“What’s his name?” I asked my more-awake husband on a Sunday morning as he told me about the carnage in Orlando, Florida. It was a little less than five months, almost to the day, before America would elect Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States.
America’s largest mass shooting—and it was a deranged lone-ranger, again. The target? A gay nightclub, Pulse, in Orlando. Odds were it was yet another psychopathic white male with the typical easy access to guns Americans unfortunately enjoy. But my instincts were different this time.
“It’s going to be a Muslim,” I said. It was similar to the certainty I had been expressing for months with friends and Keith, angered by my belief that a Trump presidency was inevitable and imminent.
“Why on earth would you say that?” said Keith. “The majority of these shootings are carried out by unhinged white guys.” I just repeated my sad premonition as we swiped through various websites on our phones. Hashtags like #Orlando, #OrlandoStrong, and others were spreading faster than the Zika virus, and Facebook “stati” were rapidly changing. The tweetology of Orlando was building up fast.
“I am doing it for ISIS,” or a similar statement, is what this mass murderer allegedly claimed in a call to a stricken night-shift producer at the local News 13 of Orlando. The CIA would later debunk the theory of any connection between the shooter and the Islamic State. It was said the gunman even managed to call 911 in the middle of his massacre. He lay dead at 5:53 a.m. according to this tweet from Orlando police: “Pulse Shooting: The shooter inside the club is dead.”
Hours later, I was proved right. It was a Muslim name, Omar Mateen, a probable self-hating gay Muslim who some claimed had a profile on Grindr, a gay-hookup app. Heavily armed, he had walked into Pulse at 2:02 a.m. After three hours of absolute annihilation, forty-nine lay dead. And fifty-three were seriously wounded. I remember thinking to myself that we Muslims in the West bore some responsibility. Our time for victimhood, as far as I was concerned, was over. More Islamophobia post-Orlando? And why not? Butchery in the name of Islam has been carried out almost every single day in the years following 9/11. History will forever mark our times as a period of a violent Islam.
My pledge of allegiance was just a year old and America’s rightward spiral was well underway. This fascist American summer was a mere foretaste. Trump had built a coalition for whom a “Muslim registry” was just one of many hateful battle cries.
“There will be scores of new Mateens,” I said to the printed press that called, saying no to cable producers. I just didn’t know how to make a case in pithy soundbites.
Using an ugly-face Kimoji, oversize blue teardrop falling from exaggerated false eyelashes, I texted Adham, my friend in Saudi Arabia: “Trump will win. And now it will be years of Muslim psychos saying they killed for ISIS.” Sitting in his Jeddah home, he too replied with a sad-face Kimoji.
To my husband that morning, I said, “Muslim check. Daesh check. This is a war that will never end. They can all invoke the Quran for violent jihad and they do and they always will.”
“But don’t you espouse reading the Quran in context? Isn’t that hypocritical?” Keith asked. He had lived through years of my making a very public case against Islamophobia, using the Quran as my primary tool. I had always been a Quran defender. Had I changed so much?
“Not even nearly,” I replied, “The Quran is an almost schizophrenic text.”
“What on earth is that supposed to mean?” he asked.
I told him about how the book that took twenty-three years to reveal was not revealed sequentially and to some could even seem discombobulated. I told him how its Surahs (chapters) were seen as either Meccan (revealed in Mecca) or Medinan (revealed in Medina). The latter, some said, were more “violent” because the Medinan Muhammad had tasted war. Pre-migration, the Meccan Muhammad had been a haunted and broken man. A pacifist, and thus the nature of those revelations.
“It’s almost as if there are two different Qurans all mixed up,” I said. “And I would even dare to add that it’s almost as if there are two different Muhammads in the Quran and the later canons of Islam.”
“Stop saying that in public. I think that’s dangerous,” he said, hugging me tightly.
Was there safety in my little island of Manhattan? “It sits off America’s coast and should be an independent nation,” I used to joke. In this changed America, would I dare to publicly wear that T-shirt I had once bought in a Southall shop in London? The T-shirt was Saudi-flag green and in bold letters proclaimed: “Don’t Panic. I’m Islamic.” I treasure it to this day.
Trump’s spooky campaign was racist and misogynist. It made PC obsolete. Millions of American tongues were suddenly untied. America’s dark side was becoming its visible one. On this June 12, 2016, massacre, Trump tweeted twice. One tweet went, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” Neither tweet had any state of grace or condolence. We were going to “elect” a cold-blooded monster. His voters preferred brown, dead gays anyway.
