What’s Osama bin Laden Doing on My Office Door?

I am anybody’s picture of a white man with medium brown hair and green eyes. I have no facial hair, dress inconspicuously, and speak with a middle-American accent. I am also a first-generation Arab-American from a mixed Muslim-Christian family. Because of my ordinary appearance and obvious Americanisms, people have often forgotten themselves in my presence. Over the years friends and co-workers have indulged in racist, slang in front of me, calling Arabs “sand-niggers” and “rag-heads.” On many occasions, if I protested, they would squint curiously and say, “But you don’t look… you know,” as if they would have chosen their words more carefully, had I only made a better effort to fit their stereotypes. Jewish and Christian friends who have known me and my family for years will nonetheless assert that Arabs and Muslims are simply bad people, even while sitting at my dinner table, apparently in no fear of

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their lives.

As an academic, I move in a rarified world where tolerance is a sacred concept and openness to new ideas is supposedly a mantra. In academia, I enjoy liberties that many people of my ancestry do not have in the wider world, and I am sheltered from the punishment and hatred that greeted many Muslims after September 11. I’m lucky and I know it.

I was a new faculty member at Ramapo College, having started in the Fall 2001 semester, two weeks before the September 11 attacks. Two days passed after the assaults before I returned and I had no illusions that it wouldn’t be a different place to work. The halls were filled with rage. All of a sudden, people began to realize that “Sam Mustafa” is the “Joe Smith” of the Islamic world. As students, staff, and faculty passed my office door, I repeatedly heard them trying to pronounce my name, usually with a worried over-emphasis: “Moo – Staffa…? What kind of a name is that?” Even when I was working at my desk, with my door wide open, students would gather outside, practice my suddenly foreign name, and stare at me as one stares at a zoo animal. When I made eye contact, they would turn away quickly. If I closed the door to get some peace, they were emboldened to hang out longer and talk louder, speculating as to whether or not I was a terrorist.

I passed classrooms that week from which I heard educators with doctoral degrees telling students shockingly xenophobic things: that Islam was a religion of hatred and oppression that needed to be fought—literally—and “corrected.” Colleagues are certainly not immune to the same feelings as their countrymen, simply because they are better educated than most Americans. But I was nonetheless surprised at how many experts on Islam suddenly existed in our faculty.

About a week after the terrorist attacks, I arrived at my office door to find everything pulled from the corkboard and replaced by a picture of Osama bin Laden, with my name written over his turban and the sentence, “We’ve Found bin Laden.”

As harassment goes, this is pretty tame stuff. My father, a retired professor who is now in his 70s, has endured far worse. When I called my mother to ask how they were, she sighed and off-handedly said, “Oh, not so bad this time…. Just the usual phone calls.” She was referring to the random hate calls that would come to the house whenever something happened in the Middle East or whenever my father (who taught Middle Eastern politics) was interviewed by local media. The “usual” was generally something along the lines of: “Fucking towel-head, get out of our country!” But after September 11, my mother was pleased to report, there was only a nightly caller screaming “Allahu-Akhbar, motherfucker!” and hanging up. Not as bad as 1979 [during the Iran Hostage Crisis], she concluded. At least this time they weren’t threatening to kill her children.

I reported the Osama picture to campus security. The administration expressed their sympathy and embarrassment. For the rest of the semester, though, I was unable to keep anything on my office door; it was always stolen. Illegible graffiti appeared. A month later, Osama was back, this time in the popular Internet picture of him dressed as a 7-Eleven clerk and again with my name over his head. More security reports followed. The college president personally apologized and promised to expel or fire the perpetrator.

Immediately after the attacks, my wife squirmed as the reports filtered in from the “Little Baghdad” area of nearby Paterson, New Jersey, where someone had spread a rumor about local Arab-Americans celebrating the World Trade Center attacks. In response, Americans who viewed themselves as patriotic had driven down to that neighborhood, bashed in several heads, and thrown baseballs through the windows of a mosque. A Turkish gas station attendant was beaten to death on September 13 just three miles from our home. Friends and colleagues who work in local public schools reported stories of Muslim and even Hindu and Sikh children being hounded out of their schools by screaming classmates, while teachers were afraid to intervene. In comparison to this, my “door incident” seems so tame as to be pointless.

In spite of these events, I have reasons to feel optimistic about the community in which I live and work. For a week after the attacks I told a few colleagues that I planned to “lay low” and keep my mouth shut. I refused some early requests to speak at campus rallies and events, particularly when I sensed that some faculty wanted to use these events for polemical purposes. But as I received more requests to speak, I found more courage and began to appreciate the protections of a liberal society. In addition to campus events, I was invited by the local chapter of the League of Women Voters and by a teachers’ organization of the local public school system. Most people at these events

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were sincerely interested, polite, and willing to consider a variety of views.

About a month after September 11 I spoke with a Pakistani man who was tired of hearing complaints about the treatment of Muslims in America. He argued—quite correctly—that any country that had suffered an attack of this magnitude would take out its rage on ethnic minorities deemed to be related to the perpetrators. America, he reasoned, had behaved better than most would and he was grateful for that.

On balance, I agree with him. In my protected environment, where academia is often called “a community of ideas,” my only complaint is the readiness of people to connect ideas to ethnicity, as if ancestry equaled agreement. After September 11, ancestry apparently equaled culpability.

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