Children reciting a Ramadan prayer, Dearborn, Michigan, Dec. 15, 2001. Ed Kashi/Corbis
In August 2008,
my book How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being
Young and Arab in America was published by The Penguin
Press. A few months later, Barack Obama was elected president of the United
States. Despite my own delusions of importance as a writer, I must admit that
there is no direct connection, but the facts are related nevertheless. Since my
book is largely about how Arab Muslim Americans had survived the erosion of
their civil rights after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the
election of Obama, a constitutional lawyer and community organizer, is
significant. His presidency seemed to promise a new era of racial justice in
American politics, what many have called the arrival of a “post-racial” age in
the United States. But in the years since Obama became president, Muslim
Americans have witnessed something new and far from a nirvana of coexistence,
namely the rise of an angry, populist movement across the nation that is
opposed not just to the free exercise of their religion, but sometimes to their
very presence in the country. How did this happen?
Before
answering this question, it’s worth reflecting on what life for Muslim and Arab
Americans was like under George W. Bush’s administration, the period that had
inspired me to write my book. It’s no exaggeration to say that prior to the
terrorist attacks of September 11, Muslim and Arab Americans registered very
little on the daily radar of most Americans. We were largely an invisible
minority, and if Americans thought about us at all, they conjured angry
overseas mobs, swarthy terrorists, or gluttonous oil sheikhs, in other words
the stock pictures of the Orientalist imaginary. With a few exceptions, such as
the 1998 film The Siege, contemporary American popular culture
almost never represented us in America, let alone as Americans. If we were
present, it was as relatively harmless and isolated individuals. The
cross-dressing Corporal Klinger, played by Lebanese American actor Jamie Farr,
on the TV show M*A*S*H was probably the best known Arab American on television,
and if you asked someone to name a Muslim American, you would probably hear an
answer either of Muhammad Ali, now comfortably celebrated, or Malcolm X, who
was killed long ago. But after September 11, the idea that Muslims and Arabs
were actually living next door became a major source of terrorist anxiety.
Immediately following the attacks, vigilante violence skyrocketed against
Arabs, Muslims, and anyone who resembled “a Muslim,” which generally meant
brown skin or something wrapped around one’s head. Almost overnight, we had
become a shadowy community to be afraid of.
The Bush administration helped fuel this anxiety. While it is true that
six days after the terrorist attacks President Bush visited the Islamic Center
of Washington, DC, where he spoke out against vigilantism and told the country
that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam…Islam is peace,” the
actions of his administration spoke louder than his words. The FBI had asked
the public for help following the terrorist attacks and established a hotline
for callers. Within just seven days, the Bureau received over 96,000 tips or
potential leads from a nervous public. For weeks after the attacks, Attorney
General John Ashcroft would announce the number of people arrested in
connection with the investigation, which reached over a thousand, in what
seemed like an obvious attempt to tell the American public that they working the
case hard, especially after having failed to thwart the attacks in the first
place. As it turned out, none of those arrested after September 11 had anything
to do with Al-Qaeda. (Zacarias Massaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker, had
been arrested on August 16, 2001.) In an October 2001 speech to the nation’s
mayors, Ashcroft proffered the suggestion that terrorism was limited to
immigrants to the United States. “Let the terrorists among us be warned,” he
intoned. “If you overstay your visa even by one day, we will arrest you.” And
in 2002, the government announced its new “Operation Tips” program, wherein it
aimed to recruit letter carriers and couriers, utility company workers, cable
TV installers, and others whose jobs provided access to private homes, as
amateur spies who were to report “suspicious” activity to the government. Only
after loud public opposition—since in this case it was not just the rights of
immigrants, Arabs, and Muslims that were being violated—was the program
cancelled.
Other law enforcement
policies played out similarly. On September 11, 2002, the government began a
program of “Special Registration” that required non-immigrant men from
twenty-five Muslim-majority countries to register their whereabouts in the
country. Then, there was heightened immigration enforcement that directly
targeted Arab and Muslim communities, the deployment of spies and informants in
the community, warrantless wiretaps, the abuse of the material witness statute
(keeping people in jail longer than they should have been), microscopic
examination of Muslim charities, and more. All of these policies were corrosive
on the human level for Arab and Muslim Americans, ultimately breaking down all
trust between people as well as alienating the communities from law enforcement.
