All-American

This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror by Moustafa Bayoumi (NYU Press, $19.95).

Moustafa Bayoumi is an English professor, actor and essayist, and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror collects essays that have been published over the last several years. The essays focus on what Bayoumi calls the “War on Terror culture,” which has actually worsened since the election of President Obama, thanks to the persistent conspiracy theory that he’s a secret Muslim out to institute sharia law.

Those of us who are close to–or are–Muslim Americans know how very difficult it has become to navigate life in the U.S., where every Muslim, no matter how secular, is expected to denounce every act of terrorism everywhere in the world and, even if this is done religiously, remains suspect in some corners. What Bayoumi does is make this near-universal experience visible for those of who might not otherwise see it in action; if we lack a diverse group, it’s quite easy to miss the reality of Islamophobia as it plays out both in our institutions and in our communities.

Bayoumi examines at the tactics used by the NYPD in Arab Muslim communities (and you can bet that these are similar to tactics used elsewhere); the ways that Islamophobia manifests both similarly and differently to “typical: American racism; and the history of Little Syria, an Arab American neighborhood in lower Manhattan that flourished from the 1880s to the 1940s—and that overlapped with the footprint of the World Trade Center.

This last section is particularly fascinating, as most Americans don’t know how integral Muslim Americans have been to building the United States, nor how deeply rooted these communities are; the story of “Little Syria” is a wonderful example of hidden American history.

(Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com) ( )