On Second Thought: the BETWEEN TWO WORLDS issue

2ECOND THOUGHT A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council

fall 14

on

[the BETWEEN TWO WORLDS issue]

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Photo by Joleyn Larson, Mandan, ND

BRIDGING CULTURES

note from the executive director When my husband Tom was in journalism school, he vividly remembers one of his professors offering a cautionary tale to the class: “If you want your audience to engage with you, never begin a news story with the phrase, ‘More violence in the Middle East today…’” The point of the lesson–people shut down when the message is constant and overwhelming.

Tom relayed this story to me when I told him of my dream for the humanities council to hold an event dedicated to exploring America’s role in the escalating violence in the Middle East. His class took place in 1995 and things have only gone from bad to worse. Such an event would be a hard sell to a war-weary population. Indeed, I found myself turning away from the images of violence and hatred scattered across the news and social media. As a mother, I didn’t want to know how many other mothers had to go to bed each night with children to bury in the morning—whether they were moms to American soldiers or war refugees didn’t matter. It’s hard to watch anyone living through a nightmare when you feel helpless to help end it.

“So you don’t think we should do it?” I asked him, disheartened.

“No,” he replied. “I think that’s exactly why you need to do it.”

His response fairly describes our mission at the council.

Our board and staff have worked hard to find a group of people with a foot in both American and Middle Eastern worlds, people who can bring the tragedy overseas back down to a human level and help connect our audience in Fargo in some small way with people in Kabul, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Gaza, and Tehran. Our hope is to move beyond headlines and politics in order to bridge cultures and begin envisioning new paths toward peace and justice.

We are so glad you decided to take this journey with us.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt Executive Director

features [contents] Cover photo by Josh Rushing.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

4 Angels in Evin

By Roxana Saberi

14 To Any Would-Be Terrorists

By Naomi Shihab Nye

18 Lunch in Nablus City Park

By Naomi Shihab Nye

22 West of Kabul, East of New York

By Tamim Ansary

26 An Afghan-American Speaks

By Tamim Ansary

30 Journey From the Land of No

By Roya Hakakian

36 No Faith At All

By Lahab Assef Al-Jundi

40 With Our Own Eyes

By G. Willow Wilson

44 America’s Greater Jihad

By Josh Rushing

52 Between Two Worlds

Complete Schedule of Events

ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Editor Janet Daley Jury, Associate Editor Erin Goodale Price, Copy Editor To subscribe please contact us: North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

ndhumanities.org Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the North Dakota Humanities Council.

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Roxana Saberi is a senior producer/reporter for Al Jazeera America in New York. From 2003 to 2009, she lived and worked as a journalist in Iran, filing reports for organizations such as Feature Story News, NPR, BBC, ABC Radio and Fox News. She was writing a book about Iran when she was arrested in 2009 in Tehran and falsely accused of espionage. She was released after 100 days. Back in the United States, Ms. Saberi wrote Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran. She also worked as a freelance journalist, with articles appearing in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST TAKEN HOSTAGE IN IRAN R O X A N A

S A B E R I

Saberi has also spoken across the United States and has traveled to Europe, South America, and the Middle East to speak with the public, media, and government officials about Iran, human rights, and overcoming adversity.

She has received the Medill Medal of Courage, the Ilaria Alpi Freedom of the Press Award, the NCAA Award of Valor, a Project for Middle East Democracy Award, a Concordia College Sent Forth Alumni Award, and an East-West Freedom Award from the Levantine Cultural Center. She was named one of Jaycees’ 2011 Ten Outstanding Young Americans and was honored by the Japanese American Citizens League as an “Outstanding Woman.”

Saberi grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, the daughter of Reza Saberi, who was born in Iran, and Akiko Saberi, who is from Japan. She was chosen Miss North Dakota in 1997 and was among the top ten finalists in Miss America 1998. She graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, with degrees in communications and French. Saberi holds her first master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and her second master’s degree in international relations from the University of Cambridge.

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The most compelling passages [in Between Two Worlds] are about a form of religious experience — the struggle of this young American-Iranian as she moves from false ‘confessions’ calculated to secure freedom to fierce truth-telling that grants her an inner liberation so powerful that even death is no longer frightening. ‘Roxana,’ her father says, ‘just remember: they can never hurt your soul.’ Truth, in other words, is impregnable.

– Roger Cohen, The New York Times

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As my cellmates and I were preparing for bed that night, our door swung open again. This time, a thin young woman in loose-fitting prison pajamas shuffled in. Peeking out between her long bangs, below one eye, was a dark red gash.

“Did they hit you?” the three of us wanted to know, once our new cellmate, Sara, had arranged her blankets in the middle of the floor.

She smiled conspiratorially, her swollen cheek pushing into her left eye.

Sara told us she was arrested early that morning with her fiancé and two of her girlfriends. They had been asleep at their friend’s apartment when several plainclothes intelligence agents burst in. The intruders were looking for the owner of the apartment, but because he was absent, they decided to detain the four college students instead.

ANGELS IN EVIN

By Roxana Saberi

“Did they hit you?” the three of us wanted to know...

Sara’s fiancé had resisted arrest, so the men started to beat him.

Sara reacted by punching one of the agents in the head. In turn, he whacked her in the face with a hard object, leaving the wound beneath her eye.

Eventually the agents collected the four friends and forced them into a van, which was parked so close to the apartment complex’s front door that the only way out of the building was into the vehicle.

They had been interrogated all day, Sara explained. Now her two girlfriends were in another cell, while her fiancé had been taken to the men’s ward of 209. She chuckled softly as she related this story, as if she found these events quite amusing.

Sara and her fiancé had predicted they might one day end up in prison. They were active in a leftist student group, had taken part in university demonstrations, and several of their classmates had been detained before them.

Imprisonment, I knew, was one risk Iranian students faced for political activism, which had been growing increasingly dangerous—especially after the hard-liners expanded their control over universities following Ahmadinejad’s 2005 victory. Student activists could also be dealt lesser punishments, such as suspension, expulsion, or the denial of entry to graduate school.

Given the possible costs, only the most daring students continued to openly call for human rights

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and democracy. Many other young Iranians preferred to follow the political scene from the sidelines or to stay out of it altogether, believing they had little part in determining their country’s future.

Despite her own discouraging news, Sara wasn’t worried. She said she had learned from some classmates what to expect in jail.

“What have you told your interrogators?” I asked.

Nevertheless, Iranian youth remained a large and potentially potent force. Roughly two-thirds of the country’s 70 million people were under thirty, and around 3.5 million Iranians were enrolled in universities.

As hotbeds of political ideas and activities, Iran’s campuses had played a major role in shaping the nation and had often served as launching pads for protests that spread into society. Soon after anti-shah university students helped the revolution succeed, the new regime shut down universities for more than two years to implement its Cultural Revolution, which aimed to purge universities of students and academics with leftist or liberal tendencies and to purify the curricula. The Cultural Revolution also transformed the student movement in Iran, with the Unity Consolidation Office, or UCO, becoming the predominant student organization.

The UCO pledged total support for Ayatollah Khomeini and became a tool for the regime to cleanse universities of opposition. But as a new generation of students emerged in the early 1990s, the group began to shift. Although still loyal to the Islamic Republic’s main tenets, it turned against conservatives and transformed into a proponent of civil society, pluralism, and freedom of expression. Many students supported President Khatami and the reformists.

Gradually, however, they became disillusioned with the slow pace of reforms.

Iran’s student activists could now be divided into four main groupings. The first included Basijis who swore absolute loyalty to the supreme leader and his policies. The second was a democracy-seeking movement led by the UCO, which had split into various factions and included many secular students. The third were modern-thinking Islamists who supported reform within the existing system. And the fourth were leftists, such as Sara, who advocated socialism, particularly Marxism-Leninism.

“It depends on what they ask me,” she said. “I try to either tell them the truth, or if I can’t, I say nothing at all.”

Sara gave me an example of how one of her interrogators pressured her to name other members of her student group.

Instead of answering directly, she had said something to the effect of, “We stand for equality and brotherhood. Don’t you believe in those values?” He had replied yes. “Then,” she had parried, “you must be a member, too.”

First Roya, then Silva and Nargess, and now this twenty-year-old student had used a variety of methods to resist their captor’s demands to lie or to admit to crimes they did not commit.

They had stood up to threats and pressures knowing that by telling the truth and proclaiming their innocence, they could jeopardize their chances at freedom.

“Do your parents know where you are?” I asked Sara, wondering if her family, like mine, was in the dark.

“I think so,” she said. “My brother was arrested last year and was later released on bail. After that, we decided that in case I was next, he should call me every night at a certain time to make sure I’m OK. If my phone is turned off at that time, he should assume I’ve been detained.

Sara was concerned, however, that her parents would be terrified their daughter was now reliving their son’s ordeal, so that afternoon, she asked the guard on duty if she could call them. Sara’s chief interrogator would have to approve, she was told. The rest of the day and all of Monday passed with no reply.

When Haj Khanom brought breakfast to our cell on Tuesday morning, Sara pushed aside the tray and flatly announced: “I want no breakfast, no lunch, and no dinner. I won’t take my cold medication. I only want to call my parents, and I refuse to eat anything until I can.”

––––––––––––––––– The next day, Sunday, March 1, Sara was taken to court and charged with having links to communist opposition groups abroad. So was her fiancé. Their two friends, however, were to be released on bail.

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“As you wish,” Haj Khanom said, her characteristic smile a little subdued by this outburst. “You can’t get what you want here by not eating.”

I had never witnessed anyone go on a hunger strike, although

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I had met and reported on Akbar Ganji, a famous Iranian political dissident who had been freed from Evin in 2006 after fasting for more than seventy days. His strike was highly publicized, and it intensified demands by the international human-rights community for his release. He later went abroad, where he continued to speak out for the movement of democracy in Iran.

had abided by many orders that were in conflict with my conscience. It may have been late for me to start resisting, but if those women could do it, why couldn’t I?

But because no one outside of Evin knew of Sara’s strike, it was difficult to predict how effective the move would be for her.

“No,” I repeated, a little louder.

Sara reduced her daily diet to three cups of tea and three dates, a box of which we purchased each Tuesday. She was already so skinny that her collarbones protruded from her neck, and the rest of us were worried she wouldn’t last long.

––––––––––––––––– I sat facing the wall with my eyes bound in the interrogation room, where Javan had summoned me one day later that week. I thought he might quiz me about my conversation with the magistrate, but instead he informed me that my father had started to “make some noise.”

“No,” I told Javan meekly.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Why not?” The pitch of his voice had become higher than usual.

“Because,” I said, straightening up in my chair, “I don’t want to lie anymore.”

Javan fell silent. Several seconds went by. He must have been analyzing my unexpected act of noncompliance.

I heard a pen drop onto my desk, followed by the swoosh of a piece of paper. Then came the interrogator’s voice, once again under control. “Write: ‘I don’t want to call my father,’ and sign it.”

I wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret the word “noise.”

I lifted my blindfold, picked up the pen, and wrote: I don’t want to call my father unless I am allowed to tell him the truth. Then I signed it.

“Really?” I asked. “Does he know where I am?” Even if he didn’t know, he must have decided he could no longer stay quiet—ignoring what I had been pressured to tell him by phone nearly three weeks earlier.

Javan took the paper and read it. Without another word to me, he instructed a guard to return me to my cell.

