History > 2007 > USA > Muslims (I)

To Muslim Girls,

Scouts Offer a Chance to Fit In

November 28, 2007
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

MINNEAPOLIS — Sometimes when Asma Haidara, a 12-year-old Somali immigrant, wants to shop at Target or ride the Minneapolis light-rail system, she puts her Girl Scout sash over her everyday clothes, which usually include a long skirt worn over pants as well as a swirling head scarf.

She has discovered that the trademark green sash — with its American flag, troop number (3009) and colorful merit badges — reduces the number of glowering looks she draws from people otherwise bothered by her traditional Muslim dress.

“When you say you are a girl scout, they say, ‘Oh, my daughter is a girl scout, too,’ and then they don’t think of you as a person from another planet,” said Asma, a slight, serious girl with a bright smile. “They are more comfortable about sitting next to me on the train.”

Scattered Muslim communities across the United States are forming Girl Scout troops as a sort of assimilation tool to help girls who often feel alienated from the mainstream culture, and to give Muslims a neighborly aura. Boy Scout troops are organized with the same inspiration, but often the leap for girls is greater because many come from conservative cultures that frown upon their participating in public physical activity.

By teaching girls to roast hot dogs or fix a flat bicycle tire, Farheen Hakeem, one troop leader here, strives to help them escape the perception of many non-Muslims that they are different.

Scouting is a way of celebrating being American without being any less Muslim, Ms. Hakeem said.

“I don’t want them to see themselves as Muslim girls doing this ‘Look at us, we are trying to be American,’ ” she said. “No, no, no, they are American. It is not an issue of trying.”

The exact number of Muslim girl scouts is unknown, especially since, organizers say, most Muslim scouts belong to predominantly non-Muslim troops. Minneapolis is something of an exception, because a few years ago the Girl Scout Council here surveyed its shrinking enrollment and established special outreach coordinators for various minorities. Some 280 Muslim girls have joined about 10 predominantly Muslim troops here, said Hodan Farah, who until September was the Scout coordinator for the Islamic community.

Nationally, the Boy Scouts of America count about 1,500 youths in 100 clubs of either Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts sponsored by Islamic organizations, said Gregg Shields, a spokesman for the organization.

The Girl Scouts’ national organization, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., has become flexible in recent years about the old trappings associated with suburban, white, middle-class Christian scouting. Many troops have done away with traditions like saying grace before dinner at camp, and even the Girl Scout Promise can be retooled as needed.

“On my honor I will try to serve Allah and my country, to help people and live by the Girl Scout law,” eight girls from predominantly Muslim Troop 3119 in Minneapolis recited on one recent rainy Sunday before setting off for a cookout in a local park.

Some differences were readily apparent, of course. At the cookout, Ms. Hakeem, a former Green Party candidate for mayor, negotiated briefly with one sixth grader, Asha Gardaad, who was fasting for the holy month of Ramadan.

“If you break your fast, will your mother get mad at me?” Ms. Hakeem asked. Asha shook her head emphatically no.

The troop leader distributed supplies: hot dogs followed by s’mores for dessert. All was halal — that is, in adherence with the dietary requirements of Islamic law — with the hot dogs made of beef rather than pork.

It was Asha’s first s’more. “It’s delicious!” she exclaimed, licking sticky goop off her fingers as thunder crashed outside the park shelter with its roaring fire. “It’s a good way to break my fast!”

Women trying to organize Girl Scout troops in Muslim communities often face resistance from parents, particularly immigrants from an Islamic culture like that of Somalia, where tradition dictates that girls do housework after school.

In Nashville, where Ellisha King of Catholic Charities helps run a Girl Scout troop on a shoestring to assist Somali children with acculturation, most parents vetoed a camping trip, for example. They figured years spent as refugees in tents was enough camping, Ms. King recalled.

But a more common concern among parents is that the Girl Scouts will somehow dilute Islamic traditions.

“They are afraid you are going to become a blue-eyed, blond-haired Barbie doll,” said Asma, the girl who at times makes her sash everyday attire. Asma noted that her mother had asked whether she was joining some Christian cabal. “She was afraid that if we hang out with Americans too much,” the young immigrant said, “it will change our culture or who we are.”

Troop leaders win over parents by explaining that various activities incorporate Muslim traditions. In Minneapolis, for instance, Ms. Hakeem helped develop the Khadija Club, named for the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, which exposes older girls to the history of prominent Muslim women.

