L.A. Muslims Feel Push, Pull of Divided Loyalty

Abdullah Hassan’s voice was low-pitched and intense as he explained how he felt about the hijacking of TWA Flight 847.

“First I am a Muslim. We oppose all kinds of kidnaping, hijacking, taking somebody else’s rights. We oppose that as Muslims,” he said. “But, well, there is a very important point here. When you fail to live in peace in your own village because somebody comes from outside and imposes something on you, what do you do?” he added, referring to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the current detention of more than 700 prisoners, mainly Shia Muslims, by the Israeli government. “You have to do whatever you can to get peace into your life,” he said.

Sharing the Good and Bad

Hassan spoke, not in Beirut, but in an Arcadia coffee shop, the chatter of suburban families whiling away a summer morning serving as counterpoint. The background accented the push and pull that Hassan said he feels between his adopted country and his native one.

“We (American Lebanese) share the good and the bad of this country and the good and the bad of the Lebanese people of Lebanon,” he said. “We don’t feel in danger here. This country was made by strangers. The only natives are the Indians.”

As the hostages begin dispersing to their homes across the country, Hassan is not the only one in greater Los Angeles who has watched the hijacking from a different political or cultural perspective.

Same Religious Sect

He is one of an estimated 500 to 1,000 Lebanese Shia Muslims who live in Southern California, members of the same religious sect that played a large role in the hostage drama of the past 2 1/2 weeks. The Lebanese Shias themselves are a fraction of the 60,000-to-70,000-strong Lebanese community here. Hassan also is one of perhaps as many as 200,000 Shia Muslims in the Southland and 500,000 in the United States who have come here, primarily from Iran, but also from Pakistan, Lebanon and Iraq, mainly as political refugees. And he is one of perhaps 2 million to 5 million Muslims in this country.

The two principal divisions of the Muslim religion are Shia and Sunni. About a tenth of the world’s 800 million Muslims are Shia. The sects were formed at the death of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, in the year 632, following a disagreement over how best to follow the prophet’s teachings.

Hassan’s opinions reflect only one point of view of members of a religion often portrayed or perceived as radical, cohesive, even monolithic. In fact, many local Shias feel they and their religion have been getting a bum rap in the American media. There is as much diversity within their ranks as in American society at large, they say.

In addition, many Arab-Americans living here are worried that the hijacking has sparked a wave of anti-Arab feeling that fails to take into account the complexity of the Arab world and the Muslim religion. Many Arabs and Shias also are concerned that their loyalty as Americans may be questioned, or that it will become even more difficult to become adjusted to this society, although they may have hopes of one day returning home.

For example, Iranian Neusha Farrahi noted that many of his fellow Iranians keep themselves apart from American society and at the same time suffer their own internal divisions. Meetings of local Iranian liberals have been disrupted by Muslim fundamentalist Iranians, he added.

“There are 1,000 beautiful and poetic things about this country that my own people don’t look for because they are so obsessed with their own problems,” he said. “ . . . They are as prejudiced about Americans as Americans are about them. We are more under attack from our own countrymen than Americans.”

Continuing ties to their home countries seem to be a dominant factor in the lives of Shias here, offering a kind of unity in diversity. In interviews with Shias around Los Angeles, the general impression that emerged was one in which Beirut, the valleys of southern Lebanon and Tehran seemed to be just over the horizon, if not closer.

For instance, Hassan said he had returned from his latest visit to Lebanon about a month ago and that he is “very close” to Nabih Berri, the leader of Amal, the Shia militia that took control of most of the 39 American hostages in Beirut. Yet Hassan said he has lived in this country for 15 years, has become a citizen and before that traveled widely in North Africa and South America.

One indication of how closely tuned some Lebanese in Los Angeles are to events in Lebanon is the fact that both Christians and Muslims of Lebanese descent operate local telephone lines that provide taped news reports of the latest events in Beirut and the rest of Lebanon. The reports are highly detailed, including information about events in Beirut neighborhoods and country villages.

