I, surprised that she was still pursuing an unwanted interaction with me, responded with, “I don’t want to speak with you.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, turning back to the man beside her, exchanging more condescending looks of contempt. “How rude!” she said to the man, to his agreement.
“No, she just doesn’t want to talk to you,” Shanzay interjected. “She removed the kennel and said she doesn’t want to speak with you, so why do you insist on continuing a conversation with her?”
“Yes, wow, so abrasive. All you did was want to start a conversation,” the man conferred with the woman. Their disgust really came from the rejection of their feeling of entitlement to my time and attention, as if, when spoken to, I was mandated to respond. If it’s difficult to grasp the concept, then consider women’s anger around the phenomenon of men feeling entitled to tell a woman to smile at them, asserting their feeling of entitlement and authority over her behavior in the public space, as if she must always appear pleasant and cheerful to their liking. No, I don’t have to respond to you when spoken to.
You may have also noticed the selective memory of the man’s quick response of calling me “abrasive”—a personification of women of color who are angry (and rightfully so) who are historically characterized as being barbarically dispossessed of themselves and seized by emotion. It’s rooted in colonial suppression of colonized subjects—that denunciation of resistance to occupiers as unprompted hostility rather than an assertion of autonomy. In this case, this man conveniently forgot who was the instigator. Upon initial interaction, I responded cordially; but the woman insisted that she was entitled to more from me. The man eagerly agreed with the woman as if my “abrasive” response—simply not engaging her—was not prompted by her contemptible intrusion in the first place.
These everyday interactions are leaking remnants of our colonial history, and the way we interact with and view minorities in our society as being outsiders that are less-than. Consider the ways in which this is playing out on a national level in our politics today. For example, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has been painted by corporate media as being uncivil, violent, destructive, and unwarranted, as if the bodies of black boys that cops have shot dead in the streets, or the very unequal framework of power administering so-called justice in the first place, had nothing to do with rousing the people to action.
The same can be said of the occupation of Palestine, in which a people, stripped of their land, property, defenses, and resources, are constantly goaded by colonial settlements, arbitrary use of force, and international law violations. When they are roused to react against their occupiers, they are then painted both by their occupier, its allies, and Western media as heedless terrorists. They further paint the occupier as having done nothing more than simply “exist.” This is then used to justify further violence inflicted upon the occupied to assert control, subjugation, and superiority. Take it and shut up. Speak only when spoken to.
The woman and man on the train continued to engage in a conversation with each other, exceptionally loud within earshot—that immature Mean Girls–esque thing you do in high school when you want someone to hear and know that you’re talking about them without actually engaging them. The woman was a transplant from London for a job here in New York, much to the delight of her newfound companion. I couldn’t help myself and we needed a laugh; I turned to Shanzay:
“These damn immigrants! They come to our country to take our jobs and then try to tell us how to live . . .”
It’s so easy to regard moments like these as exceptions, but really they are just manifestations of a long history of Western attitudes toward people of color. I see it in the same way as a white male presidential candidate vilifying minorities and immigrants in our country, when he doesn’t necessarily belong here himself. In the case of Donald Trump, his grandparents immigrated here from Germany in 1885.11 Meanwhile, Muslims first arrived to the shores of America at least several generations prior, possibly encountering Native American tribes even before making up 10 to 15 percent of slaves brought from Africa.12 As a testament to the power of racism, this isn’t enough to stop Trump from audaciously making the claim that Muslims do not deserve to be a part of this country, as if he has more right to this space, this land, than we do, the authority to dictate our right to it, and, by extension, assert that we do not belong here. Given their history of subjugation and the fact that our black brothers and sisters literally built this country, Muslims bear the real entitlement to tell Trump to get the hell out of our country.
* * *
7Bill Chapell, “World’s Muslim Population Will Surpass Christians This Century, Pew Says,” NPR, April 2, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/04/02/397042004/muslim-population-will-surpass-christians-this-century-pew-says.
8http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/12/us/orlando-nightclub-shooting/.
9Nancy Leong, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review, June 2013, 2152, 2169, http://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/vol126_leong.pdf.
10Dylan Love, “These Are Supposedly The Words That Make The NSA Think You’re A Terrorist,” Business Insider, June 13, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-prism-keywords-for-domestic-spying-2013-6.
11Alexander Dluzak, “Donald Trump’s German Roots,” DW.com, February 29, 2016, http://www.dw.com/en/donald-trumps-german-roots/a-19015570.
12“Islam in America,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/islam-in-america/.
