KING OF THE WORLD
Episode 3: Islamophobia

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

Islamophobia and the passing of the PATRIOT Act allows for private and state-sponsored bad actors, and we hear disturbing stories about those targeted.

Wednesday, September 15th, 2021
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Chapter 1: INTRO

Tina Khan (Amma)
So one day when I was giving a talk in Shahjehan’s class, one of the—I don't know who it was—they got up and said, “Mrs. Khan, can I ask you a question?” And I said, “sure.” “Is it because you are a Muslim that you have nail polish on one hand and you don't have nail polish on the other hand?” At first I laughed a little and then I stopped.

Shahjehan Khan
My mom, who I call Amma, has so many stories like this one, where she’s giving a talk to my elementary school class about Islam, usually related to the Eid holiday. I often felt embarrassed when she would give these types of presentations (I mean how many kids want to hang out with their parents during school?). But she’d usually bring snacks to keep people interested, so, that was pretty cool.

Tina Khan (Amma)
And I said that, “It's a very nice question that you have asked because it's always good to ask rather than—if you would have not asked this question, you would have gone home, told your mother that, ‘You know what? Muslim women can only wear nail polish on the left hand.’ And if she would have talked to somebody else and it would have been a completely false thing, which didn't have any meaning.” So I said, “The reason why I'm doing this is because I'm a crazy person, because I don't know why I do it, but I just do it because I think that these nails look better than these nails.” So I said, “It has nothing to do with my being a woman. It has nothing to do with my being Pakistani. It has nothing to do with me by being a Muslim woman. It's just because I have this crazy habit.”

Shahjehan Khan
Cute story, huh?

[Audio]

Almost like an American Muslim after-school Hallmark special type moment, which I didn’t know about until Amma told me this story for this podcast.

Tina Khan (Amma)
But after that, I stopped this crazy habit. And now I put nail polish—although I still think that that hand looks ugly, but I still put it—and I never forget that little kid’s thing. And since then, because of being affiliated with the Islamic Center, I have been giving talks on Muslim and Islam and Muslim women in colleges, universities, synagogues, churches, everywhere. And I always tell them this joke about the nail polish. So that's the kind of little things which you look at somebody and you automatically make an opinion about that person. And sometimes that opinion is completely opposite of what it actually is.

Shahjehan Khan
My mom’s right. Opinions can form over little things, and very quickly. And sometimes those opinions can have grave consequences. Barely 10 years later, in September of 2001, way down in Texas, another South Asian Muslim immigrant named Rais Bhuiyan was starting his workday in a convenience store when he was profiled….

Rais Bhuiyan
Around noon, a man wearing a bandana and sunglasses carrying a double-barrel shotgun walked in. Having been robbed before I immediately opened the cash register and offered him money. Instead of taking it, his gaze remained fixed and he asked, “Where are you from?”

Shahjehan Khan
And just a few years after that, in 2005, entrepreneur Akif Rahman was heading home from a trip to Canada when he was profiled….

Akif Rahman
Pulled into the immigration lane where they have the booths and had our passports ready. And three border patrol agents approached our car and, at that point when they came out, the one in the booth basically said, “You need to turn off your engine and hand over the keys to me.”

[Theme]

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

Episode 3: Islamophobia

Chapter 2: RAIS BHUIYAN

Let’s jump back to the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when everyone was scared, angry, confused, and on high alert. High Muslim alert, that is.

[Audio]

It’s not that there wasn’t fear of Muslims in the U.S. before 9/11, but it’s safe to say that a new and potent brand of anti-Muslim suspicion arose very quickly following the attacks and ensuing military response. This sentiment went far beyond those three kids threatening me in my high school hallway and later almost beating me up.

[Senate Hearing]
Russ Feingold: This should not be an occasion for ill-treatment of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, South Asians, or others in this country. It is wrong. They are as patriotic as any other Americans and are feeling extremely stressed as a result of this situation. I’ve already heard some reports of some acts and I roundly condemn them.

Shahjehan Khan
That’s former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold at a hearing on September 12th, barely 24 hours after the 9/11 attacks. He was one of many elected officials, including the President, who tried hard to counter anti-Muslim rhetoric in the media and the public.

[Audio]
Bush: The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.

Shahjehan Khan
Although what Senator Feingold was saying wasn’t intended as such, it basically foreshadowed exactly what was about to happen to many of us.

Rais Bhuiyan
As my dad taught me at a very young age, whatever you do, you do it the best you can.

Shahjehan Khan
Rais Bhuiyan was an officer in the Bangladesh Air Force before coming to the U.S. in 1999. He referred to America as his “dream country” and was excited to apply his father’s work ethic and worldview rigorously from the day he arrived.

Rais Bhuiyan
You start from scratch. And once you go up, you will appreciate more that you gradually built up your life and you gradually came to the top.

Shahjehan Khan
Rais is talking about the same American dream that has been a part of our national identity since the very beginning, sold to generations of immigrants before him, including my parents. And so in 2001, Rais found himself starting his new life in Mesquite, Texas, just outside Dallas, a place he noted to be vastly different from the America of his dreams.

