Short Description
Moustafa Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, where I teach political science. His book, “This Muslim American Life,” came out in September. It’s a fascinating collection of pieces—sometimes hilarious, often unsettling, always probing and
Moustafa Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, where I teach political science. His book, “This Muslim American Life,” came out in September. It’s a fascinating collection of pieces—sometimes hilarious, often unsettling, always probing and provocative—about, well, Muslim life in America, past and present.
There’s a mini-memoir about the time Moustafa worked as a Middle Eastern extra on “Sex and the City 2″; a Philip-Roth-like story about his discovery of a terrorist named Mustafa Bayoumi in a detective novel (that really did happen); a loving deconstruction of the Islamic undertones and overtones of John Coltrane’s music (“A Love Supreme” becomes “Allah Supreme”); a harrowing essay on how the American military uses music to terrorize and torture its victims (the phrase “Disco Inferno” takes on a whole new meaning); a long and learned history of the relationship between Muslim Americans and African Americans.
The book ranges widely, but it’s held together by a single premonition: that the wrenching changes of the War on Terror have been not only legal and political but also cultural. They are not confined to foreign policy or domestic policing; they extend to the most intimate and personal spaces of social life. They have created among all of us—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—a new set of experiences and sensibilities, a new sense of community and collectivity. At the same time, Moustafa’s book is a long, sustained insistence that we understand all the ways in which people—particularly Muslim people—live their lives outside the War on Terror. “This Muslim American Life” documents the oozing influence of the state, but with its sense of humor and history, shows just how much of the Muslim American experience lies beyond that influence.
A literary critic and gifted essayist, Moustafa brings his formidable skills as a reader of texts to his analysis of contemporary political culture. He’s got that eye—and ear—for the way our most incidental phrases, those stray bits of language, betray our deepest feelings. Where other books on the War on Terror focus on high acts of state, Moustafa finds his materials in the most unexpected places: yes, in the fine print of a legal statute, but also in standup comedy, in the parables of Kafka, in the penultimate paragraph of newspaper article. His archive is everywhere.
Moustafa and I have been friends for years, and we’ve often talked over drinks or dinner, on campus and in cafés, about the topics he addresses in his book. But it wasn’t till I sat down with “This Muslim American Life” that I truly saw the unity of his vision. So I decided to do what we always do when either of us has a book or an idea we’re excited about: sit down with him and talk about it.
Why did you write “This Muslim American Life”?
American society hasn’t really grappled with the way that it has changed during the War on Terror. We now live in an age of permanent war, and that war has justified everything from the government spying on its citizens (NSA surveillance) to the CIA torturing its detainees. We have adopted innovative forms of warfare (drones) and incarceration (Guantanamo Bay) without thinking through their consequences. And Muslim Americans are collectively caricatured, blamed and discriminated against, both by the public and by policy.
One way of thinking about these changes is to consider what I call a “War on Terror culture.” When we think of the Cold War, we think of the constant war-footing in American culture, the stereotypical images of people from the Soviet Union, even of a kind of palette of colors. (The FX show “The Americans” plays with this brilliantly.) Cold War culture changed the legal landscape of the country. It stoked our paranoia and drove our foreign policy. It influenced our novelists, painters, poets and filmmakers. And all of these fields—legal, political, entertainment—fed off of each other to create a broader Cold War culture. I think we see something similar operating right now, which we haven’t come to terms with.
But War on Terror culture is also different from Cold War culture. For one thing, there are 3 to 6 million Muslims living in this country today, and they feel the brunt of War on Terror culture directly. That’s different than during the Cold War, when the number of people in the United States from the Soviet Union was smaller and many had come as ideological dissidents. War on Terror culture also imagines Muslims in ideological terms, but it often further casts them as fundamentally dangerous because of their cultural, ethnic and religious ties as well.
You said that when we think about Cold War culture, there’s a set of stock images and even colors. What are the images or colors of War on Terror culture?
A lot of screaming beards. And hijabs. It’s comprised of images of Muslims as either victims or villains, and really nothing in between.
This is a theme in your book, images of Muslims as victims or villains but nothing in between. How does that work?
Take myself as an example. I have nothing to do with terrorism. Nobody I know has anything to do with terrorism. And yet, all Muslim life in America is seen through the lens of terrorism. So either you are a victim of this war or you are villain who is responsible for it. Like everybody else, Muslims live their lives in complex ways. But when you see a Muslim character on a television show, you can bet the story will be about national security.
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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/all-muslim-life-america-seen-through-lens-terrorism
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