Suboohi Khan, 10, won her Bismallah (in the name of God) ribbon by writing 4 of God’s 99 names in Arabic calligraphy and decorating them, as well as memorizing the Koran’s last verse, used for protection against gossips and goblins. Otherwise, she said, her favorite badge involved learning “how to make body glitter and to see which colors look good on us” and “how to clean up our nails.”

Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. does not issue religious badges, but endorses those established by independent groups. Gulafshan K. Alavi started one such group, the Islamic Committee on Girl Scouting, in Stamford, Conn., in 1990. The demand for information about Muslim badges, Mrs. Alavi said, has grown to the point where this year she had the pamphlet listing her club’s requirements printed rather than sending out a photocopied flier. She also shipped up to 400 patches awarded to girls who study Ramadan traditions, she said, the most ever.

Predominantly Muslim troops do accept non-Muslim members. In Minneapolis, Alexis Eastlund, 10, said other friends sometimes pestered her about belonging to a mostly Muslim troop, although she has known many of its members half her life.

“I never really thought of them as different,” Alexis said. “But other girls think that it is weird that I am Christian and hang out with a bunch of Muslim girls. I explain to them that they are the same except they have to wear a hijab on their heads.”

Ms. Farah, who served as an outreach coordinator in Minneapolis and remains active in the Scouts, said she used the organization as a platform to try to ease tensions in the community. Scraps between African-American and Somali girls prompted her to start a research project demonstrating to them that their ancestors all came from roughly the same place.

Ms. Hakeem, the troop leader, said she tried to find projects to improve the girls’ self-esteem, like going through the Eddie Bauer catalog to cut out long skirts and other items that adhere to Islamic dress codes.

All in all, scouting gives the girls a rare sense of belonging, troop leaders and members say.

“It is kind of cool to say that you are a girl scout,” Asma said. “It is good to have something to associate yourself with other Americans. I don’t want people to think that I am a hermit, that I live in a cave, isolated and afraid of change. I like to be part of society. I like being able to say that I am a girl scout just like any other normal girl.”

To Muslim Girls, Scouts Offer a Chance to Fit In, NYT, 28.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/us/28girlscout.html

LAPD plan draws ire from Muslims



8 November 2007
USA Today

A counterterrorism project in Los Angeles that would collect information about Muslim neighborhoods is drawing outrage from Islamic groups and civil libertarians who say it unjustly singles out residents based on faith and could lead to unconstitutional police tactics.

The groups complain that the Los Angeles Police Department's "community mapping" project, which aims to prevent radicalization and homegrown terrorism, unfairly brings suspicion on Muslims.

They say it undermines trust established between Muslims and police since the 9/11 attacks and is reminiscent of how Nazis identified Jews during the Holocaust.

"This is anti-Semitism reborn as Islamophobia," said Shakeel Syed, director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. "We will fiercely resist this."

The mapping project would collect information about specific neighborhoods but not individuals, according to Michael Downing, the LAPD's counterterrorism chief.

Downing said the aim is to study where enclaves of Muslims live so that police can study their culture, history, language and socioeconomic status to gain an understanding of their communities.

If a community is isolated, it may be determined that it is susceptible to extremist ideology, Downing said. In such cases, he said, police could then go into those communities and try to head off potential problems by offering people access to government and social services.

"Our goal is to try to be a catalyst to integrate the communities into the greater society," Downing said.

How much information would be collected and how it will be used remained unclear to groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which joined Muslim groups in writing a harshly worded letter Thursday to the LAPD.

"Singling out individuals for investigation, surveillance, and data-gathering based on their religion constitutes religious profiling," the letter said. "In addition to constitutional concerns … religious profiling engenders fear and distrust."

Darrel Stephens, president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said large police departments routinely use community mapping to understand crime trends.

Muslim leaders say mapping based on a community's faith and ethnicity is different from mapping based on crime. "In the Muslim community, there hasn't been terrorism," said Hussam Ayloush of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Ayloush said the police department's job is to enforce laws. "Police should not be in the business of analyzing political views and religious views," he said. "It's really dangerous. This is a slippery slope."

The ACLU agreed. "Religious profiling is not a legitimate tool of law enforcement," said Ranjana Natarajan an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.

