me and homeland security

guess what kind of reception the "land of the free" gives you upon returning home after two years of "service" in one of the "poorest countries in the world"?

how about one of disbelief, suspicion, prejudice and humiliation? you guessed it.

after holding me up and cross-examining me and inspecting my luggage and conscience for five hours, the folks at the department of homeland security finally decided that they "had to let me go." this is an account of the five hours that preceded their gracious decision, and of why i think this country has gone

completely fucking crazy.

it started slowly. what seemed like normal customs procedures. but from the very beginning, the lady's questions had an incredulous tone, and everything that i said was met with an incredulous response. and when it was clear that things weren't going well and that this was going to take a while, i asked if i could make a phone call. which was met with the customary, suspiciously-toned repeat of whatever it was that i just happened to say, "you want to make a PHONE CALL?"

Yes, I'd like to call my parents to let them know that I'm going to miss my flight so that they won't worry about me.

she said that she would ask someone. but instead, the next thing i knew she, along with a big man with gloves on, were escorting me to another room meant for "authorized personnel" only. seeing the guy with the gloves, i was thinking they were going to strip me and probe my anus. but that situation never materialized.

i was taken to a room where i sat alone with about 5-7 officers, some going in and out of the room. there were 2 officers interrogating me, and a 3rd guy who thought he was on the set of "lethal weapon" occasionally quipping idiotic statements which i'm sure he thought were wisecracks.

my five intimate hours with these folks left me sure of a few things:

1) they want to control your mind. by "they" i mean the government and the agencies that are supposed to "protect our borders." namely the department of homeland security. they don't want you to think anything they don't want you to think.

2) they made it crystal clear to me that they were after me because i was muslim and asked detailed questions about what my own personal faith was and what it was that i believed.

3) they have no idea about what they talk about.

4) they, the people that are supposed to be "protecting our borders," are complete idiots.

my bags were thoroughly checked. disembowelled along with my conscience. personal letters and papers, my diary, my books, were all skimmed and read.

and questions were asked. always with a skeptical tone, and my responses were met with the same tone.

upon finding tanya reinhart's book "Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948," the customs lady asked me, "Why are you reading THIS?"

I like to know what's going on in the world. Don't you?

apparently not.

but the worst questions were the ones pertaining to religion.
Officer#2: "Why did you choose Islam?"

I didn't choose it, I was born into it.

Officer#2: "Well then, why did you CHOOSE to follow Islam [after having been born into it.]?"

Well, it's part of my heritage.

at one point they read a passage in my diary where i wondered if there was any such thing as a soul. i wasn't sure. thereafter followed detailed and antagonistic questions asking to explain my personal faith.

Officer#2: "What do you MEAN you don't know what you BELIEVE in?," almost yelled at me.

well, i'm just not sure if there's a soul or not. you can't really prove that.

Officer#2: repeated, "What do you MEAN you don't know what you BELIEVE in?"

they weren't happy with my answer. they are uncomfortable with nuance. with probing. with any inquistive minds who care to know what's going on in the world or who ask questions or think things that don't fit inside their ready-made response boxes. they want black and white answers for their black and white worldview. they want to know, are you with us or are you against us? they want to know, you a good muslim or a bad muslim? well, i'm muslim, and i think you think that's bad.

it was hard to explain my personal faith to the detailed extent they were asking. for one you feel under attack. the other, faith is not so simple. especially when a bunch of hostile officers are looking for something to grab and haul you in on.

i explained i wasn't a very orthodox or strict or conventional muslim. which was hard to explain to people who think they know about islam but actually have an astonishingly shallow view of it. they wanted to know in what way i was not "orthodox." in the end i had to say i wasn't orthodox because i didn't believe that there was one true faith in the world, that i thought each faith contained truth and falseness, and that one should strive for the truth. you'd think that was as ecumenical an answer as you could give. but still they weren't happy. it didn't fit into their box. black/white. with/against. goodmuslim/badmuslim.

they also wanted to know the name of the mosque i went to in agordat, eritrea. i said, in all honesty, i didn't know the name. which suddenly awakened the faux muslim scholar sleeping in the officer to my left. "There's no such THING as a mosque with no name," accusingly he informed me.

i said i thought official names were a very american thing, not necessarily a very universal or very eritrean thing. and that in any case, i didn't know the name of the straw-roofed building that was the mosque, i didn't think most of the residents of the town knew the name, that i didn't even know the name of the mosque i attended in richardson, and that even if i knew the name he probably wouldn't be able to pronounce it.

the name of the mosque was one issue they didn't let go. till the end they thought i was hiding it from them, and they kept asking me.

the comic-relief-reject from the set of "lethal weapon" would occasionally jump in. "ERITREA! WHY would you go THERE?! It's one of the POOREST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD!"

