Photo by Michael Woodall

He laughs about it now, but it wasn’t a laughing matter that morning at a Phoenix private school when he was in fourth grade. A group of his friends said they couldn’t hang out with him anymore because he was a “Taliban.”

Imran Hafiz – bearing the proud name of the Virgin Mary’s father – looked at his pals as though they were nuts. It was a couple days after the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and in his 9-year-old mind, the viciousness of that assault had nothing to do with the cherished religion he was learning from his parents.

“I remember 9-11,” he says now, sitting in the living room of his parents’ Paradise Valley home. “Mom and Dad woke us up early and we saw the second plane hit.”

Along with his big sister, Yasmine, he sat there in horror as the towers fell. “And then the news anchors on television sounded scared. I’d never heard that before, and it scared me. But I had no idea of the implications that would follow. But then they started saying, ‘Oh, Muslims did it.’”

He tried to tell his friends he wasn’t “Taliban,” that the Taliban are the extreme right wing of Islam that has nothing to do with him or his family, but they wouldn’t listen. “It’s now immensely funny, but then, I was scared,” he remembers.

Around the same time, Yasmine was disappointed to find that, while there were fine books for Christian teens to help them through the rough years of growing up, there wasn’t anything at her local bookstore that spoke to Muslim teens – nothing that explained what the religion was all about and what it stood for, a vacuum that became particularly significant as “Islam” started being spoken in the same breath as “terrorism.”

These were the kinds of things the children brought to the dinner table as their parents listened to their frustrations and their fears. And then Hamid and Dilara Hafiz went back to New York, where they lived before moving their family to Arizona, and visited Ground Zero. As Americans, they were devastated by the destruction. But that was just the start. “We were doubly horrified because our faith was being maligned,” Dilara remembers. “After 9-11, you heard Muslims blamed, you didn’t hear Saudi Arabians blamed.”

Although most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, that nation escaped the scathing of both the American press and its people. Some say that’s because members of the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia are both personal and business associates with President George Bush and his family. Some say it’s because this was a way to demonize an enemy so Americans would do something they’d never done before in the entire history of the nation – attack a country that hadn’t attacked us first. Some say it was simple bigotry.

Consider this: How would you have felt if all Christians were blamed after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995? After all, until 9-11, that was the most devastating terrorist attack inside America – killing 168 and wounding more than 500 – committed by a “homegrown” boy, an Anglo man who’d served in our military and called himself not only a Christian but a Catholic. Yet did anyone ever say, “All Christians are terrorists”? Of course not, we know better.

The Hafiz family decided three years ago it was time for Americans to know better about Muslims, too.

Imran is now a freshman at Brophy Prep, Phoenix’s premiere Catholic boys school, while Yasmine is a senior at Xavier College Prep, the adjacent Catholic girls school. Along with their mother, Dilara, they’re fighting back against the stereotypes and misunderstandings of their religion with an amazing little book they wrote called The American Muslim Teenager’s Handbook. They published it through Phoenix’s Acacia Publishing this year.

“If we don’t speak up, how can we blame others for misunderstanding us?” Dilara asks.