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  Especially post-9/11, double consciousness manifested itself in the evolution of Muslim American engagement. Under microscopic scrutiny for terrorism and the collective expectation for us to constantly denounce, apologize, and take responsibility for the individual actions of extremists, we have severely internalized the public perception—empowered by media misrepresentation—of our communities as being made up of violent and crazy outsiders. As a result, we inadvertently prioritized shifting our image in the eyes of others rather than turning inward and cultivating our survival in this new trek we were forced to embark upon. I don’t blame our community for this. I feel that the horrible scapegoating we’ve had to endure has forced us into a corner of defensiveness, dissipating our energy in this endless game of pushing back against the misconceptions that ultimately victimize us. Imperialism behaves in this way not only out of sheer contempt for peoples different than its own, but also in a deliberate effort to prevent these groups from building themselves up. It makes me sad to think about all the resources the Muslim American community has been forced to waste for the past decade on campaigns, events, and media efforts to prove that we, too, are American; that we, too, are human, begging and pleading the public to not believe the racist rhetoric being spewed about us. I can’t imagine the types of institutions, programs, and civic society we could have cultivated for our community—the type of backbone we could have had the opportunity to grow—had we not been forced into this position.

  In this way, our behavior—aimed at constantly combating stereo­types and unjustified hatred—centers, serves, and caters to the non-Muslims victimizing us, inevitably at our own expense. This has caused us to pretty much gag ourselves and tie our hands behind our backs so as to overcompensate for the judgments and try to convince the public that we are peaceful and harmless, much to our detriment. For example, when armed bikers decided to stage an anti-Muslim rally at a mosque in Phoenix, Arizona, in May 2015, Muslim community organizers who were discussing possible responses to the violence considered passing out bottles of water to the white men who wanted to annihilate our existence. While the community is entitled to determine the most fitting way for it to respond, it still stands that Muslims felt compelled to disempower themselves even further to showcase the peaceful nature of their religion in a situation that under any other circumstance would have required a strong head-on response for security. Many Muslims cite the behavior of our loving and compassionate Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, to justify such behavior, as it was his tradition to meet hostility with peace. But I think our attitude toward such docile responses would change drastically if we recognize them as still catering to those who would judge us. My opinion is that the ­actual safety and sanctity of our community is under threat in moments like these, and that was something the Prophet never entertained; further, his acts of peace and turning the other cheek never came at the cost of human dignity.

  One reason I believe that Muslim Girl has been so successful as a media outlet is because, for us, it was in this moment that we stopped seeking the attention of or affirmation from mainstream media about the issues that are important to us. For the first time, we didn’t grovel at the feet of these media companies and beg them to cover our stories. Instead, we turned inward and made the conscious decision to develop our own alternative media channel. We released ourselves from the outward eye—by throwing ourselves straight into the center of it—and instead focused on engaging the conversations that were pertinent to our own interests and lived experiences. We created a moment for us to finally be introspective and cultivate our own identities, knowing that the world robbed us of the opportunity to do so when we were growing up. We wanted to fight stereotypes by being unapologetically ourselves and sharing what we had to say with the world.Our work has been built in the consciousness of a long line and tradition of Muslim women speaking truth to power, taking a central role in revolutionizing societies and propelling their respective generations forward toward emancipation. If we seem further along, it is by standing on the shoulders of superwomen.

  Within this framework, imagine the experience of Muslim women whose headscarves publicly announce their religion. Forget the ISIS flag: When it comes to the outward eye, the hijab has become the flag of Islam. Because our racist society is quick to view minorities as monoliths, and because our sexist society is quick to reduce women to the attire they wear, Muslim women who wear headscarves have undoubtedly become the involuntary representatives of an entire religion. Following the irrational logic according to which Muslims are judged (i.e., if one Muslim commits terrorism, then all Muslims are terrorists), every action that a visibly identifiable Muslim woman takes in public is immediately attributed to our religion as a whole. In this way, we exist in the public sphere in a perpetual state of constant awareness and consciousness of the outward eye. Our actions are constantly manipulated, negotiated, and limited to serve that purpose—another manifestation of the oppression we suffer from Western society.

  We are on the front lines of Islamophobia. Physical assault, hate crimes, and harassment against us are not only attacks upon us as individuals, but attacks on Islam itself. Like lightning rods, we attract and bear the brunt of the hateful attitudes, rhetoric, and media frenzies prompted by Islamophobia.

  * * *

  2 Hadeer Shwket, “The Battle of Muta,” MuslimGirl.com, August 28, 2010, http://muslimgirl.com/2445/battle-of-muta/.

  3Jason Edward Harrington, “Dear America, I Saw You Naked,” Politico.com, January 2014, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/tsa-screener-confession-102912.

  Chapter 3

  On my first day back to junior high school in New Jersey in 2006, I had a panic attack.

