Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

This Fourth of July was bittersweet for me. It was the first one I spent without my daughter since her birth 5 years ago. I watched our community’s big fireworks show from my driveway rather than the park where family’s gather because I didn’t want to sit there and watch without my daughter on my lap. My daughter is overseas for the summer on vacation with her mom. She wanted to be here today to join our town’s children’s parade with her friends and to sit on her dad’s lap as the fireworks lit up the sky. Instead today she is in the country of my birth and I am here without her in the country of her birth.

Today I want to share with you some of my thoughts on being an immigrant and a Muslim American citizen. This is my story only and I am not sure if there is meaning here beyond one man’s thoughts on his American journey. Nonetheless I share it with you today.

I was born a Muslim in Bangladesh – one of the world’s most populous Muslim countries. I spent most of my childhood there. I have spent part of my childhood and all of my adult life in the United States. Like most children growing up in the Third World during that time, I was fascinated with America. America was the land of Coca-Cola, bell-bottom pants, and Western movies. America was also the land of Thomas Jefferson, FDR and John and Robert Kennedy. America was the land of the Bill of Rights, the Marshall Plan and Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of all, America to me represented possibility. It was the country that could send a man to the moon and unite the whole world in one breathless moment when the first footprint was made on a world beyond our planet. Possibility.

The two Americans I admired the most when I was growing up were John and Robert Kennedy. They both represented possibility. If you go to the Third World, even today you may find in a hut in some remote village a weathered piece of newspaper with an image of JFK. JFK represented America. He sent forth an army across the Third World not to conquer by force but by example. JFK created the Peace Corps – an army of volunteers that spread the decency of America by helping the most unfortunate. JFK also stirred the world by his clarion call from West Berlin. "Let them come to Berlin", he said:

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.

JFK was larger than life. For a boy growing up in the Third World he represented America and its spirit. I finally made it to Berlin as a college student in 1987. I saw the wall that JFK gazed upon. Two years later that wall was to be no more.

Robert Kennedy was hope. His words stirred me as a child growing up on the other side of the planet and they stir me today. Edward Kennedy in his eulogy for his brother quoted him:

There is discrimination in this world and slavery and slaughter and starvation. Governments repress their people; millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich and wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere. These are differing evils, but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility towards the suffering of our fellows. But we can perhaps remember — even if only for a time — that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek — as we do — nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

…

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.[It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.] Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

 With his voice cracking with emotion, Edward Kennedy concluded:

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."

Robert Kennedy took the conscience of America to the poorest of the Third World and in doing so touched us all. One can only imagine how different our world might be if this man had been allowed to live. Robert Kennedy to me was possibility.

I came to America, like many before me and many since, for a chance at a better life. I came to America because this country produced men like the John and Robert Kennedy. Even though I have spent most of my life in America I still carry the weight of being an immigrant and a Muslim in post 9/11 America. After 9/11 my loyalties were subject to question. Suddenly instead of my actions, it was my religion and the color of my skin that defined me. I have talked more about my religion since 9/11 then in all my life previously. I have mostly had to defend my religion, and by implication me, from charges that it was a religion that glorified terrorism. Yet, with all that has happened, yet despite this country being senselessly attacked, it is a testament to the tolerant nature of American society that my family and I do not find ourselves in internment camps or some other similarly constructed arrangement. It is quite likely that if an attack such as 9/11 had happened to another country Muslims like me may not have fared so well.

A large part of the reason the situation has not deteriorated to an extreme level for American Muslims like me is the Constitution of the United States. Civil liberties represented by the Bill of Rights are very much a fabric of American society. It is those civil liberties that draw immigrants like me to this country and those civil liberties that protect Muslims like me from collective punishment. Yet today these liberties are under threat from our own Government in the name of security. But I believe that the foundations of the Constitution are strong enough to withstand any challenge and, with vigilance, in the end these liberties will survive the onslaught upon them.

I look forward to a day in America when my daughter will be referred to as an American, not a Muslim American. A day when she will be judged by only her actions not her religious beliefs. That day will not come soon, but that day will come. That day will come not because American bombs will win against "terror". That day will come because of the strength of American ideas and ideals. American statesmen like John and Robert Kennedy told the world that day would come. I believe it is possible because this country is about possibility. The world awaits that day, America awaits that day, and I await that day.