The Double-Bind of Americans of Middle Eastern Heritage

Shiva Balaghi
Kevorkian Center, NYU

On the morning of September 11, like many of my neighbors, I walked to the corner of my street and watched as the Twin Towers burned and then dissipated.  Life for all of us changed on that morning.

It is difficult to know how to talk about the unspeakable, how to deal with the unfathomable, how to understand the incomprehensible events that took place on that morning.  Words seem to elude us, and so we speak from a place of deep sorrow and anger.  Helplessness overcomes us, and so we freeze into passivity or act out of rage.

Who could have done this?  Why did they do this?  Soon, we were deluged with talking heads on television.  Journalists, politicians, and public leaders grabbed their microphones and began speaking about the culprits: the Arabs, the Afghans, the Iranians, the Palestinians, the Muslims – or all of them – Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein – or both of them.  These people unfurled this catastrophe on us. 

Like so many other Americans, I remained glued to the television set.  Charlie Gibson, the ABC reporter who likes to remind us often that he is a Princeton man, kept talking about Arabic people.  Another anchor explained to us that this attack resulted from ancient quarrels in the Middle East; correcting her timeline she said well at least to the time when the state of Israel was founded – in 1975.  Interviewing an official, Tim Russert asked if we had been underestimating “these goat herding rag wearers.”  We heard reports of happy Arabs dancing in the streets of Karachi. Bin-Laden (or is it Layden, Lowden, Laddan?) gave a speech from inside his “rathole.”  Explaining the difficulty of spying on Islamic groups, one news analyst said that it would entail “living in caves,” which is not something CIA operatives are comfortable doing. The news media was quick to cloak this terror attack in Arab overtones, to color this Arabism in highly racialized and dehumanized terms, and to transpose this Arabism onto all peoples of brown skin and of Muslim faith. 

For a few days after the attack, NYU was closed.  I spent most of the days walking around Lower Manhattan.  The stench clung to my skin and the smoke filled my lungs.  I felt as if I was watching a movie, two movies actually.  The split screen going through my mind juxtaposed the images I was seeing in Lower Manhattan with memories of another time and place – Tehran in 1979.  Then, too, my home town had burned, army trucks had filled the streets, smoke had filled the sky.  Then too fear had shattered through the tranquility of a teenager’s life. 

As I got phone calls and emails from friends and colleagues, I realized others had their own split screen memories that were haunting them.  Their split screens juxtaposed the images of September 11 with acts of violence they had seen in Beirut, in Jerusalem, in Ramallah, in Sarajevo, in Tehran.  Their fear and their anguish was doubled – they had come to America as immigrants, fleeing acts of violence to seek refuge.  They had built lives as first generation Americans.  And now the violence had followed them to their new homes.

Another day, another night.  More phone calls and emails.  The split-screen vision through which I was seeing life had become even more divided.  Now, it seemed, there were hate crimes against some Americans.  In Pleasant Grove, a middle class suburb of Dallas, Texas, a Pakistani man named Waqar Hassan Choudhry had been shot dead as he worked in a convenience store.  In Mesa, Arizona outside of Phoenix, a gas station owner named Balbir Singh Sodhi had been shot dead.  An Afghani woman wearing a head scarf in a mall in Washington, D.C. had been chased down and assaulted.  In New York, a 75-year-old drunken man tried to run over a Pakistani woman in a shopping mall parking lot. A molotov cocktail was thrown at an Arab-American community center in Chicago.  The stories went on and on. 

I spent some time watching the prayer services that were held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. and in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.  The reporters said that attendance at church services was unusually high on Sunday September 16th.  Prayer is a comfort to many at times like this.  But I watched in horror as reports came in of mosques under attack around the world.  Three mosques in Dallas had been firebombed and shot at.  A man with a Molotov cocktail was stopped by police as he tried to hurl it into the Brooklyn Islamic Center in Bensonhurst.  The small synagogue in my neighborhood was guarded by an armed New York City policeman for several days.  I hope that the day will come, very soon, when all of those who live in this country will be able to find comfort in prayer in synagogues, mosques, and churches that are safe havens for them.

On Monday September 17th, Manhattan awoke.  The financial markets opened and people flowed back to work.  I came into my office and began taking calls from journalists and teachers, asking for the help of our faculty and students.  They needed to have their questions answered.  The media requests for interviews and background information from our faculty were plentiful – but my favorite call was from a producer at newsmagazine aired on a major network who wanted someone who could speak for a segment they were taping on the wasabi sect in Saudi Arabia.  Hmm, a new angle on the story: sushi fanatics in the Gulf?  She was, of course, looking to do a story on the Wahhabis.

In the midst of the flurry of activity, I received a call from a woman with a quiet voice.  She worked at a major international bank that had lost 100 employees in the World Trade Center buildings.  Today, she said, we are trying to get back to work.  But we have a problem: our employees are lashing out at colleagues who are dark skinned.  One South Asian investment banker used the bathroom – others were afraid to go into the same bathroom for fear that he had planted a bomb.  We have a problem, she said. 

