By In 2012, my family and I moved from a bigger city in the Midwest to a much smaller college town in the south, population: 17,000. Yes, the move was inconvenient to my social life (no more Fun Day Mondays with the girls), but I chalked it up as one more adventure with my crazy family. With that, we packed up the minivan and made our trek down south.
The first year was hard. While my husband enjoyed his new position at the university, I was having a difficult time finding work in my field, civil rights. I took up cooking and working out, trying to keep up with these very elegant Southern moms who always looked well-manicured. I even joined the PTA. At my first meeting, I was approached by someone who appeared to be the head lady of the group.
“What church do you go to?” she asked, smiling from ear to ear.
“Church? Oh. Uh. I don’t. I’m Muslim.”
“I see. Well, you have a personal invitation by me to join us at our congregation.”
She smiled again.
I smiled back and said, “I’d love the opportunity for interfaith dialogue. Thank you.”
“Oh. No. I… I’m sorry. Listen, I’ve been meaning to talk to the principal. I better catch him before he leaves.” Ms. PTA exited fast.
And just like that, the smile disappeared.
And then there was that other time…
A year later, after purchasing our new home, there was a knock at the door. It was an early morning, and I was still in my pajamas drinking my coffee. Two women stood there. One appeared to be in her mid-50s. The other, much older, stood behind her. I kept my eye on the older one. She looked like trouble.
“Hello. Welcome to our city. We see you just moved into town.”
Where was this lady getting her information? The Patriot Act?
“…I wanted to invite you to our church. Have you found Christ in your heart?”
The older woman behind her kept smiling. Every once in a while she’d sway back and forth while twiddling her fingers. A bit too excited for my taste. And then, spirit fingers spoke up.
“You’d like our church. I sit in the back. We have a good ol’ time there. We could sit together and have our own little party.”
Her hair was colored a dark brown with the dye overlapping a bit on her forehead. She had bright red lipstick that was smeared over her lip line.
“Thank you, ladies. I appreciate the invitation. I’m Muslim, though, so I’ll be searching for a mosque to attend with my children.”
Spirit fingers yelled out, “What she say? Muslin?”
“No. That’s a fabric. I said Muslim, the religion. I’m MUSLIM, with an M.”
My three young boys came to the door to see what was going on. The ladies smiled, and I introduced them.
“These are my boys, Ali, Omar, and Mohamed.”
“Wow. Those are different names.”
“Yes, we picked their names off the terrorist watch list. You know, to make it easier for everyone.” I laughed. They didn’t. “I’m joking, ladies. It’s a joke.”
Later that evening, I recounted the story to my husband and daughter.
“That’s not funny. This is a small town. People here are nice. You don’t need to make things a joking matter. Just say ‘no thank you’ and let them be on their way.” My husband was concerned that I was antagonizing the natives.
Three Years Later
I received a mailer recently. No knock on the door this time, but it was certainly another invitation. However, not one to save my soul. There was no party in the back row. It was a recruitment flyer for the KKK. The KKK! I mean, you hear about them in far-removed towns, but…Oh. Wait. I am living in a far-removed town now.
“I’m concerned,” I told my husband. “Maybe we should have thought about giving our kids more American sounding names. How do you hide a Mohamed from a group of hateful people?”
“You’re being irrational. No one is looking for you, unless you continue to make jokes about being on the terrorist watch list to everyone you see at Walmart,” he said, rolling his eyes.
The truth is, I was almost relieved to know that the KKK in town was making its presence visible. I was getting way too comfortable with the polite “Bless your heart” tolerance of it all. There was no way that everyone was always this friendly. It’s a lot easier to confirm your paranoia when you have hard evidence.
Undercover xenophobia and anti-Muslim animosity is a lot more concerning when masked by smiling faces… and as far as I could tell, everyone always appeared to be smiling.
Tie a Yellow Ribbon
That people are fearful of the unknown is not news to Muslims in America. As a young child, I remember exactly where I was and how I felt the first time I was exposed to anti-Muslim ugly rhetoric, and how it scared me.
It was 1980, and I was in the third grade. There were 53 Americans being held hostage in Iran at the time. On a very warm day in California, our school decided to show support for the hostages by planting trees and tying yellow ribbons around them. During the assembly there were two teachers standing behind me. While the principal played the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” they spoke:
“These Arabs in the Middle East are trying to destroy the world. They’re all evil.”
“I’d like to see one of them try to come to our soil and take one of us hostage. What kind of religion do these people have? Barbarians!”
My stomach sank. Did they know I was Arab? Did they know I was Muslim? My eyes began to water and my knees began to shake. I was scared. I went home that afternoon and told my mom what happened. She took me to a local fabric store and we bought yellow fabric. When we got home we cut strips, lots of them, and took them outside and began tying them around trees.
“If teachers ask what you are, tell them American. They don’t like us. We are American, understand?”
My mother was an immigrant from Brazil married to a Palestinian Muslim. We weren’t Iranian, but it didn’t matter. The teachers didn’t know the difference. My mom was afraid that I would be punished for not being like them, that they would fail me. They did fail me. Not academically, but morally and emotionally. Educators that were supposed to uplift me made me feel like an outsider instead.
