This Muslim American Life

Dispatches from the War on Terror

Moustafa Bayoumi

• Editore: NYU Press
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479804061
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: Essays in Politics & International Relations

Read Moustafa's Op-ed on Trump's Executive Order Against Muslims in The Guardian Winner of the 2016 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Arab American Book Award Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake “Mustafa Bayoumi” was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an “anti-American, pro-Islam” agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed. Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the incarceration and deportation of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, based almost solely on their national origin and immigration status. The NYPD, with help from the CIA, has aggressively spied on Muslims in the New York area as they go about their ordinary lives, from noting where they get their hair cut to eavesdropping on conversations in cafés. In This Muslim American Life, Moustafa Bayoumi reveals what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans, highlighting the profound effect this surveillance has had on how they live their lives. To be a Muslim American today often means to exist in an absurd space between exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you. In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present.

part I

Muslims in History

1

Letter to a G-Man

Let me ask you something. Have you heard the story of the vizier’s son? His father, the minister, had offended the ruler, and so he and his family were imprisoned for a very long time, so long in fact that the son knew only prison life. He reached the age of reason shortly after his release and, one night at dinner, asked his father about the meat he had been eating. “It’s lamb,” said the father. The son then asked the father, “What is lamb?” The father described the animal to the son, to which the son replied, “Do you mean it is like a rat?” “No!” said the father. “What have lambs to do with rats?” And the same continued then with cows and camels for, you see, the son had seen only rats in prison. He knew no other animal.

You may be wondering why I begin this brief correspondence with such a story, but I beg your indulgence. There will be time for all things. Suffice to say, as the son shows us, confinement defeats the imagination. Call it arrested development if you will, but if you are forced to stay put, how can you discover the delicacy of lamb, sprinkled generously with garlic and massaged with allspice, roasting over an open flame? Perhaps you can almost taste it now. Yes, the mind wanders, and the wanderer’s mind, well, expands, you could say. But without knowledge or history or experience, the son could learn of these things only once it was too late. I hope it is not too late for you—and for me.

You see, I fear that you have become like the son. You believe only what you already know, see only what you want to see, but you must ask yourself how you understand those things.

I have been told that you have arrested hundreds of us and seek to question thousands more. I imagine you are looking for me. You are concerned, naturally, after the eleventh of September, as we all are. I too watched the towers fall, as did everyone I know, with a tear in my eye and the air stuck hard in my lungs. Who could have imagined such malefaction! I prayed for the people lost in those towers, just as I have since prayed for the innocents everywhere, my benedictions sounding like Walt Whitman’s brassy cornet and drums, which, as he said, play marches for conquer’d and slain persons. Didn’t we all suffer on that terrible day, the families of the dead most of all?

The city itself was in mourning, with its gaping wound right there on the skin of Lower Manhattan. And here I am going to tell you something I presume you do not know. This is almost the exact spot where, just over a century ago, the first of our extended Arab family came to this country. Have you ever wondered how Cedar Street got its name? I cannot tell you precisely, but I like to think it was because on Cedar Street, the Lebanese merchants from Zahle would sell you milk as sweet as honey and honey as rich as cream. We came first for the 1876 World’s Fair then began arriving in larger numbers, until in the 1890s we lived busily between Greenwich, Morris, Rector, and Washington Streets. By the early part of the twentieth century, our community expanded, reaching from Cedar Street on the north to Battery Place on the south. The western border was no less than West Street, and to the east, Trinity Place. But the center of our world was always Washington Street, a lane now blocked by emergency vehicles and ten-foot fences. To us, Washington Street was never just a street. It was our Amrika! After passing through Ellis Island, we would trudge up Manhattan Island with our weathered bags, looking for a friendly face in all the frenetic energy of New York, until we could hear a little Arabic and smell the food from home, knowing that on a street named for an American we had found Little Syria.

We came, like so many others, simply to make a better life for ourselves and our families. You could shovel gold on Washington Street, we were told, and so we trekked across the Atlantic, endured the verminous hostelries of Marseilles, and arrived with our satchels stuffed with hope. City life was new to most of us, since we had lived typically in villages and hamlets, and it was exciting. I remember what Abraham Rihbany wrote, back in 1914.

