9/11, five years later.

TO MARK THE FIVE YEARS SINCE 9/11, we've chosen two stories that reflect the good and the bad of these times. One is about the federal government's ongoing targeting of Islamic social service agencies and charity foundations. The other story is of a Muslim community leader who's now a newspaper publisher taking on racism in Texas and across the country.

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We've also picked three new books that are asking the right questions about a post-9/11 climate, and we talk to a novelist who's using young-adult fiction to address themes of race and immigration.

START THE PRESSES

A Muslim newspaper that began after 9/11 now thrives.

SIX MONTHS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, Sarwat Husain realized she could not be the sole spokesperson for her Muslim community in San Antonio, Texas. So she began a newspaper. Almost five years later, she freely distributes the paper throughout Texas--with paid subscribers in 25 cities across the country. The newspaper, called AL-ITTIHAAD (www.alittihaad.com), which means unity, is a combination of articles relating to Islam and new reporting on the local Muslim community.

Something else has increased in the last five years: the hate mail. "They're just trying to harass me so I'll stop doing my work," she says, adding that her husband and children are more afraid for her than she is.

Husain, who was profiled in the book The Face Behind the Veil (Citadel Press, 2006), has not wavered from her mission. In fact, she has learned desktop publishing software so that she can design the newspaper herself. She says she doesn't print anything explicitly against the United States or the Bush administration but that her newspaper is becoming an alternative source of news. She has a reporter covering local Muslim issues in Texas, which is home to a large number of Muslims.

A recent online issue of the newspaper covered Malaysia's take on Islamic finances and the online version of the newspaper includes a prayer schedule and cultural articles like one on the Arabic art of calligraphy. One of the newspaper's most popular sections is the Q & A column with Islamic scholar and imam Dr. Yusuf Z. Kavakci. Husain has been flooded with questions, mostly from younger Muslims. One question posted online came from a student wanting to know if it was okay to take a student loan. The answer? "Any loan which is to be paid back at the same amount later is ok," wrote Dr. Kavakci. "But if the amount will be more, which falls in the category of interest, riba, is not to be considered ok. This is what Muslim scholars say. Of course this whole subject is a part of interest prohibition in Islam."

Husain receives regular requests for the newspaper from universities, and she also distributes it at churches and mosques. Recently, the paper began circulating in San Antonio's city hall. Husain herself has become a community resource, recently advising a Pakistani woman in South Texas who wanted to start her own community paper.

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It hasn't been easy, admits Husain, who is president of the San Antonio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. While she runs advertising in the paper, she refuses to run offensive ads, like those selling cars by including semi-nude women. That's hurt the paper's ad revenue, and so the paper is a labor of love and a significant financial commitment for Husain. The challenges are small and large. She recently lost her webmaster and hasn't been able to afford to pay a new one.

Five years after 9/11, Husain herself has shifted political parties. Where she once voted for Republican candidates, she is this year a delegate to the Democratic convention. And she's thinking more than ever about where her community is today. It's a mixed bag. On one hand, Husain says, more people are aware of Muslims in the United States. On the other hand, in Texas many are still fearful. "People will not go to picnics. They will not go to certain stores," she says.

But Husain says she won't be silenced by the dismal political climate. "The worse it gets, the better you get," she says.

SHUTTING DOWN MUSLIM CHARITIES

After 9/11, people turned to local organizations but found those at risk too.

LAST YEAR, WORKERS AT A SMALL MUSLIM SOCIAL SERVICE agency in Virginia received a disturbing letter from their bank. After six years, Wachovia Corp. was closing the account of the five-person agency that specializes in domestic violence services and other types of immediate assistance to families of all religious backgrounds.

"We were totally shocked," said Margaret Farchtchi, board treasurer of the Foundation for Appropriate and Immediate Temporary Help, also known as FAITH. "We always kept our accounts in good shape."

But the agency also had other reasons to think that they would not be targeted. "We felt very secure because we are a local charity," explained Farchtchi. "We don't have donors from overseas. We thought we were out of what you might call the danger zone."

