For the past 30 years, the Islamic Academy of Alabama (IAA) has been nestled in a leafy neighborhood near the Birmingham Zoo, about a ten-minute drive from my first home. It serves more than 200 students and has an almost 100 percent university-enrollment rate among its alumni.
As the community has grown, so has IAA’s need for space. Many families begin in the Homewood, Glen Iris or Southside neighborhoods, but the need for larger lots, more square footage and newer construction often pushes them toward suburbs like Hoover.
The IAA’s move, however, was never going to be simple. The property they sought in Hoover was zoned for Planned Office Development, and the school requested a change to Conditional Use status.
“Safety” Concerns
The school quickly met what Rep. Juandalynn Givan (D-Birmingham) described as “a brick wall” of opposition—initially couched in concerns about traffic, safety and land use. More than 1,700 locals signed a petition against the move, and 175 people crowded into a Hoover Planning and Zoning Commission meeting to oppose it. It did not take long for the real reasons to emerge.
During public comments, one resident described a visit to Britain and her fears for Hoover: “I was shocked to witness the land that gave us the King James Bible, supposedly a Christian nation, overwhelmingly being taken over. I witnessed in the United Kingdom, especially in Manchester, Birmingham and London, that multiculturalism did not work.”
She continued, “The Muslims did not assimilate.”
Applause erupted. “Go to Homewood!” one woman yelled. “Stay in Homewood.”
Even those who avoided overtly Islamophobic statements held up signs that made their sentiments clear—and none of them had anything to do with traffic.
“Stop the 100-year plan,” one sign read, referencing the conspiracy that Muslims are plotting a long-term takeover of American institutions.
“Give an inch—Dearborn, Michigan,” another read, echoing the president’s recent attacks on Muslim communities in the Midwest.
In response, the school offered to cap enrollment, and later to limit the hours the prayer space would be open to the broader community. The opposition remained unmoved.
Hate Amplified
I will spare you the rest of the public bigotry, but the xenophobia extended beyond the local residents. State leaders amplified it.
The day after the hearing, U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama denounced the very presence of Muslims in the state during a radio interview. He described Islam as a cult and claimed Muslims posed a threat to America.
The host enthusiastically agreed. “They don’t belong in the West,” she said.
Tuberville went further: “In the future, in a year, I’ll be the governor, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to do that in the state of Alabama. They hate Christians. Let’s pack ’em up and send them home.”
Facing overwhelming hostility, the Planning and Zoning Commission rejected the proposal. Although the Hoover City Council would have made the final decision in January, the school quietly withdrew its application out of concern for student safety.
Not an Aberration, A Revelation
Witnessing this open display of hatred was painful on many levels. Some of the best years of my youth were spent in Birmingham. I did most of my training at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)—what we jokingly called the “University that Ate Birmingham.”
I often drove to Hoover to eat at Mr. Chen’s, home to the area’s best Chinese food. After a childhood spent constantly moving as a military brat, Alabama finally felt like home.
Muslims make up only 0.5 to 1 percent of Alabama’s population, but they make up a disproportionately large share of the state’s physicians, researchers and healthcare workers in its major medical institutions, including UAB.
Additionally, Muslims have been in Alabama since the first enslaved Africans were forced onto its red, muddy soil. Historians estimate that nearly one-third of enslaved West Africans brought to the Americas were Muslim.
So what do you do when the place you call home rejects you with such naked hostility? When people invoke “American freedoms” while simultaneously denying those freedoms to their neighbors?
I am not going to appeal to constitutional framers or the text of the Constitution. Instead, I ask whether this is simply who we have always been—as a society and a settler colony. Perhaps this is not an aberration, but a revelation.
The renewed platforming of this prejudice may feel fresh, but the prejudice itself is not. It is a part of us.
The “other” may change over time, but the pattern remains. Tuberville may now claim Muslims do not belong in Alabama, but substitute Muslims for Jews, or Black people, or LGBTQ people, and we know that sentiment has been voiced before.
What We Will Do
So what are we, as the newest “other” in a long line of “others,” to do?
We do what our predecessors did. We stay.
We work. We laugh. We build lives of beauty and purpose—for ourselves and for those around us.
We know enough about our messiah and prophet Jesus to recognize what some of his followers say and do bears little resemblance to what he taught. That is why the Christian faith itself is not under discussion here.
After 9/11, we were not afforded the distinction between extremists and ordinary believers, but we know such a distinction exists. We take comfort in our own faith and in the wisdom of those who endured exclusion and hostility before us:
“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
Wisdom from many corners will guide us as we forge the spaces we need in a society unwilling to offer them. True belonging, in the face of such hostility, may have to be built from self-definition, communal action and the creation of our own sustaining environments.
But unlike those who tell us to “go back to Homewood”—or to Syria, Palestine or Somalia—our spaces will remain open and welcoming to others.
Because we are Americans.
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Ali Khan is a gastroenterologist in Little Rock, Arkansas.