–––––––––––––––––

The interrogator answered my question with an order. “His noise is not helpful for you. Call him. Don’t tell him where you are. Say you’re fine and he should remain quiet.”

I reflected for a moment on this latest command. My bâzju was noticeably irritated. On the one hand, my father’s actions might hurt me if my captors decided not to release me in order to demonstrate that they were impervious to outside pressures. On the other hand, media attention, if that’s what my father was drumming up, could compel them to free me sooner—that is, if they even admitted to having me in custody.

In any case, my interrogator was telling me to lie once again.

“You seem very distressed,” Nargess remarked.

Vida and Sara had fallen asleep, while I had lain awake, tracing a stain on the ceiling as I thought about the day’s events.

I looked at Nargess. She was cradling the Koran in her lap as she often did. Since she had joined our cell, she had begun to appear healthier. Her eyes were no longer puffy from crying, and she had regained some of the weight she had lost in solitary confinement.

“Sit here,” Nargess said, patting a folded blanket beside her.

I crawled onto it, and she took my hands in hers.

The women I had met over the previous several days had defied their interrogator’s demands to lie, while I

“Think of me as your sister,” she said, gazing into my eyes. “If

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you want, you can tell me what’s bothering you. You can trust me.”

So I told her. I told her about my false confession and my desire to recant it, but not to my interrogator. I also implored her not to tell any of this to anyone, fearing if Haj Agha found out, he might have me killed as he had vowed.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said to Nargess in a muted voice.

“If I tell the truth, I may never be released. But if the only way I can go free is to lie, then freedom has little value. I now know that I was very weak, especially after meeting women like you.”

“Regardless of what they might do to me now, my soul will be at peace.”

Nargess blushed. “I am glad I didn’t succumb to these people’s threats to tell lies,” she said softly. “Regardless of what they might do to me now, my soul will be at peace.” She rubbed my palms gently. “I will pray to God to help you.”

Then she released my hands, tenderly rain her fingers across the Koran, and asked, “Do you want me to do an estekhâre for you?”

Estekhâre, I had learned years before, was a Muslim tradition of divining answers to questions; in this case, by consulting the Koran. The practice was fairly common in Iran, where many people turned to fortune-tellers for answers to their personal and financial questions and problems.

I had largely regarded fortune-telling as superstitious, but now I was willing to search for clues to my fate through almost any means.

“You know how to do estekhâre?” I asked Nargess.

She nodded solemnly.

“OK, please do,” I said.

She closed her eyes and wrapped her fingers around the top edge of the Koran. “Look into your heart, and specify your intention or wish,” she whispered.

I immediately made two: that no one would ever be harmed because of the falsehoods I had told in this prison and that I would be freed within the week. Then I told Nargess I was ready.

She uttered some incomprehensible verses, opened the Koran without looking, and read the page before her. She

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shook her head and shut the book. Then she glanced up at me and said, “You made two wishes.”

that week, she still hadn’t received permission to make her phone call. She seemed determined, however, to persevere with her hunger strike until her wish was granted.

I was astounded. “How did you know?”

Nargess smiled as if the answer to my question was obvious.

“The Koran said so,” she said, closing the book delicately.

“Make another wish—this time, only one.”

I paused, deliberating over whether instead of making a wish, I should ask a question. “May I pose a question instead?” I asked Nargess.

“Sure.”

I raised myself to the balls of my feet and hugged my knees.

A minute or two passed as a multitude of possible questions rattled around in my head. My entire dilemma, I realized, rested on whether I should let my lies persist or put a stop to them while I was still in jail. In short, should I risk my freedom to pursue the truth?

“I’m ready,” I whispered.

She recited some more verses, opened the Koran again, ran her eyes over the page on the left side, and read the last sentence to herself. She nodded slowly, as if turning over the words in her mind, then reread it.

Finally she looked up and said with conviction, “Do it. Even if you suffer, in the end you will prevail.”

Those were not the words I had wanted to hear. I had wanted Nargess to say something like, “Stick to your story until you are free.”

Sara was headstrong in other ways, too. She refused to walk around the prison yard, despite the fact that the twentyto thirty-minute sessions four times a week were our only chance to go outside. The yard was insulting, Sara declared, and it existed only so that prison officials could announce to the world that they were humane enough to give us an opportunity for outdoor exercise.

She didn’t have the energy to walk, anyway. After she had stopped eating, she spent all day lying on her blankets, watching TV from two feet away, straining her nearsighted eyes because her interrogators had confiscated her glasses.

The more weight Sara lost, the more disgusted at our captors I became. A simple phone call to her family, which should have been every detainee’s right, was a privilege that Sara was prepared to starve herself to obtain.

Yet the weaker she grew, the stronger her resolve to continue became, as if she was deriving fortitude from this act of resistance.

As I witnessed Sara’s hunger strike, I mulled over starting something similar. Unlike Sara, my goal wasn’t to gain permission to call my family, although that was something I had recently requested from my interrogator. Instead, I wanted to punish myself for having yielded to my captor’s demands. I brushed aside the thought that this frame of mind was unhealthy, and the day after Sara began fasting, I, too, decided to stop eating.

Yet I knew in my heart that what she told me was right— painfully but beautifully right.

I wasn’t actually starting a “strike,” so I didn’t formally announce my intention to the guards as Sara had. I simply began to decline my meals. The guards noticed, of course, but did not attempt to change my mind.

Tears started to roll down my cheeks as I realized that I had given up the truth on account of fear of man and fear of death.

Yes, I wanted to live, but what kind of life was worth living? The one in which I would have a clear conscience; the one in which I did what I thought was right—even under pressure. At last, I understood that I had to tell the truth—even if it cost me my freedom, even if it cost me my life.

Because I had never thought about how to try to live without food, I decided to follow Sara’s daily regime of three cups of tea and three dates, which my father had once told me were the most nourishing food to have if you were ever stranded in the desert with nothing else to eat.

––––––––––––––––– Sara had started to look rather sickly. As the days passed

My initial three days were the most difficult. First my stomach growled wildly, demanding to know why I was withholding its nutrition. Then it began to ache, pleading with me to soothe it. By the fourth day, Saturday, it had

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begun to adjust to its deprivations and, except for an occasional grumble, had resigned itself to quietly awaiting its unknown future…

––––––––––––––––– Nargess flung herself on the floor, crying. “Thank God! Thank God!” She had just come back that Saturday, March 7, from court, where she had wept before her magistrate, swearing that she was not a spy and had never done anything even remotely political. In between sobs, she had explained with heartfelt sincerity how she had gone on pilgrimages to Mecca x number of times and made donation to y mosque, and how could such a devout Muslim ever be a spy?

The magistrate had decided, as he had once before, to release Nargess on bail, and she had been permitted to call her family for the first time since her arrest several weeks earlier. The court would keep the deed to her home until her trial, whenever that might take place—if ever. But for now, this wasn’t important to Nargess.

The magistrate was an understanding and fair man, she maintained, much more decent than her chief interrogator, who hadn’t wanted to release her. When I asked her to describe the magistrate’s appearance, she said his right hand was embellished with two large rings.

Saturday was a good day for Sara, too. Her interrogator had allowed her to call her parents, but only after she broke her strike with a meal and only if she told them she was fine. She did as directed, then tried to comfort her grieving mother by making up the prediction that she would be released in a couple of weeks. Despite these fibs, Sara was happy to have spoken to her parents, and she returned to our cell with an exultant grin.

I tried to share in my cellmate’s joy but couldn’t. For them, freedom seemed within reach. But for me, there was only uncertainty…

––––––––––––––––– “Wake up,” Skinny told me the following morning. “You’re going to court.”

It was Sunday, March 8, the day that Haj Agha had said I would be sent to the magistrate’s office, where, if I wanted

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to be freed, I should repeat my confession and agree to everything the magistrate said.

I tried to hurry as I splashed water on my face and put on my chador, but I was dragging after more than four days of having eaten virtually nothing.

“I’ll pray for you,” Nargess said, as Skinny led me out the door.

A male guard loaded me into a van, where he handcuffed me to a young woman prisoner I hadn’t seen before. My wrists had become so small that I could have easily wriggled free.

Two male prisoners sat in front of us, also shackled together.

“Don’t speak to one another,” the guard ordered from the passenger seat, before we headed out the prison gate and toward the Revolutionary Court.

“Please give me the strength to tell the truth,” I murmured to myself with my eyes closed, “whatever the result might be.”

The guard began to say something to me, but the driver, who must have glimpsed at me in his rearview mirror, interrupted him and said, “Let her be. She’s not talking to anyone. She’s praying.”

With my free hand, I drew my chador over my face and continued, whispering over and over, “Please give me the strength to tell the truth, whatever the result might be.”

When we arrived at the court about thirty minutes later, the guard unlocked our handcuffs and led us to the second floor. As we neared the Security Division, a balding man approached me. “Miss Saberi?” he asked.

“Yes?” I said, stunned that anyone other than guards and officials would recognize me.

“I’m your attorney, Abdolsamad Khorramshahi.”

This was news to me. I had never seen or heard of him.

Perhaps Javan had cunningly appointed a regime attorney for me—if this man was even an attorney. With his outdated suit, stooped shoulders, and stubble on his chin, the only thing that gave him the aura of a lawyer was his leather briefcase.

My guard admonished the man for talking to me and took the other woman prisoner and me into the magistrate’s office. She and I sat in the front row of chairs in front of the

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magistrate’s desk. Khorramshahi followed and sat down a few rows behind us.

The magistrate greeted him warmly enough and remarked that he was surprised to have heard he was representing me. “Don’t you usually cover social cases instead of political ones?” the magistrate called out.

I glanced back at Khorramshahi, who was just smiling politely. Then I resumed my prayer. “Please help me tell the truth today,” I whispered, “Even if you may suffer, in the end you will prevail.”

“What are you praying?” the magistrate asked, evidently having noticed the movement of my lips.

After I wrote each answer, he would read it, then write down a new question on another sheet and hand it to me. At one point, the magistrate interrupted himself.

“How is the state of Ohio?” he asked, without altering his tone.

He was looking at me with what appeared to be complete earnestness.

“I hear it’s a beautiful place,” I said. “It borders the Great Lakes.”

The magistrate nodded and began to write his next question. Then, without shifting his gaze to me, he asked, “Could you get me a visa?”

“Something in English,” I said quietly.

I had no way of telling whether he was joking.

“What is it?”

“I was saying, ‘Please help me tell the truth today.’”

“Sure, if you set me free,” I said, only to see what his response might be.

He gave me a puzzled look, then began to leaf through a file on his desk.

“That’s what we’re working on today,” he replied, as he passed the next sheet to me.

For the next half hour or so, I waited as the magistrate interrogated my fellow prisoner by having her write down answers to his written questions. Through the few words they exchanged, I gathered that the woman had been in solitary confinement for twenty days and was charged with propaganda against Islam. After the questions finished, the magistrate told her she would be freed on bail that day. She thanked him, and the guard took her to sit in the hallway.

So I really was supposed to be released soon. He had asked me about a deed for bail last time, and now he was talking about my freedom. He had set Nargess free, and he seemed more believable and powerful than Haj Agha and Javan. Should I still recant? I asked myself, as I read the next question: Who was Mr. D, and what was your connection to him?

It was my turn.

