A Year of Living Warily

A few days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Ventura neurosurgeon Moustapha Abou-Samra was anxiously awaiting the arrival of his college-age daughter at a near-empty Phoenix airport terminal. A policeman stopped to chat.

He was looking for Arabs and Muslims, the officer said, unaware that he was talking with an Arab Muslim.

At Abou-Samra’s hotel, a new acquaintance told the startled surgeon that Arab Americans should turn themselves in to authorities or, at least, volunteer to spy on their countries of origin.

It has been that kind of year for Abou-Samra. Ironic. Unsettling. Disarming. Threatening.

“Since September 11, things are different,” said Abou-Samra, whose dapper Mediterranean appearance could pass for European. “I have in some situations not mentioned my name, a name of which I’m proud, in order to avoid conflict.”

Abou-Samra, 55, is an immigrant success story--perhaps Ventura County’s most prominent neurosurgeon, past president of the county Medical Society and a major donor to local arts and charities since moving here in 1981.

His five children reflect the American melting pot; he proposed to his Irish Catholic wife, Joanie, on her 20th birthday not long after arriving in New Jersey in 1972.

An industrial-sized U.S. flag flies from a pole at the family’s hilltop home in Ventura. He is a Dodger fan and a runner entered in the New York Marathon. They own a hay and pecan ranch in Texas.

Two cultures, two religions. Abou-Samra’s surgical office adjoining Community Memorial Hospital reflects the blend. It is adorned with two U.S. flags and a multi-hued rendition of the Statue of Liberty by artist Peter Max. A bookcase holds both a Koran and a Bible. A crystal calligraphy work spelling “Allah” was a gift from his sister in Saudi Arabia.

The doctor is an unabashed U.S. patriot, and he attends a Catholic church with his family. He is also an Arab and a Muslim, descending directly and proudly, he says, from the prophet Muhammad.

But after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon nearly a year ago, Abou-Samra was forced to reconsider what it means to be an Arab in America.

It’s a question many of the nation’s about 3 million Arab Americans--fewer than half of whom are Muslim--have struggled with since 19 terrorists made them suspect on Sept. 11.

After that, Abou-Samra’s brother, Said, a plastic surgeon in New Jersey, was tarred by hospital rumors that his assets had been frozen by federal investigators. And the Islamic Center his brother supports lost donations from people who had contributed for years, Abou-Samra said.

“They feared they’d be linked to terrorism,” he said. “That is a real concern: To worry about giving money to your church is bad, especially in a country like ours.”

Recent government infringement of civil liberties bothers Abou-Samra the most--suspects detained without charge, racial profiling by law enforcement, invasive electronic surveillance.

“After Sept. 11, a lot of things have happened in the name of homeland security and fighting terrorism,” he said. “We cannot allow that to happen, or this country becomes something it is not supposed to be.”

It’s a problem fostered not just by last year’s attacks, he said, but by a general ignorance of Arab cultures.

The situation Arab Americans face now is not so different from what Jewish Americans and Japanese Americans endured a few decades ago, he said.

“People don’t know who we are, what we stand for and what we want,” Abou-Samra wrote in a letter to his niece after the attacks, challenging her to become a community leader in Los Angeles. “They have no clue what makes us tick. And, as long as we are an unknown entity, yes, let’s use the word--’alien’--we will be treated with mistrust.

“We are educated, family-oriented, loyal, patriotic and very reliable,” he said. “We should show others that ours is a good way.”

Abou-Samra has spent three decades trying to be as American as his next-door neighbor. Moustapha, which means “the chosen one” in Arabic, is often shortened by friends to a nickname, Moose, or Uncle Moose to his nieces and nephews.

He became a U.S. citizen on Emancipation Day years ago in San Antonio, Texas, hoping to vote for Gerald Ford for president.

“He just paced the floor because he wanted to vote so badly,” Joanie Abou-Samra recalled. “And the day he became a citizen, he went to the oldest boot store in downtown San Antonio and bought his first pair of cowboy boots. He wore them to work every day.”

Abou-Samra thinks of himself as an American first. His father was an international trader, and his mother, he said, was the first woman to attend the University of Damascus, where she earned a degree in math. His grandfather helped establish the Syrian educational system after French colonialists left in 1946.