We continued to tie ribbons around trees that evening without saying a word to each other. None were needed. I understood perfectly as an eight year old that it was better to be with them than for them to think we were against them.
Turning Fear Into Empowerment
Eventually, I began to see and experience the world and its events differently. I found that diversity was something to be admired. What’s interesting is that I learned this not on my own, but through my children.
When my daughter was in the first grade, I received a phone call from the principal. She was in trouble for jumping over her desk in order to beat up a little boy who had just called her friend a “nigger.”
“Why is my daughter in trouble?”
“This is not the behavior we tolerate from our students, Mrs. Khatib. Violence is not the answer.”
“Is the little boy in trouble for using derogatory language?”
“We talked to him and he knows not to say that word anymore.”
I picked up my daughter and took her for ice cream. She needed to be rewarded.
My children don’t hide their faith either. When one of my twins was in the second grade, he attended speech therapy. I was able to watch through a two way mirror, listening in with headphones.
The therapist said, “Let’s use words that have the S sound in it.”
“Okay,” Omar said. “I’m a MuSSSSlim. Are you a Muslim? Muslims are good people. Muslims love to have fun, and love people, and love peace, and love bikes, and love toys, and love Legos! If you love these things you are a MuSSSSlim, too!”
He smiled at her as her mouth hung open.
“I know,” she said. “Let’s use words that have the T-H sound in them.”
“Great! THe Muslims are coming to town. THey love THe people here.”
The therapist looked toward the two-way mirror, face flushed. She tried.
How could my boys, all of them under the age of 10, be so strong?
When I was their age I was cutting up yellow ribbons, trying to prove how American I was. Meanwhile, in 2016, when the fear odometer against Muslims is at its peak in the news, my kids are spreading the love of their faith to anyone who will stop and give them the time of day. They figured out something that took me over 30 years to learn: To use their platform wisely, to live by example, and to look at adversity in the eyes, and kick some ass.
Figuratively, that is. Well, except for my daughter; she’s the Mike Tyson of the family.
We Always Open Our Door, and Every Day is a Learning Experience
In the four years I’ve lived in my small town, we’ve always opened our doors to people. Every Sunday night, we have a family dinner where we invite students (international and domestic), professors, neighbors, and friends to enjoy some Middle Eastern cooking. We talk about everything, laugh about nothing in particular, and make sure that everyone is happy before leaving to their own homes.
As Muslim-Americans, I feared the change from a big city to a small town would be difficult for the kids. As it turns out, it’s grown on us. Our children appear to like the fact that their names are different. They love their small town where people wave at you as you drive by, and everyone knows each other.
We’ve used this chapter in our life to empower our children, to educate them on world affairs, and to explain to them that while life is not perfect, it is definitely an adventure. At the same time, we tell our kids that they don’t necessarily have to be the poster children and spokespeople of Muslims in America.
They just need to be young, and they should leave the politics and dealing with fear-mongering to the big kids. The goal is to make your child feel safe and secure. Sometimes, just telling them they’re okay is all they need.
Ultimately, I want to make sure that when my children look back on our small town experience, they remember us opening our doors to people of all faiths and ethnicities.
In fact, I’ll even open my doors to those KKK recruiters. Maybe I’ll feed them a little hummus and tabouli, and let them see that diversity is the spice of life, bless their hearts.
This article was originally posted as a contribution piece to the ACLU’s National Blog, under its series “Faith Under Fire,” in collaboration with Muslim Girl. Let us know what you think about raising children under today’s xenophobic/islamophobic climate. How do you discuss the topic with your children?
My family name is Murray and I’m from KY so figure it out. We both know you’re lying and what you don’t know is that part of the country has earned the right to a little privacy. If the “muslim world” has problems it is not up to us to sort it out. What pray tell beside discord and antipathy do you bring to your host country……..ya know the christian place you live in that was built by christians that you ridicule.
Sweetie, why are you making it sound like freedom of religion is a foreign concept to you, when you doubtless studied American history for about 10 out of the 12 years of your basic education?
Sweetie, why that’s just all sorts of droll with a big dollop of smug aint it. I bets u be sippin gin rickeys and watchin negroes sport the poneys as I write this. That lofty work which to which you allude is a constitution not a suicide note. It may come as a great shock but Americans have come together a) out of mutual benefits that result and b) we are alike and like each other (shared values and all that silliness). Some of my “basic education” was in catholic schools which twenty years after the high water mark of their immigration had become 20% or the total and open to all (same with hospitals). So far your own community has done nil but demand accommodation. Now as for that period before formal education I developed a love for creative expression. I have an acquaintance who has written a novel on the origins of the koran and I made a very spiffy cover for it. His own fatwa preceded Salman Rushdies by about ten years and this will be his second work of fiction. The likelihood of our being killed is very real and more or less predictable. Also predictable is the response from western muslims. So let’s to each other exercise honesty- I was more free before you were here and you are mistaken that I will tolerate this situation. If Islam is to you for god only knows what reason something you wish to maintain pray do it elsewhere. You are deluded if you think entertaining a corrosive influence is in anyway the fulfillment of national aspirations. (and then their is the fear of being blown up or shot).