The nihilistic ISIS allegedly celebrated his ascent. Almost five months later as Trump won the US presidency, USA Today quoted an entity called “the al-Minbar Jihadi Media network,” affiliated with the “Islamic State,” saying, “(We) rejoice with support from Allah, and find glad tidings in the imminent demise of America at the hands of Trump.” For other Islamic anarchists, Orlando, Brexit, and finally the US election were all “proof” of the “demise of the West” that would bring “civil war” and “destruction.” As I continued to troll the dark web, I found others claiming affiliation to ISIS, saying this would all fuel “recruitment.” Islamophobia is a real thing, and I continue to live it. But the more “moderate Muslims” invoke it, the greater the power ISIS gets to recruit against what it sees as the Christian West, the enemy of Islam, against whom violent jihad is a religious duty. Trump, for ISIS, is a blessing like none other.
I wondered if Trump knew that his idea of a violent, misogynist, and offensive Islam was eerily similar to how ISIS or Saudi Arabia’s ruling Wahhabi ideologists interpreted and presented the faith. This felt like the beginning of the Talibanization of America. Like the Taliban, Trump and his followers would turn the clock back.
If there had never been an Obama, there would not be a Trump. The profound hatred of the former by the racist supporters of the latter was finally naked. This all-white bigotry actually started in 2008. The line that runs from Sarah Palin through the birthers and the Tea Party to end up with the Trumpsters is a straight one. Mostly everyone ignored the fact that a significant percentage of White America never accepted a Black man as their president. They never accepted a Black family living in what had always been a very White House, which Michelle Obama eloquently reminded us was “built by slaves.” For some it was as if the Obama years didn’t even happen. Did that percentage vote for Trump? Absolutely. But even they probably could not have foreseen a near future where strange phrases like “the alt-right,” “fake news,” and “alternative facts” would enter common vocabulary.
Barack Obama was not allowed to create a post-racial America. The “Black Lives Matter” campaign was only one example. Trump made racism and all flavors of intolerance acceptable again. The white majority in this country knew that by 2020 the majority of children under five would be from a racial minority. And in mere decades America would be a majority-minority country. For now, the fearful and intolerant parts of Trump’s white-male majority clung to power as ferociously as they could.
As Trump headed to victory, an almost forgotten affliction called the “alt-right” grew insidiously stronger. This white-supremacist fringe movement that preferred Nazi salutes, shouted Hail Trump! at his rallies, and flashed other Third Reich–style accouterments was part of Trump’s winning coalition. Even the traditional Republican right had never seen anything like it. Initially on the shoulders of his right-hand man and alt-right hero Stephen Bannon, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and hate in general would all become unlikely brothers in Trump’s Nixonian Oval Office. This was the (viciously) Separated States of America. Europe was keeling rightward and there was no reason for America not to do the same. Like millions I felt it strongly. This crowd was entering the White House to alter history and maraud our future. At the same time I reminded myself that Islamic supremacy was but a mirror of white supremacy. A few months post-Mateen and during the Trump transition, a friend who is on the senior staff of a prominent senator reminded me, “Be careful. What you say. What you write. You are Muslim. The registry will probably never happen. But it’s a time for vigilance, Parvez. We feared it and now it’s here.”
At public events, I said that I, too, was a “radical” Muslim but of a very different kind.
Radicalization had been the word of the moment for a while. Orlando had attacked my core. I was a devout Muslim. And I was gay. I ended up writing an op-ed for the American news site called The Daily Beast, which it unfortunately titled, “Gay Muslim: Islam Is No Religion of Peace.” Thankfully there was a sub-headline, “Like the two other monotheisms that precede it, Islam has blood on its hands.”
A burden had been lifted. The apologetic “Islam is a religion of peace” was forever wiped from my vocabulary. After years of getting my hands dirty throughout the Muslim world, filming guerrilla-style in dictatorial regimes with no government permission, after literally risking my life to complete and film the harsh and ultimate Muslim journey, the Hajj, I finally had earned the confidence to say this. I had battled for the truth of my words. For Islam, I had literally put my life at risk more times than I could count.
“Read it. Loved it, man! For the first time imo you are speaking the complete truth. I told you all your Islam stuff is bull-shit!” reliably texted my Jeddah BFF Adham.
I texted him that a reread would tell him that I was not damning Islam. I was just asking for necessary self-contemplation amongst all Muslims—a generalization, but not one without precedent within the faith. Are all Muslims “terrorists”? No. But are all terrorists Muslim? The majority seem to be.
In Trump’s America I would be one of many with a target on our backs. We would come to realize again that there is no real understanding of American political culture without race at the center of it. Was it as simple as Muslim being the new Black? For those like me, the facts don’t help: Islam is seemingly at war with a large chunk of humanity. It is also at war with itself. And I have always fought hard not to be a casualty.