War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims

8. Molham

E I G H T Molham Behold! In the creation Of the heavens and the earth; In the alternation Of the Night and the Day; In the sailing of the ships Through the Ocean For the profit of mankind; In the rain which God Sends down from the skies, And the life which He gives therewith To an earth that is dead; In the beasts of all kinds That He scatters Through the earth; In the change of the winds, And the clouds which they Trail like their slaves Between the sky and the earth— (Here) indeed are Signs For a people who are wise. —QUR’AN, AL BAQARAH (THE COW), : I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. —GALILEO GALILEI,“LETTER TO THE GRAND DUCHESS CHRISTINA” () When Molham suggested the Four Seasons as our first meeting place, I thought he was either trying to impress me with his sophisticated taste or test me to see if stuff like that carried any weight in my eyes. I had no idea that he had offices there, let alone that he lived there.I mean, who,other than spoiled heiresses and rock stars, actually lives in the Four Seasons? Molham does. But he definitely didn’t grow up there. As a Palestinian born in ,Molham grew up all over the place: Beirut, Geneva, Cairo, Athens. He came to the United States in , when he was in the tenth grade,and became a U.S.citizen shortly thereafter.His father was one of eleven children. At around age fifteen, he left his home, a small West Bank village by the name of Burqua,to study agriculture at a vocational school. He taught himself enough to receive a full scholarship to the American University of Beirut and then received an assistantship allowing him to study for his Ph.D. at Auburn University in Alabama. After finishing his Ph.D., Molham’s father accepted a job offer from Dupont to work in their agricultural chemicals division. After a few months of training in Delaware, he was sent to Lebanon, where he met Molham’s mom. The youngest of thirteen children, she had spent most of her youth in a Catholic boarding school in Beirut. When she was nine, her mother died in a car accident in Lebanon, just after her family moved there from Senegal, where they had owned and run a profitable textile company.After her mother’s death, she remained in boarding school, her older sister taking on the role of her guardian until she turned nineteen, when she met Molham’s father, who was eight years her senior.After a six-month courtship,they married,and less than a year later, Molham was born in Beirut. Molham describes his mother as artistic and refined:“She was into ballet , art, music. You know, that kind of stuff.” His tone changes entirely when he describes his father:“He’s a work-hard, school-school-school, rainy-day, disaster-scenario kind of guy.” This“rainy-day, disaster” mentality, however, has proven useful, given his father’s experiences, and may in fact have been a result of some of those experiences.After the Six Day War, while he was still studying atAuburn,Molham’s dad immediately became a refugee,unwelcome in his own homeland. He couldn’t go back to live with his mom or his sister because all Palestinians who were outside of the country during the war were prohibited by the new Israeli government from reentering as anything more than tourists. “None of us have any rights there. We can at least visit now, but today Molham  someone who lives in Russia who happens to be Jewish has more rights there than any of us do.I went back in ,after twenty-seven years,when my sister , Lana, graduated from MIT. Her present to herself was a trip back. We went together for three weeks. We visited Jordan, the West Bank, and Lebanon. We saw our cousins and aunts, who we hadn’t seen in forever, but it wasn’t all tea and roses.They were all still confined to their homes and they continue to be,with tanks outside their front doors to constantly remind them that they are unwelcome in their own land. It’s...