Virginia, November 07: Ali Faruk grew up as a Muslim in an Indian-American military family in Northern Virginia.
Soldiers and police officers routinely showed up in uniform for Friday prayer services at Dar AlNoor Islamic Community Center in Woodbridge, sometimes carrying their service weapons.
“It really wasn’t a big deal,” said Faruk, who works as a policy analyst for the Virginia Interfaith Center in Richmond.
Faruk and other Muslims in the Richmond area don’t accept the notion that their faith poses a conflict or a threat to service in the American military, despite a deadly shooting at Fort Hood by an Army psychiatrist who is a Muslim.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, who was seriously injured in shootings that killed 13 and wounded 29 others, grew up in Arlington County, where military service also is common in a Muslim community that is ethnically diverse.
“It’s really not about his religion,” said M. Imad Damaj, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who serves as president of the Virginia Muslim Coalition for Public Affairs.
They say the shootings say more about the state of mental health in the military than religion or ethnicity.
“The really important thing is how we are meeting the mental-health needs of our service members,” said Faruk, whose father is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and whose brother is a second lieutenant in the Air Force.
“We need to start paying attention to the strain and demands put on our military families,” he said.
Damaj, who met with the Richmond Times-Dispatch yesterday to talk about the Fort Hood shootings, compared the rampage to the massacre committed at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty and then himself. Cho was a Korean-American who grew up in Springfield, but his race and ethnicity were not raised as reasons for his actions, Damaj said.
“It wasn’t about Korean-Americans,” Damaj said. “It was about that young man. He was mentally unstable, and he snapped.”
Damaj attends the Virginia Islamic Center in Chesterfield County, where he lives. Active-duty military and veterans worship at the center, where their service isn’t an issue, he said. “People don’t even think about it.”
—–Agencies