This Muslim American Life
Thursday, November 12
Time: 6-8pm
Location: Knox Hall, 606 West 122 Street, Room 509
Join Moustafa Bayoumi, who has been interviewing and listening closely to Muslim Americans, in a wide-ranging conversation about what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans.
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 his namesake "Mustafa Bayoumi" was) in a detective novel, and 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. Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the September 11 terrorist attacks 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. And most Americans still seem confused about the difference between Arabs and Muslims, fourteen years into the War on Terror. 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. Join Moustafa Bayoumi, who has been interviewing and listening closely to Muslim Americans, in a wide-ranging conversation about what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans.
Moustafa Bayoumi is 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 Nonfiction. He is the editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara (O/R Books) and co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage). His latest book, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror, will be published in September by NYU Press. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Guardian, The National, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other places, and he is a frequent contributor to The Nation and The Progressive. A graduate of Columbia University, Bayoumi is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY).
This series is free and open to the public.
For more information about the event, please contact Amy Starecheski.
This event is co-sponsored by The Oral History Master of Arts program
and the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics at
Columbia University.