The mistreatment of the definition of terrorism—did you know the United Nations doesn’t even have an established definition of what it is? But the U.S. sure does, and it’s quite an exclusive and broad one all at the same time—really skews people’s perceptions of Muslims and the atrocities taking place around the world.
In the summer of 2016, MTV aired a new web show with me on the issues that impact Muslim Americans on their Snapchat Discover channel to millions of viewers, an episode of which listed several of my recent and ridiculous encounters with the Transportation Security Agency. They were pretty tragic cases of racial profiling, but spun to be hilarious and understandable to the network’s preteen audience. I’m all for packaging an otherwise marginalized message in a way that will be digestible to its recipients—hey, that’s what Prophet Muhammad did, wasn’t it? One Snapchat user responded to the TSA episode by saying, “Instead of complaining about things we need to do to be safe, how about you talk about how terrorists should stop killing people.” While I usually ignored such inquiries without even batting an eyelash, I took the bait and engaged, maybe because of how deep the stupidity of his comments hit a nerve.
I replied to this dude with a data plan and social media access and thus opinions worth sharing with, “Racial profiling people at airport security is actually a detriment to our safety. Think about it—there could be a white person passing through a gate with a bomb on him because we didn’t search him properly, because TSA was too busy being fixated on people that look like me.” As I was leaving the Nice airport after the Cannes Lions festival, I passed through the security machine, and it didn’t even beep, but the French National Police still stopped me for an additional search. They gave me a very invasive and public pat down, cupping my boobs and butt, hands too close for comfort in my groin area, straight down to the bottom soles of my shoes to check for a bomb. It was humiliating. The white girl behind me passed through and actually set off the detector beeping, and she was let through without any additional inconvenience.
He responded, “No one else is killing innocent people like Muslims!”
“It’s easy to think that way,” I Snapchatted him back. “What happens is that whenever Muslims do something wrong, they are always in the news and identified as their religion. When people of other faiths commit horrible acts, we are never told what religion they are because it’s deemed irrelevant, and they get to enjoy the privilege of being held accountable as individuals for their actions rather than having their background be collectively held accountable or blamed on their behalf.
“The term ‘terrorism’ is only ever applied to Muslims, but never when it’s people of other faiths. Like the KKK, Christian conservatives that bomb abortion clinics, etc.,” I continued. In this way, it’s easy to see how the public garners a skewed perception of Muslims and Islam. Zoom in on the fringe minority of any group—rather than, in this case, the 1.6 billion7 majority of all the other Muslims in the world that come from all walks of life and live peacefully in their societies (if Islam was really founded on terrorism, imagine the havoc of 1.6 billion terrorists in the world? Or even just half that many? Allahu akbar, for real.)—and obviously that would create a super limited and distorted image of a people. Like, imagine if we only focused on racists like Dylann Roof and said that’s what all white people are like? Imagine if I demanded an apology from my local Starbucks barista for the racial slur her white peer hurled at me from his car window as I walked into the store? Would that make any sense at all? Of course not.
This, my friends, is how you manufacture hate.
Before Trump’s inexcusable comments about inciting a ban on all Muslims, the sharpest I had felt this phenomenon since 9/11 was on the day that the Boston Marathon bombers were identified. I was interning for Vice in New York at the time. It was my first editorial internship, hard-fought for and hard-won. I discovered the Vice internships well past the term deadline, calling their office, and asking if I could still send in an application. “All the positions have been filled,” the secretary told me. I sent in a Hail Mary email to the main contact anyway, insisting that their current representation of Muslim narratives—limited to only Michael Muhammad Knight at the time—did not offer enough of a voice for their Muslim audience, which I surely could bring to the table. I remember how elated I was when I got the call, and how I pranced around my newsroom at the Daily Targum, where I had been elected as opinions editor that year, to my peers’ congratulations at the news. I got a coveted Vice internship.
That morning, I was getting ready to commute from New Brunswick, New Jersey, to the Vice headquarters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when the news of the Boston bombers’ Muslim faith broke. For Muslims, the media victimizes all 1.6 billion of us with each news cycle. This became blatant in the case of the shooting of Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016. When the shooter’s name was revealed to sound Muslim, the media immediately announced the shooting as a terrorist attack; perpetuated unsubstantiated claims of a proclamation to ISIS, or Al Qaeda, or Hezbollah, one of those; and placed the spotlight on a Muslim immigrant father and the narrative of a seemingly “foreign” family, suddenly forgetting that mass shootings are as American as apple pie.8 It conveniently neglected that over 70 percent of mass shootings on our soil have been committed by white men—and that, if we were to follow #TrumpLogic, we are rightfully entitled to profile and denounce all white men, and possibly ban them from our country, given this information. No. Now, anti-gay sentiment was decentered as the issue, and what broke my heart the most was that many of the people around me fell into this trap. “It was certainly, without a doubt, connected to Islam,” a haughty white agnostic investor explained to me over freshly squeezed lemonade in the East Village one sweltering afternoon in New York. “No, I mean, this was definitely about the Muslim religion,” a gay Jewish white male colleague told me during our trip in France, after I sighed to him about how exhausted I was by the public overlooking this incident as a violent outburst of homophobia. The LGBTQA+ community was doing a noble job of defying Islamophobia during such a sensitive time that I had expected to find an ally in him. Did you notice that almost all the people insisting they are experts on Islam and that perpetuate the most inaccurate notions of Muslims like they are facts are always non-Muslims?
