BY SARAH SAKHA
My father goes by “Fred”; his real name is Farzad, which sounds distinctly non-white and Muslim. My mother goes by “Sarah”; her name is Soheila. They named me Sarah, so I would blend into my predominantly white, conservative hometown in Arizona, in a post-9/11, post-Iraq invasion world, as a Muslim, Iranian-American female.
Welcome to my generation, the youngest generation of Muslim Americans with any living memory of 9/11. Starker than our memories of that day are our memories of the world that came after. We are now in our twenties, many of us recently out of college and working, or pursuing advanced degrees. As immigrants and the children of immigrants, we (or our parents) were “born in the wrong countries” — places like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Iran. Post-9/11 socialized, normalized, and internalized racism and xenophobia for so many Muslims and people of color. We are very much Muslim and American. Unlike our parents, we haven’t Americanized or otherwise sanitized our names. But like them, we are constantly aware of America’s demands and expectations for us.
We face an unremitting push and pull between our public pose and private religious identity, influenced by pressures to integrate, secularize, and Americanize. But some Muslim Americans in New York City say that to their surprise, the pressure has only grown since years immedaitely after 9/11. I spoke with five Muslim Americans who grew up in New York: Asad Dandia of Brooklyn; high school friends Tasnuva Orchi and Sidikha Ashraf of Queens; Kareem Elsaid of Staten Island; and Nitasha Siddique of Queens. Their stories offer a glimpse into New York’s Generation 9/11.
“I just want to be a badass”
Sidikha Ashraf laments her lack of good headshots. She wants to become an actress one day, but she cannot use any of her photos; they all show her hair and she just recently began wearing a hijab. On one hand, she is excited, fearless, self-confident. I am excited for her; it’s hard to think of more than a handful of Western TV shows that positively feature Muslim characters, let alone hijabis. But on the other hand, she is now very visibly Muslim, which has created new reasons to feel nervous.
“I was walking around in Staples, and this one lady was just looking at me. There is no association with the hijab and stealing highlighters!” Sidikha said. Humor is a coping mechanism for many; we joke about the things that are often the most difficult to confront.
For years, she has wanted to work in entertainment, but felt it wasn’t a practical option for her. Then, her sense of possibility opened, when a high school friend — a fellow Muslim — mentioned how their other Muslim friend wanted to work for Jimmy Fallon.
“I was like, Jimmy Fallon is an option!” Sidikha said, mimicking her disbelief. But her inclination for writing and comedy manifested much earlier than that, when she was in the third grade.
In fact, she first started writing creatively after witnessing the ugly, heated controversy around the “Ground Zero mosque,” as many opponents misleadingly called it. She took her first stab at writing a pilot then.
“My first memory of me getting angry was watching people protest about that [the Park51 mosque controversy] and saying all these mean things about Muslims,” Sidikha said.
“I watched an SNL [Saturday Night Live] clip, Weekend Update, and Seth Myers said one singular joke about the Park51 thing,” Sidikha said. She is referring to the 2010 national debate around the proposed construction of a 15-story community center, named “Park51,” two blocks from Ground Zero. The center would have included a library, swimming pool, and daycare facility, as well as the mosque. It became a heavily local, heavily personal issue for New Yorkers, which Sidikha attested to.
“You know like having rose-colored glasses? That’s the day the rose tint came off.”
For Asad Dandia, that moment of reckoning came one year later, when a sniper was going around Washington, D.C., leaving a trail of notes by his victims. He recalls the “additional sense of urgency,” given how soon after 9/11 this was occurring.
“I remember an Egyptian guy, Mohammed, raised his hand [in class] and said, ‘Well, the sniper couldn’t have been Muslim, because no Muslim would leave a note saying, “I am God.”’ That was my first realization that this little incident that I considered myself part of was going to be my reality for a very long time.”
Dandia co-founded Muslims Giving Back, a volunteer-based Brooklyn nonprofit operating through charity and work in the food pantry. But the nonprofit – and his mosque – were soon infiltrated by an NYPD informant. In 2013, Asad initiated a class action lawsuit against the NYPD, alongside the ACLU, NYCLU, CUNY Law School, and two other plaintiffs, citing their discriminatory surveillance program, namely the four-year surveillance period of the Muslim community at Brooklyn College, where Asad studied for part of his undergraduate degree.