Rais Bhuiyan
Before coming to U.S., the picture I had is a dream country—everybody’s happy, everybody’s rich, everybody is having a good life. But then when I went to that part of the country, a very small town where you can see the sign of poverty everywhere, people are struggling to make their ends meet.

Shahjehan Khan
Just as Rais had a very specific picture of Americans, a lot of Americans think of doctors, lawyers, and engineers when they think about Asian immigrants. Actually, Asian immigrants like Rais can be found all over the country, and their journeys and struggles are as real as any other blue-collar American you can think of. So it’s no surprise that Rais seemed to get along with the townsfolk as well as he did when he first got to this country.

Rais Bhuiyan
And when they came to the store, I really enjoyed talking to them and learning about their life and vice versa. They were very curious to know more about me, where I came from, what brought me to a small town like Mesquite in Texas. I always enjoy having that kind of conversation.

Shahjehan Khan
This quickly became his normal routine. Rais worked super hard all day, every day, dreaming of bigger and better things as he lived out his American dream. He was in school, he had a fiancé, and things were certainly looking up.

[Music]

Ten days after the 9/11 attacks, Rais was at work in his convenience store when a stranger burst in with a shotgun and asked him the question that many non-white, non-European-looking immigrants get asked all the time: “Where are you from?”

Rais Bhuiyan
Before I could say anything more than, “excuse me?,” he pulled the trigger from point-blank range.

[Sounds]

I felt it first, like a million bees were stinging my face. And then I heard it, the explosion. I looked down at the floor and saw blood was pouring like an open faucet from the right side of my head. Frantically and instinctively, I placed both hands on my face thinking I had to keep my brain from spilling out. And I remember screaming “Mom!” on top of my voice and then noticed the gunman is still standing there. And I thought if I did not appear to be dying, he would shoot me again.

Shahjehan Khan
The gunman left and Rais somehow managed to get himself to the barbershop next door where he begged three patrons to call 9-1-1. Luckily an ambulance was there in just a few minutes.

Rais Bhuiyan
I started feeling…losing consciousness. And images of my parents, my siblings, and my fiancé appeared before my eyes and then a graveyard. And I felt my time was up. I was seeing their faces for the last time and then I'll be gone from this world. It was a terrifying moment. I was crying. I was begging God that, “Allah, give me a second chance. I don't want to die today. And I promise if you let me live, I would do good things with my life.”

Shahjehan Khan
Against all odds his prayers were answered—Rais survived—but the incident left him with some pretty horrible consequences. He was kicked out of the hospital the next day for not having insurance. He’d go on to amass $60,000 in medical bills. And he lost his fiancé.

Worst of all though, he lost his vision in one of his eyes. Because of his air force background, Rais had always been proud of his extraordinary vision. To have that taken away was its own deeper trauma. He even contemplated suicide.

[Music]

Rais came to find out that his attacker was a white supremacist named Mark Anthony Stroman. Over the course of nearly three weeks right after 9/11, Stroman attacked three people. Rais is the only one who survived.

When he was finally arrested, Stroman told police that we were at war and that he had done what every American wanted to do. That he felt a personal need to avenge the 9/11 attacks. That he specifically was targeting people that look Muslim. And that killing Muslims was his patriotic duty.

The following year, as I was heading into my last semester as a high school senior, Stroman was headed to trial.

Rais Bhuiyan
I couldn't believe that I would face tremendous hate and violence in my dream country. But once the verdict was announced, I feel a little relief, but in the end I did not feel that, that everything ended right there. I felt very sad for my attacker because he failed to realize how he destroyed some human being’s life who did nothing wrong to him, to anyone in this country. And also how he destroyed his life and his childrens’ life, because he did not show any source of remorse.

Shahjehan Khan
Stroman was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection. He was NOT, however, convicted of a hate crime. At the trial, he actually flipped off one of his victim’s families. When he got to death row he referred to himself as an Arab slayer.

Rais Bhuiyan
And he claimed he was a true American. He was a patriot. He should be given [a] medal for his action. And he, he said that he was hunting Arabs, but the truth is that not one of his three victims was Middle Eastern.

Shahjehan Khan
Just to review, Stroman, a white supremacist, walked into Rais’ store, and saw a brown Bangladeshi man who he believed to be Arab and directly responsible for 9/11, deserving of his glorified, patriotic American vengeance.

Chapter 3: ISLAMOPHOBIA BACKGROUND

Shahjehan Khan
Rais’ story, while particularly horrific and some might even say unbelievable, was just one of many acts of anti-Muslim violence and Islamophobia in the aftermath of 9/11—acts which ranged from the serious, like murder and arson, to the more subtle like discrimination and profiling. Some of them would make headlines, others barely a peep on the local news, drowned out by the rush to go to war and seek justice.

[Audio]

In the years following the attacks, anti-Muslim sentiment across the political and media spheres was at an all-time high. It seemed like anything remotely Muslim was rife with suspicion. Every time you’d turn on the TV, Islam was deemed responsible for nearly every single extreme act of political violence that took place anywhere in the world, and the idea of the American Muslim seemed to itself be a contradiction.

But, the media was missing the other side of the story entirely. For decades, organizations like the Muslim Public Affairs Council, or MPAC, have been condemning extremism left and right—pretty much every single terrorist attack even marginally associated with Islam that you can think of.