“Our heritage is important to us,” Abou-Samra said. “But we are here in the U.S., and we have the same concerns as our neighbors.”

All five of the Abou-Samra children have both Arab and anglicized names: Omar Brian, 25, Leyla Jane, 24, Jason Chafik, 22, Jamil Susan, 21, and Patricia Riad, 18. None speaks Arabic, but they have been taught their father’s native culture and have visited the Middle East three times.

In 2000, they spent a month in Syria and Lebanon.

So one of Abou-Samra’s most immediate concerns after the Twin Towers fell was how his children would deal with the blame being cast by some on Arabs and Muslims in general.

“There was this congressman from Louisiana, saying we should round up all the people who wear diapers on their heads. My kids were upset and vocal about not treating Arabs badly,” Abou-Samra said. “I sent an e-mail telling them that their frustration was appropriate, but they should be careful when articulating to those they don’t know that this [bias] is anti-American. It was a difficult and unsettling time for us.”

The father says his children have not been personally mistreated. But thoughtless words have stung.

“It was all just really disturbing,” said Jamil, a college sophomore who will spend the fall semester in Beirut.

She plans to write a history of the Lebanese civil war and stay in quarters at Sacred Heart Hospital, where her father was the first Muslim doctor in 1971, the family says.

“People don’t know I’m Arab--I’m very white and Irish like my mom--so they say ridiculous things,” Jamil said. “I’m going to Lebanon, and someone actually said, ‘Hopefully, there won’t be any Arabs on your plane.’ Which is ridiculous, since I’m going to an Arab country.”

But Moustapha and Joanie Abou-Samra have also found themselves worrying unnecessarily for their children.

After Sept. 11, they feared that Omar’s best friend and college roommate might withdraw his invitation to serve as best man at his large Jewish wedding.

“I think my parents don’t want us to ever be hurt by anything,” Omar said. “They’re protective in a good way. And I think maybe it crossed their minds that having an Arab name in a roomful of 200 of New York’s finest Jews would make me nervous.

“But people were very supportive of me. And the wedding was wonderful.”

Omar, a third-year law student, said he has been struck most since the attacks by the nation’s heightened interest in Arabs.

“Every day there would be an article about how this [Arab] person or that person had been treated, and it was not necessarily positive,” he said. “There is a greater awareness of what it means to be an Arab in this country.”

At the same time, a Santa Clara School of Law professor reached out with compassion, Omar said.

“[He] made a very sincere and nice comment about treating Arabs as they would treat anybody else,” Omar said. “It showed me how sensitive other people could be. And I have never been discriminated against.”

That tracks, generally, with his father’s experience in America.

Twenty-nine years ago, when Joanie Morrison asked her parish priest in New Jersey to marry her and Moustapha, the priest quizzed the well-schooled Syrian on Catholicism and then noted the future bride’s ignorance of Islam.

“Father [James] MacConnell told me I needed to learn my husband’s religion,” she recalled. “We’ve tried to raise our children the same way, teaching them there is a common thread to all religion, sort of a Golden Rule, and that some people just use religion the wrong way.”

A desperate situation in 1978 reemphasized for the young couple a foundation of American culture and of most religions.

Moustapha had enrolled for six months of extra training in neurology at the University of Minnesota. But the student, his pregnant wife and their toddler son could find nothing to rent for the $300 a month they could afford.

Just as they considered abandoning the training, a couple that had asked $450 a month for a fine old house called to say they would leave two months early for a summer retreat so the Abou-Samras could use their home.

The couple even helped the Abou-Samras unload their U-Haul that evening and refused to take the cut-rate $300 rent until the end of the month.

“What we didn’t know was they’d been listening to Rev. Robert Schuler preach from the Crystal Cathedral [in California] that morning,” Joanie said. “And he said you don’t have to go to Africa to be a missionary, just look around and find someone in need.”

Two months after the September attacks, Moustapha Abou-Samra told that story at Thacher School in Ojai, which his youngest daughter once attended.

“Every step of the way, I was afforded opportunities I never would have dreamed possible in my land of birth, Syria,” he told the students.

But then he warned about the potential erosion of Arab Americans’ civil rights.

“If this were to happen,” he said, “the terrorists would have won.”