I don't remember where I was during the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001. I was 4, and I did not lose someone I personally knew or loved in the attacks -- the only relative of mine that worked in the area was miraculously able to run to safety. I can't imagine the pain of all the families who weren't as lucky and who, I'm sure, lost a piece of themselves that day.
But, as with almost everyone -- not just Americans, but those around the world who felt the effects of our post-9/11 foreign policy -- the tragic chain of events on that day still profoundly affected me. When I finally was old enough to understand what had happened, it completely and utterly changed my worldview.
I can still remember the first time that I became acutely aware that people saw me differently, because I am a Muslim. I was in elementary school, and we were on our way to Mississippi to visit my grandmother. We'd stopped at a Walmart in Arkansas as I'd characteristically forgotten a hairbrush. As we walked out of the store, I heard them: a group of teenage boys screaming at the top of their lungs "Al-Qaeda! Al-Qaeda!", pointing at my mother's hijab, laughing, and running away. There's no way my mother didn't hear them, but she acted like nothing had happened. I was so embarrassed and shocked and confused that I didn't bring it up. I couldn't believe something like that could actually happen. Not in my America, not in the country I knew and loved and called home -- it couldn't.
To this day, we haven't talked about it, or any of the other plethora of similar incidents that have happened since then. Because of growing up as a Muslim in post-9/11 America, you come to take some of these things as a given.
But it's because of these given things that I am who I am, and I hate it. I'm an apologist at best, a coward at worst. Preteen me felt the urge to try and be extra "American" so as to convince everyone I really was on "their" side. I stood each day with the rest of my class, over-enunciating the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, hiding even the slightest semblance of a foreign accent, and I filled my closet with an obnoxious amount of Old Navy. I spent all of high school keeping my mouth shut when Bin Laden was finally killed during my freshman year; when a kid in my world history class asked me if I "cried when we killed your Uncle Osama," I merely slid down in my seat and tried to pretend I was invisible. Later on, I switched tactics -- after hearing talking head after talking head pontificate about how the moderate Muslims need to speak up more after each and every atrocious attack carried out by a bearded monster with a warped ideology and an Arab name, I made sure to jump on social media and write some long status about how that wasn't the Islam of my friends and family, that wasn't my faith, that wasn't me, Islam is a religion of peace, Islam is a religion of peace, Islam is a religion of peace.
Eventually I took the coward's path and gave up. It was easier to shy away from my faith rather than deal with the mentally-devastating symptoms of the cancer that is America's unspoken war on Islam.
I understand 14 years of struggling to define who I am in a world that for some reason still believes in collective punishment is absolutely nothing compared to the infinite void the friends and families of all the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and similar horrific incidents face, and my heart breaks for them. But over the past 14 years my fear has turned to frustration and now to just exhaustion. I've tried the whole "I went to Girls Nation, I've been to Nationals for a speaking contest on the Constitution, I know the words to 'God Bless America,' I like "apple pie" thing. I've tried the "I'm sorry, that's not me, that's not real Islam" thing. Either way, you cannot engage in conversation when your partner has stuffed fingers in both ears.
My best friend told me last year, "I can't imagine being a Muslim on 9/11. I dread this for you." He was partly right: As a white male, he could have no idea what it's like to have to worry about when some ignorant idiots are going to attack your little sister like they attacked you. To the best of my knowledge, he's never been screamed at to go back to where he came from, despite being born here. He has never had to watch his grandmother be profiled and pulled out of line at an airport and forced to take off her back brace as if she was a threat to national security despite the fact that she couldn't even walk without a cane.
But he's also wrong. He shouldn't dread this for me -- I shouldn't dread this for me. It's hard not to -- even as of last night bigots are buying into the binary and cheering "God Bless America" while restricting freedom of religion to the "good" faiths, even non-Muslims are being mistaken for Muslims and attacked in the name of "justice."
It's taken me 14 years, but I've finally realized that I'm a fool for buying into this rhetoric of "us" and "them," of playing into the binary where an apology means automatically validating a baseless stereotype, and silence is taken to mean complicity. "Jihad" -- a term literally hijacked by the monsters who carried out the attacks on 9/11 and every attack in the name of a false Islam since -- in its purest form means "struggling, striving, or persevering."
Today I am grieving for the lives that were lost on September 11, 2001. And as my tribute to the victims -- and yes, there were many Muslims among them -- and also to myself, I'm reclaiming jihad and reclaiming my faith. Because in the America I know and love -- even and especially when I criticize her -- I should not dread being attacked on a specific day for something that has nothing to do with me personally. From sea to shining sea, my jihad is not physical war -- it is perhaps the most truly American ideal of all: learning to be comfortable in my own skin.