The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading Muslim civil rights organization, occupies one floor of a red-brick office building on Capitol Hill. Visitors must use an elevator pass code to reach the suite, the only one in a building of tenants that is secured against attack.
On the wall of its conference room hangs a framed front page of a newspaper showing a U.S. president, standing shoeless in a mosque and reaching out in dramatic fashion to Muslim Americans.
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In dozens of video interviews, Americans of all religious backgrounds candidly talk about the roots of suspicion, misunderstandings about Islam and confronting their own fears.
Timeline: History of Muslims in America
It’s not Barack Obama, who pledged early in his presidency to combat negative stereotypes of Islam “wherever they appear.”
The clipping depicts George W. Bush. Within a week of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington to remind an angry and frightened nation that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.”
“That was huge,” said Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, who accompanied Bush on his visit. “His statement and his visit made a big impact at home and in the world.”
By contrast, Obama has not visited a mosque in the United States since taking office, although he has done so in Egypt, Turkey and Indonesia as part of his project to repair U.S. relations with the Muslim world. Bold abroad, Obama’s outreach has been largely invisible at home as Muslim Americans confront enduring suspicion and, in some cases, outright hatred a decade after the attacks.
The president’s approach has worked to a degree internationally. Polls show that in some important Islamic countries, Muslim perceptions of the United States improved the year Obama took office, although they have dipped since then.
And it has paid off politically: Two recent surveys show that Obama has the support of more than three-quarters of Muslim Americans, a diverse mix of about 3 million people, most of them immigrants and many of them African Americans disinclined to back Republican policies.
But Obama’s tepid efforts to beat back the public’s negative impressions of the nation’s Muslim citizens in a post-9/11 nation have disappointed Muslim American leaders, who expected more from a president whose rhetoric promised so much. He has not held a single event with Muslim Americans outside the White House, favoring the relative privacy of his annual iftar dinner — the meal that breaks the fast during Ramadan — to speak about issues that are important to the group.
Polls show that a large plurality of Americans continues to hold an unfavorable view of Muslims. According to a Pew Research Center poll released late last month, a majority of Muslim Americans said it has become “more difficult” to be a Muslim in the United States since the 2001 attacks — the same proportion who gave that response in the year before Obama was elected.
Another survey makes clear the political risks the president faces in strengthening his connections with Muslim Americans. The son of a Kenyan Muslim who left Obama when he was 2, the president has repeatedly professed his Christian faith. But a poll this summer found that more Americans think Obama is a Muslim than when he was elected.
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