The magistrate asked me why I had once spoken to the Japanese ambassador to Tehran at a dinner party, why I had traveled to Lebanon, and why I had tried to assist my jailed acquaintance—all questions repeated from my interrogations five weeks earlier. He also wanted to know why I had interviewed various political figures in Iran. I explained that I was writing a book and that these people were among the approximately sixty Iranians I had interviewed to try to depict for foreigners a balanced and colorful view of Iranian society.

I sat motionless for a moment, my pen hovering inches above the paper. If I wrote the truth, I could remain locked up for year. But if I continued to cooperate as Haj Agha and Javan had instructed, I would be freed.

In sum: Truth = Prison. Lies = Freedom.

From Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran (Harper, 2010). Copyright © 2010 by Roxana Saberi. Reprinted with the permission of the author, 2014. www.roxanasaberi.com

The magistrate also asked whether I had had any classified documents, and I answered that as far as I was aware, I never did.

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Naomi Shihab Nye is a voice that America needs in its time of trouble. Her clarity combined with her verbal kindness and her knowledge of multiple cultures provide a strong, audible message that the only hope for reconciliation and understanding lies in the ideals set by the human heart.

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– Billy Collins

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A WANDERING POET TELLING PALESTINE’S HIDDEN STORIES N A O M I

S H I H A B

N Y E

Award-winning Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother in St. Louis in 1952. Just four years earlier, her father and his family lost their home in Jerusalem following the establishment of the state of Israel.

As Nye explains, “When you grow up in a house with someone who lives with a very strong sense of exile, when they are disconnected from the place they love most, that casts a certain light on how you see everything—your sense of gravity, history and justice.” In 1966, Nye’s family moved to Jerusalem but left following the outbreak of the 1967 war. They relocated to San Antonio, Texas, where she resides today. Nye explains, “I think as a Palestinian American that’s part of my job—to tell the stories that the news does not take the time to tell. We have to tell what we know.”

Nye has traveled to Palestine frequently and has given readings at all major Palestinian universities.

“I feel an urgency that Arab-American writers find a way where we can be more useful.”

Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent forty years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages.

Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her

experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes. Her book of poetry 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her collection of poems for young adults entitled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category. A new novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, was published in August 2014.

Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry reading series in the country.

In January 2010 Nye was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

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TO ANY WOULD-BE TERRORISTS

By Naomi Shihab Nye

I am sorry I have to call you that, but I don’t know how else to get your attention. I hate that word. Do you know how hard some of us have worked to get rid of that word, to deny its instant connection to the Middle East? And now look. Look what extra work we have. Not only did your colleagues kill thousands of innocent, international people in those buildings and scar their families forever, they wounded a huge community of people in the Middle East, in the United States and all over the world. If that’s what they wanted to do, please know the mission was a terrible success, and you can stop now.

Because I feel a little closer to you than many Americans could possibly feel, or ever want to feel, I insist that you listen to me. Sit down and listen. I know what kinds of foods you like. I would feed them to you if you were right here, because it is very very important that you listen. I am humble in my country’s pain and I am furious.

My Palestinian father became a refugee in 1948. He came to the United States as a college student. He is 74 years old now and still homesick. He has planted fig trees. He has invited all the Ethiopians in his neighborhood to fill their little paper sacks with his figs. He has written columns and stories saying the Arabs are not terrorists, he has worked all his life to defy that word. Arabs are businessmen and students and kind neighbors. There is no one like him and there are thousands like him - gentle Arab daddies who make everyone laugh around the dinner table, who have a hard time with headlines, who stand outside in the evenings with their hands in their pockets staring toward the far horizon.

I am sorry if you did not have a father like that. I wish everyone could have a father like that.

My hard-working American mother has spent 50 years trying to convince her fellow teachers and choir mates not to believe stereotypes about the Middle East. She always told them, there is a much larger story. If you knew the story, you would not jump to conclusions from what you see in the news. But now look at the news. What a mess has been made. Sometimes I wish everyone could have parents from different countries or ethnic groups so they would be forced

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Photo by Josh Rushing.

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tragedy and I want you to think about a few things.

I am amazed how many understand the intricate situation and have strong, caring feelings for Arabs and Palestinians even when they don’t have to. to cross boundaries, to believe in mixtures, every day of their lives. Because this is what the world calls us to do. WAKE UP! The Palestinian grocer in my Mexican-American neighborhood paints pictures of the Palestinian flag on his empty cartons. He paints trees and rivers. He gives his paintings away. He says, “Don’t insult me” when I try to pay him for a lemonade. Arabs have always been famous for their generosity. Remember? My half-Arab brother with an Arabic name looks more like an Arab than many full-blooded Arabs do and he has to fly every week.

My Palestinian cousins in Texas have beautiful brown little boys. Many of them haven’t gone to school yet. And now they have this heavy word to carry in their backpacks along with the weight of their papers and books. I repeat, the mission was a terrible success. But it was also a complete, total 16

1. Many people, thousands of people, perhaps even millions of people, in the United States are very aware of the long unfairness of our country’s policies regarding Israel and Palestine. We talk about this all the time. It exhausts us and we keep talking. We write letters to newspapers, to politicians, to each other. We speak out in public even when it is uncomfortable to do so, because that is our responsibility. Many of these people aren’t even Arabs. Many happen to be Jews who are equally troubled by the inequity. I promise you this is true. Because I am Arab-American, people always express these views to me and I am amazed how many understand the intricate situation and have strong, caring feelings for Arabs and Palestinians even when they don’t have to. Think of them, please: All those people who have been standing up for Arabs when they didn’t have to. But as ordinary citizens we don’t run the government and don’t get to make all our government’s policies, which makes us sad sometimes. We believe in the power of the word and we keep using it, even when it seems no one large enough is listening. That is one of the best things about this country: the free power of free words. Maybe we take it for granted too much. Many of the people killed in the World Trade Center probably believed in a free Palestine and were probably talking about it all the time.

But this tragedy could never help the Palestinians.

Somehow, miraculously, if other people won’t help them more, they are going to have to help themselves. And it will be peace, not violence, that fixes things. You could ask any one of the kids in the Seeds of Peace organization and they would tell you that. Do you ever talk to kids? Please, please, talk to more kids.

2. Have you noticed how many roads there are?

Sure you have. You must check out maps and highways and small alternate routes just like anyone else. There is no way everyone on earth could travel on the same road, or believe in exactly the same religion. It would be too crowded, it would be dumb. I don’t believe you want us all to be Muslims. My Palestinian grandmother lived to be 106 years old, and did not read or write, but even she was much smarter than that. The only place she ever went beyond Palestine and Jordan was to Mecca, by bus, and she was very proud

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to be called a Hajji and to wear white clothes afterwards. She worked very hard to get stains out of everyone’s dresses—scrubbing them with a stone. I think she would consider the recent tragedies a terrible stain on her religion and her whole part of the world. She would weep. She was scared of airplanes anyway. She wanted people to worship God in whatever ways they felt comfortable. Just worship. Just remember God in every single day and doing. It didn’t matter what they called it. When people asked her how she felt about the peace talks that were happening right before she died, she puffed up like a proud little bird and said, in Arabic, “I never lost my peace inside.” To her, Islam was a welcoming religion.

After her home in Jerusalem was stolen from her, she lived in a small village that contained a Christian shrine. She felt very tender toward the people who would visit it. A Jewish professor tracked me down a few years ago in Jerusalem to tell me she changed his life after he went to her village to do an oral history project on Arabs.

“Don’t think she only mattered to you!” he said.

“She gave me a whole different reality to imagine —yet it was amazing how close we became. Arabs could never be just a “project” after that.”

Did you have a grandmother or two? Mine never wanted people to be pushed around. What did yours want? Reading about Islam since my grandmother died, I note the “tolerance” that was “typical of Islam” even in the old days.

The Muslim leader Khalid ibn al-Walid signed a Jerusalem treaty which declared, “in the name of God, you have complete security for your churches which shall not be occupied by the Muslims or destroyed.” It is the new millenium in which we should be even smarter than we used to be, right? But I think we have fallen behind.

3. Many Americans do not want to kill any more innocent people anywhere in the world. We are extremely worried about military actions killing innocent people. We didn’t like this in Iraq, we never liked it anywhere. We would like no more violence, from us as well as from you. HEAR US! We would like to stop the terrifying wheel of violence, just stop it, right on the road, and find something more creative to do to fix these huge problems we have. Violence is not creative, it is stupid and scary and many of us hate all those terrible movies and TV shows made in our own country that try to pretend otherwise. Don’t watch

them. Everyone should stop watching them.

An appetite for explosive sounds and toppling buildings is not a healthy thing for anyone in any country. The USA should apologize to the whole world for sending this trash out into the air and for paying people to make it.

But here’s something good you may not know —one of the best-selling books of poetry in the United States in recent years is the Coleman Barks translation of Rumi, a mystical Sufi poet of the 13th century, and Sufism is Islam and doesn’t that make you glad?

Everyone is talking about the suffering that ethnic Americans are going through. Many will no doubt go through more of it, but I would like to thank everyone who has sent me a consolation card.

Americans are usually very kind people. Didn’t your colleagues find that out during their time living here? It is hard to imagine they missed it.

How could they do what they did, knowing that?

4. We will all die soon enough. Why not take the short time we have on this delicate planet and figure out some really interesting things we might do together? I promise you, God would be happier. So many people are always trying to speak for God—I know it is a very dangerous thing to do. I tried my whole life not to do it. But this one time is an exception. Because there are so many people crying and scarred and confused and complicated and exhausted right now—it is as if we have all had a giant simultaneous breakdown. I beg you, as your distant Arab cousin, as your American neighbor, listen to me. Our hearts are broken, as yours may also feel broken in some ways we can’t understand, unless you tell us in words. Killing people won’t tell us. We can’t read that message. Find another way to live. Don’t expect others to be like you. Read Rumi. Read Arabic poetry. Poetry humanizes us in a way that news, or even religion, has a harder time doing.

A great Arab scholar, Dr. Salma Jayyusi, said, “If we read one another, we won’t kill one another.”

Read American poetry. Plant mint. Find a friend who is so different from you, you can’t believe how much you have in common. Love them. Let them love you. Surprise people in gentle ways, as friends do. The rest of us will try harder too. Make our family proud.

Reprinted by permission of the author, 2014.

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LUNCH IN NABLUS CITY PARK

By Naomi Shihab Nye

When you lunch in a town which has recently known war under a calm slate sky mirroring none of it, certain words feel impossible in the mouth.

Casualty: too casual, it must be changed.

A short man stacks mounds of pita bread on each end of the table, muttering something about more to come.

Plump birds landing on park benches surely had their eyes closed recently, must have seen nothing of weapons or blockades.

When the woman across from you whispers I don’t think we can take it anymore and you say there are people praying for her in the mountains of Himalaya and she says, Lady, it is not enough, then what?

A plate of hummus, dish of tomato, friends dipping bread— I will not marry till there is true love, says one, throwing back her cascade of perfumed hair.

He says the University of Texas seems remote to him as Mars, and last month he stayed in his house for 26 days. He will not leave, he refuses to leave.

In the market they are selling men’s shoes with air vents, a beggar displays the giant scab of leg he must drag from alley to alley, and students argue about the best way to protest.

In summers, this cafe is full.

Today only our table sends laughter into the trees.

What cannot be answered checkers the tablecloth between the squares of white and red.