Epilogue
I was sitting beside a representative from UN Women at a closed-meeting roundtable at the United Nations, discussing the needs of faith-based feminist organizations, when one of my former college professors walked in. She was a famous white feminist leader in the women’s movement whose lessons—the ability to learn from her directly—were coveted as an honor by our competitive class of women’s leadership certification candidates. She spoke gently with a keen grasp of the issues we were facing on a global scale, putting them into accessible context for us in our often far-removed lecture room on Rutgers’s Douglass campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
That year, I barely made it to a single lecture of hers on time. I was exerting all my energy and attention on putting into practice my higher education outside of the classroom. I constantly skipped classes to attend events in New York City that would bring me, in some semblance, closer to actualizing my dreams. I remember leaving campus to attend a media class at the United Nations, only to meet Tawakkol Karman, a Libyan revolutionary and the first Arab woman to be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, leading a demonstration outside of its headquarters. I don’t remember what the content of the class was that I had to make up, but I still have that photo with Tawakkol of our smiling faces, mine beaming a little more excitedly in our half-hug.
My fellow women’s leadership scholars turned my attendance into an inside joke, and by the end of the semester, my feminist professor took such great offense to it that she rightfully reported me to our program director. “Do you understand how much of a privilege it is to learn from this teacher?” the director asked me in her office during a scheduled meeting. “She’s giving her time to teach you and you show up to her lectures late or not at all.”
It’s been two years since I graduated from that program at Rutgers, and now I am part of a coalition with that same feminist professor to decide on a resolution to present to the Commission on the Status of Women. She walked past the conference table, taking the seat right across from me. Then she looked up, saw my eager smile and excited wave, and grinned right back at me. Batons being passed.
As the youngest person in the room, it’s impossible to think that I would have found myself in the same space as her had I not been making those sacrifices to cut classes and hone my interests in real life, but it begs the question of why I had to make those sacrifices in the first place. For women of color, �
��leaning in” doesn’t always work. Sometimes you need to jump over a wall, break through a window, and kick down a door to force your way in. Sometimes you need to do this even—and especially—when the gatekeepers fail to see your worth as clearly as you do.
At the same time, it was having the privilege of learning from that feminist professor and a long line of educators and mentors—from Jordan to college, from protests to media—that led me to this room.
The last time I attended the Commission on the Status of Women, it was with my fellow women’s leadership scholars during that certification program, and we would commute from New Jersey to the United Nations together. On one of the nights following a commission assembly, my friend Katie and I were walking to Port Authority, heading home to Jersey, when we decided to extend our trip in the city and visit the Empire State Building.
“Can you look up the directions, please?” I asked her, years before I could repeat the subway stops in my sleep.
“Why can’t you do it?” she asked.
“I’m a Muslim, I can’t have that in my phone. Looking up directions to the Empire State Building? God knows what people could think.” The microdefense had become so second nature, such a preconditioned way of thinking, and the explanation fell out of my mouth so unconsciously that I didn’t think anything of it until Katie furrowed her brow at me.
“Wow. That’s really sad that you have to think that way. It’s sad that it’s even a thought that has to cross your mind.” That’s probably when I realized how strange it was.
About a year after college graduation, right at the start of what would become the Summer of Hustle, I was getting coffee with another one of our program’s women’s leadership alumni, Arabelle Sicardi, in a hipster Bushwick coffee shop with wooden tables and cheap Wi-Fi. She had just resurfaced from a media whirlwind surrounding her controversial resignation from BuzzFeed after they censored her social criticism of a major beauty corporation that was one of their advertisers. Arabelle is a half-Taiwanese, half-white beauty blogger who writes about the intersection between beauty, race, and society.
I had just made the fateful decision to leave Al Jazeera America behind and cast my dreams into the New York winds like a kite to see what they would return. I was reaquainting myself with Brooklyn, living off my savings, and wondering just how I was going to do this.
“You can do this,” Arabelle encouraged me. “This is what you were meant to do.”
It would be at a subway station of the beloved L train that I’d pick up a call from a Teen Vogue editor, Arabelle’s boss. Arabelle was fulfilling her childhood dreams of penning a beauty column for them, and she referred to the editor as her squad when she introduced us. She told him he had to hear about the amazing work we were doing for women’s voices.
By the end of the summer we had worked on a feature with Teen Vogue that would herald a breakthrough in Muslim women’s visibility in the media. The feature, proclaiming our voices as Muslim women “titanic,” would usher in a whole new caliber of coverage and representation of our issues, voices, and activities in the mainstream. It would be the first of a series of great works we would do with them that year, the first of their kind with any major American magazine. By the end of the year, I would be flying to Los Angeles for a photoshoot at Teen Vogue’s studios for their “New Faces of Feminism” cover story in the February 2016 print issue. It would be the first time that a veiled Muslim woman would be featured in a main spread—for a celebratory topic completely unrelated to Islam, the Middle East, or terrorism, no less. I became a new face for feminism, and I just so happened to be a veiled Muslim woman.
One of the questions I am asked the most is “What motivates you?” It’s always been a difficult one to answer. It’s less about motivation and more about survival. It’s not our choice to stay motivated when the alternative is hate crimes, wars, and more walls. In the United States alone, Muslims are only one hate crime away from life or death. International images of women and children being targeted and families being ripped apart by the war on terror, with more and more policies disproportionately impacting communities of color, are not our privileged motivations. Allowing another generation of little girls to grow up being told they don’t belong, that their bodies are less valuable, less human, is simply not an option.
