It always makes my blood boil when a terrorist attack is referred to as the “9/11” of Norway, or India, or Israel or some such. The day New York City was attacked was a singular event in American history, but really, it was no Hiroshima. I was in high school in Boston when it happened. And I remember arguing with the librarian that the hijackers could have been white. Even though responsibility for the attacks had not yet been claimed, I was defensive. I had awful luck in high school, I was a goth kid during the anti-goth hysteria surrounding the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, and then, I had the misfortune of being a Muslim at school after 9/11.
Ten years later, I find myself reticent to get into a discussion about religion or politics with people I don’t know. Inevitably, I am asked about 9/11. Between the Anti-Shariah movement (wherein politicians and activists are campaigning against referring to Islamic law in US courts) and the campaign to halt construction of the Islamic centre at Ground Zero, the Twin Towers have essentially crumbled away into a handful of talking points for TV personalities, talking heads and politicians.
The National September 11 Memorial and Museum opens this week at Ground Zero. Hopefully, it will mark a maturing of how we look at things. One World Trade Center, the tower that’s being built where the Twin Towers stood in the New York skyline, is scheduled to be completed by 2013. As far as the hype is concerned, I hope it’s mostly past us. Maybe then we can engage Muslim Americans about something else for once.
I’m about to leave for a gig in Paris at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam on September 17. It’s hard to imagine, but this marks the sixth year since I co-founded the Kominas. When we began, we were always referred to as “Muslim Punks”. Never mind that the group for most of its existence included two Bengali brothers whose parents were Hindu, when Americans saw four brown men in their mid-20s making an unruly noise, their gut instinct was to yell: “Muslims!”
When a story on the band was published in Newsweek, a photograph of me answering my cellphone was captioned, “Basim Usmani, praying at home”. My last name is often mispronounced as Usami, which is uncomfortably close to Osama, by reporters doing stories on how we are a positive voice against Islamophobia. I was advised all along not to make a big deal of my background, or get too wrapped up in the politics of the situation.
I have always tried to be honest with my art. While we never wanted to be pigeon-holed, our music reacted to prejudices that we had experienced in our early 20s. I wrote the lyrics of Sharia Law in the USA when a friend of mine, a Turkish American from Coney Island, Brooklyn, was visiting Boston to help us record. We were cynical, but extremely excited to be cynical together. It was refreshing to meet another kid who had to respond to the same bigoted rhetoric that continues to be popular. Long before 9/11, kids in my high school would spread rumours that I was related to Saddam Hussein. It made me sarcastic; the first two lines of the song read, “I am an Islamist, I am the Anti-Christ”. Sharia Law in the USA is the song I’m most excited to play in Paris.
I’ve made a point not to write a second song about 9/11, or Muslim “terrorists” because I think the subjects are irrelevant. The real battle is being fought far outside of America, as the majority of people that are being killed by both the Taliban and American forces are Pakistanis. The last time a plane got hijacked and flown into a building in America, it was a white man from Austin. The last major attack in a “developed” country happened in Norway, and it was done by an anti-Muslim.
Ten years after 9/11, we’re hopefully over it by now. Let’s try and remember something good that happened in 2001 instead.