Many people thought the same. As such, the story of FAITH illustrates the challenge now facing the Muslim community. Since 9/11, the government has frozen the assets of six large Muslim organizations and shut them down--although no one has been convicted of any crime. People, in turn, have begun donating in larger numbers to local charities, assuming these organizations to be free of international ties and safe from government interference. But the experience of FAITH suggests that there are no guarantees.

"It's still very much happening five years later as it did a year later," said Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations in Chicago. Rehab himself used to donate to humanitarian causes in Egypt and India but now gives to his local mosque.

Last year in Illinois, a coalition of Muslim and other religious organizations pushed the Illinois State Assembly to pass a resolution called "Charity Without Fear." The resolution called on the federal government to create a list of organizations that are safe for people to contribute to without fear of being questioned by the government. The Bush administration has made no move to respond.

With or without fear, many Muslims contribute 10 percent of their annual income to charity. Having turned to local organizations, they have begun to directly impact mosques.

"Donations are back to the levels of pre-September 11 and are better," said Mohammed Sahloul, president of the Mosque Foundation, which has about 4,000 attendees for prayer service on Fridays. The mosque's budget has doubled from $500,000 to $1 million, and they have used the new money to expand the mosque and remodel the youth center.

Sahloul says that most people used to give 70 percent of their donations for charities abroad and 30 percent to local causes. Now, it's the opposite, with 70 percent going to local organizations and mosques.

But with the closure of FAITH's account in Virginia, many leaders think a signal is being sent to the community that no organization is safe.

In Toledo, Ohio, the FBI planted an informant in the Muslim charity KindHearts three years ago. This spring, the government shut down the charity and froze its $1 million assets, accusing the organization of financially supporting Hamas, which the Bush administration considers to be a terrorist group. At the same time, the government arrested three men in Toledo on suspicion of terrorism. The connection to KindHearts? Some invoices and a change purse with the KindHearts logo were found at one of the men's homes, according to government officials.

In Virginia, FAITH isn't the only one under attack. Wachovia has apparently closed accounts held by five Muslim organizations in Virginia. Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported that FAITH may have come under scrutiny because it received a large donation from a Muslim businessman whose home and accounts were raided by the government in 2002.

In June, FAITH's board of directors was in talks with the Wachovia Corp., hoping that the organization's account might be reopened.

Daisy Hernandez is managing editor of ColorLines.

RELATED ARTICLE: POST-9/11 THROUGH TEENAGE EYES

MARINA BUDHOS is the author of a young-adult novel, Ask Me No Questions, that portrays a Bangladeshi family fleeing New York for Canada in the wake of 9/11.

You wrote the book pretty soon after September 11. What propelled you to write it? After September 11, I was keeping my ear to the ground in terms of how immigrants--and specifically Muslim immigrants-were affected. Right after, I went down to the Arab-American community in Brooklyn and interviewed some girls about their emotions and experiences. In the course of writing my prior book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers, I had become very interested in what it was like to be Muslim in the U.S.-at that time, they were talking about the impact of the Gulf War. So when 9/11 happened, I wanted to keep track of those experiences.

My initial idea was to do a profile of a teenage undocumented immigrant, and I began to talk to immigrant groups to find someone. Then, one evening, I was on a panel with a Bangladeshi activist, and he spoke about how shattered the community was--especially in the wake of the Muslim registration law. I walked away from that evening very shaken. Soon after, I opened the newspaper to read about immigrants fleeing north to Canada, and how they were bringing with them their teenagers, who had mostly grown up in the States. At that moment, I knew I had to write a novel, and really get inside the skin of that experience.

I read a review that called it a political novel and suggested that the characters could have been more developed. What are your thoughts on this? Firstly, that assumes that calling something a "political" novel is a slur or a negative. I believe I have portrayed human beings caught in a political situation. In fact, as a writer, I was very careful to make this a family story--one that coincides with a larger social story. This is as much a story about two very different sisters, and a younger sister who feels invisible within her family. Her stepping out--to speak up for her family and to urge her sister to do so--is about her inner growth as a character in the course of the novel.

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In fact, it's funny that most readers have responded quite differently to the book--they were touched, on a human level, because the characters and the sisters seemed so real. My sense is that some readers might be nervous when they encounter political material--they fear that a message is being crammed down their throat and they can't combine the personal, character-driven story with the social story. But there is no exact message to the book. This is simply to make visible a particular family; to show how they--each with their own personality--coped and grew out of these circumstances.

