(RNS) — On a Sunday evening last month, several Muslim high schoolers were sipping drinks and playing board games at a coffee shop in Murphy, Texas, for what was supposed to be a casual social gathering.
Around sunset, some of the students stepped outside Original Mocha coffee house, located in the suburb about 25 miles northeast of Dallas, to offer their evening prayer. They asked the cafe owners for permission to use the sidewalk, and 17-year-old Usman Kayani started leading the short prayer.
That is when three men who identify themselves as Christian influencers approached the roughly 20 students and began making Islamophobic comments such as “I am mocking your religion” and “You need Jesus,” according to video footage.
Kayani didn’t look behind or cut short the prayer, he said, even as one of the men came close to him. “I was kind of scared at that moment because I thought he was going to attack me,” Kayani said. “So I just closed my eyes and continued reciting the Quran. I needed to keep my prayer steady.”
Most in his group remained seated and quiet, he said, not wanting to escalate or give the agitators a reaction.
“We were taught to hold ourselves with dignity even when others don’t,” said Kayani, who is president of Plano East Senior High School’s Muslim Student Association. He said the men who mocked them were questioned by police officers and given trespassing warnings.
Eight days later on Nov. 18, at least one of the same men, who identified himself as Christopher Svochak via videos he posted of the incidents, disrupted an early morning prayer and breakfast event hosted by the MSA group at the University of South Florida in Tampa. And in late October, Svochak also recorded himself setting a Quran on fire after interrupting a Muslim student gathering at the University of Houston.
Over the last two months, at least seven Muslim student groups in the United States have been harassed by right-wing Christian activists, said Mohamad Altabaa, a Texas-based student who is tracking harassment cases with a group called MSA Unity.
Altabaa said he’s noticed a pattern of coordinated agitator groups monitoring event flyers posted to public MSA social media accounts to locate and harass Muslim students. Their goal, he said, is to provoke students, film and post their reactions, and falsely portray Muslims as violent. His research suggests the same group is traveling to different parts of the country to disrupt Muslim students using similar tactics and phrases.
“From my experience, major incidents like these usually happen once or twice every two years. You don’t really have them that much,” he said. “But seven major incidents happening? I am confident that a lot of these events are coordinated and they are targeting students in order to get these reactions from them and just cause an uproar.”
At the Florida campus, Svochak and two other men interrupted a small group of students offering early morning prayer in the corner of a university parking garage just as the sun rose, of which he posted a video online. While prostrating on the carpeted ground, Malak Albustami, a junior at USF who leads its MSA, heard running, but brushed it off thinking it was students rushing to catch the prayer. But then she heard yelling.
Three men disrupt Muslims praying outdoors at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. (Video screen grab)
“These men were huge, and they’re yelling and in our faces,” she said. “Their only intent was to attack Muslims.”
The men waved bacon (which is impermissible for Muslims to eat), spit near the students and yelled, among other phrases, “you are gonna go to hell” and “take that towel off your head,” pointing to the hijabs that Albustami and another Muslim woman were wearing, she said. They also placed a cardboard box spray-painted with the words “Kaba 2.0 Jesus is Lord” in front of the praying students. The Kaaba, located in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is considered the holiest site for Muslims and is the direction toward which they pray daily.
Albustami said she and her peers felt violated. “We were completely alone,” she said. “And the fact that they livestreamed the assault made it even worse. They wanted an audience while humiliating us.”
The University of South Florida Police Department identified the three suspects as Svochak, 40, from Waco, Texas; Richard Penkoski, 49, from Canyon, Oklahoma; and Ricardo Yepez, 28, of Tampa. The police department has filed felony charges under the Florida hate crime statute along with other misdemeanor charges against the suspects.
A group called Warriors for Christ, which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, livestreamed the USF incident on its YouTube page.
After the men left, Albustami insisted on turning around the group’s morning and continuing the event as planned with pancakes and a reflective talk, she said. And a week later, her group hosted another prayer and breakfast event, this time with hundreds of students and community members turning out in a show of solidarity.
“They came to upset us and to stop us from practicing our religion,” she said. “And we’re not standing on that. We’re not gonna let them do that.”
Saad Jaffery, a college student who leads a chapter of the national youth group Young Muslims in Dallas, connected increased Islamophobic incidents in the state to anti-Muslim rhetoric from politicians.
In recent months, conservative officials in Texas have increasingly posted negative comments about the state’s growing Muslim community on social media. And on Nov. 18, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the country’s largest Muslim civil rights group, as a terrorist organization, which Muslim advocates believe could lead to violence against Muslim communities.
“Misinformation and Islamophobia and blatant lies are being spread all the way from the governor’s office downward about our organizations, about who we are as a community, what our goals are,” Jaffery said. “And this is very troubling because from the average person’s perspective, if they’re hearing their governor say these things, it’s hard to piece together what’s true and what’s false.”
In early November, Jaffery was at a swimming event organized by YM Dallas when one of his peers was confronted by what he described as an agitator who “interrogated him using very crude and rude language” and questioned his allegiance to the U.S.
Jaffery helped facilitate meetings between affected students and the mayors of Richardson and Plano after the two Texas incidents, though he said he wished the mayors had reached out to the students to offer support immediately after the incidents.
Similarly, Albustami said USF administrators were slow to condemn the incident there. The university posted a temporary Instagram story 36 hours afterward that, according to Albustami, used vague language in condemning the agitators’ anti-Muslim language. After Albustami and other students met with Tampa Mayor Jane Castor, USF’s president issued a university-wide email addressing the incident. The MSA group has since met with administrators and is in the process of securing a larger prayer room on campus, Albustami said.
Facing a possible trend, MSA leaders around the country are talking with one another about how to protect themselves against potential attacks, Altabaa said. He encouraged students to document all interactions, to report incidents to police and university officials, and not to engage with agitators.
“They’re there to get a reaction,” Altabaa said. “Don’t give them that reaction. That’s how you make sure that their mission was a failure.”
