Muslim Immigrants From Mideast: Dreams May Not Match U.S. Reality : Alienation: Newcomers often turn to mosques for support, as did Salameh. But only a few become involved in political activism.

Three years ago, when Aly Hassan left his native Alexandria, Egypt, he was like millions of other immigrants who have come to the United States down through the years. Eager to better himself, Hassan expected to build a bright new life in a land that he thought would be a lot like the images he saw on the television show “Knots Landing.”

Like other immigrants, he soon found that the reality of life in America did not match his vision. The skyscrapers of Manhattan, glimmering just across the Hudson River, seemed tantalizingly close. But they might as well be on the moon for Hassan, who struggles to support himself by husbanding the $3,000 he brought with him and scratch for odd jobs in this grimy working-class industrial city.

Yet Hassan feels a special sense of alienation and anger that goes beyond the disillusionment and travail that have been the lot of countless generations of immigrants. As a Muslim from the Middle East, he believes that he and others like him are unfairly stigmatized by a society that knows little about them and--when it notices them at all--tends to view them as potential enemies.

“A lot of people do not like Arabs here,” observed Hassan, who says that he had a “good job” as a bookkeeper in Egypt and, until he hurt his knee, played forward on the national soccer team. “They think we’re all terrorists. Just because there are some bad people who are Muslims, it doesn’t mean all Muslims are bad. There are some bad Christians, too, but no one thinks that means all Christians are bad.”

These feelings are especially intense in Hassan’s case because he went to the same mosque and had many of the same friends as Mohammed A. Salameh, 25, the first suspect arrested in the World Trade Center explosion. Salameh’s friends say that he, too, became embittered by his experiences in this country.

Set apart from the mainstream by differences of language, culture and religion, handicapped by difficulties in the job market and shocked by what they see as bias and lack of even-handedness in America’s attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, Muslim immigrants from the Middle East often turn inward in search of companionship and support.

And increasingly that brings them into contact with the uncompromising fundamentalism that is sweeping through mosques and Muslim communities almost everywhere in the world.

Only a handful go to extremes of political activism, much less terrorism, but experts on Muslim immigration see both Hassan and Salameh as part of a syndrome of isolation, resentment and religious radicalism that is little understood by the larger U.S. society.

Many Muslim immigrants and Muslim students become politically and religiously radicalized in reaction to their environment, which they see as “anti-Arab or anti-Muslim,” according to Yvonne Haddad, a specialist on Muslim Americans at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

“Liberal young Muslims come to the United States and while living here become ‘born-again’ Muslims,” said Haddad, who is not Muslim. “It’s a pattern that I’ve noticed and studied across the country.”

Salameh’s relatives say that he was not a religious extremist when he left Jordan for the United States five years ago, but here he began attending the fiery sermons of militant Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman.

In recent years, young Muslim men like Salameh and Hassan have come to America in growing numbers, seeking job opportunities or an escape from religious or political oppression. The immigration of Muslim women and families is also growing, according to experts on the American-Arab community, but not as quickly.

Arab Muslims account for about 20% of all Muslims in the United States. An estimated 42% are African-Americans. Others are from Malaysia, Pakistan, India, Iran and Turkey. Estimates of the total number of Muslims in the United States range from 2.5 to 6 million.

In New York City alone, the number of census respondents who identified themselves as having Arab ancestry soared from 6,650 in 1980 to 51,577 in 1990. Estimates of the actual Arab population in the New York metropolitan area, including northern New Jersey, are as high 200,000.

California is home to an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Muslims, 200,000 to 300,000 of them in Southern California. About 20% are of Arab extraction.

Some Arab Muslims come to the United States to earn money to help support families back home or to help start businesses when they return to their homelands. Others seek academic degrees to help them get good jobs in America or at home. Still others are refugees of war or political instability who come looking for peace and prosperity.

But once they are here, many begin to feel that they are living in an unexpectedly hostile society.

Like other immigrants, young Arabs who want to live in the United States must first get visas--no small feat unless they have a close relative in America or an acceptance letter from a college.

Staying here is difficult, too. Many try to marry Americans so that they can get “green cards” that permit them to work in this country, as Salameh reportedly told his mother he planned to do. They often live with relatives or friends. Or they may band together with other Arab young people to share a cheap apartment.

Even if they have professional degrees, their foreign professional credentials usually do not get them good jobs in the United States. They must often work long hours as taxi drivers, stock boys at grocery stores or doing odd construction jobs, usually for established Arab businessmen. Many work and go to school at the same time. It is even tougher for those who do not speak English.

Because typical American socializing is out of bounds for them, their social lives often revolve around their mosques or friends from their mosques. Some religious Muslims grow to resent the drinking, drugs and pornography that often is popular in America.

