Ever since 9/11, it hasn’t been easy for muslims to feel accepted everywhere in the world. Terrorism has no religion. In 2012 when I visited NYC with my mom, I remember how she felt after hearing racist remarks of people calling her a terrorist or spitting on her simply because she wore a hijab. Another one of the incidents that inspired this piece is that due to the numerous terrorist attacks occurring in the world, the safest place to me (The Mosque) became a place that feared going. Terrorism in the Middle East has caused many people to fear going to their holy places due to the constant conflict between the different religions and different sub-divisions of religions. The idea for this piece came from a couple of sketches that i had done in my sketchbook using black ink and red and blue ink to highlight fear and terrorism and to show how muslims are usually portrayed on western media. I decided to develop these sketches into my sequential narrative and I did my first trial on my sketchbook. Although I really liked the first sketch I did i felt like it lacked some elements such as a repetition so I decided to change the layout and do something outside my comfort zone and also add the police light colors as blocks in-between the panels.
