This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror

by Moustafa Bayoumi

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479835645
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	09/18/2015
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,110,354
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Nonfiction. He is the editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara and co-editor of The Edward Said Reader. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY).

Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: My Muslim American Life 1
PART I. MUSLIMS IN HISTORY
1. Letter to a G-Man 23
2. East of the Sun (West of the Moon): Islam, the Ahmadis, and African America 35
3. Racing Religion 48
PART II. MUSLIMS IN THEORY
4. Sects and the City 75
5. A Bloody Stupid War 78
6. The God That Failed: The Neo-Orientalism of Today’s Muslim Commentators 99
PART III. MUSLIMS IN POLITICS
7. The Rites and Rights of Citizenship 121
8. Between Acceptance and Rejection: Muslim Americans and the Legacies of September 11 128
9. Fear and Loathing of Islam 140
10. The Oak Creek Massacre 148
11. White with Rage 152
vi ◆ Contents
PART IV. MUSLIMS IN CULTURE
12. My Arab Problem 169
13. Disco Inferno 175
14. The Race Is On: Muslims and Arabs in the American Imagination 185
15. Men Behaving Badly 210
16. Chaos and Procedure 217
17. Coexistence 240
Conclusion: Our Muslim American Lives 253

Editorial Reviews

06/29/2015
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. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Some of the essays were written as many as 15 years ago. Still, the policies he writes about have been much-discussed of latefrom Muslim registration programs to increased surveillance of Muslim communities."

amExpress

2015-06-04
Closely observed, somewhat repetitive collection of mostly previously published essays by the author of the award-winning How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (2009). Chagrined about the treatment of Muslim Americans after 9/11 and still puzzling over even more strenuous anti-Muslim demonstrations since the election of President Barack Obama, Bayoumi (English/Brooklyn Coll.) probes the so-called "War on Terror culture," which ascribes a malevolent aspect to all things Muslim. As he did in his previous work, observing the lives of young Arab-American men and women in his own town of Brooklyn, the author examines the stories of people targeted unfairly as suspicious aliens simply because of their ethnic background, beginning with the Syrian traders who flocked to the United States in the 19th century. Establishing thriving communities in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, exactly where the World Trade towers stood, the first Arab Muslims suffered the same fate under early exclusionary immigration laws as the Asians, although the courts decided in a number of significant cases—e.g., that of Ahmed Hassan in Detroit in 1942—whether Arabs were white or not and could be excluded from naturalization due to their religion. In a series of essays in which themes and motifs overlap and repeat, Bayoumi critiques the New York Police Department's invasive surveillance of American Muslim communities ("Fear and Loathing of Islam"); the U.S. government's program of "special registration" of nonimmigrant men from Muslim-majority countries, which prompted the author's first book ("White with Rage"); how Arabs and Muslims are "racialized" and demonized as blacks were previously ("The Race Is On"); and how many films and TV shows reflect American culture's bias and stereotypes about Muslims. Bayoumi sagely points out the reigning ignorance about Muslim culture and how the "right-wing lunacy" has largely co-opted "the direction of global politics" ("Men Behaving Badly"). A thoughtful study, certainly relevant if occasionally one-noted.

Kirkus Reviews

"[A] fascinating collection of pieces—sometimes hilarious, often unsettling, always probing and provocative—about, well, Muslim life in America, past and present."-Salon.com

"Fascinating...the author's narrative places the predicament of Arabs and Muslims in today's America in a broader historical and sociocultural framework.This engrossing book challenges the entrenched...stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims."-Library Journal

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2015
The 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States led to, among other things, sweeping arrests, incarceration, and deportation of many Arabs and Muslims, largely based on their immigration status or national origin. In this book, Bayoumi, an American scholar of Arab origin (English, Brooklyn Coll., City Univ. of New York; How Does it Feel To Be a Problem?) examines how contemporary American politics and social mores have produced a culture of fear and suspicion that has affected U.S. civil liberties. In a series of fascinating essays, the author's narrative places the predicament of Arabs and Muslims in today's America in a broader historical and sociocultural framework. The book's first section focuses on the historical evolution of these groups in this country. The second part analyzes theoretical issues, particularly the lingering impact of what the late Edward Said referred to as "Orientalism" on "knowledge production" about Arabs and Muslims. The third segment examines the political consequences of the "War on Terror" on Muslim Americans and provides a useful overview of political measures that have complicated the landscape of their everyday life. Finally, Bayoumi probes the development of the societal representation of Muslims in America and how culture has been used as a weapon of war. VERDICT This engrossing book challenges the entrenched sociocultural stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims; recommended for all readers.—Nader Entessar, Univ. of South Alabama, Mobile

Library Journal