    LAPD plan draws ire from Muslims, UT, 8.11.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-08-muslims_N.htm

Abandon Stereotypes,

Muslims in America Say

September 4, 2007
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

ROSEMONT, Ill., Sept 3 — It is time for the United States to stop treating every American Muslim as somehow suspect, leaders of the faith said at their largest annual convention, which ended here on Monday.

Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans should distinguish between mainstream Muslims and the radical fringe, the leaders said.

“Muslim Americans feel an increasing level of tension and scrutiny in contemporary society,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization in the United States and the convention organizer.

The image problems were among the topics most discussed by many of the 30,000 attendees. A fresh example cited was an open letter from two Republican House members, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan and Sue Myrick of North Carolina, that attacked the Justice Department for sending envoys to the convention because, the lawmakers said, the Islamic Society of North America was a group of “radical jihadists.”

The lone Muslim in Congress, Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, the keynote speaker here, dismissed the letter as ill informed and typical of bigoted attacks that other minorities have suffered.

Leaders of American Muslim organizations attribute the growing intolerance to three main factors: global terrorist attacks in the name of Islam, disappointing reports from the Iraq war and the agenda of some supporters of Israel who try taint Islam to undermine the Palestinians.

American Muslims say they expect the attacks to worsen in the presidential election and candidates to criticize Islam in an effort to prove that they are tough on terrorism.

Zaid Shakir, an African-American imam with rock star status among young Muslims, described how on a recent road trip from Michigan to Washington he heard comments on talk radio from people who were “making stuff up about Islam.”

Among the most egregious, he said, was from a person in Kentucky who denounced the traditional short wood stick some Muslims use to clean their teeth, saying, “They are really sharpening up their teeth because they are planning to eat you, yes they are.”

Representatives of at least eight federal departments and agencies attended the convention, their booths sandwiched among hundreds of others from bookstores, travel agencies, perfumeries, clothing designers and real estate developers.

Mark S. Ward, who runs programs in Asia and the Middle East for the Agency for International Development, said Washington had to compete for influence abroad with militant groups that are expert at delivering humanitarian services.

Mr. Ward said he hoped more American Muslim organizations would apply to help distribute overseas aid.

A few people approached the Federal Bureau of Investigation booth to voice dismay at its presence, said a recruiter, David Valle, but most expressed pleasant surprise.

“A lot of folks think we want to hire them to spy on their community, spy on their families,” he said. “We want to dispel any myths they might have about the F.B.I.”

The Justice Department responded to Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Myrick’s letter by noting that broad community contact in areas like voting rights was an important part of its mission.

That theme was echoed by Daniel W. Sutherland, chief officer for civil rights and liberties at the Homeland Security Department. Mr. Sutherland told a luncheon audience that the government needed to dispel prejudice and misconceptions to steer the public discussion about fighting terrorism to “a higher level.”

Sometimes frustration with the government boiled over. At a seminar on charitable giving, Ihsan Haque of Akron, Ohio, asked a Treasury Department representative, Michael Rosen, how to avoid being prosecuted for donating to Muslim charities. When Mr. Rosen said the government did not have the resources to check the million or so charities in the United States, Mr. Haque shouted, “And I do?”

Muslim leaders described the government relationship toward Muslim organizations as contradictory. The government seeks to foster greater civic engagement, because a lack of engagement is widely considered a big cause of Muslim extremism in Europe. A Department of Homeland Security official moderated a panel on aiding engagement.

Muslim groups are often treated as suspect, speakers said. In a trial that started in July in Dallas, federal prosecutors named the Islamic Society of North America as part of an effort to raise money for groups the government considers terrorists, but did not charge it with wrongdoing.

The Justice Department has to decide on its law enforcement side what it considers a target, said Khurrum Wahid, a prominent Muslim defense lawyer.

“Are they going to continue to say that the higher degree of religiosity you have the higher likelihood that you are a threat, because that’s the message they’ve sent,” Mr. Wahid said.

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, denounced by name Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham, as well as Dennis Prager, a well-known radio host who is Jewish.

“The time has come to stand up to the opportunists, the media figures, the religious leaders and politicians who demonize Muslims and bash Islam, exploiting the fears of their fellow citizens for their own purposes,” Rabbi Yoffie told the opening session.

The Koran tells Muslims to abstain from drinking alcohol and to lower their gaze in modesty when meeting a member of the opposite sex, but some college-age Muslim men and women at the convention stayed up late into the night drinking, talking and getting to know one another.

