Her own children are overcome by the same fears haunting her clients, recent Arab immigrants, and that saddens the Palestinian-born counselor, who thinks she should set a better example.
“My three children sleep in my room, in the same bed sometimes. I have to wait until they are asleep to leave the room,” said Ahmad, who works at a Metropolitan Family Services office on Chicago’s South Side. “They are afraid somebody is outside the window and they will do something to them. They are afraid even to play outside.”
Among the millions caught up in emotion after terrorists struck the United States, many Arab and Muslim families find themselves additionally pinned down by fears for their safety, frustrated by the fury unleashed against them and saddened by the worries that now burden their children.
Tammie Ismail, 25, of Bridgeview said her 12-year-old brother is having trouble sleeping. Her mother tells him he has done nothing wrong, that he is a sweet little boy–but no, he had better not go out and play today.
The crisis has led some to turn closer to Islam, even as they pray at home for fear of going to the mosque.
They have been cursed at or intimidated or heard about such things. Ahmad’s children, ages 10, 8 and 6, grew upset, she said, when they saw a sign not far from the family’s home in suburban Burbank.
It read: “We are going to kill Arabs.”
Ahmad has tried to do with her children what she urges her clients to do: speak honestly and openly while letting her children air their emotions.
Jamal Abuzer thanks God that his 4-year-old twins are too young to truly understand how deeply hate runs through the world. He said that like any father, he has tried to shield the boys from such painful truths for as long as possible.
He and his wife try to change the channel if the news comes on. But on Tuesday morning they were not quick enough, and the children saw a jet crash into the World Trade Center.
Abuzer, 33, had left for work in a Loop skyscraper, and the children thought it was his office building that had been hit.
They did not calm down, he said, until they heard his voice on the telephone. And when he returned home that night, the joy and relief in their faces overwhelmed him.
“It broke my heart that so many parents would never see their children again,” Abuzer said.
Now that pain is striking deeper.
“It has been horrible for everyone,” Abuzer said as he stood in the sunshine outside the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview after prayers Friday. “But it was double jeopardy for Muslims. First we got hurt in our hearts like everyone else by the incident and then by the people shouting `kill the Arabs.'”
A sign above fluttered in the wind: “Prayer Services For The Victims Of Our National Tragedy.”
Nearby, Yousef Ghori, 21, was passing out small American flags. Like so many of his friends at the Bridgeview mosque, Ghori was born in the United States–and proud of it.
But he also is proud to be Muslim, so proud that he has personalized license plates on his car: RUMUSLM.
“My mother feels I should take the plates off for my own safety,” he said. “She is worried all the time now.”
He has not taken them off and instead has attached two American flags to his car windows to show people ” you can be Muslim and American at the same time.”
On Thursday night, the second night in a row, a few hundred angry flag-waving demonstrators began gathering about 20 blocks from the mosque.
Ghori and some of his friends decided to join them.
“We’re Americans, too,” he said.
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Ghori said he and his friends were nervous as they waded into the crowd, waving their own American flags. His group received plenty of dirty looks. Eventually, though, he said, the hostility greatly decreased.
“We defused their anger,” said Ibrahim Abusharif, 42, who said he had joined Ghori and other Muslims Thursday night. “They were stunned. It did better than what the National Guard could do.”
As the two men recounted their peacemaking efforts, Khaled Said, 39, walked up. He wanted to know where he could get a flag. He said he had been up and down Harlem Avenue, trying to buy one, “but everybody is sold out.”
“I just want to show that I am American and I have nothing to do with what happened,” he said.
He said he does not go out or take his children to soccer practice or to school. He has not gone to work. He is afraid to leave his family alone. He canceled a doctor’s appointment Friday.
“We are prisoners, but we have committed no crime,” he said.
A number of schools, churches and mosques, community groups and social agencies have tried to cope with the problem, issuing advice and calling for others who deal with Arabs and Muslims to show sensitivity about the crisis they are facing.
“We’ve been inundated by telephone calls from people who don’t know what to do, where to go and how to be protected,” said Sahar Mawlawi, director of the Advisory Commission on Arab Affairs for the Chicago Commission on Human Relations.
Often the callers are afraid to go to the police, she said, “because they think the police are not sensitive to them.” But she urges them to overcome such feelings.
“We tell them, `You are like any other American,'” she said.
Nusrat Ahmed of Burr Ridge organized a Saturday counseling session at the Islamic Foundation in Villa Park because of the rejection she said her daughter, a freshman at Hinsdale South High School, faced at school. None of 14-year-old Soofia’s classmates would sit near her, said Ahmed, an Indian-American. Nor could she sit at her usual lunch table.
“She was not only coping with what happened, like any American, but she was also afraid for her life,” Ahmed said.
Such events come at a time when many Muslim teens whose parents are Indian, Pakistani or Arab are struggling with dual cultures, said clinical psychologist Yasmeen Khan.
“They are already struggling with developing a sense of identity and wanting to belong,” she said. “They’re trying to find a balance on where they stand with the two cultures, and then they go to school and get these hate messages.”
The teens sitting in front of the mosque in Bridgeview echoed those feelings. They looked like a typical bunch of Chicago teenagers, wearing baseball hats and baggy jeans. They also are Muslim.
“We are not going nowhere no matter what happens. We are Americans,” said Abdallah Gheith, 18, a freshman at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
They said they were used to strange looks and the occasional rude remark. They blamed that kind of behavior on ignorance. But now, they said, they worry they are facing a far worse threat.
At a grocery store with his mother on Wednesday, Gheith said he was deeply upset when a small girl pointed to his mother in her traditional Muslim dress and asked, “Mommy, is she going to kill us?”