'America’s bloodlust after 9/11 showed us that even doctors, engineers, and business entrepreneurs would be accepted only provisionally into the pantheon of whiteness'
Photo: Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos On September 11, 2001, I was a senior in college in Berkeley, California. I was a member of the Muslim Student Association who played NBA2K on his Sega Dreamcast with other chai-drinking dorks. Before 9/11, the plan was simple for people like me, a descendant of upwardly mobile Pakistani immigrants: Work hard and play by the rules, and you could become a “model minority” . After 9/11, that path was foreclosed forever.
The odd thing is that, despite all the hardships and frustrations of post-9/11 America, I’m glad that at least we were startled awake from the model-minority dream. The difference between fiction and reality was immaterial to a country gripped by chauvinism and Islamophobia. The first hate crime was against someone who wasn’t even Muslim: Balbir Singh, a Sikh Indian gas-station owner in Mesa, Arizona.
The fallout from 9/11 jolted me out of a middle-class, suburban cocoon of complacency and safety. I picked up a pen: to write, and to fight. On the radio and cable-news channels, non-Muslim “experts” were talking about us as if we were exotic zoo animals, to be observed and dissected with equal doses of horror and curiosity. We were brought on to these shows for “gotcha” interviews, and asked to condemn terrorism, of course.
I ignored their advice and decided to keep all the mirch and masala. When The Domestic Crusaders was finally produced as an Off Broadway play in 2009, the response was overwhelming. The play sold out shows, garnered international press, and won over diverse audiences who recognized themselves and their neighbors in a story of an American family struggling to integrate while preserving its own identity.
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