Islam in America after 9/11 - Notes of a Muslim looking for acceptance and understanding

In Time Magazine's recent issue, we are brought some heartwrenching stories of people whose lives have been altered by Sept. 11. We're taken close to a girl who lost her father in the collapse of the World Trade Center. We meet a survivor from the Twin Towers, whose chances of escape were impossibly slim. We see many lives touched by 9/11 through the eyes of a man distributing victim compensation money. But of course, there are many more stories, an infinite variety, all of which deserve to be heard.

Mine is somewhat complicated, one that I don't believe has yet been told.

If it were given a title, it would read something like "Muslim Girl Living in the West." What that has meant in practical terms is a special set of emotional scars from this past year, scars that still gash my notion of who I am. I often wished to God that my position were simpler, that I could feel shock or grief unclouded by those other emotions that fed my very being. That couldn't be. Unlike other people, I couldn't retreat to the community to restore myself and heal the wounds.

The sense of isolation that swamped me post-Sept. 11 was almost a tangible presence; I felt I had no right in the nation's collective mourning because I felt so excluded from the "we" in "United We Stand." I was not shown a face like mine in the pictures of suffering, though many Muslims died in the collapse of the World Trade Center; faces that resembled mine were "the other." Labels were swiftly drawn and suddenly, it was impossible to have a complex identity, which is what being a Muslim living in the West is, because the labels designating "us" and "them" were drawn right across the identity I thought I was so secure in.

It's terrible to be given a choice to be either "Muslim" or "Western." To be "non-Western," I'd have to wipe clean my imagination that's been nourished on books, movies and ideas. Renouncing the "Muslim" part would be spiritual bankruptcy. Also terrible is when you want to hide for six months because you can't bear the swift lash of judgment that you see in people's eyes or the small acts of cruelty that sting because it's apparent the person sees you as an idea and not as a human being.

There's a special kind of devastating loneliness when your world doesn't want you there, and not the world held at a distance by your nation's borders but the social world you come in contact every minute of your life. There's a kind of guilt involved about who you are. The movement of people's eyes, the tensing of facial muscles, the smallest gestures all became part of a language that I had to interpret the minute I walked out the front door.

America, as the land of the free, grants me liberty, but the condemnation I read in some people's eyes seemed as heavy as slavery. I was unbearably visible, bathed in electric lights and exclamation marks as a Muslim post 9/11, but also sadly invisible, because not many would care to see the individual behind the appearance.

I'm not judging the people for the small acts of reaction; I can understand it, given the shocking context of 9/11. What I can't forgive is the battery of Middle Eastern and Islamic "experts" that immediately jumped on every news channel and began trading in hysteria. I can't forgive the label mongers that pounded the bully pulpit about the "Islamic threat" and reduced my complex, graceful, human-affirming religion to a series of cheap images and clichZs.

You can distort anything, any Scripture by scrapping context or selecting a few choice phrases. There's a nasty whiff of self-interest when this is done; today's popular ideological merchandise has won many people profitable book contracts and T.V. appearances, not to mention some influence. And until people stop having an emotional reaction to that kind of stuff, by golly, it will sell.

I can't forgive how they've mangled historical memories. For them, the new age has brought Apocalypse with it. "Islam" and "the West" are the two abstract forces warring in face off between good and evil. Reality is a lot less dramatic; Islam and the West are two worlds that have had a long and complex history of engaging with each other, and today have an amount of healthy (and not-so-healthy) overlap.

Renaissance Europe was so influenced by Islam that Dante put famed Muslim scholars like Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina in the first circle of Hell (an honorary place for non-Christians), along with Plato, Socrates, Homer, Caesar and Hippocrates. Sir Francis Bacon, whom some people claim to be Shakespeare himself, attended a university in Muslim Spain, before beginning his great career in philosophy (and maybe English).

Now, raw images of masked men have come to stand for Islam, wiping out centuries of Andalusian and Ottoman civilization. All that doesn't matter anymore. As for today, forget context. Forget history, post-colonialism and political unrest. Forget all that simply doesn't fit in a sound bite.

It's odd, having people analyze, talk about and discuss something so personal. It's odd, having your religion made so public until it didn't belong to you anymore.

Yes, I could be a progressive Muslim or something like that, but it would mean that I would be disassociated from an Islam that people were debating on right and left, other people were defining my religion for me. Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists don't really have to think about being Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists; I had to think about being Muslim every minute of the day.

It's easier to write these things than to speak them; when I'm invisible, I actually have some kind of control over what I want people to understand about me. In the moods I can laugh at myself, I find this ironic.