People sometimes ask me, “Why do you only write about Islam and Muslims?”
They say, “Shouldn’t you branch out, cover some other topics, too?”
They’re not wrong. I should branch out more, just like everyone else needs to expand their horizons in some way. I do want to cover other topics, anyway – topics that are bigger than the little corner of life I grew up in.
But I’m never going to stop writing about Islam and Muslims.
There are Muslim doctors and Muslim lawyers, but not enough Muslim journalists and Muslim storytellers. When the time comes to cover an uprising in the Middle East, or the death of a Palestinian child, or the impact of surveillance on mosques, or the actions terrorist of a terrorist who claims he acted on our behalf – that’s when we sit back, and watch as the story gets told for us. Our story is pieced together like a broken mirror, then presented to the American public as being whole.
Then, when we turn on the TV, we see extremist-explosion-terrorist-Islam, and Hollywood picks up on that and turns it into the backdrop of a gag-inducing stream of white savior movies where the brown extras are only there to screen and flail, and we sit here wringing our hands and worrying what the retaliation will look like this time.
(Sometimes, it’s funny, like bacon thrown on the mosque doorstep.)
(Sometimes, it’s heartbreaking, like arson thrown in through a window and graffiti on the walls.)
(Sometimes, it’s fatal, like the bullets that rained down on Christchurch worshippers.)
I took Media Ethics in my sophomore year. My teacher – former editor at the New York Times, who sometimes got really deep, sometimes talked about Peppa Pig – told us that everyone has bias. The problem is that white bias is presented as neutrality, when in many cases, it’s just an incomplete worldview.
(No one in that class could point out Syria on a map, by the way – despite everyone having an opinion on it.)
I don’t want reporters outside my community having more of a say in our story than my own community. They don’t know that “Allahu Akbar” is the heartbeat of every prayer, and the phrase that calls us to it. They don’t know that every mosque has its own unique scent, like sandalwood and perfume brought back from Makkah and incense and oud. They don’t know that the masjid is where you go if you’re hungry or need financial support. They don’t know that in Ramadan, the uncles step out of my way and let me go ahead of them in the line for the perculator full of chai.
They don’t know that the elderly man with the kufi and white beard, who sits in the corner reading Qur’an all day, smiles at the kids and is happy when we make him buttery popcorn. They don’t know that our imam at Raleigh Masjid went to MIT and celebrates Black history year-round and has the best inflection when he recites verse four of Al-Fatiha. They don’t know that we put up lights during all 30 days of Ramadan. They don’t know that you’ll never find hospitality – or food – like ours, anywhere in the world.
(Because with 1.8 billion of us on every human-inhabited continent, we pretty much are the world.)
They don’t know that my memories of Madinah include me being served dinner in the courtyard of a mosque by a British couple, who appreciated the way I played with their kids after prayer. They don’t know that in Makkah, an elderly Turkish woman gave me dried chickpeas as a snack and hugged me tight and said “call me Ana” (mother). They don’t know that there’s a camaraderie that comes with with this label of being Muslim – a love that Malcolm X witnessed on his own pilgrimage. That if people turn to hate, it’s because something – colonialism, apartheid, starvation, war – broke them.
They don’t know us. So their stories about us are broken mirrors, and I can see my reflection in all the gaps between their bullet-point facts.
Who’s going to speak on our behalf, then? Who’s going to tell our story?
Who else, if not us?