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Excerpt from War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims (University of Arkansas Press) by Melody Moezzi. War on Error brings together the stories of twelve young people, all vastly different but all American, and all Muslim.
Lounging contentedly on the bed in her apartment some thirty-five stories directly above the FDR, Roxana looks at me standing over her and proclaims,"Interview me," as though she were Julia Roberts promoting her next blockbuster. I know this is going to be difficult. I have known Roxana for over eight years now. We met in college at Wesleyan when she was a senior and I was a freshman, and within days, we were inseparable. She was the only other Iranian girl I had heard of at Wesleyan, and she seemed to know everything and everyone there was to know there.
We were both loud, opinionated, sarcastic, and naive. We were also both virgins and agreed that men were useful almost solely for opening unyielding jars of pickles and hooking up electronic equipment. Roxana is my dearest girlfriend from college, and that may be part of the reason why she was the first person I chose to interview for this book.
That and it gave me a decent excuse to escape the Atlanta summer heat and go shopping and dancing in New York City.
I found it incredibly difficult to get Roxana to sit still and be serious long enough to conduct an interview, but I had a plan. I took her to an Indian restaurant and filled her to the point of near-explosion with samosas and chicken tikka masala. Once I got the impression that fullness had wholly debilitated her, I asked for the check and made my move. By the time we got home, her gorged state made her too weak to mock me or protest, and with a little persuasion, she began to yield.
Roxana is quite possibly the least repressed individual I have ever met. She'll yell when she feels like it, she'll laugh when she feels like it, she'll cry when she feels like it, and she'll dance when she feels like it- the location or circumstance is pure coincidence. Demure is not part of her repertoire. She can be painfully socially inappropriate, but she could never be disingenuous if she tried.
Roxana was twelve when her family left Iran, in the summer at the end of the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War, but the end of anything is only apparent in hindsight. Things grew progressively worse toward the end of the war. The Iraqis started bombing Tehran that summer, and that same year, Roxana's paternal grandparents died within seven months of each other. Roxana insists that her dad would never have left Iran and made somewhere else his permanent home as long as his mom was alive, and her death made their departure an imminent possibility. Also, on the night of the first Iraqi missile attack on Tehran, Roxana's maternal aunt died in a car accident. After that, her mom was fainting all the time and had to be put on IV fluids. Just the sound of missiles overhead, or anything akin to it, would send her into a fainting spell.
Thus, Roxana's mom's deteriorating emotional state and her father's loss of his greatest ties to Iran precipitated their flight. Her family began selling various household items- particularly, she remembers a Persian rug. She recalls a man coming to buy the rug and wondering why on earth they were selling it. Of course, her parents wouldn't tell her. They were afraid to tell her.
The rug reminded her so much of her uncle Hamid Reza, who was one of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians killed in the war. He was only twenty years old. She can't remember why that rug reminded her so much of him, but it did. After selling it, her father told her that they were going to Japan for health screenings and to obtain their visas.
After less than a year in Japan, they moved to Victoria, British Columbia, staying for only two years before moving to Connecticut, where they continue to live today. Roxana didn't want to leave Iran, and her parents even pushed back their flight a couple of weeks to better prepare her for the transition.
Ironically, they left two weeks after the peace treaty between Iran and Iraq was signed. Still, nothing in Iran really got any better after that. The war is a painful open wound in the collective memory of the millions of Iranians who lived through it, and its effects are still apparent today.
I personally remember an incident years after the war had ended. I was in the bathroom of my uncle's house in Tehran when all of the lights went out. I just considered it an untimely blackout. After fiddling around to find the toilet paper and the sink, I came out to find everyone walking in circles, praying frantically. They were all certain that Iraq was bombing again. In reality, the war had ended over five years before, but in the minds and homes of so many Iranians, it was still far from over.
In elementary school, Roxana was often called in from recess on account of Iraqi missiles flying overhead. I'm sure that the American government had no idea how many future Iranian Americans it was helping to create by supporting Iraq in that war, and I'm sure that American was the last thing a good number of those children wanted to become at the time. Still, I'd venture to guess that Roxana was not the only future American on that playground.
