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  My family wasn’t exceptionally devout, but we were practicing Muslims. While I resented not being able to wear shorts in middle school because my dad thought they were immodest, I am now so grateful for having grown up within the fold of Islam—not only because Islam did, inevitably, evolve into a backbone and an identity for me, but also because had it not been instilled in me at an early age, I’m not sure I would have had the strength or courage to find it myself after Islamophobia hijacked my life.

  Baba is an immigrant from Jordan. He came to America when he was twenty-six, thanks to an opportunity granted to him through the sheer luck of a visa lottery. He arrived with only a suitcase and $300 in his pocket, two-thirds of which was scammed out of him by the time he left the airport. He hustled in New York City to survive, working in convenience stores and staying in someone’s rat-infested basement for free. When he was driving me home to Brooklyn this summer, after I returned from a trip with Microsoft to Egypt, we passed by his old dwelling, on Thompson Street in Manhattan, and he excitedly pointed it out to me.

  While he didn’t practice it as religiously as I think he wished he did, my dad always tried to teach us about Islam whenever he could. He would use the time during our car rides to tell me stories about the prophets or share morals from the parables. It was during those rides that he helped me memorize the last three chapters of the Qur’an, which I still repeat three times every morning to seek protection from the evil eye—a curse Muslims believe will cause misfortune—and I feel compelled to do this now more than ever. More than anything, he instilled in me the unshakable belief that the right intentions were more important than absolutely ­anything—and that if I stuck to my moral compass, I should trust that God will always see me through. Always.

  Mama is a refugee from Palestine. Her own mother is a survivor of the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948. Deir Yassin was one of the first villages to be pillaged by incoming European militias, and those militias used the violence they carried out there as a threat to the rest of the Palestinians on the land: If you don’t get out, the same thing will happen to you. Later on, when I researched Deir Yassin’s history in high school, I would learn that my grandmother had survived purely by fate. The remaining villagers were piled into two buses: The one that my grandmother boarded was driven to the banks of the Jordan River, which she crossed with her family’s gold—which would later be used to situate her family in Amman—hidden in a sash tied around her little six-year-old belly. The other bus was driven to the heart of Jerusalem, where its passengers were killed by the city’s new inhabitants. I’m not sure how old I was when I came to understand the bloody history of our family, but my grandmother’s story always led my mind wandering toward a little girl who shone like a phoenix, rising from the ashes.

  My mother’s family came to the United States when she was a child. She had a Farrah Fawcett haircut in high school and hung out on the track after school, and she took great joy in listening to the jams of her beloved ’80s. She saved up money at her banking job to buy a bright silver Porsche with leopard-print lining that she was especially fond of, which my dad, her then-fiancé, crashed during his first drive. Her mother’s strength was passed down to her in the form of steely resolve. Mama has always fiercely fought for me and my brothers, much like a lioness protecting her cubs; we were especially grateful for her protectiveness later on in our childhood. I still remember the year that literally every student in my class took turns making fun of me and calling me horrible names, even in front of a teacher who did nothing to rectify the situation. When I went to my guidance counselor, I was told that I must be the problem, and I should change myself to make them stop making fun of me. Upon hearing this, my mother called the guidance office, demanded to speak to the stupid counselor who had given her daughter such reckless advice, and threatened to sue her and the entire school district for victim-blaming an ­eleven-year-old. I was promptly called down to the guidance office the next day and issued a formal apology.

  After 9/11, it was like a curtain had been pulled back on my family, casting them into the spotlight, and revealing to them a world that seemed to have always been festering behind a thin veil. My parents had to navigate this new territory leading a young and vulnerable family, while they themselves were being targeted. For most of my life, my dad has run his own electronics business, through which he sold video games, music, and toys. Immediately after 9/11, he feared for our existence in the United States. At the time, we had a store in an indoor flea market in our town, which was only open on the weekends and where he would work for a good eight years. He imagined the possibility of being unjustly interrogated by authorities or losing his business, or being arrested simply for his faith. The fear of attacks was palpable: His brother in Jordan urged him to consider moving our family “back home,” out of his own concern that we would be targeted or killed. He told my dad, “Imagine how easy it would be for someone to come to your store and shoot you and your family point-blank. You have to leave.”

