KING OF THE WORLD

Episode 2: Terrifying Wars

Hosted by Shahjehan Khan, produced by Asad Butt, associate produced & researched by Lindsy Gamble, and sound designed and mixed by Mark Annotto

Shahjehan experiences ritual highs and the lowest low as he begins college and struggles with a conflicted identity; meanwhile the United States initiates the everlasting War on Terror.

Wednesday, September 8th, 2021

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[This episode of King of the World contains information about suicide, which may be upsetting to some people. If you are thinking about suicide or would like emotional support, the Suicide Prevention Lifeline Network is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week across the United States. Just call 1-800-273-8255. And now to the episode.

Chapter 1: INTRO

Shahjehan Khan

Before he became the so-called Godfather of Pakistani Mixed Martial Arts

[Audio]

Bashir Ahmad was a suburban Brown kid just like me. Although he was born in Pakistan, Bashir’s family moved to Northern Virginia when he was just two years old.

Bashir Ahmad

So it's right outside of DC, and so it was quite diverse, you know, like lots of different immigrants from random places, right? Not the European immigrants, not Chinese immigrants, but like Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

Shahjehan Khan

His Virginia suburb was pretty different from Acton-Boxborough (the two towns we combined and called AB) on the outskirts of Boston.

Bashir Ahmad

My class, for example, in kindergarten, maybe 80% white. Often times maybe I would be the only Muslim or maybe one other Muslim, but it was never like, I'm the only like Brown person.

Shahjehan Khan

Bashir is exactly one year older than me—technically 365 days and like 36 hours if we’re gonna go there. So my senior year of high school was at the same time as his freshman year at Virginia Commonwealth University.

And kinda like me, his first attempt at college wasn’t going well. A few days before 9/11, he was kicked out of his dorm for smoking weed, so he found himself crashing on friends couches, trying to act like everything was fine. It’s safe to say he was a little stressed at this point, like how was he going to come clean to his parents? What was he gonna do now? And then when the attacks happened, with the added anxiety of being a Muslim in America during the nonstop post-9/11 news cycle, he basically couldn’t get out of bed.

Bashir Ahmad

I don't necessarily know if I felt like worried for like myself, but are people going to react to me being a Muslim? Maybe you feel a bit more paranoid. It's like, are people looking at me as they walk down the street?

Shahjehan Khan

Paranoia sums it up pretty well actually. Being an American Muslim in this new “post-9/11 age” was super tough. We all were immediately reminded exactly just where we stood in this country.

Bashir Ahmad

When I say where I'm from—“Oh, Pakistan you mean that place that's right next to Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda like staged their attacks, you know?” So there's obviously, you kinda feel the country's eyes now all looking at you from that moment onwards.

Shahjehan Khan

Bashir decided to turn his life around. He felt like he’d already wasted his parents’ money once, so, like so many other American kids looking for a way to pay for college, he decided to join the National Guard.

[Commercial]

Bashir was super into history, especially military history. And he figured he could easily handle the one-weekend-a-month, two-weeks-a-year requirements. Maybe, he thought, this could give him some discipline and motivation, too.

But when he showed up for his first monthly drills...

Bashir Ahmad

The way I can describe it is like Police Academy.

Shahjehan Khan

Yeah he’s definitely talking about THAT Police Academy, the 1984 comedy cult classic film.

[Audio]

Bashir Ahmad

Okay, this is not what I expected the army to be like. There was [sic] very few people there that like, “Yeah, I’m joining the army because I love discipline.” And it was just like, “Man, I got this girl pregnant,” and like, “I need something to do.” No one was serious about anything.

I asked them, this must have been my first day there, I was like, “Have you ever guys ever been deployed?” And they started laughing. They're like, “We get lost trying to make it to the highway!” And so I was like, “Oh man.”

Shahjehan Khan

So Bashir figured maybe things wouldn’t be so bad. He’d probably never see combat, and could just coast along for the next few years as he finished his enlistment duty, graduate without crippling college debt, and live out his family’s American dream. He had no idea that he would soon be an American Muslim soldier on the other side of the world, grappling with his sense of self, and struggling to reconcile what he was feeling inside with his mission and what he saw around him.

From Rifelion Media, I’m Shahjehan Khan and this is King of the World, a historical, cultural, and personal look back at the 20 years since 9/11.

[Theme]

Episode 2: Terrifying Wars

Chapter 2: AFGHANISTAN

Shahjehan Khan

When you turn 18 in America, you’re considered an adult. You can buy lottery tickets, register to vote, get a tattoo, or even change your name.

Six days before my 18th birthday, on October 7th, 2001, President George W. Bush announced the start of Operation Enduring Freedom and that the United States had begun dropping bombs on Afghanistan.

[Audio]

Bush: On my orders, the United States Military has begun strikes against Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps, and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Shahjehan Khan

A place I’ve never been but that’s loosely where “my people” came from, at least in a historical sense. My family actually originates from a tribe called the Kakazais that settled in an area on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This was the beginning of the so-called American War on Terror.

America is only just withdrawing from Afghanistan, 20 years later, literally as I’m speaking these words. However, the War on Terror is still an amorphous, abstract thing, not really one specific war, but a sort of post-9/11 war framework that has given the U.S. (and its allies) a blank slate to consistently be in a state of offense. It has been and continues to be mostly waged against Muslim people, in Muslim-majority countries.