Almost all
these programs fueled the media for years after the September 11 attacks. And
as we were transformed from invisibility to hyper-visibility, we now occupied
that zone in the American imagination traditionally reserved for enemies and subversives.
But, the random acts of vigilante violence notwithstanding, the new focus on us
didn’t translate into grassroots movements of opposition during these years.
Why should it have? The Bush administration was announcing to the public that
it was taking care of the supposed threat we posed so they didn’t have to. The
only time the American public became highly agitated about a related issue was
when, in 2006, the Bush Administration proposed selling the management of major
American shipping ports to Dubai Ports World, a company based in the United
Arab Emirates. After having been told for years by their government that Arabs
and Muslims were to be feared, the American public decided this was a
contradiction too big to bear. The outcry was loud and obnoxious, and Dubai
Ports World eventually sold their American port management business to
AIG.
With this
new-found scrutiny came an almost complete lack of understanding of the texture
of our lives. What often took its place was the most simplistic stereotyping of
Muslims or an almost willfully ignorant knowledge about Islam, even from top
government officials. Dale Watson, the FBI’s top intelligence official during
and after the terrorist attacks, was asked if he could describe the difference
between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. “Not technically, no,” was his response. Just
prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, even President Bush reportedly had to be
schooled on the elementary fact that that practitioners of Islam fell into two
main sects. We Muslims and Arabs were constantly talked about, but rarely heard
from, and the discussions about us were shallow, presumptuous, and dangerous.
Since few Americans had any real knowledge about Islam or the Arab world, gross
generalizations and bigoted statements flew easily and unchallenged across the
airwaves.
“He’s An Arab”
I decided
sometime in 2004 that I would attempt, in my own small way, to counteract this
terrible and growing tendency towards dehumanizing Arab and Muslim Americans by
writing a book. I sought to fill the emptiness of the stereotype with the stuff
of human life, and the best way to do that, I surmised, was to ground my
research in a specific geography and with a particular group of people. I chose
to write about Brooklyn, New York, home to the largest number of Arab Americans
according to the 2000 U.S. Census, and where I live. I also chose to write
about primarily young Arab Muslim Americans in their early twenties,
since it seems to me that to be young and figure out your place in the world is
already difficult, but to be young and figure out your place in the world with
a growing hostility from society around you is even more trying. I had a sense
of the kind of stories I wanted to write about. They were the ones I was
hearing from friends and occasionally reading about, but I didn’t go
specifically looking for the stories that ended up in my book. Instead, I
visited mosques and community centers, talked to friends and had them ask their
friends, consulted with lawyers, and put the word out that if anyone wanted to
tell me a story, I would offer a sympathetic ear. Writing the book became my
own journey through twenty-something Arab America.
What I
discovered was a generation that took its responsibilities to represent itself
very seriously. This was particularly true among the more devout Muslims. Pious
Muslim women told me repeatedly, for example, that wearing a headscarf was not
done solely for reasons of religious virtue but was also motivated by the need
to represent themselves and not let others represent them. The headscarf became
a symbol of religious pride and an opportunity for non-Muslims to ask the young
women questions about the faith, and many had developed an index of answers to
the questions. I found a lot of anxiety among young Muslim men in particular
regarding their own employment prospects. They worried, not without reason,
that all the negative sentiment expressed towards Muslims and Arabs would
narrow their chances to land jobs. I also heard about a few blatant acts of vigilante
violence, but many more people underscored to me the support they had from
neighbors and friends.
Then there were
stories about the government. After the September 11 attacks, Arab and Muslim
communities in and around Brooklyn felt besieged by the various government
policies and law enforcement initiatives that singled them out. Lawyers
complained to me about the difficulties they had finding clients in the
immediate aftermath of the attacks. I interviewed one young Syrian American
woman whose family was detained for three months after the attacks and then
were just as suddenly released. The father of another young Palestinian man had
been arrested in a sting operation and was sitting in jail awaiting
deportation, so the young man had been forced to assume a new role not just in
life, but within his family too, and so on. Other researchers were making
similar findings. One 2006 study by the Vera Institute on Arab American
communities and policing after September 11 found that “although community members
also reported increases in hate victimization, they expressed greater concern
about being victimized by federal policies and practices than by individual
acts of harassment or violence.”