“They are scrambling,” said Hajar. “It’s not secure--especially not these days. They are desperate. There are not enough jobs in the Arab community and not enough channels to the mainstream American community.”

Although most Muslin immigrants knew from the beginning that the United States had close ties with Israel, many are nonetheless unprepared for the depth of pro-Israeli sentiment and the widespread lack of sympathy for Palestinians and Arabs.

This feeling of being ostracized is based more on American foreign policy and American press coverage of the Islamic world, which they perceive as anti-Muslim, than on personal experiences of being discriminated against as Muslims.

“A lot of (Muslims in America) feel very uncomfortable about American foreign policy,” Haddad said.

In a survey Haddad conducted at five mosques across the country, 100% of the respondents said they think America practices racism against Muslims but very few said that they had personally been victims.

Samira Haj, an assistant professor of history at New York University who specializes in the modern Middle East, said that Muslims’ anger over what they see as the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy and America’s discrimination against Muslims is exacerbated “by the image of the society being open and democratic.”

The feeling of being the target of racism is not limited to religious Muslims or to those who have yet to make it in America, Haddad added. The same feeling is common among Muslim immigrants who receive American college degrees and have good jobs, such as Nadir Ayyad, 25, one of those charged in the World Trade Center explosion.

Ayyad--who is a naturalized American citizen, has a degree in chemical engineering from Rutgers University and had a solid career--seemed to be living out the America dream. But a closer look shows that there are reasons Ayyad, a Palestinian who grew up in Kuwait, may have felt resentment toward America, Haddad said.

He was no doubt angered, like most other Muslims, by U.S. inaction when Kuwait kicked out 400,000 Palestinians, some of them probably his friends and relatives, after the Persian Gulf War, Haddad suggested.

Every American Palestinian feels bitterness toward the U.S. government because of their pro-Israeli policies, said Yasmin Adib, an American-born leader of the Palestine Solidarity Committee.

Even Palestinians who are seeking residency or citizenship in the United States cannot help but feel a love-hate relationship with America. But because of the intifada , Palestinians’ protest of Israeli rule that since the late 1980s has made it increasingly difficult for young Palestinians to get jobs in Israel, and economic troubles in neighboring countries like Jordan, America has become a refuge.

“They see this as a country where they may be able to work and raise their families and yet also as a country which is allied with Israel--their enemy,” Adib said. “It’s not like there’s an option of a home country to go back to.”

“The way the press handles it makes being an Arab an indictable offense,” said Paula Hajar, who did her Ph.D. thesis for Harvard University on Palestinian immigrants and is now trying to set up a service to help new immigrants assimilate. But their desperation to stay here makes many Arab immigrants “pull down the shades and wait” rather than fight back, she added.

Also, while racial slurs against Latinos, African-Americans and Asians are taboo, Arabs and Muslims believe that similar verbal assaults on them are widely tolerated. Haddad and her students did a survey of all the books and articles on what must be said or not said to be politically correct and none mentioned discrimination against Arabs or Muslims.

Because the bulk of Arab and Muslim immigration is fairly recent, there are not established communities of Arabs and Muslims to stand up for themselves. The only Arab community in America with a strong network to help new immigrants get jobs and find places to live is in Dearborn, Mich., Haddad said.

M. T. Mehdi, the secretary general of the National Council of Islamic Affairs, said that Muslims can hardly read American newspapers without feeling offended. They see a story about the United States helping Jews from Russia and other countries immigrate to Israel and they interpret it as America helping Israel oust Palestinians from their homeland.

American newspapers’ bias in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is clear, Mehdi contends, because when Palestinians “murder” Jews, the stories land on the front page and when Palestinians “die” in Israel, it hardly makes the paper.

“There is an underlying prejudice in the newspapers that Arabs and Muslims are all terrorists and they deserve what they get,” Mehdi said.

Still, successful immigrants are frustrated that events like the bombing of the trade center appear to harm the image of all Arabs.

“I really resent the fact that we, who are a glowing example of the American immigrant community, are being tarnished by this,” said Rami Ramadan, an emigre from Egypt who heads the American Arab Council. Ramadan is a successful businessman, who worked his way up from stock boy to become a millionaire shoe merchant.

Samir Rizk, an Egyptian Christian who moved to the United States 20 years ago, believes that events here and abroad have made it harder to be an Arab-American than ever before.

A few days after Salameh was arrested in the trade center explosion, a customer of Rizk’s at a flea market asked him about his nationality.

“I said, ‘I’m Greek,’ ” Rizk said. “For the first time since I immigrated here, I felt I needed to lie about being an Egyptian. Of course, this hurts me.”