But it began in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001—my senior year of high school—with the hunt for Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks.

[Address to Congress]

Bush: The leadership of Al-Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country….

Shahjehan Khan

The U.S. and Afghanistan’s relationship goes pretty far back. Believe it or not, there was a time when we armed the group that would later become the Taliban (called the Mujahideen). In the 1980s, the U.S. actually hailed them as freedom fighters in their fight against a Russian invasion. Here’s then U.S. President Ronald Reagan at a press conference from that time:

[Press Conference]

Reagan: Support that the United States has been providing the resistance will be strengthened, rather than diminished, so that it can continue to fight effectively for freedom. A just struggle against foreign tyranny can count upon worldwide support, both political and material.

Shahjehan Khan

After kicking out the Soviets and engaging in a four-year civil war, the Taliban emerged as the leaders in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. They instilled a very tribal, local, and brutal interpretation of Islam—one that is very unrecognizable to most other Muslims across the world and across history.

[Music]

Immediately following 9/11, the Bush administration (and arguably the American public) was seeking some sort of swift justice. President Bush tried to force the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, who was now based in Afghanistan and whose organization known as Al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Because the Taliban didn't respond to the U.S.’s ultimatum to hand over Bin Laden, we began bombing the whole country.

[Interview]

Bush: There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt, we know he's guilty—turn him over! If they want us to stop our military operations, they've just gotta meet my conditions, and when I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations.

Shahjehan Khan

Bin Laden would remain at large for another 10 years, and eventually be killed in Pakistan by U.S. Navy Seals during the Obama administration.

[Music]

After 9/11, a new generation of Americans were given a glimpse into Afghan society, where we were told terrorists hid in caves, plotted attacks, and oppressed women. And that’s really all anyone would know unless they dug deeper than the evening news.

Huma Gupta

Individuals don't really understand how the country was subjected to very diffluent ideological regimes.

Shahjehan Khan

That’s Dr. Huma Gupta, a historian of cities and architecture in southwest Asia and South Asia, and MIT’s newest lecturer in the agricultural program for Islamic architecture.

Huma Gupta

You have a monarchy in place, then you have the Soviet invasion, and then you have the Taliban come, and then you have the U.S. government and U.S. occupation. The culture has changed a lot, and it continues to change.

Shahjehan Khan

Huma has spent a lot of time in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Huma Gupta

What I think I really appreciate about my friends who grew up in Afghanistan in those decades is that they have tremendous insight and understanding into the inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, and the limitations of all of these ideal ideological systems, right? And how they have been applied to Afghanistan in practice.

Shahjehan Khan

Afghanistan’s been like a “World Power staging ground” for generations, and has been subjected to routine foreign interference. Beyond just the U.S. and Russia, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China have all been accused of using proxy forces to gain influence in Afghanistan.

Huma Gupta

My friends talk about how their school curriculum changed dramatically over the course of 20, 30 years. As they were growing up they were first being taught math problems through sort of Soviet models and references. And then suddenly they're being taught through Taliban kind of references of like, what’s five AK-47s plus five AK-47s. And then suddenly you have the U.S. occupation and then the curriculum changes again.

Shahjehan Khan

It’s fascinating to think about how much national identity is a result of schooling and education, and how in a single generation, Huma’s Afghan friends basically couldn’t recognize their country anymore. We learned nothing of this history at AB, and while my dad would try to tell me stuff about Afghan, Pakistani, and Muslim history, it didn’t seem relevant to me until this part of the world, my so-called part of the world, was in the news constantly after 9/11.

[Music]

Chapter 3: IDENTITY

Not that it isn’t these days, but patriotism was at like an all-time high during my senior year, and I just didn’t really identify with it in the same way as it seemed like the rest of America did.

[Newscast]

As the bombs began to fall on Afghanistan at the end of 2001, I already felt like I was being pulled in a lot of different directions. I barely graduated, and though I’d participated in all the “normal stuff” like prom and senior dress up day, I still was super confused about who I was and where I was heading. About what my place would be in this new America.

[Music]

Rania Mustafa

I think identity is how you perceive yourself. It’s all the different outside factors, all the social realities, family members, friends, all these different things are coming into play as to how you perceive yourself.

Shahjehan Khan

Rania Mustafa is the executive director of the Palestinian American Cultural Center in New Jersey, the kind of place that, among many other things, helps folks struggling to figure themselves out.

Rania Mustafa

There's a lot of different identities that each of us have or different spheres or roles that we play into, right? So you have the conflicted identity, which basically means, let’s say Arab American. I have my world that's Arab and I have my world that's American and I just can't see how the two even work together. And then you have your parallel identity, where you have Arab American—I am, in these settings in these specific spheres I'm Arab, in these settings and these specific spheres I'm American.

Shahjehan Khan

Just to be clear, Pakistanis are not Arabs. The term Arab refers to an identity based on culture and language, so not all Arabs are Muslims, not all Muslims are Arab.

Rania Mustafa

And then the last one, which is the healthiest, is integrated, which basically is where you have both of those identities and you feel like you can be Arab American in this sphere that is predominantly filled with Arabs and you can be Arab American in this sphere that's predominantly filled with just Americans, but the goal is that you're integrated where you don't see. For example, being Arab is not contradictory to being American and being American is not contradictory to being Arab. And instead, it's kind of an integrated marriage that resulted with you in your identity.

