Muslim Girl

by Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

  I spent my winter vacation with the television tuned to the news, nonstop, and my eyes were glued to the constant coverage of the operation. As I watched the casualty count continue to rise beyond my control, I remember that that was the first time I felt utterly powerless. My entire young life up until that point, I had this insurmountable idea that I was going to change the world. Having grown up through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, having watched Muhammad and Jamal on my television set, I told myself that I wanted to stop a war from happening—to prevent the senseless deaths of innocent people. And now I was watching them happen right before my eyes, and the wind was knocked right out of me.

  December 30, 2008 @ 8:14 a.m.

  My eyes are welling up with tears just typing this out, and I can’t even cry about it because then I feel guilty for crying about it and wallowing in my own self-pity while hundreds of people are dying. I’ve never felt so helpless in my entire life. I’ve always preached that things are in our control, not the government’s, and yet here I am, finding myself face-to-face with a huge fucking wall that has “THIS IS THE WAY THINGS ARE” written on it in big red letters.

  The counts were depressing. Total Israelis killed: 13. Total Palestinians killed: 1,417. The disproportionate response was denounced by human rights organizations globally. Yet, the way the media slanted its coverage of the conflict was wildly unfair. When there were Israeli casualties, they were “soldiers murdered.” When there were Palestinian casualties, they were “terrorists killed.” There was no discussion of the context of the conflict—no remorse, or even distinction, regarding the civilians killed, many of whom were women and children. The public wasn’t moved. Any public discussion rested on “But they started it,” and that was that. It was then that I witnessed how media misrepresentation can directly empower violence abroad.

  The way Palestinian women especially were misrepresented by the media was heartbreaking for me, and displayed how directly women were viewed as an extension of their nation and, thereby, a justification of actions against it. Years later, while working my first post-grad job as the media relations specialist of the ­American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, DC, I would be confronted by this again during another Israeli military operation in Gaza, this time called Operation Protective Edge, in 2014. It was Israel’s response to three young Israeli men being kidnapped in a settlement. During a time of heightened sensitivity, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Where Are the Palestinian Mothers?” which argued, based off the writer’s interactions with three women, that all Palestinian mothers raised their sons to be suicide bombers and were eager to have their children’s lives claimed by martyrdom—and thus that the Palestinian people required “moral rehabilitation.” On top of being blatantly racist, the rhetoric sought to justify the disproportionate violence inflicted on the bodies of Palestinian women and children. By mischaracterizing, and then generalizing, Palestinian women in this way, it first dehumanized them, and then turned them into symbols of the people as a whole in a political attempt to normalize the idea of collective punishment by a state against a people.

  Similarly, Afghan women received the same type of processed treatment to justify the Afghanistan War that turned the lives of countless little Muslim girls around the world upside down. First Lady Laura Bush delivered an iconic speech in 2001 in which she virtually rewrote and maneuvered Afghan women’s narratives on their behalf.4 In an attempt to rally public support for military intervention, Laura Bush called on the American people to liberate Afghan women from the oppression of what she deemed to be a backward civilization:

  Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror—not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us. . . . We will be especially thankful for all the blessings of American life. I hope Americans will join our family in working to insure that dignity and opportunity will be secured for all the women and children of Afghanistan.

  While individual liberties were overwhelmingly suppressed by the Taliban, she used the Afghan women’s narrative to impose a violent solution that was not of their own choice or opinion, and which, in retrospect, placed even more devastation upon them by subjecting them to war and disproportionately harming them and their children. The theft of brown women’s narratives is not only an injustice placed on them, but also one extended to their male counterparts; by insisting they need to be liberated from their “barbaric” civilization, Laura summoned the colonial assertion that brown women need saving from brown men, when, in actuality, brown women have suffered at the hands of white men more than at those of any other oppressor in history. It is this mentality that makes it easier to understand how the United States government could commit such inhumane acts like those perpetrated in the Abu Ghraib prison cells or at the Guantánamo Bay detainment center.

  I was one of a seemingly small minority of Muslim students in our huge high school of three thousand students in conservative Republican East Brunswick, New Jersey. During media frenzies surrounding Islam or Muslims around the world, I was usually one of the only voices against what I believed to be human rights atrocities, much to my own ostracization, even from teachers. In eleventh grade, I had a history teacher named Mr. A. He was one of the youngest teachers in the department, with a hilariously sarcastic sense of humor that kept my attention in what became my favorite class of the day because of the topic area. That year, as part of the curriculum on U.S. history, we were learning about the Iraq War of 2003. I’m not sure if he was the one who brought up the subject or if I did by the sheer absence of it from the lesson, but during one class period, we talked about Abu Ghraib.

