I Wish I Could Promise You They'd Love You: A non-Muslim American living in a Muslim country’s perspective on American Islalmophobia

On my last New Year’s Eve in Seoul, South Korea, while out with friends at a restaurant, I happened to meet a young woman co-worker. She and I were about the same age (25), she had been in South Korea about as long as me (more than three years), and she was also American and from the North East coast. She was out with her boyfriend, a soldier in the US military, and by the time we ran into them, they were both pretty drunk. We spoke for a little bit, and she asked my friend and me if we wanted to move places. I said that I wanted to wait because I was trying to convince a male friend of mine to come out and celebrate the New Year holiday.

“Do you like this friend?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I answered. “But we can probably leave. I don’t think he will come out. He is Muslim and doesn’t drink.”

They both stopped and looked at each other.

“Do you want to date this guy?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many other girlfriends does he have? Are you going to be one of his wives?”

“…what?”

“You know, we were looking for a friend to bring out with us, and you could be that friend, but we won’t allow our friends to date a Muslim.”

“Um…okay…”

This conversation continued for a good ten minutes with them both ranting about how absolutely terrible it would be for me to date a Muslim man and how terrible Muslims were until finally our group split. Looking back, I should have told them what they said was wrong more aggressively, but I didn’t because they were drunk and it was a holiday. I didn’t feel like arguing or fighting.

After that, I only saw them a few times in passing, but the incident stuck with me. I wouldn’t call their reaction normal, but it wasn’t unbelievable either--especially not after reading some of the news coming from the US lately. Although I was aware of prejudice against Muslims before this, what struck me about the incident was that it was coming from two people that were presumably well educated (one had finished a Master’s and another was in Master’s program at a fairly well-known liberal arts school), from a relatively liberal part of the US, and both were well traveled and working in another culture (albeit, not a Muslim one). All of these factors presumably should make for a fairly open-minded individual, drunk or not. At the very least, they should have had the sense or shame to stop ranting or apologize for their offensive comments.

At the time of that incident, I had no idea that Peace Corps would send me to Indonesia, a country with 249 million people, 90% of which are Muslim, and incidentally the home country of the friend that I had been texting in the previous story.

Since I came to Indonesia about a year and a half ago, I often find myself thinking about what would happen if someone from my village, located a few hours’ drive outside of the capital, Jakarta, moved to America. What if they moved to a small, rural, and economically depressed town in America, perhaps in upstate New York or Pennsylvania, a few hours’ drive to New York City? I wonder how much attention he or she might attract, especially if she were a woman who wore a hijab; probably not nearly as much attention as I do in my village, where people almost daily ask for pictures and barrage me with questions about my origins. You are much more likely to see a foreigner in a small town a few ours away from New York City than you are a foreigner (especially a young, white, female foreigner) in a small village outside of Jakarta. But what if he or she went to some remote Appalachian town in Kentucky, or a fishing town in Maine, or some very small town in Alaska? It’s hard for me to say what the reaction would be because I’ve also never been to those places.

I do think that a random Indonesian coming by his or herself to a small town near where I grew up on the North East coast might at least get a lot of questions about her home country from curious people. Americans don’t really know much about Indonesia at all, and I guess that very few even realize that Indonesia is a majority Muslim country. I took an anthropology class in college once with the extremely broad title of “Islamic Culture,” and we barely spoke about Indonesia.  I don’t think this was an intentional oversight of the professor, but simply the result of the fact that he had worked in the Middle East and Africa. But it doesn’t change the fact that for the most part most Americans are very ignorant of Indonesia, and I believe most of them have a very narrow image of who a Muslim person is.

At the risk of generalizing, I think for many Americans, the average Muslim looks like a Saudi Arabian, or maybe someone from Iraq or Egypt. These images aren’t necessarily wrong, but rather narrow. A woman in Saudi Arabia might cover most of her face in public with a black cloth, but a woman from Kazakhstan might go out with bare soldiers to a club and drink vodka, while a young Indonesian woman might dress with a brightly colored headscarf and wears extra covering when she prays. Ask a black American Muslim and an Afghani Muslim how each one interprets a verse of the Quran, and you’ll probably receive very different answers. Similarly, a Catholic Pope from Argentina seems to interpret church doctrine very differently than a Catholic Pope from Germany.