Shahjehan Khan

I never felt integrated growing up and certainly not in the years after 9/11, and at least from the conversations I’ve had with folks, many American Muslims felt the same way. That paranoia Bashir described was real.

The American Muslim identity, and its supposedly conflicting loyalty to “regular American” identity, was being questioned constantly. “Where are all the good Muslims? Will the moderate Muslims please stand up?” We were having to answer for and defend ourselves against every bad thing that was happening everywhere in the world.

And our paranoia was about more than just words. Our places of worship and community centers were also being attacked.

Rania Mustafa

After 9/11, we have to think about it, that mosques were vilified a lot of times. And people were seeing it [sic] as a place that was breeding terrorism while in fact it was actually probably mitigating terrorism.

Shahjehan Khan

Rania’s research shows religious settings are key for American Muslims to think through questions of identity. The types of stuff I was dealing with.

Rania Mustafa

Automatically when something like that happens, you're put into question, you know? Now a Muslim is being painted as this, now everyone's calling this Muslim “terrorist.” You're actually then faced with this need to answer and speak up on behalf of all Muslims around the world.

Now, if I don't have this religious setting or supportive setting in general to kind of understand what happened and, “how does my identity come into question?” then I can, in turn, internalize it and then end up not understanding my identity fully and, in turn, kind of blaming myself or blaming my identity or even divorcing myself of my identity saying, “No, that's not—if that's what Muslims are then I don't want to be a part of it.”

Shahjehan Khan

Community engagement and collective support allowed many American Muslims space for reflection and the strength to build a strong identity. To get to a point where they could say, “Whatever happened is not who we are. It’s not what we believe.”

Rania Mustafa

And then the question comes, “What can I do to educate people and have them come to that same realization?” So again, it's very interesting seeing that. Because it's the healthiest way, specifically for adolescents, which is when, you know, identity is really put into question and when identity is formed.

Shahjehan Khan

Mosques really did become a key community gathering space, and not just for Muslims.

It felt like every mosque or Muslim organization was doing interfaith stuff or holding open houses in a desperate attempt to prove that, “It’s not us man; we’re just like you.” My dad remembers it this way at our family mosque in Massachusetts.

Malik Khan (Agha)

From that point on, there was a constant struggle going on at the center as to how to deal with the consequences of what has happened because of this 9/11. There was an impact on the community as a whole. The local town had sent police vehicles over there. They are all quite sensitive to the fact that this is an Islamic center and it could be in danger.

Shahjehan Khan

To his credit, Agha is someone who can’t help but see the good in people. Our mosque was surrounded by a progressive interfaith community, folks that are still a source of support for him today.

Malik Khan (Agha)

Our neighbors started to come. And literally a couple of hundred people came from our neighborhood and there are people who are bringing with them flowers and things and messages—“Don’t worry. You are safe. We are with you. We’ll help you out.”

Shahjehan Khan

No matter how bad things got for us after 9/11, Agha took it upon himself to be that moderate Muslim voice, giving interviews in local newspapers, on the local news, and even encouraging me to write about moderation in Islam in my college essay. I’m guessing he was secretly worried my grades were so shitty no school would take me. So that’s what I did (meaning I copy & pasted what he wrote into my college application). And I eventually got into UMass Amherst.

[Sounds]

Shahjehan Khan

A lot of families probably feel mixed emotions about dropping their first kid at college. In my case, due to an already difficult high school experience, there was an extra layer of worry that permeated the Ford Windstar as we drove the 90-minute route towards Amherst at the beginning of the fall 2002 semester.

Noorjehan Khan

I remember like when we went to go drop you off at college, I remember that being a big deal.

Shahjehan Khan

My sister Noona.

Noorjehan Khan

And I remember, like, on the car ride home, Amma put a blanket over her head and she wept in the back seat, and that was very dramatic.

Shahjehan Khan

Noona is right about my mom’s tendency to worry about stuff, but to Amma’s credit, I was definitely the kind of kid that kept her up at night.

Tina Khan (Amma)

I don't know whether you remember or not. But I had a dream about it, that you were going to be lying in a ditch. I said this. “Lying in a ditch,” was the word I used. Till then I didn't even know that you were doing something crazy stuff. I don't know why I said that. And I don't know whether it was a dream or whether it was my own brain working on me, but that's what I said.

[Music]

Shahjehan Khan

She had every right to be worried. Remember this was only one year after she was trying to comfort me after my first real experience with overt racism and xenophobia. Likewise, nearly 60% of American Muslims said we faced an act of bias or discrimination that year. And nearly half of us felt our lives had changed for the worse since 9/11. So, I don’t know, maybe, like, EVERY Muslim parent was on edge?

But I was an adult now, it was a new school year, and I was going to college, so there was nothing to worry about, right?

Shahjehan Khan

The fall 2002 semester would mark the one-year anniversary of 9/11. The War on Terror was in full swing. The U.S. had overthrown Afghanistan’s government in just a few months and helped install a new head of state named Hamid Karzai, while Pakistan, under the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf, was seen as our strongest ally against terror.

[Audio from The Daily Show]

Musharraf: My thought process was basically the interest of my own country, the national interest of Pakistan, and the security of Pakistan.

Shahjehan Khan

But there was definitely skepticism about what America’s true agenda was in the region.