  The Abu Ghraib scandal was one of major significance to me growing up. It came to light when I was still a teenager, and it does something to you to see people who look like your family get tossed in naked piles of limbs and genitals like animals. It absolutely unnerved me as an Arab Muslim girl, reminding me that still today my own society saw me as nothing more than a brown body that only belonged in another world. The blatant usurping of power stunned me, affirming that it was true: They could do whatever they wanted to us. We were the barbarians from a backward, inhuman civilization. We were the savages with no respect for life or human dignity, apparently.

  “The U.S. government tortured these Iraqis in a prison cell and used tactics especially offensive to their Muslim faith,” I shared with Mr. A and my class from my seat. In my high school I always felt obligated to be the voice to speak up against injustices that were being swept under the rug through our school system. I would be vindicated three years later, when I’d be invited to guest teach an honors history class about Islamophobia under the supervision of the district’s history supervisor. I’d point to the dusty history textbooks lining the wall of a class full of bright, wide-eyed young people and tell them, “Everything you’re learning here is bullshit.”

  Mr. A responded with: “They got what they deserved. They’re all terrorists.”

  I can imagine feeling that punch in the gut I still get whenever I hear something blatantly dehumanizing and just wrong, which never hurts any less no matter how many times you hear it. How can it hurt any less each time you are told you are inferior?

  “No, they’re not. They’re Iraqi civilians,” I pushed back.

  “Yeah, Amani, because the American military really just rounded up random Iraqis off the streets and threw them in these jails, right?” he said in a sarcastic tone that prompted the entire class to erupt with laughter. In that moment I might have almost ­second-guessed myself. It was a wild assertion, but not because I was wrong; it was because our actions overseas really were that horrific, and our complacency at home really was that outrageous. In situations such as those—which arose pretty often in my conservative suburban high school, as you might imagine—I felt obligated, as the often sole
dissenting voice, to deliver these marginalized narratives to my classrooms. My Islamic faith taught me that if you can’t change something with your hands, change it with your tongue, and if you can’t change it with your tongue, then desire to change it in your heart. Injustices were taking place under our noses, often financed by our tax dollars, and the absolute least we could do was muster up the courage to speak up about them when the opportunity arose.

  That day after school, I went to the computer lab to use ­EBSCOhost to search the topic of Abu Ghraib’s prisons for some semblance of the truth that I’d insisted upon in our classroom earlier that day. I still remember the somber feeling that washed over me as I scrolled through the pages and pages of torture photos that popped up on my screen. The reminder of the injustice only emboldened my search. Then I found it: the Holy Grail. A research report said, outright, that the American military rounded up random Iraqi civilians off the streets into the backs of their trucks and dumped them into this monstrous prison, without bringing a single charge against most of them.5 In one article for the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh described most of the prisoners, including women and teenagers, as being “civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints.” I printed out the thick packet of research and carefully highlighted the parts that directly disputed the points that Mr. A had gotten the whole class laughing about.

  The next day I was eager to show Mr. A what I’d found. I handed him the packet, opening to the page about the rounding up off the streets, the trucks with impunity, the no charges. He read it, squinted his eyes, and said, “It depends on how you read the sentence,” as if I was the one who couldn’t understand basic English.

  • • •

  Toward the latter part of high school, the paralyzing way I viewed myself came to be seen as being standoffish by the rest of my peers. I could no longer connect with people. I found it painfully awkward to be in social settings, and I experienced such an intense feeling of disconnect that I couldn’t even identify basic social cues, like to laugh when someone in class said something funny. It’s difficult to describe—it was like the conversations happening around me didn’t apply to me. I wasn’t good enough. I was suffering from a mix of an inferiority complex and a racialized imposter syndrome; I feared I would be outed as undeserving of being here among the rest. I was made to believe I actually wasn’t as smart, or as hardworking, or as worthy. Of course, as the law of attraction would have it, my peers treated me the same way I was expecting to be treated, which only affirmed how I felt. I was an outcast and I didn’t belong.

  To add insult to injury, the male high school teacher of my competitive political program and Model United Nations class took me aside one day to have a talk with me, in which he told me, point-blank, that I was “very large. Just big—” and thus intimidating to everyone else in my class. “You have to smile more and be more bouncy,” he advised me, to counteract my intimidating behemoth of a body and earn my classmates’ civility. He was the same teacher who, for my senior Model United Nations ­conference—the capstone trip for all participating seniors before ­graduation—paired me with a sophomore who was the only other girl in our program who wore a headscarf. Pairing a senior with a ­sophomore—even for a regular Model UN conference, let alone the final competition for a senior—was unusual, and something that had never been done before. My level was reduced to that of a first-year in the program, and, again, it was my headscarf that became the most important criterion and marker of my level relative to those around me.

