I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.
Mahmoud Darwish, “I Belong There”
You returned home just before my own return to Allah. From him we come and to him we return.
My father, Ali Amine Beydoun
I buried my father in a metro Detroit graveyard on October 3, 2016. It was only four months after I had accepted a tenure-track teaching position with the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, which presented me with the opportunity to continue my legal academic career at home—near the friends, family, and city that I loved. The timing of my homecoming was bittersweet, but was perhaps arranged according to some divine design to provide me with one final opportunity to mend wounds with the man I had been estranged from nearly all of my life. During the next four months, my father and I forged a surreal semblance of a father-and-son relationship—within the bleak and gray contexts of hospital intensive care units—before his final departure, which would come only months after I set foot back home.
I vividly remember helping wash my father, in line with the Islamic custom, on the day of his burial, reflecting on his absence for much of my childhood, and on how the country that lured him far from his native Lebanon gradually broke him and sent our family into a tailspin. My father spent much of his adult life, and my entire life, living between Michigan and the Middle East, a rolling stone blown by the winds and his whims far from my mother, older sister, younger brother, and myself. His void left us without a father at home for long stints, and it compelled my mother to work odd job after odd job, supplementing her modest wages with welfare and the money my siblings and I could muster up.
I never understood why my father made the choices he made, but learning about the earliest phases of his life, on the streets of Beirut, as a child from a poor Shiite Muslim family from southern Lebanon, provided some answers. He spent his whole life running toward something and away from something else, whether it was the family he was born to or the one he spawned and continuously spurned. Poverty, war, and the quest to make something of himself molded him, and at the same time, pulled him far from his loved ones. He was always gone, but this time, gone for good.
“Been waiting on you all my life/All my life, you’ve been missing all my life,” sang Frank Ocean. I must have played that song, “Nights,” off of his album Blond a hundred times the day of my father’s burial. Ocean’s words looped over and over in my head, with images from the distant and not so distant past springing up alongside them. That song today, and I am sure for many years to come, will remain a looming reminder of my father’s passing. The day of his funeral felt endless, and the weight of the finality of it all—the running to and from, the soul-piercing cries and sea of black, the turbulence of our relationship—sank my mind deep into the past. Memories of his sudden arrivals and departures, the financial and personal troubles his void created for my family, and the endless burdens my mother carried as a result—reflecting and remembering as my mind raced and my legs stood still.
En route to the graveyard, I reflected on the good times, and on his last days of life, plugged to a ventilator and an unsightly host of other medical devices, their numbers, graphs, and graphics spelling out that death was near. I thought about the dreams he voiced out loud for himself as I sat on his lap as a toddler, and the dreams he envisioned for me. Those days felt like ages ago, and his big voice and even bigger presence were whittled down to an emaciated body in a hospital bed.
“You are the man I always wanted to be,” my father whispered to me on a rainy April day in Detroit, the last time I heard his voice, weeks before he lost it permanently. His small, nondescript room, with a window looking onto Jefferson Avenue, was less than five miles from my new office and roughly thirty-four years from the day he took a snapshot of me smiling widely, in my lambskin jacket, in front of Detroit’s Renaissance Center on that same road.
“Perhaps he was summoning me home,” I often thought as I sat at his bedside during his final days, when, after years of rebuffing his attempts to start anew, I finally heeded his call. Only moments before it was too late.
My homecoming converged with his final departure, and the choreography of daily hospital visits, one-directional bedside chats, and an exchange of tears that communicated regret and fear danced away from the Reaper looming nearby. But the Reaper was unrelenting, always creeping forward despite my father’s best efforts to hold him off, and to hold on. Death’s advances were always unmistakable—at times stripping him of his voice, leaving his body with incorrigible sores, and causing streams of tears when he sensed that its sickle was nearing. If life begins with the promise of everything, then it ends with the emptiness of nothing.
My father and I always had a turbulent relationship, beginning even before my parents’ divorce in 1994. Our views often clashed and our paths diverged. But we pieced together a bond while he lay still, scared, and silent in a myriad of metropolitan Detroit hospitals that he cycled in and out of for nearly two years. Most importantly, I learned how a Muslim man who dropped out of school in the fifth grade in his native Lebanon and hustled on the streets of Beirut to provide for his family ultimately achieved his dreams through me. He fell short, as a husband, and for me, as a father. But before he took his final breath, I promised to carry him and his dreams to the finish. Or at the very least, to try my best to do so.
