Muslims and the West: Who is responsible? by Khan Hussan Zia
The following is a guest article by Khan Hussan Zia, author of Muslims and the West: A Muslim Perspective. This article originated in a Facebook group discussion of my September 23 article “Pakistan, Palestine, and the USA: In search of common humanity.” I am writing the next installment of my Dawn column, to be published on Friday, October 7, as a response in turn to Mr. Zia, and I decided that the fairest approach in doing so would be to give readers the opportunity to read his words in full, rather than only quotes selected by me. – Ethan Casey, September 30, 2011
I enjoyed reading the piece by Ethan Casey. He is a good man with a conscience, like the majority of Americans. Sadly, the reality of politics is such that people like him have no control or influence over the policies of their government. They like to believe that these are formulated for the greater good by a democratic setup. The reality is that they live in an oligarchy in which politicians are subservient to specific interest groups. It will take too long to explain how it works. Anyone interested may like to look up the chapter “Essential West” in my book Muslims and the West: A Muslim Perspective.
It may be true that the state and the people are not the same, but it is also true that it is the people who enable the state to do what it does. To that extent the people of America have to accept responsibility for the actions of their government. I wonder how many of them have even given a thought to the more than one million innocent Iraqi men, women, and children that have been killed and four million rendered homeless and forced to live in refugee camps, as a result of just the most recent Gulf War. This is one quarter of the country’s entire population, and quite apart from the horrors perpetrated earlier in the First Gulf War and the UN sanctions that followed. The sheer scale puts to shame what history’s legendary killers Chengez, Hilaku, and Taimur inflicted on the world.
The same holds true for what has been done to the people of Afghanistan in the past ten years, not to speak of the crimes against humanity committed through the drone strikes in FATA that have killed thousands and terrorized the entire population for years on end. It is all very well for Mr. Casey to write [that] “we need to work all the harder to find common ground, and then to hold it against the forces of division and enmity.” Try telling this to someone who has just had a drone missile crash through his ceiling that killed his wife and children, and left the rest of his family screaming in pain from burns, bloody wounds, and broken bones. What common ground does he hope to find with this poor man and thousands of others like him who had never done any harm to the United States or its so-called war on terror?
It is not right to speak in the same vein about the feelings of the people of America as those of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan. The Americans are not suffering in the same way and cannot even understand, let aside feel, in the same way as the latter. Any attempt to generalise the issue borders on the insensitive and hypocritical. Each case has to be looked at separately, based on individual circumstances and merit. “Search for common humanity” and “common ground” begins with recognition and atonement of the wrongs done and will not amount to much if the entitlements and standards applied to the parties involved are different and discriminatory. With respect, it is not true [that] “we’re all responsible for the damage that results from misunderstanding and mutual suspicion.” Only some of us are.
Khan Hussan Zia was born in a family with connections to Afghanistan. He was educated in Pakistan and England and later served in the Pakistan Navy. He is an old student of Islamic and Indian history and contributes to newspapers and magazines mostly on geopolitical subjects. His earlier books include The Pathans of Jullunder, the social history of a community in India that was uprooted in the partition of the subcontinent, Soft War on Pakistan, an analysis of the media campaign against that country, and Pakistan: Roots, Perspective and Genesis.
Pakistan, Palestine, and the USA: In search of common humanity
I woke up this morning to the news that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last week. The New York Times called it “the most serious charge that the United States has leveled against Pakistan in the decade that America has been at war in Afghanistan.”
The geopolitics of such matters are analyzed ad nauseum by Very Intelligent People in think tanks from Washington to Islamabad. The careerist participants in that debate are largely talking past each other, because each of them starts from the tendentious premise that the state that represents his or her society is the one that’s in the right. I don’t intend to contribute to that tedious and largely pointless conversation. I intend to do an end run around it, by reminding myself and anyone who might read this of our shared humanity.
Part of the problem is that both Pakistan and America are hyper-political cultures that, for historical and ideological reasons, both suffer from a damaging tendency to conflate the society with the state. Hence the unexamined terms “the United States” and “Pakistan” – the impoverished vocabulary of conventional journalism – in the quote above from the New York Times. What is “the United States”? What is “Pakistan”? To what version of these notional entities do I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, owe allegiance? Am I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, required or entitled to make excuses for things “the United States” or “Pakistan” do that we know to be wrong? Are we required always to support and excuse “us” against “them,” as though societies were necessarily rivals, like football teams?
This sort of thing has gotten much worse, and the stakes much higher, in recent years, but in truth it’s nothing new. Way back in 1767, Samuel Johnson observed that
In a time of war the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves, and ill of the enemy. At this time the task of news-writers is easy; they have nothing to do but to tell that the battle is expected, and afterwards that a battle has been fought, in which we and our friends, whether conquering or conquered, did all, and our enemies did nothing. Scarcely any thing awakens attention like a tale of cruelty. The writer of news never fails in the intermission of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins; and if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province.
In other words, don’t believe what you read in the papers. I began as a political journalist – a writer of news – like any other, but quickly became dissatisfied with the constraints and conventions of that kind of writing. It’s the opposite of poetry, in the sense that it systematically squeezes meaning out of language by resorting habitually to cant and to glib phrases like “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” (Haiti), “Himalayan kingdom” (Nepal), “Muslim separatist insurgency” (Kashmir). George Orwell would have – did have – a lot to say about phrases like those, whose purpose is not to enhance understanding but to disable thinking and human sympathy by pushing emotive buttons.
My personal declaration of independence from the treadmill of such intellectually and morally impoverished language was my 2004 book Alive and Well in Pakistan, whose title as well as form – first-person nonfiction narrative, following role models like Graham Greene and Paul Theroux – are acts of intentional resistance. Resistance is anything but futile; it is hard but necessary work that we must do in order to maintain our humanity.