[Press Conference]

Journalist: We understand you have advisors who are urging you to go after Iraq, take out Iraq, Syria, and so forth. You really think that the American people will tolerate you widening the war beyond Afghanistan?

Bush: Our focus is on Afghanistan and the terrorist network hiding in Afghanistan—right now. But as well we’re looking for Al-Qaeda cells around the world. If we find an Al-Qaeda cell operating and, we will urge the host country to bring them to justice. And we’re having some progress, making progress.

[Music]

Shahjehan Khan

Now that I was out of the house, I decided I was gonna totally reinvent myself. And I’d start by being someone that didn’t move over on the sidewalk and instead expected others to move for me. I’m not sure where I got that idea, but it felt like it would help me build up the confidence that I was lacking. Well, that new Shaj walk lasted about 3 days. It was pretty clear that starting over was going to be harder than I thought.

It turned out that I was housed in a multicultural dorm with people from all over the world. Sounds wonderful, right? Well, it should have been, but there was an immense pushback within me as soon as I moved in, one that I now understand as a very conflicted identity, even an internalized racism rooted in white supremacy. I was used to being the “only” version of me, so that I could neatly separate my different identities (American, Muslim, Pakistani), and suddenly something was wrong. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t only surrounded by white people. I wasn’t just the exception.

A couple of days into the semester, I was eating lunch with a half-Indian, half-white kid, who straight up asked me, “Wouldn’t you agree that most of the problems in the world are caused by Muzlumz?” That’s how he said it. Here was another kid asking me another piercingly direct question, putting the weight of the so-called Muzlum World on my shoulders, just like that asshole from senior year of high school. But this time he was, well, sort of a Brown guy like me! What the fuck?? He went on to complain about our dorm and how there were too many minorities and that he was trying to move out. I tried my best to be like, “Well, actually it’s complicated,” but I felt ashamed for not having more answers, and to be perfectly honest, for also wanting to move out of the dorm myself for the same reasons he did.

Shahjehan Khan

Rania, the expert on identity whom we met before, noticed a shift in herself during this time as well, but seemed to be able to draw strength from a clear sense of self and purpose.

Rania Mustafa

So after 9/11, there was a huge emphasis on my identity as being an American Muslim. And we were always taught that you are an American, you have rights. You should be proud of the fact that you’re American. There's a lot of different privileges that you hold because you're American. So going into college I was very much a proud American Muslim. Like it never occurred to me that people would not see me as such.

Shahjehan Khan

But going to college, she found herself, like me, out of her usual bubble.

Rania Mustafa

And I found out that a lot of people unfortunately don't perceive me as American. So then that started having me question, what does it mean to be American and how do I handle this? So the way I internalized it is actually that I am American and that people don't understand what it means to be American, so I have to educate others to understand what it really means to be American and to see that I do not actually contradict what it means to be American. I’m actually very much the epitome of it.

Shahjehan Khan

A lot of Muslim American kids like Rania found purpose and meaning in activism at this time—it helped them to bridge these divides in their identities. I, on the other hand, basically malfunctioned anytime I would try to think about the different parts of myself. When it came to other Pakistani students, or the Muslim students, or the “Desi things,” or the “Muslim things” (like the student clubs and associations), none of it fit right. I wasn’t inspired by my courses or taking risks, or exploring the things I might be passionate about like so many people do while they’re at college. I wasn’t expressing myself there because I didn’t know who I was.

The only self-expression that had ever made sense to me was guitar playing, but I was too scared to start another band after my high school band broke up. And really, was playing the guitar gonna take me anywhere in life?

My days were now reduced to hiding out in my dorm, smoking tons of weed, and trying my best to stay away from people. My heavy cannabis use was at an all-time high; I couldn’t get out of bed without smoking. I was skipping all my classes, seeing the school nurse regularly for anxiety and appetite issues, and literally staying up all night to get stoned and watch a music visualizer on my computer by myself. Fucking Winamp. I became that guy people would get high with and then go do whatever else they had to do. I was a horrendous roommate, student, and friend. Really no different from that caricature of high school Shahjehan, just a year older.

[Sounds and Commercial]

Chapter 4: HIGHS AND LOW

My 19th birthday came and went that October as things continued to look bleak. I was depressed, anxious, overwhelmed….

I had started going home most weekends, and it was on one of these visits, around Thanksgiving of 2002, that I decided to come clean to my parents about everything. About how I felt awful every single day.

Tina Khan (Amma)

I couldn't put two plus two together because I just didn't know what was going on. And things just kept going worse till you yourself one day told us that you needed to see somebody.

Shahjehan Khan

This wasn’t an easy conversation for us to have, and was probably my first real moment of honesty with my folks, who didn’t come from a time or place where it was normal or acceptable to discuss these types of feelings.

I still remember the way we were sitting in the living room, my parents on two chairs by the fireplace, photos of my grandparents up on the mantle above, only one of two ceiling floodlights on.

My folks went into parenting overdrive. My dad decided that rather than continue to live on campus where they thought “the bad stuff” was going on, I was gonna live at home. He was gonna drive me those 90 minutes to my classes from our house every day.

I saw our family doctor right away, who put me on my first round of antidepressants and recommended a therapist who added a little antianxiety medication to the mix.

