They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  At JFK, a white woman is holding a sign that says “WE ARE ALL MUSLIMS” and I appreciate the messaging, but I don’t know that it lands for me when thinking about the future dead that might pile up along some borders while trying to flee some state-manufactured terror. I consider how little I feel Muslim today, even less than I did in college. I haven’t stepped into a mosque in five years. My name, the only thing tethering me to people’s idea of what Islam is. But I am afraid today, as I was in the winter of 2001. This protest is spontaneous. The executive order was signed last night, and when word began to spread that there were travelers, some citizens, being detained in airports, people took to the streets. Lawyers pushed themselves into airport fast food joints, picking up the WiFi signals so that they could start to do work to get detained people free. It is a comforting and uniting protest, one that isn’t rooted in much shared ideology beyond people simply being angry. One man next to me tells me that he didn’t vote at all, but he was “pissed off” when he read the news this morning. “You just can’t cross a moral line like that,” he said, in a thick New York accent. “Fuck that guy. The Statue of Liberty is right over there.”

  It is eight days in to this new and violent empire that is building upon a legacy of violent empires before it, and I have finally stopped trying to tell myself that everything is going to be all right. There is no retaliation like American retaliation, for it is long, drawn out, and willing to strike relentlessly, regardless of the damage it has done. September 11 is used as a tithe in our church of brutality, even 15 years and endless bombs down the road. The U.S. ignored the Geneva Convention, raping, sodomizing, and torturing prisoners of war at their black site bases around the world. The military bombed wedding parties consisting mostly of women and children in Iraq at Mukaradeeb, and in Afghanistan at Wech Baghtu and Deh Bala. Here, we are saying that we will tear your country apart, we will give birth to the terror within, and then we will leave you to drown in it. This feels, tonight, like a particularly immense type of evil. Real power, I am reminded, doesn’t need a new reason to stop pretending to be what it actually is underneath. All of the old reasons are enough to seduce. On my phone, a Muslim friend texts me to ask how my family is. If any of them are in danger. I tell her no, that I am standing, now, in the city where my mother and father were born. There is no border that my living family can be pushed to the edges of, even though a country glares at our name and wishes otherwise.

  I still say Allahu Akbar often. It simply means “God is Greater” in Arabic. In the rare times that I would be called to lead prayer in my home when I was younger, I would stumble through all of the Arabic without confidence, except for the ending of the prayer, when I would easily and proudly shout Allahu Akbar, the only Arabic that fit comfortably over my tongue. Now, it is associated with a call of terrorists before some vicious act is committed in the name of Allah. The perversion of it hasn’t pulled me away. I still say it in praise, even when it doesn’t fit a specific situation, or when something like Alhamdulillah (“Thank God”) might be a better fit. I like the translation, mostly. Even though I don’t pray, I still like the idea that there is a God and that they are Greater. Than us, than this moment, than this wretched machinery that we’re fighting against and sometimes losing. It is the last lifeboat of Islam that I find myself clinging to. As the protest tonight stretches long and hundreds more people stream into the terminal at JFK, until it is overflowing and spilling out of every edge of geography. I think of how foolish I was, to once pray for a country’s mercy, and how thankful I am that those prayers were not answered. How, through this resistance, we might find a freedom where no mercy is required. We might find a humanity that is not asking to be seen, but demanding instead. How we all pray for the wrong things sometimes, but somehow, God is greater.

  On Paris

  Perhaps if you were once young and black, or young and brown, but definitely young and Muslim in the heart of a Midwestern city surrounded by corn fields, trees, whole stretches of land where you were feared. Perhaps then you would sneak out of a house, or take the money your father gave you for food or college textbooks, and you would go to see a live show wherever you could find a band playing some songs that you knew enough words to.

  You might find some other weirdos like you. The outcasts, the Muslim kids who also knew what it was to have a head covering torn from them in a crowded school hallway, the ones who knew what it was to both run into a fight and run away to survive. You might find a small corner and dance together, sing together, revel in being alive and imagining yourself, for a few hours, un-feared and un-killable.

  Having “a place to belong” is something that often works on a sliding scale. The urgency of owning a space with people who look like you and share some of your experience increases the further against the margins you are. Live music, even at its most unhealthy and potentially violent, has historically provided a small mercy for young people who found no mercy elsewhere.

  A live show was the first time, as a teenager in Columbus, Ohio, that I found a few other young Muslims who had the same relationship to music that I did. At an early Fall Out Boy show at The Basement, a venue in my hometown of Columbus that is, very literally, a basement, I first noticed them. Muslims who I noticed from school or Friday prayer at the mosque, camped out in the back of the venue. Ones who didn’t grow up in a house like mine, where most music was accepted (or, at worst, tolerated).

  We connected through mutual passion for feeling most at home during a concert, or our family histories. How we all learned to sneak rap albums past our parents (the trick, back when “Parental Advisory” stickers were actually stickers, involved peeling the sticker off your cassette or CD before you made it back to your house). How our homes varied from understanding to fiercely strict, and how we still found ourselves at live shows with each other. Occasionally, we would travel to a concert in another Midwest city, Chicago or Detroit, and see more of the same. Teenage Muslim music fans who we connected with online at the dawn of social media, who shared our passion and our stories.

