Six Muslim imams get on a plane. ...
No, this isn't a set-up for a joke. It's dead serious stuff in a post-9/11 world, whatever your take on what happened last week on US Airways Flight 300 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
The six Muslim scholars were among the 141 passengers on an evening flight bound for Phoenix. Before takeoff, three of the imams stood up and started saying their evening prayers. In the end, all six were led off the plane by police after the plane's captain and airport security asked them to leave and they refused. They were detained and questioned for five hours and released.
One of the imams is now calling for a boycott of US Airways. And the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other civil rights outfits are calling for hearings into religious and ethnic profiling as well an investigation into the detention of the men—whose only misstep was "flying while Muslim."
Was it? Were the six discriminated against simply for saying their evening prayers? Should the passengers and crew have gone out of their way to ignore the actions of the Muslim men on the plane?
"This event would be the equivalent of Roman Catholic bishops being arrested in China because they wore clerical robes and invoked Jesus Christ in prayers," Asad Zaman of Minnesota's Muslim American Society told The Minneapolis Star Tribune.
What poppycock. If Catholic bishops or a band of evangelicals had been the ones standing up on a plane and doing the public praying, you can bet passengers would have found it disturbing and reacted. Yes, the fact that those praying were Muslim men probably generated, let's be honest here, a certain terror on the part of the passengers and crew. But, if you feel compelled to ask why would that be, you're either ignorant of what happened on 9/11 or disingenuous.
Let's assume for a moment—and, as we'll soon see, only for a moment—that the whole affair simply involved Muslim men standing on a plane to say their prayers. Would the imams and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have a legitimate beef?
Not really. The fact is that the cabin of a commercial jet is a public place, and a fraught one at that these days. All Americans are called on to make certain accommodations upon entering the public square, and those accommodations are even greater when we fly airliners in an age of the Islamic terrorists. It's also impossible to believe the imams didn't understand that their actions would make their fellow passengers uncomfortable, what with 9/11, hijacked jetliners, 3,000 dead innocents and all.
Do the demands of the American public square, both pre- and post-9/11, pose a burden for Muslims at prayer time? Perhaps, yet not an unreasonable or unanticipated one. Owais Bayunus, a Muslim scholar in Minnesota, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that many Muslims "accept the fatwa (an opinion by an Islamic legal scholar) that it is acceptable to combine the prayers during travel."
The fact is, however, that the story began even before the men rose to pray. They had been praying together—very loudly, according to a gate agent—while waiting to board. A spokesman for the airport reported that witnesses said they were talking about the Iraq war and Saddam Hussein and making anti-American remarks. Some heard one say he would do whatever is necessary to keep his commitment to the Quran. "They seemed angry," a passenger wrote in a police statement. "Mentioned 'U.S.' and 'killing Saddam.' Two men then swore slightly under their breath/mumbled. They spoke Arabic again. The gate called boarding for the flight. The men then chanted 'Allah, Allah, Allah.'"
The imams deny everything except the praying, but to believe them, one has to not believe what multiple—and probably unrelated—witnesses stated.
On the plane, the group split up. Some sat in the front, some in the middle and some in the rear. A few asked for seat-belt extensions, even though they appeared not to need them. They then got up and visited with each other, which further alarmed some passengers. One passenger passed a note to a flight attendant about "suspicious Arabic men on plane."
Was that passenger wrong? Were the pilot and security officials wrong to take action?
Not on your life. Not on the lives of the crew and 135 other passengers on Flight 300.
David Reinhard