  I was walking to school with my dad that morning, wearing the headscarf that I had brought back with me from Jordan. It would be the first time I saw all my classmates again since leaving nine months earlier, and it would be the first time any of them saw me with a scarf on my head. For many of them, it would be their first time learning I was a Muslim. I was excited for this day to come, until it finally did, and then I was suddenly fighting butterflies in my stomach. A feeling of anxiety washed over me the closer we got to school, and then, as we were climbing up the grassy green lawn toward the baseball field, I froze dead in my tracks and broke into tears.

  “What’s wrong?” Baba asked, deeply concerned. “Amani, if you don’t want to wear it to school, you don’t have to. If it’s going to be this hard for you, you can take it off.”

  I genuinely gave the option some thought. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’m scared I’m going to lose my friends. What if every­one hates me? How will people treat me? If I walk in wearing a headscarf now, I feel like I’ll never be able to take it off, and if I take it off now, I feel like it’s going to be so much harder for me to put it back on.”

  I was already late to school. I needed to be decisive. I needed to be intentional.

  “Whatever you want to do, I support you,” my dad said to me. “Just know that if you are able to commit to this, then there’s nothing else in your life that you wouldn’t be strong enough to commit to.”

  I took a deep breath, wiped my face, looked back at the school, and readied myself for the moment that would change my life forever. “All right, let’s go.”

  It was the image of Auntie Ebtisam, standing up from the raft at the bottom of the slide at Splash Zone, drenched clothes sticking to her skin, laughing from behind her black sunglasses and wet, lopsided hijab, that I remembered.

  • • •

  I was one of only a small handful of girls in my large high school who wore headscarves. During lunch I would be grateful just to find someone to sit with, regardless of the company. On my first day back to school in New Jersey after returning from Jordan, I spent my lunch hiding in a bathroom stall rather than facing the anxiety of finding a table to sit at, or, worse yet, sitting alone. The caf
eteria pretty much defined which social circle you belonged to, and I guess it was an outward manifestation of my internal detachment and new cultural disorientation that I never had a defined table of my own. Walking into the cafeteria inevitably made me feel like all eyes were on me, and, in my severe reverse culture shock from returning to the States, that was a newfound attention that I was eager to shake off. I couldn’t stand the prickly feeling of passing by a table with a lunch tray in my hands, clearly looking for a place to sit, only to be met with the unwelcoming glares of peers silently signaling that, no, a seat at their table was not available. Nor could I bring myself to ask, “Can I sit here?” and subject myself to the unbearable scrutiny of whether I was socially acceptable enough. On top of my awkwardness, I felt like my headscarf created a new barrier between me and the other students with whom I wished to connect. This all came to a head when I was walking home from school one day that year and a gang of girls circled around me in the parking lot and tried to get me to take my headscarf off. It was not long before I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to survive, I had to force my personality out to protect myself and overcome this barrier—that, if I wanted to break out of it, I had better chances by being the one to extend my hand and start the conversation. By eleventh and twelfth grade, I relied on my wit to feel like I had some worth among my much cooler peers, who could afford to wear a different Ed Hardy something every day and matching uniforms of Uggs and Abercrombie. I came across as standoffish or condescending, but at least it was something better than feeling worthless.

  I guess my first very tangible experience of life post-hijab came one humid afternoon in an inauspicious parking lot across the street from my junior high. My mom had just picked me up and we were on our way home. I was sitting in the passenger seat in my super-awkward hijab—I still hadn’t figured out what styles were flattering for my chubby cheeks (if only I had appreciated them more instead of totally resenting the way they made my face look like a tomato in just about any scarf I tried at the time!)—and she was driving with the windows down, as was her style my entire life. I still remember looking up at her when I was much younger and much shorter, seeing her bangs flutter in the breeze as she smiled from behind her thick sunglasses and sang along to a throwback ’80s song.

  My mom doesn’t wear a headscarf, and I almost forgot how shocking this is to some people. Even recently, I Instagrammed a photo of us from the Cannes Lions Festival in France and people flooded the comments asking how this could be and if we would make a video about our respective decisions. One commenter wrote, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a daughter that was traditional and her mother wasn’t.” It’s a welcome observation: Personally, I just love how it seizes people’s preconceived notions about the hijab and causes them to question the supposed compulsoriness of it all. The first time someone confronted me about it, it was the secretary in my high school principal’s office, a friendly non-Muslim white woman who felt comfortable approaching me about these sensitive topics, and she pulled me aside one day to ask me why my mom didn’t wear a scarf on her head.

  “Because she doesn’t want to,” I flatly replied, prompting a subtle smile on her face. God bless her soul. I still remember the time she asked me why I was “Americanizing” my impossibly long last name by shortening it to the KATATBA printed across the back of my track hoodie. I was slightly offended that my decision would be presumed to have anything to do with being more “American,” when honestly my last name exceeded the apparel character limit, as was typical. But what she said would always stick with me: “You should be emphasizing every single letter of your last name with pride, in all its cultured glory.” Baby steps. I soon changed my profile name on Facebook from Amani Katatba to the abbreviated Amani Alkhat, much to the dismay of my peers, and then eventually to Amani Al-Khatahtbeh. In all its glory.