What has the response been to the book so far? Extraordinary. I had a book launch in New York that was attended by a massive amount of people. The book sold out of its first printing within about six weeks of publication. I've had teenagers e-mail me out of the blue, [and] teachers. One librarian called me up to say that she began the book early in the morning and could not go to work until she had finished it.

What message do you think the book offers immigrant children? That they can be visible and heard.

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I read somewhere that your father's Guyanese. I was curious about your own ethnic background. My father was an Indo-Guyanese who came to this country in the '50s. My mother is Jewish, the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Though my father eventually became a naturalized citizen, he always was afraid that someone could take away his citizenship. My Russian Jewish grandmother was exactly the same way--she was smuggled illegally through Europe for a couple of years before she came to America and was always afraid of being "caught." So these stories, of immigration, of being invisible, of living in terror, of your status being taken away from you--were imprinted in my own psyche. That's why it was important to me, as a writer, to make readers see that a novel isn't necessarily "political" in some flat sense--that human beings, throughout history, have their inner lives bound up in these circumstances.

--Daisy Hernandez

RELATED ARTICLE: EDITORS' PICK OF POST-9/11 BOOKS

Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes from and What it Means for Politics Today

Son of a Jordanian father and a Palestinian Nicaraguan mother, who then grew up in Appalachia, Steven Salaita knows what he's talking about when he writes: "The recipient of racism usually undergoes a different sort of intellectual development than do white theorists: one based on the knowledge that identity does matter, and matters deeply." This book is the first to put forward an intellectual framework on anti-Arab racism--one that includes the breadth of history and culture yet ties closely to current pressing issues of post-9/11 profiling, the implications of Abu Ghraib and the significance of the Palestine-Israel conflict. Salaita makes a strong case for why "terrorist" can be a racist word, and places anti-Arab racism squarely in the history of white supremacy.

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By Steven Salaita

Pluto Press, 2006

Targeted: National Security and the Business of Immigration

The landscape of immigration law changed years before 9/11, but the policies put in place since have effectively halted asylum cases, devastated immigrant families and resulted in roundups and special registrations. Deepa Fernandes, best known for her voice and politics on New York City's Pacifica station WBAI, spent the last four years interviewing immigrants, lawyers and organizers to produce a fuller picture on the state of immigration. She sets the current struggle amid the historical context--going back to show how racist groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform mainstreamed their ideas. Readers will also be drawn to the chapter on the immigration industrial complex, where Fernandes deftly shows how the detention of immigrants has resulted in big business for corporations.

By Deepa Fernandes

Seven Stories Press, 2006

Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram and Kandahar

Four months after 9/11, Moazzam Begg was abducted at gunpoint in Pakistan. Handcuffed and hooded, he was shoved in a truck, where an American pulled out handcuffs that he claimed belonged to someone who had died at the Twin Towers on 9/11. Thus begins the nightmare that Begg, a British-born Muslim, recounts in this riveting memoir. Aided by the journalist Victoria Brittain, creator of the much-acclaimed play Guantanamo, Begg tells of being imprisoned for three years by the U.S. government that ultimately releases him without charges. But Begg sets this within the context of a childhood deeply shaped by racism in England. This memoir--so unlike others in its genre--is a call to action and an indictment of the times we live in.

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By Moazzam Begg with Victoria Brittain

The New Press, 2006

"UNDER THE HOOD I FELT I COULDN'T BREATHE PROPERLY.... FLASHING LIGHTS--
OBVIOUSLY FROM SOLDIERS' CAMERAS TAKING TROPHY PICTURES--CAME AND WENT
IN FRONT OF ME, DESPITE THE HOOD'S DARKNESS. FROM BESIDE ME A VOICE SAID
IN ARABIC, "SHALL WE PRAY, BROTHER?" A GUARD CAME AND SCREAMED IN MY
EAR, "SHUT UP, MOTHERFUCKER, IF YOU SPEAK AGAIN I'LL KILL YOU."
--FROM ENEMY COMBATANT"