“If you keep your gaze lowered all the time, you might just walk into a wall,” said Hazem Talha, a high school senior from Atlanta who said he was here for the religious lectures.

    Abandon Stereotypes, Muslims in America Say, NYT, 4.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/us/04muslims.html

Borders Spell Trouble for Arab-American

April 29, 2007
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Abe Dabdoub calls the day he was sworn in as an American citizen last year the proudest moment of his life, little suspecting that his new identity would set off a bureaucratic nightmare at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security.

Most of his family members live in Canada, and on each of Mr. Dabdoub’s 14 trips to visit them since last August, on his way back across the Ambassador Bridge into Michigan, the Customs and Border Patrol agents have sent him through a security gantlet, he says.

He has been fingerprinted 14 times, his body searched 9 times, been handcuffed 4 times and isolated in a separate detention room 13 times. On the fourth trip, the border patrol agents started subjecting his wife to similar scrutiny.

Two months ago, he sought relief through a new online system that the Department of Homeland Security trumpets as a one-stop shop for travelers who think they have been wronged, the Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, or TRIP. But the problem continues unabated and, typical of such cases, no one in the federal government nor his elected representatives will tell him why he is being singled out.

“I’ve always believed that in America if there is some type of injustice going on, that if you make it known to the right people, it will get taken care of,” said Mr. Dabdoub, 39, who was born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents. They moved to Canada when he was 5.

“This time I’ve lost faith in the system; it’s either indifferent or inefficient or both,” Mr. Dabdoub, an engineer and manager of a plant in Cleveland that provides steel to automobile companies, added, in a telephone interview.

Arab-American and civil rights organizations say experiences like Mr. Dabdoub’s are common enough that they suspect the federal security agency is profiling Arabs and Muslims, an accusation the department denies.

Various Arab-American organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union are holding a conference in Cleveland today to highlight cases like Mr. Dabdoub’s. They want increased Congressional oversight of the terrorist watch list system to insure that the security agency is not abusing the basic civil rights of United States citizens at the borders.

“Their primary job is to make sure the right people are identified on those lists,” said Kareem Shora, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, one of the organizers. “If innocent people are being identified in that process, the manner with which that can be rectified is very, very limited.”

A Government Accountability Office report issued last September said that just 31 individuals whose names were mistakenly on the watch list had them taken off in 2005. Thousands of such redress queries have been submitted, most of them from people who are misidentified. But their names cannot be removed because they are not the person on the list, the report said.

At least two legal cases prompted by border problems are working their way through the courts, including one filed in Federal District Court in Chicago last year by the A.C.L.U. against the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

More recent episodes that provoked concern include one in which border agents reportedly Googled the name of an Ohio man and then questioned him about a letter to the editor he had written to The Toledo Blade regarding events in the Middle East.

In Chicago, the government is trying to get the A.C.L.U. case dismissed on the grounds that such stops are “routine,” said Harvey Grossman, the legal director for the Illinois branch.

Documents the court forced the government to release in February indicate that the Customs and Border Patrol agency has received more than 11,000 queries about border issues since Sept. 11, 2001, he said, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement has received 4,855.

The government maintains that it cannot identify how many of the complaints stem from border detentions, which underscores its “cavalier attitude about the treatment of citizens,” Mr. Grossman said.

The homeland security response is that its basic job is to identify “bad guys,” and that this generates some greater inconvenience that affects a fraction of the millions of Americans traveling.

Since the TRIP system was inaugurated in February, it has received 600 to 800 complaints a week, said Russ Knocke, the spokesman for the department, and it takes time to process them through all of the federal agencies who can contribute to the terrorism watch list.

He would not comment on Mr. Dabdoub’s case, noting only that the department was aware of it, and emphasized that seeking redress was no guarantee against extra scrutiny.

Mr. Dabdoub said no one he contacted in the government helped him. After the first incident, on Aug. 6, he wrote his two United States senators, George V. Voinovich and Mike DeWine, who was defeated last November.

He received a joint form letter saying they would look into the problem and get back to him. He never heard from either one again. He got no response at all to two letters he sent to Marcy Kaptur, his congresswoman.

Homeland security officials took five months to answer a first letter, and suggested he complain to the border supervisor.

Drawing a little extra scrutiny because of his Middle Eastern origins is one thing, he said, but being singled out on every crossing is abusive, and he carefully logs each incident on a spreadsheet. He said he faced no problems on his repeated border crossings from 2001 until 2006, when he lived in the United States as a Canadian with a green card, he said.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group, said, “A big reason that these watch list systems don’t work is because the agencies are allowed to compile all this information that basically goes unchallenged.”

