On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was riding my moped from the outskirts of Boston back to Cambridge.  My father had just called to make sure that I was no longer in New York City.  I stopped to see the burning World Trade Center on a 40-inch flat-screen television in a storefront display.  The rest of that day was a nightmare of trying to find my girlfriend across the overloaded cellular circuits of New York.

Like everyone, fear filled me those next few nights and days.  Repeated calls and emails finally got a response from an Egyptian-American friend of mine, who told me what was happening to her in New York City: “A kid that was a friend of the family was stabbed to death in Bay Ridge and another girl was stabbed, but she managed to survive. Two of my aunts have been harassed and their scarves were pulled off their heads. My mother has remained home since the incident … and as we were in the mosque on 96th, there was a bomb threat and everyone was evacuated.  It’s been a real shocking experience that has just caused me to be in a state of disbelief.”

With this on my mind, I began graduate school and soon was pursuing the research that would end up being my dissertation, an exploration of the experiences of Muslims in America.  Initially, I thought that the situation would be far more dire than I eventually learned.  As the research has progressed, I have become more and more optimistic.

I had planned to write this in a non-academic setting.  Unfortunately, Spencer Ackerman has beaten me to the punch.  His piece is well worth reading, and my research has led me to agree broadly with his conclusions.  However, one thing missing from his work is the fear that so many Muslims felt and continue to feel.  

What is striking about the Muslim response to this fear is how they are able to maintain optimism about their future in America.  The key to this is crucial to the experience of Muslims in America, and quite different from Western Europe.  Our long history of immigration has been colored by many negative incidents, for Chinese, Irish, Italians, and finally and most awfully, the internment of Japanese Americans.  Those of us on the political left often tend to fixate on the negative qualities of America, making it easy to forget just how good America is at integrating immigrants.  

Today, what we see and what a Muslim immigrant sees, is that these were followed by slow acceptance and eventual success in American society.  This is an invaluable ideological resource.  The tribulations of today do not have to be the reality of tomorrow.  When the mosque is firebombed, when your cousin is assaulted, you know that this is just a passing phase.  Endure.  Even if it is no rainbow, at the end there will still be a pot of gold.  For so many of those I spoke with, their future in America shines so brightly that even the darkest corners of the present are illuminated with hope.

Pete DeWan