[Audio]

They vehemently condemned the 9/11 attacks after they happened (like literally everyone else), held a conference later that year on moderate Muslim voices, condemned the murder of innocent civilians, and even put together a fucking quilt on the first anniversary of 9/11 with all the names of the victims. Real, constructive action and symbolic emotional healing and solidarity; they covered it all.

My dad, who I call Agha, remember, was the head of our local mosque. He was routinely on local media around Boston condemning the attacks and telling people violence is not a part of Islam, and in a sense begging people to stop attacking Muslims.

Ilhan Cagri
I don't even like the term Islamophobia; I call it anti-Muslim sentiment. Being anti-Muslim is mostly, mostly about being anti-person-of-color.

Shahjehan Khan
Ilhan Cagri is a Research Fellow with MPAC’s DC Office who has been researching the American Muslim community for years, as well as conducting human rights studies in Muslim-majority countries.

Ilhan Cagri
There's a lot of research that says that people who don't know a Muslim or haven't worked with a Muslim are the people that have sort of the most prejudice against Muslims.

Shahjehan Khan
This all took a serious, lasting toll on American Muslims’ sense of safety and security. People thought twice about appearing “visibly Muslim,” whether that meant shaving off facial hair or worrying about being harassed for their hijabs.

But some stood tall, without even really thinking twice about changing what they looked like. Remember how my aunt and cousins were visiting from Pakistan when 9/11 happened? My cousin Mehru remembers a small but powerful act of resistance from her mom, my mom’s elder sister, Amber Khala.

Mehru Sami
We were very scared. We then later on started hearing stories about some Sikh guy, because he had a beard got attacked, as people thought he was Muslim. And my mother, she would refuse to wear Western outfits and she would just wear the Pakistani shalwar kameez. And we would keep on telling her that, “Mama, please don't go in the malls wearing shalwar kameez,” but she wouldn't listen.

Shahjehan Khan
Soon after 9/11 they flew home from Boston, from Logan Airport where the first two planes were hijacked.

Mehru Sami
It was a little weird because when we went, there was actually nobody at the airport, there were these big dogs sniffing away. And when we went into the elevator we realized that everybody just left the elevator when we went in. So that was disturbing.

Shahjehan Khan
According to the Center for American Progress in DC, Islamophobia can be defined as “an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life.” It can be seen through basic stuff like discrimination or ignorant threats like the kids in my high school; systems-level things like laws or policies that either overtly or covertly target Muslims or Muslim communities; and finally, actual acts of violence like assaults, vandalism, arson, shootings, and bombings.

It’s hard to pin down like one person, place, or thing that fed the spike in Islamophobia post-9/11, but the media environment and the War on Terror probably had something to do with it. The FBI’s own hate crime statistics show an exponential jump in anti-Muslim hate crimes immediately following the attacks, from 28 in the year 2000 to 481 in 2001. That’s a fucking ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN PERCENT INCREASE. And the thing is, it sort of settled back around 150; it never went back to what it once was. The next spike would be—no surprise—during the Trump Presidency.

[Audio]

Islamophobia was forcing Muslims to confront their identity in new ways in the years after 9/11. Even if they didn’t want to—and I certainly didn’t—it seemed the public was doing it for them.

It also seemed that the public had trouble differentiating between Muslims and people who were just, like, Brown.

Ilhan Cagri
Poor Sikhs. The Sikh community took a lot of flack. They were targeted because of their turbans. In Kansas, there were those Indian gentlemen who weren't even Muslim; they were shot because somebody thought they were Iranian.

Shahjehan Khan
Remember that guy who shot Rais Bhuiyan in the face? He actually killed two other people, one of whom was a Hindu immigrant. And again, Stroman told police he wanted to kill Arabs to take revenge for 9/11, but instead shot Rais (a Bangladeshi) and killed two other South Asians (a Pakistani and an Indian).

What may be surprising to you is that according to the Gallup Religious Tolerance Index, Muslim Americans are among the most integrated religious groups in the U.S. And if you think of the thousands of violent things that happen in the U.S. every year (like, for instance, white supremacist violence or even just gun deaths), it should be a no-brainer that there’s just no real connection between simply being Muslim and being violent any more than there is in like, I don’t know, wearing leather jackets and being violent? But what happened consistently following 9/11 was that every time a Muslim did something violent or was even suspected of it, all of us were under fire. It was all our fault.

Ilhan Cagri
It's like, not all Muslims are terrorists, but if you're a terrorist, you're a Muslim. That was the ideology after 9/11. Every time there was some killing somewhere, it didn't matter if it was terrorist or not terrorist, you know, if a Muslim did it, the rest of us would like, “Oh dear Lord, how are we going to handle this now? We're going to have to come out; we're going to have to say we don't support this. Everybody has to make public statements.”

