One University Confronts Tensions Over Islam With Its Neighbors

Joe Buglewicz for The Chronicle

Last month members of a Muslim youth group in Murfreesboro, Tenn., felt a need to do something. The anti-Islam campaign rhetoric of Donald J. Trump and his surprise election victory had stoked fear among Muslims in this city, where Middle Tennessee State University is located. In the days after the election, several Muslims, including at least one MTSU student, reported facing harassment.

Murfreesboro Muslim Youth, which counts university students among its members, wanted to promote unity with an event in the city’s public square, a dozen blocks down East Main Street from the campus. The plan, as one student described it, was for a “love rally” of sorts, in which members would hand out flowers, candy, and handwritten cards to passers-by, and help remind local residents that Muslims are just like everyone else.

Unexpectedly, the gathering drew at least 200 people, most of whom were not Muslim. Signs proclaiming love and tolerance dotted the crowd. Many wrote heart shapes and messages of solidarity in chalk on the bricks in front of the Rutherford County courthouse, and with colorful markers on a banner that, by the event’s end, was 25 feet long.

The show of support would have been meaningful in any American city. But it was particularly meaningful in Murfreesboro, a community that has endured half a decade of heightened tensions over Islam and, since the election, has seen them flare up again.

Angry protests erupted nearly seven years ago over the construction of a new, larger mosque just outside of the downtown area. A lawsuit filed by residents to try to prevent the mosque and an adjacent cemetery from being built went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to take up the case.

The unrest exposed a familiar town-gown divide. The campus is an “enclave of little hippie kids,” compared with the more-conservative Murfreesboro, said Salim Sbenaty, a sophomore at Middle Tennessee State and a member of the university’s Muslim Student Association. Professors say they don’t often encounter disrespectful attitudes toward Islam in their classrooms. Muslim-student leaders describe the campus as generally welcoming, if a little ignorant at times about who Muslims are and what they believe.

Muslim students and faculty members say they have a solid base of community support. Still, they say there are reminders that not everyone is happy about the growing presence of Islam in the area: the occasional dirty looks from residents, the anti-Muslim bills backed by local lawmakers, the county’s strong vote — 60 percent in favor — for Mr. Trump.

But as the university and its home city continue to diversify, and as Mr. Trump takes office, students and faculty members say Middle Tennessee State has an important role to play in educating people about Islam and in improving cross-cultural understanding at a particularly difficult time for Muslims in America.

‘After All We’ve Done?’

The Muslim community’s growth has contributed to the increasing diversity of Murfreesboro’s population over the past two decades. By 2009, about 250 Muslim families lived in the city, and they had far outgrown the existing worship space, a small suite in an office building. Some were forced to pray in the parking lot.

So plans were drawn up to build a larger Islamic Center that would eventually include a school, a swimming pool, and a cemetery. The first hint of resistance came quickly. In early 2010 “not welcome” was spray-painted across the sign marking the intended site of the new mosque. Having lived, worked, and volunteered side by side with their mostly Christian neighbors for decades without much incident, local Muslims were shocked by the sudden backlash.

What followed were tense protests, a fire at the construction site that was ruled arson, and a string of lawsuits that would ultimately cost Rutherford County nearly $350,000. The mosque’s supporters found themselves facing, among other arguments, the claim that Muslims did not have freedom of religion as protected by the First Amendment because, according to the plaintiffs, Islam was an ideology.

The new Islamic Center opened in 2012, just in time for Ramadan, though the legal battle against it dragged on for two more years. Mr. Sbenaty, the MTSU sophomore, said the day the mosque was denied zoning approval for its cemetery, in 2014, was the first time he truly “felt that prejudice, and that is what infuriated me.”

“After all we’ve done?” said the young Muslim, who was born and raised in Murfreesboro. “After all of the open houses that we’ve had and after the 500 volunteer hours I put into that community, after all the soup kitchens — y’all still don’t care about us?”

After the Supreme Court declined to take up the mosque opponents’ case, in June 2014, tensions over Islam in Murfreesboro seemed to subside. But then came the 2016 presidential campaign, during which Mr. Trump made his plans to combat Islamic terrorism a centerpiece of his message. He also proposed temporarily barring all Muslims from entering the United States, and he has hinted at supporting a national registry for Muslims, though his remarks on the subject have been ambiguous.

Mr. Trump’s corrosive rhetoric resonated with millions of voters and seemed to embolden some Trump supporters to make known their distaste for Islam. Earlier this year, a young Muslim woman in Murfreesboro was nearly run off the road downtown by a man who called her “a [expletive] terrorist,” according to a police report. The woman told the Daily News Journal that she had no doubt her hijab had provoked the assault.

Allen Hibbard, chair of the university’s Middle East Center and a professor of English, said he knows of a female student who was harassed after the election for wearing a hijab. “I do worry that anti-Islamic rhetoric in this past presidential-election campaign has resulted in a redefinition of what is acceptable and permissible speech in the public sphere,” he said.

