How 9/11 Shaped Who I Am Today
The events of that September morning have been the shadow over my entire adult life. As a teenager growing up in NYC in the aftermath of 9/11, I, like many millennial Muslim-Americans, struggled with the sudden change in the way I was perceived. A dirty look at the grocery store served as a reminder that I was now seen as violent, untrustworthy, and unwanted. At the same time, like every other American we were processing what the attacks actually meant for our nation. Our home was attacked, then we were told it was never our home in the first place.
I’m 36 now. I’ve spent more than half of my life in the post-9/11 world. How did it change me and other Muslim Americans like me that grew up in the shadow of this event? The societal scrutiny, both secular and religious, in the aftermath of 9/11 created a fraught minefield in which to grow up. Every choice I made was a critical data point in how society accessed me and my threat level. Growing up under a microscope has to have an effect on us. Can we draw a direct line from that day to who I am today? I think so.
In 2015, fourteen years after 9/11, I was waiting for a bus in Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. I was on my way to visit my family in a suburb outside of the city. I had missed the previous bus by moments so I was in for a wait. After some time, I left the platform to go down to the terminal to use the restroom. When I returned to the platform I was greeted by a small squad of police officers and two police dogs. I knew immediately that they were there for me.
You see, what had happened was, a woman had placed her travel bag on the ground to hold her spot while she sat on a bench 15 or so feet away. I happened to be about 5 feet away from that bag. So when I took my innocent trip down into the bowels of the Port Authority a middle-aged white man had called 911 to report an unattended bag which he had assumed was mine. I think we can all agree that my being a Pakistani-American man, in my 30s, with a full beard, had a lot to do with how that situation was addressed. Perhaps, you are saying, “I would have done the same thing.” Perhaps I would have too. But can we all agree that there were some assumptions made here?
The matter was resolved fairly quickly after that. The police officers asked me if the bag was mine and I told them it was not. To her credit, the owner of the bag immediately came forward and said it was her bag. I remember being surprised that the police did not tell the woman not to leave her bags unattended. Instead, they asked to search my bag. They asked me where I was going. They asked to see my ticket.
After the police left the middle-aged white man walked over to me and said “well, you can’t be too safe.” I bit my tongue. I could have said, “Why didn’t you ask if that was someone’s bag before you called 911?!” I didn’t ask because I was too in my head. I’m also, contrary to the general view of brown men, extremely averse to conflict. I had experienced extra screenings or snide comments but nothing like this before. It became clear to me that as far as that man was concerned I had a dark and dangerous superpower. My mere presence near a bag made it a dangerous weapon.
I stood there quietly, and we both got on the same bus. Later that day I would tell my White-American girlfriend (now wife) of the events that happened that day. She would react in horror. She would apologize for what happened to me. Even still I couldn’t really express how that interaction felt like a confirmation from the otherness I had been running from my whole life.
I was 16 years old when the events of 9/11 happened. I was in my English class when our teacher ran in and said that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. I remember thinking it must have been a small plane, like a Cessna. A tragic accident. By the next period, it was evident that I had been wrong. A group of us gathered around a TV in the school library. As it became clear that the attacks had been committed by brown Muslims I remember feeling very conscious of the looks that came in my direction.
In the days after, every class seemed to be a debrief into the events that took place that day. Mathematics of Extremism. Science of Jihad. I found myself being called on by teachers I had only known for a few weeks to explain. “Why do Muslims hate (insert one or more of the following: America, Jews, Women, Freedom)?” I, a 16-year-old, found myself the woefully underprepared spokesperson for nearly 1.3 billion people, who all came from different sects, cultures, and races, tasked with trying to scratch out a measure of understanding and nuance from my recently traumatized classmates and teachers. I’m sure I failed at that task.
In the months and years after, my family feared reprisals from the very government that they were citizens of. While talking heads on CNN and FoxNews debated whether we should be rounded up, deported, or made to register we searched for anything that could spare us. There were American flag bumper stickers and decals in the windows of every Muslim we knew, as if to say, “Hey I’m one of the good ones.” It didn’t do anything. In times of fear, we all cling to whatever we think might help us. We took a sudden interest in outward displays of patriotism all the while harboring a paranoia that we were being watched. We would say phrases that danced around the topic of government monitoring that always seemed to trail off without actually saying what we were all thinking.
“Hey, that white van has been across the street for a few days now.”
“I could have sworn I locked the door. It’s weird, if someone broke in, why was nothing taken?”