The social
consequence of this kind of government scrutiny was what I was mostly
interested in documenting, and it was fascinating to hear stories from Arab
American shopkeepers about the support they received from their neighbors, or
to witness the active involvement of human rights advocates in the affairs of
the community, or to hear about churches and synagogues that were pursuing
interfaith efforts to get to know their Muslim neighbors better. In the face of
government repression bearing down on an essentially vulnerable community,
active resistance was found among key elements of American civil society,
operating with integrity and sometimes very effectively to counteract the
rampant scapegoating.
And so it
seemed reasonable to believe that the civil rights of Arabs and Muslim
Americans would again be if not completely restored, at least not made into a
political football to score easy points with by the time Barack Obama was
elected president. After all, at the Democratic National Convention of 2004,
Obama (then a Senate candidate) had spoken out unambiguously for the civil
rights of Arab Americans. “If there’s an Arab-American family being rounded up
without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil
liberties,” he said to wide applause. And by 2008, the American public was
growing tired of George W. Bush, who was serving out his second term, and of
the wars overseas. The government’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina
signaled to many that the administration was arrogantly out of touch with the
needs of its people, and the sudden near collapse of the banking system
translated into a loss of confidence in Republican economic policies. Change
was in the air.
Then again, just being Muslim or Arab American became a major political
issue in the 2008 presidential election. John McCain, the Republican candidate
for president, tried to dress down a woman at a Town Hall meeting who said she
couldn’t “trust” Obama because “he’s an Arab.” McCain responded by saying, “No
Ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have
disagreements with,” as if being a decent family man is the opposite of being
an Arab. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign, which had moved two women in hijab out
of camera during a campaign stop, called the repeated allegation that Obama was
a Muslim a “smear,” as if being a Muslim was the equivalent to being a
criminal. Still, I was optimistic that these could be chalked up to the dying
breaths of political opportunism at the expense of Muslim Americans.
Boy, was I wrong, and not just because the Obama administration has followed,
and in many cases even expanded, the same harmful policies as its predecessor
on civil rights issues. Under Obama, the government has relied more on its
dubious use of spies and informants within the Muslim American community,
authorized the killing of an American citizen without due process through its
now common tactic of drone strikes, deported unauthorized immigrants at far
faster rate than George W. Bush, grown the surveillance state massively,
protected its own legally questionable actions by invoking the State Secrets
Act, and much more.
Although the Obama administration speaks in a far less aggressive
rhetoric when implementing these terrible policies, the popular climate since
2008 for Arab and Muslim Americans has nevertheless neither improved nor stayed
the same but has gotten precipitously worse. Polling data bears out the change.
Just weeks after the terrorist attacks, 39 percent of Americans harbored
negative feelings toward Muslims according to a Washington
Post-ABC News poll conducted in October 2001. Surveys in
recent years repeatedly show that that number has climbed to around 50 percent.
Opinions are one thing, actions are another, and in the last few years in the
United States, a right-wing anti-Muslim activist core has mobilized against a
perceived “Islamic threat” on American values and the American system in ways
they hadn’t prior to 2008. Legislation has been introduced in more than two
dozen states prohibiting the use of Sharia law (sometimes referred to simply as
“foreign law”) in state courts, and the Republican National Platform of 2012
contains almost identical language. Kansas recently signed its bill into law,
even though there is no known case of a Kansas judge basing a ruling on Sharia
and in the American legal system the Constitution necessarily takes precedence
over any other law. But much of the anti-Muslim agitation is about phantom
threats anyway.
Nor is the putative threat of Sharia law usurping the Constitution the
only anti-Muslim agitation in the American public sphere. Legislators actively
promote the idea that Muslim Americans are fifth-column infiltrators, poised to
take over the country in the name of Islam. This past summer, five Republican
lawmakers sent a letter to the Justice Department claiming their “serious
security concerns” of the “deep penetration in the halls of our United States
government” by the Muslim Brotherhood. (Other Republicans dismissed the
allegation for what it is: ludicrous.) Peter King, a Republican congressman
from New York and chairman of the Homeland Security Commission, held five
public hearings about radicalization in the American Muslim community, even
though all the serious social science on this question—from the Pew Research
Center, the Rand Corporation, and the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland
Security—shows that American Muslims overwhelmingly reject extremist ideology.
