Internment(6)

My parents look at each other. My mom puts her hand on mine. “I know we argued about it before, but your father and I believe this now more than ever. We will not deny who we are. We won’t lie about being Muslim. Muslims have been in America since the first slaves were brought here. Can you even imagine what they went through to hold on to Islam? What they endured?” Tears come to my mom’s eyes.

I turn to my dad. “Remember what you said before? About taqiyya? What about living to worship another day? Maybe you were right.”

My dad sighs and shakes his head. “Beta, I spoke out of fear, out of an instinct to protect you and your mom. And I do want to protect you, but I’m ashamed that I allowed myself to think, even for a minute, that hiding who we are would have been the right answer. Taqiyya, concealing our religion, is forgivable, but only under extreme duress—only to save lives. And the census was hardly a life-threatening situation. Look at Hazrat Summayah. If she didn’t conceal her faith, it hardly seems acceptable for us to do so.”

“She was tortured and impaled! That’s kind of a high bar for duress, don’t you think?” I pause, waiting for my parents to disagree with me, but they only exchange sad glances. I sigh and continue. “I understand what you’re saying. We can’t erase ourselves. But look at what happened to Nabra, and those Muslim students at Chapel Hill, and that seventy-year-old New Yorker who was almost beaten to death after two guys asked if he was Muslim. And those mosques that were burned down in Texas and Seattle? Remember those ‘Punish a Muslim Day’ flyers that mysteriously started showing up around Chicago and Detroit? Don’t you think we should’ve protected ourselves then? Now look at us. I feel like we can’t even breathe.”

I can see my words like knives, wounding my parents. My dad’s face falls. My mom walks back to her chair, her hands clenched in fists at her sides. “Layla. We made a choice. And it was the right one. What do you think you’re going to accomplish by rehashing it now? The past is the past.”

“Beta, we will do everything in our power to protect you,” my dad says, gently taking my mom’s hand in his. She unclenches her fist to accept his gesture. “But we can’t live a lie. It’s not only that every person in this town and campus knows who we are—we host the interfaith iftar every year, after all—”

“Hosted,” I say, cutting my dad off. “As in past tense. That all ended after the election, didn’t it?”

He continues, not missing a beat. “We have a moral and ethical obligation to tell the truth.”

So much of my dad’s poetry is about finding truth in small things. Of course he believes this. And my mom—her whole chiropractic practice is based on a holistic health approach to life. Sure, my dad calls her a spitfire, and she is tough. But her love is fierce, too, and lies and deception don’t enter her worldview. They both, in their own ways, so desperately want to see the good in people and the world.

During the election, with paranoia and Islamophobia and isolationism as the prevailing themes, my parents held on to this hope. During the primary debates, when the now-president said on national television that there was justification and precedent for a Muslim registry, my parents, along with so many others, dismissed it as fearmongering, red meat to rile up the base. They clung to their belief in the American ideals of equality and freedom of religion even when they heard our leaders say that men gathering around Confederate statues with hands raised in Nazi salute were “very fine people.” When politicians seized on an attack at a French nightclub to warn about creeping Sharia and sleeper cells on US soil and polls began to favor the Muslim ban and the registry, so many of us said, “It can’t happen here.”

The thing is, it’s not like half this country suddenly became Islamophobes because of any single event. But the lies, the rhetoric calling refugees rapists and criminals, the fake news, the false statistics, all gave those well-meaning people who say they’re not bigots cover to vote for a man who openly tweeted his hatred of us on a nearly daily basis. Through the political dog whistles and hijabis having their headscarves ripped off and mosques vandalized with swastikas and the Muslims who went missing—through all of it, my parents prayed and believed that things would get better. They seem to have this eternal flame of hope.

But that’s not me.

I stand up and take my plate to the kitchen. I’m not hungry anymore. I leave my parents to their hopes and prayers.





The president’s grating tone wafts up to my room. It’s not loud enough for me to hear, but every National Security Address hits the same notes. America First. Lots of euphemisms and misplaced superlatives. And fearmongering and the need to close borders and chain migration and illegals. And how he will make it all great again.

My parents keep the television on in the living room even though they’re in the basement, watching Pretty in Pink on an ancient portable DVD player. It’s one of my mom’s nostalgic high school faves. I’ve seen it dozens of times. I honestly can’t believe the disc hasn’t cracked in half yet. If I were a little bummed out, I’d probably welcome the distraction that is Ducky’s charm and the ridiculousness of Steff as a high school senior in an oxford unbuttoned to his midriff. But I’m not merely bummed out. I’m sick to my stomach. I feel like my skin doesn’t fit right. Saccharine sentimentality isn’t going to stop me from feeling helpless and terrified.