Before moving on, I want to say that I don’t mean to stereotype entire countries either; there is great diversity in how someone practices a religion even within the same country, same province, same town, same community, etc. because people are individuals, not labels. My point is that while many Americans can accept two different Popes with radically different viewpoints as both Catholic, they seem to have a much harder time realizing that Muslims, too, are individual people. Islam is not some static, unchanging force unaffected by local culture, history, economic situations, power dynamics, technology, or global and local politics.
In Indonesia I have met Muslims who drink, smoke, and have multiple girlfriends (and in some cases wives, though this is pretty uncommon in Indonesia), and I have also met Muslims who never do any of those things and are extremely devoted as family men and fathers. I have met Muslims that dislike Western culture influences and others that totally embrace them. If someone tells you that they are Muslim, the only thing you can assume about them is what holidays they celebrate because Islam is a religion almost 1500 years old spread across countries, borders, cultures, and languages. It is not a recent cult, a tightly knit organization, a membership club, or a corporation.

ISIS and other forms of Islamic terrorism are not inevitable, constant, or ubiquitous in the Muslim world. In the United States, we have the KKK and Westboro Baptist Church, both of which are influenced by Evangelical Christianity but are not representative of everyone that practices the religion. They are groups born of the political and historical climate of the American South, and it would be ridiculous to claim that all Evangelical Christians are violent racists or homophobes or that Evangelical Christianity inevitably leads to violence. And consider that the entire Muslim world is much more populous, spread out, historically older, and vastly more diverse than the population of Evangelical Christians. You don’t have to like or agree with Islam as a religion to see the logical fallacy in categorizing all Muslims as dangerous or as having some Western Society destroying agenda.

Despite these obvious facts, there are Americans at political rallies claiming that the US has a problem with Muslims and “secret training camps” where Muslims are training to destroy us. Muslim students are humiliated or isolated for their religion or treated as dangerous. Muslim travelers in the US are often harassed at airports. People make up rumors that our president is Muslim as a way of de-legitimizing him, never mind the fact that legally, even if he were a Muslim, he still has just as much right to be president as a Christian in a country with freedom of religion. They imply that as a Muslim he would not be able to defend his country from Muslim terrorism or would somehow be sympathetic to Muslim enemies, ignoring the fact that sharing a religion does not automatically make two people friends. Furthermore, it historically has rarely made two peoples immune from violent conflict. ISIS kills more Muslims than people of any other religion. People suggest that solutions to the problems in the Middle East should involve nuking the entire region, and our country is loath to accept Muslim refugees from the Syarian civil war, an awful conflict that we helped escalate.

Eighty years ago, another political group became powerful by making the ridiculous claim that all the people in a global, ancient religion were part of some world destroying networked conspiracy. We look back at the Holocaust with disbelief—how could Germans and Nazis really believe that all Jewish people were part of some ancient conspiracy? And yet now we have Americans that seem to think that anyone who practices Islam, a much more populous religion than Judaism, has the potential or desire to become a violent terrorist.

I live and teach in a nearly 100% Muslim community. I have been here for a year and a half and guess what? The vast majority of the people in my community do not care one bit about what the average American person is doing right now. They care about their jobs, their families, their wives, their husbands, their children, their Facebook accounts, their cell phones, their plans for the weekend, their prayers, their dreams. The average Ahmad in my class does not care about building bombs, he cares about building a speaker so he can play Bob Marley or Metallica loud enough to annoy his neighbors. To him, ISIS is just as much a scary boogeyman as it is for Americans. He is not thinking of boarding a plane to destroy America, he is thinking of going to Saudi Arabia to make his pilgrimage. He isn’t worried about whether Western influence is destroying is soul, he’s picking the movies, games, and books that he likes from countries all over the world. He doesn’t care if Americans are having pre-marital sex or if they are converting to his religion; he cares that Fitri, the girl in the next class, smiled at him this morning. He’s wondering if he should get her phone number and try to text her. Like most teenage boys in America, his biggest dilemma is how to get a girlfriend, not how to topple the American empire.

                I won’t claim that there is absolutely no prejudice or ignorance about non-Muslims and foreigners in my community. One of my students told a Peace Corps staff member that she thought all Americans were sadists until she met me. I have had people ask me to convert and made passive aggressive comments to me, such as “you would look so much prettier if you wore a hijab.” Men have asked me impolite questions that they would never ask a Muslim woman. I have been harassed on the street and shouted at because of my skin color. I cringed when a teacher at my school thought that my new principal might be Catholic because he used to work at a Catholic high school, and she was nervous about him leading the school if that were true. I have seen a couple of Indonesian friends post anti-American memes or articles that generalize about Americans or Christians on Facebook. I had an Indonesian friend tell me that Hitler wasn’t that bad because “he only killed Jews, and Jews are evil, look at what they do in Palestine” (as awful as that statement is, at least that person was willing to listen to me and reflect on his opinion when I told him how offended I was). There are cases of religious violence in Indonesia. Every once in a while, churches are burned or protested (and in Christian provinces, sometimes Mosques are also burned). All Indonesians are legally obligated to pick one of five religions (Muslim, Christian, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist), and marriage between religions is technically illegal. There are extreme political parties in Indonesia that want to ban pre-marital sex and alcohol, and there is often some controversy when non-Muslims gain very politically powerful positions at the federal government level.

