Translator: Elise LECAMP
Reviewer: Maria Pericleous Allow me to take you back
to a couple of months ago. I'm at the Women's March in San Francisco
with a neighbor and a dear friend. I trust her with
my four-year-old daughter; she trusts me with her children. She’s my rock. One minute we are chanting
for women’s rights, the next we are shouting for trans rights. We are in a sea of umbrellas and people: some carrying the iconic image
of a hijabi wrapped in an American flag; some chanting slogans
against Islamophobia. My friend looks at me and says, "You don’t have to deal
with that stuff, right?" "Why, because I'm not Muslim?" I have had this conversation before. People I work with, or people who have known me for years, separate me, the Sahar they know, from the idea of "Muslim"
built in their imagination. They de-Muslim me. There are 1.7 billion Muslims worldwide. We look different. We practice different. We identify with being Muslim differently. But somehow we all get packed
into the same Muslim box. This box is so well-constructed
in our collective imaginations that when people like me don’t fit in it, we get de-Muslimed. I am not alone in this. It even happened
to the best-selling poet in America. [ACT I: Being De-muslimed] What images come to your mind
when you think of Rumi, poet of love? Peace? Love ? When Jalaluddin Rumi was my age, he was an orthodox Muslim
preacher and scholar. Islam, the Quran and Prophet Muhammad stayed central to his poetry
until the day he died. But Rumi’s religion has been erased
from Western imagination and most popular translations
of his poetry. An erased history is a big part
of the story of the 1.7 billion Muslims. [ACT II: Belonging to the 1.7 billion] Another is the reductive
imagery of Muslims that has colonized
Western books for centuries. This seductive imagery is defined
by the dark men you should fear and the exotic women you need to save. The path-breaking Palestinian
American scholar Edward Said first deconstructed
this imagery in the 1970s. But it stands tall today. Our politicians, my news industry,
and Hollywood all continue to build on it. Take the 1998 film
The Siege as an example. In it, Arab American men
are actually rounded up in an internment camp
in New York's Yankee Stadium. Here’s Denzel Washington at the top,
with the bad dangerous Muslims, and there he is below, with the good,
patriotic Muslim FBI agent. This film was released three years
before the tragic events of 9/11. I’ve worked in the news
industry for 13 years, and I’ve seen this kind of reductive
powerful narrative dominate our newsfeeds. This narrative overshadows the fact that nine Muslim women have led
their country in the last three decades, while the US couldn’t even elect its first real female
presidential candidate in 2016. This narrative fails to recognize that French Muslim women, who can't wear
their hijab in public buildings, and Saudi Muslim women, forced to cover
their bodies by their government, are two sides of the same coin. It’s one powerful group
controlling the other. This narrative diminishes Muslim leaders
leading movements of change; it ignores the fact that the first Muslim prayers
said on American soil were said by Africans
brought here on slave ships; it erases the existence of Queer Muslims. This narrative has captured
our collective imaginations so deeply and so inaccurately that Sikh men and children
are often the target of anti-Muslim attacks and violence. Because of the stories we tell
and the way we tell them, Islamophobia today is more
than fear of Islam, the religion, it is fear of the other. In the news industry,
we tell more than stories based on facts or alternative facts, (Laughter) we also build narratives
that help you make sense of the world. And my industry has epically failed at capturing the narrative
of the 1.7 billion Muslims. And we’ve failed them here, in the US,
where seven million Muslims make up the most diverse
religious group in America. One in three Muslim Americans
are African Americans, and six out of 10 Muslim Americans are first-generation immigrants
who come from 77 different countries. Four decades ago, my immigrant parents arrived in New York
to live their American dream. My mother placed her first
jewellery designs on 5th Avenue, and my father worked hard
in the skyscrapers of New York - skyscrapers made possible by a Bangladeshi
American Muslim structural engineer named Fazlur Rahman Khan. Back when Khan was re-imagining
the skylines of the world, my parents were unapologetically
Muslim and American. But am I unapologetically
Muslim and American now? Sometimes when people ask me
why I don’t eat pork, instead of taking out my Muslim receipts or my pocket Quran,
that all Muslims carry, I say, "Out of respect for Peppa Pig." (Laughter) I was joking, we don’t all
carry pocket Qurans. We don’t have to be
Islamic theology experts to be “Muslim” or to almost always get selected for random security checks
at the airport. There are hundreds of islamic scholars, Muslim activists, and interfaith activists who are combating
pervasive lies about Islam. These lies are churned out
by a well-oiled Islamophobia machine with dozens of financial backers,
think-tanks, and misinformation experts who swept in and easily manipulated
our already flawed image of what Muslims are,
of what Islam is. Because of the stories we tell
and the way we tell them, Islamophobia is more than someone
snatching a hijab off a woman or this horrifying map of attacks
on mosques across the US. Islamophobia in its ugliest form
attacks our sense of belonging, which is so vast, and varied,
and intersectional that it cannot possibly fit in a box. Let me explain: I was born Muslim, but being Muslim was born
in my imagination when I was 4 years old, in a makeshift mosque in the basement
of a Presbyterian Church in New York. When social scientists
describe religious life, they refer to the three B's:
belief, behavior and belonging. My Muslim belief may not always
be visible, but it’s there. Perhaps my neighbor, my rock, my friend,
would see that I’m Muslim if she could see through
the 50 feet of concrete and air that separate our homes. She’d see the nighttime ritual
with my daughter, cradled in the crook of my arm, me whispering the Arabic
protection verses that seal the Quran, repeating them three times each. Asking for her to be protected
from the evil that can be seen and the evil that cannot be seen. My Muslim belief may not