While Hassan said he has no plans to return permanently to his native country, there are many others who wish they could go back.

At their Persian-language bookstore in Westwood, Neusha Farrahi and his father, Farhang, agreed that they would return to Iran immediately if they could. Both fled the country after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established a fundamentalist Shia regime following the revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

They would return, Farhang Farrahi said through his son, who acted as interpreter, partly because the “American people judge everything on the basis of the information they receive from the American media. The portrait of the Iranian in exile has been distorted. If there are Muslims and Shia and people like those terrorists fighting in Iran and in Lebanon, that means that all Muslims, all Shia, or all Iranians have the same mentality.”

The elder Farrahi, 52, would leave, too, because he does not speak English and finds American society hard to comprehend even in small ways. “He loves Walt Whitman (a 19th-Century American poet) but he can’t read Walt Whitman in English,” his son said. “He’s in Walt Whitman country but he can’t feel the Walt Whitman country because he cannot communicate with people . . . the majority of Iranians here, especially the older ones, have this problem. . . . When he touches someone in the market here, they get upset, they say, ‘Don’t touch me, man.’ In our country it is customary for men to touch, even kiss, without being labeled homosexual.”

However, it is the blanket image of Shias as terrorists that troubles most local members of the Muslim sect.

Radicalism Overemphasized

“I think they (the American public) see the Shias of Lebanon as all militant and carrying weapons,” said Dr. Bassam Sinno, a Lebanese who has been in the United States nine years. Sinno, who is a psychiatrist in private practice and on the staff of a crisis management center in Van Nuys, added that he believes “Shia radicalism” is overemphasized. But, he said, his co-workers don’t see him as part of a radical group. “They see me mostly as a person they get along well with,” he said.

Like most others interviewed, Sinno said he had lost relatives and friends to one or another of the many Middle Eastern conflicts. In his case, Sinno said his brother, his brother’s wife and a son, as well as a cousin and his wife died in a single explosion in 1982.

Babak Nafarman, an Iranian who is a graduate student at UCLA, said that hostility aroused by the hostage crisis has both “conscious and unconscious” effects on him.

“You become much more withdrawn into yourself and hesitant to communicate with the average American,” he said, adding that at worst Middle Easterners in this country might feel they are “unofficial prisoners in an unofficial prison.” Like others, Nafarman asked not to be photographed as a precaution against retaliation.

Somewhat Less Polite

Nonetheless, none of those interviewed said they had experienced verbal or physical hostility because they were obviously from the Middle East. Rather, Americans tended to be somewhat less polite, if they reacted to--or guessed--their origins at all, several said.

Press Conference Called

James Kaddo is a Maronite Christian and chairman of the Los Angeles-based United American-Lebanese Committee. Although he is a Christian, Kaddo said he is concerned that Americans are beginning to lump all things Middle East together. That’s the reason he participated in a press conference held here last week by Arab-Americans calling for the release of both the hostages and the prisoners held by the Israelis, he said.

“The Arabs are being mistaken for the Iranians,” he said, referring to the fact that one group holding a few of the American hostages is thought to be financially supported by the Iranian government. In fact, Iranians and Arabs are ethnically different, and speak different languages--Arabic and Persian.

No Sitting on Hands

During the crisis, Kaddo said he had been in contact throughout the Southland with Lebanese of many different persuasions.

“All of the factions have been contacting me and feel we should not sit on our hands because we don’t want to have Americans feel that we have a loyalty problem,” he said.

Some of those who talked to The Times said that they are Shia by an accident of birth and that they no longer practice the religion. Others said that being a Muslim comes first and that being a Shia is secondary.

“Personally, I don’t want to divide Islam into Shia and Sunni,” said Imam Musa Mousavi, president of the High Islamic Council of the Americas in Los Angeles. “Division does not help. All sections of the Islamic religion have a place.”