Roxana finally became a naturalized U.S. citizen in twenty-three, but she was an American long before that. This I can attest to much better than she might ever admit herself. The girl speaks fluent English with no accent, and she talks faster (in both English and Farsi) than anyone I've ever met. She has lived in America for over half of her life, and she admits that when she goes back to Iran to visit her extended family, she realizes how American she truly is. When I ask her what has most shaped her American experience, she responds,"I don't know, dude. MTV. McDonald's. You're not really writing that down, are you?" Of course, I'm writing it down. Is there anything more American than music videos, reality television, or Happy Meals?
I can't think of much, but that may just be a generational thing. Regardless, there isn't even a word for "sarcasm" in Farsi. Roxana is about as American as, I don't know, MTV or McDonald's. And yes, she is Muslim too.
Q/A
with Melody Moezzi
Why did you write the book?
I wrote this book because I was sick of how the media was portraying something that was incredibly important to me: my faith. After 9/11, there were so many people writing about and reporting on Muslims and the so-called Islamic world who knew absolutely nothing about the faith or its followers. It baffled me at how quickly and how frequently people, even very well-educated people, accepted the preposterous claim made by a few fanatical criminal deviants that their evil actions were based in or supported by Islam—how easily Americans bought into the lie that Islam was a violent religion and that the world could easily be divided into “The West” and “The Islamic World.” There are Muslims everywhere in the world, and most of us are no different than any other people of faith—we want to do right by God, and this means no lying, no cheating, no stealing, no killing, etc. Sure, there are evil people out there who claim to follow any number of religions—that doesn’t mean that they’re right. Somehow, the general American public has accepted that this maxim holds true for all other faiths, but it has been slow to accept it in the case of Islam. Still, I don’t blame the public for this. I blame their educators and information-providers, and this puts me in the uncomfortable position of criticizing the media while also deliberately becoming a part of it. So, I wrote this book in an effort to wake people up to the simple fact that “Islam” and “Muslims” are not the evil monsters and goblins that the media often makes them out to be. I wrote this book as a reminder to the world that Muslims are human beings. I was trying to humanize what so much of the “Western” media has chosen to first politicize and then quickly and easily demonize. The truth is that the vast majority of us are no different than anyone else in terms of our basic moral inclinations, and incidentally, when you really take the time to look around the world, there are a whole lot more Muslims today staring down the barrel of a gun than pulling the trigger.
How did the book get published?
It was a serious feat to get this book into print. While I initially had a lot of interest from agents and publishers, once they found out that “writing a book about young Muslim Americans” did not include bashing and lambasting Islam, they lost interest. I had a good number of agents and editors ask me to include a terrorist, and I was quickly made highly aware of the fact that if I did go out and find some terrorist to interview, then I would also win myself a respectable book contract with a trade press. Ultimately, I realized that if this book was going to get published any time in the near future, it wouldn’t be by one of the big trade presses. So, I amicably parted ways with my agent, and set about the task of finding an academic publisher willing to take on a not-so-academic book. I’m not a professor or a scholar by any means, and when I sold the book to the University of Arkansas Press, I was still a lowly law student with less-than-enviable grades. Most of the academic presses were turned off by the fact that I wrote the book for a general public audience, as opposed to an academic one, and not having a PhD didn’t help me much either. Larry Malley at Arkansas was willing to take a big chance on me and this book, and I will be forever grateful and indebted to him for that.
Who are the people profiled in the book?
If these people were not my friends to begin with, they ultimately became so. They are from highly diverse backgrounds in terms of race, national origin and level of practice, among other things. But they all share one commonality: they are both Muslims and American citizens. I have received some criticism claiming that I just wrote a book about a bunch of my friends and that I wasn’t objective enough. It is true that most of my subjects were already my friends, and if they weren’t so when I started writing the book, they became so in the end. I actually consider this the greatest strength of my book. I wrote largely about young Muslim Americans whom I already knew because I realized that if the American public knew these people (who happened to be Muslim) as well as I did, then there was no way that they could hate Muslims or Islam in the same way that they may have done before.
Because I am Muslim, I also happen to know a lot of other Muslims—that’s not an advantage that the majority of the American public has, so I figured, why not share this? I make no apologies for the fact that I wrote this book in first person, not hiding behind any false pretense of objectivity, or that many of my “subjects” were in fact my friends. I have love and respect for each of the individuals profiled in this book because they deserve it. I see nothing wrong with writing about people whom you know and love. It makes a lot more sense to me than writing about people whom you don’t know and hate—which is what I see filling the shelves at Barnes & Nobles more and more these days.
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