I started to see that therapist weekly. It was nice enough to talk to him, but I honestly didn’t have that much faith that he could help me feel happy after years of being shrouded in sadness. And although he tried his best to bring the identity piece into therapy as well (as much as a white dude could, I suppose), it created more conflict. I would come home from sessions feeling like I was weird, that my parents weren’t “normal white parents” since I had to hide dating and stuff from them. And that maybe their arranged marriage was really the thing that had been fucking with me for years.

[Music]

I promised everyone that I wasn’t going to get high anymore, but I literally kept that promise less than 24 hours. My mom remembers that first day they chauffeured me to campus.

Tina Khan (Amma)

Oh my God. We brought you over there and then you said, “I'll be back in a minute.” And you went to see somebody and you came back and you were fully stoned the first day.

Shahjehan Khan

​​And it didn’t get better.

Malik Khan (Agha)

And I would just take you and drop you at the college and then I would come and pick you up from there, bring you back home. Uh, sometimes you just will not meet me there and I’ll just have to wait, uh, but there's several instances in which I’ll just, I remember waiting in the parking lot for 2, 3, 4 hours.

Shahjehan Khan

The truth is, I was getting high while my dad was waiting for me. It’s really hard to say that now, and when I was asking him about it, I kinda felt like a piece of shit. But it was definitely the most important thing in my life at that point. The ritual of smoking weed was almost just as important as the effect; breathing in the smoke in long, deep breaths was like drawing in a sense of safety and security, and then exhaling all the negative stuff in my head and body. It’s hard to tell exactly if I was addicted at this point; I feel like it’s a bit more complex and the word addiction may be the wrong way to think about it. But it had absolutely been my main coping mechanism for years. And it was hard to stop.

Although I wouldn’t have exactly thought of it like this, my dad drew a direct connection to my problems then with what happened to me my senior year of high school, when those kids harassed me after 9/11.

[Music]

Malik Khan (Agha)

And that's something that happened immediately to us, and that did have an impact on you. You were quite depressed for a long time. And that essentially was one cause of the problems that you ran into later on.

Shahjehan Khan

I don’t know if I would have allowed myself to connect these two things until I started putting this show together. 9/11 did force me to confront many things that were already bubbling at the surface, and I’m not saying I wasn’t affected by what happened that day at AB—I absolutely was and have talked about the actual incident many times. Yet something about suppressing memories of what happened to me in the days and weeks after 9/11, even after years of therapy, makes me wonder what other stuff I’ve pushed aside.

In terms of what happened to me at the end of 2002 though, it probably makes a lot of sense.

[Sounds and E.R Transcript]

“Doctor”: This 19 year old man in the first semester at UMass Amherst was admitted to the emergency department for evaluation and treatment of depression and suicidal ideation in the setting of heavy marijuana use. The patient felt so hopeless Saturday night he took Klonopin pills in a suicide attempt. At that point he came to the emergency department with his parents, but signed out against medical advice due to the decreasing acuity of this suicidality and his concern about separation from his family.

Parents are both Pakistani-born Muslims, father came to the United States for graduate studies and stayed. Both parents are now United States citizens. This patient is the oldest of three. There is no clear history of alcohol or drug abuse in the family, although he is not sure. There is also no history of depression or other mental illness.

The patient was alert, oriented, personable, and expressing clear low-self esteem.

[Music]

Shahjehan Khan

It’s ten days before Christmas 2002 and I’m lying in an ER bed at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts. I’ve just come back to consciousness. I’m holding my dad’s hand. I’m numb, pissed, and embarrassed that I woke up. What you just heard is my actual emergency room transcript, and damn, it really brings me right back. It’s wild how they pretty much summed up my entire life at that point so succinctly.

Just a few hours prior I had made what seemed like the only reasonable decision—to take my own life because as far as I was concerned, it really wasn’t a life worth living anymore.

I remember standing in the bathroom with the pill bottle and feeling relieved that I was finally making a permanent decision, something that’s common with folks who attempt suicide.

I had been feeling small and powerless for years, without any sense of agency over my life, and instead of opening new doors, going to college had completely shrunk me into a terrified shell of the person I used to be. It wasn’t like high school where even if I was high all the time, something about it felt safe and familiar. Now I was terrified of meeting new people who might want to get to know me, because I felt like deep down I had nothing to offer anybody other than maybe a weed buddy.

Here’s Rania again.

Rania Mustafa

I think self-esteem is a way that we can actually measure identity because it's kind of like the way you see is your pride or your comfort in expressing this identity. So that's how it kind of ties into each other. You know, for example, if you had high self-esteem in this specific identity, then you also hold high pride. You're willing to practice different culture, cultural practices, different traditions, and hold that specific identity in high esteem. While if you have low self-esteem it’d be the opposite; you'd be questioning your identity, not understanding the different parts of identity, thinking that's not part of who you are. Um, also not wanting to practice the different traditions of identity, trying to distance yourself from that identity, which then in turn, you know, ends up affecting you, because, for example, like then when you're in spheres where people are questioning that part of your identity, you tend to shrink.

[Music]

Shahjehan Khan

In less than a week, my friends from high school will be back in town for the holiday break. Most of them seem to be doing pretty great, becoming legit adults, and here I am at the lowest point of my life, with doctors telling me that I shouldn’t go home, that I should check into the psychiatric unit. So that’s what I did.

