Muslim man finds Mainers tolerant Nation at large seen as less accepting

BANGOR – Mahmoud El-Begearmi had hoped that five years after Sept. 11, 2001, Americans would understand that the terrorists who planned and executed the attacks were not representing the tenets of Islam.

El-Begearmi, a retired Cooperative Extension professor at the University of Maine, said Monday that he was saddened that the progress toward tolerance and understanding that has been achieved in much of the state had not been reached on a national level.

The leader of northern Maine’s Muslim community, El-Begearmi spent the final months of 2001 and most of 2002 traveling throughout the state explaining how Muslims, Jews and Christians all trace their roots to Abraham, father of Isaac and Ishmael.

He often said that he did not believe that Osama bin Laden was correctly interpreting the Quran, the holy book of Islam.

“I think locally,” El-Begearmi, 62, of Bangor said Monday. “We’ve moved so much together.

“We had friends over last night, and in our conversation, one mentioned that he had been at a get-together recently. Rep. [Michael] Michaud was there with some Lebanese people and some others whose countries are in conflict politically, but these people were able to get together in an atmosphere that was like any other get-together.

“I had hoped that by now,” he continued, “that would not just be happening in Bangor, but happening nationally. I had hoped that we’d have gone back to talking to each other, and life would just go on.”

El-Begearmi, a native of Egypt, is an American citizen. He moved to Maine in 1981 and began a weekly prayer group at the university. The group, made up mostly of Muslim students, faculty and staff, in 1995 purchased land on the corner of Park and Washburn streets in Orono. The community opened its mosque, the Islamic Center of Maine, on the site less than six months after Sept. 11, 2001.

El-Begearmi said that in the post-Sept. 11 atmosphere, Muslims did not experience locally what Muslims in other states did.

Few of the people who attended the mosque the first year it opened are still in Maine, El-Begearmi said Monday. The new members, many of them students, come to El-Begearmi with fears about their safety and privacy based on national news reports.

“All new people who have arrived feel they cannot let their guard down,” he said. “They’ve heard about FBI interviews years ago. That is still making people uncomfortable. As recently as a few weeks back, I tried to make the point that regardless of what you hear about people being arrested or interviewed by police, at end of day this country is still a country of law. You might not see it at first sight, but eventually your rights will prevail.

“I try to let them know that they are not going to be snatched somewhere and nobody would know about them anymore.”

Although the charged, fearful atmosphere after the attacks has abated, the political climate in Washington is “poisoning the process” and keeping the psychological wounds inflicted that day from healing, El-Begearmi said.

“Grief is a process that we must go through when we experience loss,” he said. “At some point, peace comes to your heart, and you start to move on. But when you are constantly reminded of this loss, you can’t find that peace.

“When people start talking about the war in Iraq … on TV and still evoke 9-11, even though there’s an abundance of information available that does not ever link Iraq or Saddam Hussein to the events of 9-11 – this is what I see is poisoning that atmosphere. I am much saddened by the fact that this environment, which has not given people a chance to heal, still exists.”

El-Begearmi said he has not given up hope. He said Monday that in another five years, in a different political climate, people and governments around the globe might understand that the things that unite them are more important than their differences.

“Experts talk about cultural divisions and civilization clashes,” he said. “I think this is not helping. There is no civilization divide between Islam and the West.

“On an individual level, the person in Afghanistan or Egypt or Indonesia and a person in Maine want the same things – to have a family, a home, a job,” El-Begearmi said. “This is the human level that I was hoping that we’d have reached by this time.”