So, on that otherwise usual morning heading to my Vice internship, when the Boston bombers were identified as Muslim, I hit the brakes on everything. I was literally out the door, but then stopped dead in my tracks and retreated to a chair in my living room, hovered there for what seemed like an eternity, and whipped out my phone to get some friends’ input while I calculated the severity of the situation. The first person I texted was a photographer friend that had been working in the city for years after he graduated from our alma mater.
“Hey, did you hear? They’re Muslim,” I said.
“Yea,” he texted back.
“I’m honestly too scared to go to the Vice office today. I can’t ride the subway!!!! What if someone pushes me onto the tracks or something? NY is going to be hell today,” I spilled.
“If you’re scared, they win,” he responded.
So I went to Vice that day.
• • •
After what honestly felt like a harrowing trek to Brooklyn, my self-awareness on 100 and my alertness to my surroundings even higher than that, I finally found my way into the office safely and trudged over to my desk beside the rest of the interns, tossing my heavy bag in front of me with a sigh of relief. I probably wasn’t in my chair for a good five minutes before the intern beside me—the carefree one that I’d had orientation with, who at the time had been really excited about the flowing booze he would soon enjoy at Vice parties almost as much as the non-traditional work environment we were entering with hippo-sized rhinestone-embellished panties on the wall—swiveled over to my side with his laptop in his hands.
“Hey, Amani,” he said, “you’re Muslim, ri
ght? Do you mind taking a look at these Qur’an verses and searching for anything that could hint at why the Boston bombers did what they did?”
It sucks that Muslims don’t get some type of trigger warning just for being exposed to extreme anti-Muslim bigotry in our society. I’ve always wanted to do the research on how much of an emotional toll today’s climate takes on Muslim youth. I know that for Palestinians, whenever a major assault is taking place in Palestine overseas, my young Palestinian American peers here often experience a sweeping depression, sometimes even physical illness.
It is mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting to have to assert your humanity time and time again. It is exhausting to have to denounce violent actions on behalf of your entire religion, and then be subject to hideous moments like these.
“Um, I really don’t think Qur’an verses had anything to do with their actions,” I told him. “They were crazy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Could you take a look at them anyway?”
• • •
Several weeks earlier, as I got into the swing of things in my semester-long internship, I found Vice editor in chief Rocco Castoro sitting at his desk. I made a coffee run as my excuse to pass by him, hovering at the coffee machine as I mustered up the courage to walk up to him. Then I did it. I went up to him, introduced myself, and said, “I want a Vice column.”
Startled at first, he asked me what I had in mind, and I told him how I felt like having a space on Vice would give my voice as a Muslim woman a groundbreaking platform on political and social issues. He chewed on the idea a bit, thought it was cool, and referred me to the Features Editor Who Made These Decisions. As I turned to walk away, he stopped me.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I want to get your opinion on something.”
I turned back, excited and flattered that my input was going to be used on something important enough to be on Rocco’s desk. I was the only veiled Muslim woman in the newsroom and it was cute how much my college self freaking admired Vice. I wouldn’t have been able to imagine that a few short years later, Muslim Girl would become the first Muslim website to partner with them in their influential ad network.
“We’re deciding on the cover for the next issue of Vice magazine,” he said. “It’s the Hate Issue. I’m deciding between these two options—what do you think?” He pulled out two print versions of the cover and laid them in front of me.
On the left, there was a makeshift Vice cover with a photo of the KKK burning a cross. On the right, there was another mock cover, this one with an image I was much more familiar with, but that was still completely foreign to me: It was a photo of a brown man with a military vest on, wearing a green headband with the Islamic proclamation of faith wrapped around his head, against the backdrop of some conflict zone with a dead bleeding body and a rampaging fire behind him. He was holding up soldiers’ dog tags in his hands and had an assault rifle in his lap.
“I think you should go with the KKK one,” I told him, after a few moments of silence. He might have thought I was thinking it over, but really I was trying to calm my panicking thoughts that even Vice would betray me like this. “I think the picture of the Muslim guy is a really stereotypical depiction that already exists all over the media. It just reaffirms this skewed image of Muslims. But the KKK one, for the Hate Issue, would be interesting, because that’s the type of imagery that people need to be reminded of, and it’s not common. It would be different.”
