For many Muslim Americans, threats of violence and discriminatory policies under Trump’s administration signal a need for increased political engagement

Fariha Nizam was sleepy and stressed last Thursday morning when she boarded the Q43 bus, which cuts through the affluent Queens neighborhood where Donald Trump was raised.

As a Muslim, she was concerned about the newly minted president-elect and his campaign promises that targeted Muslims, immigrants and women. But it wasn’t until an older white couple began yelling at her, 10 minutes into her weekly commute to her internship, that the reality of Trump’s America set in.

“Most of what they were saying was telling me I can’t wear it [the hijab] anymore and telling me to take it off,” Nizam, a Bengali American, said.

The 19-year-old student had heard some Islamophobic comments before, but hadn’t experienced such aggressive harassment in New York City, where she, like Trump, was born and raised. But the stream of verbal abuse forced her to confront a reality she had been trying to avoid – that Trump had actually won.

“I didn’t believe it until the moment this incident occurred,” she said of Trump’s victory. “I don’t think I absorbed it and felt the reality of it, I didn’t. I kept myself distracted all of Wednesday and then Thursday happened and then it hits me, this is actually what’s going on and it was not OK.”

They were telling me I can't wear [the hijab] anymore Fariha Nizam on her harassers

Nizam is one of several Muslims around the country who have spoken to the Guardian about life since Trump’s victory. Trump won the keys to the White House following an incendiary campaign where he proposed a ban on Muslims, said Muslims “hate” Americans and promised a Muslim registry. Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, reportedly a key member of Trump’s transition team, said on Tuesday that the president-elect’s advisers are already considering the Muslim registry.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the amount of hate crimes reported since election night has been unusually high – as of Tuesday, the civil rights organization had tallied 437 incidents nationwide.

This is the case even in seemingly Muslim-friendly places like New York City, and in Michigan, which has one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the US. Civil rights groups there have reported an uptick in harassment – with one calling for a hate crime investigation after a Muslim woman in Ann Arbor was allegedly forced to remove her hijab by an unknown white man who, according to police, threatened to set her on fire with a lighter.

In another reported incident, two men shoved an 18-year-old woman wearing a hooded sweatshirt, commented on religion and asked her: “Do you know you’re in America?”

In the traditionally liberal city of Ann Arbor, two alleged incidents of ethnic intimidation and religious bias in a week is unusual, said Detective Lt Matthew Lige of the Ann Arbor police department.

“Certainly Ann Arbor, as a community that prides itself on its diversity, in race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, all those type of things,” he said. “So, for us to have two incidents that fit in this category is unusual and certainly [with] the political climate that we’re in right now, it’s concerning.”

Michigan and New York are home to some of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the US. But it is impossible to say with certainty how many Muslims there are in the country as the Census Bureau does not ask questions about faith. Estimates vary from as few as 3 million to as many as 8 million. Within that overall demographic, there is huge diversity in terms of geography, religious identity and race-cum-ethnicity, which renders any generalizations about the “Muslim community” in America perilous.

How we can use the leverage of our voting block in a post-9/11 world has become all the more critical Congressman André Carson

Beyond the urban centers, which include Los Angeles and Detroit, Muslims are widely scattered in relatively small numbers across the nation. Added to that geographical splintering are two other important layers of diversity: of faith (some 65% identify with Sunni Islam, 11% with Shia; the other 24% don’t identify with either group and includes some people who say they are “just Muslim”) and race/ethnicity (about a quarter of US Muslims are African American; others are more recent immigrants from Arab countries, Iran and South Asia; and a further fifth are converts).

Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic studies at American University and author of Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam, said that such fragmentation now poses Muslims in the US with a crisis of leadership that is being felt particularly acutely given the surge of hostility. “The fact that the Muslims don’t have a coherent platform and voice is a huge negative for them at this critical moment,” said Ahmed, a former Pakistani ambassador to London who now lives in Maryland.

But André Carson, one of two Muslim members of the US Congress, said people were starting to get involved in politics in greater numbers than ever before. “Engagement is there. How we can use the leverage of our voting bloc in a post-9/11 world has become all the more critical after the election of Donald Trump,” he said.

At a time of heightened anxiety, it was all the more important that Muslims came forward and ran for public office, he said. “All hope is not lost. But if we don’t hold people to account they will be emboldened to do whatever they want,” Carson said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest André Carson, US representative for Indiana. He is one of two Muslim members of Congress. Photograph: Jeff Roberson/AP

Top Democratic politicians including Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and Nevada senator Harry Reid have called on Trump to make amends for his campaign’s hateful rhetoric, but the president-elect seems to be ignoring their calls.

The closest thing he made to a peace offering was on Sunday, when he said on 60 Minutes that he was “saddened to hear” Latinos and Muslims were being harassed following his victory. “And I say, stop it. If it – if it helps, I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: stop it,’” Trump said.

These comments ring hollow in Minnesota’s predominantly Muslim Somali communities, which stand at about 25,000, according to 2010 Census data. At a campaign rally the Sunday before the election, Trump said that community was a “disaster” for the state.

Lul Hershi, a Somali American activist from St Cloud, Minnesota, said Trump’s victory feels like her “worst nightmare” after 24 years living in the US.

“The platform this guy was running on, most of it was against me, as a human being, as a Muslim, as a minority. I’m really worried and confused – I don’t know who is who anymore. I’m looking over my shoulder whenever I go outside my house. I’m just scared.”

