I’m Muslim; This Doesn’t Make Me an Expert on Terrorism or Foreign Policy

I’m posting this the afternoon after the murders of more than 50 people at a concert in Las Vegas. I wondered if this piece would be appropriate. I thought, perhaps, now might be a good time to remain silent rather than bring up some other topic. I reflected a bit on what my Mixed Company collaborators, Natalia and Kalonji, would advise. I think they’d say I should publish this as it’s something I’ve mulled over for a while. They’d also ask that I remind readers to pause themselves before posting their own or others’ opinions on mass shootings, gun control, and who gets called a terrorist and when. How much do you or the person you’re following actually know about this issue? How much work have they put into researching, testing, and implementing solutions? This is not to say there’s no place for your rage-tweets nor am I saying all members of society shouldn’t have a say in issues that affect us all. I just think, no — I know — we’d all benefit if everyone <ahem> took a moment before putting hands to keyboarding and posting.

I went to a party in high school once (don’t tell my parents) and a brother of a friend of a friend asked me what I thought about the War on Terror. He was hand rolling a cigarette with loose Turkish tobacco, hunched over a patio table in the dark backyard of who knows whose house. He was in the military. He’d just returned from Afghanistan. I’d probably just returned from losing a tennis match. So, you know, I was the one who’d have something substantial to say about the war. All I remember about that conversation is he hated Pakistanis for harboring Afghan soldiers and thought they had dumb, curly toed shoes.

I’m Indian, so of course it follows that I have a recipe for that Indian thing you ate once and know that Indian kid from your elementary school and am familiar with that tourist ashram where you found yourself after college.

And because I’m Muslim, I can speak knowledgeably on foreign policy, terrorism, and can account for each of more than 1.6 billion people’s personal relationships with God. This has been true since I was 15 and spent September 12, 2001 at school sharing my expert perspective on the events of the previous day.

I realized recently a trope in my writing: I say I’m writing about a thing I didn’t ever want to write about but now I’m writing about it and it’s uncomfortable but I needed to do it because reasons. I never wanted to write about terrorists who happen to be Muslim — but now, it’s not because I’m worried about what people will think or feel vulnerable about sharing, but because I actually have nothing knowledgeable or weighty to say and also shouldn’t have to say anything.

Because guess what? Not only am I not a terrorist, I’m also not an expert in terrorism! I actually know less about the motivations and rationale of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda than I’d like because I’m scared if I research those things, the FBI agent assigned to track me will have to file a special report.

My history education has been pretty sub-par, but I know primary sources–the ones I’m scared to pull up online — are the most useful to make sense of social movements. But I came into my political self right after 9/11, with classmates explicitly telling me that Muslims deserved to be locked up or killed without trial. And such racially driven injustice wasn’t without precedent: In high school, I met a man who was on death row for 14 years because he’d been tortured into making a false confession by the Chicago Police. I know better than taking risks just to satiate my curiosity because better people had been targeted for less.

I can make as much sense of a bombing of a market in Baghdad during Ramadan–a month of peace and reflection and family, my favorite month–as I can make sense of the hundreds of civilians killed by drones my taxes help pay for in Syria and Pakistan. Of course, I generally get that I need more historical context, and that fear is easier to tap into than compassion. I have theories about human people wanting power and access to resources and being kinda terrible as a group–but I’m mostly full of crap.

And I’m mostly as overwhelmed and confused as anyone else. When I watch the news, I also remember how my daughter inexplicably really loves the music of Ariana Grande–whose concert was targeted in the U.K.–and think about the faces of the Rohingya and Syrian and Afghan kids I tutored and remember the many times a friend told me about the time he was beat up for being gay, and I feel angry and sick and powerless to do anything to help anyone.

What I can say with conviction as one Muslim individual, is this: l: prayer and submission to my Creator help me accept I will never understand how or why all people can be just so damn violent. Here, my writerly impulses and writer friends encourage me to add some details, so evidence, perhaps a verse from the Quran and or a reminder that Islam means peace (which it does but only kind of). I’m not going to. You need to take my word for it. I am neither “not like those other Muslims” nor am I “not really-really Muslim-Muslim.” I’m Muslim–that I say my religion does not breed terrorism is evidence enough.

I’ve resisted finishing this piece for months now — the long, verdant days of Ramadan have shortened into crisp Fall orange and yellows. And here, I present my final piece in our Ramadan series about this thing I didn’t even want to write about. Usually, in completing a piece, I concede that the task was worth the effort.

But here, I’ll maintain this: the mainstream narrative doesn’t get to drive my narratives or what’s relevant about my experience to a larger audience. And I’m not more prepared to say something useful about terror now than I was when I was a teen. Maybe next time I will write about what I’ve retained and built on from those years, like my trove of knowledge on boybands and Harry Potter. Or perhaps I’ll write about learning and education, a field to which I’ve committed years as a teacher and now a doctoral student (but of course, on the off-chance I do go to a party these days, I meet at least five people who know more about what’s “wrong with schools these days” than I do). Don’t, for now, expect-on-command my hot-take on ISIS or reflections on post-9/11 foreign policy.