Being in the psych ward is a pretty eye-opening experience for me. I feel really strange at first because there are people here with severe mental illnesses and opiate addictions. “Real problems, not like me,” I think at the time. I’m just a confused teenager that smokes too much weed and got super sad one night and did something stupid. But before long, I’m taking a hard look at my life for the first time ever, without weed, and admitting that maybe, just maybe, whatever I’ve been doing thus far hasn’t been working all that great.

I’m introduced to AA and NA meetings, I get a counselor, psychiatrist, and I do start to get better. I’m eventually grateful to still be alive, to be given a second chance. I do really well in all my group therapy sessions, make friends with the staff and the other patients in the ward, and even have sort of a treatment girlfriend who I play ping-pong with every night. And my roommate ends up being an older Egyptian Muslim man with a severe drinking problem, likely the first Muslim person I’ve ever openly discussed addiction with. He shares his Marlboro Light cigarettes with me on our smoke breaks, and I’m thankful to him for allowing me to feel a little more normal for the first time in a long time.

My parents come every single day, usually bringing food as they try their best to hide their tears.

Malik Khan (Agha)

Then there was—I think this was when you were—then you had joined this group, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous. And then we’ll go to the meeting, you’ll go to the meetings. And several times me and Amma joined those meetings. We’ll just sit together and people individually will talk about their own problems, you know, and then everybody will speak. I don't think that we said any—I don't recall me talking. We basically were just listening as the parents, you know?

Shahjehan Khan

As the end of my hospital stay approaches, my dad floats the idea of trying school again, this time as a commuter to the local UMass campus in Lowell, Massachusetts, not too far from home.

It seems like 2003 could be the fresh start I was hoping for.

[Music]

Chapter 5: IRAQ

Shahjehan Khan

The year that started in a psych ward for me was also the start of the War in Iraq, aka the Second Persian Gulf War, aka Operation Enduring Iraqi Freedom. Yeah, okay. It was a sort of follow-up to the Afghanistan invasion, the next chapter in the War on Terror, but unlike Afghanistan, not as easily tied to 9/11, so the American public needed to be convinced that President Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat.

Quick review of America in 2003: George W. Bush was president. Remember, his dad, George H.W. Bush, tried to oust Hussein in the early 90s during the first Gulf War. Dick Cheney was VP—he was also the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil companies, up until he became VP. And Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense. You might call them the Muslim world’s own Axis of Evil. Here’s historian Dr. Huma Gupta again.

Huma Gupta

So there has [sic] been decades of complicity with the Saddam Hussein regime on the part of the United States, but when Saddam Hussein started to make decisions that countered the regional security interests and economic interests of the U.S., there was a sudden reversal of the position of Iraq as a key ally in the so-called Middle East.

Shahjehan Khan

In a now infamous speech to the United Nations, then secretary of state Colin Powell warned the world about the horrors that were looming if Saddam Hussein was left to his own devices.

[U.N. Speech]

Colin Powell: For example, they can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin. In fact, they can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people. And dry agent of this type is the most lethal form for human beings.

Shahjehan Khan

Sounds serious, right? It turned out Powell was promoting flawed intelligence from several Iraqi defectors and exiled politicians who were looking to get the U.S. to invade Iraq. You know, like legitimately fake news.

Huma Gupta

There were, of course, awful human rights abuses, violations, massacres conducted by Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, those were not the primary reasons for the war.

Shahjehan Khan

Those people pushing for war with Iraq were basically comparing what Saddam Hussein was doing there with what was happening in Afghanistan.

Huma Gupta

As if Saddam's regime was similar to the Taliban, as if we could paint the entire region of southwest Asia, North Africa, central Asia, with one broad brushstroke. And all of these people thought and lived in the same way.

Shahjehan Khan

For many Americans, war is a thing that happens somewhere else, and the U.S. is mostly justified when we start one.

Huma Gupta

There were very distinct differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. But there was a presumption that the vast majority of Americans seem to buy into, that what was being told to them was in fact the truth.

Shahjehan Khan

Along with U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, the U.S. pressed on, saying that Iraq was hiding weapons and not following U.N. Security Council inspections and regulations. But the inspectors themselves were like, “Yo, we need more time; we aren’t done.”

[Address]

Bush: States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.

Shahjehan Khan

The so-called inspection deadline of March 19th, 2003, came and went, and 48 hours later, the invasion began.

[Address]

Bush: At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.

In a Pew Research Center survey done after the war started, majorities in four Muslim nations said they doubted the sincerity of the War on Terrorism. They said that it was just a way to control oil in the Middle East and to dominate the world. That was the sense for a lot of American Muslims as well, who have seen this story play out again and again in Muslim-majority countries.

I mean, the U.S. was pretty forthright and brazen in its approach and propaganda.

[Press Conference]

Fleischer: The President this morning has spoken with three foreign leaders. He began with Prime Minister Blair, where the two discussed the ongoing aspects of Operation Iraqi Liberation.

Shahjehan Khan

That’s White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in the early days of the war referring to it as Operation Iraqi Liberation. O-I-L. Oil. As fucked up and incompetent as the Bush administration was, it's hard to believe that no one caught that.

Huma Gupta

The Iraq invasion sent a powerful message to other countries in southwest Asia, right? That the U.S. was willing to strike, the U.S. was willing to wage an illegal war in order to discipline dissenters.

The Iraq War was thus not a war fought just for oil. It was fought for hegemony. It created an opening for the United States to go in and secure their interests and to essentially facilitate a regime change and put someone else in power that would be far more susceptible to what they wanted in the region.

