From Pacific Standard Magazine
On an early morning last summer, Ajeyo Yusuf got the fright of his life. “I get a little bit jittery when I talk about this,” he says, recalling the incident.
That morning, the 26-year-old from Bangladesh woke up around 5 a.m. at his family’s home in Queens, New York. He was answering emails before heading into work at the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, when he saw out the window “a few burly white guys” descend the stairs to his family’s basement apartment. The men knocked on the front door and identified themselves as police, which was also emblazoned across the back of their jackets. Yusuf, though, could see through this ruse. “I knew who they were,” he says. “They had to be ICE agents.”
Yusuf and his family are just a few of the more than three million Muslims in the United States who now find themselves in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump‘s controversial immigration policies, as well as the hate groups and individual bigots who have been incited by the president’s rhetoric.
Trump’s road to the White House and his time in office have also been accompanied by a rise in extrajudicial anti-Muslim violence. Just days after the election, the Pew Research Center reported that assaults against Muslims had reached levels not seen since 2001.
But fear among Muslim-American communities is not leading to paralysis. Rather, it is inspiring resistance.
In response to the surge of Islamophobic policies and violence, Muslim organizations have begun training their communities to defend themselves. Founded in 2003 to address the needs of Muslims post-9/11, the Muslim Community Network recently began organizing holistic self-defense workshops.
“Our self-defense classes are unique in that we first offer attendees the opportunity to process current events and discuss how to empower each other through guided questions, and then we move into the self-defense portion,” explains MCN executive director Christina Tasca. Following Trump’s election, MCN organized a self-defense workshop that filled up its 2,700 slots in just 10 hours. Three more classes were organized after the initial event, and MCN has received funding from the New York Community Trust to provide further workshops.
