By Jose Requena

A number of incidents on campuses across the country suggest that Muslim students are finding it harder to go about daily life. In these times of conflict, Muslim students are facing prejudices and legal loopholes in the pursuit of their education.

Last semester, incidents ranged from notes full of religious and cultural slurs to—in perhaps the most extreme example of discriminatory vengeance—a U Mass Amherst student falsely accusing a Muslim student of terrorist plotting to the National Security Agency (NSA). This semester, Muslim students are experiencing trouble again.

In South Carolina, three Palestinian students’ night out ended in the hospital. The students claim that several members of the Guildford College football team assaulted the trio and yelled racial slurs as they attacked. Several bystander accounts agree. Two of the three victim were themselves students at Guilford.

“It was the ugliest thing I have ever seen," said Omar Awartani, one of the victims. Awartani, a freshman pursuing a double major in aerospace and mechanical engineering at NC State, was visiting his Guilford friends at the time of the attack. "I've seen Israeli soldiers doing this to me in Palestine, but I've never seen this with citizens. It just came with punches, kicks, and brass knuckles. There were witnesses that told me they were picking up rocks and bricks and hitting me."

Some fault the campus Public Safety Office for responding too late, with some witnesses stating officers took as much as 45 minutes to arrive. College Spokesman Ty Buckner disputed these claims, saying, "I do know that they did respond and now we're following up. I would suggest that it did not take forty-five minutes to respond. I'm sure the college will assess all the aspects of this event and make sure we're doing what we need to do."

In Massachusetts, another Muslim student is engaged in a different kind of fight, although many people perceive the fight as similarly rooted in discrimination. The Harvard Ph.D. candidate Omar al-Dewachi is caught in a legal mire that keeps him from re-entering the U.S. and thus from completing his studies. Al-Dewachi, who hails from Iraq, came to the U.S. with a passport issued by Sadam Hussein’s regime. That passport is now obsolete.

Al-Dewachi, who studies social anthropology, traveled to Montreal to continue his research on the Iraqi diaspora. As he told the Harvard Crimson in a telephone interview, he received a U.S. entry visa on Jan. 31 but was told the next day that the “N” series passport he was planning to use with the visa was invalid. In order to get the necessary “G” passport he would have to return to war-torn Baghdad.

“One wonders if it’s almost a perverse joke,” said Al-Dewachi’s academic advisor Steven Caton, director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies and a professor of contemporary Arab studies in the Department of Anthropology. “I can’t imagine having to go back to Baghdad...It’s almost a death sentence, and he obviously has no intention of going back.”

According to Caton, Dewachi is not the only member of the Harvard community affected this way by State Department regulations. He said that Asad A. Ahmed, an assistant professor who was scheduled to teach Anthropology 2675, “Secularism, Religion, and Nation in South Asia” this semester, is currently awaiting a visa to reenter the United States from Pakistan.