As Hassan Shibly rode home from Toronto late that night, two days after Christmas last year, he had to peer through the fog and spray behind his mother’s blue Toyota Sienna to make sure that the car behind them could keep up in the freezing haze. His father was out of the country visiting Syria. His mother drove as his younger brother and sisters slept heavily in the back seat. Hassan dutifully sat next to his mother up front, tired but uplifted from the conference they’d attended.
In the early morning hours they approached the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, looking forward to getting back into the United States and being home. At the border, they handed over their passports to the customs agent and told him that they had been visiting Canada to attend the annual Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference.
The agent then said they had been selected for a random inspection. He told Hassan’s mother, Sawsan Tabbaa, to park their minivan and have its passengers enter a nearby building to wait.
Hassan led the way to the room, his mother trailing behind with his groggy siblings in tow. He entered the small, frigid room and let out a shock of laughter. Sitting before him was Tamer Osman, a friend from Buffalo who had also attended the conference—and left to return to Buffalo hours before Hassan and his family.
As he scanned the crowded room, he took stock of the situation—it was filled with attendees of the conference: couples holding babies, a pregnant woman, children and elderly people forced to sit on the unwashed floor for the lack of seats. Several of the families attend his mosque in Buffalo.
After the initial disbelief of the situation wore off, fear began to take hold. Hassan remembers thinking, “Am I going to end up in some secret prison?”
No one was told why they had been stopped, but what was obvious to everyone in the room was that their selection had been anything but random. Yet, to the best of their knowledge, they had committed no crime, they were peaceful citizens—American citizens—who had attended a conference on tolerance and the open discussion of their faith and now simply wanted to return to their homes.
Within weeks, Hassan found himself at the center of a news story that reached not only a local audience, but garnered attention in the New York Times and media outlets across the country.
For the Syrian-born, Buffalo-raised 19-year-old sophomore political science major at the University at Buffalo, this unthinkable situation—and the subsequent lawsuit that he and four others brought against the Department of Homeland Security—was just one more experience in what being an American has been to him.
American Pastoral
Hassan was born in Damascus, the capital city of Syria, which is nestled at the northernmost reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, some 50 miles east of the Mediterranean Sea. “In Syria, our neighbors were Christian,” he recalled. “It’s a very tolerant city.”
In Damascus, his father studied under Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, a Muslim scholar who preached a message of intercultural and interfaith tolerance and justice before the family emigrated to Buffalo when Hassan was four.
“When we came to this country,” Hassan said, “it was the American dream being fulfilled.” The small family, which then consisted only of Hassan and his parents, lived in a second story apartment above a small storefront on Hertel Avenue. Living on $500 a month, there was no room for luxury. While Hassan attended a small preschool on Hertel and played in the park near his apartment, both of his parents enrolled at the UB Dental School, where they both earned doctorates and now teach.
When Hassan entered kindergarten, he experienced his first brush with what being outspoken and different would earn him. “I got in trouble when a lady came in to speak about Israel,” he said. Knowing only what he had culled from the news in Buffalo and Damascus, the young Hassan was unfamiliar with the delicacy of Mideastern politics. “I raised my hand and asked why Israelis were killing Palestinians.”
His teacher was so infuriated by the question that she sent a letter home to his parents recommending that he repeat kindergarten, Hassan said. After a meeting with the principal, it was agreed that Hassan would be allowed to take an aptitude test that would determine if he was ready to move on to first grade.
“I was supposed to have time with my parents to prepare, but instead the principal came in one day and pulled me out of class to give me the exam,” Hassan remembered. Then, with a slight smirk, he added, “I got a top score.”
He took a valuable lesson from the experience at an early age that echoed what his father had taught him about the teachings of Kuftaro, “You have to speak for justice no matter what the consequences.”
After kindergarten, Hassan moved with his family to a house in Amherst and began to attend Windermere Boulevard Elementary School. Though the school had an eclectic mix of ethnicities, Hassan was singled out because of his background. “Back then I was still new to the culture,” he said. “You get made fun of for the differences.”
But like most boys his age, most of Hassan’s childhood memories consist of a healthy obsession with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, bike rides through the neighborhood, and the reading of Goosebumps and Animorphs novels.
“We used to organize Power Rangers games and make costumes out of cardboard,” he said. “They always made me Lord Zordon.”
“My best friend at the time was Jason,” Hassan said. Jason, a white Christian who is now a sophomore at UB, has remained a close friend. “He was always the kid who was better at sports. The only thing that I was better than him at was school—and that doesn’t count.”
Over the years, he was still teased about his religion and culture, but in a sense, it was in this way that he was truly American—enduring the ribbing and jokes that become a right of passage into adolescence.
“Pepperoni was always a big issue,” Hassan said. “Muslims don’t eat pork, and my teachers would always forget when they ordered pizzas for class parties. The other kids would say, ‘Why don’t you just peel it off?’ But I couldn’t have any.”
“Even in elementary school I would fast for Ramadan, so I would just go to the library and read during lunch. People would try to tempt me with food—great friends they were,” he said with a smile.
When Hassan started at Amherst High School, he grew a greater interest in his father and Kuftaro’s teachings of justice. He joined the mock trial club and took interest in his history and social studies classes.
“There was this one evil assistant principal,” he said, a spark lighting in his eye. “I had to go see her because I had gotten in trouble for being late. It wasn’t my fault, but she wouldn’t hear my case—she just gave me a detention.” Feeling as if he had been done an injustice, Hassan went to the school library and looked up a Supreme Court case from 1975. “I went back and argued it with the case and I got out of the detention,” he said.
‘Who Would Do Such a Thing?’
