HOUSTON

Attorney Alamdar Hamdani used to represent multimillion-dollar corporations. Now Hamdani represents cab drivers and convenience store owners who are called in for questioning by the FBI.

Nohayia Javed was a college student who never thought of herself as different from her classmates. Then she was beaten up and had hot coffee thrown in her face.

Many lives changed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But Muslim-Americans say that, as a group, the change for them has been dramatic, generally negative and certainly long-lasting. Overnight, they became an enemy in their own country.

The backlash has primarily been focused on those with ancestries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

“We feel embarrassment, frustration, anger on a daily basis,” said Farha Ahmed, general counsel for the Muslim American Republican Caucus, at a recent symposium on racial profiling at the University of Houston Law Center.

Ninety-nine percent of Islam’s adherents are nonviolent, said Ahmed, a Libyan-American, but “that doesn’t seem to be enough.”

Hamdani realized the day of the attacks that there would be a backlash against fellow Muslims. So he joined the American Civil Liberties Union and started representing, pro bono, people who were being detained or questioned by the government.

Hamdani, an American citizen raised by Indian parents, says it’s one thing for the general public to look at Muslims with a jaundiced eye, but it’s something else for the government to do that.

“Just because I worship a god named Allah doesn’t mean the 1st, 4th, 5th amendment don’t apply,” he says, referring to the Bill of Rights amendments concerning the rights to free association and speech, against unreasonable search and seizure, and to due process.

FBI spokeswoman Shauna Dunlap says her agency’s work in the Muslim community benefits both sides.

“No lead can go uncovered in a post-9/11 world,” she says.