And today’s
anti-Muslim mobilization is not confined solely to politicians. A cartoonish
pastor of a fringe church in Florida garnered international headlines when he
sought to burn the Koran on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
He was talked out of his actions by the secretary of defense, but proceeded to
perform his heinous action at a later date. A cable television channel aired a
show, All-American Muslim, about Muslims in the Dearborn, Michigan
area that soon became controversial. Right-wing conservatives alleged that the
show was propaganda because—and here’s the rub—the show didn’t include the
extremist point of view, as if the only point of view that qualifies as
authentically Muslim is the extremist one. Such is the worldview of
Islamophobes today. The controversy caused two corporate sponsors of the show,
Lowe’s and Kayak.com, to pull their advertisements. Anti-Muslim activists led
by Pamela Geller, an anti-Muslim blogger and populist demagogue, funded a
campaign to place advertisements on public transportation that many interpret
as being hateful and anti-Muslim. The ads read: “In any war between the
civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat
Jihad.” And a proposed a Islamic cultural center, to be located in downtown
Manhattan and modeled after the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural center in New
York, was transformed by a very vocal anti-Muslim crowd into “the Ground Zero
Mosque,” though it was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero. On September 11,
2010, a large demonstration of thousands of people opposing the center was held
in Lower Manhattan, with many of the demonstrators carrying signs with statements
like “What Would Jesus Do? Have His Throat Slit by Mohammed,” and shouting “No
Victory Mosque” in unison. Nor is this the only Islamic center in the country
that has faced resistance. In fact, opposition to mosque construction has now
occurred in at least half the states in the country, as reported by the
American Civil Liberties Union.
Fear, Inc.
Something has
changed in America. When my book was published, it was rare to see large
numbers of Americans on the streets protesting Muslim Americans exercising
their right to practice their religion. In the last couple of years, however,
we have seen raucous anti-Muslim protests around the country, from Tennessee to
New York, California to Michigan. In the minds of many, it seems, a new
narrative has taken hold, one that operates more along the lines of culture
than through the threat to national security. Acts of cultural and religious
expression, and even just the ordinary activities of Muslim Americans, have now
become suspicious on another level beyond imminent violence. Just being Muslim
is now seen as a threat to the very culture of America.
And so we
return to the question regarding the origin of this change. Is this new
populist agitation against Muslim Americans the logical outcome of a decade-long
“war on terror” that shows little sign of ending? Is it due to the dogged
persistence of Orientalist clichés that never seem to die but multiply into new
formulations? Is it because of a few high-profile arrests of Muslim American
terrorism suspects in the United States in recent years? Is it a consequence of
an American foreign policy that depends upon demonizing its overseas enemies?
And has this demonization of Muslims abroad travelled back, like a chicken
coming home to roost, to American Muslims? Or is the rise of populist anger at
Muslim Americans pushed by a small group of right-wing ideologues who wish to
goad the United States’ population to the right of the political spectrum for
specific foreign policy goals—often connected to American intervention in the
Muslim-majority countries and support for Israel’s policies against the
Palestinians?
The Center for
American Progress, a liberal think tank in the United States, has supplied good
evidence for this last answer. In August 2011, the center published Fear Inc.: The
Roots of the Islamophobic Network in America, which argues that the
rise of Islamophobia in the United States is connected to “a small, tightly
networked group of misinformation experts guiding an effort that reaches
millions of Americans through effective advocates, media partners, and
grassroots organizing.” The report actually identified the key players in this
Islamophobic network, as well as the more than $40 million paid out by seven
foundations over ten years to support their detestable mission. While there is
likely some truth to this reason, and all of the reasons, I think many miss the
bigger picture. Fear, Inc., for example, makes a
convincing case, but it also assumes that people can be directed to act by the
network and not by their own desires or for their own reasons.
