Within three days after the vote, the Muslim Council of Britain had recorded 100 Islamophobic incidents. The British National Police Chiefs’ Council noted a 57 percent increase in reported hate crimes, with 337 total by the end of the week. A video went viral on social media in the days following the vote, showing white teens on a Manchester bus verbally attacking a military veteran of color and telling him to “go back to Africa!” At the same time as the Brexit campaign amplified racism against immigrants entering the country, it also drew on resentment toward Syrian refugees by suggesting that their entry would put British women at risk of sexual assault. The latter reiterates the traditional British colonial inference that its white women were superior objects of desire to uncontrollable and inherently devious brown men that, today, the UK was in danger of having wash up on its shores. The tragic irony is that the wealth that the UK sought to protect with #Brexit was robbed from the home countries of many of its immigrants, and the refugee crisis is the result of political complacency that has now been coming home to roost.
It seemed to me that the Brits around me were suddenly confronted by the stark reality of their makeup, a truthful reminder of their nation’s racist history that, even in 2016, the country just couldn’t seem to shake off. I imagine it’s how we Americans felt when we somberly watched the poll numbers rise in favor of Donald Trump, when we introspectively watched during the primaries as states, one by one, like dominoes, bolstered his rise. I fear the feeling I will have when the same thing happens as states flip to red in favor of Trump during election night. For us Americans, it has been an avalanche, something uncontrollable, something deeply revealing of the psyche of our country. At the very least, we’ve seen it coming. It’s been measured symptomatically for months. For the UK, the thought was so far gone that they never really imagined it happening. Self-aware as they were, many expected the numbers to be close, but none—even those who voted to leave—ever really foresaw it. The racism was supposed to stay politely tucked away within homes and at dinner tables.
Chapter 6
“The media is hype about Muslim women right now, but only the ones that fit a certain kind of image,” I told Contessa. I was finishing up my makeup in the studio bathroom as she taped more of our conversation for the CNN reel.
It’s so meta. You have to wear a headscarf, of course, because the media’s lazy perception of Muslim women—and the only visual they’re keen to perpetuate—is that all of them wear headscarves. Plus, the Muslim community can more easily see you as a woman leader if you satisfy this requirement. That’s the qualifier. Then, after that, you have to be some level of attractive, of course. In societal terms, that means a lighter complexion is a major bonus. That privilege has been on my mind a lot this year: If I was a Muslim woman with darker skin, maybe a chocolate color rather than the honey-caramel flavor that was acceptable for being not too foreign but just enough, then I doubt I’d be getting as much airtime as I am right now. Maybe not nearly as many people would care about hearing what I have to say.
Then, of course, you have to be fashion-forward. Like, you need to wear a headscarf and show that you’re still different, but you need to make them forget that you’re different by mixing it with the perfect combination of Western trends to remind everyone that you’re also the same. It has to be a testament to our country’s obsession with the way women dress: Even when the outward intent of media attention on Muslim women is inclusivity, the extent of it has gotten stuck on our presumably outrageous ability to dress modestly and with good taste—according to our society’s standard—at the same time. “Muslim Women Push Back Against Stereotypes!” was the hot headline in varying degrees—the story was always about the way we dress. Not, for example, our activism, our business acumen, our personal success. Before Muslim Girl started consciously reshifting the attention of the media, recentering the actual Muslim women whether they were behind headscarves or not, for a good amount of time the headscarves were the story. The narrative was exclusionary and always centered around how we are able to make moves in spite of a marker on our heads, or, possibly even worse, because of it. There is a renewed sense of animosity among some within the Muslim community whenever a new story goes viral of a Muslim woman that wants to be “the first hijabi _________”—fill in the blank with preferred career, profession, or vocation.
When this trend started taking off in the media a few years ago, it spurred criticisms of self-tokenization. The catch is that a lot of the time, when you’re a (visible) minority who is among the first to make progress in new spaces, your presence will be tokenized. The hope is that this temporary state dissolves as more and more of us enter these spaces along our evolving strides in representation. One thing that gets neglected from the conversation is that often, tokenization is a means of survival of its own. It can take cards that have been unevenly dealt against us, that by any other means would be used to suppress our livelihoods, and subversively transform them into a brief moment of opportunity to reshuffle the deck. This happens on a large scale when tokenized peoples use their acquired privileges to push the collective further.
More often than not, tokenization is forcefully imposed on us, and not just on an individual level, but on a community level as well. When all the public eye sees are headscarves instead of individual stories, our community is collectively tokenized. It creates the perception that opportunity is limited and only a rare few of us can make it. Whenever that happens to an already marginalized community, it pits its own members in a competition against one another instead of against the restrictive frameworks that put us in that position in the first place. The first hijabi whatever won’t eliminate Islamophobia just as the first black president hasn’t eliminated racism, though both are signifiers of some type of progress—symbols of ascending beyond adversity.
