Distressing words for Muslims

Mahmud Jafri, a Shi'ite Muslim who was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and arrived in the United States 31 years ago, is adamant when he says he wants to be viewed as an American.

''We are Americans who happen to be Muslims," said Jafri, who is president of an Oriental rug company and active in Republican politics in Dover.

Jafri and fellow trustees of the Islamic Masumeen Center of New England in Hopkinton, one of the region's few Shi'ite mosques, were among the Boston-area Muslims who were alarmed by Governor Mitt Romney's recent call for heightened surveillance of certain Muslims to ensure national security.

''We should not be identified by our faith [or] by the acts of a minute minority who [do] not represent mainstream Islam in any way, form, or shape," Jafri said. ''I don't think America is about that."

Romney's suggestion that surveillance of certain mosques should be increased, made in a Sept. 14 speech on homeland security to the conservative Heritage Foundation, prompted a backlash from local Islamic associations, civil liberties groups, and religious organizations.

In the speech, Romney asked rhetorically whether more could be done to improve intelligence-gathering and to crack down on potential terrorists.

''How about people who are in settings, mosques for example, that may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror? Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping?" he asked, also suggesting tighter scrutiny of foreign students arriving from countries designated as sponsors of terrorism.

Romney, who is said to be considering a presidential run in 2008, has insisted he would only target mosques harboring religious extremists and would only advocate intelligence-gathering methods permitted under the Constitution.

''The governor is not going to apologize for doing what is necessary to protect our citizens and homeland," Romney's spokeswoman, Julie Teer, stated in an e-mail this week. ''The reality is we are at war and need to know when there are terrorists living in our country.

''The majority of Muslims are decent, law-abiding citizens, but unfortunately there are extremists who want to kill Americans and overthrow the US government. We need to find those individuals who teach terror and hate and stop them before they carry out their acts of cowardice," the e-mail said.

Hassan Abbas, an international security fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, is vice president of the Hopkinton mosque.

He is also a former Pakistani police chief stationed near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the author of a book on Islamic political power in his native country.

''Yes, religious extremism is a serious issue," Abbas said. ''But Romney's statement . . . creates [a] stereotype. I personally think Romney crossed the barrier by saying that. . . . I don't think that's in the American spirit."

Many Boston-area Muslims said they have long felt welcomed by most local residents, but they add that they do worry about stereotypes and profiling, especially in the post-Sept. 11 environment.

Their concerns are heightened when they travel, many said, because they believe they are singled out by security officials due to their last name, a head scarf, or a long beard.

Massachusetts is home to some 200,000 Muslims, Islamic groups say. The state's Muslim community includes people from a variety of homelands, ethnicities, and cultural traditions stretching from North Africa to Southeast Asia.

A poll in July from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 55 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Muslim-Americans, compared with 51 percent two years earlier. Attitudes about Islam itself were slightly less favorable.

Religion and recreation intersect at the mosque on Wood Street in Hopkinton, where shoes -- in accordance with Muslim tradition -- line the entrance to the main prayer area and where a lone boy was shooting a basketball outside on a recent sunny day.

The center is a religious and cultural hub for about 150 Muslim families, largely from Pakistan and India.

It also draws families from Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, mosque officials said.

Because the state's Shi'ite population is small, the mosque in Hopkinton has no in-house religious scholar, or alim, Abbas said. It periodically invites scholars from Detroit, Chicago, or New York, which have larger Shiite populations.

Jafri said that, following the Sept. 11 attacks, he and others at the center met with state and federal officials, offering access to their mosque and transcripts of religious services.

''After making this good-faith effort totally on our own initiative, for the governor to make these reckless remarks [is] disheartening and very sad," he said.

Syed Shabi Zaidi, the center's president and a native of Pakistan, called his Muslim community ''very open."

On the other side of the mosque, in an area partitioned off for them, several women said they didn't want government surveillance of potential security suspects to extend to all Muslims.

They said they worried about their children, who sometimes ask them why they are treated differently than other children.

Abbas, the mosque vice president who joined his peers for a gathering last weekend in Hopkinton just days before the commencement of the holy month of Ramadan, said he felt Romney was sacrificing the state's relatively small Muslim vote in favor of a tough line on homeland security.

Abbas said he also worried about members of his community being singled out.

''Because of religious extremism, I'm looked at differently."