A few weeks ago, Faisal and Nazia Ali were returning home to Cincinnati from a 10th anniversary weekend getaway in Paris.

Nazia, who was wearing a headscarf, sent a few text messages to her parents as she settled into her seat for the nine hour flight, eager to get home to her three young sons.

The couple would have returned home just fine, comfortably capping off a romantic weekend, but one thing bothered a crew member: they appeared to be Muslim.

What followed has become distressingly common — after a long delay, the Alis were told that they had to leave the plane to answer some questions and that they would not, in fact, be flying home at this time.

"It was humiliating. We were treated like criminals. I thought, `We are American citizens. You can't do this to us.' " Nadia Ali said.

It’s besides the point to rattle off the credentials of the Alis, to establish them as upstanding US citizens who contribute to their communities and promote peace.

Because what happened to them is unethical and illegal on the most surface level. The Alis were discriminated against and kicked off a plane because of prejudice. A crew member made a gross generalization about Muslims — a group containing 1.6 billion people — based on a handful of sensational news stories from the past decade or so. Instead of treating the Alis as individuals, who had kids and lives to get back to, the crew member and then the rest of airline’s staff decided to treat them as stereotypes who could not be trusted.

This incident isn’t an outlier. Muslims are discriminated against at airports — they face more rigorous security screening; on airlines, they face glares and nasty comments — all the time. Normal behavior by Muslims such as checking a cell phone, reading a book, or speaking in a different language is too often construed as threatening.

It happens on all the major airlines. It’s demeaning, humiliating, and extremely inconvenient, if not outright damaging, for the victims of this prejudice. In the UK, Asians are almost 80 times more likely than a white person to be detained at an airport or port. 

One family in the UK was barred from traveling to Disneyland in the US and ended up losing $13,340 that couldn’t be refunded.

The Washington Post argues that, in the wake of Donald Trump’s calls to ban Muslims from entering the US, this kind of discrimination is on the rise.

If you ask a representative group of Muslims what flying is like for them, you’ll hear story after story of discrimination.

Many Muslims have taken to social media to express their exasperation with #FlyingWhileMuslim


Airport security is important, but it should never be used as an excuse to indulge prejudice. All people should have the right to move freely throughout society without facing discrimination.

News

Demand Equity

All Major Airlines Make #FlyingWhileMuslim a Challenge

By Joe McCarthy