The old Kentucky home will never be your own. You don’t want it to be we both know that. You think yourself a new breed of Islamo yuppie cracking wise about the “natives” in a 3rd tier college town. They’ve seen a thousand variations of you if anything you’re more otiose because their is the whole adhering to the “final word” religion (except when you become happy partners in the book). Perhaps your ecumenical overture fell flat because everyone else in the group had found work arounds for interfaith marriage and disposed entirely of sacred texts identifying jews as monkeys. Your special corner of heaven was always hard and as I said before those living there deserve more than getting piss little from their govt and then having to shoulder someone else’s societal problems.
And no “sweetie” this aint been a KKK hate screed so don’t give yourself a big victim pat. The preceding is not bitterness it’s determination and we still got plenty.
I would love it if you practiced more privacy. I don’t know what your part of the country has been overwhelmed by to need this additional quiet time, but please enjoy some privacy, and live by example Murray! I’m also sorry you are so plagued by apathy. Caring for a family in an unfamiliar place is hard work. (we can’t all have grace of Christ) Its ok if you don’t always have the strength support others who have to cope with it. Good luck!
I don’t know how to take this though if I had to guess it was intended as a gentle upbraiding. If so I guess it’s always nice to give the keyboard a workout. And I’m sincere about this you are not a native speaker and you seem to be wanting to push the frontiers with a litte nuance- so good for you. Here are some hints. Do not be too strident. Apathy is very strong and plague is as a verb about as bad a choice as nazi is for a noun. On top of this the two conditions are mutually exclusive; apathy is insidious and slow a plague is quite blunt and very immediate. The are not opposite to be sure but they are not sympathetic you want the modifier to resonate with it’s master. Another hint specific to Muslims which I wish you would observe is this; avoid all references to Christ because you have no knowledge of him. A couple decades ago it may have been an appropriate ice breaker to assert that indeed we muslims also believe in christ. Most christians know plenty about Islam and this bit in particular is just obnoxious. I can comment on the your posit of caring for a family in an unfamiliar place because it is couched between either very obscure sarcasm or obscure sincerity- I just can’t tell. The point writ large I wanted to illustrate to the author is that her piece was cheap and self serving. The people she belittles in her writing and daily life were sustained for a couple hundred years by the cruelest profession known to man and despite this and countless untold contributions to their immediate communities and country they seem to be the one group to which all manner of sport can ridicule can be leveled at w/o notice.
To be clear, wherever this women came from (or her forebearers) can have her back because she brings nothing to the community she is now in. As for the difficulties raising a family in a new place. My mother seemed to pull it off without complaint but that could be because when we went to church it was one who counted among it’s primary goals the assimilation of disparate people into one people. To this day I can name more presidents than saints and it was learned in religious school. Beyond this we both know the west is the only place on earth that a muslim family can be free and this is because it free rides on a culture that is pluralistic because it holds in common truths that you do not- ie, don’t kill artists, don’t condone killing artists, fly into a rage when someone kills an artist in the name of allah and most of all do not in great numbers join the army that kills artists (and lots of others) especially when it’s opponent is available to you.
I’m coping peachy kiddo and I know you are too and why wouldn’t ya you live in a city built by the greatest race on earth. Their is a one in four chance your child was born in a hospital founded by one of Patricks many minions. Keep writing kiddo it is one of the few things in activities which only brings benefits, that and reading I suppose. I wish I could say the same of Islam and you have no idea how I’ve tried. Just for a few moments I wish you would consider what is by virtue of outside perspective what is so abundantly obvious (the koran was written by one man more or less in one sitting in the order it is now in and for a moment think of what I’m saying. Anyone transcribing leaves evidence of himself. I mean for goodness sake it has to be literally from god because the only alternative you have is it’s completely bollocks. The reason it just sings despite the horror shows it describes the things harmonic is it’s only consistency)
Words can not describe how much I love this article!!!! I am not Muslim but articles like this show me how beautiful your religion is. <3 with love from Canada
I am a speech pathologist and if I had your child say that to me I would have celebrated and reward him on how beautifully he said those s and th sounds! And those sentences!!! ❤️❤️ Really enjoyed the reading though.
I have a feeling i know this small KY town, have lived in this small KY town, and will be moving back to this small KY town next year. There are ignorant in that small town. But there are wonderful people full of love an acceptance. There are some on here spouting hate and ignorance. I feel sorry for them. Sorry for all the hate and fear they have in their heart. I served 8 years in the military and my experience there and in life has proven to me that every walk if life has the goid and the bad. I didn’t train and fight to kill Muslims. I trained and fought to protect real people just trying to survive another day. It just happened to be in a land where people claiming the Islamic faith were/are doing horrible things to good people. Good Muslim people. I hope the ignorant can go about their lives and leave you and your family in peace.