Open-mindedness, on demand
On September 11, 2001, Mo S. Hassan was the Vice President of Online Mortgage Lending at M&T Bank. Aasiya Zubair, Hassan’s wife, was an architect who owned a 7-Eleven Store in Orchard Park. Because of the events of that day, both their careers took unexpected turns.
“In December of 2001, my wife and I were driving to Detroit,” Hassan recalls. “Along the way we were listening to the radio, and they were making lots of derogatory comments about Muslim-Americans. My wife felt there needed to be some kind of a TV channel that lets all Americans know who we are.”
Instead of just getting angry, Hassan and Zubair got to work. It’s been only six years since the couple’s transformative run-in with hate-speak, and Zubair’s idea has grown into Bridges TV: a national English-language network that broadcasts to over 2 million homes out of its unassuming Orchard Park studio. If you turn on Time Warner Cable channel 260 or Dish Network channel 578, you’ll find a wide variety of Muslim-related programming, from news and sporting events to sitcoms and cooking shows. The diverse selection of shows on Bridges underlines the inherent xenophobia of the mainstream media—when Muslims are discussed on CNN, it’s usually in one primitive light.
“There was a lack of any [Muslim-American] media,” shares Zubair, director of programming at Bridges. “We wanted a TV channel that shows that Muslims are just your regular next-door neighbors, bridging the gap between East and West. I never thought it could be done.”
Despite her skepticism, Zubair urged her husband to put his MBA from the University of Rochester to good use. He spent most of 2002 putting together a business plan. “It took me about six months of going to WNED, where I volunteered as a telephone operator, just to get to know what a TV station exactly is,” Hassan reflects. “I talked to the local broadcast channels—all of them were extremely helpful. That’s the nice thing about Buffalo; the people are open.”
With the plan in place, the couple spent 2003 raising money. By the end of 2004, Bridges was on the air. Hassan and Zubair, who both grew up in Pakistan, characterize the WNY community as a friendly, supportive place. They use words like “accepting,” “tolerant,” and “open” when describing how the area responded to the idea behind Bridges.
And while the greater Buffalo area is not an Edenic place that’s somehow untouched by the anti-Islamic prejudice that has infected our country and defined its behavior during this decade, our Muslim community has built some bridges that you don’t find everywhere.
“When you look at the Muslim population in Western New York, you’re not looking at a small, monolithic group,” explains Dr. Khalid Qazi, president of the Western New York Chapter of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). “You’re looking at a large, highly heterogeneous group of approximately 20-25,000 people, which comes with its own cultures and diversities. Even within the Muslim groups, they don’t fully know each other’s culture. They may know each other’s religions, but not their languages, food, music, etc.”
Qazi breaks the community into four demographics: Arabs (people who hail from lands where the mother tongue is Arabic), South Asians (e.g. Kashmiri, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Irani), Indigenous Americans (e.g. African-Americans), and miscellaneous (e.g. Caucasians, Europeans, Turks). And of this wide cross-section of cultures, several have been here for generations, including the Yemenite community, which is largely based in Lackawanna.
“After the war, Henry Ford started establishing the Ford industry in Detroit, and he brought in an immigrant workforce; a good number of them came from Yemen,” Qazi explains. “A lot of them gravitated from Detroit to Buffalo, into the steel industry and auto industry, so that’s how a majority of Yemenites came here.”
What’s happened in the Yemenite community since 9/11 is more than enough to tarnish the ringing community endorsements of Hassan and Zubair. But while Qazi’s take is sobering, it’s not without hope.
“On 9/11, we got hit with a double whammy, as Americans and Muslims. That, and the Lackawanna Six, has had a devastating effect. I don’t see it disappearing soon,” Qazi reflects. “If there is any silver lining, we had been working in the community for twenty years, especially with the interfaith community. They knew who we were; they knew what we had been doing.
“So there is xenophobia on the one hand,” he continues. “But on the other, it is a fact that we have some great people in the community.”
At a time when even saying the word “Muslim” makes some white Americans raise their eyebrows, it’s crucial that Bridges TV continue to grow. By filtering their outrage into a tool that promotes an America driven more by understanding than fear, Hassan and Zubair have taken inspiration from both ends of Dr. Qazi’s spectrum in their quest for the greater good.
“Before 9/11, I had never thought of myself as a Muslim-American. I was just another American,” Hassan states. “Afterwards, hearing so much negativity in the media, we were like, ‘something needs to be done.’”
Whether it’s a nightly newscast, an interfaith roundtable, or a cricket match, the network is piping a badly needed perspective into millions of American homes, 24/7. I think it’s safe to say Hassan and Zubair have “done something” in a big way.
Appeared in the June 2008 issue of Buffalo Spree.