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  My love letter to all the little girls who ever cried in the dark

  Forgive him who wrongs you;

  join him who cuts you off;

  do good to him who does evil to you;

  and speak the truth even if it be against yourself.

  —Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him

  Introduction

  “I’m kind of playing the game right now,” I told Contessa Gayles in the bathroom of Muslim Girl’s overpriced Williamsburg studio in Brooklyn, New York. I was staring at my reflection in our light-framed vanity mirror, doing the makeup routine that I’ve learned works best on film and that has become second nature over the past few months. Contessa’s camera was rolling, getting some footage for the CNN interview we were about to shoot.

  Muslim Girl blew up over the past year, for lack of better words. Our work to amplify Muslim women’s voices in mainstream media reached worlds of new audiences. We were getting republication inquiries, media requests, and columns published in major outlets we only ever dreamed of, and our work was being profiled everywhere from Teen Vogue to the New York Times. In January 2016, we became the first Muslim company to land on Forbes’s “30 Under 30” list, and I became the first veiled Muslim woman to be recognized in the media category. And now here I was, carving my dark black liner around my eyes with precision, getting that cat eye as sharp as the shards of another glass ceiling we were about to break. Maybe.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned us of the dangers of the single story, and mine—as privileged and seemingly mediocre as it may appear to us Western Muslims, and as endlessly fascinating as it may seem to those looking in—carries the weight of a generation of little girls eagerly searching for a reflection of themselves in the world around them.

  I’m perfectly aware of my role as the Token Muslim Girl these days. It’s fulfilling to know that the opportunities created by Muslim Girl have come from exceptional hard work and sacrifice, but it’s disheartening to think that it must be because they have become lucrative to somebody out there who’s definitely not us. They call us “palatable,” and indeed my story is much easier to swallow than that of Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi. She was fourteen years old when American soldiers in Iraq gang raped her girl-child body while holding her family hostage in another room, before executing all of them and setting the bottom half of little Abeer’s body on fire. I can spend days talking about how 9/11 impacted us Muslim youth living in the West, but our experiences pale in comparison to the recipients of our country’s resulting foreign policy in the Muslim world. Yet, the stark dichotomy of our experiences are only flip sides to the same coin: an illustration of how anti-Muslim bigotry takes shape on different walks of life in different ways. The relationship between them is politically intertwined. I see us—we, the Muslim citizens of the countries exporting these policies—as the gatekeepers to the rest of the Muslim community-at-large. We have a responsibility to use our privileges, resources, and every avenue at our disposal to assert a change that will ripple out and alter the course of history.

  I’m not really sure I understood what was going on when 9/11 happened, but I was old enough to feel the world shift on its axis that day and change everything forever. I remember it so vividly because it was confusing and chaotic, and the first time since my grandfather from Jordan passed away that I was enveloped by sadness all around me, yet this time it applied to everyone. That day has become crystallized in my memory not just for how harrow­ingly scary it was—how we didn’t know what would come after that—but also because I deeply believe that my generation of millennial Muslims has, whether we like it or not, come to be defined by it.

  We have become commodified in every demeaning way: Our bodies have become political targets in the service of returning America to the imaginary greatness it once enjoyed, which I can only assume was during the days of outright racial comfort and superiority of white people; at the same time, our bodies have been reprinted, sold, contorted to fit the only cool narrative society can accept, sold to us Muslim women in a way that makes us eagerly jump to celebrate the shattering of another glass ceiling.

  I still remember hearing the story of Cennet Doganay—the French schoolgirl who shaved her head in 2004 in protest of France’s new law banning Islamic headscarves from school—when I was in middle school. I watched a story of her on the news, a rebellious breath of fresh air amid all the headlines pounding me with horrible messages about what Muslim women stood for, and to my twelve-year-old self, it was like hearing that there was life out there. There were little girls who felt just as attacked and dis­respected by their societies as I did, and this one was talking back. I wondered if I would ever have the same courage as her.

  Abed Ayoub, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, issued a statement in the winter of 2015, almost immediately after Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigration, stating that levels of Islamophobia at that time were the worst they had witnessed since immediately after 9/11. My heart hurt. I could not imagine a generation of little girls living through a Trump era—the terrifying possibility of a Trump generation—and enduring the same unsettlement that my friends and I did growing up, not just from navigating their own identities, but their surroundings as well. Enough is enough. The cycle needs to stop. In this case, it’s less of a cycle and more of an uphill battle in which we toil. We’re climbing toward the light with exceptional weight on our backs, digging our heels into the dirt of the past to gain our way to the top, only to slip—no, be completely knocked down—by an uncontrollable, newly emerging force that causes us to tumble all the way back to where we started, much to the jeers and cheers and additional trips of the bystanders around us. Everyone can see it happen, and complacency is a killer.