I dreamed I had a daughter. I could see the back of her reading over a book, but I could never see her face. She was hidden behind long, dark hair and was very quiet, receding to the shadows of a room but still glowing beneath my sheer admiration of her. She was so beautiful, and in my dream I knew that hers was a beauty that the world would seek to destroy because it would not be able to understand it. I was seized by the innate, instinctive nature of a mother compelled to protect. I felt this desperate urge to protect her from the world, shield her from the cruelty that I knew would inevitably befall her and to which she did not deserve to be subjected. I woke up, my heart still pounding with this raw emotion. She stayed on my mind for days until I spoke to an intuitive friend who told me that the little girl in my dream was me, and that protection was what I had wanted most when I was the little girl’s age.
I think of that little girl every single day. I thought of her when I was tagged in an Instagram photo of a teenage girl ripping the glossy page of me out of her Teen Vogue issue to hang on her bedroom walls, much like I did with the pages of waify white models from the magazines I read in junior high. I thought of her at the United State of Women Summit, when a Muslim mother recognized me and ran up to me with her little four-year-old daughter, asking if she could introduce us because she wanted to show her daughter that she could be anything she wanted. I thought of her, especially, when a Hindu mother approached me to tell me that she prints out MuslimGirl.com articles to read with her fourteen-year-old daughter before bed as their self-esteem-building exercise at the end of a long day. I thought of how two years earlier, I almost stopped myself from going to my media internship, the image ringing in my head of a Hindu man getting pushed onto subway tracks as retribution for 9/11.
I think of the little girls we were and the little girls we could have been, and the little girls who never were and what little girls will be if we have anything to say about it. I think of how our generation is a fateful one. We were the little girls who had our voices robbed of us. We were the little girls who had our bodies and our homelands ripped apart while our hands were tied behind our backs. We were the little girls who were told to sit down and shut up while our world betrayed us. We are rising up—we are the ones reclaiming our voices, the ones talking back, and the ones reminding the world that no, we haven’t forgotten. We grew to become our own saviors.
Acknowledgments
Rabbina laka al hamdu wal shukr,
hamdan wa shukran katheeran,
tayebban mubarakan,
kaman yanbayaghi bejelaly wajheka
wa atheemy soltaneka.
We are all made of star stuff, and I’ve been made up of my fair share of stars. It is impossible to name every incredible soul who has brought this book to life, the many friends, family, allies, and supporters that have been its lifeblood, and everyone along the way who has added their touch to this historic journey. All I can say is, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for bringing us to this moment.
Salam Baba, thanks for being my biggest motivator, my rock, and the one constant in my life. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for you. Mama, you are my soul, and I hope you never forget that everything I am is you. Faris and Ameer, thank you for putting up with me and being the two guys I can always count on. I hope it’s been worth it. This book is courtesy of Ameer’s 3 a.m. Dunkin runs.
To the #MuslimGirlArmy—every editor, writer, reader, and supporter we ever had along the way—I am who I am because of you. Clique, thank you for sitting with me. I love you like air. Thank you to our tribe, those who enthusiastically backed our work, for giving their vote of co
nfidence to the girls in diners. It is the honor of my life to work with you all. Thank you to the league of superwomen who make up my many mentors—we stand on the shoulders of giants and our work is another link in the chain.
Arabelle Sicardi, you are my fairy godmother; thank you for being the definition of a powerful ally. Abdul Rehman Khan and Sabah Abbasi, thank you for being my sounding board whenever I needed one. Special thanks to Jenna Masoud for snapping the photo that landed in a thousand interviews.
I want to express deep gratitude to the team that made my childhood dream of writing a book come true. Thank you to my agent, Erin Malone, for guiding me through the process of publishing my first book and translating a whole new world for me. Thank you especially to my editor, Ebony LaDelle, for sharing in my vision for this book and truly bringing it to life, and to Jonathan Karp for the opportunity of chronicling a crucial experience during this historic moment. Thank you to Maureen Cole, Ashfia Alam, Richard Rhorer, and Jackie Seow for all the work you put into making this endeavor a success. Thank you Zareen Jaffery for being a guiding light for Muslim bookworms.
Most importantly, thank you to everyone who has been part of the ride.
About the Author
Photograph by Jenna Masoud
AMANI AL-KHATAHTBEH is the founder and editor-in-chief of MuslimGirl.com, the number one Muslim women’s blog in the United States. She regularly provides commentary on social, cultural, and political issues through outlets like CNN, Al Jazeera, and the BBC, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, and made Forbes “30 Under 30” list. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and events addressing issues pertaining to women, Islam, and the Arab world. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter at @XOAmani and read more on MuslimGirl.com.
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