War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims

1. Melody

O N E Melody It is not righteousness That ye turn your faces Towards East or West; But it is righteousness— To believe in God And the Last Day, And the Angels, And the Book, And the Messengers; To spend of your substance, Out of love for Him, For your kin, For orphans, For the needy, For the wayfarer, For those who ask, And for the ransom of slaves; To be steadfast in prayer, And practice regular charity, To fulfill the contracts Which ye have made; And to be firm and patient, In pain (or suffering) And adversity, And throughout All periods of panic. Such are the people Of truth, the God-fearing. —QUR’AN, AL BAQARAH (THE COW), : I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda. I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such, I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole. —MALCOLM X, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X My parents, especially my father, have always cautioned me against religion in general,and for the most part,they have been right in doing so. They never fully endorsed the practice of one religion to the exclusion of any others in raising either my sister or myself. This is perhaps why I was so adamant in my initial refusal to write this chapter.It took a great deal of goading from my agent at the time to do it, and even then, I must admit that I began writing reluctantly. But ultimately, I did write it, not because my agent wanted me to but because I thought it was only fair to subject myself to the same scrutiny to which I had subjected all of the other individuals whose stories I had been entrusted to tell in the pages of this book. I couldn’t very well bring myself to tell the stories of others from my own admittedly subjective standpoint if I hadn’t first laid out where that subjectivity was coming from. The last time I remember going to a mosque with my family,I must have been seven or eight years old. We had gone to this mosque in downtown Dayton every couple of weeks since I could remember, and I liked it mostly because they always had doughnuts,which we never had at home,and because the kids were always just playing hide-and-seek when they weren’t eating doughnuts.On that last visit,we were greeted by police.The mosque had been vandalized by some neo-Nazi kids who apparently thought it was a synagogue. It was covered in swastikas, and the windows were all broken. We stopped going after that because my dad said it wasn’t safe, and eventually, my sister and I started going to piano lessons instead, which I hated because I was always being upstaged at recitals by this Korean prodigy half my age and, to top it off, there were never any doughnuts. If anything, the religion of our household was education, and focusing on one tradition of any variety—religious,cultural,or otherwise—would only limit our education. My parents had no problem sending us to a Catholic school when it was the best school in our district, and they had no problem sending me to live with nuns in Spain to study alone at the University of Madrid when I was only sixteen because my Spanish teacher assured them that it would be a priceless educational experience. My dad used to make me look up and write down every new word I heard or read in the English language in a steno pad, and he would test me on them weekly. He refused to let me get away with having less than perfect English just because he did. More than anything else, though, he refused to let me have a chip on my shoulder just because I was the child of immigrants, or looked different from most other kids growing up in Dayton, or spoke a different language, or didn’t Melody  worship Christ.There was an absolute prohibition on bitching about that kind of thing in the Moezzi household. I remember going to a slumber party in the eighthgradeandhavingacoupleof girlscornermeasIwastryingtogotosleep. They insisted that I accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God before...