Lodi, USA - After the terrorist attacks of September 11, angry people threw eggs and shouted insults at the Pak-Indian Spices Grocery store downtown.
After the arrest here this week of two Pakistani-American men suspected of involvement in terrorist training and the detention of two Pakistani Muslim religious leaders, Mohammed Shoaib, 53, a shopkeeper, fears another backlash.
"People don't know who's who and what's what," said Shoaib, who immigrated here as a child, following his father, who had followed his uncle, who arrived here in the 1930s.
Many Pakistani-Americans were shaken, some convinced that the arrests were the result of a misunderstanding and that the men who were being held would eventually be cleared.
Shoaib said he and many of his customers believe that opponents of the religious leaders told federal authorities about them.
The opponents, also members of the Pakistani Muslim community, want to block the detained men's plan to expand a Lodi community center and add a clinic, school and other facilities.
Some in the community see the Farooqia Islamic Center as a threat to traditional Muslim values. The center, a pink corrugated tin building that lies among rolling fields and new tract homes on the south side of Lodi, houses only a library and offices.
Local leaders estimate the Pakistani population in this Central Valley town at 2,000 to 4,000 people. The U.S. census counted 700 Pakistani-Americans in Lodi in 2000.
Many of Lodi's Pakistani Americans hail from the Attock district in Pakistan's Punjab state, five to six hours from the Afghanistan border.
The town's only Islamic house of worship, the Lodi Muslim Mosque on Poplar Street, was founded in the late 1970s. The community's men work in a variety of occupations: field labor, factory work, engineering and real estate. Many of the community's women stay home to raise families.
Clad in jeans and a sweatshirt, Nawaz Shah, 19, who came to Lodi from Peshawar, Pakistan, as a child, spoke about the need to dispel stereotypes.
Now a business major at Delta College in Stockton, he helped found the South Asia Culture Club three years ago. On Aug. 14, the club celebrates Pakistani Independence Day with performances and a feast.
"It's so people know who we really are, not stereotypes that we are terrorists," he said.
Shah said he supports expanding the Farooqia Center with a school so non-Muslims can learn more about Islam there. Muslim women, who cannot attend the Lodi Muslim Mosque, could meet at the facility and study their religion.
Shah said his father, a cannery worker, taught him to value education and religion above all.
"The imams are good people, respectful, who teach peace, who were up front and always out in the open" Shah said.
He spoke on a bench behind the Boys and Girls Club across the street from the mosque. In the adjacent park, teenagers wearing loose Pakistani cotton tops and baggy hip-hop gear played basketball and sat on the swings.
"It's sad to see this ruin people's lives," he said of this week's arrests. "In the end, the government apologizes for its mistakes. This happened to others, like the Japanese people," Shah said, referring to the internment camps of World War II.
At a Sacramento news conference Wednesday, U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott repeatedly tried to reassure the Lodi Muslim community that federal investigators respect the suspects' civil rights and the community's religious freedom and will not tolerate anti-Muslim hate crimes.
"These are criminal charges and immigration charges against certain individuals, not a religion or people in a community," Scott said.
"And to those who would seek to retaliate against Muslim persons for the actions at issue in this case ... I have one simple word of advice: Don't. As our agencies have long demonstrated, we have zero tolerance for hate crimes and acts of retaliation."