Most of all, she’s afraid for her children.

“I’m scared for them. The moment my kids walk into this house, my heart is OK. While they are away, I don’t know. I’m just praying.”

In addition to the spate of bullying that has been reported across the US, there is a sense of foreboding around whether the Trump administration will target Muslim communities with surveillance. Since 9/11, Muslim Americans have had to deal with wave after wave of state interference, starting with mass arrests in the wake of the New York and Washington terror attacks; the special registration scheme for non-citizens, NSEERS; FBI entrapment cases; and the NYPD’s surveillance of mosques and communities in New York and New Jersey. After that litany, there is now a looming apprehension about what the next iteration will be.

“There’s a kind of paralyzing anxiety about what the government is going to do next,” said Moustafa Bayoumi, a commentator on Muslim American affairs and Guardian columnist. “But the one thing that is giving people hope is the sense that the rest of America has woken up to emotions that have troubled Muslims for 15 years.”

The platform [Trump] was running on, most of it was against me, as a human being, as a Muslim, as a minority. Lul Hershi, 24

Such apprehensions have been heightened by Trump’s choice of closest advisers. Rudy Giuliani, a leading contender to become US secretary of state, has suggested that Muslims on the government’s watchlist should be electronically tagged.

David Clarke, the sheriff of Milwaukee County in Wisconsin whose name has been floated to be head of the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, has proposed setting up patrols to target Muslim neighborhoods. Chris Christie, who until Friday was leading the president-elect’s transition team, said in the run-up to the Republican primaries that he would turn away all Syrian refugees including “orphans under age five”.

“To say that small children should be treated as threats is pretty extreme,” said Robert McKenzie of the Project on US Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. “It gives the message that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the Islamic faith that even an infant could be a danger.”

It is Trump voters’ acceptance of these suggestions that make people, including Haji Yussuf, want to work to improve relations between Muslims and their neighbors. Yussuf is a co-founder of Unite Cloud, a civic organization in St Cloud that works to establish better relations between the Somali American community and the rest of the city.

“My kid’s future, my kid’s relationship with their neighbors, how is that going to turn out? Whoever is in power right now, in Minnesota and on the national level, are people that are anti-me, anti-Islam, anti-immigrant,” he said.

Yussuf said he is still trying to piece together how “six of 10” of his neighbors could have voted for Trump. At Unite Cloud, he’s planning to change strategy, moving away from community events in which like-minded people tend to show up, in favor door-to-door canvassing.

“I don’t want the same group of white moderates. Good people come all the time to those events. You see the same faces … We want to go to homes, go there and talk to our neighbors about issues that are important in our neighborhood, and why they feel the way they feel. I want to know,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Esra Altun, who was attacked for wearing a hijab, stands with Jana Kadah, a Syrian American Muslim student. Photograph: Alyssa Jeong Perry

This feeling of reaching out to the people who seem to be against you was shared by Esra Altun, a San Jose State University student who was attacked by a man in a campus parking lot after the election. The man pulled Altun’s hijab and choked her with it.

Altun, a Turkish American Muslim, said she wanted to speak with her attacker.

“I want to talk to him about why I am wearing this scarf and try to understand his reasoning behind why he would do that,” she said. “I am not looking for a violent end because I know he is an American and I’m American because he lives here and I live here. This is both our homes.”

We are saying to our Muslim brothers and sisters, be concerned but do not project yourself as a scared victim Dawud Walid

Amid the wave of hostility sweeping Muslim communities across the country, there are signs of hope. People are coming together, supporting each other and finding solace wherever they can.

Take Ilhan Omar. On election night she became the first Somali American legislator in the US and the first Muslim woman to hold office in Minnesota. The 33-year-old has since become a symbol of hope not just for Somalis, but nationally and internationally.

“The results of this election is very disheartening, but I’m reminded that I won and that creates a particular kind of hope and aspiration for people,” Omar told MSNBC on Tuesday. “And that in the face of despair and hate we must continue to fight, we must continue to strive for the nation that we know we can be, the state we know we can be.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ilhan Omar became the first Somali American woman to hold public office. Photograph: Stephen Maturen/AFP/Getty Images

The symbolism of Omar’s win has not been lost on the Somali community, said Jibril Afyare, president of the Somali American Citizens League, a Minneapolis based civic group.

“That shows the message that Mr Donald Trump was sending to Minnesotans, and fellow Americans was rebuked, or debunked … and there is more to come. There are a lot of Ilhans in our communities,” he said.

African American Muslims are drawing on the experiences of the civil rights movement for clues as to how to respond now. Dawud Walid, a black Muslim who heads the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said: “We are saying to our Muslim brothers and sisters, be concerned but do not project yourself as a scared victim. We learned long ago that in America acting scared in the face of oppression is like blood in a pool of sharks – it will only attract more danger.”

For Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American Muslim in New York and co-founder of MPower Change, hope came to her two days after Trump’s victory when she was still reeling from the election result. She had travelled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to attend a meeting of a civil rights group and was surprised when she was accosted by about 150 non-Muslims outside the venue brandishing placards.

The posters said: “The world would not be complete without you,” “You belong in our America,” and “I trust you.”

When she realised that this impromptu gathering was actually offering her the hand of friendship, she cried. “It was an emotional moment for me at the end of a very hard week. It reminded me there are still good people in the United States.”

Additional reporting from Alyssa Jeong Perry in San Jose, California, and Ryan Felton in Detroit