Samar Salem, a junior and member of the Muslim Student Association, said one of her friends, a black student and lifelong Murfreesboro resident, converted to Islam after the election, and has already been treated differently around town. “People are like, why would you be like them?” Ms. Salem said.

Few of the reported incidents of harassment have taken place on the campus. But the university isn’t a bubble of safety for Muslims, said Saleh Sbenaty, a professor of engineering technology and father of Salim Sbenaty. He’s also chair of the Islamic Center’s outreach committee.

As there is no worship space on the campus, Muslims often have to say their daily prayers in public areas. “We’re at a point where they may think twice before they select a place for a prayer,” he said, because of the possibility of harassment.

‘Meet a Muslim’

As a public institution, Middle Tennessee State must tread a fine line between supporting its diverse student body and minding the wishes of the state legislature. Rutherford County lawmakers “are very vocal about their opposition to Islam,” Professor Sbenaty said.

“In their heart and soul, they believe that Islam is bad for the country and the community,” he said, a perspective that makes it difficult to have a constructive dialogue with them. Bryan Terry and Bill Ketron, who represent the county in the state’s House of Representatives and Senate, respectively, did not respond to requests for comment from The Chronicle.

Still, among most Tennesseans, “the fears are rooted generally in ignorance, not stupidity,” said Andrew Polk, an assistant professor of history and an expert in American religious history.

“It’s one of those things where a little learning is a dangerous thing,” he said. Many of his students know enough about Islam to form an opinion, he said, but it’s not always an informed one. “You can believe what you believe, but it has to be based in reality.”

That’s where the university can step in, many students and professors say, and help lead efforts to promote religious literacy, both on the campus and in the surrounding community.

One event the Muslim Student Association puts on regularly is called “Meet a Muslim,” in which passers-by can find coffee, doughnuts, and friendly Muslim faces. Students must ask a question to get a snack.

“One of the things we really think about is [that] the way to get things accomplished is person to person,” Salim Sbenaty said. He believes such events “have really opened up some hearts.”

That’s an example of how the university has been able to “humanize” the discussion of Islam, Mr. Polk said. “A lot of that fear and anger can only be sustained when you’re not talking about real human beings,” he said.

Sean Foley, an associate professor of history and expert on the Islamic world, said his goal was not to persuade students to feel one way or another about Islam, but to give them tools to think. “I teach in a conservative state — there’s no question about that,” he said. “One thing you have to be able to do is teach into a classroom in which you assume that all of the students have different political viewpoints.”

One important niche he believes MTSU has filled and should continue to fill is bringing people with different perspectives on the Middle East to speak and teach — and to avoid “the echo chamber that many accuse of existing in American higher education.”

‘So Much Like Christianity’

Jenna Dawn Gray-Hildenbrand, an assistant professor of religious studies, came to the campus in 2012 as the first tenure-track faculty member in the discipline.

Each year she has noticed an increasing interest in religion courses. MTSU hired another tenure-track professor in the field in 2013 and has just approved a religious-studies major. While it’s not explicitly stated, she said, she is sure the administration’s strong support of her program has to do in part with the mosque controversy.

When she arrived at the university, she designed a religion-and-society course that now counts as a general-education requirement. One assignment asks students to attend a religious service that they’re not familiar with and write an essay about the experience. The mosque has always been one of the most popular sites, even though it’s uncomfortable for many students.

“For several of my students, when they visited the Islamic Center, it was the first time they’d ever walked into a space where they’d been a minority,” Ms. Gray-Hildenbrand said. Tennessee’s population is 79 percent white, and 81 percent identify as Christian, according to the Pew Research Center.

She shared excerpts from students’ papers about visiting the mosque this past semester. One described Islam as “so much like Christianity, they just don’t have an offering plate.” Some said they had been surprised at how racially diverse the congregation was. Another thought the mosque would have strict rules, but remarked that the atmosphere ended up being “chilled and relaxed.”

Toward the end of each visit, the mosque’s imam and Professor Sbenaty conduct a question-and-answer session with the students, stressing that they should ask anything, including about terrorism. The two men conclude by telling the students: Now that you’ve seen our worship space, if you hear someone saying something about Islam that you know isn’t true, please say something.

“That,” Ms. Gray-Hildenbrand said, “really resonates with them.”

In Murfreesboro, at least, there are signs that the Muslim community’s supporters are mostly drowning out the voices of its opponents. Last fall an attempted anti-Islam protest outside the mosque flopped. After the election, a group of community members called the Murfreesboro Support Alliance brought flowers to the mosque.

Since the mosque opened, it has regularly welcomed residents to join the congregation for iftar, the breaking of the fast during Ramadan.

Despite the anti-Muslim sentiments that have cropped up on and around campuses since Mr. Trump’s victory, including in Murfreesboro, the younger Mr. Sbenaty has faith that his city will overcome them. He says, “Love wins.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Nadia Dreid is a Chronicle intern.