Source/Credit: Chattanooga Times Free Press
By Perla Trevizo | September 9th, 2011
REMEMBERING 9/11
Naseer Humayun can clearly remember what he was doing on Sept. 11, 2001.
Humayun, now a pulmonary and critical care specialist, was doing his residency at St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pa., making the rounds of his intensive care unit patients when he saw the World Trade Center’s twin towers falling on television.
“It was just ... I was totally ...” Humayun stuttered, searching for the right words.
“I was just extremely sad and basically hurt that this had happened,” he said in an interview from his home in Tunnel Hill, Ga.
“No. 1, America had been attacked and then by people who called themselves Muslims,” said Humayun, a Pakistan native who moved to the United States 18 years ago, eight of those in the Dalton, Ga., area.
His daughter Najia doesn’t remember 9/11. She was only 3 years old. But she does remember watching a video in school when she was in third or fourth grade that showed the devastation after the attacks.
“It was really sad watching what happened,” she said.
But the awkward stares from her classmates and the tension that followed were, in some ways, just as disheartening.
“It makes the Muslim community feel sad that many people in America are biased now and think most Muslims are terrorists,” she said.
Neither she nor her family have been personally attacked, but she said after 9/11 one of her cousins in Maryland was called a terrorist at school and was teased.
Her mother, Khola Humayun, said she also feels the stares when she goes shopping or to the bank and she’s wearing her hijab — the scarf Muslim women use to cover their hair.
“I feel sometimes a resistance but it’s from people who don’t know me personally,” she said. “I don’t know what’s in another person’s heart.”
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