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Muslim names no fly list { February 21 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/sports/othersports/21ROWW.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/sports/othersports/21ROWW.html
February 21, 2003
Rower With Muslim Name Is an All-American Suspect
By IRA BERKOW
They weren't going to let Aquil Abdullah on the plane at Newark International Airport, at least not right away.
"We need you to step to the side," he was told by a reservations clerk for his prospective flight to Seattle. "I have to call a police officer."
"What's the problem?" asked Abdullah, a 29-year-old member of the United States national rowing team and the single sculls winner in the 2002 United States national rowing championships. The incident at the airport happened a few weeks ago, on the morning of Jan. 31, and Abdullah had a good idea what the problem was. A similar incident happened to him a few months earlier.
Abdullah was on a no-fly list. "What this means," Andrew Kurpat, a police officer with the Port Authority in Newark, explained yesterday, "is that anyone with a common Muslim name has to be checked out, to see if it's an alias, to see if he's on a terrorist list."
So the Port Authority officers checked through their files, contacted the F.B.I. and the immigration authorities, and then came back to Abdullah. He was no terrorist. By this time, his flight had departed.
"I can understand the concern," Abdullah said recently with a graceful, disarming demeanor and an easy smile. "It's legitimate, of course, and some of my friends are angrier about the name profiling than I am, but I do wish the authorities could be quicker about the check."
Abdullah had arisen at 3:30 a.m. in his apartment in Princeton, N.J., the town in which the national rowing team trains, to get to the airport two hours before his flight. He didn't get the next flight until 6 in the evening, didn't arrive in Seattle until 1:30 in the morning. "It took me almost 24 hours to get from Princeton to Newark to Seattle," he said. "Someone joked that I could have made it faster by rowing."
There are a few things that set Abdullah apart from someone with another common Muslim name like Muhammad or Hussein. One is that he is the only black man to win either a national single sculls rowing championship or a race at the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta in England. He was a silver medalist in the 1999 Pan-Am Games, and in the 2000 United States Olympic trials he was just 33-hundredths of a second away from making the Olympic team. (Anita DeFrantz and Pat Spratlen Etem, both women, are the only other African-Americans to have made the national rowing team.)
Another difference is that Abdullah was not even his name at birth. He was born in Washington with the name Aquilibn Michael X. Shumate. When his father, Michael Shumate, converted to Islam when Aquil was 6, he changed his and his son's last name to Abdullah.
Aquil, who grew to be 6 feet, 185 pounds, was a high school football star (a wide receiver at Woodrow Wilson), won a rowing scholarship to George Washington University (after rowing for Wilson High in his senior year) and earned a degree in physics.
"I can understand his being detained at an airport once," said Mike Teti, head coach of the national rowing team, "but when it happens again, that's unfortunate. Here's a guy representing his country in athletics and he's as American as you can get. A second time, they should know who he is."
As for his rowing ambitions, Abdullah's not making the Olympic team in 2000 remains a spur. He recalls the last day of the single sculling competition, Monday morning, June 12, on the Cooper River in Camden, N.J. Midway through the race, Abdullah slipped ahead, but with 750 meters to go in the 2,000-meter course, Abdullah and Don Smith were dead even, plunging their oars at about 31 strokes a minute. Smith pulled ahead and won the Olympic spot with a time of 6 minutes 50.18 seconds, to Abdullah's 6:50.51. (Smith finished eighth at Sydney.)
Abdullah was heartbroken about his loss, but a friend put it into perspective for him. "What do we win when we don't win?" he asked.
Abdullah now seems able to answer it to his satisfaction, as he did in "Perfect Balance," a book he wrote with Chris Ingraham in 2001. It is a small philosophical book on a young man's thoughtful journey to self-understanding. "Growing as people is the most important victory we can ever achieve in our lives," he writes. "Because each person is the only one accountable for his actions, each person is also the only one responsible for his success or failure."
Abdullah's goals include not only trying to improve personal traits — greater consistency, dependability and determination, greater family values — but also to win in the world championships in Milan in August and make the Olympic team in 2004.
"Aquil is a multidimensional, multitalented guy," Teti said, "and he has been pulled in different directions. He'd be out until 3 in the morning playing saxophone in his band in nightclubs. He also works freelance as a computer programmer. I told him: `Aquil, you have to put all your eggs in one basket if you're going to reach your goals in rowing.' I think he has, now."
Meanwhile, the chance that Abdullah will again be checked and double-checked before a flight is likely. "I oscillate between feeling great, that the government is taking such measures to protect the citizens of the United States — I know that there is a price to pay for this protection," he said, "but then I get feelings of indignation that I'm being singled out. I mean, I have obligations, too. I don't want to miss my flights. And I'm concerned as to what comes next, what infringements on our personal freedoms."
And if he were on an airplane with someone with Arab characteristics, how would he feel? "I would raise an eyebrow and get a good look at who he was, and check out what he was doing," he said. "But I know I'd feel a sense of shame, too, because I know the feeling of being followed by a detective in a department store because of assumptions he made because I was black. The issue is terribly conflicting for me."
Finally, Abdullah was asked the name of the mosque he attends. "I'm not a member of any mosque," he said. "I'm Catholic, actually."
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