Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA via AP
Protesters demonstrate against President Trump’s “Muslim ban” at Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon, January 29, 2017.
I became a “Muslim” on September 11, 2001.
Until that date, I was devoutly irreligious at least twice over. Growing up in Iran, my family had little to do with mosques and prayer. There were lots of Iranians like us, as I remember—and not because we were “Westernized” or modern. We were part of a long and perfectly respectable tradition of being irreligious. When we immigrated to Memphis, Tennessee, I became even more mistrusting of faith again as missionaries and good-hearted Christians rang our doorbell to invite us to their faith.
Despite all my attempts to live a religion-free life, 9/11 taught me that this is not easy. The violent acts of a few Saudi nationals had absolutely nothing to do with me. The U.S. government disagreed: After 9/11, Islam became a race, and I became a “Muslim,” whether I liked it or not.
All people from Muslim countries became targeted as especially dangerous and worthy of surveillance, monitoring, and harassment. I was put on a no-fly list. Federal agents “visited” me twice at home. The second time they came, they also talked to my neighbors and the super of my building about my “ethnicity.” No matter our piety or depth of religious belief, Iranians, Arabs, South Asians, and North Africans became a community overnight. What defined us as “Muslims” wasn’t whether or how we prayed. What defined us was a system of racial profiling.
All of this was legal even if it was never legitimate.
After 9/11, Islam became a race, and I became a “Muslim,” whether I liked it or not.
There were many layers of irony to this racialization of a religion. My Iranian Jewish friends helped me make sense of what was happening. I learned from them that being from the Muslim world had long entailed a beleaguered identity, at least within the wider American Jewish community, which is dominated by Ashkenazim (or Jews from Europe). Iranian Jews had been racially marked, marginalized, and segregated by the mainstream American Jewish community. They told me stories about their arrival in the U.S. in the late 1970s, like: “We were told we could pray in the basement of the synagogue. It was winter and the basement wasn’t heated.” Iranian Jews, in other words, were treated from the get-go as “people of color” by their European co-religionists.
While throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Iranian Jews were living as ethnicized others among other Jews, we nonreligious “Muslim” Iranians were passing as white, hustling to assimilate into the American melting pot. Or at least we thought we were. But on 9/11, the lines of American whiteness became suddenly clear. Abruptly, we discovered that we weren’t white after all.
The historical context makes it even more ironic. Remember: It was in 2001 that George W. Bush declared that racial profiling is “wrong and we will end it in America.” A few years later when the Department of Justice issued new guidelines for Bush’s promise, called “Regarding the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies,” they made one exception, which turned out to be crucial to my life:
The above standards do not affect current Federal policy with respect to law enforcement activities and other efforts to defend and safeguard against threats to national security or the integrity of the Nation’s borders.
In other words, the top law agency in the country reserved the right to profile people in the name of national security and the “war on terror.” This was the legal mechanism for how people like me became “Muslim,” and how that term abruptly stopped referring to voluntary religious affiliation, and became, instead, one of fixed racial identity.
In responding to the atrocious attacks of 9/11 in terms of civilizational war rather than as a crime, this country made a fateful decision. The U.S. didn’t merely pursue those individuals responsible for the attacks; it decided to wreak vengeance on the entire civilization that they purportedly came from. To this day, my atheist mother still cannot fathom how the Saudi perpetrators of the terror attacks would result in the targeting of her son.
Those individuals who carried out 9/11 hailed from one tiny faction of Sunni Islam birthed by the CIA during a Cold War anti-communist campaign. In its response, the U.S. came to see all Muslims as essentially the same. Abroad, U.S. forces attacked “terror threats” from Africa to Southeast Asia. At home, it directed law departments to search out supposed fifth columns of Muslim sleeper agents and potential terrorists.
In the years since, I have come to see my predicament as part of a longer history that begins with colonial settlers and slaveholders using race to justify—to themselves and no one else—their superiority and moral right to extract, rule, and use violence as a tool of governance. The way racial identity is foisted upon a civilizational one is a peculiar phenomenon of whiteness that is now being applied to Muslims. America, as a society that started off through wars to destroy Native peoples and their civilization by marking them as racially inferior, was now targeting Muslims. It was startling to discover that I would be shoehorned into this horrendous history on account of a religion I have never believed in, nor ever observed.