  These were also the spaces where I understood that my fears were not entirely unique. The ways that I felt about navigating the world were shared by others, the few of us drawn together by both our need to escape into music, and the things that drove us to the escape.

  I was a college freshman on a small Ohio campus in September 2001. A time where the word “terrorism” most loudly latched itself to my Arabic name, latched itself on the shoulders of my Muslim friends from Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon. I did not go outside often in that winter. When I did, it was to make the short trip to some cheap show, indie or punk rock, underground hiphop. Wherever I knew I could see some of the other Muslim kids I knew, and we could sit in between songs, covered in sweat, and speak of our survival.

  In Islam, live music and concerts are a tricky thing. In many Muslim households, the act of going to a concert is seen as haram, or sinful. I knew young Muslims who would go to concerts only when they told their parents they would be elsewhere, and had others cover for them. This may never change. In 2015, I read about Muslim teenagers in Turkey and London, rushing to Justin Bieber concerts. Muslims at Coachella and Bonnaroo, basking in that small window of freedom, sinful as it may be.

  Hasn’t that always been the way of it? We all choose our sins, and their measure. The ones we believe will render us unforgivable, and the ones that we will wash off with a morning prayer. This is something that I find particularly hard to ignore as we again look upon an act of terror that has overshadowed all other acts of terror. Even the ones that have spanned decades, or centuries. As we again discuss selective outrage. Rather, the merit of life, or what we do with how others choose to mourn. Most importantly, as we again ask questions of what Muslims around the world “deserve” and what they “need to do.” Then again, have we ever really stopped doing this?

  It is a luxury to be able to tear your gaze away from something; to only be made aware of old and consistent blood by a newer shed
ding of blood. It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary. It is a luxury to be unafraid and analyze the very real fear of others. I know and understand all of this, and still, as I turned to Paris, even with my knowledge of the world’s many horrors, I was particularly struck to read about the shootings that took place in a concert venue. Many concert-goers, mostly young, were gunned down while taking in an Eagles of Death Metal show. I considered the dead, how many among them may have gone out hoping for an escape from whatever particular evil was suffocating them. I considered how many may have been young Muslims. Then, as always, I considered all of the young Muslims still living.

  Historically, when people who identify as Muslim kill a large group of people who are assumed to be non-Muslim, the world wishes to see dead Muslim bodies in return. In America, men stand outside of mosques with guns. People urge others to violence against anyone who they believe to be Muslim. Worldwide, in response to this senseless violence, Muslims are assaulted, ostracized, and further misunderstood. I still hear and read stories about Muslims who navigate airports differently, aware of the discomfort that others have around them in that setting since September 11. There are few things like being feared simply due to having a body. There is no way to easily come to terms with this. Those who fear you may wish that you simply make yourself small, if you refuse to disappear. This is how a simple, public space becomes something entirely unpleasant. This is how a place of release and joy becomes something you hold an arm’s length away.

  It is hard for me to put these things together. Young Muslims around the world, afraid and eager to find a cleansing space. A concert venue, much like the ones where I felt most unafraid, covered in blood. A world, eager for revenge, people to hang their rage on. The idea of feeling most like yourself when watching live music seems small to some, I’m sure. I can only speak for how I found safety and comfort, while also considering how spaces of safety and comfort have become increasingly rare for young Muslims over the past 15 years. Attacks and intimidation at mosques aren’t entirely surprising. Much like assaults on black churches, people will always come first for where you pray. But knowing what music, specifically live music, can do in these times, I worry about Muslims being afraid in those spaces. Or worse, being feared in those spaces.

  It is jarring, what we let fear do to each other; how we invent enemies and then make them so small that we are fine with wishing them dead. How we decide what “safety” is, how ours is only ours and must be gained at all costs. How we take that long coat of fear and throw it around the shoulders of anyone who doesn’t look like us, or prays to another God. There is something about a dark corner crowded with your people, a song you know, and a night you can bookmark to reminisce on whenever the world is calling for the death of everyone you love.

  On the song “Hurt Me Soul” from Lupe Fiasco’s classic 2006 debut album Food and Liquor, Lupe opens the track by muttering Astaghfirullah before the beat drops. Heard frequently in my childhood home, in a literal sense, it means “I seek forgiveness from Allah.” But what I always found interesting was how often it was used to express shame. To say I shouldn’t have to do these things, but I don’t know how else to survive.

  I imagine Lupe Fiasco, a Muslim making a living performing live music, understands this the way that I do. The shame that exists because of what we have to do in order to remain alive, be seen as human. I consider this while the smoke clears, and we watch young Muslims today do what we always watch young Muslims do in these situations. They plead with the world to be spared. They work tirelessly to show their humanity, show us all the acts of good they have done. They tell the world that they are not like the ones who have killed, as if the world itself, awash with blood, deserves this explanation from the innocent. When I see this now, it breaks my heart. In part, because I recall doing this myself, in the early 2000s, to anyone who would listen. But in part because I know that these are young people in the world, thrashing against what many of us did in our youth, while also coming to terms with their new life as a target. There is shame in this, absolutely. Though I’m not sure that the burden of it belongs on Muslims around the world.