When we get tokenized for our identities, the single story that Chimamanda warned us about easily happens. One Muslim woman’s story is taken to represent Muslim women like a monolith, like an absolute truth that exists for all of us. The intricacies of the different identities that exist among Muslim women far beyond their faith are melted away. One question that Muslim Girl often struggles with is that of our representation of Muslim women and their diverse struggles in other parts of the world. The truth is that Muslim women come from literally every walk of life, and being fully aware of our own Western privilege, we cannot possibly attempt to speak on their behalf. However, our privilege affords us influence that many women in other parts of the world do not possess. When we do not have the opportunity to uplift them into these spaces, the best that we can do is use our unique position to create an impact that we hope will ripple out. This is the premise upon which Muslim Girl was founded. Knowing that failed domestic and foreign policy has fallen on the mischaracterization of the Muslim woman’s narrative, reclaiming it would alter the public’s perception of our needs and opinions and cultivate a stronger presence for us in the public sphere. When that happens, especially as residents of the primary exporter of failed foreign policy in the Muslim world, we wield power to change policies that directly impact the lives of women abroad. We can never speak on their behalf or have our single stories represent their struggles, but what we can do is attempt to use our privileges to make radical change.
I look back at my reflection. A part of me resents the light-colored contacts I wear: an abstract mix between periwinkle blue and seafoam green, framed by the dark, thick eyebrows that my classmates would chastise me for in school and the black Middle Eastern lashes that my elementary school nurse once told me I should have thinned out, because they were too much.
At the same time, these light attributes have become colonized as Western standards of beauty. The high demands of the media world create intense pressure to cater to and unrealistically live up to them. The racial undertones are palpable. With brown eyes, I’m Arab. With gray eyes, I’m exotic, racially ambiguous. With my contacts in, people ask me where I’m
from out of admiration. Without them, people ask me where I’m from because I look too different to possibly be from here.
“You can talk, but you also have the look,” a producer told me once. I could tell she hesitated so as to not offend me. It’s no surprise to me that appearance is often the gatekeeper. In my case, my media-standard look has garnered me access to spaces and people to which I would otherwise be denied. They’ve given my voice and what I have to offer a vessel through which people might give a second listen to what I have to say, as sad as it is that people might barely pay attention otherwise.
I still feel intense pressures regarding my body image, despite having lost a hundred pounds in a year. I’ve always felt indescribable pressure to lose weight, become smaller, less in the way. My weight loss reminded me of declawing a feline. The woman shrinks, she takes up less room, her body makes everyone else in the room more comfortable. And, no, it’s not always about health. Even at my highest weight, my doctor told me that my health was the ideal profile for anyone my age. I was just as awesome at my heaviest. But when I became lighter, people finally began to see me—just for the wrong reasons.
“Sometimes you have to play the game to change the game,” I admit to Contessa. Play the system so you can share the stage with Bill Clinton and then mention the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Deal the cards right so you can get invited to speak at a White House summit and then remind the audience that our government drones Muslim girls like you in other parts of the world. That’s what privilege looks like.
The bathroom conversation never made it into the final cut. The featured image for the CNN profile was a landscape close-up frame of my eyes.
• • •
I was part of the opening plenary of Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) at University of California, Berkeley—the very first panel to kick off the entire event—and it was moderated by former president Bill Clinton himself. My co-panelists included NASA astronaut Cady Coleman, Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann, Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, and “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page founder Wael Ghonim. It was such an honor to be sitting among them. When I first met Wael in the holding room before our panel was to begin, I immediately flashed back to the hundreds of pages of research I did in college that were inspired by his Facebook page and the developments of the revolution it sparked. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions took place just as I had started college, so you can imagine the powerful impact they had on my outlook of our generation during one of the most important transitions in a young American adult’s life. To me, nothing was impossible. There were no limits to what we could accomplish together. Commence the many moments of activism that breathed life into me at Rutgers University, from organizing for Palestinian human rights, to taking on censorship at the Daily Targum, the Rutgers University daily newspaper, to eventually occupying an administrative building and ousting former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice from speaking at our 2014 commencement. But I digress.
When we all took our seats on stage beneath the blinding blue lights at CGI U, I realized that I was the last panelist—and the one sitting directly beside Bill Clinton. I was stunned by my positioning and quickly conferred that it had to be for the photo ops. Super bonus points for a former president to be gracious and inclusive enough to have a hijabi on his stage. In fact, three out of the five of us were Muslims, and I hardly think that was a coincidence. Hillary Clinton was in a tight race against Bernie Sanders, and he was getting major social justice points. He was the progressive king at the moment. Only a few weeks ago, Hillary had been at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention—and she’d given a hawkish speech about the need to support Israel’s right to self-defense at all costs. In American terms, that meant killing unarmed and defenseless civilians. When I first contemplated the speaking invitation from the Clinton Foundation, I called up my friend and Muslim badass Laila Abdelaziz, an employee at the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Tampa, Florida. I expressed my concerns to her about accepting an invite from the foundation given the current political climate.
“OH MY GOD, you HAVE to go!” she exclaimed. “Amani, you HAVE to. That is SUCH a platform. Who cares what people think? Just go and say what you have to say,” she said on the phone. Not gonna lie, maybe my own butterflies had something to do with it. I told her I was kind of nervous, and scared I wouldn’t make the best use of the opportunity.