Police surveillance – and deportations – were rampant across New York City in the post-9/11 era, targeting certain neighborhoods. New York City Muslim Americans would face more than a decade of high-tech surveillance, stop-and-frisk, anti-radicalization “human mapping” of Muslim communities, and deportations.
“I remember people were disappearing left and right; later we find out they were being deported,” Asad said. According to the ACLU, thousands of Muslims were detained and deported post-9/11, many simply because they had overstayed their visas and turned out unlucky. Asad noted Bay Ridge, which is primarily Arab, and Foster Avenue in Coney Island, which is heavily South Asian, as the hardest hit Muslim communities. That mass deportation, which he witnessed firsthand as a ten-year old, inspired Asad to work as a Muslim community organizer when he reached adulthood. Being visibly Muslim, however, wasn’t always as intuitive a decision.
“I said I’d never do this again”
Asad entered the Brighton Beach subway station in New York City one day, wearing a kufiyah on his head, with a business casual dress shirt and pants. He had worn the kufiyah like that before without a second thought, and had never had any issues wearing it in public.
“I remember when I got on [the subway], I heard the loudspeaker go off, ‘Suspicious passenger arriving,’ two or three times,” Asad said. Slowly it dawned on him that the announcement was about him. He instantly questioned his choice of dress. “I sat down and froze. At that moment, I said, I’d never do this again.”
He never wore his kufiyah like that in public again, and he reevaluated what he could expect from New Yorkers. Before, he had believed that New Yorkers didn’t care about the religious expression and identity of others — or at least, that they wouldn’t stigmatize people who dressed according to their religious or cultural identity. Now he realized there were limits even to the storied insouciance of New Yorkers.
Nitasha Siddique had a similar moment of awakening at a much younger age. When she first wore a hijab for the first time to school at around six or seven years old, her elementary
It was many years later when she understood their reasons for asking – they had taken it as a sign that they needed to intervene on a young girl’s behalf. She was spooked; she did not wear the hijab for a long time after.
She started wearing it permanently four years later; in high school, she began to think of hijab politically, too.
“Teachers were surprised that I spoke up,” Nitasha said. She faced the assumption that if she wore a headscarf, she would be quiet, passive, or docile. In high school, she had asked her teacher for a college recommendation. She recalled him writing, “Despite all these things about her family and her culture, she still managed to excel in school.” It was patronizing, even alienating.
That alienation is something we can never quite shake off, particularly those of us who are more visibly Muslim – the kufiyah, the hijab, the skin tone, the name given to us at birth. Kareem Elsaid described being close to his teacher in fourth grade, two years after having moved from Cairo, Egypt to New York; he was the teacher’s pet. “I used to be asked to do everything,” Kareem said.
After 9/11, suddenly, he wasn’t anymore. “Hey Kareem, she doesn’t ask you to do anything anymore,” one friend told him.
His classmates turned against him. In sixth grade, he was called “sand nigger” for the first time. On another occasion, he was playing basketball one afternoon and asked another boy for the time.
“It’s 9:11,” the boy replied. Kareem was called a “terrorist” for the first time, and said he narrowly escaped getting cornered or even beaten up by the other kids.
“The quickest way somebody could shut me down was by saying, ‘Shut up, you terrorist, or sand n-word, no counterargument to that,” Kareem said, speaking to junior high school. “I’d just get more emotionally riled up, just losing – just constantly losing.”
After a few instances of narrowly escaping what could have been assault, Kareem knew how to walk with his keys in between all his fingers in case a situation were to transpire quickly – though talking about that today, he smiles and shrugs his shoulders. Some things we just come to terms with and get used to.
“I was the first Muslim they had ever met”
“For a lot of people in my class, I was the first Egyptian they ever knew, the first Muslim they had ever met,” Kareem said.“I just didn’t fit in.” He talked about fitting in with other minorities and people of color in college, and the looks, often aggressive, he got from white New Yorkers. With his full, dark beard, he still encounters hostile glances to this day, but he is used to it.
Kareem’s non-Muslim friends felt free to criticize America’s wars abroad, but he did not ;to the contrary, he felt the need to express caution when talking about the war, to not come off as extremely “unpatriotic” or emotional.
“Someone candidly said [to me], ‘I think we should just nuke them all,’” Kareem said. If he pushed back, people would question his response in correlation with his Muslim, Middle Eastern identity; he had to be cautious.
