About this item
Winner of the 2016 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Arab American Book AwardA collection of insightful and heartbreaking essays on Muslim-American life after 9/11. Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake "Mustafa Bayoumi" was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an "anti-American, pro-Islam" agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed.. Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the incarceration and deportation of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, based almost solely on their national origin and immigration status. The NYPD, with help from the CIA, has aggressively spied on Muslims in the New York area as they go about their ordinary lives, from noting where they get their hair cut to eavesdropping on conversations in cafés. In This Muslim American Life, Moustafa Bayoumi reveals what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans, highlighting the profound effect this surveillance has had on how they live their lives. To be a Muslim American today often means to exist in an absurd space between exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you. In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present.
About the Author
Moustafa Bayoumi was born in Zürich, Switzerland, grew up in Kingston, Canada, and moved to the United States in 1990 to attend Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in English literature. He is currently a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is also the author of "How Does It Feel To Be a Problem? : Being Young and Arab in America" (Penguin) , which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. (The book has also been translated into Arabic by Arab Scientific Publishers.) His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The National, The Guardian, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The Nation, and many other places. His essay "Disco Inferno" was included in the collection "Best Music Writing of 2006" (DaCapo) . He is also the co-editor (with Andrew Rubin) of "The Edward Said Reader" (Vintage) and editor of "Midnight on Mavi Marmara: the Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict" (O/R Books and Haymarket Books) . He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Sun-Times, and on CNN, FOX News, Book TV, National Public Radio, and many other media outlets from around the world. Panel discussions on "How Does It Feel To Be a Problem? " have been convened at The Museum of the City of New York, Drexel Law School, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and through PEN American Center, and the book has been chosen as the common reading for incoming freshmen at universities across the country. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
