"All Muslim Life in America Is Seen Through the Lens of Terrorism"

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.

When I began reading your book in August, I felt I was reading a book of history, since a lot of the events and policies you discuss date back more than a decade. But as I kept reading through the fall—when we had the attacks in Paris, then in San Bernardino, andnew revelations of NYPD spying at Brooklyn College, where we both teach—my experience of the book changed. It started to feel like a present-day text. I know that for you nothing about the War on Terror feels like a document of history. But how do you write for a reader like myself, who has forgotten or drifted away or never knew certain things in the first place?

It’s true that Muslim Americans have been living through a long and exhausting present over these last 14 years, one that is hard for us to forget. But an important aspect of War on Terror culture is that it has made the rest of the country forget even our very recent history. One example of this is the idea bandied about by Donald Trump of registering Muslims in a special database. Many people were up in arms over the proposal; there were invocations of Japanese internment. But you don’t have to go back that far in history. In fact we have had a Muslim registry in this country during the War on Terror. In my book, I talk about NSEERS, the program commonly called “Special Registration,” that was begun by the Bush administration one year following the September 11 attacks. This program required non-immigrant Muslim men coming from 24 Muslim-majority countries to register with the government. It was a colossal failure, put thousands into deportation proceedings, and broke apart many families. It also resulted in zero terrorism prosecutions.

How is that possible? I mean, I was around during Special Registration: I even wrote about it at the time. Yet I had forgotten about it until I read your book. This was very significant. And yet, it disappears from consciousness. How do you have a War on Terror culture when you have so much amnesia? I mean, part of any culture is memory, right?

The nineteenth-century French intellectual Ernest Renan wrote that a nation is made up of individuals who have a lot in common with each other but who have also forgotten many things. Nations memorialize certain events while forgetting others. This amnesia is a constant part of any culture. But it’s always worthwhile to try to recall what has been forgotten because it’s revealing of how power is distributed in any society.

You write, “To be a Muslim American today is to be full of potential, and not in the sweet way that grandmothers and elementary school teachers used the word…. In the grammar of Islamophobia, the future is tense.” What do you mean by that?

Well, we only have to look at the justifications the NYPD offered for its blanket spying program on Muslim communities here in New York City. They were saying that the NYPD has to patrol Muslim Americans before they become terrorists. That was the testimony the NYPD delivered to a Senate committee in 2007: “Rather than just protecting New York City from terrorists,” one of their advisers said, “the New York Police Department believes that part of its mission is to protect New York City citizens from turning into terrorists.” This is an extraordinary statement. Is the NYPD really aiming to crawl into the souls of Muslims and discover their true essence even before Muslims know themselves? In today’s Islamophobia, people don’t merely hold intolerant ideas about you as a Muslim. In fact, they are scripting their assumptions about your future for you as well. And that’s an extremely debilitating place to be in. It renders anything you say inconsequential—