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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-05-19
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05ZwgjQjnI0
allow me to take you back to a couple of months ago I met the women's March in San Francisco with a neighbor and a dear friend I trust her with my four year old daughter she trusts me with her children she is my rock one minute were chanting for women's rights the next were shouting for trans rights we're in a sea of umbrellas and people some
carrying that iconic image of a hitch IV wrapped in an American flag some chanting slogans against Islamophobia my friend looks at me and says you know I have to deal with that stuff right why so not Muslim I've had this conversation before people I work with are people who have known me for years separate me the soccer they know from the idea of Muslim button their
imagination way the Muslim me there are one point seven billion Muslims worldwide we look different practice different we identify with being Muslim differently somehow we all get packed into the same Muslim box this box is so well constructed in our collective imaginations their own people like me don't fit into we get the Muslims I am not alone in this it even happened to the best selling
poets in America what images come to your mind when you think of who me poet of love peace left when you love the room he was my age he was an orthodox Muslim preacher and squalor Islam the Koran the prophet Mohammed states central to his poetry till the day he died but roomies religion has been erased from western imagination and most popular translations of his poetry
unraced history is a big part of the story of the one point seven billion Muslims another is the reductive imagery of Muslims that have colonized western books for centuries this seductive imagery is defined by the dark menu should fear and the exotic women you need to save the path breaking Palestinian American scholar adverts aid first deconstructed this imagery in the nineteen seventies but it stands tall
today our politicians my news industry and Hollywood all continue to build on it take the nineteen ninety eight film the siege as an example hit it Arab American men are actually a rounded up in an internment camp in new York's Yankee Stadium Paris Denzel Washington at the top with the bad dangerous Muslims and Darius below with a good patriotic Muslim FBI agents this film was released
three years for the tragic events of nine eleven I've worked in the news industry for thirteen years and I see in this kind of reductive powerful narrative dominate our news feeds this narrative overshadows the fact that nine Muslim women have let their country in the last three decades while the US couldn't even elect its first real female presidential candidate in two thousand sixty this narrative fails
to recognize that French Muslim women I can't wear their his job and public buildings and saw the Muslim women forced to cover their bodies by their government are two sides of the same coin it's one powerful group controlling the other this narrative diminishes Muslim leaders heating movements of change it ignores the fact that the first Muslim prayer said on American soil were said by Africans brought
here on sleeve shirts it erases the existence square must this narrative has captured our collective imaginations so deeply and so inaccurately Sikh men and children are often the target of anti Muslim attacks and violence because the stories we tell and the way we tell them Islamophobia today is poor than fear of Islam the religion it is fear of the author in the news industry we tell
more than stories based on facts or alternative facts we also build narratives that help you make sense of the world and my industry has epic we failed capturing the narrative of the one point seven billion mostly and we fill them here in the U. S. were seven million Muslims make up the most diverse religious group in America one in three Muslim Americans are African American and
six out of ten Muslim Americans are first generation immigrants who come from seventy seven different kind four decades ago my immigrant parents arrived in New York to live their American dream my mother placed her first Julie designs on Fifth Avenue and my father worked hard in the skyscrapers of New York skyscrapers made possible by a bungalow they she American Muslim structural engineer named followed among con
back when Khan was re imagining the skylines of the world my parents refund apologetically Muslim and American but I'm I unapologetically Muslim in America now sometimes when people ask me why I don't eat pork instead of taking out my Muslim receipts or my pocket Koran that almost with Kerry I say out of respect for Papa pick I was joking we don't all carry pocket kron's we
don't have to be Islamic theology experts to be Muslim or to almost always get selected for random security checks at the airport there are hundreds of Islamic scholars Muslim activists and interfaith activists who are combating pervasive lies about Islam these lights are turned out by a well oiled Islamophobia machine with dozens of financial backers think tanks and misinformation experts who selected and easily manipulated are already
flawed image of what Muslims are of what the slum it's because of the stories we tell and the way we tell that Islamophobia is more than someone snatching a handjob for women or this horrifying map of attacks on mosques across the U. S. Islamophobia in its ugliest form attacks our sense of belonging which is so vast and varied an intersectional that it cannot possibly fit have
box let me explain I was born Muslim but being Muslim was born in my imagination when I was four years old in a makeshift mosque in the basement of a Presbyterian church in New York when social scientists describe religious life there for dinner three beats police behavior and belonging my Muslim belief may not always be visible but it's there perhaps my neighbor my rock my friend
would see that I'm a slim if she could see through the fifty feet of concrete in air that separate our homes she see the nighttime ritual with my daughter cradled in the crook of my arm me whispering the Arabic protection versus that sealed the Koran repeating the clothes three times each asking for her to be protected from the evil that can be seen and the evil
