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Muslims wary on 9/11 anniversary

BY MARTIN C. EVANS | Newsday Staff Writer

September 12, 2006

As a new Sept. 11 dawned for Afroz Kazi, a Pakistani Muslim living in Farmingville, thoughts turned to his old friend Mohammad Salman Hamdani, who as a child played with Kazi's two children when they lived in Queens.

Hamdani, 23, a Bayside medical technician who kept a copy of the Quran with him wherever he went, was killed at the World Trade Center five years ago, apparently after rushing there to help rescue survivors.

"I attended his funeral and saw his mother crying in her black dress," Kazi said. "And it reminds you of what other families are going through today."

"It was a tragic moment," he continued. "Islam doesn't permit terrorism. We feel sorry for the people who were killed. Children lost parents, wives lost husbands. People suffered. It was a big loss."

As area residents paused to reflect on the 9/11 terror attack that killed almost 3,000 people , local Muslims expressed a mixture of sadness for the dead and disappointment that so many Americans continue to link terrorism with their religion.

Last month, President George W. Bush said America was at war with "Islamic fascists." Two days later, the New York Post ran a story headlined "Jihad Poison a Home Brew," which asserted that the latest threat of terrorism comes from "Islamic fascists" born in the west, who have "a crackpot take on Islam and a will to kill."

Many area Muslims said their religion embraces people of different races and cultures, from Europeans to Africans to Chinese to Indonesians, and abhors the killing of innocents.

For Faisal Ali, of Bethpage, a Muslim immigrant who attended prayer services at the Islamic Center of Long Island, in Westbury, Monday was tense.

He said that although he has found America to be more tolerant than many other countries, including his native Pakistan, he worried that Monday's anniversary might bring reprisals.

"Islamic fascists, I don't even know what that means," said Ali, 34, a computer technologist, who came to the United States a decade ago. "You can't hold a whole religion responsible for what people do."

At the Mediterranean Kabob House in Westbury, Alptekin Ozkilic, 20, stopped in for a lunch of shepherd's salad and lentil soup.

Ozkilic, a Turkish immigrant studying at Nassau Community College, said too many people use Muslims as a scapegoat.

"My friends who want to live like Muslims here, like women who want to wear head scarves, they are having problems," Ozkilic said. "Some Americans don't want to understand the rest of the world."