Maybe there is another motivation. Perhaps this rising populism has
less to do with Muslim Americans specifically and more to do with the changing
demographics of the United States. Put another way, perhaps the anger directed
at us is at least as much a symptom of a general malaise that some Americans
feel about their changing fortunes and dwindling stature as it is about
specific foreign policy objectives or a kind of classical anti-Muslim bigotry.
The phantom fears surrounding Muslim America may be driven by an anxiety held
by an older, white, and Christian America that is nervously confronting the end
of its majority in American politics. And the fact that this populism rises to
prominence after 2008, that is to say after the election of Barack Obama, is no
coincidence. Obama is also a symbol to them of the beginning of the end of
their historic privileges.
Actually, their
fears are not unfounded. In 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau projected that in 2042
the population of the country would be majority minority, that is to say, white
Americans would now constitute less than 50 percent of the population.
(Currently minorities account for about 37 percent of the population.) In some
ways, we are almost already there. The Census Bureau revealed in July 2011 that
more than half of the babies born in the country belonged to current minority
groups and, in October 2012, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released
a study showing that Protestants now account for less than half of the
population—as opposed to forty years ago when they made up about two-thirds of
the nation.
The racial, religious, and ethnic transformation the United States has
been experiencing since the immigration laws changed in 1965, when the door was
opened to non-European immigrants, is indeed profound. In some ways, this
transformation is even more significant to an American identity based on
whiteness than the end of slavery or the end of segregation in the United
States. Those watershed moments in American history meant that the majority
lost much of its ability to impose its will on a minority. This time, however,
the concept of a majority in society will itself become outdated.
Even though Muslim Americans account for somewhere between 1-2 percent of
the population, our oft-remarked upon and exaggerated difference from the
majority matters to those who worry about the disappearance of an America they
feel they know. Maybe this is why we repeatedly hear the fears that Muslims are
taking over America, an impossibility considering our numbers and influence.
The fact that it is far more socially acceptable to express negative opinions
about Muslims than virtually any other racial, religious, or ethnic group, also
suggests that much of the hostility directed at us could be a displacement for
general feelings of impending usurpation from a position of privilege. What
else explains the strange and enduring allegation that President Obama is
actually a Muslim, a belief that has more than doubled since 2008, from 16
percent to 34 percent, among Republicans? There is almost certainly an implied
racial coding going on here. It’s another way of saying that the African
American Obama is not one of “us,” and “Muslim” becomes a stand-in for many
kinds of otherness.
We don’t have
to take the idea of a “white America” too literally here either. Race and
racial thinking is the long tragedy of the American drama, and any talk of
white identity may invoke older images of hoods and burning crosses. But that’s
not how the current anxiety about losing a place of privilege in the nation
expresses itself today. It’s more a feeling of social melancholy expressed in
many ways, from anti-immigrant movements like the Minutemen to the rise of the
Tea Party, and frequently channeled on Fox News. Behind the anger, one often
hears a pervasive sense of loss. When a Muslim community on Staten Island
wanted to build an Islamic Center in 2010, they met with opposition from their
neighbors and the mournful feeling that the old America was slipping away was
expressed by one protestor who said, “We just want to leave our neighborhood
the way it is—Christian, Catholic.”
The Atlantic magazine
recognized this cultural anxiety about the changing demography in the United
States when it published an article in 2009 called “The End of White America?”
The article quotes sociologist Matt Wray, who studies whiteness in America
today: “Following the black-power movement, all of the other minority groups
that followed took up various forms of activism, including brown power and
yellow power and red power. Of course the problem is, if you try and have a
‘white power’ movement, it doesn’t sound good.” The article continues: “The
result is a racial pride that dare not speak its name, and that defines itself
through cultural cues instead—a suspicion of intellectual elites and city
dwellers, a preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or
feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with ‘the real
America.’” Anti-Muslim populist agitation—politically permissible in ways that
mobilizing against other minorities simply isn’t—adopts similar characteristics
that likewise work to build a culture of pride in that same white, Christian
America that now feels anxiously under siege. These include suspicions of a
“politically correct” elite (that is, in this case, forcing Muslims onto
average Americans), a direct alignment of Christian with American values, and a
sense that this populist vanguard is the last, best defense of the “real”
America.