  The best I can possibly do is speak on my own behalf, to be brutally true to my own lived experience, and share with you a snapshot of a walk of life that I believe has been shared by many of my brothers and sisters wandering the same familiar corridors of our English-speaking diaspora, never cultured enough for home and never American enough to truly belong.

  I think we’ve become starved for people to actually listen to us. We’ve become so desperate to hear our own voices above all the white noise that we have willfully compromised and repackaged our narratives to make them palatable—to make them commercial and catchy, to make them headline-worthy, to sell a story that you will find deserving of your attention. We call it playing the game, because you consuming some semblance of our truth is better than you consuming whatever else is out there, conjured by someone else on our behalf. But that’s not good enough anymore.

  Chapter 1

  The only time I ever cried during an interview was when I was asked to recall my memory of 9/11. Was it for International ­Business Times? The Guardian? I can hardly remember anymore. But, surprisingly, I had never been asked that question before, and it caught me so off guard that when I started describing the vivid image seared into my memory, the tears began to fall.

  On September 11, 2001, Bowne-Munro Elementary School in East Brunswick, New Jersey, planned to hold its annual Yearbook Photo Day. We were all dressed up and excited for an excuse to leave our classrooms, go outside, and spend the day on our grassy soccer field, against whatever backdrop they had for us that year. There was an electric energy of anticipation when we
got to school. Everyone was wearing their best clothes; the boys wore new sneakers and the girls had their hair plaited in cute updos, or their smiles beamed from between bouncing curls. My hair was always frustratingly thick and slightly unruly, but at least Mama tried to brush it straight for me that day, my uneven curtain of bangs resting just above my eyes. I always felt my best on Yearbook Day, if only because Mama was eager to get a new set of photos of me to add to her collection. She took pride in displaying what turned out to be a chronological evolution of my awkward haircuts over the years, in pretty frames among porcelain figurines in the heavy cherrywood cabinet that was only accessible in the dining room on special ­occasions.

  Mama loved Yearbook Day. She had just bought me a new outfit. I was wearing a stiff pair of jeans and a blue shirt—I hated the color pink when I was a little girl and rebelled against expected “girliness” by always opting for blue and green, which is fascinating considering nearly everything I own is pink now—with a black vest over it. I finished the look by slathering on my favorite Bonne Bell Dr Pepper Lip Smacker. I was probably wearing a pair of dress shoes that I couldn’t wait to show off. And I remember it was really warm and sunny outside.

  From the earliest moments of our first period, however, something was weird. Actually, a lot of things were weird. First of all, it was eerily quiet in our school. The TVs in all of the classrooms, which were usually on the district’s cable channel of PowerPoint slide announcements to the background tune of elevator music, were turned off. That morning, the principal didn’t deliver our usual morning announcements over the PA system, either. Then, soon enough, we were told by our teachers, almost inconsequentially, that Yearbook Day was canceled. They told us pesticide was sprayed on the fields that morning so we couldn’t go outside. I remember feeling confused and a little disappointed, but everyone else just accepted that we would take our pictures another day, so I did, too.

  Our math teacher cried so much throughout the morning that some of us thought that someone in her family had died. I remember the class trying to make her feel better while faculty passed through the halls or popped in every now and then in a state of disarray.

  “It’s okay, Ms. Brady,” we said to her when she was hunched over at her desk, her eyes red from the tears, her face contorted like she was hanging on by a thread that could break at any moment. “It’s going to be okay!” we cheerfully encouraged her. That only made her cry even more.

  Our young fourth-grade minds were not much alarmed by these events, nor did we really think to string them together. How could we? How could we have possibly imagined what was waiting for us?

  Our school day finally ended with an unscheduled early dismissal, much to our delight. Somehow, our parents were already informed of this, because when I ran out of school, my mom, who was routinely late to pick me up, was on time and waiting for me. I ran up to the car and Mama leaned over the passenger seat to unlock the door for me from the inside. I opened the door and didn’t even have time to climb into the seat before she said, “Amani, something happened today.”

  “What’s up?” I asked, getting in and closing the door beside me.

  “You know the Twin Towers?” she asked.

  “No—” I responded, confused.

  “You know those two really tall buildings that are next to each other in New York? That we were looking at and talking about how huge they were when Dad took us for a drive in the city?”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering.

  “Okay, well, there’s been a crash, and they’re not there anymore.”

  “They’re not there anymore?!” I asked, trying to understand. “Like, at all?”

  “No, honey. They’re not there anymore. Two planes crashed into them.”

  “What? There was an accident? Is everyone okay?” I asked naively.

  “Someone drove the planes into them,” my mom said, but I still was not processing what had just happened. For the rest of our five-minute car ride home, I kept repeating the same questions, not sure how someone could intentionally fly a plane full of people into a skyscraper full of people, nor that those two towers in the opening credits of my parents’ favorite television show, Friends, could possibly cease to exist. They weren’t there anymore?

