Hasad, Salat, and the N.Y. Football Giants
Khalid Hasan, the Washington correspondent of Daily Times and the special correspondent of Associated Press of Pakistan in Washington D.C., had written an article regarding the travestied mishandling of the Muslim Prayer Room situation at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.
If you're not familiar with the story, the gist of it is that there were five Muslim men loitering around an air duct at Giants Stadium and they were arrested because of their suspicious behavior during the second quarter of the Saints/Giants match-up. The men claimed to be praying. They were eventually released and now they are crying racial profiling.
Anyway, Hasan wrote this article in response to the events:
"WASHINGTON: Praying in public may have become a high-risk activity for a Muslim in America, going by what happened in New York recently.
Halfway through the second quarter of a football game between the New York Giants and New Orleans Saints, FBI agents swooped on five Muslims who were offering namaz near a ventilation duct in the Giants Stadium, handcuffed them and took them away. The FBI had been alerted by stadium security guards who felt that the five men may be engaged in some illegal or suspicious activity. The men were taken in custody but later released without charge – but no apology – when the FBI realised that all they were doing was offering their prayers at the time due.
Twenty-seven year old Sami Shaban, a law student, told the New York Daily News: “No matter where we are, we stop and pray.” He and four of his friends, all Giants fans, complained that they had been racially profiled. An FBI spokesman denied the allegation, saying, “It was where they were, not what they were doing.”
The story has had a happy ending in the sense that authorities at Giants Stadium have decided to create special prayer areas."
There are so many things wrong with Hasan's article I don't even know where to start.
Firstly, the headline reads, "Praying in public high risk activity for Muslims". I wonder if Hasan would rather not write a more accurate article entitled "Not being Muslim high risk activity for non-Muslims". I don't even need to start in with references of beheadings, car bombs, wedding explosions, suicide bombers, mosque explosions and airliners as projectiles for people to know it's a much riskier thing to be American and oppose Muslim extremists than it is for a Muslim to pray in America.
Secondly, what's so happy about an ending that appeases the very people who are hell bent on destroying our way of life? Why did the Giants Organization feel pressured to offer prayer rooms to Muslims when they did nothing wrong? I wonder if there is a chapel on site for Christians to do their devotions. Maybe there are a set of confessionals and an onsite priest to receive those devout Catholics who feel bad for eating two too many bratwursts from the concession stand.
So why is Hasan's take on the situation off base? Because Hasan painted a picture of the stadium security as the guilty party, and of the five Muslims as the victims. Let's take a look at the facts to examine whether the authorities acted correctly in this case.
- President Bush Senior was in attendance at the game that night. You had better believe that security was heightened. I would hope that security officers would detain ANYBODY doing ANYTHING suspicious in these areas. Imagine if there really were terrorists introducing a toxic agent into the food and air supply and dozens of people died and hundreds were hospitalized including President Bush Sr.. How much ire would the security guards receive if it came out that they didn't stop the folks that they saw hanging around the air ducts because they were afraid to be labeled racial profilers?
- The men were in a sensitive area where there was a central air intake duct and near where food preparations take place. Isn't this case the very definition of heightened security? When security is tightened or security awareness heightened, many innocent people will get inconvenienced. That's just the way it is and in the world we live in today, these inconveniences will continue to expand.
- The men claim to be practicing their Salat (prayer). Muslims are required to pray five times a day; at waking, at noon, at mid afternoon, at sundown and when they retire.) Twenty-seven year old Sami Shaban, a law student, told the New York Daily News: “No matter where we are, we stop and pray.” That seems real devout. It seems like convenience is not a luxury they provide themselves and that they will exercise namaz (prayer) whenever it is time. The problem is, depending on which report you read, the men were praying early in the first quarter, during the second quarter or at halftime for a game that started at 7:30pm. According to the Five Pillars of Faith, the Salat is to be performed five times a day at waking, at noon, at mid-afternoon, at sundown, and before retiring. So which prayer were they performing at 8-9pm? I thought they were so devout they "pray everywhere"
- They were not profiled because of their nationality or because of their appearance as Mostafa Khalifa, one of the men detained, claims. "Let's be real here, if anybody with my description even scratches their ear, people get nervous," said Khalifa, 27, who, like Shaban, wears a long beard. The truth is, if it were an African American man doing the same thing at the same place, he would also have been detained. If it were an Asian man doing the same thing at the same place, he would also have been detained. If it were a WHITE MAN doing the same thing at the same place, he would also have been detained. There was no racial profiling going on unless you want to call the recognition of high-risk behavior profiling. (As if a security guard who stops a man wearing a ski mask from entering the bank would be called a facial-wear profiler.)
- They were not religiously profiled as another article says that the men claimed they were. As I said, the incident had nothing to do with race or religious behavior. The men were detained because they were doing suspicious things in a sensitive area. Period. It could have been a group of Japanese women with suitcases and toolboxes and they would have been detained as well. Japanese women don't fit any particular terrorist profile, but the combination of their suspicious activity and the area in which they were performing these activities make them subject to detention.
- At any rate, it wasn’t security that spotted them and detained them, it was people who saw the suspicious behavior and reported it. I thought we have all been called to report suspicious behavior for the safety of everyone around us. That's what we've been told over and over again at BART stations, airports, and anyplace else that large numbers of people congregate. Steven Siegel, spokesman for the FBI said, "This was a routine, precautionary law enforcement action. The number one priority of the FBI is to prevent future terrorist attacks, and we ask people to report what they consider to be suspicious behavior when they see it. It turned out to be just a group of gentlemen congregating in an area where the public doesn't normally go," The five Muslim men were confronted back at their seats after they had left the air duct area and were taken for questioning.
The bottom line about profiling is, we all have to do get inconvenienced because of security concerns. (Just think of the airports, for example.) It's just that when the rest of us get inconvenienced, we don't cry, "racial profiling!" because we don't fit the profile. Eventually, someone who does fit the profile will get inconvenienced and then they complain of getting profiled. What should we do? Do some sort of reverse profiling where anyone that fits the profile gets an automatic pass? That wouldn't work either because by profiling those you want to give a free pass to by seeing if they fit the profile, you have just racially profiled again!
And as far as the Giants Organization is concerned, I think they've made a big mistake by bowing to the pressures of various Rights Groups. What happened was an issue of safety and security. A better response would have been to install security cameras and to further restrict sensitive areas from fans. (The area where the five men were praying has already been fenced off.) To respond by installing prayer rooms, in effect, admits fault on some level regarding religious or racial profiling.