Where do the souls of hills hide when there is shooting in the valleys?

What makes a man with a gun seem bigger than a man with almonds? How can there be war and the next day eating, a man stacking plates on the curl of his arm, a table of people toasting one another in languages of grace: For you who came so far; For you who held out, wearing a black scarf to signify grief; For you who believe true love can find you amidst this atlas of tears linking one town to its own memory of mortar, when it was still a dream to be built and people moved here, believing and someone with sky and birds in his heart said this would be a good place for a park.

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From 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2005).

Copyright © 1994, 1995, 1998, 2002 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author, 2014.

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A CHILDREN’S BOOK WRITER FROM AFGHANISTAN TRANSFORMED BY 9/11 TA M I M

A N S A RY

Tamim Ansary was born in 1948, in Kabul, Afghanistan. His father worked as a professor at Kabul University and his mother—the first American woman to marry an Afghan and live in Afghanistan—taught English at the country’s first girls’ schools. In the mid-fifties, his family moved to the tiny government-built town of Lashkargah, in the country’s southwestern desert.

Today, that area is the heart of the Talibinist insurgency. Back then, it was the nerve center for the country’s biggest American-funded development project, a vast complex of dams, canals, and experimental farms, which his father helped to run.

When he left Afghanistan in 1964, the country was still a tranquil backwater. He finished high school and college in the United States, then worked for a collectively-owned newspaper.

Later, just as Khomeini was seizing power in Iran, he traveled in North Africa and Turkey, looking for Islam, and found Islamism instead. Unnerved and exhausted, he returned to San Francisco, married the love of his life, and settled into a quiet life of editing and writing children’s books.

Then came September 11, 2001. The day after those airplanes brought down the twin towers, an email he wrote to a few friends went viral on the Internet, and he found himself derailed from his previous career into speaking for Afghanistan and trying to interpret the Islamic world for the West—because at the time there was no one else to do it. In his memoir West of Kabul, East of New York, he depicts how it was to grow up straddling these two vastly disparate cultures— Afghanistan and America. In 2010 he published Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes to critical acclaim, and more recently The Widow’s Husband, a historical novel set in Afghanistan in 1841. In 2012 he released Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan.

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Ansary has written an informative and thoroughly engaging look at the past, present, and future of Islam. With his seamless and charming prose, he challenges conventional wisdom and appeals for a fuller understanding of how Islam and the world at large have shaped each other. And that makes [A Destiny Disrupted], in this uneasy, contentious post 9/11 world, a must-read. – Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

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WEST OF KABUL, EAST OF NEW YORK

By Tamim Ansary

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Photo by Josh Rushing.

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For many long years, my siblings and I thought we were the only Afghans in America. When I introduced myself to people, they’d say, “Interesting name. Where are you from?” When I said Afghanistan, I could feel myself changing, not unpleasantly, into a curiosity. Few knew where Afghanistan was, and some were amazed to learn it existed at all. Once, in a college gym class, a coach found my free-throw shooting form humorous. “Where have you been all your life,” he guffawed, “Aghanistan?” When I said yes, he was taken aback: he thought Afghanistan was just an expression, like Ultima Thule, meaning “off the map.”

The Soviet invasion put Afghanistan on the map, but it didn’t last. By the summer of 2001, a new acquaintance could say to me, “Afghanistan, huh? I never would have guessed you’re from Africa.”

That all changed on September 11, 2001. Suddenly, everywhere I went, strangers were talking about Kandahar and Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif. On September 12, the abrupt notoriety of Afghanistan triggered a volcanic moment in my own small life.

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I was driving around San Francisco that day, listening to talk radio. My mind was chattering to itself about errands and deadlines, generating mental static to screen me off from my underlying emotions, the turmoil and dread. On the radio, a woman caller was making a tearful, ineffective case against going to war over the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The talk-show host derided her. A man called in to say that the enemy was not just Afghanistan but people like that previous caller as well. The talk-show host said thoughtfully, “You’re making a lot of sense, sir.”

The next caller elaborated on what should be done to Afghanistan: “Nuke that place. Those people have to learn.

Put a fence around it. Cut them off from medicine! From food! Make those people starve!”

me. At noon I got a call from my old friend Nick Allen, whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. Somehow, he’d received the e-mail and had felt moved to track me down and say hi.

An hour later, I heard from Erik Nalder, the son of an American engineer, whom I had last seen in Afghanistan thirty-eight years ago. He’d received my e-mail—I couldn’t imagine how—and had felt moved to track me down and say hi.

Then the phone rang again. A caller from Chicago. A hesitant voice. “My name is Charles Sherman…” Did I know this guy?

“I got your e-mail…” I couldn’t place him. “You don’t know me,” he said.

“Then how did you get my number?”

More than thirty-five years had passed since I had seen Afghanistan, but the ghosts were still inside me, and as I listened to that apoplectically enraged talk on the radio, those ghosts stirred to life. I saw my grandmother K’koh, elfin soul of the Ansary family. Oh, she died long ago, but in my mind she died again that day, as I pictured the rainfall of bombs that would be coming. And I saw my father, the man who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, leave when the Soviets put the country in a clamp. He was long gone, too, but if he’d lived, he would be in Kabul now, an eighty-three-year-old man, in rags on the streets, his ribs showing, one of the many who would be starving when the fence was flung up around our land.

I didn’t begrudge those callers their rage, but I felt a bewilderment deeper than shock. No one seemed to know how pitifully harmless Afghans were, strong contenders for the Poorest People on Earth award, overrun by the world’s most hardened criminals, and now, it seemed, marked out to suffer for the crimes of their torturers.

I wanted to call that talk show, but when I came home, I felt too shy. I’d never spoken to the media on any level.

So I went downstairs to my office and wrote an e-mail to a few of my friends. I poured out to them what I would have said to the public if I could have mustered the courage to call that talk show. The moment I clicked on SEND, I felt infinitesimally better.

Later that day, some of the people on my list asked if they could pass my note on to their friends, and I said, “Sure,” thinking, Wow, with luck, I might reach fifty or sixty people.

That night, I logged onto my server and found a hundred e-mails in my in-box, mostly from strangers responding to the message I’d hammered out earlier. It boggled my mind.

The power of the Internet! I had reached…hundreds.

The next day, I realized something bigger was rising under 24

“I looked you up on the Internet—anyone can get your number…I just wanted to tell you that…your e-mail made a lot of sense to me.”

I thanked him and hung up, but my heart was pounding.

Strangers were reading my e-mail, and anyone could get my phone number. What if the next caller said, “Hi, I’m with the Taliban”? What if Al Qaeda knocked on the door? How long before some hysterical racist sent a brick through my window?

I wanted to cancel my e-mail. “I’ve reached enough people, thank you; that will be all.” But it was too late. I couldn’t withdraw the e-mail. I couldn’t issue corrections, amendments, or follow-ups. My e-mail spread like a virus throughout the United States and across the world. My e-mail accounts overflowed with responses, and the servers had to start deleting messages I had not read. Radio stations started calling—then newspapers—then TV. By the fourth day, I found myself putting World News Tonight on hold to take a call from Oprah’s people—inconceivable! I have no idea how many people received the e-mail ultimately. A radio station in South Africa claimed it reached 250,000 people in that country alone. Worldwide, I have to guess, it reached millions—within a week.

What had I written? I wondered. Why the response? I barely had time to ponder these bewildering questions. The media seized on me as a pundit. The questions came at me like hornets pouring out of a nest, and all I could do was swing at them. From those first few insane weeks, I only remember Charlie Rose’s skeptical face looming toward me with the questions, “But Tamim…can you really compare the Taliban to Nazis?”

I tried to tell him about that guy I’d met in Turkey, the one in the pin-striped suit who had wanted to convert me to his

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brand of Islam, and the horror that had filled me as I read his literature afterward, but my long-winded digression wasn’t appropriate for that or any TV show. I stumbled out of the studio, my mind reeling. What did I mean? The words I had used in that e-mail were so brutal. The Taliban, I had written, are a

CULT of IGNORANT PSYCHOTICS. When you think BIN LADEN, think HITLER. I never would have used such language if I’d thought millions of people were listening. I’m sure I would have measured my language more carefully. But in that case, probably no one would have listened. And had I misspoken?

Would I now renounce my words? I decided the answer was no.

Two weeks later, my cousin’s wife, Shafiqa, called to tell me there was going to be a memorial service for Ahmen Shah Massoud that night, complete with speeches, videotapes, posters, and more speeches. I should come.

Massoud was the last credible anti-Taliban leader in Afghanistan, the man who put together the Northern Alliance, a towering figure, assassinated by the Arab suicide bombers two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center. I admired Massoud, and his assassination disheartened me, but I was just too spent to go to his memorials service. “I need to rest,” I pleaded.

Shafiqa was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Listen, Tamim, we are all proud of what you have done. You have written a letter. That’s good. But Massoud slept with only a stone for a pillow for twenty-three years. He scarcely knew the names of his children, because he would not set down the burden of liberating our country. I think he was tired at times, too. I think you should be at his memorial service.”

I hung my head in shame and said I would be there.

The following week, a representative of the Northern Alliance phoned me. “You have the ear of the American media. You know how to say things. We know what things must be said. Let us work together. From now on, you must be the spokesman.”

“The spokesman? For what? For whom?”

“For our cause. For our country.”

I could feel my ears shutting down and my eyes looking for the back door. Was Afghanistan really my country?

Dear reader, let me pause to introduce myself properly.

Yes, I was born and raised in Afghanistan, and I know Islam intimately, from the inside, in my very soul. Yes, I learned to say my prayers from my Afghan grandmother; yes, I know the flavor of sundown on the first day of Ramadan, when you’re on the porch with the people you love, waiting for the cannon that will mark the moment when a white thread can no longer be distinguished from a black one and you can put the day’s first sweet date in your mouth.

But my mother was American, and not just any American, but a secular one to the max, and a feminist back when there hardly was such a thing—the daughter of an immigrant labor agitator in Chicago who would have been a Communist if only he could have accepted orders from anyone but his own conscience. And I moved to America at age sixteen, and graduated from Reed College, and grew my hair down to my waist, and missed Woodstock by minutes, and revered Bob Dylan back when his voice still worked. I made a career in educational publishing, and if you have children, they have probably used some product I have edited or written. I am an American.

How could I be an adequate spokesman for Afghanistan or for Muslims?

“Look, I have nothing to tell people but my own small story,” I told the fellow from the Northern Alliance. “Maybe I can help Americans see that Afghans are just human beings like anyone else. That’s about all I can do.”

“That is important, too,” he said, his voice softened by anxiety and despair.

In the weeks that followed, however, the media kept punching through to me, and I kept answering their questions. It turned out that I did have plenty to say about Afghanistan, Islam, and fundamentalism, because I have been pondering these issues all my life—the dissonance between the world I am living in now and the world I left behind, a world that is lost to me. And as I kept talking, it struck me that I was not the only one who had lost a world.

There was a lot of loss going around. Perhaps it wasn’t really nostalgia for the seventh century that was fueling all this militancy. Perhaps it was nostalgia for a world that existed much more recently, traces of which still linger in the social memory of the Islamic world. Lots of people have parents, or grandparents, or at least great-grandparents who grew up in that world. Some people even know that world personally, because they were born in it. I am one of those people.

