In fact, my everyday life is free from these concerns precisely because of who I am, or at least how I imagine people perceive me. My gender and racial appearance and lack of identifiable religious identity make it possible for me to have a morning routine free of concern about what awaits me out in the world.
Yet there are people very, very dear to me—including in my family—who do have to think about encountering hostility when they leave the house. They have helped me, and sometimes pushed me, to reflect on how different it is to live with this possibility rather than to live without it.
It is a very significant difference. The kind of difference that could explain what the young woman you are about to meet calls “fear in your heart.”
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Public Lives
In November 2017, a college student named Maheen Haq published an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun called “Being Muslim Is . . . .”1 I found her writing so moving that when I read it I emailed her immediately and thanked her for sharing her experience. She responded within minutes with a kind message. Months after this exchange her article has stayed with me—maybe more than any other of the thousands of articles I have read while doing research for this book.
In her op-ed, Maheen explains what it feels like to be Muslim in rural Maryland, where she grew up. I encourage you to read the article yourself, but I’ll summarize it for you: It’s not easy growing up Muslim in rural Maryland. Her everyday experience is littered with indignities. She provides a brief accounting of these experiences by presenting the reader with a list.
To begin, each line starts with “Being Muslim is” and continues with a brief explanation of a particular moment or moments in her everyday life: being flipped off as she drives, having foul diatribes directed at her as she walks down the street, hearing other people at the mall make nasty comments about Muslims that are just loud enough for her to know that they were meant to be heard.
But then the list’s style shifts suddenly. The sentences become more abrupt, general statements of what it is like to be Muslim in today’s United States. I keep turning over the first of these statements in my mind.
“It is fear in your heart.”
For this young woman, being Muslim in her hometown means living with fear in her heart. I have certainly been afraid in specific moments in my life. But this seems so different than living with fear in my heart, the accumulation of painful and scary moments over time. I can only imagine that this kind of fear seeps into almost every part of life.
Maheen goes on to describe how this fear shows itself in her life. Having to apologize for crimes committed by people she doesn’t know. Feeling powerless when others call her a terrorist, even though she herself feels terrified by the anti-Muslim hostility that has become such a significant feature of public life in the United States.
She is not without hope. Prompted by a nine-year-old asking how she should respond when someone asks her if she is a terrorist, Maheen wrote her article to express confidence that hard work will bring a better future. She ends the article by pledging to be courageous in the face of fear. She draws on the examples of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Prophet Muhammad, and Martin Luther King to argue that being Muslim requires fighting for justice. She quotes the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, which establish the fundamental equality of all people, as a call to action in our time.
Reading Maheen’s article leaves me feeling hopeful about the future she foresees. Yet doubt enters in when I take a step back and think about it in relation to all of the stories about anti-Muslim hostility I have read over the last few years. Maheen’s commitment to what most of us might identify as core American values does not change the reality of our present. The fear that has seeped into her heart is still very real for many people.
That fear has prevented her from being her true self. She has changed the way she looks. She has changed the way she acts so that others see her as nonthreatening and amicable. She has censored herself when it comes to expressing her opinions.
In her article, Maheen labels herself a hypocrite because the answer she gave to the nine-year-old didn’t match with her own behavior. When confronted with anti-Muslim hostility, she told the girl, you resist, you break free, you speak your mind. However, Maheen’s own confrontation with anti-Muslim hostility had made her forget how to fight, “[h]ow to be unapologetically Muslim, unapologetically confident, empowered and passionate.”
I’m confident that Maheen will work with every fiber of her being to be all of these things. Still, it makes me incredibly sad to imagine that her experience of life in her hometown has left her feeling like she needs to be apologetically Muslim, like being her full self will make others question whether she belongs in the only place she has called home.
Of course, Maheen is not alone in this.
Beginning in 2015, Muslims across the country began experiencing greater and greater hostility based on their religious identity—or at least what people assumed to be markers of Muslim religious identity, like headscarves on women, turbans and beards on men, and brown skin. The remarkable diversity of Muslim communities in the United States means that in reality there aren’t any characteristics definitively marking someone as Muslim.2 As a result, in addition to Muslims, many non-Muslims, including Sikh Americans and other people of color, have been targets of anti-Muslim hostility because of gendered and racial or racialized stereotypes about who “seems” Muslim based on a variety of factors, not just physical appearance.
If Maheen’s encounters with anti-Muslim sentiment and behavior can serve as an example of what many Muslims in the United States experience with some regularity—and my research certainly suggests that this is the case—then maybe we can begin to imagine the toll this might take on people’s lives, both as individuals and as members of a broader American Muslim community. Individual experiences of anti-Muslim hostility affect those individual lives. But the knowledge that anti-Muslim hostility is a more general phenomenon, that Muslims across the country are encountering hateful speech and behavior as well, reinforces and deepens the entire community’s expectation of further encounters with hostility.
This is how fear seeps into the heart.
How does this fear affect life for Muslims in the United States? Maheen’s story helps us begin to answer to this question. All of the moments she describes as having contributed to the fear in her heart took place in public—they are very much part of the conditions of her public life. Our work begins, then, by looking at this idea: the conditions of our public lives.
The Conditions of Public Life
In perhaps the most famous paragraph in the history of our country, the Declaration of Independence establishes three rights as the building blocks of life in the United States. The words are profound, and their formulation seemingly straightforward: All people have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Despite the apparent simplicity of this formulation, however, we know that in reality there are lots of different ways that people understand what the words mean.
Something key was missing from my presentation of this famous phrase. In the Declaration itself, a creator God endows all people with these rights. What this means exactly has been at the center of debates for quite some time. It could mean that the people creating a new and experimental form of government intended for religion, or Christianity more specifically, to be at the heart of national public life. Or it could mean that they were underscoring the inalienable nature of these three fundamental rights by referring to a creator God who was nonetheless distant from the everyday life of its creation. The way we interpret this phrase has significant implications for our public lives.
Other parts of the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” formulation require a fair amount of interpretation as well.
The pursuit of happiness means different