“Yeah, I will tell you,” she started, “I was invited to a closed-door meeting with Hillary, and I accepted it SOLELY because I wanted to use the opportunity to talk to her about BDS.” She was referring to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement—a nonviolent civil response to Israel’s international law violations. It’s a movement modeled off of the humanitarian response to the South African apartheid regime, which was the only non-military response in history that ever successfully defeated apartheid. “When she was right in front of me, and she was shaking my hand, I completely froze. They are VERY intimidating,” she said. Crap. Now I was even more nervous.
At CGI U, Bill Clinton welcomed the summit and then opened up our plenary session by posing a statement to me that would later play back on GIFs and memes across the Internet: “This is a pretty steep career lens for a Muslim woman,” he said.
In that moment, I really didn’t have time to think of how to gingerly word my reply or consider how respectable it would sound when I responded. “I actually don’t think it is too steep for a Muslim woman.”
My response was met with several moments of raucous applause from the woke San Francisco student audience. In those brief seconds, I was merely reacting to a latent offense I felt at his words. “For a Muslim woman.” That phrase alone encapsulates much of how the media has been treating stories of Muslim women over the past two years or so. It’s interesting because on the outside, it seems like Muslim women are gaining a lot of inclusion, but are we really? You might have noticed that likely much of the positive media attention that you’ve encountered that has been focused on Muslim women has treated them as exceptional subjects due to their religion. “Why this Muslim woman is breaking stereotypes [insert something mediocre here].”
This is not to negate the incredible work and accomplishments of Muslim women; on the contrary, it’s important for us to recognize that those works and accomplishments deserve recognition in their own right—not solely because they were produced by a Muslim woman. That’s not what makes them valuable. To assert so is to imply that, inversely, Muslim women are unlikely to do x, y, and z. Muslim women are uniquely incapable of doing this. The only thing that makes their work special is that it’s done by a woman whom we would otherwise presume to be prevented from doing so, because she is oppressed, or uneducated, or weak, and her success is something of an anomaly. While it’s welcome to celebrate the accomplishments of Muslim women in spite of societal challenges, only framing their stories in this way continues to center the status quo. The story becomes not about the hard work to which she has dedicated herself, but ironically about the hurdles in place to prevent her from doing it.
Worse still is when this framing forces a preconstructed narrative of the Muslim woman’s lived experience. For example, I had an experience with a major publication that took my story of how I am defying cultural norms through my personal choices and twisted it into a #basic and offensive story portraying me as rebelling against my religion itself. It was manufactured to be your run-of-the-mill “poor Muslim girl restricted by Islam and trying to break free” type of anecdote by intentionally washing away the nuance of my personal account. Sure, we can play the system to get our message and our voices out there, but we must also beware getting played the heck out in the media’s rapid commodification of the headscarf and Muslim women as a hot headline for hits, views, or sales.
When it comes to Muslim women, the public wants a superhero to consume. We are praised when we are badasses who ta
lk back. Our headscarves are imagined to really be condensed capes. We are cheered through Facebook likes and Instagram hearts when we stand up to society in various ways, as if we are not vulnerable, have nothing to lose, or are not putting our lives on the line by doing so.
I wrote a Facebook status during the height of what I’m going to start referring to as the Trump Scare, after he made those horrible Muslim-ban comments, about a terrifying moment on NJ Transit when I found myself to be the only woman left in my train car. A man walked up to me, physically put his hands on my scarf, and asked, “Are you going to let me take this off of you later?”
Everyone commenting on my Facebook status was eager to hear how the story played out. Did I tell him off? What did I say? How did he respond? How did it end? I guess we somewhat have the double-edged sword of the internet and social media to thank for desensitizing us and reducing precarious life events into two-dimensional fodder for entertainment. But then one commenter disrupted the pattern.
“I really don’t understand how everyone is responding with such amusement, as if Amani didn’t just describe an obviously dangerous situation,” she said. “How about we all stop pretending this is some fairy-tale wet dream about a superhero hijabi who breaks all stereotypes and tears things up?”
Chapter 7
Here are the rough, general, immediate guidelines as to how Muslims react whenever a public act of violence takes place: 1) Pray to God that the perp is not Muslim. Dear God, spare us this one. Please. 2) Compulsively follow any convenient corporate news outlet or subsequent trending hashtag on developments, oscillating between mourning the victims and fearing for the sanctity of your life. 3) If the perp is identified to be white and/or non-Muslim, emotionally prepare yourself for the trauma of having the double standard dangled in your face again that they are just “mentally disturbed,” because, remember, the word terrorism only applies to people that are shades of brown. 4) If they’re identified as Muslim and then inevitably as a terrorist, or having ties to some terrorist organization, or, even more conveniently, as having outwardly proclaimed loyalty to a terrorist group somehow, mentally prepare for the—possibly violent—backlash. 5) In the case of our highly digital Muslim community, prepare a corresponding Facebook status: whether offering thoughts and prayers for the respective Western city, exasperation at the hypocritical label of a “lone white shooter,” or an urgent and woeful reminder that all Muslim and “Muslim-passing” friends stay safe in the ensuing media frenzy of another terrorist attack.
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