A profile and interview with Program Director Homayra Ziad appears in the Baltimore Sun in anticipation of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. In the article, Dr.Ziad answers questions about the military relationship between the United States and several Muslim-majority countries, and the effect that this has on Muslim Americans. The following is a snippet from the article:

Ask Homayra Ziad about 9/11′s impact, and prepare for a multilayered lecture — fitting for the director of the Program in Islamic Studies at Johns Hopkins.

To Ziad, 44, a Muslim American born in Pakistan, the first step toward healing is to establish a sense of what Islam is and isn’t.

“Despite the fact that we have a historically diverse community,” she says, powerful forces on the post-9/11 landscape are incentivized to promote stereotypes of Muslims as “foreign,” “violent” and “people who hate the U.S.”

Ziad cites the military-industrial complex as one that exploits such portrayals to build support for wars like the 20-year Afghanistan conflict. The result, in her view: thousands of battlefield deaths and countless ruined lives, but also acceptance of civil rights violations ranging from the surveillance of mosques to inappropriate deportation and torture.

That, she says, makes accurate teaching of Islam “a matter of life and death.” As part of a course she’s teaching on 9/11′s effects, she’s teaming with a community-based nonprofit, the Justice for Muslims Collective, to illustrate how such concessions promote Islamophobia.

The growing number of people committed to such work makes Ziad largely optimistic. “I have a lot of hope,” she says.