SOUL FOOD:

The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, seems at once both far away and near. Its memory still casts itself like a shadow across my mind and heart.

I recall what my husband said as he gently woke me: “A jetliner has just flown into the World Trade Center.” Televised scenes of the morning replay through my mind like an indelible slideshow.

People stand in shattered, open windows in the North Tower that has been ripped open by American Airlines Flight 11. They wave pieces of white cloth like flags of surrender.

I think, absurdly, “Olly, olly oxen free.” United Airlines Flight 175 slams into the South Tower.

The buildings billow smoke. They look like sci-fi monsters with bellies of molten fire.

People step off window ledges like divers from a board, but they fall like birds with broken wings from a nest. Catch them, I remember thinking, Lord have mercy somebody catch them.

To kick off its International Decade for A Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World 2001-2010, the United Nations had earmarked Sept. 11, 2001, as an International Day of Peace.

Did the men who that day turned four airliners into missiles filled with mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and sisters and brothers know that?

In the hours and the days and the weeks that followed, we talked of a “new normal.” Some said everything had changed forevermore.

Seven years later, I try to take stock. Most people I ask, “What has 9/11 changed?” quickly reply, “Airport security.”

We arrive at airports two hours before our flights. We put carry-on toiletries in zip-lock bags.

We remove our shoes and our jackets, our jewelry, cellphones and loose change before stepping through metal detectors for security’s sake.

It’s not that we are unaware weightier realities have also altered. They are, though, harder to circumscribe.

A year after Sept. 11, 2001, Aron David Berkowitz, rabbi at Congregation Adat Israel in north Huntington Beach, told me, “The last year has unleashed an anti-Semitism that has not been seen since the Holocaust.”

Polls here and abroad have shown anti-Semitic sentiments and conspiracy theories to be on the rise. Some blamed Jews for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 as well as for the cataclysmic tsunami in Indonesia in 2004.

Berkowitz likened the events of Sept. 11 to the sounding of the shofar, the ram’s horn blown at Rosh Hashana to get everyone’s attention. The question, he said, is then, “What does one do afterward? How do we change our lives?”

Seven years later, I’m pessimistic that on the whole we have changed for the better. Above all, when it comes to religion, our collective acrimony seems on the rise.

Assaults on religion are surely not new in modern and post-modern times. But an unprecedented number of books published in recent months revile religion with unmitigated rancor.

In March alone last year, three of them — “Letter to a Christian Nation,” by Sam Harris; “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins; and “God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist,” by Victor J. Stenger were on the New York Times bestseller list. Their tenor is strident.

Then there is “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens. Religion is being blamed for the world’s worst ills.

The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 — spawned by a radical, militant conception of Islam — are offered up as a prime example. So in the religion-as-toxin view of the world, Islam and Muslims are taking the hardest hit.

By July 2006, a Gallup poll showed 39% of all Americans harbored prejudices against Muslims.

An equal number thought Muslims should have to carry special identification cards.

Half doubted the loyalty of U.S. Muslims to this nation. A third believed they supported al-Qaeda. A fourth did not wish to have a Muslim living next door.

Yet in polls, three in five Americans say they know little or nothing about Islam. Fewer than half know someone who is Muslim.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the e-mails I get distorting Islam and railing against Muslims have increased. The number swelled again with the rumor Barack Obama is Muslim. That being Muslim can be used as a political smear says a great deal.

Even defenders of other faiths often look at Islam and Muslims with suspicion. Some do so with rhetoric as rabid as that used by the radicals they condemn.

Surely those who perpetrated the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, like those who bombed a train in Madrid on March 11, 2004, and the London Underground on July 5, 2005, are our enemies. They are the enemies, too, of millions of Muslims living among us — Muslims as American as we are, Muslims with no enmity toward us.

This week as I perused the current events book table at Barnes & Noble at Bella Terra, there was a crop of books sounding siren warnings about threat of Islamic Fundamentalism. They ranged from Andrew C. McCarthy’s “Willful Blindness,” to Brigitte Gabriel’s “They Must Be Stopped,” to Mark Steyn’s “American Alone.”

The back cover of Steyn’s book raises the specter of “the threat of Islamic imperialism.” The front flap paints a word picture of Talibanic enforcers cruising Greenwich Village burning books and barbershops while the Supreme Court rules sharia law does not transgress the separation of church and state.

Islam has replaced communism as the world’s greatest perceived evil. Muslims have become the boogeymen communists and suspected communists once were.

A synopsis of “They Must Be Stopped” describes Islam as “a religion rooted in the 7th century with teachings that are absolutely opposed to democracy and equality.” But it neglects to distinguish whose Islam.

It is not the Islam of the Muslims I know in Orange County. Muslims from Egypt, from Syria, from Jordan, from Chicago. Muslims who cherish democracy and equality as much as you and I. Not the Islam of Sumbul Ali-Karamali, author of “The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media and the Veil Thing.” Ali-Karamali earned a law degree from UC Davis and an L.L.M. in Islamic Law from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

I spoke with her in April when I wrote a column on Muslim women’s rights. White Cloud Press just released her book.

I’ll tell you more about it next week from Washington D.C., where I will be attending the Religion Newswriters Conference. So biased and befuddled we remain about Islam and Muslims seven years after Sept. 11, 2001, a full day of the conference will be devoted to covering Islam.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.