Soon after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Wisconsin school-teacher Norman Porter and his students discovered that expressions of hatred were not limited to terrorists.
"As I was driving to work just a few days after the attacks, I heard on National Public Radio that people were threatening Muslims in this country," Porter said. "People were driving byand screaming at Muslim children and attacking Islamic students. As a teacher who centers his life on kids, the thought that anyone would actually threaten children because of something like this was really a hot button for me," he added. "So I tried to think of something we could do about it at my school."
Porter's response was to reach out to Muslim students and give his own students an opportunity to learn about Islam firsthand. "We needed to demonstrate that we accept these people as our neighbors and as part of our community," he said. "They are not and should not be targets."
Anxiety and Fear
"I tell my children that truth and righteousness have to be seen, not talked about," Porter continued. "Kids need to be taught that democracy and love are active, not passive."
For Porter and several St. Philip Neri students, that active expression meant going to the Salam School at the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, a target of repeated threats after the September 11th terrorist attacks. After discussing the trip with Michael Brown, St. Philip Neri's principal, Porter talked about it with his 7th and 8th grade students. He then contacted Salam's principal, Humaira Bokhari, to discuss the idea. "I said I would love for these students to visit us," Bokhari recalled. "I thought it would be good for our students to meet with other people and for other people to meet with them."
Bokhari passed Porter's request to Nudrat Hassan, a social studies teacher at Salam who worked with Porter to arrange the field trip the week after the disasters. "I had kind of becomeour PR person because my face was all over the television after the attacks," Hassan said. "We were on the news a lot, and then we got this phone call from St. Philip Neri."
Dark Days
The days after the attacks of September 11 were anxious ones for American Muslims. "The day of the attack, we received four threatening calls at Salam," said Bokhari. "Callers were just shouting, 'You killers! Why don't you just leave this country?' People were driving by and rolling their windows down to scream obscenities at our children. We also had a parent who was not allowed to get on a bus—the driver stopped but the passengers would not let him on—and another who was beaten in a store. Many women did not feel safe leaving their home just to buy groceries. It was all so painful."
The venom was felt not only by parents and students but by some of the school's faculty as well. Hassan, for instance, experienced some of the hatred following the attack firsthand."A woman actually spat at me in a store," she said. "I managed to dodge [it], but when I told her 'I wish you could understand what this means to go through,' I could see in her face how shocked she was that I spoke English."
Such actions made many students and parents hesitant about proceeding with the visit to the Islamic school, according to St. Philip Neri's principal. "Some of our kids could not go because they were afraid or their parents were afraid to let them go," Brown said. "But we had about 30 who did go, and it was planned very carefully."
The planning, Porter and Hassan felt, had to be student-centered if the trip was to succeed. "The day before we went, I went with our class officers—our president and vice-president along with some other student representatives—to meet with Ms. Hassan and find out what we should wear, what we could do and what we should not do, and what we needed to know in order to behave appropriately," Porter said. Students were told that they would have to remove their shoes upon entering the center's mosque and that they would have to respect the distances between themselves and others. Girls also wore pants so that their hemlines would not come up when they crossed their legs or sat down.
Following the initial meeting, the class officers and student representatives went home and contacted every student who planned to visit the school the next day. The students shared the information with one another and passed the word until everyone knew what was expected. "It was all up to them," Porter said.
Reaching Out
On the day of the visit, the students from St. Philip Neri arrived at 12:30 to meet first with Ms. Hassan, and one of Salam's religion teachers answered students' questions about Islam's views on pork, alcohol, and other issues. Following the meeting, the students were permitted to observe a prayersession that lasted from 1:00 to 1:30. After the prayers, a social gathering was held where students from both schools exchanged flowers and read prepared statements.
"I never directed or said anything," Porter said. "I told the students that I was not going to lead any of this; they needed to determine the particulars and take these actions themselves. Our job as teachers is not to fill students with information but to fill them with the ability to make coherent and substantial moral decisions on their own. If we're the ones pulling the strings, then there's no dignity in any of this."
Following the speeches, the students sat and talked. Girls from St. Philip Neri brought scarves so they could learn to tie them around their heads the way Muslim women wear the hijab. The gesture provided an interesting cultural education opportunity, but it also created an awkward moment for the boys. "The guys kind of felt left out at that point," Hassan said. "They sat that part out, but then they started having the usual teenager talk—sports, clothes, video games, and other things.
"We didn't want the focus of this to be religious," she continued. "Norman and I want the students to see this as a civics lesson rather than a religious one. We want them to see this as part of their duty to be good citizens."
Questions and Answers
That positive citizenship, Hassan and others attest, has been repeatedly demonstrated in the days and weeks following September 11.
"We're going to be meeting with St. Philip Neri again," she said. "In the next six months we're hoping to let them start using our gym. In fact, our kids have been asking me every day about it because St. Philip Neri does not have a gym, and we do not have a [soccer] field, so we're hoping to set up some kind of reciprocal arrangement not just to use each other's facilities but also to give the kids more opportunities to meet and mingle with one another."
This cooperative spirit has not been limited to schools, according to Bokhari, but has extended to much of the local community as well. "Although we received a number of threatening calls after this happened, I have to say that we had fewer calls expressing bigotry and anger compared to the number of supportive and friendship calls we received," she said. "I had several calls from schools all over Milwaukee telling me that if our building was attacked that we could use theirs. Pastors from local churches came and assured us that they were with us, and so many people brought flowers, cards, and letters of support to make our students feel welcomed and safer that I wept. I really did."
The outpouring from the community reflected what Porter felt was most important for his students to learn: a sense of moral responsibility that needs to be demonstrated to be effective. "I'm a teacher first and foremost," he said. "Part of what I teach is that students must have moral responsibility intheir community."
Hassan echoed these sentiments. "This has been a great civics lesson opportunity for me as well," she said. "I can honestly say that we are all now taking this as a chance to teach our kids how to be good people, and that part of being a good Muslim means being a good person who deals with people in an appropriate manner. I tell my students that they need to represent themselves and not feel like victims because of what other people have done—you don't judge people by their religion or their race but by what they do. That's what it means to be a good citizen—and a good person."