Mr. Rotenberg noted that oversight groups including the White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which issued a report this month saying it would review the amount of transparency possible, all ignored the Privacy Act.

For any government agency to say, “We have got something on you but we can’t tell you what it is, really goes to the heart of what the Privacy Act tried to prevent,” Mr. Rotenberg said.

    Borders Spell Trouble for Arab-American, NYT, 29.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/us/29border.html?hp

Rewriting the Ad Rules

for Muslim-Americans

April 28, 2007
The New York Times
By LOUISE STORY

For years, few advertisers in the United States have dared to reach out to Muslims.

Either they did not see much potential for sales or they feared a political backlash. And there were practical reasons: American Muslims come from so many ethnic backgrounds that their only common ground is their religion, a subject most marketers avoid.

That is beginning to change. Consumer companies and advertising executives are focusing on ways to use the cultural aspects of the Muslim religion to help sell their products.

Grocers and consumer product companies are considering ways to adapt their goods to Muslim rules, which forbid among other things, gelatin and pig fat, which is often used in cosmetics and cleaning products. Retailers are looking into providing more conservative skirts, even during the summer months, and mainstream advertisers are planning to place some commercials on the satellite channels that Muslims often watch.

Marketing to Muslims carries some risks. But advertising executives, used to dividing American consumers into every sort of category, say that ignoring this group — estimated to be about five million to eight million people, and growing fast — would be like missing the Hispanic market in the 1990s.

“I think Muslims have had to draw into themselves,” said Marian Salzman, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of JWT, a large advertising agency in the WPP Group that plans to encourage clients like Johnson & Johnson and Unilever to market to American Muslims. “It puts an increased burden on a marketer post-9/11 to say, ‘Look, we understand.’ ”

Companies in the Detroit area, where there is a dense population of Muslims, are leading the change. A McDonald’s there serves halal Chicken McNuggets; Walgreens has Arabic signs in its aisles. And now, Ikea, which recently opened a store in the suburb of Canton, Mich., that has had trouble attracting as many Muslim customers as it had hoped, has been touring local homes and talking to Muslims to figure out their needs.

The store there plans to sell decorations for Ramadan next fall and is adding halal meat to its restaurant menu, or meat that is prepared according to Islamic law. Catalogs in Arabic are being planned, and female Muslim employees are expected to be given an Ikea-branded hijab, to wear over their head if they wish.

Video
More Video »
Marketing to Muslims is, of course, mostly intended to increase sales, but advertising has also long been a mirror of changes in society.

Ms. Salzman pointed to ads in the 1960s that featured Jewish products like Levy’s rye bread, which, she said, helped bring that group more into mainstream advertising. She also noted that ads from companies like McDonald’s in the early 1990s portrayed busy mothers who admitted that they did not cook every night like their mothers did.

“Marketers have actually helped us to rewrite the rules about what we’re comfortable with,” she said.

Because the Census Bureau does not ask about religion, there is no authoritative count of Muslims in America. Some Muslim organizations provide estimates as high as 10 million. Others say it could be as low as three million.

Whatever the number, many Muslims have clustered in areas that include Orange County, Calif.; Houston; the state of Georgia; northern Virginia; New York City and Long Island; and the Detroit area.

Over the last few months, JWT conducted a large study of Muslims in the United States and Britain to determine whether they would be receptive to specialized advertising. There were 835 people in the United States study. Muslim Americans spend about $170 billion on consumer products, JWT estimates; this figure is expected to grow rapidly as the population expands and younger Muslims build careers.

Ms. Salzman said the study found that Muslims were buying many standard products but that they felt excluded from mainstream advertising. In particular, she said, they wanted companies to recognize their holidays.

Ms. Salzman said JWT had little trouble surveying Muslims in Britain, but found it had to clarify at the start of each phone call in the United States that it was not calling from a government agency.

Over the next few weeks, JWT plans to reach out to the chief executives of all of its major clients, including JetBlue, the Ford Motor Company and HSBC, to encourage them to market to Muslims in the United States and Britain.

“These advertisers have been in the Middle East and in the Far East Muslim countries for decades, so they’re already dealing with the Muslim market,” said Tayyibah Taylor, publisher and editor in chief of Azizah magazine, a Muslim-focused magazine in Atlanta. “They just haven’t been dealing with the Muslim marketer here at home.”

