We Americans see each other as women and men of many faiths and cultures. But do we recognize and know each other?
When I came to Arkansas in 1994 from the East Coast, I wondered what assumptions about “women in Islam” I’d have to face as a woman of Syrian origin. How could people in this Southern state understand what it is to live under the shadow of a tiresome stereotype?
Before long, an Arkansan woman briskly dislodged my own prejudices. She said, “So you feel misunderstood as a woman from a region perceived as backward? From a culture stereotyped as demeaning to women? Your Middle East sounds a lot like the South. So you seek balance between celebrating who you are in a community and affirming what you can become as a woman, as a human being? You don’t have to explain that to me. I’m a Southern woman.”
Her remark jolted me. I saw myself in her.
On my first road trip across the deep South, all I could think about was the film “Deliverance.” I drove nervously through towns such as Gould, “Pop. 513, home of the Turtle Derby.” I recalled my childhood in Indiana, where the Ku Klux Klan had harassed my family. I worried that my headscarf would target me for an Islamophobic hostility the local police might share.
The Arkansan woman’s remark made me recognize those I had been regarding with fear. How blind is fear, hurrying joylessly past and missing the handlettered signs: Pecans–We buy & sell,” “Grace Free Will Baptist Church,” “M.C. Jones & Mother, Rabbit Ear Crafts.” How abundant is the path of recognition.
Our opulent bazaar of cultures reminds me of Jahiz, the greatest figure of classical Arabic literature when Baghdad was the cosmopolitan capital of the world. He wrote urbanely of the beauties of his society, which included black Africans, golden Greeks, red Persians, the faithful and the skeptical, men and women of many talents. He rejoiced that God “created you from a male and a female and made you into nations and tribes that you may know one another” (Quran 49:13).
If only we Muslims remembered more of that part of our legacy to the world. I sometimes hear from Muslims who fear that we will lose our “identity” in this land. Isn’t it the same fear that makes Americans hostile to their Muslim countrymen? We all fear that the stranger threatens our safety, culture, identity. Fear that masculine and feminine identity will dissolve keeps hurtful barriers between men and women of all backgrounds. Fear keeps us huddled in emotional isolation. It diminishes our capacities to love, to mourn, to rejoice.
I wanted to mourn during the unfolding of the Oklahoma City bombing. When I saw the children, I thought about my daughters in their preschools and felt an anguish shared by millions. But some headlines focused on “persons of Middle Eastern descent.” Suddenly my energy was deflected to defending against the bitterness we attracted as scapegoats. Instead of weeping for the victims that day, I could only whisper: “Let it not be an Arab or a Muslim who did this.” I couldn’t cry because the raw accusation in people’s eyes bored into the back of my shoulders.
Banished by this angry stare from the communal mourning, I carried a knot of unwept tears. I feel the same isolation whenever such sadness afflicts other parts of the world to which I feel connected. When the 114 were massacred in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996, when the latest reports come from Algeria, we immigrants circle in bewilderment with our wounds. Who will mourn with us? Who has the capacity to recognize those killed as people like us? The capacity to recognize people on the other side of the world is the immigrant’s gift.
When Salam died, I finally cried for all the victims of Oklahoma City. Salam was the fetus of an Iraqi-American woman mobbed by America’s fury. Teenagers hounded the 7-month’s pregnant woman, easily targeted because of her dress, and pelted her Oklahoma home with rocks. She miscarried. Following Muslim custom, the parents gave the stillborn a name, Salam, Arabic for “peace.” Muslims and other Americans wept together at the funeral of the miscarried child. It was so tiny, this footnote to a massacre. Tiny enough to break my dammed-up grief.
I imagine this immigrant woman like my mother who came to this country 30 years ago, feeling as if she had been dropped from the talons of a huge bird into alien terrain. The teens targeted the Oklahoma woman because of her dress. The irony is that women who “cover” have greater visibility than men in our mosque communities. This high profile increases our opportunities to be heard but also heightens our vulnerability as women in a place that continues to regard us as outsiders. I imagine I want to write about joy, yet keep returning to the bitter, the murrah, a word shared by Arabic and Hebrew. By tasting horseradish at the Passover seder, Jews remember bitter experiences. Yet bitter taste develops our palate for joy. There is a risk-free multiculturalism that won’t admit the bitter, the real angers and fears that emerge from our historical encounters.
Recognition is risky. It can cost us friends who think we’ve gone too far. What if we would be gaining something more fully human, even approaching the divine reality, in knowing one another? We might gain more than Turtle Derbys. Maybe pecans, grace, a tender name for peace. Maybe an increased capacity for joy, developed through pain.