always be visible, but my belonging
is always in my shadow. Belonging is this image of my grandmother
standing with her sisters, half a century ago, in Karachi, Pakistan. It is the image of her
that I see right now, when I close my eyes: Nano, surrounded by her finished
and unfinished canvases of Sufi saints; and a heavily bookmarked Quran, a book with 114 chapters
that she knows practically by heart. Being Muslim is saying the prayers
she tells me to say when I’m having a bad day. Being Muslim is how I refer to God:
Allah Mian - God, my master. For a people colonized
for centuries by an empire that started as a corporation called
the Honorable British East India Company, calling God my only master
has deep meaning. Belonging is growing up
hearing, "Men don’t cry," but seeing my refugee grandfather cry. In between writing books on Modern Islam
and Kashmiri independence, Nana Jaan cried unapologetically
for his family in Indian Kashmir, family and sisters he couldn't
embrace for the last 50 years of his life. Belonging is knowing that there are
millions of Kurds and Palestinians, like my grandfather, whose families were torn apart
by colonialists, who divided the Muslim world
like a game of Risk. Being Muslim is knowing
that in the last two centuries all but four Muslim countries
were colonized by Europe. Being Muslim is knowing
that the first aerial bomb in the history of mankind was dropped on a Muslim country
a century ago. It is knowing that around the same time, my grandmother’s grandfather, a distinguish lawyer and an
Indian Kashmiri British impirial subject, was called dangerous
by the newspapers of the time for running the first mosque in England. Before airplanes existed, he traveled to more places
in the world than I can imagine, preaching the radical word
of love, peace and social justice. The word of Islam. Belonging to my tribe of 1.7 billion runs deep into our
unforgettable bloodlines and unacknowledged histories. It is knowing that fourteen years ago, the most powerful military in the world, with troops currently spread
on every continent except Antarctica, went into Iraq chasing weapons
of mass destruction that didn’t exist. It’s knowing that now
more than half a million Iraqis lie beneath the rubble of that war. It is knowing that the rate of suicide
amongst US veterans has jumped 32 percent since 2001. Being Muslim American
is knowing that 1400 years ago, the first call to prayer, the Azaan, was said by a freed
black slave named Bilal. Being American Muslim
is knowing that 200 years ago, an African Islamic scholar
named Bilali Muhammad was brought to this land
and made a slave. Being American Muslim
is calling Malcolm X an American hero. It is the warmth I felt when people overwhelmed the airports
to fight the Muslim Ban. It’s the hope I feel
when we stand up for our dreamers; it's the hope I feel
when we say, "Black lives matter." Being American Muslim is knowing the inherent intersectionality
of our multi-hyphenated identities but failing to communicate it to you. The Muslim narrative of 1.7 billion has more possibilities
than a Rubik’s cube, but we're portrayed in reductive binaries: us versus them; good versus bad. Being a mother is the worry I carry
for my child and all Muslim children, knowing that powerful, privileged people build structural Islamophobia
on these binaries. Structural Islamophobia are the Muslim registries
that began with President Bush but continued under President Obama. It is pervasive mosque surveillance. It is a country closing its borders
to people it is bombing. It's an immigration officer
handcuffing a five-year-old child. It’s the wars we wage and the bombs
we drop on Muslim countries. Because of the stories we tell
and the stories we don’t tell, here we are today. In a study called the Ascent of Man, researchers at Northwestern University showed this scientifically
incorrect image to participants and asked them to rate groups on a scale
of 1 to 100 in terms of evolution. Muslims scored the lowest. We are too deep
into de-humanizing Muslims. We are decades behind recognizing the dangerous tropes
we perpetuate in our newsrooms. It's a big downer, isn't it? Well, there is a growing movement led
by American Muslims in the media industry that gives me hope. This movement aims to capture the complexity of our
multi-hyphenated identity and our forgotten histories. The #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast; Sapelo Square about Black Muslim life; and Ms Marvel, the Pakistani American
superhero all give me hope. [ACT III
The conversations we need to have] But I’m deeply worried
about this global moment we are in. And this moment has consequences
beyond the 1.7 billion. There’s a reason conspiracy theorists that existed on the dark corners
of the Internet now rule the White House. They rose exponentially
because they "othered" Muslims. There’s another group that rose
exponentially the last few years by making an other out of all of us. They didn’t exist five years ago, and now they rule large parts
of Iraq and Syria. I’m worried about the realities
and the histories that I was unaware of
when I was my daughter’s age but make me unapologetically Muslim today. Things I left breadcrumbs for,
throughout this talk. Things that might have
resonated with you too because in all the intersections
that make up our humanity, there might lurk a story
of being "othered." Right now, across the bridge in Berkeley, the 8th annual Islamophobia
conference is happening. Over there, more than a hundred academics are getting together and talking
about our problems with the "other," talking about structural racism
and American militarism. All of us need to ask ourselves, "Why aren't we having
these conversations?" Why am I giving you this talk,
at TEDxStanford in 2017, when the man who introduced us
the concept that wars are waged by dehumanizing the "other"
was a scholar here, decades ago. All of us need to ask ourselves
uncomfortable questions like my friend and I did in the rain about how we consciously
or unconsciously perpetuate the “other” because the work
of re-imagining a new future, where we don’t have an American President
eating chocolate cake while bombing broken countries
and "othered" people, goes well beyond the visible
and invisible 1.7 billion. It starts here, with all of us. (Applause)
even ExMuslims don't know/understand that there are other types of Muslims and "their" own Islam is not the only Islam.