From SALON
I didn’t pray much as a child. Sometimes I would copy my grandmother as she prayed toward Mecca. I remember the ritual: bow down, come back up, bow down, looking to both sides while twirling my right fingers. Then she would pick me up with a sheet tied around her waist and carry me over to the neighborhood park, where we would lie down in the grass. This is all a dream to me now. A time when an elderly woman with a hijab and her granddaughter wouldn’t get stared at for being a Muslim.
Back then, I felt like an ordinary child. Ours wasn’t a religious family, besides celebrating Eid-al-Fitr and Ramadan. “Muslim” wasn’t my identity. It was my faith. I was an American.
But my identity crumbled when the Twin Towers fell. I was 8 years old, in third grade, and I was as frantic as any kid would be that day, trying to understand why so many children had to lose their mothers and fathers. I couldn’t imagine their pain.
“You’re a terrorist!” said my best friend in the hallways of our elementary school, pointing at me, his innocent eyes turned menacing. I couldn’t believe it. But this was the start of a new life for me.
That year was hell. Friends distanced themselves. Teachers became mean. Such alienation was normal for me and surely millions of Muslims worldwide in those years. Fearing discrimination and violent attacks, my family changed our last name. “Harvard” was a slice of Americana; a far cry from our original surname. My parents wanted to protect my sister and me, but elementary school teachers and kids knew exactly what had happened, and our situation only became worse. In my silence, lies continued to grow.
In sixth grade, a teaching assistant gathered all the students around the classroom for the last lesson of the day.
“Islam is an evil religion. Muslims all around the world kill innocent, non-Muslim people,” she said. “In their holy book, they said that all good Muslim children must kill kids like you.”
I wanted to say something. I wanted to speak out, because I knew that wasn’t true. I wanted to tell her that I would never hurt my best friends or any living thing, and that there are more than a billion Muslims who are loving and kind.
But I had no power. I was a child, a Muslim one, and she was an adult with authority. What voice did I have?
That year I moved to a new school about an hour away. It was the perfect opportunity to start over and pretend to be somebody I was not. I completely disregarded my faith publicly as a Muslim — and my real life undercover began.
