By 2. On the Muslim-American sense of belonging:
Abed (@aayoub93): It’s temporary, but it’s getting worse. The types of hate crimes we are seeing are getting worse, and we expect it to get worse before it gets better. That’s why it’s important that all the organizations and individuals represented do their part to insure these hate crimes don’t continue, and this rhetoric doesn’t continue. And that’s what we need to collaborate on as a community. When you have three individuals shot in their own home, or as we saw today in Louisville, situations like this really make the community uncomfortable.
Zahra (@zahrabilloo): I’m a little conflicted about the idea that it’s going to get better, because our legacy has, for a very long time, one of being oppressed or of being targeted, because that is the cost of challenging the status quo, that is the cost of speaking truth to power.
So, Im struggling recently with this idea that its going to get better. If we are always advocating for justice, if we are always pushing for that, which is what, I believe, our religion commands us to do, does it get easier? Is the end of the horizon a place of comfort? Is that what we’re seeking? What I’m actually fascinated by is our evolving sense of welcomeness, and what it means to be integrated as Americans, at least speaking from the perspective of someone who grew up in an immigrant family.
Reflecting on the legacy of some of our families and communities to aspire to be a model minority, or to align with heternormal white culture in the United States, and how that’s changing, and how our identification with criminal justice issues, with racial justice issues, with comprehensive immigration reform is broadening what it means to feel welcome in the United States. As a civil rights lawyer, I am actually more afraid of state intrusions on my liberty, whether they be Guantanamo or NSA spying or CIA torture than I am of individual hate crimes. Both are incredibly frightening. Both should be treated with coarse concern, and we should be working on them. So how is our relationship with the state evolving as we become more and more entrenched as a Muslim community?
Linda: We have to remember that we have different experiences in the Muslim community, so when you speak to an African-American Muslim it’s not the same, when you speak to an Indian-American Muslim or a Pakistani-American Muslim or a Palestinian, everyone comes from a different experience. There was a time in this country where many of us benefitted from privilege, from basically being not black. I work in a community where I get to hear people’s stories, and people don’t feel that they belong… they respond to their experience… this is the reality of the people, we can’t take that away from how people feel. It’s hard to tell someone whose father was separated from the family, and we have many of these cases in my area, where the father was detained, he goes into a detention center for five months, he’s deported to Jordan, and you’re an American citizen child who still lives here, and someone tells you “But you’re American, and you need to own that”… that’s not that kid’s experience. It’s a really hard conversation for us to have about self-worth when people in a community feel like they don’t belong, and they’re being treated like they don’t belong in every facet of their lives. So, my struggle always is, how do you get people to understand that they are worthy of dignity and respect…?
Margari: If we look at the African-American Muslim experience, it doesn’t reflect that sense of not belonging.
Like in Philly, where Islam is fully entrenched, they’re like we belong here, no matter what type of treatment… For many black Americans, because of our suffering in the country, we feel that we belong. So, when we talk about the Muslim sense of belonging, we’d have to distinguish that that is not the universal experience for all Muslims.
Many black Muslims feel like they belong here, because this is their only [home]… like if I go abroad, there’s no place anywhere else where I have any roots, any connections anywhere outside of the U.S.. And so that sense of belonging comes from that struggle, and suffering, and pain, and knowing that my ancestors were enslaved on these soils, and that is a specific experience, but it is still a significant experience… So maybe African-American Muslims can be bridge-holders for the discussion of belonging.