The souls of young Muslim folk

What it's like to be America's new "problem" in the age of terror.

By Justin Jouvenal

Read more: Religion, Books, Race, Interviews, Islam, Muslims, Authors, Books Interviews, September 11th

Aug. 26, 2008 | The question posed by W.E.B. DuBois in his classic "The Souls of Black Folk" cut to the marrow of what it was like to be black under Jim Crow. Now, more than a century after DuBois penned his query, Moustafa Bayoumi thinks it is appropriate to ask it again. The associate professor of English at Brooklyn College argues in his new book, "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?" that young Arabs and Muslims are America's latest "problem."

In a few destructive hours on Sept. 11, he writes, the groups went from being just another set of minorities in our multicultural patchwork to "dangerous outsiders" in many Americans' eyes. Hate crimes spiked 1,700 percent against Arabs and Muslims in the months after the terrorist attacks and thousands were detained, questioned and deported. A 2006 USA Today/Gallup poll found 39 percent of Americans believed all Muslims --including U.S. citizens -- should carry special IDs.

"We're the new blacks," a Palestinian-American in his 20s tells Bayoumi as the young man puffs on apple-flavored tobacco in a hookah lounge. "You know that, right?"

In "The Souls of Black Folk," DuBois aimed to pull back "the veil" separating whites and blacks by presenting a full view of black life. In his new book, Bayoumi gives us seven richly observed vignettes of the lives of young American Arabs and Muslims who live in Brooklyn; he hopes to cut through the suspicion and fear they face as they navigate post-Sept. 11 America and come of age.

Bayoumi's subjects are more ordinary than extraordinary, but that is precisely the point. In the war on terror, he argues, Arabs and Muslims have been reduced to two types: the exceptional, assimilated immigrant and the violent fundamentalist. Bayoumi hopes to humanize, as well as complicate, our view of Muslims by presenting his subjects in the texture of their daily lives with all of the attendant humor, boredom, messiness and small victories and defeats. That does not mean the book is prosaic -- suspicion, fear and being different create roadblocks and tough choices in every chapter.

Among the stories Bayoumi tells are those of Sami, a U.S. Marine who is deeply angered by Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq; Rasha, a college student whose entire family is jailed on immigration charges; Yasmin, a high school student who wants to serve on the student council, but faces challenges because of her religion; and Akram, a Palestinian-American who wants to leave the country in which his father worked so hard to build a life.

Bayoumi, whose work has appeared in the Nation and the London Review of Books and who co-edited "The Edward Said Reader," spoke to Salon by phone.

What do you mean when you say young Arabs and Muslims are the new "problem" in American society?

Everybody has an opinion about what it means to be an Arab or a Muslim. Young Arabs and Muslims are the ones most feared by the culture at large, so it was very important for me to excavate the stories I found to illustrate the realities and tempos of real life during the age of terror.

In the wake of Sept. 11, thousands of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians were arrested and detained for weeks or months on immigration charges. You open the book with the story of Rasha, a 19-year-old college student whose family was rounded up in a raid. What happened to her?

Rasha has lived in the United States for almost the entirety of her life, even though she was born in Syria. She came as a youngster after her family was granted a tourist visa. Her family applied for asylum status after leaving behind a very brutal regime in Syria. Asylum claims take a very, very -- almost inhumanely -- long time to adjudicate, so they lived in this kind of in-between zone where many people live. They're not quite legal. They're not quite illegal. This made them very vulnerable, as it made a lot of people vulnerable after Sept. 11.

She was one of thousands of people that were rounded up in these mass arrests in the months after Sept. 11 precisely because of the vulnerability of her immigration status. She also suspects her family was reported to the government by a snitch in the community. Regardless, she spent three months of her life in prison, which she felt was a great injustice. She thought she would never be in prison unless she had done something wrong here.

Her entire family was rounded up in the middle of the night.

They were woken up in the middle of the night. The street was blocked off. They were put in shackles, especially her brother, who spoke back to one of the officials. The official then said to him something to the effect of "Put your hands together, like when you pray." The whole family was really traumatized by the horror of the whole ordeal. It lasted several months and involved several different prison institutions. She got an education in what the prison system means. Immigration and criminal detainees are often held in the same place. Her mother was incarcerated with her, as was her sister. The two daughters were trying to make this ordeal as easy as possible on their mother. She's really come through it as a much stronger person. [Rasha's family was eventually released from prison, but the immigration case against them is still pending].

There is an interesting dynamic at work with one of your other subjects, Akram. His father is a Palestinian who immigrated to America and built a life with a mom-and-pop grocery store in Brooklyn. Akram, on the other hand, is disenchanted with America's treatment of Muslims and wants to move to Dubai to teach English. Is this part of a wider trend?

Yes. Akram's story is not exceptional. The Gulf as a whole and Dubai in particular have an allure to this younger generation for many complicated reasons. One of which is there seems to be a growing hostility to all things Muslim in the United States. They think if they go to the Gulf they can escape a lot of that. Then there's the role of globalization. Dubai is now seen as a hot spot -- it's where the action is. It's interesting to me because this earlier generation, his father's generation, believed that about the United States. They could come to the United States and fulfill all of their potential. Now, in a lot of ways, their children feel that way about a place like Dubai.

Next page: Sitting in on a closed-door meeting between Brooklyn's Muslims and the FBI