He looked at the two covers and back up at me, surveying my reaction. “Hm, that’s very interesting,” he said. “All right, thank you.”
• • •
After an exhausting day at the Vice office dealing with the Boston bombing coverage and Intern Who Just Doesn’t Get It, I threw my heavy bag over my shoulder again, carrying the Macbook Pro I had been lugging around on my commute for this internship for months. As I was walking out, I passed by the reception desk, and something caught my eye. I stopped, and it was a stack of printed copies of the new Hate Issue. The cover staring back at me was of the brown man with the military vest. I walked out of the office’s glass double doors and didn’t return to my internship again.
• • •
The winter of 2015 was a tumultuous and difficult one to navigate. The second Paris attack of the year had just taken place in November, and the Muslim American community was still dealing with imminent backlash as a result of the sensational media coverage when the San Bernardino shooting happened only a few weeks later. The oncoming confusion with all the mixed information surrounding the shooters came to a head when the New York Post published a cover photo of San Bernardino victims with the large overset headline MUSLIM KILLERS. The irresponsible journalism and hysterical, propagandized coverage wildly legitimized anti-Muslim sentiment and made leaving our homes all the more difficult.
The aftermath brought with it a series of attacks on the Muslim American community in rapid, head-spinning succession. In Seattle, a Somali teenager was beaten and thrown off the roof of a six-story building. Bigots shot at a Muslim woman as she was leaving a mosque in Tampa. A little sixth-grade girl was taunted with the name “ISIS” as her boy classmates in the Bronx ripped the scarf off of her head and physically beat her on the playground. Two days after Trump’s call for a Muslim ban, our team at Muslim Girl felt compelled to publish a “Crisis Safety Manual for Muslim Women” for basic survival in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting. I started distancing myself from social media at this time, lessening the log-ins and the amount of posts—only staying plugged in long enough to stay informed for our Muslim Girl coverage. Unfortunately, there were no trigger warnings for “vilifying you for your religion,” “subjugation & dehumanization,” or “delegitimizing your existence.”
As a veiled Muslim woman, I was yet again overcome with a fear of leaving my house in the morning. The type of rhetoric Trump was using—banning all Muslims from the country, like we were different, incompatible with American life, like we didn’t belong—made even a born and raised Jersey girl like me feel like an outsider all over again. I was frustrated, because I had already been through this before. I already lived through and survived this assault on my identity. And as a society, we’re supposed to be progressing forward, not backward. The Muslim community worked tirelessly against this type of hatred since 2001, and suddenly, like a slippery slope, Trump had us falling right back down to where we started. The thought that another generation of little girls would have to endure an experience that almost broke me, that was the most difficult thing in my life to navigate, was truly heartbreaking. And so Muslim Girl decided that this time, instead of wasting space on our platform to talk back to Donald Trump—engaging in the same broken-record disputes and responding to the same unfair attacks on our humanity that we have collectively been facing since 9/11—we would stop giving Trump any space on our platform at all. He didn’t deserve it, and we deserved better.
It was during this time that I started actively pitching Muslim Girl so that we could sustain our increasingly critical work. The Harvard Law Review published Nancy Leong’s analysis on racial capitalism in June 2013, which analyzes “the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person.” While we were dishing out Muslim Girl’s neatly streamlined numbers in pretty PowerPoint slides at shiny conference tables, trying to quantify and convince in dollar signs why Muslim women’s voices are valuable, all I could really think about was how our site had to resort to publishing a crisis safety manual for Muslim women just to live. All the hateful rhetoric in the media—Paris, San Bernardino, now Trump—wasn’t made in a void. The social complacency that Muslim Girl was created to combat has real life or death consequences for Muslim women in Western societies. While the world scapegoats Islam, Muslim women quickly become the most vulnerable targets, and, yet, the fashion industry and corporations are simultaneously eager to profit off of them.
At the same time, 2015 saw the trending topic of modest fashion and a huge surge of interest in Muslim women as consumers. Leong argues that “nonwhiteness has acquired a unique value because, in many contexts, it signals the presence of the prized characteristic of diversity,” yet warns that “the ‘thin’ version of the diversity objective—emphasizes numbers and appearances. That is, it is exclusively concerned with improving the superficial appearance of diversity.”9 This can be said of many of the media outlets cashing in on hijab headlines while maintaining often racially or religiously uniform newsrooms, but also of the fashion industry’s treatment of modest fashion. Many brands, from DKNY to Dolce & Gabbana, started launching their own modest fashion lines catered to Muslim women. Global media outlets heralded H&M for including a headscarf-clad model in their marketing campaign. Yet few brands have successfully integrated Muslim women fashion designers, consultants, or models into their lines, nor have they championed causes that would benefit the women from whom they’d gain the profit. In this way, what would otherwise appear to be a positive step in social inclusivity could have adverse effects on Muslim women, by putting out of business the designers that have been creating headscarves and abayas long before they became an Instagram sensation.
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