We said goodbye to my father for the final time that cool autumn day in Michigan. I remember his cold body rolling into the dirt and seeing his face one last time, pale but poised for the afterlife, and hearing the prayers of friends and family converging with the piercing cries of my sister, Khalida, who tended to him most closely during his final years. From God we come and to him we return. My father departed for his final homecoming shortly after I made my own.
Today, he lies buried only a few miles from the cafés he frequented, the friends he made, the streets and corners that perpetually remind me of him, where his long-estranged son returned and made a home. My father, a man who was a shadow for much of my life became real, present, and finally, a father, in his last days. Since his death, his shadow is ubiquitous in the city he brought us to in 1982, a city that would become the most concentrated, celebrated, and scrutinized Muslim American community in the country. I see him more today than I ever did before, and I listen closely to the vision he had for me and the pride that would beam from him when he read about my work.
His burial site is full of names like Mohammed, Hassan, Zeinab, Kareem, Marwa, and Fawzia, old and young Muslim Americans, who, like my father, migrated to, lived, and believed in the dream America offered. Like mine did on that day, their families congregated atop a patch of dirt—American dirt—to bid farewell and permanently lay loved ones to rest. Those same families continued to pursue dreams on behalf of the departed, and to give birth to new dreams by forming families and having children, building businesses and institutions, achieving professional and academic success. Muslim Americans of all ages, ethnicities, and generations are buried here, alongside my father, joined by millions of other Muslims buried elsewhere in the United States, who helped construct the very backbone of this nation, made immeasurable and irreplaceable contributions to it, and traveled from long distances and ravaged lands to enrich it—and despite what Islamophobia and its predecessor systems propagate by popular view and law, made this country what it is today.
My Detroit homecoming was met with immense difficulty, mourning, and heartbreak. I had been lured by an ailing father who lived long enough to see me on a consistent basis. My new office was a short drive from his hospital bed, and after his departure, a short drive to his final resting place. But in the coming months, my summoning back to Detroit would make even more sense. Roughly a month after my father’s passing, Donald Trump was elected to office, and the unhinged Islamophobia his presidency formally inaugurated would be acutely felt in metropolitan Detroit, the symbolic seat of Muslim America and the city I called home once again.
I watched the election returns alongside hundreds of Muslim American students and activists, mothers and fathers, on November 9, 2016, at the Arab American Museum Annex in Dearborn, Michigan. The crowd that came together that night overwhelmingly believed that Hillary Clinton would claim victory, as the political pundits and experts had forecast, and by doing so would put an end to the brazen Islamophobia unleashed by Donald Trump. Well, they and we were wrong, and Trump claimed Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, and one battleground state after another to win the presidency. The unexpected result of the 2016 presidential election, and the Islamophobia it endorsed, would usher in a different kind of mourning.
The room in the museum annex in Dearborn was gutted after the collective realization that Trump would become the country’s forty-fifth president, and fear crept onto the faces of Muslim Americans young and old. One young college student I had known since she was child, Nora, was visibly shaken. Like thousands upon thousands of women in metropolitan Detroit, Nora wore a headscarf. For the twenty-one-year-old, the article of cloth she diligently wrapped around her head every morning, as had the late Yusor and Razan Abu-Salha, was central to her identity. It was an expression of religious devotion and a symbol of solidarity with Muslim women who wear the hijab, a disproportionately maligned segment of the Muslim American community. Yet, that night, Nora revealed that she was considering removing her headscarf, fearing that it would attract the hateful backlash she read about in newspapers during the presidential race—a palpable fear shared by many young Muslim women in her social media feed on election night.
“I don’t know what to do,” she revealed to a circle of family and friends. Being Muslim in America has always been wrought with scrutiny and suspicion. But the entrance of Trump spelled emboldened Islamophobia, and for conspicuous Muslims like Nora, a far higher likelihood of harm.
