By PAUL VITELLO

It was easy for them to love the candidate. With the same passion, and for the same reasons that millions of other young people did, they loved Barack Obama’s call to activism, the promise of change, the sheer newness of him.
What was hard was feeling they could not show it because they were Muslims.
“I pretty much kept away, because I didn’t want to appear with an Obama button and have people look at me and say: ‘Oh, a Muslim girl supports him. Aha,’ ” said Sule Akoglu, a 17-year-old New York University freshman, who wears a head scarf.
Like just about all the Muslim students who gathered at the university’s Islamic Center on the day after the election, Miss Akoglu described a mixture of delight and frustration at the successful campaign of the nation’s first black president-elect. He had run a great race, broken so many barriers, done so much right. Yet the persistent rumor that Mr. Obama was a Muslim had led his campaign to do things that the students found hurtful, they said. The campaign had dismissed a Muslim staff member for seemingly flimsy reasons. A campaign worker had shuttled two young Muslim women wearing head scarves out of the line of sight of TV cameras at a rally.
And the candidate known for his way with words had never said the words they waited for.
“In my community, people were saying to me, ‘Who do we support?’” said Meherunnisa Jobaida, a journalism student from the New York City borough of Queens. “The person who is making the stereotype- Or the person who is not defending us?”
The words defending them were finally spoken instead by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, when he announced his support for Mr. Obama on October 19. Answering a question about the candidate’s faith, Mr. Powell said: “Well, the correct answer is he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is- Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?”
Lina Sayed, a Queens native and a recent N.Y.U. graduate now working in finance, said Mr. Powell’s straightforward articulation of an essential American principle lifted a sense of alienation that she had come to accept, and was almost unaware of. “I forgot about the American dream,” she said. “I forgot that something like this was possible.”
The Islamic Center at N.Y.U. serves about 2,000 students who identify themselves as Muslim, offering activities like skating and bowling, as well as a place for religious instruction, daily prayers and regular meetings where students are invited to come and talk.
Though a small sample, the views of the students - most of them the Americanborn children of immigrants from South Asia and the Middle East - generally reflected the results of surveys and recent scholarship.
The Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, for example, recently found overwhelming support for Mr. Obama among the country’s estimated 2 million Muslim voters; and scholars like Jen’nan Ghazal Read, a Duke University sociology professor who studies assimilation patterns among Muslims in the United States, has described the sense of resignation many Muslims felt at how the pejorative use of the word “Muslim” went unchallenged during most of the campaign.
“This is a very sober, mature voting population,” Professor Read said in a telephone conference call with reporters. “They understand the realities.”
Sufia Ashraf, a freshman pre-med student, voiced that sobriety: While disappointed by Mr. Obama’s failure to speak up for Muslims, she was willing to forgive him. “I would rather Barack Obama win,” she said. “If he had said something like what Colin Powell said, he might have lost.”
Ms. Sayed said two of her brothers who worked in the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania, both of them with “very Muslim names,” decided to do their door-to-door canvassing as “Alex” and “John.”
Among the students, many are children of small-business owners who supported Senator John McCain. Many were schoolchildren on September 11, taken by surprise by the taunting of their classmates, and even more surprised by the police security that became part of their daily school life for a while.
For all the apparent conditions placed on full participation in the political process, the students said, they were more optimistic about the future the day after the election than the day before.
The election proved that the promise of America is real, that the only barrier to participation is one’s own inertia and that “now is the time for us to step up,” said Haseeb Chowdhry, a senior at the university’s Stern School of Business.
“We love this country. This country has an ability to change - that is its strength,” he said.