From West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story (Picador, 2002). Copyright © 2002 by Tamim Ansary.

Reprinted with the permission of the author, 2014.

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Tamim Ansary, penned this piece on September 14, 2001, and emailed it to a handful of friends. It subsequently went viral.

AN AFGHANAMERICAN SPEAKS

By Tamim Ansary

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.” Ronn Owens, on San Francisco’s KGO Talk Radio, conceded today that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but “we’re at war, we have to accept collateral damage.

What else can we do?” Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we “have the belly to do what must be done.”

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I’ve lived in the United States for 35 years I’ve never lost track of what’s going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I’m standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think “the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews in the concentration camps.” It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats’ nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban?

The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan — a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets.

These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the

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Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban?

The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.

Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done.

Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs.

Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today’s Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing.

Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban — by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of “having the belly to do what needs to be done” they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let’s pull our heads out of

Photo by Josh Rushing.

the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying.

And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: That’s bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It’s all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to lose; that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s probably wrong — in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean — but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.

Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Reprinted by permission of the author, 2014.

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Hakakian’s intimate anthropology opens a window on one life during turbulent times in the Middle East. . . . This book does us the service of removing some of the region’s mythical stereotypes . . . and illuminating a real contemporary culture we would do well to know better. –Seattle Times

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IRANIAN-AMERICAN WRITER AND HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST R O YA H A K A K I A N

Born and raised in a Jewish family in Tehran, Roya Hakakian came to the United States in 1985 on political asylum. An author and Farsi poet, Roya is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. IHRDC was founded in 2004 by a group of human right scholars, activists, and historians to document the patterns of human rights abuse in Iran and to promote accountability, a culture of human rights, and the rule of law in Iran. Roya also serves on the board of Refugees International.

Roya is listed among the leading new voices in Persian poetry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World and received the 2008 Guggenheim fellowship in nonfiction. Her most recent book the Assassins of the Turquoise Palace about Iran’s terror campaign against exiled Iranian dissidents in Western Europe has been named a Notable Book of 2011 by the New York Times Book Review in September, made Newsweek’s Top Ten Not-to-be-missed books of 2011 and was among Kirkus Reviews Best Non-Fictions of 2011. Her memoir of growing up a Jewish teenager in post-revolutionary Iran is entitled, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran was a Barnes and Noble’s Pick of the Week, Ms. Magazine Must Read of the Summer, Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year, Elle Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2004, and was named Best Memoir by the Connecticut Center for the Book in 2005 and has been translated into several languages including German, Dutch, and Spanish.

Roya lives in Connecticut.

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JOURNEY FROM THE LAND OF NO

By Roya Hakakian

New York City, July 13, 1999 It was an ordinary morning at the office. Wrapped in a heavy sweater, sleeves pulled over fingers hiding form the arctic indoor summer temperatures, I had every reason to expect this to be a day like any other. CNN was on. A pile of several major dailies lay on one side of my desk, and on the other was a second stack of magazines I had brought back from the Delta Shuttle courtesy stand. The first order of business was to answer e-mails, which I usually managed to do while sipping a tall cup of latté. I glanced at the names in the in-box, keeping an eye out for any breaking news on the Associated Press wire service. The telephone rang.

“Roya speaking.”

“Hi, Roya. This is David, David Unger, calling from the New York Times.”

“Oh, hi! You are…”

“An editorial writer working on a piece on the recent student uprisings in Iran. You come highly recommended as a source. Is this a good time?”

No. It was not a good time. It was never a good time to talk about Iran. I rarely did. But this call, I knew, I had to take. Thousands of students had taken to the streets in the largest pro-reform demonstration since 1979. Now, in the demonstration’s third day, the students were calling on the newly elected president, Mohammad Khatami, to join their movement against the “hardline” elements in power, mainly the supreme leader, Seyed Ali Khameni. Many had been arrested. A few had disappeared, among them Elahe, a dear friend. And sitting in my office, watching the news, seeing young men and women face the riot police, their shirts bloodied, their faces hidden under rags, thugs charging at them with batons, seeing them be clubbed and fall to the pavement, was all too familiar. All too frustrating. There was nothing I could do to help them or my missing friend, expect to talk to an editorialist. In my guilty helplessness, I Had placed all hope in the New York Times to save Elahe, the students, and Iran itself in a sharp cluster of five hundred words or less. So I said, “Yes. I have been expecting your call. But hold on for just a minute, please.”

This was simply a call between a television journalist and her colleague in print. Still, I got up from my chair, peeked into the hallway, and quietly shut my door. This was a call about Iran; no call could be more personal. We began talking.

I had expected to hear from David. I had also expected the 30

[between two worlds] conversation to proceed as it often does with Americans. They come, I had decided, in two kinds: The misinformed, who think of Iran as a backward nation of Arabs, veiled and turbaned, living on the periphery of oases and fairly represented by a government of mullahs; and the misguided, who believed the shah’s regime was a puppet government run by the CIA, and who think that Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerical cabal are an authentic, home-grown answer to unwarranted U.S. meddling.

The first group always amused me. In their company, I would blame every appalling trait in my character on my “Bedouin upbringing.”

Walking along Coney Island beach on a hot summer evening, I licked the drops of ice cream off my palms, and when I saw the shocked look on my date’s face, I explained that my lack of etiquette was due to a childhood spent in a land where napkins and utensils were unheard of. His believing blue eyes welled with tears of empathy.

A college roommate once asked what my family used for transportation in Tehran. I told her we kept six camels of various sizes in our backyard. My father rode the papa camel, my mother the mama camel, my brothers the younger camels, and I the baby camel.

While my roommate’s common sense was still in the grip of political correctness, I went on to design a fantastically intricate grid of fourlegged traffic regulations for bovines on even days and equines on odd.

But that second group –those misguided Americans—exasperated me. Bright individuals abandoned inquiry and resorted to obsolete formulas: America had done Iran wrong. Therefore the clerics cut ties with the United States. Therefore the clerics were leading the nation to sovereignty. These individuals had yet to realize that though Iran’s rulers fervently opposed U.S. imperialism, they were neither just to nor loved their own people. This second group had not accepted the notion that the enemy of their enemy was yet another enemy.

It took only one question for me to decide that David belonged to the second group. He asked, “Do the ‘reformists,’ backed by President Khatami, stand a chance against the ‘hard-liners’?”

This bipolar division between reformist and hard-liners was as crude as my own division between misinformed and misguided American’s.

Reducing a nation of seventy million, with three thousand years of history, to two simply camps infuriated me. The assumption that Iran was on the verge of an imminent transformation if only one faction managed to subdue the other had the ring of a sensational headline, and though as a reporter I understood its logic, as an Iranian I detested it. True watchers of Iran knew that Iran itself was the “beloved” its great poets had serenaded for centuries: capricious yet slow, inspiring hope in one breath and evoking despair in another.

However, David quickly added that the editorials did not always reflect his own personal views. In fact, they often did not. This was an important disclaimer. Several more nuanced questions followed.

His voice was tender. IF a deadline was looming, his voice did not reveal it. In its timbre, there was time and infinite patience, which encouraged me to tell him my worst fears. Every horrifying possibility flashed through my mind: Elahe assaulted, bleeding in a ditch or along one of the many canals of Tehran; or sitting before 31

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interrogators, blindfolded, forced to write a recantation letter. Talking to David, I dressed in words the horrors I was conjuring. I told him so. I also told him that I had no faith in the new president, or any other cleric, to deliver what the students were demanding. I saw that the protestors were in grave danger. In the most dignified way I knew, I begged him to write with the utmost urgency.

The next day brought an editorial headlined FATEFUL MOMENT IN IRAN; the next week , the quashing of an uprising, the third week, the news of Elahe and her release from custody; the next month, another e-mail from David—a new editorial deadline.

––––––––––––––––– In the weeks that followed, David’s notes continued to arrive. He wanted to know about the reformists’ background and their former allegiance; the Iranian relationship with the Lebanese Hezbollah; the role of secular Iranians in the revolution of 1979 and in the subsequent fallout. With Elahe’s release, I had little incentive to talk about Iran. Writing to David took real effort. I had to provide him with the “insider facts,” information only natives are privy to, and add my own views, which were embittered by my history. Every time I wanted to substantiate an opinion, I drew upon a personal experience I had never talked about before, until at last I wrote, apologetically, that I could not continue. Despite my reputation, I confessed that I was not a good source after all. There were experts far better than I, whose names I suggested. When it came to Iran, I admitted, I was anything but objective. The past and the events of the years that followed the revolution had biased me forever.

Within moments after I e-mailed him the note I thought would be the end of al notes between us, a sharp beep announced the arrival of a new e-mail.

From: David@Nytimes.com To: RDH@cbsnews.com Subject: The years that followed the revolution.

R, Tell me about them. d When you have been a refugee, abandoned all your loves and belongings, your memories become your belongings.

Images of the past, snippets of old conversations, furnish the world within your mind. When you have nothing left to guard, you guard your memories. You guard them with silence.

You do not draw your treasures into the light, lest exposure soften their sharp—sad or gay—details (the best lesson I ever learned from visiting museums). Remembering becomes not simply a preoccupation but a full-time occupation. What

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you once witnessed is the story that brought journalists to your doorstep, but they left without the scoop. What you once witnessed is what scholars sought in the archives but did not find. What you once witnessed is what biographers intended to write. But how much can biographers do if the witnesses are silence?

When you belong to a breed on the verge of extinction, a Jewish woman from the Islamic Republic of Iran living in the United States, one small step can turn you into a poster child for someone else’s crusade. And you know of nothing more suspect than a crusade. Memory is the membrane in which the past is sealed and also the blueprint of what you once, when you were at your most clearheaded, envisioned as the future. You keep silent. To guard all that, true. But also because you cannot tell pain from anger. And since you do not wish to displace them onto an innocent listener, you do not allow yourself pain or anger. You walk on. You must walk on. In the new country, you must begin anew. To make yourself do so, you invent a metaphor. Not a beautiful metaphor, but a practical one to propel you.

You imagine you are a secondhand car whose odometer has been resent to zero by exile, that craftiest of dealers.

With all the old parts, you are recast as a brand-new human engine. Within you is all the clanking, hissing, and racket of past rides. But you muffle it all and press on.

David wanted me to speak. But he had no cruside. A historian, he was looking for what he knew was still too soon to have been written. He was a voice without a face.

Somewhere on the top floor of another New York City highrise he sat behind a desk. I had never seen him. All I knew of him was the words that kept arriving. Our friendship had been formed in written words, the only life those memories could have if they ever were to be expressed.

And in English. To write about Iran in Persian would be daunting. Instead of reexamining the memories, I feared that in Persian, I might begin to relive them. Persian could summon the teenager at sea. English sheltered the adult survivor, safely inside a lighthouse. I did not know how to use the language of the censors to speak against them; to use the very language by which I had been denied so much as a Jew, a woman, a secular citizen, and a young poet.

The love of Iran was still in my heart, yet I could not return.

The irrevocable journey I had made was not the physical one, out of Iran. It was the journey from “no,” from the perpetual denials. And what I had painstakingly arrived at, greater than even the new land, was a new language, the vessel of my flight to vast possibilities.

––––––––––––––––– I postponed writing David till I could be certain I wanted to commit myself to telling him. His note had opened the floodgates, and a world once shut away had come rushing

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back at me. But how and where would I begin? In need of a reprieve, I accepted a reporting assignment that took me to Albany, Georgia, for a few days.

