I experienced 9/11 first as an American mother, then as a ‘Muslim other’. For the first three hours, I didn’t know whether my son, who worked for one of the banks in the World Trade Towers at the time, was in New York or in London on that fateful Tuesday; when he finally called me with a terse: “Mom, I’m all right,” I thought of all the mothers who didn’t get that reassuring phone call. My second thought was to pray that the perpetrators of the horror would turn out to have no connection to the Middle East. When that prayer was not answered, I understood that, although I had believed myself and my family to be completely integrated in American society for twenty years, at that moment I lost my right to share in our national tragedy; I lost the right not to be judged as a representative of a perceived “community.”
In the weeks that followed, as images of an Islam I didn’t recognize spewed over the airwaves, I volunteered to speak wherever I was invited, to try to distance the religion I had grown up with as a child in Egypt from the atrocity falsely perpetrated in its name. The first time my neighbor of eight years heard me speak at a church, she burst out: “I didn’t know we had Muslims in the cul-de-sac!”
“But Gwyn, what did you think we were?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But not that kind of Muslim!”
I suppose she meant it had never occurred to her that the neighbor she saw watering her bushes in shorts and tank top could be ‘a Muslim.’
Today, ten years later, it seems evident that efforts to distance Islam from terrorism have proved futile; an entrenched, unapologetic Islamophobia is the last avowable prejudice in America. The only hope of reversing that alarming trend lies in the Arab Spring which, if it succeeds, might open the eyes of the world to a different image of Arabs/Muslims: not as an undifferentiated horde of potential terrorist recruits but as hopeful, tolerant, peaceful young protesters aspiring to a modicum of dignity, democracy and employment. I saw them in action when I walked among them in Tahrir Square during the revolution in Egypt last winter. Not for their sakes alone, but for the sake of a retreat from the dangerous rhetoric of a clash of civilizations in the world, I can only hope that the idealists get the upper hand over the cynics.
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Don Rich
Matthew DeCoursey
RenaissanceLady
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