On Monday, November 20, 2006, six imams were removed from a U.S. Airways flight as they tried to head back home to Phoenix from the North American Imams Federation conference in Minneapolis. The New York Times reported that a fellow passenger passed a note to a crewmember claiming there were six suspicious Arabs on the plane who had said the word Allah several times and cursed the United States’ “involvement with Saddam Hussein” (Sander 2006). In the note, the passenger also provided the seat numbers for the imams. As a result of this note, the imams were handcuffed, removed from the plane, and then interrogated for several hours by the FBI. The imams were released because they posed no threat to national security.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of post-9/11 racial and religious profiling in American security settings.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 152