Being Muslim on Long Island, after 9/11 and now: Stories of hatred and healing

In the weeks after 9/11, when life was forever altered, Americans came together in shared grief.

But for many of the approximately 100,000 Muslims now living on Long Island, the deadliest terrorist act ever committed on U.S. soil — carried out by 19 al-Qaida hijackers — pointed an unwelcome spotlight at them.

In interviews with Newsday ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Muslims recalled the pain they felt at the time. While many of them were U.S. citizens fully integrated into American life, suddenly, they said, they were viewed as the enemy.

They reported hearing shocking comments and threats of violence directed at them on the street, even from neighbors who had once been their friends. It shattered their sense of safety and acceptance.

Those interviewed said they felt unfairly blamed for an act of terrorism by people they did not consider to be of their faith because killing is a violation of Islam’s basic teachings. A relative of one Long Islander was imprisoned for 17 years on terrorism charges that were ultimately thrown out.

"Somehow the entire religion of Islam was connected with an act of terror, and that was very tragic for Muslims," said Daisy Khan, a Muslim and a board member of the Interfaith Institute of Long Island, a group that promotes interfaith dialogue. "There was a sense of fear and anxiety about their place in America and their sense of belonging."

Nationally, anti-Muslim crimes post-9/11 jumped from 29 in 2000 to 499 in 2001, according to the FBI. The agency said the increase happened "presumably as a result of the heinous incidents that occurred on Sept. 11," The Associated Press reported.

But today the Muslims interviewed by Newsday said there also is an ongoing healing process on Long Island and elsewhere. This summer, a Suffolk police detective sergeant visited a Shirley mosque after hate graffiti was found at the site of where a new mosque is being built. "We will not stand for it," Det. Sgt. Matthew DeMatteo said of the crime.

Islamophobia isn’t gone, but 25 years after 9/11, those interviewed said there has been substantial progress.

"Twenty-five years later, the Muslim American story is not a failed integration," Khan said. "It’s actually a successful integration story because you see many Muslims now acting as agents, running for office, despite them being discriminated against."

Here are some of their stories.

Becoming targets

Nayyar Imam, a longtime local Muslim leader, recalls how within hours of the terrorist attacks someone smashed the car window of his hijab-wearing cousin at Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove.

The next day after they dropped off the car in Port Jefferson to be fixed, the glass company owner noticed in the back seat a tourism pamphlet from Boston — the city from which some of the hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center had departed.

When Imam and his cousins showed up later to retrieve the car, Suffolk County police were waiting for them. The business owner had called authorities. Days later, two FBI agents walked into the pharmacy in Coram that Imam owned to question him about an employee.

The episodes underscored the suspicion with which many Muslims on Long Island said they were regarded in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Imam said.

"I was very scared at that time," said Imam, 71, who came to the United States in 1982 from Pakistan as a trained pharmacist and got licensed after studying at Long Island University-Brooklyn. "All the community was scared."

Some Muslims shaved their beards and stopped using their Muslim names, he said. Some women stopped wearing hijabs, or head coverings.

Imam decided to put his family on lockdown — going out only if necessary. Two months later, when he finally decided to venture out, he was walking the streets of Manhattan with his wife and three small children when a motorist rolled down his window and yelled, "Why don’t you go back where you came from?"

Imam felt embarrassed for his children and, seeking to shield them from the truth, told them the man was talking about them going back to Long Island.

A quarter-century later, life for Muslims on Long Island has improved and they don’t suffer as many of the same daily humiliations, he said. But they feel there is still a cloud that hangs over them which may take decades to overcome, he said.

Today "it is kind of OK," he said. But "we are still on the hot seat. ... You feel discrimination, although it is much less."

In 2011, Imam was named the first Muslim chaplain to the Suffolk County Police Department — a sign of progress, he said.

But around the same time, when he and others were pushing to open a mosque in Mount Sinai, residents protested at public hearings, he recalled. The mosque eventually got approved.

It took 15 years for him and others to get approval for a Muslim cemetery in Suffolk County. And he noted that plans to open a Muslim boarding school at the site of a former Catholic boarding school in Bay Shore, released this summer, have elicited heated public opposition.

In August, someone spray-painted anti-Muslim graffiti on a banner at the site of the mosque under construction in Shirley. Similar graffiti was written on stop signs near a mosque in Deer Park in April.

Many Muslims on Long Island are professionals working in hospitals and universities, Imam said, but that isn’t enough to convince some people.

"We are highly educated and highly qualified, especially on Long Island," he said. "Still, we are not accepted."

A family destroyed

Sarwat Paracha still cries when she talks about the cousin who was imprisoned for 17 years on terrorism charges that the government ultimately dropped, freeing him from jail.

"Making him look like a monster was really heartbreaking for us," said Paracha, 58, a West Hempstead resident. "The whole family has been destroyed."

Her cousin Uzair Paracha was arrested in Brooklyn in 2003 when prosecutors accused the 23-year-old from an elite Pakistani family of being an al-Qaida sympathizer. He was convicted in 2005 of trying to help an al-Qaida operative fraudulently obtain immigration documents to enter the United States to carry out a terrorist attack.

