Essay: New York Muslim State of Mind
(L) Me wearing a t-shirt that says I love Harlem in Arabic; (R) Bill Keller, speaking to his camera crew in front of Park 51, shortly before he yelled at me “You are your husband’s property!” Sept. 2010. Photo: Alexandra Ben Othman.
Once upon a time, a white man wearing a U.S. flag emblazoned with the names of everyone who was killed during the September 11 attacks around his neck like a boxer about to enter a ring, yelled at me “You are your husband’s property!”
“I’m divorced!” I yelled back.
“If you went to Eye-ran (sic), your husband would be your owner! He can have as many wives as he wanted! He could beat you when he wanted!”
“I live here.”
Who: Evangelical preacher Pastor Bill Keller, accompanied by his very own camera crew.
Where: Outside Park 51, a proposed Islamic community centre two blocks north of the World Trade Center site. Notorious Islamophobe Pamela Geller (unrelated to Bill) had spent the previous weeks calling it the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Bill Keller was calling it a “Victory Mosque.”
When: Labor Day weekend in 2010, when I joined a solidarity stand in front of Park 51 that initially comprised a group of Muslim women and a non-Muslim white man in front of Park 51, holding signs in support of its opening.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t know why any woman would want to be a Muslim,” (“I’m a Muslim,” the actual Muslim women behind Keller shout). “....unless she was afraid of being killed.” (“I’m a Muslim,” the actual Muslim women behind Keller shout some more.)
Keller’s sermon for his camera crew was a veritable Sharia soup, wherein every other sentence contained a word, and a world, he could not define but which served its purpose during the years of “Creeping Sharia.” In the early 2000s, white supremacist, Christian zealots passed bills and laws against “Creeping Sharia” to ban a non-existent threat from an “Islamic law” that no one in the U.S. said they wanted, and therefore was at no risk of being imposed. Those bills and laws were fodder for fear mongering that fueled their constituents–who were also white supremacist, Christian zealots. Recognize, that those who yelled “Creeping Sharia” loudest then, are the same ones who did not just “creep” upon the nation with Christian zealotry but announced it at every turn. They are the same people now destroying the rights of just about every one who is not a white supremacist, Christian zealot. And so the country did not fear the Creeping Christian Zealotry.
I say this in every essay: because they were white and Christian they were therefore not considered dangerous.
The obsession with what Islam does or does not do to Muslim women from an Evangelical white man in a country in which white Christian nationalists have shown us exactly what they can do to women and their bodies was especially rich. And a reminder that as racists and as Islamophobic such men are, they are also deeply envious of and covet what they think Muslim men can do to Muslim women.
The three days I spent outside Park 51 in 2010 forever cemented for me how ignorant and unhinged the average person in the U.S. can be about Islam and Muslims and how normalised and acceptable Islamophobia is in this country.
Because of those three days outside Park 51 fifteen years ago, I am not in the least surprised at the vile Islamophobia that Zohran Mamdani is being subjected to today.
We would find dog shit left overnight at Park 51’s doorstep. Some people circled the site in a car with a decommissioned rocket attached to its roof. Tourists visiting New York City from other parts of the country for the holiday weekend who had heard about the “Ground Zero Mosque” would show up to tell us that we were disrespecting the dead of 9/11 and could we not just move a few blocks further?
As is so often the case, people who don’t live in New York City, who can barely tolerate what this magnificent city is and does, become feral when it’s time to “defend” our city aka when their white supremacy and Christian supremacy is challenged.
Bill Keller, who earned a degree from Jerry Falwell‘s Liberty University while serving three years in prison for insider trading and became a television and Internet pastor when he was released in the early 1990s, came from Florida to flex his Muslim-bashing muscles.
I moved to the U.S. a year before the September 11 attacks, and I moved to New York City a year after the attacks. Because I’m no longer visibly Muslim (I wore a hijab in my late teens and early twenties), I am assumed to be Latina (I wish I had the Spanish to match that assumption so that I could answer the countless requests for directions I receive.)
Two days after 9/11, a man tried to start a fire in my Seattle local mosque’s parking lot. When two Muslims coming out from night prayers tried to stop him, the man– who was drunk – tried to shoot them; he missed, then jumped into his car and drove into a tree.
Two weeks after 9/11, a group of young men asked the white husband of a Pakistani-American woman I knew. "What's it like to fuck a terrorist?"
Two months after 9/11, a special agent with the FBI went to my brother’s home in the Midwest to ask him if he “knew anyone who had celebrated the attacks.”
A year and a half after 9/11, while he and my sister-in-law were expecting their first child, my brother had to submit to “special registration,” as part of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) that the Bush administration enacted on September 10, 2002. He was photographed, finger-printed and interrogated for the database which would go on to register and monitor more than 80,000 Muslim and Arab men and boys. More than 13,000 of those registrants were placed in deportation proceedings. Special registration was aimed at temporary foreign visitors who present "increased national security concerns."
A decade after 9/11, President Barack Obama’s administration suspended NSEERS. More than 15 years after 9/11, it ended the programme, which had not resulted in a single terrorism conviction.
In September 2012, I was arrested in NYC for spray painting over a racist and bigoted pro-Israel ad paid for by Pamela Geller’s hate group. It was one of the first things I did soon after I became a U.S. citizen and I did it because I knew that as a citizen, my passport guaranteed me rights to protest and civil disobedience that non-citizens did not have, as we’ve seen with the abductions and political detentions of anti-genocide protestors such as Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Otzurk, and others.
Five days after my arrest, and unrelatedly but in a reminder of the consequence of hate speech, a man set my brother’s local mosque in the midwest on fire, just hours after my niblings were in the building for Sunday school. The arsonist said he’d seen on Fox News that “Muslims are killing Americans abroad.”
I spray painted over that fucking ad for the same reason I stood outside Park 51 that Labor Day weekend in 2010: because I was fed up with the bullying and vilification of Muslims in the U.S.. My Twitter feed after my arrest was uninhabitable. In addition to calling me a "bitch" and "cunt,” racists and Islamophobes would have you know I'm an "Islamo-Nazi anti-speech ungrateful immigrant" incapable of appreciating the wonders of the first amendment.
It is no wonder they call Mamdani a “Communist” and “Islamist” in the same breath - vilifying pejoratives cut from the same fearful cloth.
I spray painted over that fucking ad for my niblings. They will not grow up to be scared or apologetic for being Muslim, or Egyptian, or brown. They will not grow up feeling they should apologise for something they had nothing to do with and they will not grow up hiding any part of their identities or having to choose one identity over the other.
Zoharan Mamadani will become the first Muslim mayor of New York City and Bill Keller, Pamela Geller, et al can just fucking cry harder.
—You can support my work via a one-time payment through PayPal
—You can also support my work via Patreon
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her new book, an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, will be published March 5, 2025. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
I appreciate your support. If you like this piece and you want to further support my writing, you can like/comment below, forward this article to others, or send a gift subscription to someone else today.