  But back in that parking lot across the street from my junior high on that warm day, there were few things of which I was sure. We had just gotten pulled over by a cop car, the lights still in my mom’s rearview mirror, and some white officer was now outside my mom’s driver’s-side door asking for her license and registration. She was navigating the conversation as smoothly as she normally does, asking what the trouble was and making small talk about the weather. But then the officer decided to bend down and peer in through the window, to look past my mom and right at me on the other side, sitting pensively in the passenger seat, with my unruly unibrow, my scarf haphazardly wrapped around my head. And then he said it.

  “Do y’all speak English?” he interrupted my mom—clearly mid-conversation in her perfect I’ve-been-here-since-I-was-nine-years-old Jersey accent.

  I can’t tell you how I responded, because I really don’t remember. My memories of that afternoon are doused with anger about how this dude had the audacity to ask me if I spoke English when I probably spoke it better than him. I started reading when I was a toddler; by the time I was in first grade, I was getting called out of English class to join a special instructor because I read faster than all my peers; by fourth grade, I was part of the Talented and Gifted program for advanced students, and once I reached middle school, I was placed in advanced English classes, where I’d remained ever since. That year, upon my return from Jordan, I had to argue to my junior high guidance counselor about why I needed to be placed in a higher level of English because I had already read all the books in my class’s curriculum that year. And now I was facing this prejudiced asshole who took one look at the scarf on my head and assumed that I didn’t belong, and thus that I could not speak English.

  I wish I could say that experience was out of the norm, but it truly was the first of many similar encounters since I made the commitment to wear a headscarf. Another time in college, I was shopping in the makeup aisle of a drugstore—probably for more contour powder or something, naturally—and a white woman shopping beside me was struggling to read the back of a bottle. “Excuse me—” she started, in a thick European accent, until she looked up from the product to see me in all my hijabi glory, and was startled. “Oh! Sorry, do you speak English?”

  I’m not sure how many times is the norm for the “average American” to be asked if she speaks English while living in, you know, presumably English-speaking America, but I’m guessing that number substantially increases if you fall within one of the following categories: 1) You have a shade of skin that is not considered white. 2) You wear garments that connect you with a certain culture or religion, and more so if that culture or religion is flagrantly misrepresented by the media. 3) You are actually visibly an out-of-place tourist or something. Taking into account the large number of minority communities we have in our country, I am going to take the guess that many of us, from many different backgrounds, have been subjected to the same scrutiny.

  This type of experience demonstrates some very deeply entrenched preconceptions that American society harbors toward its minority communities. The assumption that one cannot speak English because of one’s culture or religion stems from historical stereotypes of immigrants—specifically, people of color—as being uneducated, illiterate, unintelligent, and unassimilated. And seeing as how America should be the “salad bowl” of the modern world, it doesn’t make sense that being “unassimilated” should be seen as unordinary or viewed so negatively in today’s society.

  • • •

  I’m not sure if every young person experiences a moment when they are confronted, point-blank, by their own naiveté, when it shakes them awake and dissolves that fantastical dream of how big the world is and their sheer power to possess it. If To Kill a Mocking­bird is any signifier, there is likely a moment in which we lose our innocence, and that doesn’t necessarily have to mean engaging in an act that is constructed to be adulterated. I still painfully remember what that moment was for me. It wasn’t in the deaths of Muhammad and Jamal al-Durrah, which I watched on my parents’ Arabic satellite television in the warm living room of our New Jersey home
when I was only eight years old. That may have represented my first tangible exposure to senseless ­violence—even though, at the time, I still didn’t fully understand why they died or who had killed them. I was only cued to sadness in school the next day when my teacher, knowing my mother was Palestinian, came up to me to ask if I had watched the horrible scene and how tragic it was. Well, it was hard to avoid. Muhammad and Jamal—in the since repeated image of Jamal desperately covering his twelve-year-old son Muhammad with his arm under ceaseless crossfire before both were shot dead—became a symbol of innocent life cut short, of the pure humane instinct to protect rendered obsolete.

  No, that moment of lost innocence would come much later, during the start of the year in which I would finally create Muslim Girl.

  I don’t remember where I was when I first got the news about Operation Cast Lead being under way, but I will likely never forget how I spent the duration of it. It was an Israeli ground invasion in Gaza at the end of 2008 that was a response to Hamas rocket fire against the occupation. The civilian population of Gaza, one of the most densely populated territories in the world, was unarmed due to a long-standing blockade that stopped any raw materials from entering the country. Meanwhile, the Israeli army utilized weapons that were outlawed according to international law. This was an unbearable attack for me to witness. It happened exactly during winter break of my junior year in high school. It was also during the lame-duck period leading up to President Barack Obama’s inauguration following a successful presidential campaign, the first for which I volunteered. I dedicated my whole heart to the effort, and would walk around our track during gym class listening to its anthem “Yes We Can” by will.i.am. I do remember President Obama being my hero yet remaining conveniently silent about the whole ordeal while he vacationed in Hawaii with his family before dealing with the human tragedy he was about to inherit. Operation Cast Lead was the first military ground invasion in Occupied Palestine that I was old enough to witness, understand, and feel.