Shahjehan Khan
I can’t tell you the number of times there would be a breaking news incident somewhere in the world and I’d either mutter to myself or to someone else that, “I hope it’s not a Muslim.” Because I knew the same fucking cycle would start all over again. The truth is, out of thousands of violent incidents in the U.S., there were about 160 acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims in the first decade following 9/11. One hundred sixty. In 10 years. And a report from the FBI makes this even more abundantly clear:

“Twenty three of the 24 recorded terrorist incidents from 2002-2005 were perpetrated by domestic terrorists. With the exception of a white supremacist’s firebombing of a synagogue...all of the domestic terrorist incidents were committed by special interest extremists active in the animal rights and environmental movements. The acts committed by these extremists typically targeted materials and facilities rather than persons….” It goes on: “Eight of the 14 recorded terrorism preventions stemmed from right-wing extremism, and included disruptions to plotting by individuals involved with the militia, white supremacist, constitutionalist and tax protestor, and anti-abortion movements.” These are actual FBI statistics, still on their website today, and they don’t mention Muslims anywhere. But that’s definitely not what it felt like. At least not to me.

[Theme and commercial break]

Shahjehan Khan
Other than when my mom would come to school and talk about Ramadan or fasting, I can basically remember a one-week unit on Islam as a high school freshman, sandwiched somewhere between ancient Egypt and the Dark Ages in our oh-so-vague World History class. Basically, that means I didn’t learn anything substantial in school about Islamic history outside of the Ottoman Empire. Nothing about Islamic philosophy, art, or music. And many of my Muslim friends say the same thing, in schools that they went to across the U.S.

[Audio]

I just want to take a moment to share a little bit about the American Muslim community. There are about 3-4 million of us here in the States and we are a very diverse group racially and ethnically: 40% of us identify as white, 30% as Asian, and 20% as Black. Some of us are very religious and some of us are not religious at all—just like followers of any religion. We are also a very young population that is mostly immigrant.

The immigrant and Brown narrative generally takes center stage, but one thing to know—and one thing I definitely was not taught in school—is that ISLAM HAS BEEN IN AMERICA SINCE THE VERY BEGINNING. Like before George Washington. While there’s some discrepancy about whether Muslims were first here in the 16th, 14th, or even as early as the 12th century, one thing is clear: Somewhere between 10%-50% of the ten million African slaves brought here were Muslims. Muslims—Black Muslims in particular—literally built this country and have been here for generations if not centuries.

[Music]

One of the earliest things that I remember learning in Sunday school about Islam was that Muslims are supposed to be forgiving, kind, and humble people, perhaps something else that was lost in the post-9/11 climate of fear. And that was definitely true of Rais Bhuiyan.

[Music]

If you can believe this, he didn’t just survive a vicious act of anti-immigrant terror (one that was intended to kill him), but he led an international campaign to save his attacker, Mark Anthony Stroman, from death row. Rais says his Islamic beliefs gave him the strength to forgive; he would eventually use that strength to create a non-profit called World Without Hate, which works to prevent and disrupt hate and violence through storytelling and empathy.

Rais Bhuiyan
Some of our current priorities are the launch of National Healing and Reconciliation Initiative, helping to pass a 9/11 Hate Crime Resolution in Congress. With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaching and continued hate and violence on the rise, we believe [in] sharing stories like mine to help build more awareness around hate and violence and inspire people to treat one another as humans first.

Shahjehan Khan
To date, Rais and his organization have worked with more than 250,000 people across the world.

[Music]

Chapter 4: PATRIOT ACT

Shahjehan Khan
After 9/11, U.S. government security hawks started revisiting national security frameworks in an attempt to consolidate and expand power.

[Audio]
John Ashcroft: We know that prevention works. The PATRIOT Act gives us the technological tools to anticipate, adapt, and outthink our terrorist enemy.

Shahjehan Khan
That’s former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft talking about Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, also known as the PATRIOT Act, a behemoth 342-page,150-section document proposed the week of and in response to 9/11. The PATRIOT Act redefined terrorism and sentencing, sometimes without statutes of limitation, and allowed for foreign intelligence techniques to be used domestically. Basically it made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary citizens. And since its inception, that has basically meant American Muslims.

Ashcroft and the rest of the Bush administration pushed this legislation through Congress, who had little or no time to read it, let alone debate it. Remember when Bush said, “You are either with us, or against us?” That same rhetoric was used to imply that any members of Congress that didn’t pass it would be blamed for any future terrorist attacks on the U.S. One provision in the law lets the government go into your house while you are away, search through and even take your things—and not tell you until later. The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, said that while most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, it actually just turns regular citizens into suspects.

A commercial from the ACLU at that time warns of this overreach of power:

[Commercial]
Thanks to provisions in the PATRIOT Act, the government can get information you thought was private without your knowledge or consent.

Shahjehan Khan
It’s actually kind of hilarious, showing naked people in situations where one would hope they’re wearing clothes.

[Commercial]
Now there’s a push to make these powers permanent, and that could leave any one of us exposed.

Shahjehan Khan
Like on a tractor or in the middle of an important business meeting.

[Commercial]
Amend the PATRIOT Act. We deserve to be both safe and free.

Shahjehan Khan
Although the commercial certainly takes visual liberties, the crux of it is pretty right on. It soon became pretty clear that the PATRIOT Act was targeting Muslims, particularly immigrant Muslim men, and by 2005, even the conservative figures from the Michigan Journal of Race and Law were pretty staggering:

[Music]

3,000+ deportations with more than 13,000 in the process of deportation, 15,000 detained or arrested, 18,000 subpoenas or search warrants had been issued, 50,000 fled the country in fear, 90,000 had been interviewed, interrogated, or raided by the FBI, 100,000 had been electronically surveilled, and over 140,000 people had been interviewed, fingerprinted, or photographed at ports of entry or designated immigration offices. And that’s just the stuff that was actually documented.