Hassan’s freshman year went well—he had friends, joined the wrestling team, and did well in school. But then, at the beginning of his sophomore year of high school, came the single most important world event of his young life. “9/11 really changed the course of things.”
He can still remember the exact events of that Tuesday morning five years ago. “I walked into math class—which we all hated—and the teacher had a TV on,” he said.
“I remember thinking it was a joke; no one believed it. I was thinking to myself, ‘Who would do such a thing?’ My friend, Miles, found out his uncle had died, and then Osama bin Laden’s name came up. Everyone was talking about Muslim terrorists. I remembered the Oklahoma City bombing—everybody said that was Muslims too.”
He walked into his next class, European History, with all of these thoughts racing through his mind. When he sat down he saw that there was one word written across the chalkboard: Jihad.
“I raised my hand and explained what jihad was,” he said, “and that this was not jihad. Jihad is a beautiful concept—true jihad, not terrorism of course.”
According to Hassan, the true translation of jihad is “struggle”—a struggle that consists of three tenets. The first is financial struggle—an effort to bestow one’s wealth on needier, less fortunate people. The second is internal struggle, or the struggle to overcome worldly temptations, evil thoughts, and desires. The third, and often misconstrued tenet is physical struggle. Physical struggle allows for one to defend oneself when they are wronged, without transgressing in the eyes of Allah.
“Jihad promotes self purification, justice, liberty, humanity, equity, and protection for the weak,” he said. “What they did goes against everything that jihad is.”
When he went home that evening, Hassan watched some of the TV coverage with his family and then retreated to his room.
“I remember sitting in the corner of my room on my prayer rug,” he said, “just crying and praying. I felt so sad for the victims. I cried and prayed.”
Following the attacks, Hassan noticed an immediate difference in his life; a change that had not come from within, but from the outside world. “I really enjoyed ninth grade,” he said. “Tenth grade was a little rougher—being made fun of on the bus, kids calling me Osama.”
His family’s house was egged soon after September 11 and there was a pronounced air of anger and mistrust being leveled at Muslim Americans all over the nation.
“There was a backlash against Muslims,” he said. “People told us to go home, but this is our home.”
Racial tension at school even pushed Hassan close to the breaking point one day. “There was this one kid at school that kept calling me a terrorist and making remarks to me in class,” he said. “I had had it, it was a bad week. When I went to ask the teacher something, he threw something at me—I just snapped and turned around and punched him.”
In the face of widespread fear, hatred, and confusion, Hassan and his father began to speak out on the values that they had so long cherished. “After 9/11 our message of tolerance didn’t change, but it gave it more importance,” he said. “Every week since then my father and I have gone to churches, synagogues, and schools explaining what Islam is.”
Together, they have traveled all around the U.S., dispelling myths about Islam, putting their faith into a context, and speaking about interfaith and intercultural coexistence. “I don’t want to convert people,” Hassan explained. “I just want to bridge gaps and bring tolerance.”
Reverend Stan Bratton works with Hassan’s father on the Network of Religious Communities in Buffalo, an organization that Bratton said, “facilitates communication and religious understanding.” He has seen the pair speak on a number of occasions.
“They go before non-denominational gatherings, talk about interpreting the Muslim tradition, and respond to questions,” said Bratton. “They are both true scholars of Islam—probably the best speakers at these events. They are usually received warmly, but sometimes they are asked very pointed questions, especially in today’s political climate, and they always respond with patience and respect. They are very open to people and very committed to working for peace.”
A True Jihad
Despite death threats that his father began to receive, or perhaps because of them, Hassan has continued to raise his profile and speak out within the Buffalo community, as well as attend conferences such as Reviving the Islamic Spirit.
It was on one of these trips last year that he was singled out by the border patrol as a possible terrorist. When Hassan was detained on the way back from conference—his third in so many years—he was filled with conflicting emotions. He stood in the room, leaving what few seats there were for others to utilize and listened to the wailing of his baby sister while the other detainees were slowly led out for questioning, fingerprinting, and photographing.
When the time came for Hassan to pray, which observant Muslims are obliged to do five times a day, he and a friend threw their coats on the soiled floor, and they prayed in the middle of the room.
Over the course of the more than three and a half hours for which they were forced to stay at the border, Hassan oscillated between feelings of humiliation, pity for the children and elderly people forced to sit in the cold room, and anger at the border agents. “When we were in there, I wished that I could see them one day in court,” he said.
By mid-April of last year, Hassan’s wish was granted. Along with his mother, and three other of approximately 40 detainees that night, Hassan filed a suit against the Department of Homeland Security alleging that their First and Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.
Last month, on December 22, Federal Judge William M. Skretny ruled that the Department of Homeland Security had acted within the scope of the constitution when they decided to detain the conference attendees due to a credible threat of terrorists at the conference. He expressed sympathy for them, but dismissed the case.
“It’s an upsetting precedent,” Hassan said of the ruling.
The implications of the case are wide, he said. According to Hassan, it basically gives the government carte blanche to racially profile its own citizens and then detain them indefinitely without charges all for the stated purpose of national security. “When you give up some freedom for some security,” said Hassan, paraphrasing Ben Franklin’s famous quote, “you end up giving up both in the end.”
A few days after the ruling, Hassan and his family traveled to Toronto to once again attend the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference. They made it home without incident.
Hassan and the other plaintiffs have plans to appeal the judge’s decision, but even so, he noted that, “It was not a wasted effort. We got a victory in the sense that awareness was raised, we got support from the community, and we did not have it happen again.”
When asked if this case would make him think before taking on the government again, a spark returned to his eye. “I’m not discouraged.”
“This is why you come to America,” said Hassan, “to escape these things. We’re American citizens. Forget the fact that we’re Muslims. What they did, they did to American citizens. It could happen to anyone.”
