Muslims Face Job Discrimination,
Media Stereotyping, Report Finds
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By YOJI COLE�2001 DiversityInc.com
Aug. 23, 2001
Muslims in the United States are regularly vilified by Hollywood and many times stereotyped as religious fanatics by the media, and according to a study released Wednesday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) those portrayals spill over into a Muslim�s personal life.
Muslims, followers of the religion Islam, step into a murky atmosphere of misunderstanding, distrust, and preconceptions when they walk the street, enter the workplace, or sit in a classroom, according to the report, which chronicled 366 complaints over the past year.
CAIR, a Washington, D.C.-based Islamic-advocacy group, has tracked the complaints that have come into its offices since 1996. The complaints have been categorized: workplaces, schools, government agencies and public accommodations.
This year�s report recorded a 15 percent increase in the number of discrimination complaints over the previous year. However, it did not represent a comprehensive sample because Muslims may have logged charges within their company or another agency. The greatest number of complaints were related to Hijab, modest clothing Muslim women wear in public that is generally loose-fitting and includes a head covering.
These workplace complaints increased from 42 percent in 2000 to 48 percent in 2001, according to the study.
A female Muslim employee usually would be directed to remove her scarf or face termination, or just told to go home, said Mohamed Nimer, the director of research at CAIR and author of the report.
Charges of discrimination regarding the workplace also included pension plans. Employers who offered pension plans refused Muslim employees� request to invest their funds in a halal business venture. Halal means permissible by the Islamic faith and the Quran, the Muslim holy book, forbids riba (interest on money).
"With a growing population group, that is making more and more of a percentage of the workforce, you will run into these problems more," said Nimer.
The number of Muslims in the United States is difficult to ascertain but estimates go as high as 8 million. The Britannica Book of the Year estimated that in mid-2000, there were 4 million Muslims in the United States.
The American Muslim community is also a mosaic of cultures, its members having come from all of the five major continents. In fact, a Zogby International survey showed that most Muslims are immigrants - 77.6 percent vs. 22.4 percent U.S.-born.
This same survey indicated that the ethnic origins of the Muslim community in the United States are:
* 26.2 percent Middle East (Arab)
* 24.7 percent South Asia
* 23.8 percent African American
* 11.6 percent Other
* 10.3 percent Middle East (Not Arab)
* 6.4 percent East Asia
Americans are also converting to Islam. An average of 17,500 African Americans converted to Islam each year between 1990 and 1995, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Four discrimination incidents reported last year were connected to conversion to Islam, according to the CAIR report.
In one case, a high-school student was questioned by school officials about her conversion, and was then dismissed from school after she wore hijab. She was later allowed back into school. And in three other cases, coworkers and supervisors harassed or terminated the converts from work, the CAIR study reported.
Nimer wrote an employees� guide to Islamic religious practices because, he said, he thought businesses were firing Muslims as a result of ignorance of Islamic practices.
However, businesses that were offered the guide after they were reported to CAIR refused it, he said. CAIR received repeated discrimination charges about the same company and the same manager or management team, he said.
"That tells us they don�t consider this issue a serious issue to be dealt with proactively," said Nimer. "They just muddle through the incidents on a case- by-case bases."
If business owners do not create a more comfortable environment for Muslim employees, Nimer added, court direction and/or legislation would force them to change the atmosphere.
Some Muslim employees have successfully used the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to settle complaints about job discrimination.
The Supreme Court in 1999 decide to reject the appeal of a lower court ruling in favor of bearded Muslim police officers against the Newark, N.J. Police Department�s no-beard policy. And three states, New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota, passed laws within the past year to regulate the use of the halal food label. Recognizing halal food as a consumer product, the laws generally placed a penalty on businesses that would try to misrepresent their product by placing the word "halal" on their labels.
"The acts make it a misdemeanor to use the halal food label on products that are not actually halal. So in that sense there is protection for Muslim consumers," said Nimer.
The Muslim community, notably the Arab population, is also subjected to the stereotype of being religious zealots who are engaged in a holy war against Jews and Christians, he said. Hollywood movies regularly portray Arab people in this fashion using actors with Middle Eastern traits to play terrorists. And the news media basically follows suit by overplaying the religious factor when reporting incidents of political violence around the world or between Palestine and Israel, said Nimer.
"That clouds the perception of a Muslim in the mind of a segment of the American public," he said.
In the area of immigrant rights, the Muslim community has been fighting a clause in the 1996 anti-terrorism legislation that allows the federal government to proceed with deportation of non-citizens on the basis of classified information. Almost all secret-evidence detainees have been Muslim and it wasn�t until the American Muslim community joined with other groups and mounted a legislative challenge to secret evidence that the U.S. government released the detainees, according to the CAIR report.
However, the effort to repeal secret evidence continues, said Nimer.
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