It wasn’t just at airports where Muslims were being profiled or detained under the PATRIOT Act. It was essentially the same at ports of entry like the Canadian border near Detroit, where in 2005, a young American and I guess visibly Muslim man, his wife, and kids were heading home after a trip to Toronto.

Chapter 5: AKIF RAHMAN

Akif Rahman
Let me ask you something. Uh, you know, I've had several incidents before this, right? Do you want me to get into the specific one that occurred that really kind of led to the main one, if you will, is that what you want me to start with? Or do you want me to set it up with…?

Shahjehan Khan
I would be happy—whatever is comfortable for you. I mean, whatever you think makes sense in terms of the progression for people to kind of like understand.

Akif Rahman
Because the stop where I was, you know, what we’re talking about was after probably a year of several different stops at airports versus driving in. This is my first drive-in from Canada, which is why it was, possibly why it was more involved.

Shahjehan Khan
So I’m sure for a lot of you, driving to and from the Canadian border is like not a big deal at all. The hardest part is the line, the possible inconvenience of having to pull over, take a couple minutes out of your day, make sure your documents check out, maaaaybe pop your trunk open, and then you’re free to go. Well, I wish this was the experience us Muslims have at the border. Unfortunately, so many of us have a horrible travel story or know someone who does, a story involving U.S. border security or the TSA. Akif Rahman’s case is a particularly outrageous one.

Akif Rahman
I identify myself as an American first and of course I am a Muslim and you can see from my face and I have a beard. And then, you know, someone that looks at me will, can tell you right away that most likely I’m a Muslim if they're familiar with my heritage and our religion.

Shahjehan Khan
On May 8th of 2005, Akif was traveling back from Toronto with his family when they were stopped at the American-Canadian border in Detroit by U.S. Immigrations officers. After what seemed like an unusually long wait, the agent asked him to turn off the car.

Akif Rahman
So, you know, I turned off my engine and handed him the keys, obviously seeing that there was [sic], you know, three uniformed border patrol agents approaching the car. And I was asked if I had any weapons on me or in the car.

Of course, I don’t. I don't have any weapons, I don't own any weapons. And I told them that I don’t. And then they approached the car and they asked me to step out of the car. You could tell this was something that they were serious about. And I think the question about having a weapon in the car or not was highly unusual for me. Handing over the keys with the car off, highly unusual, right? And you could see that they were approaching me with caution, like you’d expect an officer—hand on the gun, you know, step out of the car. And then I was escorted by these three uniformed border patrol agents from my car into the border patrol office. And I left my wife and my two young kids behind in the car, not knowing what was going to happen to them and them not knowing what was going to happen to me.

Shahjehan Khan
See, in addition to public scrutiny of people with Muslim-sounding names and Muslim-looking faces, whatever the hell that means, there was actually governmental and administrative support for all sorts of pretty dystopian things, stuff going on behind closed doors, the extent of which we are still finding out almost 20 years later. There was surveillance on the Muslim community being done sometimes by paid informants (something we’ll talk about more in a couple episodes). There were punishments based on nothing more than alleged suspicious activity (aka deportations of folks back to countries they sometimes hadn’t lived in for decades), and, like in Akif’s case, extended, terrifying, and unjustified detention of primarily Muslim men.

Akif Rahman
I wasn't really told what was going on. I was put up against the wall, you know, one of the agents asked again about whether I had a weapon on me. And 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 to that point. And shoes taken off, just a full-on search that you would expect, like you'd see on TV, from someone who was a criminal, who was being arrested or going to be arrested. And then I was handcuffed, first handcuffed to a chair and a bench, they just handcuffed me and said, well, really didn't say anything.

Shahjehan Khan
The Supreme Court eventually ruled that it's illegal to indefinitely detain anyone without cause, but it was nearly impossible to challenge the legality of surveillance and most things related to The PATRIOT Act. Plus, it’s not like Akif was in a position to defend himself at all, as the agents continued to hold and repeatedly grill him with the same questions over and over and over. What was he doing in Canada? Why was he there? Why was he traveling back? Questions about his identity, his name.

[Sounds]

Akif Rahman
[You] could kind of understand that there was something that they thought I was, or they felt that I was some person that I wasn’t. This is also during the time when, you know, renditions were very frequent, right? Think about post-9/11, you read all these stories about people getting picked up in airports and taken out of the country and God knows what's happening.

Shahjehan Khan
Whether Iraqi, Pakistani, or just non-white Muslim, it’s important to remember that Akif’s experience was in spite of the fact that he’s an American citizen. He’s supposed to have rights, right?

Akif Rahman
As an American, you feel like, you know, as long as you've done good and you've done the right thing, honest person, you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have any criminal record behind you, you should be allowed back into your country. I didn't know how much longer I was going to be detained. And I don't know if I was ever going to be released.

