Category Archives: America post 9-11

Care for some hummus with your pop-culture terrorist images?

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Pop culture muslim terrorist flight 93 lillies

"Popular culture image of Muslim terrorist with lillies" or "Is it perverse to call this a nature-mort?" But seriously, this is the image of air travel that popped on the TV tonight, just a few hours before I leave Oregon for home - and the usual TSA treatment. This image is my own, it depicts the man who flew Flight 93 into the ground on 9-11 who is praying just before his death (with some of the lillies in my room in the foreground).

It is late at night, and I am thousands of miles from my cozy New England home here in Oregon.

I am cooped up in my tiny, yet luxurious, hotel room, frantically making notes for my report to my boss about the (scintillating and a bit intimidating) conference I have just attended.

It has been a couple of hours of passionate writing and figuring out how I want to present my thoughts to my boss.

And until this moment, I was ignoring the fact that I needed to eat dinner (it’s going to be room service), or pack my bag (newsflash to Kenne, the Queen of Manners puppet who is stalking me: “I am not folding my laundry into the suitcase and so what if the baggage reviewers see that!”).

And so there I was, finally ready to take a break and order some food (it’s going to be nane cayi (peppermint tea) and a hummus plate in honor of the dumb cultural question of the day “Oh – your husband is Turkish? Isn’t Turkish food, you know, like, Israeli food really?”) when I made the move to turn on the television for a little bit of balance from the workaholic intellectual over-stimulation that I tend to get waaaayyyy into when alone in a hotel room.

The Flight That Fought Back

The Flight That Fought Back (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Do you find it odd that the background here is dark - as if the incident did not happen in the light of day?

And there it was, a whole lot of yelling about “Allah” and “All-ah” and “Allah u akbar” on a plane – and I realized that the Discovery channel was showing the film entitled The Flight that Fought Back about the famous Flight 93 of “Let’s roll” fame.

It took me about 10 seconds to figure out what I was watching, of course. And I must say, as an interested observer of the portrayal of people from the Middle East in American culture, this gem did not at all disappoint.

Of course, it immediately made me think with a defeated shrug, about tomorrow morning, and the TSA-ness I will likely endure as I did four days ago (you can read that here)

I stood, somewhat mesmerized until my hummus plate arrived, for about 20 minutes of LOLing at both the gender stereotypes and the ethnic stereotypes that were rampant throughout it (e.g. big burly men saving the day while women prayed and sniveled and macho looking Muslim men intoning Allah at every possible turn and generally being violent and angry the whole time).

This kind of pop culture image gets me everytime – or – I should say that it gets my rile-able self.  As the wife of an American born in Turkey, I know that for most people, this is one of the major images of people that come from M.’s region of the world.  Now, forget the fact that most Turks I know consider themselves European – but that’s a story for another time.

In my intellectual but also gut-level (yet manageable) anxiety, it’s all I can do to stop myself from fantasizing about antagonizing those TSA lovelies once again tomorrow morning by wearing a scarf on my head.  In a rare show of stern-ness that I can respect, Kenne calls me out on the need to show respect – versus mockery – of people who wear scarves as part of their religious or spiritual practice.  I quickly shut my mouth for all but hummus consumption.

Kenne nods her approval before corralling the little chorus of dancing ladies to come and fold my laundry for me.

 

On post 9/11 travel

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When I last left you, I was whirling back through time and space  pondering the presence of angels – or melekler – in the middle of the Haghia Sofya in Istanbul.

Today, I wished for those melekler to make their presence known today, but did not feel the swish of their wings in any palpable way.  This is, perhaps, because I was captive to the air travel industry in America – an industry and a mental and physical space that could use a few more melekler, if you ask me.

Kenne, the Queen of Manners and the Maintenance of Ladylike Behavior tells me that yes, indeed, the depravities of the TSA experience certainly call for at least one melek to be devoted to the cause.  She is still horrified at the images that the TSA lackeys see when one is scanned.  I remind her that she is a puppet made out of wax paper, and they really can’t see much of what is under her clothing, because she is a figment of flatness…she sniffs her disapproval.  She isn’t sure of anything anymore.

But here I am, Kenne or no Kenne, the overly-anxious yet justifiably paranoid wife of a Turkish-American man, the melekler have helped me to become attuned to the sideways glances followed by subtle hand signals and unexplained numerical codes written on boarding passes made by TSA lackeys upon seeing my husband’s country of birth on his U.S. passport.  These are the glances, hand signals and numerical codes that precede the “randomly selected” questions that are posed to M.  I am now used to watching M.’s gentle and gracious external demeanor as he is walked through the questions we now know by heart.

Karagöz, that trickster of a puppet, the namesake of the whole puppet troupe, is usually bound and gagged by his fellow puppets in these moments, for fear that he will engage in some excited utterance that will incur the wrath of the TSA lackeys.  So far, he has been thwarted.

Sometimes, now, such as this morning, the puppets and I are convinced that I am now sometimes “randomly” selected for the TSA special as well.

I say this, and the entire Karagöz puppet troupe concurs, as I (we, they remind me), were subjected to 2 special “extra” searches today.  Who knows.

