In ways large and small, from perceived prejudice in the workplace to a heightened sense of anxiety at home, the events of Sept. 11 continue to reverberate in the lives of American Muslims.
State and federal civil rights agencies have been flooded with complaints from Muslims who contend that their employers and co-workers openly denigrated Islam after the terror attacks, sneeringly labeled them terrorist and, in some cases, fired them solely because of religion or national origin.
Many other Muslims say they see evidence of a quiet but persistent discrimination against them in their everyday social transactions. It is not necessarily tangible. A once-friendly acquaintance no longer says hello. A child is repeatedly teased over his Arabic name. A customer calls the police to suggest that a foreign-looking merchant might be a terrorist.
"Being Muslims, will we always be suspected?" said Mansoor Khan, a Pakistan-born doctor who runs Help & Hope, a volunteer aid group for Muslim immigrants in Queens. "Will we always have to worry about someone coming to knock on our door? As American citizens, will our identities be shaky just because we are Muslim?"
It is difficult to say for certain whether the shock of Sept. 11, followed by the war in Afghanistan, has set off a widespread public reaction against people who are Muslim or are presumed to be Muslim. What is clear is that many Muslims firmly believe that American attitudes toward them have become more negative and mistrustful.
In a national survey by the Zogby International polling company in March 2000, 35 percent of the American Muslims polled reported having experienced discrimination because of their religion. Thirty-nine of Arab-Americans polled said they had experienced prejudice based on their ethnic heritage. But feelings appeared to have shifted significantly after Sept. 11. In November 2001, another Zogby poll found that 57 percent of American Muslims believed Americans held unfavorable opinions of Muslims and Arabs.
The unease that many people now feel is not necessarily linked to a concrete event or overt behavior.
"What we have now is a feeling of insecurity, a feeling that I can't really describe in words," said Zaheer Sharaf, a grocer and service station owner who immigrated from Pakistan six years ago.
His own sense of anxiety deepened four months ago, when some family friends visited from Pakistan. They stepped outside Mr. Sharaf's grocery store, on Main Street in Broad Brook, Conn., to snap a few photographs. Someone who saw them called the police to report suspicious foreigners with cameras. "The police came to the store, and I explained the situation," Mr. Sharaf said. "They were very nice, but I felt so embarrassed. I'd like to be part of society here, but minor things like these make me feel excluded."
From the moment American officials identified the people who planned and executed the terror attacks as Muslims, a backlash against Muslims was feared. But there were also strong efforts to promote tolerance. Not long after the attacks, a host of celebrities publicly urged Americans not to blame all Muslims for the deadly acts of a few.
Despite a scattering of attacks on Muslims and Islamic sites across the country, there was no widespread eruption of hatred or vengeance. Volunteers offered to protect mosques and accompany Muslim women who were frightened to leave their homes. Synagogues and churches invited Islamic scholars to speak at interfaith seminars.
But at the same time, under the broad umbrella of fighting terrorism, the government directed a spotlight on Muslims, singling them out for investigation and interrogation.
In addition to the 1,000 men arrested in an early law enforcement sweep, 5,000 young Muslim men who are in the country on tourist or student visas have been summoned by the F.B.I. for interviews. Attorney General John Ashcroft has said these men, because of their Muslim contacts, might have useful information about terrorism.
The Justice Department has also singled out for arrest another 5,000 Muslims immigrants who did not leave the country after being ordered deported, although they represent just a fraction of the 320,000 people of all backgrounds who violated deportation orders.
"I really believe that employers may be saying to themselves that if Ashcroft can do this to Muslims, then so can we," said Omar T. Mohammedi, a New York lawyer who is representing groups of Muslims who have filed discrimination complaints against their employers.
Indeed, the clearest sign of stress among Muslims has been the dramatic rise in civil rights complaints.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported that in the seven months since the terrorist attacks, it had received 427 complaints from Muslims alleging religious discrimination in the workplace, up from 171 in the same period the year before. It also got nine complaints from Sikhs who said that they had experienced discrimination after Sept. 11 because they were mistaken for Arabs or Muslims. In the same period a year earlier, the commission had no complaints from Sikhs.
"We've never had anything like it since the creation of the commission," said Cari M. Dominguez, the chairwoman of the 37-year-old agency. "Charges by Muslims nearly tripled, and while the rate is slowing, we're still getting new complaints. "
The biggest number of complaints have come from California, Texas, Illinois and Florida, accounting for 150 of the post-Sept. 11 cases among them. Fourteen complaints were lodged by people in New York State from Sept. 11, 2001, to April 11.
Ms. Dominguez said that some of the increase possibly resulted from efforts to encourage Muslims to exercise their right to file grievances. "But as long as we are internationally still on alert, I suspect we'll continue to see this trend," she added.
The New York State Division of Human Rights has also seen an increase in bias complaints from Muslims and Arabs. It got 38 such complaints dealing with workplace and housing discrimination after Sept. 11 and through the end of March, a 37 percent increase over the same period the year before.
The New York City Police Department got 117 reports of hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims — covering everything from vandalism to verbal abuse to assaults — between the terror attacks and the end of March. Most of those incidents occurred in the first charged months after the terror attacks.
In the first three months of this year, the department got only 14 complaints. Nevertheless, police officials said, the situation is far from being back to normal: on average, the department used to deal with just seven complaints of bias attacks against Arabs and Muslims a year.
The wounds to the community may be deeper than any statistics might indicate. "We're a community that doesn't report, that doesn't come out and speak," said Dahlia Eissa, a lawyer who worked for the Arab-American Family Support Center in Brooklyn until this month. "We even attempted to talk about the issues in group meetings, but people were too afraid to come.
"We've heard that families have packed up and left, that people are thinking of changing their names. A lot of people now think that if their name is Omar or Mohammed or Osama — something clearly Muslim — they'll never get anywhere in this country anymore."