“It [the caution] made me agree with people I normally would not have agreed with because I was the only one in that group,” he said. There was a risk of being questioned, “Why are you siding with the terrorist?”
“I didn’t want to identify as a Muslim”
Sidikha’s younger sister, Hana, was born one year after 9/11.
“We had to give her a name that doesn’t sound Muslim,” Sidikha said. I related to that conundrum; my own parents followed the same rationale – a name that could be pronounced, spelled, and not questioned. They pushed the more “Iranian-sounding” name to the side – my middle name is Ariyan – and gave me an innocuous name that could blend into many faith backgrounds: Sarah.
Sidikha recalled her Bronx Science High School sweatshirts, “I remember my parents being like, stop getting your name on the back of those sweaters; people on the street are going to know your name and know you’re Muslim.”
In private, at home, her family encouraged spirituality. But Tasnuva Orchi, Sidikha’s close friend and classmate at Bronx Science High school, recalled her father’s word of caution., “Have opinions, he told her, but don’t stand out.” Or, better yet, before attending college, “Don’t make them associate your face with Islam on campus.”
Even in semi-private spaces at Bronx Science during high school, when a small group of Muslim girls, including Tasnuva, would gather to have religious discussions, halaqa – “a bunch of hijabis in a circle” – the security guard would tell them that they couldn’t gather in that classroom, any classroom, because it looked suspicious. The student Christian group, however, never faced difficulties holding unscheduled meetings in places. Tasnuva talked about internalizing a fear of being publicly Muslim from a young age, having to “pick and choose” her identity based on whether in that moment she wanted to be perceived as Muslim.
Often times, Muslim Americans of my generation do not want to associate with Islam at all. “I didn’t understand why it was happening to me; I had no impact, wasn’t involved in 9/11, but I was being treated like the person who had targeted people,” Kareem said. “That pushed me away from Islam.”
“How do we keep going? Where do we keep going?”
I asked all the Muslim-American New Yorkers with whom I spoke whether they thought it was harder being a Muslim now, or right after 9/11.
“I think it’s easier now because some folks are taking the initiative to learn about the religion and understand it, especially those with a Westernized upbringing, and post-Iraq War,” Kareem said. He pointed out the level of public support for anti-Muslim persecution when the Muslim Ban, President Trump’s 2017 executive order banning entry of nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries, went into effect – a level that would have been inconceivable had the Muslim Ban taken effect in 2002.
Asad also commented on the level of public support today, and how there are many more legal and community services for Muslim Americans, as well as institutional power and government representation, compared to 18 years ago. But still ,in the wider American public, the backlash and bigotry seem about the same, or worse, than immediately after 9/11, he said.
Tasnuva felt the bigotry to be worse, especially given her mother wearing hijab. “This is the first time people on the streets will stop and look at me and my mom,” Tasnuva said. “That had never happened to me in my entire life in New York, until the last two years. No one would come up to you and say things like, ‘Get out of America.” She recalled overhearing conversations on the subway, “I remember when this community used to be all Italian, not as Muslim,” or “We’re finally getting back to the good old days.”
Nitasha described that point when “you start becoming numb [to] the way people act towards you, that makes you question whether you belong.”
“There is an exhaustion,” she said. “Our views are commodified now… they [non-Muslims] want to represent us, but to what end?”
That made me think about Arab and Muslim representation in the media post-9/11 – and of Sidikha, and how one positive joke in support of Muslim Americans on Saturday Night Live made her seriously reconsider her place, as a Muslim woman, in Western media.
“The fact that he said one joke made me realize that there is an outlet to comment, to speak truth to power,” Sidikha said. The environment has changed, but not necessarily improved.
“[It’s] not the same survival mode experience that it was post 9/11. Now, how do we keep going, where do we keep going? That is the bigger question.”
For now, we just keep going forward – Nitasha, toward a career in psychology and clinical research; Asad, toward a Doctorate in Islamic studies, while continuing his community organizing and speaking on New York surveillance and policing; Kareem, toward a Master’s in International Economic Policy to work at the intersection of economic development and the Arab world; Tasnuva, toward a career in data and technology, a field dominated by white men; and Sidikha, toward her dream of becoming a hijabi on the big screen. And I, toward telling our stories.