In any case, as the overly-anxious yet justifiably paranoid wife of a Turkish-American man, I take this lens I have been given, the joy of seeing the world through a cross-cultural mirror,  and use it to observe the goings-on around me during my traveling moments.

And today, in my 4 a.m. sleepiness as I trudged across the cement-polished floor in my stocking feet, dragging my belongings along behind me, I was not disappointed as I saw several scarf-bedecked Muslim women getting the extra wanding and puff-machine treatment in the “special” aisle I had just come through.  The new version of “driving while Black” in America.

So there I was, waiting for the plane to load, trying not to think all about this as I was squeezed in between two businesspeople of corpulent proportions, the puppets politely indicating their protest with not-so-subtle jabs, I willed myself away into the world of my iPhone and found this image about the infamous, inimitable and I suppose I must admit, somewhat necessary TSA despite all of my whinging.  I cannot attest to the veracity of the facts therein, but wanted to share it with you, care of the scintillating blog Life of Refinement.

Let’s see what happens on the way home.  The Karagöz puppets sigh and shake their heads.

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Bebe Ruhi sadly questions Americans and Qu’ran burnings

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On Islamophobia (click photo for source, credits)

When I last left you, I wrote about my early exposure to Islam.  Specifically, I wrote about my parents’ interest in Persian rugs, and the carpet-weaving community’s practice of always leaving at least one mistake in their work as “only Allah is perfect.”  You can read more about all of that here.  While this was hardly an exhaustive introduction to the tenets of Islam, I do feel luck to have been raised by parents (one agnostic, one Christian) that was more than open to learning about other cultures and religions – as imperfect as those efforts may at times be and as imperfect as any human can be in their efforts to be respectful of, sensitive to and aware of different cultures and religions.

Efforts to open my mind continued in my high school – and in fact my first exposure to the idea of feminism was through the writing of Fatima Mernissi, who wrote about Islamic feminism (on how Islam and veiling in particular allow women to be treated as respected equals, more on this another time).  While in college, I lived as a non-Jewish person in my University’s residential Hillel House, where I learned about Judaism and keeping kosher.  Flung heart-first into the experience of religious intolerance, I experienced our Hillel House’s post-traumatic stress after members of the Aryan Nation senselessly broke into that house on a school break – intentionally defiling the house with feces, urine, spray-paint and meat on the dairy dishes.  It was confusing and heartbreaking – why would someone do this?  I wrestled with this question on gut and mind levels for a long time.  Even though I have answers, the whole thing still makes my stomach hurt.

Later, while practicing as a social worker in New York City, I worked with many Muslim immigrants, mostly from Yemen and various parts of Africa.  Tasked with investigating child abuse and/or neglect, my cross-cultural thinking was put to the test.  I often wrestled with the question “if it is right in one culture, should that be able to stand in a second culture of residence – and vice versa.”  While I disagreed in a very personal way with some of the ways the tenets of Islam were implemented in some of the families I worked with when it came to disciplining adolescents walking the cross-cultural tightrope of their new culture and their family culture, I did my best to be fair in my decision-making and to respect all I worked with to the best of my ability.

It is, perhaps, these facts of my upbringing as well as the fact of being married to a person from a Muslim majority country and the ways he is sometimes misunderstood or stereotyped that lead me to feel so upset about the most recent Qu’ran burnings in Afghanistan by U.S. armed forces and the reactions of some of those around me.  It is always painful to me, cringe-worthy even, when friends or family in Turkey work to make sure that I understand they do not associate themselves with the worst that call themselves Muslim, much as I distance myself from those soldiers that decided to burn religious books in a garbage purge.

It may sound cliché, but my extreme disappointment and upset over this incident so far away renews my commitment to making some kind of a difference in the lives of my students – a few of whom I overheard last night joking about this incident in Afghanistan.  My heart sank, my anger surged, and I said nothing.  Normally, I am fairly “out there” but I am trying to be more mindful of and attentive to the power of my role as a professor and the need to ask calm questions to encourage them softly to look at their statements and views in a way that might bring some learning and transformation.

Today, I am just left with Bebe Ruhi, the ever-questioning Karagoz puppet in my mind, who has tears running down his cheeks, and rocks back and forth, asking these questions over and over:

How can these kind and loving students who are training to be social workers be so mean in their comments? 

How can you get them over this hump of ignorance?

How could these American soldiers be so disrespectful?

I know people are ignorant and in pain about 9/11 and whatever they are experiencing on the ground, but how could they be so stupid and inflammatory?

I know soldiers get all worked up with what they are expected by their governments to do – and sometimes experience moral conflicts, but why does this keep happening?

How does this type of behavior square with the alleged religious tolerance the United States supposedly represents?

What is wrong with Newt Gingrich, that bombastic idiot, for questioning President Obama’s decision to apologize for this? What on earth is wrong with an apology?

M’lady, can you explain Americans to me?

None of these are new questions or particularly unique ones.  Many of them have many documented answers already.  Today, I am feeling down, and I just wish these questions would be less present in life as they are just so painful sometimes.  Must be a blue day.