Mona EltahawyVarmennettu tili

Muslim Americans were not invented on September 11, 2001. Our history with New York, and the rest of the country for that matter, far precedes those attacks. Some of the earliest arrivals were on slave ships that crossed the Atlantic.

The Arab men in the bodega did not think I spoke Arabic nor that I understood the ugly things they were saying about Marcus.I confronted them in rage at the fuckery of being Muslims who were anti-Black in NYC at a time when Muslims were being subjected to the fuckery of profiling

A year and five months after 9/11, I began a relationship with a Black American man in NYC. We lived together for three years during which we boycotted the Arab-owned bodega in our Manhattan neighbourhood because of the racism of the men behind the counters.

And paranoia: just before I left, a group of Muslim men had been stopped on the highway. Apparently, a customer at a diner they’d just frequented had heard them speaking Arabic (not sure how she knew it was Arabic and called the police, saying they were acting “suspiciously.”

A year after 9/11, I left my husband. Not because he was an American and I an Egyptian, nothing to do with culture or religion; nothing to do with 9/11. We brought out the worst in each other.

Two weeks after 9/11, a group of young men asked the white American husband of a Pakistani-American woman I knew in Seattle “What's it like to fuck a terrorist?" #September11 #20thAnniversaryhttps://twitter.com/monaeltahawy/status/1437074782433030144 …

Remember our prayer in NYC in 2005 was 2yrs after the US invaded al-Sadr’s country Iraq, in its war of revenge--along with the war on Afghanistan-- for 9/11, leading directly or indirectly to the deaths of almost half a million Iraqis. Sadr replied “Allow a woman to lead prayer.”

A BBC documentary filmmaker told me that during his interview soon after our prayer with Iraqi cleric Muqtader al-Sadr - usually described as “hardline” and “fiery” in western media - he asked Sadr what was the worst thing the US had done.

A woman leading one hundred people in prayer would inspire people to extremist violence, rather than than oppression, torture and corruption of regimes such as those led by Qaddafi and his fellow dictators at that Arab League summit.