  That all came to a head at the end of senior year—the year I founded Muslim Girl—right before graduation in 2010. I actually threw my hat in the ring to go to prom. For some reason, I assumed all through high school that I wasn’t going. Things like that weren’t for me. But, I guess, like the question Mrs. Rabii posed to me all those years prior, I thought, Why not? I wanted to go to prom. And so I started shopping for a plus-size dress off a clearance rack at the mall and figuring out how I would style my ­already difficult headscarf for a formal affair. I found a dress that not only fit me, but was also kind of flattering and made me feel confident—in my favorite shade of purple, no less. It had a silver rhinestone embellishment on it, so I bought sparkly silver high-heeled shoes, which were probably the fanciest shoes I had ever owned at that point. Then, finally, I hunted for days and eventually found a black scarf with glittery silver trim that went with my black bolero jacket—gotta cover those arms, you know—and pulled the entire outfit together.

  One of my classmates needed one more person to split the cost of a limousine, and that’s how I earned my spot in actual pre-prom plans, with photos and everything. We were to meet up at my classmate’s extravagant home in an affluent community, where the other girls in our group would be waiting with their dates, and my classmate’s mom would serve red wine for the grown-ups to enjoy and commemorate the special occasion, before it was ­picture-taking time.

  To regard something with such importance was, to me, a symbol of esteem, and before I decided to attend prom I truly didn’t think I was “in the running” or worthy enough to have the experience. It was a radical act for me to consider that I should go. That thought of not being “in the running” was one that permeated other facets of my self-image, such as where my shapely, big, brown body was concerned. It wasn’t like white girls’ bodies. It wasn’t normal. It didn’t have a slim waist that tapered into seemly hips and a refined butt. I was a gigantic blob who loomed over people, in doorways—who was, in the way I saw myself, always in the way. Mine wasn’t a woman’s body—it didn’t look like the bodies I saw on TV.

  The day of prom, my mother employed her hairstylist friend to come over to our house and do my makeup in preparation for the big night. I spent hours getting ready—from the pampering, to the press-on nails and pedicure, to plucking away at the unibrow before sliding on the shiny new dress, to, finally, fashioning my fancy headscarf with a rhinestone headband to top it off. My dad even closed his electronics store early—it took something SERIOUS for that to happen!—to give me my share of the limousine tab and drive me to my friend’s home.

  We drove up to her gorgeous white house, and my dad pulled over to drop me off. “You look great!” he reassured me, as I said thank you, bid him farewell, and jumped down from his van. As I closed the door behind me and started walking toward her steps, a weird feeling seized me by the throat. I freaked out. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around, ran back, and opened the ­passenger-side door of Baba’s van, and, in tears, told him that I didn’t want to go.

  He seemed taken aback by my sudden shift in emotion, and then almost angry. “Baba, you are good enough,” he said. “You are worthy enough to be with them. Don’t think you’re not.” I didn’t realize at the time that that was what I needed to hear, or that feeling less than enough was where my negative reaction came from. It took many more years of self-awareness for me to learn what he meant when he said that to me, or the roots of what I felt that day. But I did go to prom, in all my single and grape-purple glory, and I insisted on being part of the prom photos with the couples in their corny prom poses, as I awkwardly stood on the edge of the lineup, hand on my hip, against a shiny white limousine.

  • • •

  My dad always had this eerie way of knowing how I was feeling even when I didn’t. In my reaction to prom, it was like he had it all figured out, and it took me years to realize that he probably knew because he saw in me something that he too harbored within himself.

  Unlike how Baba didn’t think twice about identifying my lack of self-worth, I didn’t question why, that evening, he didn’t park the car, hop out, and come join the rest of the parents in my classmate’s kitchen, where they were happily socializing, talking proudly about the great night their kids were about to have. He didn’t belong among them. Even though he still remained close to his childhood friend Mamoun in Jordan,
it was difficult for him to socialize himself in America. Ever since I could remember, my father had worked in his electronics store every single day, from morning until night, to make ends meet for our family. Any day that he was forced to close the store meant we might not be able to pay a bill or make a grocery run. As an immigrant from a low-­income background, my father didn’t have the privilege of a social life. Actually, he rarely connected with people deeply enough to make friends. Most of the people with whom he socialized were his employees, and even they routinely betrayed his trust by shoplifting from his store when he wasn’t looking. His best friend in America was an old Jewish man named Eddie Cohen who owned a kosher hot dog stand in the same flea market where my dad had a video game store, and they didn’t get along at first. But over the years, they became such close and seemingly unlikely companions that when Eddie died from a sudden heart attack, I realized I hadn’t seen my dad mourn that deeply for anyone since his father passed away.