That's why I went there.

i had all kinds of forms, certificates, letters of reference to show that i had a legit teaching job in eritrea. but still, they wondered, "you're sure all you were doing in eritrea was teaching?"

comic-relief man's grand-prize question was asked as he was looking at photos of my students in eritrea: "Man, what were you doing in NWFP (North West Frontier Province, Pakistan)?!"

bewildered, i responded, "That's Eritrea. The people in those photos are Black. They are not Black in NWFP."

ok, so not NWFP, then they asked where i had been in pakistan besides karachi. i mentioned lahore and islamabad.

Officer#1: "Lahore, that's real RADICAL place."

I looked at him as if he were crazy.

Officer#1: "Ok I guess you don't think it's radical?"

I explained that no, I did not think that Lahore was a radical place. I didn't see it as being very different from Karachi. I explained that it's a city of over 5 million people and that you can't reduce an entire city of 5 million people into a "radical place." There are people of all walks of life and from all sorts of educational backgrounds living in Lahore. To call it a radical place would be like calling the entire city of Houston a radical place.

Officer#1: "Ok then, which places in Pakistan do you consider radical?"

I didn't think you could call any of the big cities radical. They are cities of millions of people coming from different places and from different backgrounds. You can't call an entire city of millions a radical place.

after the personal questions came probably the scariest part of the night. when they searched through their database and asked me about people i knew. they asked about my parents, my grandmother, relatives, distant relatives, friends, friends of friends. they knew all of these people. had their names, knew their whereabouts, in some cases more so than i did. i felt like i was being monitored and was walking a tight-rope. like if i happened to jay-walk in a few days i would be arrested.

after five hours of questioning and luggage and brain inspection, they told me they had to let me go.

their stupidity, like when they clung to the issue of whether i believed in a soul and kept asking me, "what do you MEAN you don't know what you BELIEVE in?," might've been strategy, i concede that. maybe they were just trying to find something, anything, to grab onto, and were trying to make me "crack" somehow. but, maybe they're just stupid. i mean, if i were a terrorist, a fanatic, would i be pondering things like whether there is a soul, and questioning my faith? probably not. i would know exactly what i believe and be ready to die for it. it'd be black and white. but that's what i think is the thing. they're just as black and white as any terrorist. and they wanted my answers to match their white answers. no room in the middle, no room for inquiring minds. tell us what you believe, this or that, none of this wishy-washy thinking shit.

and then of course their stupidity was shown in the standard way these days. the pundit who knows islam but doesn't know the world, so hence knows nothing. there's no room for the real, for the world, for humanity, in their and in many people's understanding of islam. islam is not treated as a real culture by any of these pundits-without-a-brain. it's understood as a pathology. it can be understood completely by reading books in isolation, and any of the marks of a real culture--dynamism, variance, deviations, the way real people live everywhere, are not considered, are not accepted. ditto that for many western attitudes towards/understandings of any third world culture or society. it's taken that you can completely understand these places and people by a simple set of rules to be learned and mastered. they are like puppets in a show we can read the script of. asked about our own societies, the first thing we say is "it depends," fully recognizing the complexities of any society. when asking about another society, we want absolutes. we want the rules, because, implicitly, we are human, they are puppets. i've gone way off topic now, but to try to connect it, i'm thinking my interrogators must've thought, what the hell kind of muslim doesn't know if he believes in a soul? i didn't read about this in "The Arabs." you a goodmuslim or a badmuslim? you moderate or radical? we got no box for "muslim who doesn't know about souls."


the ordeal at the airport left me feeling like my family and i are being watched, along with many others, big brother style. maybe i'm being slightly paranoid, but it's still the way i felt, especially after they started scrolling through their database. more so than ever, it made me feel scared about living in america. i've experienced prejudice many times growing up here, but i've never felt more viscerally, it's never been shown to me so personally before, that being muslim is a crime. and i'm just the tip of the iceberg.