  Yet, here, I still write about the living while so many continue to die. I write about music while bodies are prepared for burial. I write about fear from the safety of my apartment, and someone may call it brave. Me, a man who no longer bows to anything five times a day, who had pork just yesterday, who only speaks light Arabic when visiting his family, still writing about how I wish for Muslims, especially young Muslims, to be safe. To have a haven, a place where they can find each other and say I see you. I’m still here.

  Then again, as we’ve come to understand so often, it isn’t only music. I know that there are still awkward, anxious black and brown kids, Muslim kids from all backgrounds, who look for places where they can be themselves, songs that they can hear their experiences in, a world they can dance into and imagine themselves free. Who are still learning that everything can be weaponized, from their bodies to the spaces that they believed to be theirs, and I still hope for them. I think of them today and always. I hope that they can still slide the music they love past their parents and vanish into an album good enough that it makes them forget about everything outside. I hope they always have a place where they are not outcasts for two hours when the house lights go down. I hope they have somewhere to be unafraid and un-feared, like I did.

  Through the bombs and the burials, the threats and the anger, I hope they find each other in a room where a song that they know all of the words to crawls up the walls and rattles the lights above their heads. I hope they can still sneak out of their homes. I hope they can still spend their textbook money on live shows that their parents would disapprove of.

  This, too, is survival. Astaghfirullah.

  My First Police Stop

  My first car was a 1994 Nissan Maxima that I got the summer before my senior year of high school. It was an odd shade of brown, a fading gold stripe encased the body, and it had a loud muffler. Still, it was mine, and growing up without a lot of money makes you cherish what is yours. Shortly after I drove it off the lot, I started to have an issue with the car. The car’s alarm would be triggered by me unlocking the driver’s side door with the key. An electrical problem that, I was told, would cost almost as much as I paid for the car to fix. This resulted in two solutions: either I unlocked the door and quickly started the car to silence the incessant combination of loud horn and flashing lights, or I would have to unlock the passenger door, which did not trigger the alarm, and climb across it. It was a typical high school car, faulty and deeply loved.

  In early September of 2001, after a few weeks of locking myself in my dorm room in between soccer practices and a rigorous new class schedule, my roommate dragged me to my first college party. Admittedly, I wasn’t much of a hard-partying person in high school, but I briefly celebrated the idea of reinvention, despite the fact that my college, Capital University, was only a few miles away from my father’s home. I would still, largely, be within walls with people who didn’t know anything about me. People I’d be spending at least a few years with, and a blank slate to rebuild. The infant stages of college always seemed to be thrilling in this way: after years of observing who you could have been in high school, you can step into it, in front of people who don’t know any different.

  After a few hours inside, mostly clinging to the safety of a wall, I skipped out of the party, eager to escape a house imprisoned by a thick cloud of body heat and drink in the night air. I rushed to my car and put the key into my driver’s side door. Before turning it, I looked around the street where I parked. The towering and expensive homes, the paved sidewalks, the darkness and silence. I opted for what I was sure my father would say was the smarter choice: I unlocked my passenger side door, clumsily climbed across the seats, and started my car. As I put it in drive and began to accelerate, I first saw the police car’s lights.

  I spend a lot of time trying
to pinpoint exactly how fear is learned. Rather, how we decide that fear is a necessary animal that grows out of our relentless expectation to survive at all costs, and how I have been afraid and been feared at the same time. When I reflect, I think the fact that I lived for 17 years without a direct fear of the police makes me lucky. I knew of the warnings from my father: don’t go on a run at night. Don’t reach into your pockets too quickly. Be polite in front of them.

  Growing up in the neighborhood I did, police were often present, and yet I never learned to be afraid. Police would drive slow past the basketball courts in summer, scanning the games and the people watching. They would follow my friends and I around corner stores, eyeing our hands and the items in them. I had seen them make life difficult for people in my neighborhood who were not me, and yet I never learned to be afraid. Until the early fall of 2001.

  Bexley, Ohio, sits on Columbus’s east side. A small and flourishing mostly white suburb that centers on Capital University, it is sandwiched by two significantly poorer, mostly black neighborhoods, one of them being where I grew up. This has always created an interesting tension within the city, especially as Bexley has expanded on each side in recent years, pushing the poor on its borders further toward the margins. For years, there has been an odd tug-of-war happening between the residents of Bexley, between their fears and their progressive-leaning stances. For example, the person who punches a Democratic ticket on Election Day might also clutch her purse tighter when walking past a black person on the street. Because Bexley is a sheltered suburb that is sandwiched between two poor, mostly black neighborhoods, the residents have a proximity to blackness that is rooted primarily in a vision of monolithic poverty. This breeds sympathy, for the conditions, but not much interest in actually engaging the people. In 2001, despite black people pushing against its borders, Bexley remained 90 percent white.