This Muslim American Life
Dispatches from the War on Terror
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2016 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Arab American Book Award
A collection of insightful and heartbreaking essays on Muslim-American life after 9/11
Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake “Mustafa Bayoumi” was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an “anti-American, pro-Islam” agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed.
Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the incarceration and deportation of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, based almost solely on their national origin and immigration status. The NYPD, with help from the CIA, has aggressively spied on Muslims in the New York area as they go about their ordinary lives, from noting where they get their hair cut to eavesdropping on conversations in cafés. In This Muslim American Life, Moustafa Bayoumi reveals what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans, highlighting the profound effect this surveillance has had on how they live their lives. To be a Muslim American today often means to exist in an absurd space between exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you. In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this initially intriguing but ultimately disappointing collection of essays published between 2001 and 2012, Brooklyn College English professor Bayoumi (How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?) addresses Muslim-American life from four angles: history, theory, politics, and culture. Regarding history, Bayoumi reflects upon African-American Islam and immigration law, from the quotas limiting the number of non Northern Europeans allowed to emigrate to the U.S., which were only repealed in 1965, to more recent legislation passed during the "war on terror." For theory, he draws heavily on Orientalism, Edward Said's classic 1978 study, disparaging the bestselling works of Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Reza Aslan and judging Efraim Karsh's The Arab Mind "trash scholarship." He reports throughout on the surveillance, racialization, and racial profiling of Muslim-Americans and on how the War on Terror is presented in television programs such as 24 and movies such as Zero Dark Thirty. Bayoumi juxtaposes his own experiences (an extra on Sex and the City, his citizenship ceremony, his earlier book) with more general information (early litigation involving immigrants, the use of loud and offensive music in "torture lite," ideological links between WWII-era internment of Japanese-Americans and War on Terror era Islamophobia.) Unfortunately, the redundancies inherent in a collection of previously published articles give the book a dull and dated quality, though Bayoumi's subject matter is certainly neither.
