Tell us about a time when you felt out of place. “The Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. It was constructed by the West, and continues to be constructed, as a place of backwardness, threat, and difference.” — Edward Said, Orientalism In 2012, I was accused of something…
Tell us about a time when you felt out of place.
“The Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. It was constructed by the West, and continues to be constructed, as a place of backwardness, threat, and difference.”
— Edward Said, Orientalism
In 2012, I was accused of something so outrageous it still echoes through my bones. My boss, swollen with prejudice and power, claimed I sympathized with the 9/11 hijackers. It wasn’t clumsy ignorance. It was deliberate. To him, my identity as a Muslim, a Palestinian, an Arab woman was enough to collapse me into suspicion.He didn’t know my story.
He didn’t know I had lived in New York City on that terrible day in 2001, displaced by the towers’ collapse, walking streets blanketed in ash. He didn’t know I had volunteered at Ground Zero, lungs burning with dust, hands blistered from service. He didn’t know that two years later, in 2003, I had gone to Iraq with the U.S. military—not to wage destruction, but to stand where life was breaking, to serve, to help.
To accuse me of siding with hijackers was not only false; it was a grotesque inversion of truth. It erased grief. It erased service. It erased humanity. And yet his words were not only his own. They were the echoes of a larger story: a story centuries in the making—the long shadow of Islamophobia.
A Fear Cultivated, Not Born
Islamophobia was not born on September 11th. Its roots run deep in colonialism. European powers justified conquest by casting Muslims as despotic, violent, and irrational (Said, 1978). These caricatures outlived empire, shaping cultural imagination long after. By the late 20th century, Hollywood had turned Arabs and Muslims into one-dimensional villains: oil sheikhs, hijackers, terrorists (Shaheen, 2001).
When the towers fell, these tropes rose again. Grief was real, but it became a commodity of fear. Politicians blurred the line between faith and extremism, collapsing billions of people into the actions of a few. News cycles repeated burning images until fear became reflex. This was not simply prejudice—it was what sociologists call moral panic (Cohen, 2002), fear inflated and weaponized into law.
Narcissism at Scale
What my boss did to me in 2012 mirrored what the West did to Muslims globally after 9/11. Narcissism thrives on projection. It casts one’s own violence onto others to preserve the illusion of innocence (Twenge & Campbell, 2009). My boss erased my truth and recast me as disloyal so he could feel righteous. Nations did the same: invading Afghanistan and Iraq, displacing millions, while insisting Muslims were inherently violent.
This is narcissism at scale—the abuser posing as savior, the victim rewritten as threat. A form of societal gaslighting that forces those wounded to defend their own humanity.
Silence as Complicity
Cruelty thrives in silence. In my workplace, colleagues who knew my character looked away. Fear made them quiet. That silence was not neutral; it was complicity.
The same silence echoed through society. Hate crimes against Muslims spiked seventeen-fold after 9/11 (FBI, 2001–2002). Women in hijab were harassed, men detained, mosques surveilled. Yet much of the public looked away. Social psychology calls this the bystander effect (Darley & Latané, 1968). Injustice requires not only aggressors—it requires the quiet of those who choose not to intervene.
Muslims in Uniform: The Forgotten Patriots
My boss’s accusation also erased a longer history—that Muslims have fought and died for this country since its founding. In 2003, when I went to Iraq, more than 3,500 Muslims were actively serving in the U.S. military (Pew Research Center, 2011).
Captain Humayun Khan was one of them. In 2004, he ordered his soldiers back from a suicide bomber and stepped forward himself. He took the blast, saving his unit. Years later, his parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, held up their son’s memory at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, confronting the rhetoric of exclusion with the truth of sacrifice.
Or James Yee, the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay. He ministered to detainees and soldiers alike, living the principle of service. For this, he was falsely accused of espionage, imprisoned, later cleared. His story shows the paradox clearly: Muslims served faithfully, yet suspicion followed even in uniform.
Muslims are not outsiders to this nation’s history. We were in the Revolution, the Civil War, both World Wars, Vietnam. Some lie buried in Arlington, their headstones marked with crescents (CAIR, 2008). Yet Islamophobia erases these truths, insisting again and again that Muslims do not belong.
From My Case to a Nation’s Case
Seen this way, what happened to me in 2012 was not just personal. It was a microcosm of a national script. My boss accused me of what I had never been, ignoring the truth of who I was. In the same way, a society accused Muslims of being perpetual threats, erasing grief, loyalty, and contribution.
The Trump era made this script explicit. His 2017 “Muslim Ban” sent families into chaos at airports, stranded students abroad, and told the world that belonging could be revoked with the stroke of a pen (Beydoun, 2018). Even after its repeal in 2021, the residue lingers. Polls show Muslims still viewed more coldly than nearly any other group (Pew Research Center, 2021). Schoolchildren report bullying at alarming rates (CAIR, 2021). Job applicants with Muslim names are still less likely to be hired, especially women who wear hijab (Ghumman & Ryan, 2013).
Islamophobia adapts. Sometimes loud, sometimes subtle. Always erasing. Always rewriting.
Erasure and the Cure of Storytelling
At its core, Islamophobia is erasure. It erases Muslims who died in the towers. It erases the Muslim volunteers at Ground Zero. It erases soldiers like Khan and chaplains like Yee. It even tried to erase me—my grief, my service, my humanity.
But trauma studies remind us that healing begins with narrative (Herman, 1992). Erasure is the wound; storytelling is the cure. Every time we tell our stories, we refuse silence. Every testimony is resistance, a fragment of memory that pushes back against distortion.
Truth Still Breathes
Islamophobia “took over society” because fear was profitable, useful, and contagious. But its power is not eternal. My boss’s lie is already dust. My truth still breathes: I was in New York on 9/11. I volunteered at Ground Zero. I went to Iraq. I was accused, but I refuse erasure.
This struggle is larger than me. It belongs to Muslim families burying sons in Arlington, to children enduring bullying in schools, to communities resisting surveillance. Islamophobia feeds on forgetting. Resistance begins with remembering.
We are not shadows. We are not suspects. We are human. We grieve, we serve, we create, we resist. And our stories still live.
“Human beings are not only what they are, but also what they have the power to become.”
— Edward Said
References
Beydoun, K. A. (2018). American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. University of California Press.
CAIR. (2008). Muslim Veterans in the U.S. Military. Council on American-Islamic Relations.
CAIR. (2021). Bullying and Islamophobia in U.S. Schools: A Report.
Cohen, S. (2002). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Routledge.
Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4), 377–383.
FBI. (2001–2002). Hate Crime Statistics: United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Ghumman, S., & Ryan, A. M. (2013). Not welcome here: Discrimination toward women who wear the Muslim headscarf. Human Relations, 66(5), 671–698.
Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books.
Pew Research Center. (2011). Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism.
Pew Research Center. (2021). Americans Express Increasingly Warm Feelings Toward Religious Groups.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Vintage Books.
Shaheen, J. (2001). Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Interlink Publishing.
Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2009). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Free Press.