Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ikram Ahmad picked up his dorm phone. He said the callers identified themselves as members of a Jewish fraternity and invited him to dinner.
“Then they said, ‘Wait a second, you cannot eat our food because you are Arab,'” Ahmad said.
Ahmad knew he had been targeted for being Muslim. But the callers didn’t have all their facts right: They misidentified Ahmad, a Malaysian international student, as an Arab.
“They thought I was an Arab because of my name,” said Ahmad, now a McCormick senior. “It was more based on my name than who I am.”
Sept. 11 forced Ahmad to look more deeply at what it means to be both Malaysian and Muslim, he said.
Islam is Malaysia’s national religion. But most Malaysians do not resemble the stereotypical Muslim image, so Ahmad initially was not worried about being personally affected by post-Sept. 11 backlash, he said.
“Malaysians aren’t targeted like Muslims because Malaysia is a multicultural society,” Ahmad said. “The prejudice was more on people who look like Arabs or are Arabs.”
When he first arrived at Northwestern, Ahmad was reluctant to broadcast his religion, he said. But he was not afraid to pray in public or explain his religion to curious acquaintances, he said.
Being Malaysian as well as Muslim now, four years after 9/11, is an opportunity to educate his peers about Malaysia, Ahmad said.
“Since everybody had the misconception that Arabs are Muslim, I liked to more play up my Malaysian culture by being a Muslim,” Ahmad said. “I feel more proud (of) being Malaysian, because I can tell people that not only Arabs are Muslims; Malaysians are Muslims, too.”
When he took Feminism in Islam, a special topics class, Ahmad attempted to relate discussion topics to current events in Malaysia, he said. He also attends Muslim Cultural Student Association events and played bass for the Malaysian band at Asian Rock Night this year.
Ahmad never worried that he would be victimized because of his religion, he said. Living at NU immediately after the attacks may have sheltered him from prejudice, he said.
“The community is different,” he said. “In college, your mind is more open because you always want to learn, right?”
Ahmad may not have faced as much prejudice because many people in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences “understood where he was coming from,” said Siris Rivas, who was Ahmad’s mentor at the beginning of his freshman year.
Rivas, now a first-year graduate student, said Ahmad gave her different insights into Islam and current events.
“We were just constantly negotiating and talking about what was going on in the media versus what he was hearing from back home versus what the BBC was saying, because it was totally different perspectives,” she said.
Ahmad’s perceptions of tolerance and American society changed after Sept. 11, he said.
“After hearing all the stereotypes and the arrests on travels and all that, sometimes I felt that maybe someone should’ve put more emphasis on educating about what Islam is about,” he said.
The Sept. 11 attacks changed his life in another way: Ahmad no longer plans to stay in the United States after he graduates in May. He thought the United States was fun before Sept. 11. Today, he sees international students having more problems getting jobs, and he is wary of President Bush’s policies, he said.