The Reverend Jerry Cochran had served in the U.S. Navy in the early 1970s and was suffering from a lung disease.

Like most African Americans of his generation, Jerry had been assigned the most undesirable tasks while in the navy, among them the scrapping of the nonskid coating off the deck of the USS Enterprise. Within two years, Jerry had been diagnosed with a “respiratory disease of unknown origin” and discharged. He believed the disease had resulted from the polluted air he had inhaled while working on the deck. Now a biopsy proved the presence of elements, identical to those within the coating he had once scraped, in his chest. The dust was gradually hardening Jerry’s lung tissue and lessening his breathing capacity. Jerry was slowly suffocating.

Driving past the cotton fields in rural Georgia, I mulled over the many details that demanded my attention: the few unclear facts, the original documents, footage to shoot, sounds to record, his difficulty breathing and speaking, his wheezing. I decided to arrive at Jerry’s church early, to soak in my surroundings, an old habit that had got me far as a child. I reviewed all the questions and went over what I needed to prepare for the crew and our correspondent before the on-camera interviews. This was a man on the brink of death, I thought. He was about to trust his final words to me. And it was up to me to show how he had been mistreated and misdiagnosed and as a result was dying.

Inside the church, rows of children sat around tables, doing homework. Mrs. Cochran welcomed me. She asked if I was too tired or had had any trouble finding my way. The afterschool hours were the busiest at the church, she explained, and she apologized for the noisy surroundings. But I insisted on watching the children and staff go about their business. For reasons I never understood, I have always felt instantly at ease among black Americans and forget my own outsiderness. I said, “I’m happy to wait here and watch the kids. The reverend must be busy. I know I’ve come early.”

“The reverend has been on pins and needles for days waiting for you,” she replied, sounding like an exhausted wife who has had to contend with far too much for far too long. “It’s not every day 60 Minutes comes to our neighborhood.”

To find a quieter location for the filming, Mrs. Cochran took me on a tour of the building. We walked past several rooms, each filled to the ceiling with boxes of evidence the reverend had gathered on his own condition and that of his fellow servicemen. Years of correspondence had amounted to pile after pile of documents: letters from the Veterans

Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and on and on. Some bore the stamps of the White House, others of the U.S. Congress. Behind the façade of an unassuming twostory structure hid a colossal archive. And at the end of its last corridor, I imagined a gaunt man on his deathbed.

But I was wrong. In the last room, at the end of a hallway, behind a desk, in a suit, sat a corpulent man, who rose exuberantly to his feet and greet me. He looked hale and cheerful. Upon seeing the buoyant reverend, I felt the worst of a journalist’s fears rush over me: I was chasing a sham.

––––––––––––––––– It took hours to pore over papers and sift through medical reports till I found the documentary evidence that attested to the severity of Jerry’s condition. But more compelling than the records were his testimonies. At first, when he saw the skeptical expression on my face, he slapped his chest and said, as if before a judge, that his heart could no longer bear the weight of a history denied. The disease in those boxes, he pleaded, would kill him faster than the disease in his lungs.

He laid out photographs, exhibits for a jury of one, of himself and his buddies, their arms on one another’s shoulders, their faces bright with the proud smiles of young, invincible men, standing in uniforms against the majestic background of the sea. They dreamed of serving their country and hoped for a great future. But the dust had buried their dreams. Two of those young men were dead. Being forgotten had already killed their spirits. The dust would finish the rest.

Jerry’s eyes fixed on my face as if expecting a confession.

He asked whether I understood what it meant to be bearing a story never told. “I do,” I said with a voice on the brink of breaking. He paused, examined my expression, and, seeing that he had won me over, lowered himself into a chair, to rest at last.

––––––––––––––––– Back at the hotel, long past midnight, tossing in my bed, I was restless to write. The feel of Jerry’s firm grip as we shook hands still enveloped my hand, and his opening line kept playing in my mind: “I have waited years for you to come and hear my story.” So he began.

––––––––––––––––– And so I began.

From Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).

Copyright © 2004 by Roya Hakakian. Reprinted with the permission of the author, 2014.

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THE SON OF AN ACCLAIMED SYRIAN ACTIVIST FINDING HIS OWN LEGACY L A H A B

A S S E F

A L - J U N D I

Lahab Assef Al-Jundi was born and raised in Damascus, Syria.

After immigrating to the United States, he earned a degree in Electrical Engineering and discovered his passion for writing poetry. He published his first collection, A Long Way, in 1985.

The son of acclaimed Syrian poet Ali AlJundi, the younger Al-Jundi writes poetry, mainly in English, that transcends ethnic themes to address issues of universal significance. Both political and personal, his richly evocative poems reveal a refined consciousness, a keen perceptiveness, and a serious engagement with humane concerns.

His poetry has appeared in numerous

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literary publications and many anthologies including: In These Latitudes, Ten Contemporary Poets, edited by Robert Bonazzi, Inclined to Speak, An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, edited

by Hayan Charara, and Between Heaven and Texas, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye. His poems were selected in 2009 and 2010 by The Poetry Society of America for display on Dallas’ DART trains (Poetry In Motion Program) and on San Antonio’s VIA Transit system buses (Poetry On The move program).

His latest poetry collection No Faith At All was published in 2014.

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We need his hope and calm, where brokenness begins long healing, and citizens caught in tragic cycles of conflict find windows and doors to peer through, toward one another. Please give yourself the gift of listening to him. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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LIKE SALT

SUBMISSION

By Lahab Assef Al-Jundi

By Lahab Assef Al-Jundi

I once dreamt I was being chased by a shepherd in a desert.

I surrendered to death

I, briefcase in hand, in blue suit, pressed white shirt and red necktie.

Plodded to her with my Certificate of capitulation

He, clutching a long wooden staff, in flowing tan gallabiya and checkered black and white headdress.

She signed it— Resurrection

I stopped and spun around to face him.

My shock was met by his— I was looking into my own eyes!

He was seeing his face as he stared at mine.

Arab American.

Does one end where the other beings— Two countries separated by a border?

Or do they overlap— Floodlights of different colors?

Merge like salt, silt and sand— River finding sea?

Looked at me and sighed. Beat it I have other things to do I burned the document and ambled off ~ I went to love and pleaded Take me Do with me as you please If you are wine I will drink you Till this soberness is completely gone If you are light Please let me immerse myself in you Let me breathe you Till I am glowing from the inside out There is no deeper longing than this Love smiled and said I am you

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THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADOX

DO NO HARM

Center is stillness

We can imagine a world in peace.

What is hard to grasp

is why those who can do not.

Lahab Assef Al-Jundi

Sight no guarantee for light Shadow means nothing by itself How long to dwell on death to delight in life?

Have all questions been answered?

What if the answer is no?

Truth?

It is our shadow.

By Lahab Assef Al-Jundi

Nothing is wrong with Spring Break but some linger there for decades,

start a war.

Every empire, Roman to Ottoman, f---ed things up and died.

Let us change course while

there is time.

I see perfection as I look back under my wing.

Ahead

a warm kitchen

and a good friend.

All poems from No Faith At All (San Antonio, Texas: Pecan Grove Press, 2014.) Copyright © 2014 by Lahab Assef Al-Jundi. Reprinted with the permission of the author, 2014.

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G. Willow Wilson has a deft hand with myth and with magic, and the kind of smart, honest writing mind that knits together and bridges cultures and people. You should read what she writes. – Neil Gaiman

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THE VOICE BEHIND THE FIRST FEMALE MUSLIM SUPERHERO G .

W I L L O W

W I L S O N

G. Willow Wilson is a gifted young author whose writing explores, across multiple genres, the most pressing issues of our time. An American convert to Islam, Willow lives today in both Egypt and the United States. Her articles, graphic novels, and books reflect her extraordinary cross-cultural experiences with remarkable originality and courage.

Willow began her writing career at the age of seventeen as a freelance music critic for Boston’s Weekly Dig magazine. Since then, she’s written the Eisner Award-nominated comic book series Air and Mystic: The Tenth Apprentice and the graphic novel Cairo. In a field typically dominated by male novelists Willow stands out no less than the strong female characters she creates. Her first novel, Alif the Unseen, was a New York Times Notable Book and a contender for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). She currently writes the bestselling monthly comic book series Ms. Marvel for Marvel Comics.

In her early twenties Willow moved to Egypt where she spent several years working as a journalist. She was the first westerner to be granted a private interview with Sheikh Ali Gomaa after his promotion to the position of Grand Mufti of Egypt. Her articles about the Middle East and modern Islam have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly and the Canada National Post. Willow’s memoir about life in Egypt during the waning years of the Mubarak regime, The Butterfly Mosque, was named a Seattle Times Best Book of 2010 and has served as a common read for communities and campuses across the country.

Seattle and Cairo are home for Willow, where she lives with her husband and two young daughters.

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WITH OUR OWN EYES

By G. Willow Wilson

In the upper reaches of the Zagros Mountains, the air changed. The high altitude opened it, cleared it of the dust of the valleys, and made it sing a little in the lungs; low atmospheric pressure. It was a shift I recognized.

We had been driving for hours, winding north along a wide dry basin between high peaks; then we turned west. Now the car, an old Peugot, struggled upward along switchbacks cut into the mountainside, past intersecting layers of rock laid down over geological ages.

For a moment I was reminded intensely of home.

It had been almost a year since I had been back to Boulder, in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. The snug valley where I had gone to high school, learned to drive, where my parents and sister still lived, could be seen as a tidy whole from this height in cliffs much like these.

Looking down into the plain below, I felt as though I was seeing double, and that an hour’s hike along the switchbacks would bring me to my own doorstep.

At the time, it was a sensation that seemed a little perverse. I had just flown into Iran from Egypt—this journey had begun thousands of miles from my own country. That a mountain and a change in the air in Iran should make me think of home in the spring of 2004, the spring of the War on Terror, the clash of civilizations, the jihad, the things that had made my quiet life almost unlivable, must be sheer perversity, I thought then. I didn’t yet realize that the Zagros Mountains had no name when they were forced out of the ground millions of years ago, and neither did the Rockies, that the call of earth to earth might be something more real than the human divisions of Iran and America.

I had faith, then; it was in the mountains that I first thought of divinity, and these mountains reminded me of that sensation. But I didn’t yet have faith in faith—I didn’t trust the connections I felt between mountains or memories, and if I had been a little more ambivalent, I could have allowed the Zagros to be foreign, and the memory to be coincidence.

Fortunately, I didn’t.

Ahmad, my guide plus chaperone, pointed west over the receding peaks.

“If you kept driving that way, you would get to Iraq,” he said. He was from Shiraz, and had

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silver hair and laugh lines. Before the revolution he flew planes for the Shah, whom he had hated, but not as much as he now hated the mullahs. During one of our conversations on the road from Shiraz to Isfahan, he told me he used to fast during Ramadan and pray with some regularity. In his eyes, though, the Islamic regime had so deformed his religion that he stopped. Thinking I would judge him for this lapse lest he provide a rationale (I was an American and a Sunni, and therefore unpredictable) he told me he didn’t need to fast; fasting was meant to remind one of the hunger of the poor, and he helped the poor in other ways.