But the conviction on charges of providing material support to al-Qaida, conspiracy and other counts was overturned in 2018 when Judge Sidney H. Stein of U.S. District Court in Manhattan said newly discovered evidence cast doubt on Uzair Paracha’s guilt. Allowing the conviction to stand, Stein ruled, would be "a manifest injustice."

Stein ordered a new trial, but prosecutors dropped the case in 2020. They said they did not believe the new evidence exonerated Paracha, but they could not easily review 14,000 classified documents before the trial date.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment.

In secret negotiations with the government before dropping the case, Paracha, who grew up partly in Queens and speaks fluent English, agreed to give up his status as a permanent U.S. resident and return to Pakistan, where he was born, according to media reports.

His attorney, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York, said at the time that Paracha’s "slate is clean and he returns home to Pakistan a free and innocent man."

But the ordeal has left Sarwat Paracha and other relatives on Long Island permanently scarred, she said.

"Nothing can compensate the years that he had gone through, that we have gone through," she said. "We are living in fear obviously that because of this, anything can happen," she added.

She recalled visiting her cousin in jail in Terre Haute, Indiana, and in Brooklyn. Uzair Paracha’s father, Saifullah Paracha, an affluent businessman, also was arrested by U.S. authorities in 2003 as part of the same case and was held for nearly two decades by the United States, mainly at Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He was never charged with a crime. A prisoner review board approved his release in 2022, and he also returned to Pakistan.

"My uncle and Uzair were labeled as terrorists and they are the most sweetest people I know," Sarwat Paracha said. "And they’re the most caring people I know. They have such a good heart."

After their arrests, many of Paracha’s friends shunned her and her family "because they thought we were part of the terrorist group," she said. "They right away disconnect you."

She and her family also became targets of anti-Muslim sentiment, she said. Standing in line at a pharmacy and wearing hijabs, "we heard people behind us, cursing us, saying, ‘Go back home.’ ”

"I had nothing to do with" 9/11, she said, "but I felt like I was a criminal. ... You felt a lot of pressure, you felt very unsafe. Muslims were to be blamed at that point. Even today if something happens, we are the first ones to look at as the bad guy."

For years, her husband was detained for hours at airports including Kennedy Airport after returning from trips overseas. It got so bad, the rest of the family would routinely go home to West Hempstead and then go back to Kennedy to get him when he was finally released.

Despite all that, 25 years later, Paracha said she feels generally accepted and well-treated in her neighborhood. "I feel very safe and the neighbors are very respectful."

But she is still cautious about going to some places.

"Even today, Muslims don’t feel safe in neighborhoods where we feel we are not welcome," she said.

Labeled terrorists

Mohammad Rashid was enamored of the United States from the day he arrived from Pakistan in 1990.

He earned an MBA from St. John’s University, landed a good job with a pharmaceutical company specializing in cancer medicines, and eventually ended up living with his wife and children in Syosset. One of his children graduated from Harvard Law School.

But it all changed on Sept. 11, 2001.

That evening, while he was still living in Queens, he was walking out of his house to get in his car. His neighbor, whom Rashid thought was his friend, was walking by with his girlfriend and made a racist comment threatening violence to Arabs.

He said it loud enough to make sure Rashid heard it.

"It was shocking because I knew this person the last four, five years," said Rashid, who took the comment as an indirect threat.

But it was just the beginning, he said. Soon, after the family moved to Long Island in 2003, the taunting became focused on his children in school, where other students called them "terrorists," he said.

"That was the norm — calling Muslim kids terrorists," he said.

In 2011, nearly a decade after the terrorist attacks, U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader, in Pakistan. In a school hallway, one student made a disparaging comment to Rashid's son.

"What a wonderful experience I had before 9/11” in the United States, Rashid said. "I never wanted to go back [to Pakistan] because I love this country. This country gave me so much."

He traveled often for his job, but after the attacks he was almost always pulled out of the security lines for extra inspection — a humiliation he suffered in front of his colleagues as he was detained for a half hour or more.

"You feel like a second-class citizen," said Rashid, now 62 and a U.S. citizen.

He was disgusted by the terrorist attacks, saying they contradicted the foundations of Islam.

"Whoever takes a life unless for a just reason, like a punishment for a murder, it will be as if they killed the whole humanity," Rashid said.

"The action of a few individuals was put on the whole community," he said, referring to the terrorists.

Rashid has become involved in interfaith work at the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury, which has allowed people of other faiths to get to know Muslims better. Now he is president-elect of the mosque and serves on its executive committee.

He said he again feels generally supported by neighbors and co-workers. He doesn’t get stopped at the airports anymore.

He thinks the election of a Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, as mayor of New York City last November is another indication of progress.

While he still sees some disturbing signs on Long Island, such as the graffiti at the mosque site in Shirley, he said, "Most people are good people."

Newsday's Anastasia Valeeva contributed to this story.