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Pakistani-born builder Abdul Sageer is about to complete New York's newest mosque, but his face falls, seven years after the 9/11 attacks, when he wonders who will reconstruct his immigrant community. "Yes, we're putting up a building," says Sageer, 60, "but that won't help return things to the way they were." Maybe nothing will.
The backlash in the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks hit hard in what New Yorkers call Little Pakistan, running along Brooklyn's scrappy Coney Island Avenue. FBI raids, special registration requirements from 2002 for immigrants from a list of mostly Muslim countries, and then a wave of street-level abuse, triggered an exodus.
And when thousands departed - many residing illegally, some legally - they took with them the community's self-confidence. "This was a great place for us, but when the mistrust started, people didn't want to take chances: they picked up and left," said Sageer, eyes twinkling under a head of white hair. "I don't think they'll ever come back."
New York state has almost 45,000 Pakistani-Americans, according to the Census Bureau, but the real number could be five times greater, say community leaders. Estimates for how many left since late 2001 vary equally, from thousands to tens of thousands. Little Pakistan still has the feel of a classic New York enclave.
Signs written in Urdu are as common as English, women wear headscarves, and the shops sport evocative names like Punjab Pharmacy, Bismillah food and Pakiza Halal Meats. At the site of the future mosque, Sageer's construction crew, equipped with a yellow digger, is working hard.
But the activity masks a realisation that the good days are gone and the bitter feeling of being made to pay endlessly for the crimes of September 11. Many storefronts are boarded up or marked "For Rent" and in what was once an almost exclusively Asian stronghold, visible inroads are being made by newer arrivals - Russians spreading from Brighton Beach. Sayyed Shah, waiting for customers at his legal services business, sighed hopelessly.
"Look at all the free parking spaces," he said, gesturing at the empty sidewalk outside his silent office. "This place used to be jammed. People double-parked. It was crowded." Shah, 36, said he arrived in New York a decade ago from Islamabad. Since 9/11, he hasn't felt fully at home. "Pakistanis were so comfortable here before 9/11. Then they got this bad name - they were portrayed as endorsing all the bad stuff," the bearded Shah said.
"People here moved out because they were scared. They hadn't done anything wrong and some even had their immigration papers in order, but they knew they could be accused anyway." That sense of being made scapegoats for the 2001 atrocities - even for today's US difficulties in taming the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan - afflicts Muslims of all stripes, community activists say.
A Muslim group will next Monday launch a publicity campaign challenging commuters on the New York subway to think beyond stereotypes of Islamic terrorism. The advertisements will "encourage people to think for themselves," says Azeem Khan, at the Islamic Circle of North America. "But it's an uphill battle," he said, "because people eat up that stuff about Islamic extremism."
Mohammad Razvi, founder of a grassroots community organisation in Little Pakistan, said locals now go out of their way to prove their patriotism. They've even left up row on row of the Stars and Stripes raised along Coney Island Avenue for the July 4 Independence Day. And Razvi, whose non-profit Council of Peoples Organization gives immigrants language and legal help, said he was fighting to bridge the post-9/11 gap.
"For example, the FBI didn't realise that when they came to someone's door the woman of the house would not open up immediately because she had to go and cover her head," he said. But the damage already done is profound. "Pakistanis transformed this neighbourhood.
They built it up. Now they've had the rug pulled out from under them," he said. "The community emptied out." At the mosque building site, Sageer said he expected to complete the project, long delayed, in three or four months. "These are hard times. But you know what, whether people are doing well or they're not, we're still going to build this. You can't stop praying, can you?"

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2008

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