“Then why do the poor fast?” I asked him. The Ramadan fast was required of all Muslims, not just the wealthy. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye; evidently I was an American Sunni who discussed theology. Among the middle classes, theology had gone out of fashion in Iran. But I had just come from Egypt, where the reverse was true. Ahmad left the question floating in the air.

“Iraq?” I climbed on a rock near the edge of the promontory where we were standing, having parked the car on the shoulder of the road. My Nikes stuck out from under the hem of my black robe. I had overdressed. In Khatami’s Tehran, chadors and manteaux had been replaced by short, tight housecoats and scarves that were barely larger than handkerchiefs. Knowing only that Iran was under a religious dictatorship, and Egypt was under a military one, I had dressed as conservatively as possible. I didn’t realize that whatever the political reality, Egypt was far more socially conservative than Iran. The reasons for this would become clear to me only later: when a dictatorship claims absolute authority over an idea— in the case of Iran, Islam, in the case of Egypt, a ham-fisted brand of socialism—frustrated citizens will run to the opposite ideological extreme. The Islamic Republic was secularizing Iran; in Egypt the short-robed fundamentalists multiplied and multiplied.

“Yes, Iraq. I think at night farther southwest you could maybe see the bombs falling. But far away; first the plain of Karbala, then Baghdad.” Ahmad came to stand next to my rock, and pointed northwest. “Karbala is where Imam Husayn is buried.”

“We have his head,” I said, thinking of the fasting argument.

“In Cairo. There’s a square named after him where the shrine is.”

“What?”

“His head,” I repeated, wondering whether I should put an honorific before his; Husayn ibn Ali was a grandson of the Prophet and beloved by all Muslims, but particularly revered

by Shi’ites. I didn’t want to commit a faux pas. No matter what Ahmad thought about fasting. I put one hand to my back; the infection in my kidneys had manifested itself as a

dull spreading pain there, and a touch of fever. Living in an industrial neighborhood in Cairo, not a clean city to begin with, I had developed an unfortunate apathy toward my health.

“This is the first time I hear this about Imam Husayn,” muttered Ahmad, and broke out into a laugh.

“It’s true,” I said. “The Fatimids brought him with them. At least, that’s what the ulema tell us; maybe it’s all a lie and the shrine is empty.” A light wind ran down the channel of the valley below. I took a breath and held it for a moment, then let it out in a sigh. Ahmad smiled a little.

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s beautiful up here.”

––––––––––– Later, in the car, Ahmad told me, “I think you are becoming a little bit Arab.” He said so gently, but this is not a compliment in Persia. On some level, I agreed with him—I was so submerged in Cairo, so cut off from America, that something was bound to change. Yet I still felt like myself. I was disturbed because I had been told I should be disturbed; that the Arab way of doing things, being opposed to the American way of doing things, represented the betrayal of an American self.

But I had discovered that I was not my habits. I was not the way I dressed or the things I did and didn’t say. If I were all these things, then standing on that rock and looking west, I should have been someone else.

But I remained.

When the term “clash of civilizations” was coined, it was a myth; the interdependence of world cultures lay on the surface, supported by trade and the travel of ideas, the borrowing of words from language to language. But like so many ugly ideas, the clash becomes a little more real every time someone says the word. Today, it is a theory supported not only in the West, where it was invented, but also in the Muslim world, where plenty of people see Islam as irrevocably in conflict with western values. When threatened, both Muslims and westerners tend to toe their respective party lines, defending monolithic ideals that crumble as soon as the opposing party has turned its back. The truth emerges.

It is not through politics that we will be delivered from this conflict. It is not through pundits and analysts and experts.

The war between Islam and the West is a human conflict, in which human experience is the only reliable guide. We are all standing on the mountaintop, and we must learn to look out at the world not through the medium of self-appointed authorities, but with our own eyes.

From The Butterfly Mosque: A Young Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010.) Copyright © 2010 by G. Willow Wilson. Reprinted with the permission of the author, 2014.

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JOURNALIST AND MARINE CORPS VETERAN OF THE IRAQ WAR J O S H

R U S H I N G Josh Rushing has presented twentyeight episodes of Fault Lines since helping launch the show in 2009. He has covered a wide array of issues, such as NSA surveillance, immigration, and the drug war. On any given day “on location” has meant a death chamber, illegal mine shaft, cocaine lab or battlefield, while “a day in the office” has ranged from hunting seals with Inuit in the Arctic to running from riot cops in Santiago.

A veteran of Al Jazeera English’s earliest days in 2005, Josh has been a leading presence on the air since the channel’s beginning. Josh authored

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Mission Al Jazeera: Seek the Truth, Build a Bridge, Change the World, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2007. His writings and photography have been widely published from AlJazeera.com to National Geographic.

Josh became known to audiences around the world as the US Marine featured in the 2004 documentary film Control Room. He resigned from the the corps as a captain after fourteen years.

Josh has four children and a very, very understanding wife.

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“Some people will try and ignore Josh Rushing’s message, but his story is too extraordinary to be dismissed. Understanding his message requires strength and moral courage. I have rarely been as impressed with another human being as I am with him.” – Richard Dreyfuss

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AMERICA’S GREATER JIHAD

Photo by Josh Rushing.

By Josh Rushing

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In Arabic the word jihad means struggle, or holy war. Many Islamic scholars distinguish between what they call the greater and lesser jihads: the lesser is the fight to defend the faith; the greater is the struggle to overcome the chasm between the best and worst within oneself.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, America has been engaged in its own jihads, both the lesser and the greater. With troops deployed around the world presumably defending their homeland (while offending nearly everyone else), one might call it a victory in this lesser jihad that at the time of this writing there have been no new attacks on the United States since the Twin Towers fell. However, reports from the frontlines of America’s greater jihad—the struggle for the nation’s soul, the ideas America is supposed to represent—are much more grim.

For fourteen years as a U.S. Marine I dedicated my life to defending America, but through a surprising series of events I have found myself pulled from the fight against foreign enemies and thrown onto the frontlines of America’s greater jihad, as a correspondent for Al Jazeera English.

I have an office four floors above our studio in a building three blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C. From this vantage point, in the heart of our nation’s capital, I often find myself traversing the battle lines of America’s struggle with the best and worst of itself. Such was the case when I went to shoot a story on America’s dwindling rural population in Small (and getting smaller) Town, USA. In a country consumed with immigration issues, I wanted to explore a corner obsessed with emigration.

Producer Peggy Holter, cameraman Mark Teboe, and I headed to Divide County (population 2,200) in rural northwest North Dakota, just a few miles south of the Canadian border. There I interviewed everyone, from high school students to business owners, about the

value of their little piece of the heartland and the risk of it emptying out as young people went away to college and found little reason to return home afterward. I first sensed something might be amiss when a reporter from The Journal, the local paper, showed up to cover me covering them on my first day in the area. She was friendly enough, but after chatting for a bit she admitted to her surprise about how I was dressed. I thought blue jeans and a button-down shirt might appear more casual than what she was accustomed to seeing reporters wear on television.

“No,” she said, “it’s just that when I heard there was a crew here from Al Jazeera I thought you’d be wearing robes and headscarves.”

Although this wouldn’t had been true even if I had been working for Al Jazeera Arabic—the original Al Jazeera—I took the opportunity to tell her about Al Jazeera English, which at the time was preparing its global launch, and the story on “vanishing America” that we were pursuing in her neck of the woods. She seemed fine with my explanation, we parted amicably, and I didn’t give it much further thought until she called me a few days later, sounding more than a little distraught.

She told me that a couple of days after we met, a man who identified himself as an agent from Customs and Border Protection entered her office and asked her to step outside with him. She asked if she could bring her reporter’s notebook, to which he sternly replied, “No need. I’ll be the one asking the questions.” Once out of the office he began to grill her about her encounter with me: Did he look American? Do you think he was a citizen?

What kinds of questions did he ask? What were they doing up here near the border? Did they take pictures or videos? The agent informed her there were potential international implications to my visit, on which he was not at liberty to elaborate.

This impromptu interrogation left her upset, and, since headlines at the time were exposing (and criticizing) the U.S. intelligence services for maintaining a list of private phone numbers they sometimes tapped in search of potential terrorists, she also worried about having been added to that database. Would calling her mother to discuss the interrogation put her on the list as well? She e-mailed her brother in Washington State, who, like his sister, found the story alarming, and hesitated before calling to reassure her. When he hung up 45

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the phone, he saw an unmarked car pull up in front of his house. A man leaned out of the passenger side, spray-painted a strange symbol on the sidewalk in front of the house and drove off.

He was dumbfounded by what he saw, and had he not taken a picture of it, even his sister may not have believed him. Overcoming her fear, she wrote a column about her bizarre encounter in The Journal, while her brother recounted his own version of the story on his blog. The fuse was ignited: from there, a watchdog group that wrongfully associates Al Jazeera with Al Qaeda picked up the story and released an urgent media advisory about Al Jazeera probing the United States’s unsecured borders. This story gained national exposure when Fox News ran a note about it on its ticker. A legion of conservative bloggers propelled the incident even further, fanning the flames of their xenophobic followers with visions of Arabs teeming at the United States’s porous border with Canada.

Back in North Dakota, the Customs and Border Protection agent who had visited the reporter was now tracing my footsteps, giving the same big-brother treatment to everyone I interviewed, prompting a series of nervous phone calls to me.

They were worried they might have said something that could put their country at risk or, even scarier, something that could put themselves at risk from their own country. The agent effectively burned every bridge I had crossed in North Dakota, ensuring that

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there wasn’t going to be any follow-up interviews on this story.

All of this might have been more amusing than frustrating, were it not for a bolt of bad news I received the same day I found out about the federal agent following me. In an e-mail from an old friend, I learned that one of my best friends from high school, Matthew Worrell, had just been killed in Iraq when his Little Bird helicopter was shot down in a battle south of Baghdad. Like me, Matt had two sons who looked just like him. Jake was three years old and Luke, which is my son’s name as well, was eighteen months old.

Matt’s death hit me hard. At the funeral, his sons wore tiny suits and Luke sucked on a pacifier with a red, white, and blue handle that matched the colors of the flag draped over his father’s coffin.

Matt’s death reminded me that the struggle, the lesser jihad the United Sates currently faces, comes at a high cost.

What angered me most was that Matt died serving an idea of America—the idea of a nation with an open mind and heart—that resembled the actual state of America less and less, and seemed to be vanishing faster than the people in North Dakota.

The nation was becoming blinded by fear, seeing enemies where there weren’t any, and treating honest inquiry—the kind guaranteed in the Constitution— with suspicion or hostility.

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Photos by Josh Rushing.

I called the agent who was on my trail, and this time the questions were for him. Why was he harassing the people I interviewed? If he had questions, why didn’t he contact me? Was this part of his job? To protect America’s unsecured Canadian border from the “threat” of Washington-based reporters? His stumbling answers were meek at best.

