Young U.S. Muslims Strive for Harmony

'Ambassadors of Their Culture'

Al-Sarraf grew up the eldest of four children in leafy Pasadena, Calif., with an Iraqi father and a mother who is half Palestinian and half German American. His parents signed up the children for hockey and soccer and took them to deliver food to the homeless on Thanksgiving.

"We wanted our children to grow up feeling comfortable in their skin as Muslims and as Americans," said his mother, Amira Al-Sarraf.

At his secular private high school, Al-Sarraf started a Muslim club, which was popular, he said, because it gave out free pizza. He gave annual presentations during Ramadan, but few people focused on his religion.

Then, during senior year, terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. His principal asked him and his brother to give schoolwide talks about Islam, which their mother said "validated their role as ambassadors of their culture."

Al-Sarraf said Sept. 11 "gave me extra motivation. I think all Muslims felt extra pressure -- to be the token of what Islam really is, to defend Islam."

His light skin, cleanshaven face and green eyes make it hard to guess his background. But sitting in a Starbucks at the GWU student union, he spoke authoritatively of the challenges Muslims growing up in the United States have faced since 9/11.

"The natural trend of immigrant communities," he said, is that "the first generation comes, establishing itself. Then the next generation has a different set of issues, figuring out who they are and how they fit in."

The terrorist attacks accelerated that process. "There was this pressure on the Muslim community to grow up in a year, when it's a 20-year process."

Last year, when Al-Sarraf awoke to hear that four young Muslims had blown themselves up in the London subways and killed 52 other people, he felt chilled. The four were not unlike him and his friends: middle class, educated, raised in the West. And yet the bombers were so alienated from their environment that they had sought to destroy it.

Just as after Sept. 11, Al-Sarraf's impulse was to take action, feeling "that we need to address the issue before it gets as far here as it did in other places." Al-Sarraf did not see extreme isolationist Islamic groups in the United States, but he felt it was up to his generation to take a stand.

"Who's going to be the ones to address it?" he asked. "And the realization was that . . . it's us."

After the bombings, he and 15 friends, mostly students of political and international affairs, sent out a news release to U.S. campuses, condemning the attack. The next month, they started an initiative to encourage young Muslim Americans to get involved politically, to develop a collective identity, to vote and to consider forming lobbying groups or running for office.