Today in the United States there are a thousand prisoners.  Prisoners of fear: Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans, Pakistani-Americans, Sikh-Americans, Iranian-Americans, who are afraid to go to work, to shop, to pray, to send their children to school.  Flying while Arab has become a bizarre phenomenon.  If you are an olive skinned male, you can expect to be asked to leave a plane at any time because the pilot or passengers refuse to fly with you.  The FBI is investigating dozens of hate crimes; the Council on American Islamic Relations puts the number of reported attacks on at 625.  Many more are unlikely to ever be reported or investigated.  These people feel a double bind: they must deal with the anguish of September 11 and the fallout from the racism which they now face.  Racism that can deny them their livelihoods, their personal safety, their sense of belonging, even their lives. 

It is my personal belief that violence is wrong.  I am horrified that any one for whatever reason would fly a plane into a building filled with human beings.  I am also horrified that anyone would hurt, injure, or kill innocent people living in America who happen to be of a certain ethnic or religious background. 

Some of our leaders have talked about “us” and “them.”  I do not know where this invisible divide is, where humankind is supposed to be split into two. 

Many of us who are immigrants to this country have left behind horrific lives; we Americans of Middle Eastern heritage are often avid consumers of the mythical American dream.  Having come from countries with autocratic regimes, we believe that the bill of rights is an unshakable document, that we are now living in that city on a hill.  Now it seems the lines are being drawn and that our skin color and faith makes us suspect and dangerous – outsiders in our own homeland.  Last night’s episode of “Politically Incorrect” was devoted to the discussion of diversity versus security.  Bill Maher talked about an Arab-American man who had been detained for 2 weeks.  After being questioned and having his entire personal life investigated, it was found that he had no connections to any terrorist groups.  Upon his release, he made a statement saying he felt no resentment for the incident; he understood that it was necessary to catch the terrorists and that as an Arab male he might have been suspect.  Bill Maher celebrated this generosity.  This is a telling sign of how the media is asking us Middle Eastern Americans to handle this situation.  We must gracefully forego our civil and legal rights in order to accommodate fear-based racism.  It takes an immense amount of work, every single day, to make people feel comfortable with you if you are of Iranian, Arab, or Afghani heritage.  It can be degrading and emotionally exhausting. 

So, the question at hand is what is to be done? We need to try to understand the mind set of men who could fly an airplane filled with civilians into a building filled with human beings -- mothers and fathers, daughters and sons. In order to commit such horrendous acts, those men had to be completely disconnected from their humanity. They had to be able to stop thinking and feeling altogether. To them, those buildings were reduced to mere symbols. The onus is now upon us to tap into our own sense of humanity, our compassion, and our natural instincts to try and understand one another as human beings. We must never allow other people -- whether individuals or members of a faith or of an ethnicity -- to become representations, to become symbols. I know that searching for understanding at a time like this is incredibly difficult. But it is precisely at times like this, when reaching out and breaking down barriers seems an impossible task that it is absolutely imperative that we do so.

The media has a tremendous amount of power – the power to construct and to debunk the mythology of symbolism through which so many see the world. Now more than ever, it is time to make a concerted effort to take account of the consequences of the representations of Muslims and Islam in the media. Last week, Diane Sawyer was interviewing Jehan Sedat on Good Morning America. As the widow of President Anwar Sadat, a man assassinated by members of an Egyptian Islamic group, Jehan Sadat was being asked to shed light on radical Islam. As Diane Sawyer asked her to explain the roots of the rage felt by the Islamists, ABC News ran footage of some of these Islamists as they sat in prisons in Egypt. Why, Sadat and Sawyer pondered aloud, are they so angry? There was a dislocation between the lack of understanding in the conversation and the stark footage of the Egyptian prison filled with Muslims --at no point did either woman refer to the possibility that Egypt's policy of repressing alternative voices, including those of Islamists, might play a role in this rage. Last week, NPR's Morning Edition, a decidedly intellectual and leftist voice in the media, aired a commentary by the editor of the journal Commentary that offered a reading of the Muslim position on Arab- Israeli peace. The commentator kept referring to 'the Islamic mind' and tried to explain the way certain political proposals were heard by 'the Islamic ear'. As if 1.2 billion Muslims, practicing different forms of Islam and living very diverse lives, could hear with one ear and think with one mind.

This long overdue process of understanding the complexities of Islam, however, can not be undertaken by the media alone. The important work of confronting prejudices against Muslims in America is not the  responsibility of the media alone. It necessitates the recognition of the marginalization of Islam in this country at all levels. And this process of trying to reach a better mutual understanding must entail the active participation of various elements of the Muslim community itself -- which needs to take a hard look in the mirror and ask itself difficult questions about its own complicities in this quagmire. Arriving at a better understanding of the violent turn of some Islamists became abundantly clear on the morning of September 11. Distancing Islam from those actions necessitates a coming to terms with very difficult sociological and doctrinal issues that can no longer be avoided. Even as we urge the media to be more inclusive, to be more careful in their rhetorical and graphic representations of Islam, Muslim leaders must be active and willing participants in the creation of new paradigms and new conversations.

And I believe that as the site of this horrible attack and as the nexus of global cosmopolitanism, New York must play a central role in this new dialogue of understanding. New York has always represented something special. A safe haven for all peoples, a true center for diversity. New Yorkers must set an example and show that we are not governed by fear, by ignorance, by violence. Now more than ever, New Yorkers must show the world that wisdom and compassion and humanity are always more powerful than any weapons. Ultimately, they are our most effective security measures.