For a teen aspiring to be president, being Muslim is a hurdle in post-9/11 America

Aya Beydoun wants to be president of the United States. On paper, the 17-year-old already is not an implausible future occupant of the White House.

She’s an ambitious, articulate, near straight-A student, planning to use a college law degree as a stepping stone to politics. She already chairs her high school politics club.

Her problem – at least according to Ben Carson, one of the leading presidential candidates in the current Republican field – would be that she is Muslim.

Aya’s voice quivers when she mentions Carson, a former paediatric neurosurgeon who studied at the University of Michigan just a few miles from her home.

The teenager was at home last Sunday, watching the TV with her mother, Wanda, whose parents came to America fleeing the Lebanese civil war in 1970, when the pair heard Carson’s incendiary remarks.

In his trademark quiet, civil voice, Carson, who is currently trailing only Donald Trump in the Republican polls, said on NBC News on Sunday that Islam is incompatible with the US constitution and he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation”.

Beydoun said: “I see a lot of awful things in the media; people dying, discrimination, politicians being disgusting, but this really hit home because that was me he was talking about.”

“I’m educated enough to know that what he’s saying is absolutely against the constitution, but what about all the kids in my area who don’t know that? Now they’re going to think that maybe they have to lie or keep their religion a secret, maybe they can never fulfil their dreams.”

View image in fullscreen

Post-9/11 demonisation hasn’t slowed

Carson’s comments did not emerge from a vacuum. They marked just the latest example of an increasing tolerance for Islamophobia in the Republican presidential race, as views historically associated with the Tea Party fringe have been thrust to the mainstream.

Just days earlier, at a rally in New Hampshire, for example, Trump declined to challenge a questioner who claimed Muslims had created secret training camps in America and added: “When can we get rid of them?”

“We are going to be looking at a lot of different things,” Trump replied.

Others in the Republican field distanced themselves from Carson and Trump, but only grudgingly.

For Muslim Americans who have lived through 14 years of post-9/11 demonisation, the remarks were salt in an already open sore.

Dearborn, Aya Beydoun’s hometown, has grown accustomed to a pervasive climate of Islamophobia. The small Detroit suburb has a population of 96,000, a third of whom are Arab Americans.

Many are descended from workers who migrated to the city to work in the automotive industry in the early twentieth century. Others, like Beydoun’s family, arrived fleeing war, including Republican president George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

The suburb, home to the largest mosque in North America, provides a window into how radically the relationship between Muslims and Republicans has changed in recent years.

Like the majority of Dearborn’s resident’s, Beydoun’s mother, Wanda, 46, voted for Bush in the 2000 election, attracted to the GOP’s appeal to family conservatism.

Bush took the city with 54% of the vote that year. Four years later, after the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act, and start of the Iraq war, Bush lost vast swathes of the Muslim vote.

In 2004, following the invasion of Iraq and the imposition of the Patriot Act he lost it in a 14% swing to the Democrats.

Still today, Bush remains the only sitting president – of either party – to have visited a Mosque on American soil. Meanwhile Dearborn, due to its large Muslim population, has become the bête noire of Christian and conservatives radicals, caricatured as a city living under Sharia law or a hotbed of terrorist activity. Neither is even close to being true.

In La Shish, the beloved local halal restaurant where Wanda Beydoun has worked a minimum wage managing job for 16 years, these stereotypes are a source of amusement.

The outside is decorated with giant pumpkins in preparation for Halloween, as lofty stars and stripes flutter in the wind. The premises next-door is a strip bar.

A newspaper stand outside offers free copies of the Arab American News, which leads with a headline “Time For Tolerance – The Clock That Changed The Narrative”, and a beaming photograph of Ahmed Mohamed, the Sudanese-American 14-year-old who was the other major controversy in news of Islamophobia this month.

Mohamed, from Irving, Texas, was arrested last week on suspicion of creating a bomb after he brought a clock to school to show his teacher. His case has come to embody the pervasive discrimination faced by many young American Muslims; in an act of conciliation he was invited by Obama to visit the White House.

Muslims, like African Americans and Latino communities, increasingly feel drawn toward Democrats – and away from Republicans.

“It was a big mistake,” Wanda Beydoun said of her vote for Bush in 2000. She said the city was more tolerant toward Muslims back in the 1970s. “People used to ask where I came from, what the food was like. They accepted us for who we were,” she said. “Today, unfortunately, they don’t.”

