Lavapies, this city's rambling working-class neighborhood, is home to many of the city's immigrants.

Among them were the three Moroccan men arrested as suspects in the Madrid railway bombings. But even in the wake of the March 11 railway bombings, many Muslims here say that while the atmosphere is tenser, they do not feel unfairly targeted.

"In the street, people sometimes give you a sad look, or look at you a little suspiciously, but that's normal given what's happened," said an Egyptian who runs a gift store in Lavapies.

Neighbors said they have been vigilant against any anti-Arab backlash. "We are trying to make sure that doesn't happen," says Maria Luisa de Miguel, a Spaniard who lives down the street from a small storefront mosque. She pointed to a sign advertising a solidarity rally that night, printed in four languages. "We are a lot of cultures that have been together for years."

Many comparisons have been drawn between the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks and the March 11 terrorist attack, which was among the worst in modern European history.

For all of the similarities, there is also a striking difference. For Muslims in Spain, the atmosphere has not turned ugly, as it did in the United States. Nobody is asking, "Why do they hate us?" The media is not dominated by rhetoric about "a clash of civilizations" between East and West. There has not been a massive police roundup of Arab immigrants here, nor the hundreds of expulsions without due process that occurred in the U.S. after Sept. 11. Spaniards continue to patronize their local Muslim grocer, go to Moroccan restaurants and interact with Arab colleagues. Nobody is clamoring for an attack on Morocco.

"The Spanish populace has proven itself very mature, and knows the difference between terrorism and Islam, just as they can differentiate between ETA and the Basque population," said Helal- Jamal Abboshi Khaledi, the general secretary of the Union of Islamic Communities in Spain. ETA is the Basque separatist group that has waged small-scale terror attacks in Spain for decades. Of course, Spaniards were angry. The bombing of four early morning commuter trains was the worst in European history, killing 191 people and injuring more than 1,700. In the days after the attacks millions of people held demonstrations throughout the country.

But the public did not direct its grief and wrath at Muslims, despite the mounting evidence that a Moroccan group linked to Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. Instead, Spaniards took their anger to the polls. Voter turnout increased by more than 7 percent in the national elections three days after the attacks, and it was there that Spaniards exacted their vengeance by ousting the ruling Popular Party. The conservative government was widely blamed for bringing the terrorism to Spain because of its backing of the American invasion of Iraq, despite opposition from more than 80 percent of the Spanish public.

In the wake of the attacks what most enraged the Spaniards were the revelations on the day before the election that the government had tried to spin the investigation in order to divert attention away from Al Qaeda and lay the blame on ETA.

"The vote was a punishment for the years of lies," said Iris Bernal, a 26-year-old sociologist attending a post-attack demonstration.

It is not clear why there has not been a more strident anti-Muslim reaction from the Spanish public. The country has a long and tense relationship with the Arab world, from the conquests of Spain in the 8th Century to the Spanish enclaves in Northern Morocco until 1956, where even today Spanish is still widely spoken. At the same time, Muslim architecture and culture is still very much a part of southern Spain. The recent immigration of Moroccans, who make up the overwhelming percentage of Muslims in Spain, only began in the last decade. Some 300,000 are reportedly here legally, and another 100,000 to 200,000 are undocumented.

One reason there has not been a backlash is that about a third of those killed or injured in the bombings were immigrants. After it was reported that many did not seek medical attention for fear of being deported, the government announced that victims of the bombings and their families would be granted legal status.

Still, there has long been widespread racism against Moroccans in Spain. Moroccan immigrants are associated in the minds of many Spaniards with petty crime, drug trafficking and oppressive attitudes toward women, said Carmen Gonzalez, a professor of political science at the Open University in Madrid who studies immigration. But this existed long before the March 11 attacks, and so far, she said, it has not translated into hysteria.

Spaniards have been especially sensitive to xenophobia after an outburst of anti-Moroccan violence in southern Spain several years ago. Since then there has been a deliberate public education campaign to make sure it would not occur again. This was stepped up in the wake of the March 11 attacks.

"The authorities and the media have been clear in insisting that Spaniards should not make an association between those who carried out the attacks and Muslims living in Spain," said Haizam Amirah Fernandez, an Arab-affairs analyst at the Royal Elcano Institute, a Madrid think tank. This is in stark contrast to the U.S., notes Amirah, where the mass media had long depicted Arabs as terrorists.

With decades of experience with the Basque separatist group ETA, Spaniards have a lot of experience in separating out terror groups from an ethnic population, said Fernando Vallespin, a professor of political science at the Autonomous University Madrid. Also, he said, because of its proximity to North Africa, Spain has an intimate political and personal relationship with the Arab world. Like neighbors, they sometimes squabble, "but we also see their struggles."

The Spanish public, Vallespin said, "was immediately capable of distinguishing between a fundamentalist terrorist group and poor immigrants who are struggling to make a new life and find a job."