New York is three cities on top of one another. The one city is in the air—in the elevated railway trains, which roar overhead like thunder, and in the amazingly lofty buildings, the windows of whose upper stories look to one on the ground only a little bigger than human eyes. I cannot think of those living so far away from the ground as being human beings; they seem to me more like the jinnee. The second city is on the ground where huge armies of men and women live and move and work. The third city is underground, where I find stores, dwellings, machine shops, and railroad trains. The inside of the earth here is alive with human beings; I hope they will go upward when they die.1

His words never seemed so tragically real to me.

We came as sojourners, and after establishing ourselves in New York, we launched out, men and women both, around the country as pack peddlers. Loading up on goods from the stores on Washington Street, we carried what felt like the world on our backs. Our shops were fables to you. Never had you seen our soft rugs for sale, or a gossamer web of silken lace with Arabic letters hugging its border. Boxes rested on boxes in our tiny dark shops, full of carved olivewood trinkets or luxurious satins or silver wire as thin as a spider’s web. As the New York Daily Tribune put it in 1892, “In the midst of all this riot of the beautiful and odd stands the dealer, the natural gravity of his features relaxed into a smile of satisfaction at the wonder and delight expressed by his American visitor. But the vision ends, and with many parting ‘salaams’ one goes back to the dust and dirt, the noise and bustle” of Washington Street.2

We found no magic in our stores, however, just opportunity. We carefully folded the crocheted tablecloths of linen and stiff silk dress collars and loaded them with the spicy perfumes and soft talcum powders into our packs. The scrubbing soaps and gentle creams came next, and on top the rosaries, crosses, and carved icons that the people across this country so loved to buy from us, the Holy Land vendors. These are the things we carried. Jewelry and notions, we used to call them, and if you stopped to talk to us along our route, you might, as someone once said, buy a story with your bargain.

From the beginning then, our lives here have been about being on the move, carting goods and people across borders to make life a little bit better, a little bit easier, just a little more comfortable. We were the ones who brought the city to the country. We were Internet shopping before eBay, the catalogue before Sears. We went places others would not, namely into the warm hearths of African American homes that ringed the cities we visited. There, the food was heavier and the laughter heartier, and we would be treated to a hospitality we recognized like home. Detroit, Chicago, Fargo, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, we knew the vein-like crisscrosses of this country before Jack Kerouac spoke his first French word. And we walked, mostly, and then we ached to come back to Washington Street, where we could replace our worn soles and enjoy a little backgammon before heading out again.

But that was a long time ago, and, well, nothing gold can stay. Maybe it is true that nostalgia makes time simple by the loss of detail, but today, things seem so different. Since those early days, we have become doctors and lawyers, writers and engineers, but we are still shopkeepers and taxi drivers, and we continue to move lives around this country. And yet, these days many of us sit stationary in our homes, unsure of what will happen to us if we step beyond the threshold of our doors. But I will come to that, all in good time, my good man.

We came from Mount Lebanon, from Syria and Palestine, but you called us all Syrians or, less accurately, Turks. We were mostly Melkite and Maronite, but there were a few Muslims, Druze, and Jews among us. By the 1920s, we had grown as a community into Brooklyn as well as Manhattan, on Joralemon Street, State Street, and Boerum Place, close to Atlantic Avenue, where you find many of our shops today. We continued to trade, and we worked in dusty factories, mostly sewing clothes and fine lace.

But in fact everything started to change in the 1920s. I talk not only about how, in the years leading up to that troubled decade, the immigration authorities became increasingly frustrated by our dusky looks, questioning whether we were “free white people” or “Asiatics.” This racial ping-pong game used a strange chromatic logic that mostly bewildered us, and after the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and the harsh depression of the 1930s, the numbers of our newcomers dwindled. Rather, I refer also to our daring to dream of self-determination back home.