“Acting Muslim” today in the United States invites suspicion from the state and maximizes the prospect of backlash from hatemongers. For Muslim Americans who confirm their religious identity by wearing headscarves or Islamic dress, fasting on Ramadan and regularly attending the mosque, merely practicing their First Amendment rights is perilous. Muslim Americans like Nora, driven by fear to conform, cover, or conceal their Muslim identity, may diminish the prospect of suspicion from the state or backlash from bigots, but in doing so they are complicit in supporting the very mission Islamophobia aims to advance—eroding and eliminating every manifestation of Islam, until it is gone from America altogether. Like the naturalization era discussed in chapter 2, when Muslims were legally prohibited from becoming citizens, Islam today is still effectively viewed as unassimilable and irreconcilable with American identity. Much has changed, but so much more has not.
As I have written elsewhere, “The decision to act as non-Muslim as possible is an emergent phenomenon in Trump’s America.”1 And as this book illustrates, it is a contemporary consequence of Islamophobia, an effect of the centuries-old systems that spawned it. Nora is not somebody I read about in a newspaper; she is someone I have known since she was a child. She grew up just blocks away from my mother’s home, in one of the most densely populated Muslim communities in the country. Nora is only a handful of years older than my two eldest nieces, Du’aa and Kawkab, who attended the same university she did and who also wore the hijab.
On the night of the election, fear was robust within my hometown and within my family. Given the challenges that lay ahead with Trump and the escalating Islamophobia he ushered in, I was precisely where I needed to be. After years spent living far from home, I was back in Detroit. The city my father brought us to after fleeing civil war in Lebanon. The city where poverty and single parenthood forced my mother to raise us in eleven different houses, until she was finally able to purchase and make a home for us on the west side. The city where the streets taught me as much as any textbook or teacher did, taught me through rough instruction to confront each fight with a willingness to punch back, and punch back harder than the foe standing in front of me. Standing alongside familiar faces and family members, I had no choice but to fight. And I was ready to do just that.
The city that taught me how to fight also gives me great reason to continue fighting. The familiar sight of mosque minarets, Arabic script adorning restaurant and grocery shop awnings, and headscarved and bearded elders strolling up and down Warren Avenue are once again my routine panorama. This is neither foreign nor frightening, but home—in the heart of America. Memories of my father, and his ever-looming shadow, remind me that he is nearby. I have much to fight for, within this town and beyond it. Muslim America is bigger than any one city, larger than one community, far more heterogeneous than caricatures old and new, and the threat of American Islamophobia lives everywhere.
No longer a young activist but a seasoned advocate and professor, I find that young faces look to me for leadership in the throes of disaster. At the university where I work, blocks away from where I grew up and currently reside, I feel obligated to try to channel their anxiety and fear toward resistance and activism. Islamophobia, in its most explicit and apparent form, now lives in the White House. Large segments of this country rushed to the polls to elect a candidate who campaigned on hate, one who made Islamophobia a hallmark of his message and a cornerstone of his vision for the country. His message and vision resonated strongly, revealing that Islamophobia was once again swelling in minds, households, and halls of power in the United States.
But this was not the first time Muslim Americans had faced this brand of hate from the state and fellow citizens, as I reminded an audience of nearly 2,500 people at an emergency community town hall in Dearborn in February 2017. I spoke alongside activists Abed Ayoub, Asha Noor, and Noel Saleh only days after Trump’s Muslim ban caused mass hysteria and fear among the town’s large Arab and Muslim American population.2 Nor was it uncharted territory for Muslim Americans to fight, resist, and rebel against Islamophobia and the systems that mothered it. The roots of Islamophobia are deep, but the might of the Muslim American narrative and rightly guided tradition of resistance is even deeper. Our history chronicles systems devised to dehumanize Muslim Americans as anti-American and terrorists, but it also chronicles valiant stories of resisting, enduring, and overcoming.
Enslaved Muslims resisted the slave code and rebelled against slave masters before the United States was a sovereign nation. They built roads and railroads, cities and state buildings, without compensation. “After two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal,” they are still denied reparations.3
This country is where Muslim immigrants were pushed and pulled to a new land to piece together better lives for their children, lured by dreams that were deferred by discrimination—and still realized despite that discrimination. This nation is where racism overlaps with xenophobia, crossed by and compounded with an Islamophobia that strips or diminishes the citizenship of Muslim Americans. By voting, marching, and struggling to exercise a religion demonized by law and policy, these same Muslim Americans bring to life the civil liberties that although enshrined in the Constitution, have been systematically denied them.
This is the land where we buried our sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, and where, inshaʼAllah—God willing—we will one day bury Islamophobia deep in the very soil that spawned it.