Shahjehan Khan
And remember, his wife and kids were in the car, and he had no idea what was going on with them.

Akif Rahman
What were they thinking? Were they hungry? Where were they? What are they being told and what are they thinking is happening to me? And I had no indication, right? And no matter how many times I asked the border agent what was going on he just said, “They're waiting for you.” And, “You basically don't need to worry about them right now. They’re fine.”

[Sounds]

Shahjehan Khan
After four long hours of being handcuffed, interrogated, and panicked beyond anything he’d ever felt, Akif found the courage within himself to speak his mind directly to one of the agents.

Akif Rahman
The questions that were being asked were around what I thought about 9/11, whether I knew about any kind of terrorist financiers, what I would do if I knew someone who funded terrorism. You know, strange questions that I found were very private, personal, and didn’t really make sense in the context of trying to get home from a family trip in Canada. And so I expressed that, and I said, “You know even if I did, I don't think this is a setting that I would tell you in.” And took a little bit more of a more direct line because I didn't know where all of this was going. And I think he could tell because he was face-to-face that, you know, I'm not someone who is in any way or shape a threat to entering the country or whatever they thought.

Shahjehan Khan
According to Akif, this changed the vibe of his interrogator, who then ordered him to be released from handcuffs. The agent then went to actually check on Akif’s wife and kids, and let him know that his family was doing okay. It would still be another two hours though before he was officially released, and when he asked why he was detained and treated the way that he was, their answer was simple, cold, and direct: “We don’t have to tell you ANYTHING.”

[Music]

Akif Rahman
What I would want people to take away from my experience and story is that we've got to implement policies and process[es] that actually are targeting what we really want versus just banding and stereotyping a group of people into a block and treating every single person who is Muslim, who may be coming into the U.S. for, you know, living or work, as some sort of a threat.

Shahjehan Khan
With the help of the ACLU, Akif and several other plaintiffs filed a formal lawsuit against the FBI and CBP. They were eventually successful in taking his name off the so-called Terrorist Screening Database, but the fight against wrongful detentions and illegal surveillance and targeting of Muslims continues.

One of the worst parts about stories like Akif’s is the purgatory or like being-in-limbo time that you have to endure while it’s going on. You lack power, agency, access to a lawyer or a phone call, or any of the things that we learn in school are integral and unique things that make America unlike other countries. This really puts the idea of American exceptionalism into question.

[Audio]
Anonymous: There is this word “exceptionalism,” which has been repeated throughout American history—that we are the exceptional country. That, at this point, I think makes us a danger to ourselves.

Chapter 6: NAMES

Shahjehan Khan
I can’t give you hard data about exactly how much of my brain was impacted by Islamophobia-type shit during this period of my life, or for that matter, how much it still is today. I can say that it had a significant impact on my mental health. Hearing stuff like Akif and Rais’ stories definitely kept me awake at night, and made me fear not just for my own safety, but that of my friends and family as well.

It was 2004 and I was still barely removed from a serious suicide attempt. Yeah, maybe I was trying to go to college again, but I was pretty checked out. I was going to AA and NA meetings on and off, but I was still getting high. All the time. And going to the mosque was even harder now, because I still hadn’t resolved like where I fit into the idea of being an American Muslim man. I felt farther from it than ever before. It’s not that I was getting any real pressure from anyone to be a better Muslim or whatever, more of what a lot of us so-called third-culture kids go through where we don’t exactly fit in anywhere, like what Rania Mustafa was talking about in the last episode with the whole identity confusion thing.

Part of my confusion was a lack of connection to and powerlessness around news stories about Iraq and Afghanistan. Stories where Muslims were always the bad people, and Islam was a force of evil in the world that needed to be eradicated.

[Audio]
Anonymous: These people live to kill us, they live to attack us, they live to horrify us. And when people pull back that’s exactly what they want.

Shahjehan Khan
I was like constantly on the defensive, ready to get into arguments with anyone who even uttered a peep about Islam or Pakistan. I remember this one English class I took where the first book we had to read was about soldiers during the Vietnam War, and naturally our discussions would come to what we felt about Iraq. One kid in particular kept saying, “Well, doesn’t Saddam love Sharia law and like didn’t he gas his own people? We should be bombing the shit out of Iraq so they don’t get us here.” I would try my best to avoid talking about it, but inevitably the teacher would call on me, and I’d give some sort of bumbled and confused answer, my face would get all hot and blushy, and I’d never be satisfied with what I said—just always left with the feeling that the others kids thought I was an anti-American possible terrorist or something. I wasn’t sure who I was except in opposition to who I wasn’t.

In fact, by 2004, I wasn’t even really sure what name to use anymore. That sounds a little weird, so let me explain. My full name is Malik Shahjehan Muhammad Khan. Malik is also my dad’s name, and it’s technically my first name.

Tina Khan (Amma)
So Malik came up with two or three names, which I'm not going to say over here, because maybe somebody who is listening it's their name or something. But those were the names which I’m sorry to say just didn’t appeal to me. And why they didn’t appeal to me, that also I will not say. I’ll tell you later [laughter]. But every day Malik would come up with a crazy name. And I said, “no, no, no”. One day, all of a sudden, I don't know what came in his head. And he said that, “How about Shahjehan?” And I said, “YES.”