  [Some of these issues are further discussed in the blog of a different Peace Corps Indonesia volunteer who is a Muslim American, which you can read here: http://blackhijabiinindonesia.com/2015/09/13/hijab-privilege/ ]

                All that being said, the vast majority of people that I’ve met here, have accepted and loved as I am. I have been welcomed. I have never been told to go home. I have never been called evil, violent, or accused of conspiring against the people in my community. I have never been the suspect of a crime, had my things destroyed, or been overtly bullied. I have never been held responsible for things other Americans or Catholics have done. I have never been blamed for the actions of my government. No one has told me that the world would be a better place if my entire country were nuked or destroyed. I have been invited to religious ceremonies without being forced to participate. I have had Muslims offer to find churches or Catholic communities for me. Furthermore, just because some reverse prejudice exists doesn’t make other prejudice excusable or okay, especially not in the US, a country that preaches liberty and opportunity for all peoples, no matter their background.

 

A fellow non- Muslim Peace Corps Indonesia volunteer wrote in a recent blog:

            
“The people who took us as strangers into their homes are in fact Muslim. These are the people that taught me how to eat with my hands, how to use a squat toilet, how to get from point A to point B, which bus to get on when I am traveling, invite me to their family gatherings, and take care of me when I am sick. Most of these people would give me the shirt off of their back…This is my country of service and these are the people I am serving alongside. I consider that to be a privilege. It is disturbing to me that just because the Extremists also claim to practice their religion, they get a bad reputation for it, and it is not fair in the slightest. One of my students was actually under the impression that Muslims were not allowed in the United States because of all the hate she has seen on the media. That breaks my heart…So for the next person that wants to try to preach their  “Islamophobia” towards me, please take a step back, because that is my family you are talking about.” (taken from katindonesia.tumblr.com/post/129467015440/ignorance)

Questions I have gotten from some Indonesians include, “Do all Americans hate us?” “Do they think I am a terrorist?” As I said at the beginning of this post, I spend a lot of time wondering how my students and friends here would be treated if they came to the United States. I spend time reading the things people from back in the States post on Facebook. Although I rarely see someone post something explicitly Islamophobic, I sometimes see my “liberal” and “tolerant” friends posting some meme comparing Republicans to Muslims as a way to disparage them or some passive aggressive joke implying that Muslims as a whole are extreme, or that Islam is some kind of static, blanket belief system with no diversity or subtlety. I think back to those two idiots at the bar in Seoul.

Sometimes my students tell me that they want to come to America. I look at their smiling faces and think of how genuinely excited most of them are to see me and talk to me. I want to be able to tell all of them that if they went to my country, they would be accepted and loved as much as they have accepted me. I want to tell them that my country is great and beautiful and that they could travel there proudly as Muslims without being harassed or garnering suspicion. I want to tell them that Americans would be curious about them and ready to learn from them. I want to promise them all these things. And I do think they probably would be welcomed and loved and treated well by most people. I have to have faith that the majority of my countrymen would treat my students as the beautiful individual people they are and not as potential criminals or ticking time bombs. I must believe that most Americans would accept their religion as a part of their unique identities, not as a character flaw that needs to be corrected.

I need to trust that most Americans are smarter and better than the sickening phobia tainting our politics and rhetoric, that most Americans are open to learning and accepting, that most Americans would give my Muslim students a chance to teach them about themselves, and that most Americans want to move closer and closer to the ideals of freedom and tolerance on which our nation was founded. I am the only American my students and most of my community has ever met. I am representing our country. To consider that the alternative might be true, that our phobia of them might be stronger than our tolerance, would make me ashamed to represent our country to them.

 So, to my friends and family back home, I ask you to examine some of the beliefs you might have. If there are any that wouldn’t make me proud to walk into my Muslim Indonesian students’ classrooms and represent America to them, then I ask you to take some time to think about whether those beliefs have come from a place of love and logic or one of irrational fear and hate.