that cannot be my Muslim belief may not always be visible but my belonging is always in my shadow the longing is this image of my grandmother standing with her sisters half a century ago in Karachi Pakistan it is the image of her that I see right now when I close my eyes Nono surrounded by your finished and unfinished canvases of Sufi saints and a heavily bookmark
on a book with a hundred and fourteen chapters that she knows practically by heart being the same as saying the prayers she tells me to say when I'm having a bad day being Muslims however referred to god Ella mia god my master for people colonize for centuries by it empire the started as a corporation called the honorable British East India Company calling guarded my only master
has deep meaning belonging is growing up hearing men don't cry seeing my refugee grandfather cry in between writing books on modernise lan and Kashmiri independence not a John cried unapologetically for his family in Indian Kashmir family and sisters he couldn't embrace for the last fifty years of his life belonging is knowing that there are millions of Kurds and Palestinians like my grandfather whose families were torn
apart by colonialists who divided the Muslim world like a game of risk being Muslim is knowing in the last two centuries all but four Muslim countries colonized by your being Muslim is knowing that the first aerial bomb in the history of mankind was dropped on a Muslim country a century ago it is knowing that around the same time my grandmother's grandfather distinguished lawyer and a British
Christmas an Indian Kashmiri British imperial subject it's called dangerous by the newspapers of the time for running the first mosque in England the four airplanes existed he travel to more places in the world that I can imagine preaching the radical word of love peace and social justice the word of Islam belonging to my tribe of one point seven billion runs deep into our unforgettable bloodlines on
acknowledged it is knowing that fourteen years ago the most powerful military in the world where troops currently spread on every continent except Antarctica when interop chasing weapons of mass destruction that did not exist it's knowing that now more than half a million Iraqis lie beneath rubble hatha or it is knowing that the rate of suicide amongst US veterans has jumped thirty two percent two thousand and
one being Muslim American is knowing that fourteen hundred years ago the first call to prayer the azan was said by a freed black slave name Bilal being American Muslim is knowing the two hundred years ago an African Americans and Africans Islamic scholar named the lolly Mohammed was brought to this land and made a slave being American Muslim is calling Malcolm X. an American hero it is
the warmth I felt when people over when the airports to fight the Muslim then it's the hope I feel when we stand up for our dreamers it's the hope I feel when we say black lives matter being American Muslim is knowing the inherent inter sexuality of a multi hyphenated identities failing to communicate to you the Muslim narrative of one point seven billion has more possibilities than
a Rubik's cube but we are portrayed and reductive binaries US verses than good versus bad being a mother is the worry I carry from my child and almost from children knowing that powerful privileged people bill structural Islamophobia on these binaries structural Islamophobia are the Muslim registries that began with President Bush it continued under president Obama it is pervasive Moscow valence it is a country closing its
borders to people it's bombing it's an immigration officer handcuffing a five year old child it's the wars we wage and the bombs we dropped a Muslim country because of the stories we tell the stories we don't tell here we are today in a study called a centerman researchers at Northwestern University showed the scientifically incorrect image to participants and ask them to rate groups on a scale
of one to hundred in terms of evolution Muslims scored the lowest we are too deep into de humanizing Muslims we are decades behind recognizing the danger strokes we perpetuate in our news from it's a big Downer isn't well there is a growing movement led by American Muslims in the media industry that gives me hope this movement aims to capture the complexity of our multi hyphenate identity
and are forgotten his the good Muslim battle some podcast the palace square about black Muslim life and miss Marvel the Pakistani American superhero all give me hope but I am deeply worried about this global moment we are in and this moment has consequences beyond the one point seven billion there's a reason conspiracy theorists that existed on the dark corners of the internet now the room rule
the White House there rose exponentially because the other Muslim there's another group that rose exponentially the last few years by other making and other out of all of us didn't exist five years ago and now they rule large parts of Iraq Syria I'm worried about the realities in the histories but I was unaware of when I was my daughter's age but maybe unapologetically Muslim today things
I left bread crumbs for throughout this talk things I might have resonated with you too because in all the intersections that makeup our humanity there might lurk a story of being authored right now across the bridge in Berkeley the eighth annual Islamophobia conferences have over there more than a hundred academics are getting together and talking about her palms with the other but talking about structural racism
at American militarism all of us need to ask ourselves why aren't we having this conversation why am I giving you this talk tech Stanford in two thousand seventeen when the man who introduced us the concept that wars are waged by dehumanizing the other was a scholar here decades ago all of us need to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions like my friend and I did in the rain
about how we consciously or unconsciously perpetuate the other because the work of reimagining and your future we don't have an American president eating chocolate cake while bombing broken countries and other people goes well beyond the visible and invisible one point seven billion it starts here with all of us