Shahjehan Khan
What Amma means by this is that everyone technically called me by my middle name, Shahjehan, but that itself was changed in a couple of ways. I don’t remember when it started happening but no one seemed to be able to pronounce it growing up, and I guess I was too embarrassed to correct them, so I became Saj to all my hometown friends from Acton and Boxborough.

Shahjehan Khan
So with your friends, your high school friends, you are Noorj. And with my high school friends, I'm Saj. I just wondered, what is the distinction for you between Noorj and Noorjehan?

Noorjehan Khan
Oh, it's so complicated.

Shahjehan Khan
Where are you on that whole thing?

Noorjehan Khan
Oh, it’s so hard.

Shahjehan Khan
Yeah, isn’t it? [laughter]

Noorjehan Khan
I think that even goes with the identity piece, right, of like very clearly of how I even say my name and introduce myself depends on who I'm talking to.

Shahjehan Khan
Code switcher?

Even—oh, huge code switch—but also, even when people ask me where I'm from, if I say Pack-i-stan or Pock-i-stawn.

Shahjehan Khan
I don’t say Pack-i-stan anymore. I straight up say Pock-i-stawn.

Noorjehan Khan
It’s—

Shahjehan Khan
No, no. But that's just me.

Noorjehan Khan
Oh yeah, for sure. And I've tried to make that switch more often, but 8 times out of 10 it’s—

Shahjehan Khan
What do you think that’s about?

Noorjehan Khan
What? The difference of saying Pack-i-stan or Pock-i-stawn? It’s the same, if you say hu-kah or hoo-kah, or like all these other dumb—can I have a chai tea latte? I think it's become a more politicized issue than maybe it needs to be, but it also is important. I don't know, it’s complex. I think with my name, that's been a huge struggle forever because as a kid, I super disliked my name cause it was complicated. And like you had to—

Shahjehan Khan
Me too, me too.

Noorjehan Khan
You had to memorize where you were in the attendance list. So when you see their face get confused, you're like, “Oh, that's me, like I'm Noorjehan. I'm that one you're going to show….”

Shahjehan Khan
Yeah.

Noorjehan Khan
Even though both of our names are very phonetically spelled.

Shahjehan Khan
And they’re pretty badass!!!

They are badass names. You remember the title of this show, I hope? King of the World? Well that’s my name. And Noorjehan’s means “light of the world.” I challenge you to find more badass names in AB during the 1990s or early 2000s. That’s why looking back it’s like extra sad that both of us felt weird about our names.

Noorjehan Khan
If you were taught like just a second of phonics then you should be able to handle it; it's not like we have silent letters in there.

Shahjehan Khan
Yeah. BEN-JA-MIN, SHAH-JE-HAN.

Noorjehan Khan
Oh, for sure. As a kid, Noorj, like that nickname came 100% from Saj. It came from yours because Emily N. is the first person who shortened my name. And she got that because Eric Dearborn called you Saj.

Shahjehan Khan
WOW, YOU REMEMBER THAT?!!!

Noorjehan Khan
Oh yeah. You would remember where your name comes from.

Shahjehan Khan
That’s amaaaazing!!!

Noorjehan Khan
So I was already Noorj before I entered school. And then Emily knew me in school so that’s where Noorj started. Mickey Wax was the first person to call me Noorje; she put an “e” on there; whatever. As a kid in the Desi community, I couldn’t say my own name so if someone asked me my name I said it was Noonehan; that’s where Noona came from. So all those names are where that is.

Now, as I grew up, even…people ask me, “Is it Noor-zhe-han or Noor-jeh-han?” And I’m like, “Really, it’s neither.” And that’s a very recent development in my life, in the past two years when people ask me is it Noorzh or Noorj, I give them the whole five-minute explanation of, “Actually, it’s neither of them. I’ve Americanized my name to Noorjehan. It’s actually two separate words—it’s Noor and Jehan, and we’re combining it, so your call on if you want to do Noorzh or Noorj because neither of them is actually the proper pronunciation of my name.” And I give them the whole background.

Shahjehan Khan
This interview was literally the first time Noona and I had ever talked about this stuff, and it just kept getting more and more incredible for me to hear her perspective. I went by Saj all through high school, and was even okay with the Saj/Shahjehan dichotomy when it came to my family and the Pakistani community, but it seemed to really become an issue when I went to UMass Amherst, that first time I tried to go to college.

Remember in episode 2 where I was placed in that multicultural dorm as soon as I got to campus? Well, kids asked me right away why I didn’t go by Shahjehan. There were other kids from the Pakistani community on campus that knew me as Shahjehan, and when I’d try to go between the two different worlds, my neat little partitions started to crash together and overload my weeded-out brain. It was too much.

[Music]

Noorjehan Khan
As a kid, I just like responded to anything. And I think—the only person who called me Noorjehan were [sic] Agha or Amma when I was in trouble. Otherwise it was Noona or it was Noorj.

The most me thing that I've done with my name is—I don't know if you know this story, but it's pretty good. When I, so then coming out of high school, I was like, okay, college, like, I can have a new identity. If I want to have like a different name, now's the fricking time, and I can go with it.

