Charlotte imam shares first-hand experiences with Islamophobia post 9/11

Charlotte Muslim Community Center imam John Ederer has an analogy he uses when describing what it felt like to be Muslim after the 9/11 attacks.

“Imagine if when the Klu Klux Klan was in its heyday and had 2 million followers and influence over the police and believed that Christ had called them to do this. Imagine if someone just honed in and focused on the fact that they were Christian and constantly broadcasted that message in a place where Christianity was a minority. Imagine what people would have thought?,” Ederer said, comparing the extremist Isamist group ISIS to the KKK extremist Christian group.

Ederer faults media and politics for the anti-Islamic rhetoric that came about following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “You couldn’t turn on the TV or read the news without having it called to your attention that these 19 terrorists were Muslim. So now you have an entire religion being blamed for the actions of 19 people.”

Profiling Muslims

Ederer’s first brush with profiling occurred when he and his wife — both white, American Muslims — were coming back from an Islamic conference in Toronto in 2004. They were detained by security and relentlessly interrogated because of their attendance at the conference and because of the books and Arabic study materials Ederer carried. Security personnel even took their car keys to perform a search before they were released.

From there, the scrutiny got more intense. In late 2011, two years after becoming the imam of Charlotte’s Muslim Community Center, Ederer was suddenly unable to print his own airline tickets. “TSA would be waiting for me at the gate. I wasn’t allowed to board until 25 minutes before the plane was taking off,” Ederer said.

After dozens of calls to airlines, the Transportation Security Administration, his local congressmen and senators, and finally government agencies in Washington, D.C., Ederer discovered he had been placed on a watch list.

“No one could tell me why I was on this list. It took years to try to figure out why this was happening. I finally got the response that I was perceived as a progressive imam,” Ederer said. His name was removed from the list in Feb. 2014.

“We have to be deliberate in how we talk about this event, even today. There is a general misunderstanding of the word jihad. People think jihad is what happened on 9/11. Jihad actually refers to the struggle with ego and desires of selfishness. Socially, it means having order — a military, a police force — all things that we have in America. If the idea behind it was to destroy Christianity, it would have happened a long time ago. The term jihad has been controlled,” Ederer said.

In recent years, the imam has been active in helping to educate and inform the community on how to teach about Islam in classrooms in Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools. “Superintendent (Earnest) Winston has been very humble and hands on. We’ve had several diversity meetings, and he has made it clear that they want to empower Muslim voices and be cautious with the wording and substance of materials being used in schools,” Ederer said.

“Even 20 years out, we still need to be careful about how it is going in the history books. We shouldn’t be having to give rigorous education to our kids that we are not terrorists.”

This story was originally published September 7, 2021 at 6:30 AM.