Amani Al-Khatahtbeh - Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2016 by Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2016

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Jacket photograph by Jenna Masoud

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-5950-3

ISBN 978-1-5011-5952-7 (ebook)

My love letter to all the little girls who ever cried in the dark

Forgive him who wrongs you;

join him who cuts you off;

do good to him who does evil to you;

and speak the truth even if it be against yourself.

Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him

Introduction

Im kind of playing the game right now, I told Contessa Gayles in the bathroom of Muslim Girls overpriced Williamsburg studio in Brooklyn, New York. I was staring at my reflection in our light-framed vanity mirror, doing the makeup routine that Ive learned works best on film and that has become second nature over the past few months. Contessas camera was rolling, getting some footage for the CNN interview we were about to shoot.

Muslim Girl blew up over the past year, for lack of better words. Our work to amplify Muslim womens voices in mainstream media reached worlds of new audiences. We were getting republication inquiries, media requests, and columns published in major outlets we only ever dreamed of, and our work was being profiled everywhere from Teen Vogue to the New York Times . In January 2016, we became the first Muslim company to land on Forbes s 30 Under 30 list, and I became the first veiled Muslim woman to be recognized in the media category. And now here I was, carving my dark black liner around my eyes with precision, getting that cat eye as sharp as the shards of another glass ceiling we were about to break. Maybe.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned us of the dangers of the single story, and mineas privileged and seemingly mediocre as it may appear to us Western Muslims, and as endlessly fascinating as it may seem to those looking incarries the weight of a generation of little girls eagerly searching for a reflection of themselves in the world around them.

Im perfectly aware of my role as the Token Muslim Girl these days. Its fulfilling to know that the opportunities created by Muslim Girl have come from exceptional hard work and sacrifice, but its disheartening to think that it must be because they have become lucrative to somebody out there whos definitely not us. They call us palatable, and indeed my story is much easier to swallow than that of Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi. She was fourteen years old when American soldiers in Iraq gang raped her girl-child body while holding her family hostage in another room, before executing all of them and setting the bottom half of little Abeers body on fire. I can spend days talking about how 9/11 impacted us Muslim youth living in the West, but our experiences pale in comparison to the recipients of our countrys resulting foreign policy in the Muslim world. Yet, the stark dichotomy of our experiences are only flip sides to the same coin: an illustration of how anti-Muslim bigotry takes shape on different walks of life in different ways. The relationship between them is politically intertwined. I see uswe, the Muslim citizens of the countries exporting these policiesas the gatekeepers to the rest of the Muslim community-at-large. We have a responsibility to use our privileges, resources, and every avenue at our disposal to assert a change that will ripple out and alter the course of history.

Im not really sure I understood what was going on when 9/11 happened, but I was old enough to feel the world shift on its axis that day and change everything forever. I remember it so vividly because it was confusing and chaotic, and the first time since my grandfather from Jordan passed away that I was enveloped by sadness all around me, yet this time it applied to everyone. That day has become crystallized in my memory not just for how harrowingly scary it washow we didnt know what would come after thatbut also because I deeply believe that my generation of millennial Muslims has, whether we like it or not, come to be defined by it.

We have become commodified in every demeaning way: Our bodies have become political targets in the service of returning America to the imaginary greatness it once enjoyed, which I can only assume was during the days of outright racial comfort and superiority of white people; at the same time, our bodies have been reprinted, sold, contorted to fit the only cool narrative society can accept, sold to us Muslim women in a way that makes us eagerly jump to celebrate the shattering of another glass ceiling.

I still remember hearing the story of Cennet Doganaythe French schoolgirl who shaved her head in 2004 in protest of Frances new law banning Islamic headscarves from schoolwhen I was in middle school. I watched a story of her on the news, a rebellious breath of fresh air amid all the headlines pounding me with horrible messages about what Muslim women stood for, and to my twelve- year-old self, it was like hearing that there was life out there. There were little girls who felt just as attacked and disrespected by their societies as I did, and this one was talking back. I wondered if I would ever have the same courage as her.

Abed Ayoub, legal director of the American-Arab Anti- Discrimination Committee, issued a statement in the winter of 2015, almost immediately after Donald Trumps call for a ban on Muslim immigration, stating that levels of Islamophobia at that time were the worst they had witnessed since immediately after 9/11. My heart hurt. I could not imagine a generation of little girls living through a Trump erathe terrifying possibility of a Trump generationand enduring the same unsettlement that my friends and I did growing up, not just from navigating their own identities, but their surroundings as well. Enough is enough. The cycle needs to stop. In this case, its less of a cycle and more of an uphill battle in which we toil. Were climbing toward the light with exceptional weight on our backs, digging our heels into the dirt of the past to gain our way to the top, only to slipno, be completely knocked downby an uncontrollable, newly emerging force that causes us to tumble all the way back to where we started, much to the jeers and cheers and additional trips of the bystanders around us. Everyone can see it happen, and complacency is a killer.

The best I can possibly do is speak on my own behalf, to be brutally true to my own lived experience, and share with you a snapshot of a walk of life that I believe has been shared by many of my brothers and sisters wandering the same familiar corridors of our English-speaking diaspora, never cultured enough for home and never American enough to truly belong.

I think weve become starved for people to actually listen to us. Weve become so desperate to hear our own voices above all the white noise that we have willfully compromised and repackaged our narratives to make them palatableto make them commercial and catchy, to make them headline-worthy, to sell a story that you will find deserving of your attention. We call it playing the game, because you consuming some semblance of our truth is better than you consuming whatever else is out there, conjured by someone else on our behalf. But thats not good enough anymore.