Shahjehan Khan
That’s what I did too, man. I went with Malik.

Noorjehan Khan
Amazing, that makes sense. I went to college orientation, and in orientation, I told everyone my name was Tina. Just full swipe, took Amma’s name. And I was like, let's just go with this. Let's go with Tina. Like maybe that'll be my new—Yeah. In orientation, I just was like, “My name is Noorjehan, I go by Tina.” Cause people do that all the time, you know what I mean? “My name is whatever, I go by this.” No one batted an eyelash at it. So I did that for the three-day orientation. Then I got home and I was like, “Nah, that feels weird.” So when I went back to college, I told everyone that my name was Noorjehan and there were still like a sprinkling of people who called me Tina.

Shahjehan Khan
Wow.

Noorjehan Khan
Then, when I joined the South Asian groups, I was like, oh, they can recognize my name, but I still want it to be shorter. So I'll go by Noor. So all the people who I met who are South Asian at Northeastern call me Noor or Tina, and then everyone else calls me Noorj. Then, I was at a party once and a guy asked me my name and I said, “Noorj.” And he was like, “Did you say Laur?” And I was like, yeah, sure. I look like my name is Laur, like short for Lauren. And I just went with it and he thought my name was Laur for three years of college. I did not tell him until I was walking down the street and he was sitting on the porch and I was walking with some of my friends. He goes, “Hey, Laur.” And I was like, “Tim, my name is Noorj and it's not your fault. It's my fault. I just never corrected you.” And he was like, “Okay.” And we never spoke again.

[Music]

Shahjehan Khan
Noona touches on something important. A lot of immigrant kids like us have been encouraged or even forced to take on Westernized versions of our names. Sometimes it’s at school or at work, sometimes when you’re ordering food on the phone. And the thing is, your name can have some serious implications and lead to discrimination and othering.

Like, my producer Asad remembers a time a few years ago when he was trying to book an Airbnb. The host denied his request. So hours later, his wife, Erica, put in a request for the exact same place just to see what happened. Well, it was accepted. This kind of stuff happened so much, particularly to the people of color, that in 2016, Airbnb established an antidiscrimination policy and team.

Noorjehan Khan
The last piece I'll say on names is that where names comes up the most currently in my brain is like—we’re not pregnant; we’re not having kids anytime soon—but like, we would like to have kids. It’s like, what are those, what are those names going to look like? And especially when I got married, I was like, I don't want to get rid of my last name because it's really important to me. But most likely our kids' last name will be Christensen. So I'm like, I'd like their first name to have some sort of Pakistani Muslim something to it so they remember that. And one of my favorite teaching professional developments I attended, there was a guy there who he, I want to say has an Irish background and his wife is Latina. And he talked about this whole thing of…intentional disruptions, of like having—so he named his kid like Pedro O'Connell or something like that, where like a super Latin name, super Irish last name. And he was like, I want people to look at that name and be like, what? And like have to requestion like what they think this person should look like. And he was like, “This kid's name is Pedro. He has red hair.” Like you would never think that, but like, we have to force those intentional disruptions all the time.

And I think that's what I want with my kids. I think eventually when I do change it it'll be hyphenated; my last name will be or my name will be Noorjehan Khan-Christensen, but my kids will, the last name will be Christensen but I want their first name to be like ethnic as hell.

Shahjehan Khan
That's super cool, man.

Noorjehan Khan
Yeah, but still pronounceable cause I do think I still have that trauma. But something that's like, something like that, or at least their middle name to be something where not even they but other people know that this is regular now to have those names, you know what I mean? Like I want it to be both pieces, cause they are both pieces.

Shahjehan Khan
They are, man.

Noorjehan Khan
Or they will be.

Chapter 7: CONCLUSION

Shahjehan Khan
When I went back to college for the third time in the fall of 2004, I was still Malik. I was officially two years out of high school and was going to therapy two times a week. I mentally prepared for what would probably be another semester gone up in a cloud of smoke, where a cascading series of microaggressions about my name, my place in American, Pakistani, and Muslim culture would probably reach another breaking point.

[Theme]

One day after my morning class, I grabbed some food from the dining hall and made my way to the library when this Desi kid in a black leather jacket and long hair pulled into a ponytail burst into the room. I immediately recognized him from Sunday school at the Wayland Mosque.

Basim Usmani
So my name is Basim Usmani. Me and Shahjehan met up probably way back in 1998, and we formed a band together in probably 2005.

Shahjehan Khan
That band would forever change both of our lives, and take us on a journey that most kids only dream about.

Next time, on King of the World:

Thanks for listening to today’s episode. If you want to learn more about the people on King of the World, check out our episode guides. You can see pictures of me and my family, information about Muslims in America, and even pictures of my Ford Windstar. You can find those on our website, Rifelion.com.

King of the World is a production of Rifelion Media. Today’s show was produced by me and Asad Butt, and 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. Thanks again to my family—Amma, Agha, Meryum, and Noona. And special thanks to Rais Bhuiyan, Ilhan Cagri, Akif Rahman, my cousin Mehru, and Basim Usmani. We’ll have links in the show notes to learn more about each of them. Thanks again for listening. I’m Shahjehan Khan.

[Commercial]