The story of my misadventure in North Dakota resurfaced six weeks later when my executive producer, Joanne Levine, mentioned it in an op-ed piece about Al Jazeera for the Washington Post. To accompany her article, the Post editor retrieved an archived photo of a protest that had occurred outside Al Jazeera English’s Washington studio. A group opposed to Al Jazeera coming to America—never mind Al Jazeera Arabic already had a bureau in Washington and had been distributed in the States for years—had spent months on its website calling for a protest, claiming that the launch of Al Jazeera English could lead to suicide bombings on the streets of the United States. The group’s recruitment skills were about as effective as their planning foresight. According to the Washington Post there were all of six protestors outside our office building, denouncing us as a “propaganda shop on American soil.” A spokesman for the United States American Committee—the group responsible for promoting the event—claimed that they had expected at least 200 outraged citizens to participate in what they hoped would be a continuous, round-the-clock demonstration. But by six o’clock, the band of six had gone home.1 I missed the show, though a few of my colleagues went by to see the protest, but like the people who had organized the demonstration, they were disappointed with the turnout. Although a photographer covered the diminutive demonstration, the Post did not print a picture—until they retrieved an archived photo of the April protest to accompany Joanne’s commentary. The photo’s frame was tightly filled with a handful of protestors and their handmade signs, without explaining they were the protest in toto; from the tightly cropped photo you might have though the demonstration was huge.

This is a strange time for America. Everywhere it seems people are seeing things through a prism of their own fears and stereotypes. When the reporter from The Journal in North Dakota heard that a crew from Al Jazeera English was in town, she expected Bedouins on camels. The Border Patrol assumed we were doing reconnaissance for a pending invasion. The reporter’s brother thought secret agents were marking him, but instead, the person in the mysterious car was simply designating a trail for a bike race passing through the neighborhood that weekend.

The protestors believed we were bringing an anti-American agenda to the nation’s capital. And my friend died 1 “Al Jazeera Office Protested,” Washington Post, May 1, 2006, p. B3.

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in a war initiated by fears of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terrorist ties that didn’t exist.

It doesn’t take an expert to see the signs of a changing time. After being interviewed by Terry Gross on her radio program Fresh Air about my experiences in the war to liberate the Iraqi people, I received an e-mail from a former Israeli military officer who wrote to me: “Six months in the desert doesn’t make you f---ing Lawrence of Arabia.” Granted.

At a time when the historic conflicts of the Middle East continue to impact us in a daily fashion—from the friends we have buried, to the news we watch every night, to the shoes we remove each time we board a plane—I am dumbfounded as to why more Americans aren’t interested in the Arab world. Many Americans seem to know very little about the Middle East, and often broad-brush the whole area. When I am invited to talk, I’m often asked to describe life in Qatar, and regularly people are surprised when I tell them of the luxury hotels, fine seafood restaurants, and beautiful beaches. It seems like people in the States often picture the entire Middle Eastern region as the exploding market place often depicted in Hollywood interpretations of that part of the world.

I am dumbfounded as to why more Americans aren’t interested in the Arab world.

From Mission Al Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.)

Copyright © 2007 by Josh Rushing. Reprinted with the permission of the author, 2014.

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Photo by Josh Rushing.

From my vantage point—working for an Arabbased media company in the heart of the United States, trying to practice skeptical and challenging journalism in a news environment where those values seem increasingly less important—my North Dakota experience has all the elements of a good story: honest, hardworking people; fearful bureaucrats; ignorant extremists; a good soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice; and a few simple twists of fate, such as the stranger marking the brother’s house and the photograph taken out of context. It was as rich and kaleidoscopic as any true picture of our country; and it was business as usual on the frontlines of America’s greater jihad, and my own, personal mission Al Jazeera.

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think bigger. think differently.

Learn more about our Community Innovation program.

Inspiring and supporting communities in the pursuit of innovative solutions to their challenges.

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FREE WRITING WORKSHOP

OF ANY U.S. WAR N O W

F O R M I N G

Participants will write monologues and essays based on their experiences.

Workships facilitated by university professors in Grand Forks, Fargo, Minot, and Dickinson. For specific dates in your area, please send an email to info@ggfct.com or call 701-746-0847. sponsored by

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[between two worlds]

iHuman exploring the intersection of technology and humanity

october 2, 2015 bismarck, nd our digital society This ideas summit is for anyone interested in the future of our digital society. Whether you are a plugged-in tech addict or an off-line skeptic your assumptions about technology will be challenged.

Leading innovators and researchers from both the tech industry and academia will share their insights into the ways rapid advances in technology are creating both amazing opportunities and dangerous new challenges. Digital developments are changing everything from the way we worship to the way we wage our wars. We can harness the power of virtual reality to create more dynamic learning spaces for our children, but we must also be wary of the threat to personal privacy when so much of our lives are now uploaded.

Understanding the power and pitfalls of technology allows us to remain its masters instead of its unthinking servants.

A program of

series

series

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: AMERICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST has been made possible by these generous sponsors:

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SCHEDULE OF EVENTS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: AMERICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST Hosted by Roxana Saberi

OCTOBER 9, 2014

Fargo Theatre 314 Broadway Fargo, North Dakota

9:00 AM

“BETWEEN TWO WORLDS” OPENING REMARKS BY ROXANA SABERI

9:30 AM

POWER TALKS ROUND 1 TOPIC: MY JOURNEY BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

G. Willow Wilson: Reading Comics in Cairo As political and sectarian divisions grow in the Middle East and here at home, there are startling—and instructive—points of convergence.

Through the lens of pop culture (comics, films, TV and popular literature), I’ll explore some of the ways art and media have brought my friends and readers together across the cultural divide, using one particularly vivid example—the reception of the dystopian film V for Vendetta by Egyptian audiences—to illustrate how analysts missed an opportunity to predict the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

Roya Hakakian: A Journey Between Two Languages I believe that the great transition that I made, my great arrival in America, did not occur when my plane landed in NYC. It occurred in stages and when I managed to really live in English not as a speaker of second language, but as a bilingual speaker. The ease required that I truly begin to see the world and think about everything, writing included, in the way that a native born American does. Only then was my journey to the US complete.

Tamim Ansary: Afghan-American or American-Afghan?

As the son of the first American woman to marry an Afghan and live in Afghanistan, I spent my childhood moving back and forth between two worlds daily. Decades later, living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I found myself embraced as a mentor by the children of Afghan families exiled to this land by the holocaust that befell Afghanistan—young folks who saw in my experience echoes of their own lives. How are these experiences different, how are they similar, and what is universal about living in two disparate worlds no matter what those worlds be?

Josh Rushing: My Journey Along the Frontline with the Islamic State I just returned from a reporting trip to Iraq where I traveled the entire 600-mile frontline between the Islamic State and Kurdistan from the Syrian to the Iranian borders. Along the way what I witnessed shatters the simple binary of good versus evil that seems to be the daily narrative of the US media’s telling of what’s happening there now. With escalating US military action in the region it’s more important than ever to understand what we’re getting involved in.

Lahab Assef Al-Jundi: A Long Way From My Father’s Country In this first part I cover the period of my childhood in the newly independent country of Syria, reflecting on how being born to parents of two different religions in a conservative society helped shape the foundation of my world view. I also touch briefly on the tumultuous times for family and country, times whose reverberations are still impacting current events, from the conflict with Israel, to the raging bloody revolution inside Syria.

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[between two worlds] Naomi Shihab Nye: Finding Myself in Palestine A journey through Palestinian heritage, family and the power of humanity. When a child of the American Midwest find herself suddenly in high school in the Old City of Jerusalem, what elements of her father’s precious Palestinian heritage became more clear to her? How do we filter the experiences of ancestors to find meaning in a world of mixtures? Is it possible to live in the dream we would wish for the world— Mutual Respect?

11:30 AM

LUNCH BREAK

12:45 PM

POWER TALKS ROUND 2 TOPIC: TODAY’S CHALLENGES AND TOMORROW’S REALITY

G. Willow Wilson: Generation Why The Middle East is one of the youngest regions on Earth, with 30% of the population between ages 15-29. As this generation of revolutionaries comes of age in the brave new world of social media, they are connecting with their contemporaries across the globe—and the results of these alliances have the power to upset our understanding of world politics. But is people power enough to overcome the entrenched, autocratic “deep states” whose counter-revolutions have so devastated the hopes of the Arab Spring?

Roya Hakakian: Redefining the War on Terror I will discuss what I believe we, as Americans, misread about the Middle East. That misreading leads us to faulty assessments and gets us investing in efforts that yield little and are mostly not enduring. The challenge is to redefine the “the war on terror” as “the war against gender apartheid,” an apartheid that I believe has, thus far, cloaked itself under the mask of religion/Islam. Tomorrow’s reality would then become a redefined “war.” It’ll shift the current confrontation between Islam and Christianity or Judaism, or... to a confrontation between those who stand with women’s equality in the middle east and those who don’t.

Tamim Ansary: In the Future, the Past Will Still Exist There is a standard story in the Middle East and Central Asia, a story studded with stock terms such as terrorism, tribalism, and Islam, as well as democracy, elections, and modernity. In Afghanistan—my land of origin—those terms include corruption, drugs and Taliban. That’s the surface narrative and it isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. I want to peel it back to reveal another narrative beneath.

Josh Rushing: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World As the world becomes increasingly skeptical of Western foreign policy, we have to interact with the international media to reach the people that are most hostile to us. Engaging all sides needs to be standard operating procedure for our government in the new media battleground.

Lahab Assef Al-Jundi: Visions of Peace Here I examine the personal transformation I navigated from life as an Electrical Engineer working for corporate America, to the breakthrough that eventually led to a life of poetry, and a passion for peace. I look at the different kinds of peace, what each one means on personal, and mass consciousness levels, and what roles poetry could play in bringing such visions to life.

Naomi Shihab Nye: The Stories That Need to Be Told Stories are our gravity. Everything happens inside them. As a child once told me, “Everything was old before I was born.” What elements of old stories can help us survive our new worlds? How do we record and remember the stories which will help to give our own lives shape?

How do we listen better?

3:00 PM

4:00 PM

PANEL DISCUSSION AND AUDIENCE Q & A (VIA TWITTER, TEXT, EMAIL)

5:00 PM

THINK & DRINK ADD-ON OPTION: MORE STORIES Casual, round table discussions with speakers at local venues, two drink tickets provided for each participant (must be 21 or older). Limit: 12 per session, tickets required.

Josh Rushing and G. Willow Wilson | Zandbroz Variety Store, 420 Broadway Roya Hakakian and Tamim Ansary | Atomic Coffee, 222 Broadway Lahab Assef Al-Jundi and Naomi Shihab Nye, moderated by Roxana Saberi | Juano’s, 402 Broadway

CLOSING SOCIAL—BOOK SIGNING (APPETIZERS AND CASH BAR) Hosted by Miss North Dakota 2014, Jacky Arness Ecce Gallery, 216 Broadway

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North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

ndhumanities.org

We have ways of making you think.

Board of Directors CHAIR Christopher Rausch, Bismarck VICE CHAIR Melissa Gjellstad, Grand Forks Najla Amundson, Fargo Bethany Andreasen, Minot Aaron Barth, Fargo Tayo Basquiat, Mandan William Caraher, Grand Forks Kara Geiger, Mandan Carol Ratchenski, Fargo Elizabeth Sund, Minot Iris Swedlund, Velva Jessie Veeder Scofield, Watford City Karis Thompson, Fargo Susan Wefald, Bismarck STAFF Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Stacy Schaffer, Development Officer Angela Hruby, Administrative Assistant The North Dakota Humanities Council is a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities inspire our vision of a thoughtful, respectful, actively engaged society that will be able to meet the challenge of sustaining our democracy across the many divisions of modern society and deal responsibly with the shared challenges we currently face as members of an interdependent world.

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”

— Albert Einstein