On defending Muslims

Ms. Khakpour, an Iranian-American, captures well the experience of protecting people while disagreeing with their ideology. Her editorial was published in the New York Times yesterday, on the anniversary of the day a group of Muslims plotted to wreck the World Trade Center in New York City.  Her example of taking up someone else's reputation can apply to Muslims, Amish, Mormons, ATI-ers, Democrats, Tea-Partiers, or anyone. It also dignifies un-anonymous (onymous?) relationships, where you know you're talking to a real person who knows how to blush.

Porochista Khakpour, "My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern-American." New York Times, September 11, 2010.

The hilarity started to curdle at the moment I was also feeling the most euphoric: during Mr. Obama’s bid for the presidency. It was around then that I began murdering whole days on the Internet, and not just on the Internet but in its dirty basement, the comments sections of blogs. There, an angry tribe of fake names spoke in misspelled obscenities and declaimed the true, evil nature of Middle Easterners and their intentions in this country. This is silly, I’d tell myself, these trolls aren’t representative of my neighbors or of Americans.

Then I’d go on Facebook, and engage in more online warfare with friends of friends, real flesh-and-blood people with real-life names, who a bit more politely and grammatically stated the same. And there was me — a non-Muslim, who has publicly criticized certain Islamic practices — flaccidly battling for Muslims worldwide. It got to the point that I was telling people I didn’t even know that their opinions were making my life downright “unlivable.”

It reminds me of how I used to experience so many mixed emotions when I’d see women in full burqa in Brooklyn: alarm at the spectacle (no matter how many times I’d seen it), followed by a certain feminist irk, and finally discomfiture at our cultural kinship. And then it would all turn into one strong emotion — protective rage — when I’d see a group of teenagers laughing and pointing at them.

Porochista Khakpour, the author of the novel “Sons and Other Flammable Objects,” is a professor of literature at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.