  The flea market became a microcosm of what was happening to our nation on a larger scale. My dad explicitly remembers the dramatic shift in language in the news: He watched networks quickly transition from covering an abstract entity called Al Qaeda throughout the ’90s in a region that average Americans basically understood to be the Middle East, to employing sweeping language that implicated Muslims and the Islamic religion as a whole—no longer focusing on political disputes, but instead feverishly seeking to relate terrorist acts to the Qur’an and amplifying connections between the Muslim identity and violence. The change in rhetoric, he recalls, suddenly made it acceptable for other people to attack us with the expectation that they would be absolved of accountability. My family was placed in a position of extreme vulnerability and exposure, being attacked and alienated solely because of our religion.

  One of the employees of another toy store in the flea market slashed all four of my mother’s tires. This act of violence is still, all these years later, stuck in my parents’ memories from that time. They could feel that it was only an extension of the type of violence people around us wished to impose on us, and it was one that was blatantly hateful, inconvenient, and costly. When my father went to the owner of the toy store to inform him of his employee’s actions, the owner turned aggressive against my father.

  “What? Are you THREATENING ME?” he angrily demanded of my big brown dad. “Do you want to BOMB ME?” he said. Later, instead of questioning the employee who had slashed our tires, the police who arrived would instead question my father regarding accusations that he wanted to bomb the toy store. The police were used like a weapon against us, as they had been for people of color for a long time. Becoming the scapegoat meant that anyone could hold your identity against you at their will. It became a wound that people could prod and poke to try to bend us at their pleasure.

  The other vendors launched a petition addressed to the flea market management, in which they demanded that all Muslim vendors and their businesses be evicted. This, of course, empowered other vendors to increase their harassment of my family. I still remember “the Jewelry Lady” from across the aisle walking into our store and openly insulting my father, in front of me and his customers, while wildly waving the petition in her hands. It was painful to watch. I felt so sorry and confused about why my dad had to suffer, and I truly thought the Jewelry Lady was evil for hating us for our religion. I didn’t understand how anyone could be that mean for no reason. As all of this was happening, I felt like the entire world hated me and hated us for who we were, and, damn, that was a heavy feeling for a child. I guiltily asked myself why God had chosen to make me be born Muslim when I could have just been born Christian in America and had my life be so much easier.

  Our beautiful house in the calm New Jersey suburbs was egged, water-ballooned, and TP-ed. I remember the appearance and smell of rotting eggs. The dozens of colorful and broken latex balloons that surrounded our home would have looked pretty a
nd festive if I hadn’t been aware of the hateful sentiment that delivered them there. My mom was sitting under one of the windows in the living room with one of my baby brothers in her arms when an egg flew in and landed on her head, almost hitting her child. I remember this was the only thing she kept repeating when she found the teens who did it: “You could have hurt my baby. I don’t care about the house, but you almost hurt my child. That’s all I care about.”

  My Jordanian aunt and grandmother were scared that they wouldn’t be able to return home, or that they would be arrested and accused of something horrific. One day, they were in the public restrooms at the flea market, performing ablutions to prepare for prayer. Lots of Muslims have known the awkward experience of getting caught with their foot in the sink. When other people walked into the restrooms and saw my family washing themselves, they crowded around my aunt and grandmother like they were freak shows and started calling them horrible names. My relatives didn’t understand much English, but it was easy for them to understand the spite, hate, and anger in their tormentors’ voices.