  When I walked into our home, my family was in the living room, their eyes glued to the television screen. My dad was standing beside the TV and my mother joined him. My baby brothers, Ameer and Faris, then three and four years old, respectively, were in the family room, watching SpongeBob SquarePants. My grandmother and Auntie Ebtisam were sitting on the long couch in the back of the room, reacting in ­Arabic. They were visiting from Jordan and living with us for one year at the time, enjoying their first trip to the United States. My ­twenty-three-year-old aunt had her elbows up in the air, her fingers at work twisting her waist-length black hair, usually hidden beneath a veil, into one tight strand that she distractedly wrapped around the outside of her ear, which was a habit of hers. They couldn’t believe what had happened. “I had just taken them there a couple of days ago,” my dad, or Baba as we usually call him, told me. “They looked up at the towers through the sunroof of our car in wonder.” Now, suddenly, they weren’t there anymore.

  But, here, on our TV, there was an image of the Twin ­Towers with clouds of black smoke coming out of them. I was trying to understand how they got like that, trying to imagine how this could have possibly resulted from a plane crash—and then it happened. The news channel looped the footage—a scene that would continue to loop in my mind’s eye, surface in my everyday, for the rest of my life—of two planes crashing into the sides of the towers. My eyes saw it. I was suddenly a witness to an evil that I was not even able to grasp, exposed to a tragedy that I only had the capacity to feel but not comprehend. Whenever the footage appeared in the broadcast, everyone in the room fell silent again, in a trance, probably not far from my own elementary struggle to make sense of what I was seeing.

  And then, Baba said something that I didn’t understand at the time, but that alerted me to the impact of the day’s events beyond two beautiful towers—and, as I later would learn, thousands of people—not being there anymore.

  “This is a horrible thing that happened,” he told his mother. “And they’re going to blame us. And it’s going to get much worse.”

  • • •

  “Sorry,” I told the journalist. She paused to give me a moment to clear my voice, and I hoped to God she didn’t think I was faking it—feigning emotion for some type of dramatic impact, or to prove my patriotism.

  I hope she knows my pain is genuine, I thought. I hope she doesn’t doubt that a Muslim American can be this impacted by 9/11, too. The truth is that 9/11 never ended for us.

  • • •

  Elementary school was a very difficult period in my formative years concerning the development of my self-esteem and self-identity as a Muslim girl. By the time I finished elementary school, the U.S. was already involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The feelings of vulnerability and lack of protection were only second to those that I experienced in middle school, where the early teen years got really brutal. But, I think for many of us, elementary school creates the most sensitive impression of where we stand relative to other people and our status relative to the world around us. That’s when the bullying started.

  It was that same year that I heard my first racial slur. By then I had already become a class target, so the epithet only intensified my sunken self-esteem that always forced me to bite my tongue, not talk back, not stand up for myself for fear of the bullying getting worse. By fifth grade, every social interaction was distinctly marked with the preceding thought, Dear God, please don’t let them put me down. And then the first time my heritage was held against me as an insult marked the end of the days that I innocently took pride in my culture as a source of joy and the subject of class celebrations during Culture Day, naive to the implication
s of race and history. It made me realize that my brown eyes and dark hair and tan skin made me feel more than just ugly compared to the other girls.

  It happened in math class. It was audible to our classroom table of four or five other students, who would witness and compound my humiliation. It was a student with black skin who said it, who was always eager to make fun of other people so he wouldn’t get made fun of himself. It was a phrase that would resurface ringing in my ears with every photo and every scrap of footage coming out of the Middle East for a long time.

  “Your people throw rocks at tanks!”

  I could hear other students gasp. One Jewish classmate burst out laughing. My people. Throw rocks. At tanks? And in a few moments, as the blood rushed to my cheeks, I was awash with the realization that this insult was different. This one didn’t sting like the comments that I smelled or that I was ugly or fat. Suddenly, I belonged to a people, and that people was something I should be ashamed of. Shame. I didn’t know why I felt ashamed, and I wasn’t sure exactly what he was referring to or why it was so bad. But I did recognize that it was different. And I did feel that it hurt. And so I told my teacher.

  The student got sent to the principal’s office, and the principal ended up suspending him. Upon receiving the news, my other classmates shamed me even more for telling on him. And thus began this weird dynamic of getting victimized and then either silencing myself or getting victimized a second time if I talked back. When I went home that day and told my dad, he was sad and angry for me, but then he waved those feelings away with a smile.

  “That’s something you should be proud of, Baba,” he told me, in our living room covered in tapestries and Middle Eastern upholsteries. “Your people throw rocks at tanks.”

  • • •