The Bad Muslim Discount

by Syed M. Masood

When I was growing up, Karachi was a place caught between ages, grasping at modernity while still clutching at the fading relics of an inglorious past. It was a city of skyscrapers and small, squat shanties. It had modern highways but was still pockmarked with peddlers wheeling vegetables over narrow dirt lanes on wooden carts. Imported luxury cars, rumbling, shining and glimmering in marvelous mechanical glory, were not uncommon, though neither was the pitifully obnoxious braying of overladen donkeys hitched to rickety wagons.

Islam was weaponized for the Cold War. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

I’ve yet to find one like Clifton Beach, where you can buy a ride on a camel or horse and walk back over their hoofprints barefoot in the black, tarry sand.

I suppose that boy deserved his fate because he failed to take the one precaution that should be gospel for both white-collar criminals and naughty brown-skinned children—never, ever, under any circumstances, leave a paper trail.

Every kid from the subcontinent knows that there are three acceptable career paths you can walk down. You can become a doctor, you can become an engineer or, if you are painfully slow, you can study economics or finance. Being an English major is not on the menu and, just in case it wasn’t clear, you can’t order anything that isn’t on the menu.

“I know a place where we can be safe from the Americans,” he said. “The grave?”

Muslims have always been a thread, albeit a subdued one, in the tapestry of America. We fought against the Confederacy in the Civil War, so our presence in the States is not exactly a new phenomenon. Before September 11, 2001, however, no one talked about us because, despite our facial hair and head coverings and odd prayer routines, we were like everyone else. We lived our lives in peace and were, though noticeable, generally unnoticed. After the fall of the Twin Towers, there was no anonymity to be had. Some people saw the thread that represented Islam in the United States and began furiously yanking at it, hoping to rip it away from the idea of America, not realizing that doing so would change the very fabric they sought to preserve. The message was clear. We no longer belonged where we had always been. I never had to face overt hatred or bigotry. Clean shaven, dressed in Western clothes, blessed by television with more or less the right accent, I thought I blended in.

I have spoken to other attorneys who’ve represented clients they believed with fierce certainty were innocent, and most of them fear ever encountering that certainty, that innocence, again. They have learned the hard way that the weight of innocence can crush you. The thought that you will lose when you should not, when you must not, can break you. It can shatter your soul. It can make you ask, again and again and again and again, that question most fatal to a litigator: “What if I make a mistake?”

“They come to our countries and they pretend to care, and they run us over and they don’t stop to see how bad they’ve hurt us. They never stop, which is what they’re supposed to do. It’s American policy, according to the rules someone wrote down and all of them agreed to follow.” Azza tossed the remote aside. “It doesn’t matter who wins. They’ll still be running us over. So who cares?”

“It didn’t work out. She heard a lecture by some famous imam, some Hamza Younis or something—” “Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. How can you not know who he is? The man is an ocean of knowledge. How can you be a Muslim in California and not know who Hamza Yusuf is?”

For all that was made of how Muslim women had to dress, little was ever said of how Muslim men were supposed to look away when they saw what they weren’t supposed to see.

“Muslims—our generation, in the West—are like the Frankenstein monster. We’re stapled and glued together, part West, part East. A little bit of Muslim here, a little bit of skeptic there. We put ourselves together as best we can and that makes us, not pretty, of course, but unique. Then we spend the rest of our lives looking for a mate. Someone who is like us. Except there is no one like us and we did that to ourselves.”