Tag: Arab-Americans

He Didn’t Want to Lie in a Grave That Couldn’t Be Visited

Syria became a graveyard, where an aspirational vision of who we are and what we will tolerate now lies. We won’t be immune to the consequences of our failures.

Graves of people killed during the Syrian war, in the town of Qamishli in northeastern Syria.Credit…Baderkhan Ahmad/Associated Press

When my father died last April in Baltimore, he had finally given up the desire to be buried next to his parents in a cemetery in Damascus, Syria. That he had time to ponder where to be buried was the burden of knowing for several years that he was dying. It was also the luxury, especially for a Syrian, of still having some choice in the matter.

It is vulgar to even mention just one Syrian’s death and unfulfilled desires, when dying has become the Syrian way of life and unfulfilled desires have become life’s promise to Syrians. None have been shielded. Even the victors have lost. [full story]

The FBI’s ‘Vulgar Betrayal’ of Muslim Americans

APRIL 21, 2018

In 2001, when Assia Boundaoui was sixteen years old, she woke up in the middle of the night, roused by lights shining outside her bedroom window. She looked out to find two men aloft fiddling with the wiring of the recently installed street lamps.

She ran to her mother’s room, afraid, telling her they should call the police. Her widowed mother tried to calm her down. “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “It’s probably just the FBI. Go back to sleep.”

By that year, the FBI had become such a ubiquitous presence in the small town of Bridgeview, Illinois—home to some 200 Muslim Arab-American families—that the residents attributed many extraordinary and unexplained occurrences to what the community suspected was the government’s surveillance of their every move. There were the unknown cars that sat for hours outside their houses; men who didn’t appear to be in need going through their trash cans; and odd clicking sounds and static on the line when residents spoke on the phone. [full story]

For Syrian-Americans, the Travel Ban Feels Alarmingly Familiar

FEB 5, 2017

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a panicked message from my friend Kinan Azmeh, in Beirut. He wanted to know, “Do you think I can no longer go back to America?”

A virtuoso on the clarinet and a brilliant composer, Kinan was fresh from a concert in Germany where he had débuted his latest work with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, with whom he tours as a member of the Silk Road ensemble.  [full story]

Of Mustaches and Megalomaniacs

AUG 28, 2011

In the autumn of 1990, my father, who had been clean-shaven all his life, decided to experiment; he grew a moustache.

Nobody cool in America had a moustache in those days. Magnum PI, which starred Tom Selleck and his moustache, had already been off the air for a few years. Even worse, Saddam Hussein had a moustache. And more than anyone else in suburban Baltimore, where I was stuck in my junior year of high school, my father – with his moustache – looked a lot like Saddam Hussein.  [full story]

Ground Zero mosque as wedge issue: Muslims vs. ‘real’ Americans

AUG 17, 2010

NEW YORK — Like today’s other hot-button issues including gay marriage and illegal immigration, at the heart of the uproar over Cordoba House, the proposed Muslim community center located in lower Manhattan, is generally a struggle to define what makes an American truly, authentically American. And specifically underlying the Cordoba controversy, the fear of the radicalization of Muslim-American youth, and the growing Islamophobia spreading through the US (a Florida church is hosting “International Burn a Koran Day” on Sept. 11) is a suspicion that a Muslim cannot be a real American.  [full story]

American Jihadis: Blame violence-prone boys, not Islam

APRIL 2, 2010

NEW YORK — The recent arrest in Yemen of Somali-American Sharif Mobley, accused of being a member of an Al Qaeda affiliated group, raises the question: Why are young American men abandoning this country’s promise and opportunities to pursue jihad in foreign countries with groups rooted in anti-Americanism?

From concerned citizens to journalists to think tank panels to Capitol Hill, everyone seems to think that the key to understanding “why” these men have turned against America lies in the pathology of Islam. But they’re missing something big.  [full story]

For Muslim New Yorkers, Final Rites That Fit

JAN 8, 2006

ERHAN YILDIRIM is singing in Arabic. His voice barely rises above the sound of the water that falls onto ceramic tiles after it spills over the lifeless body in front of him.

In mournful tones, Mr. Yildirim celebrates God — “He is great, and there is no God but God” — as he prepares yet another immigrant for a proper Muslim burial, one that will bring the man closer to his homeland than he has been in years.

On this late November day, Mr. Yildirim, who is trained to be an imam, then performs the man’s last ablution. It is the same ritual that every Muslim performs in life before prayer: washing the feet, hands and face. Mr. Yildirim then washes the entire body with olive oil soap before fetching a pure cotton shroud and wrapping it around the naked body like a cocoon.[full story]