than a quarter of the U.S. Muslim population, more than any other ethnicity. Complicating matters, Muslims who are black often are confused with Black Muslims, Nation
of Islam followers, who abide different beliefs.

 "You can't define what a Muslim looks like," said Saifulloh Amath, 23, a San Jose resident who is Cham, an ethnic group native to
Vietnam and Cambodia.

 His family has been Muslim as long as it can trace. But he is taken
for a "devout Buddhist."

 "You can't stereotype all of humanity under one dress code," Amath said. "In the middle of the Vietnamese jungle, you have people who
speak Arabic," the language of the Quran.

 For women, the stereotype revolves around wearing a scarf, which complies with a religious requirement to cover their hair.

 For men, the caricature has almost nothing to do with faith because there's no physical attribute unique to Muslim men. The male stereotype involves beards and skin, eye and hair color, and names.

 "Sam" Hachem usually doesn't introduce himself by his real first name. With sandy-brown hair and gray-green eyes, the clean-shaven Hachem said people often guess after hearing his accent that he is "Eastern European."

 But once he gets comfortable with someone, Hachem usually tells them his first name is Hussein and that he's a Lebanese immigrant.

 At that point, people react. They immediately move to subjects around terrorism.

 Once when he revealed his name at a bar, someone joked and asked him if he was going to blow up the place. Hachem retorted, laughing, "No, there's not enough people."

 "When they hear the name, I'm a totally different person," said Hachem, 29, a nonpracticing Muslim. "They automatically think of trouble."

 The Oakland resident believes he could easily use his real name full time in the Bay Area, which he thinks is accepting of difference. It's just easier to start off with Sam.