After the door closed on the Sublime Porte, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was supposed to mean that we would have the right to determine our own fates. You visited us under the auspices of the King-Crane Commission, and we welcomed and admired you, believing you would support us in the pioneer spirit of independence from foreign rule. But what we were left with were mandates and protectorates, leading to fracture and complaint in a moment when we felt unified and needed each other. The Europeans did not rule lightly, something I was sure you would have understood, but you have consistently lived up to underestimation, I dare say. It was the catastrophe of 1948, however, that broke our hearts. Tell me, what did the Palestinians do to warrant having their homes seized from them, their worlds disrupted, their lives bulldozed now for over sixty years? Because another people wanted the land the Palestinians had always lived on, they—the Palestinians—must be dispossessed into misery and squalor? Indeed the genocidal horror inflicted on the Jewish community in Europe was evil unmasked, but what had this to do with the Palestinians, except to turn them into the victims of another policy of extermination and cultural supremacy? It seems I am asking so many questions, but why you continue to deny the rights of the Palestinians just confounds me. It seems that their “crime” is simply to be born Palestinian, and in this scheme, a Palestinian life counts less than another. Yet there is no greater wrong in the world, for whoever degrades another degrades me and you and all of us.

Your ears prick up now that I am talking about the Palestinians. I think that when you hear this word, all you hear is terrorism. To us, we hear the echo of dispossession and the call for justice, but these days especially it appears to us that you are criminalizing all references to us and our Palestinian family, and it is affecting how we live here. For over sixty years we have been speaking to you about this tragedy, but the actions of a handful of lunatics, madmen who have never until recently and only when convenient spoken about Palestine, have given you the motivation to shut us up and shut us down. You are infiltrating our mosques and gathering places, tapping our phones, detaining us by the hundreds, and seizing our charity. At airports you search us, and if you find Allah on a leaf of paper, you accuse us of sedition. We are beginning to wonder what you think you are protecting from your cars and radios, the people of this country or policies abroad that continue an injustice and lead to slaughter. But never mind that for now. There will be time. First, before you continue to cast us as perpetual foreigners, let me tell you why Muslim New York is our modern Granada.

For over half a century, we crossed the Atlantic to land on its avenue in Brooklyn. No doubt, you know of this constellation of stores, restaurants, butchers, and bookshops, their wares piled high like the old places on Washington Street. But does it surprise you to hear that our first recorded community organized around a mosque, back in 1907, stood not on this thoroughfare but in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and was founded by a group of Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian Muslims? By 1931, this American Mohammedan Society purchased three buildings on Powers Street for worship and community affairs. But Islam on this land surely precedes these intrepid travelers, for the first of us Muslims to arrive in this country dates back far before the birth of the republic. (You are confused because I had written we arrived in the late nineteenth century, and so you think I contradict myself. But I am large. I contain multitudes.)

Islam in this country is about as old as Virginia, and the first Muslims were brothers and sisters of our faith who were captured on the African continent and brought here solely for their labor. Have you read the slave statutes, like this early one, from 1670, which states that “negroes, moores, mollatoes and others borne of and in heathenish, idollatrous, pagan and mahometan parentage and country . . . may be purchased, procured, or otherwise obteigned as slaves”?3 We labored and suffered, and yet we continued to pray, fast, and recite the word of Allah whenever we could.

Take Ibrahim Abdur Rahman, for example. A son of royalty from Futa Jallon in West Africa, he was captured and made into a slave, landing in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1788. Over the next forty years, he was known to steal away to the riverbank when he could. There he would sit alone and scratch out Arabic words in the dirt and remember home. Later, the public learned about brother Ibrahim and his talents, and with his newfound notoriety, he sought to return to his people. Thus began a nationwide tour for Ibrahim. Paraded around the country by the American Colonization Society as an African curiosity, he raised money for his and his family’s release from bondage and travel back to the African continent. This tour took Ibrahim not only to our New York but also to the White House, where he met John Quincy Adams. It seems the always polite Ibrahim had a sly, winking view of the politics of this country. He described his visit simply. “I found the President the best piece of furniture in the house,” he states in a letter.4

We are lucky to have Brother Ibrahim’s story preserved. Most of our sisters and brothers who were enslaved have sadly fallen through history’s sieve. We do have enough evidence, though, to know that Muslim slaves dot the forcefully tilled landscape of this country throughout its history and across its geography, from Natchez to New York and beyond.

In addition to this part of our family there are the Muslim mariners, many of whom arrived in the ports of Brooklyn, ruddy faced, out of breath, and eager for a place to bow their heads in remembrance of God. They surely came in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. But we know that from 1939, after they landed, they made their way to State Street, in the heart of the Arab community, where Sheikh Daoud Ahmed Faisal and his wife Khadija had their mosque, the Islamic Mission of America. (It is still there, but you must know that already.) In the cramped quarters of the brownstone mosque, sailor prayed with seamstress, ...