By turning the events of 9/11 into a racial and civilizational struggle, America picked a fight that it could not win.
The U.S. reaction unleashed a chain of events that domestic American audiences have often cheered. I watched as Americans cheered their victories, from the toppling of Saddam to the killing of Osama bin Laden. The experience was bewildering: Do Americans really not understand the destruction they’ve wrought? Do they not grasp that each instance of torture and collateral damage has the potential to set something new and violent in motion? As the victory of the Taliban suggests, the real winners have been the most reactionary sections of the Middle East. The mullahs were not popular figures before the U.S. invaded, but now they are seen by many as the heroes who drove out the occupation army and saved the land from foreign oppression.
Growing up in a staunchly anti-religious family in Iran, I thought of mainstream Islam through the comic stories of the trickster figure Mullah Nasreddin. This figure belongs to the folklore of the entire Middle East: In the Arab world, they call him Juha; in Turkey, Hoja. For us, Mullah Nasreddin personifies the idiocy of the clerical establishment. A petty huckster and charlatan, Mullah Nasreddin is an idiot savant who loses his keys in his dark house, then goes to look for them outside, under the streetlamp, where it is brighter. In other stories, he swindles his neighbors out of their pots and pans. And when it comes to carrying out his duties as a leader of the faith, he ducks out as quickly as possible. He always finds himself sitting backwards on his donkey.
For those of us who had no connection to mosques, Mullah Nasreddin was the only mullah we knew. I had only one devout Muslim in my family, my grandmother. In my large extended family, she was the only person who prayed. She was also educated—she’d had to dress as a boy to attend schools. She knew the Quran as well as Persian poetry. In other words, she knew enough to mistrust and disregard the bearers of orthodox interpretation of her faith. She had a low opinion of mullahs in general and would often speak about them with a sharp tongue and foul mouth. If Nasreddin is in my mind whenever I think of mullahs, it’s because of her.
By turning the events of 9/11 into a racial and civilizational struggle, America picked a fight that it could not win.
That is why I am amazed that the term “mullah” has become synonymous with the people who successfully brought the world’s superpower to its knees. For 20 years, they bided their time as American military contractors collected billions in public funds, emptied their arsenals, and tried out new war toys on innocent Afghan civilians. The tricksters waited as the U.S. exhausted itself, then left in disgrace.
If it is not clear by now: I am not here arguing that there is something inherently redeemable about Islam as a religion. I don’t have that kind of faith. Islam is no more or less intolerant, irrational, or resistant to critical questioning than any other religion. Muslim clergy peddle in as much superstition and false hope as their counterparts Jewish, Christian, and other faiths. But what I see passing in the world, especially since 9/11, is that Islam has been increasingly defined by its narrow orthodoxy—by its mullahs.
For those of us who continue to live, love, and identify with cultures of the Middle East, but who also have little religious identity or faith, we have plenty of ideas and predecessors to assert our presence among the more conservative members of those societies. But the more the dominant superpower in the world frames its interests and justifies its violence in civilizational terms, the deeper the narrow orthodoxy of Islamic societies will define its own dominance over its societies and the more it will succeed in marginalizing the un- or anti-orthodox ideas that have challenged it for centuries. Afghanistan is the latest, and I am afraid, the most successful manifestation of this process.
It is from those of us who come from the depth of this cultural experience that we all have to ask: How did the mullahs get control over those societies? But this is a rhetorical question, at this point. The answer is that the Muslim orthodox establishment has been targeted by an equally ideological, albeit waning, superpower that continues to define its interests in civilizational terms.
As America slowly comes around to accepting that it is no longer a superpower, it goes on—in Trumpian and now Bidenesque babblings—to actively empower the most reactionary sectors of Muslim societies. It looks like the mullahs are bringing America to its knees. My grandmother is probably laughing—and crying—in incredulity in her grave.