“I thought I heard someone else on the line while I was on the phone!”
It was clear to us that we were always being assessed for our level of threat and put on a scale that never seemed to have a value of 0. Even if you weren’t a threat today, you could be one tomorrow. In the Muslim-American community, paranoia became a reality we all lived with. We had a desire to hide and wait out the storm but we had to continue living our lives. We went to school. Our parents went to work. They were, in many cases, “essential workers” as we would know them now. We would hear stories of patients asking for different doctors. Cab drivers attacked for wearing turbans (many of whom were actually Sikhs and not Muslims). Women’s hijabs were torn off, the perpetrators convinced that this act would liberate these oppressed women. It was in this climate that it became taboo to be Muslim or Arab. Remember in 2008 when then Presidential-Candidate John McCain had to defend Barack Obama when a lady in the audience called him “an Arab?” To that lady, that was enough to convince her that Obama was a danger. While McCain did respond “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with.” That response still assumed some correctness in her assessment that if Obama HAD been an Arab he was a danger. What would America have become if John McCain had responded with “So what if he’s Arab? Arabs are Americans too.”
The media we used as entertainment also reinforced what people already believed about us. Post-9/11 Thrillers like Sleeper Cell, Homeland, and even the more recent Bodyguard all featured Muslim extremism as major plot points. Brown Muslims had joined the ranks of the Nazi Germans and Communist Russians as Hall of Fame Hollywood badies. That was despite the fact that in the years after 9/11 the growing risk of danger was increasingly coming from the right-wing and white extremists. Through pop culture, America was told that the face of what you fear was a 20 to 30-year-old Brown Man, with a beard, who was probably trying to seem normal and blend in. Also known as: Me.
With all this going on, I was conditioned to basically avoid the topic of 9/11 or even Islam, especially around non-Muslims. A socio-political Voldemort. I knew that when I met new people I had to prove to them that I wasn’t a threat. Perhaps, this is why I found myself gravitating toward “white-people” things. If I was into Punk music there was no way I was a terrorist, right? Other Muslim-Americans found solace in staying within their communities. To those people, I became too “whitewashed.” I was called things like Coconut (Brown on the Outside, White on the Inside) or ABCD (American Born Confused Desi). The latter particularly bothered me because I wasn’t born in America. I also wasn’t confused. I was trying to survive in a country that wanted to put me in a box and label me.
In my early 20s, I went to visit my family in Pakistan. To them, I was an American and culturally I didn’t quite fit in. Everything from my hair, to my voice, to my clothes gave away that I was different. In Pakistan, I truly FELT American. That feeling lasted throughout the plane ride back to NY and came to an abrupt end when I reached Customs. Nothing expressly happened but fear of possible rejection or additional scrutiny often permeates our interactions with law enforcement. I recall a wave of familiar anxiety coming back to be me as I spoke to the Customs Agent. Where was I welcome? I was too American for Pakistan and too Pakistani for America. I know that this is a feeling that many American Muslims, and immigrants in general, have felt.
For many Millenial Muslim Americans there was a pretty binary choice laid out for us: do I lean into my faith and possibly risk being alienated from American society or do I westernize myself so that I can fit in but potentially lose a part of my heritage, faith, and culture. There was very little nuance that allowed you to be somewhere in the middle of that binary. We understand that people can be culturally Christian and not go to church every Sunday. We have never had that subtly with Muslims in this nation.
Things may be changing though. Unlike in 2001, we now have A-List celebrities from the larger Muslim diaspora. Mahershala Ali, Bella Hadid, Zayn Malik, DJ Khaled, Kumail Nanjiani, and Riz Ahmed to name a few. There is a chance that your grandmother knows who some of these people are. Can you imagine how different it would have been if 9/11 happened in a Western world that had the faces of positive Muslim figures that could represent their cultures and faiths?
Ironically, I have felt more connected to my cultural heritage since I married my wife. In the early days, we learned to navigate combining two culturally different families by trying to engage with those differences head-on. In explaining holidays and traditions to someone who wasn’t exposed to those things, I’ve finally taken up that spokesperson role that was forced upon me in high school, albeit in a small way. Our engagement with these challenges has reinforced the notion that inclusion is possible. It just takes dialogue and a willingness to love your fellow American. With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 perhaps we can all engage with that as a society. We weren’t in a place as a nation to engage with it in the days after 9/11 or even after the 10th anniversary. Today we are.