[Audio]

The point of public relations slogans like “Support Our Troops” is that they don’t mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course there was an issue, the issue was, do you support our policy? But you don’t want people to think about the issue—that’s the whole point of good propaganda.

Shahjehan Khan

This was the start of all those yellow “Support Our Troops” magnet bumper stickers on people’s cars, which I saw as reductive and really simplistic, part of the whole “you’re with us or against us” vibe. It was uncomfortable from an identity standpoint because on the one hand, what was my relationship to Iraq? Since when did I become someone that cared about the so-called Muslim world?

One night at a party in Acton I got super drunk, went outside, and ripped those stickers off of a few cars that were in the driveway. I can’t put that feeling into words; maybe it was a combination of being the only Brown person there and feeling like something was wrong with me and that I wasn’t doing enough to condemn what was going on. I felt helpless.

Bashir Ahmad

This was right before we were gonna get deployed to Iraq. They had the entire battalion, right? And there was me and there was [sic] like two other guys to talk about Islam to everybody else.

Shahjehan Khan

Remember Bashir Ahmad, who we met at the beginning of this episode? Well, his chill National Guard enlistment to pay for college was no longer a fantasy version of Police Academy anymore.

Bashir Ahmad

Like we're like the lecturers and we're all, I'm looking back, I’m like we were a bunch of three dumb asses who didn't know anything. And I can see the benefit in that because maybe it could be like, okay, it's humanizing these—“Oh, look, these are our fellow soldiers; they’re also Muslim and they're talking to us about Islam.” But at the same time, to put us in a position where we’re, like, the experts. That really before going to Iraq kind of sums up the experience of being a Muslim in the Army.

Shahjehan Khan

And then he was there. Like. Literally. In. Iraq.

Bashir Ahmad

The platoon that I was attached to—a lot of country boys, you know, really good group of guys. And I was close to them, you know, these are my comrades in arms, right? And, I had taken on a lot of, some of the country habits. I started like dippin’ tobacco. It's like, so I can identify with them, you know, we were listening to the same kind of music and all that. And, then it's like, we're out on a mission. And then, you know, he was like, yeah, we're gonna go out, we’re gonna kill some Hajis.

Shahjehan Khan

The term “Haji” is a derogatory term for Arabs, especially Muslims. It was first coined by U.S. Military forces during the Iraq invasion that year.

Bashir Ahmad

And then it's like, wait, wait, wait. And then you go out and you see people are living at a lower standard of living, people are living in poverty. You see the burqas, you see the men with the beard, you see people that really could theoretically be someone that you see at a family gathering, or at a wedding or something like that, or at the mosque. And you can really relate to both sides and you're there in the Humvee with an M16. And with one group who has for the most part dehumanized the others. And then another group with whom from the physical looks, from their culture, I can relate to and I can empathize with. And it was a lot of times it, maybe I could say, it was almost like there was like a wall, or like a sheet of glass between myself and like that other world, whereas I could see it and I can relate to it, but I just couldn't touch it. I don't know. It was weird. Cognitive dissonance—it’s a good way to describe a lot of times what I felt.

Shahjehan Khan

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be a Muslim American soldier. It seems to me the epitome of the conflicted identity on Rania’s scale. Like conflicted and in a literal conflict at the same time.

Before the Iraq War had begun, I found myself at a restaurant where this marine was talking about how much he wanted to die a glorious death on the battlefield, how he missed his tours in Afghanistan. And I told him, “Bro, you really sound like a suicide bomber right now,” which made some people laugh nervously but mostly led to an awkward silence. No surprise—I was the only non-white person in the room, but it was the first time in a long time, maybe ever, that I had felt comfortable making other people uncomfortable. Maybe I was starting to move away from that conflicted identity Rania

was talking about?

Being a pretty privileged suburban kid for the early part of my life allowed me to pretend I could distance myself from politics, even when they were right in my face. However, as the post-9/11 shitstorm continued in my life and all over the country, things started to come into focus. On February 15th of 2003, my whole family hopped on a tour bus that left from our mosque in Massachusetts with a bunch of other families headed for New York City to join almost a million-strong peaceful anti-Iraq War protest. My sister Noona was twelve at the time.

Noorjehan Khan

Yes, because I have a very specific memory of that protest.

Shahjehan Khan

Tell me about it.

[Sounds]

Noorjehan Khan

So, I remember us, like everyone got together. And then I remember one point we hit a corner and all the police was [sic] there to stop the protest and they were on horses. And I remember Amma was holding my hand. And the police was [sic] like coming at us on horses and she held her ground and was like, “We're not moving.” And I was like, there's a giant—

Shahjehan Khan

Amma said that?

Noorjehan Khan

I don’t know if she said it, but she wouldn’t move.

Shahjehan Khan

I must have been by my dad at that point because while I totally remember the horses charging and Noona being scared, I definitely don’t remember my mom’s part in it.

Tina Khan (Amma)

Stopping the horses like this with my hand, because she was so scared that I didn't want the horse to come back near that she would really be—because she was saying, “Oh my god!” She was screaming. And I was just like doing this to the horse to go back.

Shahjehan Khan

It’s a really amazing, almost cinematic image.