At the very
fringes, an explicit “white power” movement does in fact exist in the United
States, and according the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks domestic
hate groups, “white power” and other right-wing extremist groups have grown
“explosively” in recent years. In 2000, the SPLC monitored 602 hate groups. It
now tracks 1,018, almost double the number. They expanded most quickly, the
SPLC notes, after the election of Obama, and while not all of these
organizations are “white power” groups, many of them have expanded their focus
to include Muslims as another despised minority. In August 2012, white
supremacist Wade Michael Page opened fire at a Sikh Temple, killing six, and
although no definitive motive has been determined for his rampage, it’s likely
that Page was motivated by his hatred of non-whites. With their distinctive
style of dress and dark skins, Sikhs, of course, have suffered many anti-Muslim
hate crimes in the United States since 9/11.
The Browning of
America
The “white
power” movement is only the most extreme example of a narrative of discomfort
between an older version of America and a new multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and
multi-faith America, but the fretful sentiment is commonly found among large
swaths of the population. The best evidence for this, particularly when
considering attitudes toward Muslim Americans, is found in a 2011 study
co-produced by the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research
Institute titled What It Means to Be an American: Attitudes in an Increasingly
Diverse America Ten Years after 9/11. The study polled 2,450
adult Americans on a variety of pressing political questions surrounding
immigration and identity, and the results are intriguing, particularly because
the study took age, education, and political leaning into account. While it was
not solely concerned with American attitudes towards Muslims, the study did ask
many questions about American attitudes to Islam, and it quickly becomes
obvious that suspicion of Muslims divides along political and generational
lines. (The study did not quantify responses by race.)
According to the poll, older Republicans
specifically, not the public generally, are the most predisposed to be
suspicious. Less than half of the Republicans surveyed held favorable views of
Muslims, compared with about two-thirds of the Democrats, and younger Americans
(18-29 year olds) had twice as much social interaction with Muslims compared to
their seniors. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans say that the values of Islam
are at odds with American values and that trust in Fox News correlates highly
with negative attitudes about Islam. Significantly, the number of Republicans
that perceives a conflict between American values and Islam (63 percent) is in
the same ballpark as Republicans who also see immigrants generally as
threatening American customs and values (55 percent). Through its many
questions, the poll confirms the view that those holding the most ardent
anti-Muslim attitudes come mainly from a very specific, generally older, and
highly conservative segment of the population, precisely the ones who would
feel most threatened by the browning of America.
It may not seem so, but this is ultimately
good news. For one thing, the current generation of younger Americans, the most
religiously and ethnically diverse in the nation’s history, tends to be less
opposed to Muslim Americans than their senior counterparts, though 23 percent
of younger Americans still bewilderingly believe that American Muslims are
trying to establish Sharia law in the land. While it’s always possible that
people’s opinions change as they age, the overall trends in the survey strongly
suggest a society of more rather than less inclusion.
More important in the short run is the
recognition that we don’t have to assume a “clash of civilizations”
confrontation every time a conflict with Muslim Americans arises. We can and
should be thinking about politics in context, and that means thinking carefully
and deeply about what the cleavages in American society currently are and from
where they derive. We need not believe that large numbers of Americans are and
will forever be opposed to Islam and Muslims.
But the bad news is not absent either.
Anti-Muslim agitation is a political reality in the United States today, and it
needs far more attention than it is currently being given. It’s also entirely
reasonable, unfortunately, to expect more resentment, elevated anxiety, and the
increased possibility of violence in the years to come, as the demographic changes
in the country become even more evident. If and when more violence arrives, the
challenge will be the same as it was with the September 11 attacks. We
shouldn’t rush to judgment, we shouldn’t look for easy scapegoats, and we
shouldn’t blame an entire religion or race for the actions of a few. What we
need to invest in, now and in the future, are more complex ways of thinking
about American society and better ways of achieving a society that provides
justice for all. And when that day comes, How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?, instead of being about current affairs,
will become a book about history.
Moustafa Bayoumi
is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City
University of New York. He is the author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab
in America, which won an American Book Award and the Arab American
Book Award for Non-Fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian,
National, New York Times
Magazine,
New York
Magazine, London
Review of Books, Nation, and other publications.