My supervisor wanted to talk to me. “Come to my office when your shift is over,” he said.
It was only a few hours after the World Trade Center towers had fallen in New York on September 11.
I was living in Portland, Maine, and working at the city’s main post office, which hired temporary workers as the holiday season approached. He said a few other things I did not quite understand, but I kept nodding as he spoke. I still struggled with spoken English, especially when Americans spoke quickly or with a strong local accent.
I knocked on his office door. He asked me to sit in one of two chairs beside his desk, then sat in the other, facing me. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Is there a problem?”
He laughed. “Don’t you watch the news?”
He asked about my family. I told him they were all in Iraq. I told him I had come to the United States as a refugee and was now studying at the University of Southern Maine. Then he asked whether anyone at work had bothered me that day. “No,” I said. Before I left, he told me to come to him if anyone in the building gave me trouble.
“Are you all right?” It was a question I heard many times on September 11, and for months afterward. Friends of mine heard it too, sometimes over the phone from people they did not know. I later learned that some of the callers were volunteers with American civic and humanitarian groups, checking up on Arabs and Muslims to offer help and ask whether they had faced harassment or abuse.
There was plenty to worry about. An FBI report later recorded 481 anti-Islamic hate crimes in 2001, up from 28 the year before. American newspapers also carried accounts of attacks and discrimination against Arabs and Muslims in mosques, airports, government offices and other public places.
But there was another side to those months as well. Yahya Hendi, then an imam and Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University, later said that interfaith cooperation had reached a level he had never seen before. Churches and synagogues, he said, had opened their doors to Muslims who needed places to pray.
That, too, is a side of that awful day that needs to be remembered.