  My aunt and grandmother’s relative obliviousness to the happenings around them due to the cultural and lingual barriers became a strange outlet for me as I renegotiated the new climate I was navigating. My aunt and grandmother didn’t know much beyond the fact that right here, right now, they were being hated for their religion, but there wasn’t really anything they could do about it. They continued living their lives as they always had, while I was trying to survive unbearable judgment that I attempted to cope with in small ways. At the age of ten, I already knew that I shouldn’t compromise who I was and that these moments called for resolve, but of course I searched for opportunities to avoid public scrutiny, judgment, or insult. Once, I remember my grandmother visited an accessories store in the flea market and purchased a white scarf with red hearts and English text on it that she didn’t understand. When she put it on, to my horror, it said I HEART JESUS! I was terrified at what people would think, and ran to my dad to make her take it off.

  “So? That’s great!” he said. “We love Jesus, too. People should know that. And now she’s wearing it on her head.”

  My father had this uncanny ability to shield me from my own negative thoughts, or those new internalized feelings of inferiority and embarrassment. He could take anything I was enduring and turn it into something noble or empowering. My aunt placed me in a similar situation that summer, when we joined my dad at his business location on the boardwalk at the beach. I spent most of the summers throughout my childhood with my ­father on the Jersey Shore, when he would stay there for weeks at a time to run his store, and I grew to take great pride in being a Jersey girl who slept just fine with sand in her bed. That year, my dad’s landlord got us season passes to the Splash Zone Water Park across from our store, and I would go there every single day. The rest of the family would join us on some days, when my mom wasn’t busy running the other store in East Brunswick, and on one of these occasions we decided that the entire family would spend a day at Splash Zone.

  I almost had a heart attack when my aunt decided to join me for the raft ride, fully clothed, from head to toe, in headscarf, metallic silver button-down shirt, and black slacks. She stood in line with me at the very top of the slide, coolly looking out from behind her black sunglasses, among all the white families in their drenched swimsuits, making us the center of attention. ­Everyone was staring at us. I could not understand why she had to put us in that position, and I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t wait to jump on the raft, rush down the slide, and get out of there.

  When I went back to my dad’s store, wrapped in a towel, wet hair falling in strands on my face, I was quick to unload on him what had just happened.

  “Baba!” I said, pointing to the topmost slide at Splash Zone across the way, which could be seen from anywhere on the boardwalk. “Do you see that ride up there? The tallest ride at the water park? Auntie Ebtisam came with me, and she was wearing ALL HER CLOTHES, and it was so EMBARRASSING! Everyone was staring at us!” I told him.

  “Wow, good for her!” my dad said. “She should be able to enjoy the ride just like anyone else. That took a lot of guts, didn’t it?”

  • • •

  I was in the sixth grade when I first made the decision to lie about my religion. It happened one sunny afternoon on our yellow school bus, heading home from another exhausting day of middle school in which I constantly tried to blend away my differences and fit in, only to inevitably capture the attention of bullies in my classes, and even ones I didn’t know in the halls. I would get taunted for being a “monster” as I walked to class in between periods, and all I ever wanted to do was disappear. I was sitting next to my “bus partner,” Jesse, who was this Italian kid with nerdy glasses—a signifier at our school that made him slightly uncool, too, and thus gave us something in common—with a gorgeous thick shock of brown curls on his head. He was in my Italian class, and would be my classmate for the seven years I studied the language throughout school. The next time I saw him after we graduated was a couple of years later, in college, when he was a barista at Starbucks with a bunch of hickeys on his neck. It’s always nice when the nerds get happy endings.

  On this bus ride, we were sitting in the awkward silence familiar to those of us banished to the outskirts of social life, when Jesse broke it: “Hey, what religion are you?” he asked. Crap. I felt a wave of panic wash over me. That conversation probably lasted only fifteen seconds, but to my eleven- or twelve-year-old lost and insecure self, it triggered a repetitive loop right before my eyes of newsreel after newsreel featuring brown men who looked like my father in orange jumpsuits and women who looked nothing like me talking about what my identity represented. It was agonizing.

