Moustafa BayoumiRezensionen

OK. Very New York centric. Could have done a better job providing some basic historical context.

This book was upsetting to me. I understand that in the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks and the continual assaults by people of the faith that Muslim peoples were demonized and marginalized. When it comes right down to it I suppose people are afraid, but it is a shameful thing to have in your history. I am proud to be an American citizen, but when I see all these horrible ignorant things that people do to other people, it really makes me upset. It should not happen in a country like the United States, but even I am guilty of racial bias sometimes.

All-American

This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror by Moustafa Bayoumi (NYU Press, $19.95).

Moustafa Bayoumi is an English professor, actor and essayist, and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror collects essays that have been published over the last several years. The essays focus on what Bayoumi calls the “War on Terror culture,” which has actually worsened since the election of President Obama, thanks to the persistent conspiracy theory that he’s a secret Muslim out to institute sharia law.

Those of us who are close to–or are–Muslim Americans know how very difficult it has become to navigate life in the U.S., where every Muslim, no matter how secular, is expected to denounce every act of terrorism everywhere in the world and, even if this is done religiously, remains suspect in some corners. What Bayoumi does is make this near-universal experience visible for those of who might not otherwise see it in action; if we lack a diverse group, it’s quite easy to miss the reality of Islamophobia as it plays out both in our institutions and in our communities.

Bayoumi examines at the tactics used by the NYPD in Arab Muslim communities (and you can bet that these are similar to tactics used elsewhere); the ways that Islamophobia manifests both similarly and differently to “typical: American racism; and the history of Little Syria, an Arab American neighborhood in lower Manhattan that flourished from the 1880s to the 1940s—and that overlapped with the footprint of the World Trade Center.

This last section is particularly fascinating, as most Americans don’t know how integral Muslim Americans have been to building the United States, nor how deeply rooted these communities are; the story of “Little Syria” is a wonderful example of hidden American history.

(Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com)

This is the common reading for incoming students at my university for the Fall of 2013. The author writes biographical profiles of about half a dozen Arab-Americans who live in Brooklyn, New York and how their lives changed in the wake of 9/11. The young people who served in the military had especially interesting profiles, I thought. This book shows how pervasive racism is in the U.S.½

Excellent collection of portraits of young Arab-Americans who are subjected to discrimination and idiginities because of their religious beliefs. The perseverence of these young people is inspiring. This book resonates all the more now with the virulent Islamophobia that is pervasive all over the country these days. Bayoumi approaches his subject as W.E.B DuBois did in The Souls of Black Folk.

This is a moving collection of the challenges and opportunities experienced by the Arab youth in America. Whether immigrants or US born, they face unique situations as youth in the US.

To start off I feel I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, that this is most definitely a laymen's perspective. I have never studied race relations or sociology in any sort of academic setting, nor have I read a lot of books on the subject. I just heard about this book on the radio, thought it sounded interesting, and ordered it from the library.

The book is a compilation of seven portraits of young Arab-Americans or Muslim Americans living in Brooklyn. I feel like the author did a good job gathering a variety of perspectives in spite of the limited geographic location. One person is angry and can't wait to leave America behind for the hope of a better life in Dubai. Another feels that every ethnic group suffers a certain period of persecution in America, and this is just their turn. The levels of trouble vary as well, from a young woman's stint in jail due to an overstayed visa, to a man's difficulty in finding a job with 'Al Jazeera' on his resume, to another woman's difficulty in reconciling her Iraqi heritage and American upbringing. My favorite portrait in the book was that of Yasmin, a high school girl who was forced to step down from her post as secretary of the student body because her religion did not permit her to attend school dances. Her determination in addressing the unfairness of the situation was admirable, and made for a wonderful story (and one of the more hopeful anecdotes).

My only real complaint is that I felt the author's prose got a bit self-indulgent at times. My personal laugh-out-loud favorite was, "The soldier walked into the TV room and slipped the disk into the DVD player, which disappeared like a Communion wafer into the machine's mouth" (73). Is he really trying to suggest that Michael Moore's 9/11 movie (the DVD in question) was, to these soldiers in Iraq, akin to a Catholic becoming one with God? Because that's not only strange, but doesn't even match the attitude of the soldiers that he describes towards the movie, which was ambivalent overall. Even those who felt the movie was correct were hardly reverent. If the author could have cut down on the silly metaphors, I think it would have been a better book.