Noorjehan Khan

And it was this giant horse with the policeman. And I remember thinking that like, “What are they going to run us over? Like, what's the plan with this? Like, why is this happening? And I would like to go home.” And the horses were coming and I peed my pants. Yes. And I didn't tell anyone cause I was scared and everything was happening around us and the horses were there. And then finally we ended up like walking away and then we ended up going to a pizza place and I just sat in my filth and I was like, “This is a horrible day.” And to this day I'm still terrified of horses. And I also, still to this day, don't like going into big crowds.

Shahjehan Khan

I remember feeling really angry that they would charge at my sister like that, and that the NYPD was trying its best to suppress a really peaceful and beautiful demonstration. They were part of this “machine” all around me that I thought I’d been ignoring all these years, but had actually been chipping away inside at me piece by piece, with every overt or passing comment about Muslims, every question about my identity or my loyalty, and the constant barrage of media about what America should do about those evil people who were out to get us.

[Sounds]

Chapter 6: CONCLUSION

According to one researcher, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3000 protests against the Iraq War. 3000! It's said that these were the most expansive peace protests before any war, and I’m proud to have been there. I’m sure many American Muslims were proud as well; this was one of the first times many of them came out en masse since 9/11. It’s definitely something I’ll never forget, and being there in that New York City crowd had a big influence on the direction my life would eventually take.

[Audio]

Shahjehan Khan

The Iraq War officially ended in 2011 and we recently officially lost the Afghanistan War to the Taliban. But still America's War on Terror continues. Right now, there are a number of other wars and military operations initiated by the United States that fall under the “The War on Terror,” in places like Syria and Pakistan. Places where a lot of times the U.S. Military uses drone strikes that kill not only their intended targets, but many innocent civilians as well.

Some analysts say the War on Terror isn’t winding down, it’s actually expanding. And even worse, countries like Russia and China have co-opted the term, using the vague “War on Terror” terminology and framework to justify the persecution of minority groups and political and cultural enemies.

[Address]

Bush: We know this from not only intelligence but from the history of military conflict in Afghanistan. It’s been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not gonna repeat that mistake.

[Sounds]

Shahjehan Khan

According to a November 2019 report from the Costs of War Initiative from Brown and Boston Universities, since 2001 the U.S. has spent roughly $6 trillion on the War on Terror in more than 80 countries. While the death toll from the September 11th attacks was around 3000, almost 800,000 people have died in post-9/11 wars, including countless civilians, journalists, and other so-called collateral damage. Another 37 million have been displaced and an untold number have mental, emotional, or physical disabilities because of this War on Terror.

It begs the question, what is America’s endgame?

[Sounds]

Part of me wonders what might have happened if I enlisted in the military like Bashir did to try and fix myself, like I’ve heard from many folks who are directionless in life or going through inner turmoil.

Bashir and I definitely had one thing in common though.

Bashir Ahmad

I always kind of had this, this nostalgia for Pakistan and I just felt like I wanted to do something for there. And you know, that emptiness that you kind of feel, so that's really what drew me to go to Pakistan.

Like, I like to say, it was kinda like, there was this voice inside my heart, saying like, you need to go back, you know?

Shahjehan Khan

And go back he did. While he was in the military, Bashir got into martial arts, and after he finished up his duty, he decided to head to Pakistan and set up the country’s first MMA fighting league spearheaded by his organization called Shaheen Academy. Their mission is to share this proactive path to mental and spiritual health with men, women, and children that might not otherwise have access to it, and who are often struggling through the harsh realities of living in a developing country.

Bashir himself became a world-renowned champion fighter, but his victories go deeper.

Bashir Ahmad

I think it really helped me, uh, resolve a lot of these kind of these conflicting feelings of identity, you know?

Cause you know, when you, when I went and then after a time realized, “Oh, okay, I'm an American.” You know, it's weird. It's like going back to Pakistan to connect with my roots made me realize and made me more comfortable that I'm an American. Like the irony of that situation—that going to Pakistan to become a Pakistani made me more comfortable being like, “I'm an American, I'm an American Pakistani. I can belong in both worlds.” I'm culturally an American. I have a history and a lineage and a part of my culture that's going to remain with me.

Shahjehan Khan

It was going to take a couple more years of juggling all these different pieces of who I thought I was supposed to be before things slowly started to get better. And unfortunately, for a lot of American Muslims, there would be even darker days ahead on our own soil.

[Theme]

Next time on King of the World:

“I was pushed up against the wall, I was frisked searched, handled in a rough manner—something that has never happened to me in my life.”

Thanks for listening to today’s episode. We’d love to know what you think and hear about your experiences post-9/11. We’re using a tool called PodInbox, which allows us to hear directly from you. Visit podinbox.com/kingoftheworld to send us an audio message directly, some of which will play on future episodes. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

King of the World is a production of Rifelion Media. Today’s show was produced by me and Asad Butt, with sound design and sound mixing by Mark Annotto. Lindsy Gamble is our associate producer. We had production help from Isabel Havens, Mona Baloch, and Erica Rife. Theme song by me with production help, mixing, and mastering by Nick Zampiello. Original music by Simon Hutchinson. Additional voice-over by Dr. Sabeen Chaudry. Special thanks to Bashir Ahmad, Dr. Huma Gupta, and Rania Mustafa. We’ll have links in the show notes to learn more about each of them. And of course, thanks again to my family—Amma, Agha, Meryum, and Noona. Thanks again for listening. I’m Shahjehan Khan.