  I didn’t wear a headscarf at the time, so I had the chance to hide behind being uncovered. It was a distinctly different moment from my first day wearing a headscarf to school two years later, when I had a breakdown walking to class in the morning and seriously considered ripping the scarf off my head before walking through the school doors. But in that moment, in sixth grade, my frizzy hair catching the sun beaming in through the school bus window next to me, I had the chance to conceal myself within the veil of anonymity, ambiguity.

  Finally, after what seemed like light-years of my guffaws and hesitation, I made a fateful decision that I would recall for thousands of moments after that. “Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “Something Mediterranean, I forget.”

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but that decision would become a pivotal moment in my journey. While maybe counterintuitively I thought it would offer me some relief—a small break from the exhaustion of being a Muslim in today’s society, some protection from the constant barrage of judgments, stereotypes, and attacks raining down on me from the media and my surroundings—what it did instead was cause a sense of even more palpable shame to wash over me. I was perfectly entitled to hide. Even in Islam, God permits us to renounce our religion if we are being persecuted and under threat of danger. But despite knowing this, I think what I felt at the time was the supreme unease that I had just done something against my nature. I submitted.

  It’s funny, because that’s how Western media wants to perceive us, right? Submissive. Girls hidden behind veils who are only told what to do, who only have the mind to either follow a male family member or outrageously commit to violence as our only animalistic form of expression. And yet, what is it exactly that Western society wants us to do when it imposes an impossible pressure on us to bend, conform, assimilate, submit? When French laws supposedly aim to “liberate” Muslim women from the compulsion of wearing religious garments by ironically forbidding them to wear religious garments, and then fining all Muslim women who dare appear in the public sphere while refusing to abide by such outrageous rules upon their agency, what is Western society trying to do but make us submit? When trolls leave comments on MuslimGirl.com threatening us, telling us to shut u
p and accept the Western violence inflicted upon us because at least it’s not the otherwise somehow different violence that we would be met with in Muslim countries, what do they hope we will do but submit? When we are ridiculed and targeted for covering our bodies in the face of the hypersexualization of patriarchal Western society that demands we, as women, take our garments off—that is more comfortable with a pair of naked breasts than covered hair—what does Western society want from us but our submission?

  We are not submissive. To the contrary, every step we take in our non-Muslim home countries, in spite of pressure, threats, judgments, and even laws, is a reluctant act of defiance. The ­Arabic word islam means submission—in our religion it means submission to God and God alone. You want us to submit. Submitting is not in our nature.

  The shame I felt was two-pronged: First, I felt bad about myself, as might be expected given the societal pressure for Muslim girls to view themselves as inferior; second, I felt bad about my decision, which, though I had made it for the sake of survival, I saw as a lack of courage, integrity, and strength. Of course, I know now that I was only a child, and that that was an undue burden to place on myself, but what could I do? That’s how society trained me and inevitably caged me in.

  All my life I’ve been conditioned to feel that I’m “less than.” It’s hard to explain, but I know my sisters of color understand this weird feeling that sticks to your bones so early and so discreetly that it requires evolving some superhuman level of self-awareness to even notice it.1 W. E. B. Du Bois described such confines in the context of the black community thusly:

  It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

  In many ways, this phenomenon can apply to both black and, more recently, non-black Muslims post-9/11 as well. Being indoctrinated early on into a society seemingly at war with Islam, I quickly became afflicted by this condition, marked by a feeling of severe inferiority compared to my peers. This isn’t some WebMD diagnosis based on a ­bullet-point list of symptoms: The effects of this illness vary widely and, to be frank, the greatest symptom may be that we have possibly spent most of our lives searching for a WebMD of this nature, that affirms this phenomenon we have been feeling, that echoes our symptoms and their effects right back at us. That’s probably how MuslimGirl.com came to exist: the WebMD of patriarchy and Islamophobia, all wrapped up in one and sealed with a media-friendly pretty hot-pink bow.