Ever since 9/11, Arabs and Muslims in America have felt themselves demoted into “a new but lowly domestic racial category,” Moustafa Bayoumi writes in “How Does It Feel to Be Problem?”
“We’re the new abeed,” the author quotes one young man saying.
That translates to the N-word, Millersville University freshmen are learning.
Bayoumi’s American Book Award-winning portrait of seven young Arabs in America is the One Book/One Campus selection, aimed at provoking student discussion of the issue during freshman orientation and beyond.
“We chose this book particularly to assist our majority white, Christian campus in appreciating the experience of Arab Americans who often have difficulty feeling accepted in communities like ours,” says Dr. Caleb Corkery, associate professor and assistant chairman in the MU English department and member of the One Book, One Campus Committee.
Bayoumi’s book title is a question black leader W.E.B. Du Bois posed a century ago to his people in his own book, “The Souls of Black Folk.”
The Brooklyn College English professor explained he doesn’t mean to equate anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment with centuries of African-American slavery but he is drawing a parallel.
“Almost every struggle for equality uses the civil rights struggle as a paradigm,” Bayoumi said in a telephone interview last week. (Campaigns on behalf of gay people and unborn babies have employed it.)
• Bayoumi’s book was published in 2008. Since then, “unfortunately, I think things have gotten worse. There’s more popular hostility toward Muslims,” he said, citing the “hysteria” over the Ground Zero mosque, state legislatures’ attempts to ban Sharia law, and NYPD and CIA spying on the community.
He sees “a clash of civilizations taking hold” and pointed out that a lot of the recent abridgments of mainstream Americans’ freedom and privacy, including the current administration’s wiretapping, were “tried out first on Muslims.” Republican Sen. Rand Paul might have had a point in filibustering against future use of drones on American soil, since they’re now killing in Arab-Muslim lands, he said.
“Every single Muslim can feel the pain, regardless of whether they have gone through the same experience or not,” said Yasir A. Mohamed, an Indian graduate student in psychology who is involved MU’s Muslim Student Association and in the One Book, One Campus campaign.
Though he hasn’t been subjected to public humiliation, detention or torture, “when I got into the country, they wanted to take some ‘extra time’ to do background checks on me to make sure that I wasn’t a terrorist,” he notes.
• Bayoumi will discuss recent Arab and Muslim experiences -- which range from employment discrimination to unwarranted arrest and imprisonment -- when he visits campus Sept. 12. He and “Yasmin,” one of the young Brooklynites featured in his book, will spend the day in classrooms and then present a free, public lecture and question-and-answer session at 7 p.m. in the Lehr Room, Gordinier Hall.
Readers will recognize Yasmin as the student government secretary at a public high school who was forced to to resign her position because her Muslim faith prohibited her from attending school dances. Yasmin launched a legal challenge that resulted in accommodation for her religious beliefs. Today she is a lawyer clerking for a federal judge in New York City, Bayoumi notes.
Not only Yasmin, but all the young people in the book -- whether born in Syria, Kuwait, Jordan or New York -- come across as sincere in their struggle to reconcile their cultural background and religious beliefs with this country’s suspicion of them. Many now embrace the faith that their elders neglected or downplayed to fit in. Bayoumi sees this as their effort to define themselves positively, countering the negative definition imposed by a hostile society.
He also makes clear Arab-Americans’ treatment is not unique in this multicultural society, mentioning governmental and societal actions against Japanese-Americans in World War II, German-Americans in World War I, etc.
MU’s Corkery notes that to enhance understanding of the issues, the university has reached out to its campus Muslim and Middle Eastern student associations, a local mosque and local veterans who served in Arabic and Muslim countries.