View image in fullscreen

‘The community feels profiled’

A few miles down the road, there is a sign on the front door of the offices used by Fatina Abdrabboh, president of the Michigan chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. It warns visitors no recording devices are allowed into the building without written permission.

“There’s a chilling effect here,” she says, alluding to a fear the building itself might be under surveillance. “The community feels profiled for sure.”

Per capita, Dearborn has the highest number of citizens on the federal government’s terrorism watch list, according to leaked FBI documents reported last year. An analysis of FBI flight data in August revealed that a plane linked to counter terrorism operations flew over the city seven times in a single week. The FBI provided no public explanation for the flights.

The agency has never felt that it has much to apologise for in the wake of its post 9/11 focus on domestic intelligence, which is solidly focused on Muslim communities.

The FBI even used to teach counterterrorism agents that Islam itself, rather than terrorism in the name of a distorted and radical interpretation of the religion, was the fundamental problem confronting US domestic security.

Seven states have now passed bans on Islamic law after activist-led campaigns convinced non-Muslims that an unfamiliar religious code represented a threat. (A federal appeals court nullified Oklahoma’s ban in 2013.)

Abdrabboh’s work in Dearborn and the surrounding areas is focused on the everyday racism her clients face. There is, for example, the case of a 34-year-old local woman forced to remove her headscarf by male police officers following an alleged minor traffic infraction, a 10-year-old elementary school student in a nearby suburb who is bullied everyday by his classmates labelling him an Isis terrorist, or the group of East Michigan college students arrested after they peacefully protested a campus screening of the controversial blockbuster American Sniper.

Yet even these low-level experience are connected to the broader national discourse, she said.

“There’s no day without a call,” she says. “We bear the brunt of it, when a presidential candidate says something like Carson on international television. We see direct increase in cases; where suddenly the guy being mistreated at the factory, has a supervisor who’s a bigot and becomes emboldened to treat his supervisee even worse, because Ben Carson’s saying it, right?”

Following the 9/11 attacks, reported occurrences of anti-Muslim hate crimes skyrocketed 1,600% according to FBI statistics. The rate has since levelled off, but remains over three times higher than it did before 2001.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s approach to Muslim communities, while markedly different to the approach advocated by Republican adversaries, is often met with disappointment and frustration from many American Muslim leaders.

The White House’s “Countering Violent Extremism” initiative has sought to move domestic counterterrorism away from a focus on Muslims, emphasising dialogue with unspecified “local communities”. Obama himself declines to use the phrase “Islam” or “Islamic” in reference to terrorist or jihadist groups, such as Isis.

But some Muslim groups argue the cautious language is a fig leaf for continuing to approach their communities primarily through law enforcement and homeland security.

There remains, among many Muslims, a sense of besiegement, and a growing frustration at perceived legal double standards. North Carolina authorities did not treat the February slaying of three young Muslims in Chapel Hill as motivated by bigotry. In July, a judge permitted bail for a Tennessee man on trial for plotting to firebomb a New York Muslim community.

Maintaining hope despite being victims

Despite all this, leading voices in the American Muslim community remain optimistic.

One of the most prominent, Feisal Abdul Rauf, was embroiled in a firestorm of controversy five years ago after he became involved in the planned launch of an Islamic cultural centre blocks from the World Trade Center site, which critics called the “Ground Zero Mosque”.

Time magazine branded Rauf and his wife “the kind of Muslim leaders right-wing commentators fantasize about”, while protesters said the proposed cultural building would be akin to building a shrine to Hitler at Auschwitz.

Yet Rauf insists his experience has been a positive one, and has been moved by the messages of support received over the years from Christians, Jews and atheists. In a telephone interview from Malaysia, where he is traveling, Rauf said “Americans don’t buy” the anti-Muslim rhetoric propagated by politicians.

“They don’t believe that Islam and Muslims are really a threat to their country,” he said. “We Muslims have been the greatest victims of organisations like Isis and al-Qaida.”

That much is clear in Dearborn where Beydoun, who turns 18 next year, is preparing to vote in her first presidential election. She will canvass with her politics club, knocking on doors in the city and reminding people to vote. Like any any good politician, she declines to say who she will vote for.

Excitedly, she recalls the middle school politics class that first got her hooked on the idea of government, elections and democracy. “I learned about how important everyone’s vote is and just how special it is to live in a country where that is available to us,” Beydoun said, her hands gesticulating like a future stateswoman.

• This article was amended on 26 September 2015 to correct the spelling of Feisal Abdul Rauf.