Almas Abbasi, a radiologist in Long Island who was one of the people interviewed by JWT, said she would be grateful for advertising that included Muslims.

“If Ramadan starts, and you see an ad in the newspaper saying, ‘Happy Ramadan, here’s a special in our store,’ everyone will run to that store,” she said.

Her daughter, Shaheen Magsi, a senior at the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, N.Y., said her family turned off their cable television three years ago after seeing too many negative stereotypes about Muslims. She said she quickly grew tired of telling people at school that, no, she did not agree with Osama bin Laden.

“It’d be really good to say, ‘Oh, there’s a Muslim on TV, and they’re portraying something good other than Muslims killing people,’ ” she said.

Just what approach companies should take to reach Muslims is far from clear. The market is diverse, including African-Americans, South Asians, Caucasians and people from the Middle East, as well as people who are more or less conservative in their religious views. American Muslims disagree about whether the Muslim women in ads should wear the hijab, for instance.

Nationwide Financial Services has already been advertising to people from Pakistan and India, who are often Muslim. But it prefers to focus on their country of origin, said Tariq Khan, Nationwide’s vice president of market development and diversity.

Still, religion is culturally relevant at times, he said, and Nationwide may run ads in print publications in June that feature Hindu and Muslim weddings.

Rizwan Jamil, director of beverages at Unilever in Pakistan, said Unilever often ran promotions there for Lipton tea and custard powders during Muslim holidays, using bright and festive packaging, and discounts. These sorts of gestures would appeal to a broad swath of Muslims in the United States, he said, without setting off discussions about religion.

“It’s just like when you’re advertising something for Christmas,” Mr. Jamil said. “You’re not talking about Christians or Christianity. You’re talking about Christmas, the event. I would be careful — to the extent that I used religion. I wouldn’t shout it out. I wouldn’t shout out to the world that ‘I’m talking to Muslims.’ ”

There is a genuine fear about how to market to Muslims — and whether to do so — at many big companies, executives at Muslim-focused media outlets and organizations said.

“United States companies don’t want to risk alienating their domestic consumers,” said Nasser Beydoun, chairman of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn, Mich., which is working with Ikea, Wal-Mart and Comcast to develop strategies to reach Muslim consumers. Other companies like Frito-Lay and Kodak have recently considered marketing to Muslims.

Publishers of Muslim women’s magazines, like Azizah and Muslim Girl Magazine, said they had to dispel advertisers’ concerns that they would feature articles that were radical or political.

Bridges TV, a cable and satellite network, has changed its sales pitch to make advertisers more comfortable. When it was introduced in 2004, Bridges TV presented itself as a Muslim television network, but lately the network has been having better luck labeling itself as “bridging the West and East,” said Mohamed Numan-Ali, the network’s advertising manager. Brands like Ford, Lunesta and Lincoln have signed on as advertisers, he said.

On the other hand, some Muslim-focused media companies that are courting advertisers highlight religion as their strength. Executives at QTV, a new satellite network centered around the Koran, tell advertisers that the focus on religion is what keeps its viewers tuning in, often five times a day for prayer calls.

Companies that advertise on QTV should not worry about backlash, said Mahmood Ahmad, president of Digital Broadcasting Network Inc., which produces QTV, because “Fox News viewers are not watching QTV anyway.” He added, “QTV is the safest place to be because they won’t know.”

Advertising on satellite channels popular with Muslims and in the publications that focus on them would be inexpensive compared with mainstream media and might be highly effective because so few companies reach out to this group.

“People would flock to it,” said Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, a nonprofit group based in New York. “They would say ‘I can’t believe I’m being validated by Macy’s. I can’t believe I’m being validated by Whole Foods.’ ”

Even in mainstream advertising, companies may win over customers by including Muslims in some ads, said Razaq Baloch, a partner in Spicy Banana, an ad agency specializing in reaching customers from India and Pakistan.

Alia Fouz, a Palestinian-American who lives near the Ikea in Canton, said she never felt that ads were addressing her as a Muslim when she was growing up in Virginia. Sitting in the Ikea snack bar with her young son, she said ads that included American Muslims would grab her — and her son’s — attention.

“We should be included,” Ms. Fouz said. “We live here.”

Rewriting the Ad Rules for Muslim-Americans, NYT, 28.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/28/business/28muslim.html