But resistance to the states that presume to represent our societies, and to the propaganda organs that presume to define the terms of our conversation, is only the first step. The long-term task is to maintain our use of language at a level that enhances understanding, in both the intellectual and the empathetic sense. The kindest review of Alive and Well in Pakistan was by Alex Spillius in The Daily Telegraph, who wrote that “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity.” What “the media” would define for us as “the other” is not other at all; we’re all human beings, all in it together. We may not properly understand or agree with each other, but that only means that we need to work all the harder to find common ground, and then to hold it against the forces of division and enmity.
But just as it won’t do simply to blame the putative other side, blaming “the media” is an evasion and a cop-out. The ultimate responsibility lies in each and all of us. If you don’t like or believe what you’re told or what you see on television, do the work of reading and of joining the conversation. We can joke ruefully about how people don’t read books anymore, how we’re all too distracted to take the time to understand or care, but the solution is to make the time. There’s no more urgent task.
Is this post, then, a plug for my own books? Sure it is. I wouldn’t have written them if I didn’t believe that they do some of what needs to be done. And my occasional writings, my “blog” and my columns in Dawn, are a running addendum to my books. But my writings are only a starting point, and only one of many. If you’re an American and you want to understand Pakistan, read the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa or Mohsin Hamid. To understand what the most vulnerable immigrants to the United States endure, read the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat‘s brilliant memoir Brother, I’m Dying.
Meanwhile, in New York, Palestine has formally requested membership in the United Nations, and starting today you’re going to be asked to acquiesce in what “the United States” thinks about that. As a very partial antidote, maybe a starting point to thinking about it differently, I ask you to read my article “Israel and the Distortion of American Politics,” which I wrote last May after the deadly attack on the flotilla that was trying to deliver relief supplies to the Gaza Strip.
Don’t excuse yourself. And, to begin with, refuse to accept at face value whatever you read in the New York Times or hear on TV about what “the United States” – the state – accuses “Pakistan” – the state – of doing or abetting. The stakes are too high, and we’re all responsible for the damage that results from misunderstanding and mutual suspicion.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) andOvertaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti, will be published in March 2012. He lives in Seattle. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
After Ten Years, Walking Forward Together
I was asked to write the following article for the newsletter of the New York-New Jersey chapter of APPNA, to mark the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. An installment of my weekly Dawn column, “A long 10 years,” also marks the anniversary.
In 2004 I had the privilege of spending several days in Haiti with Dr. Paul Farmer, the celebrated Harvard Medical School professor and co-founder of Partners in Health. He told me then what an illiterate Haitian peasant woman had said to him in his apartment in Boston on September 11, 2001: “Poor [Americans], now you’re going to have to eat your own misery too.”
“I thought a lot about what she said,” Farmer told me, “and there are many ways to interpret it. It was obviously sincere sympathy for us, but the point she was making was that this is the way the rest of the world is: always subject to hazard and danger and violence, and your country’s been largely spared that. … I never asked her, ‘Is this what you meant?’ I know that’s what she meant.”
Aung Zaw, an exiled Burmese journalist living in Thailand, had said much the same thing days after the attacks, in an article I reprinted in a book. “If Americans want to feel safe again in their own country,” he wrote,
they must begin to understand the insecurity many feel in theirs. More importantly, they must examine their nation’s policies vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and ask themselves honestly if these policies have contributed in some way to this insecurity. Now that its own worst fears have been realized, America can no longer afford to ignore the fears of others.
The kindest, and also the most helpful, way to understand the anger, bigotry and confusion in post-9/11 America is to say that white Americans are on a steep learning curve about the world and our place in it. I use that line often in my writing and public speaking. Truth be told, all people are on a learning curve – learning to respect and make allowances for each other, learning to lay aside bitterness and a victim mentality, however justified these might be. Sometimes, what’s justified and what’s useful are not the same.
Pakistanis understand the point that Aung Zaw and the Haitian woman were making, because you and your country of origin have lived its truth. And this elucidates something else I’ve been saying for a while: that Pakistanis and other Muslims are in a position to play a valuable leadership role in today’s America. To be sure, APPNA members especially are already leaders within the Pakistani-American community; but what I mean is that your leadership is needed even more urgently in the wider American society. Kindly see my articles “Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?”, published last October on my own www.ethancasey.com website, and “Pakistan & America Both Need APPNA’s Leadership,” in the summer 2011 APPNA Journal.
I was asked to write this article to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I prefer to do so by looking more ahead than back. What can we do now, after a decade of damage has been done? This is where you come in, as Pakistanis who are also Americans, and as Pakistani-American community leaders who are also respected professionals responsible for the health of Americans of all backgrounds. It really is true, as a teenager told us at a mosque in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey last October, that the principles of sharia and the principles on which the United States was founded are compatible to the point of being nearly identical. To say this in so many words might frighten Americans who are ignorant and fearful of Islam and Muslims, but there are other ways to say it. And the prescription for what ails America is a heavy dosage of such principles.
Many Pakistani-Americans I know talk about how they feel a need to “give back” to Pakistan out of duty and gratitude, and similarly to “give back” to America as the country that has welcomed them and allowed them to thrive. I would go beyond that and say that America needs you. My friend Dr. Farzana Naqvi of Irvine, California put it well when I asked what had prompted her to lead one of the first groups of volunteer medical professionals (from a range of ethnic and religious backgrounds) to Haiti after the earthquake: “I got a call, and I was told they needed a physician, and would I go. So the fact that I was needed was, I think, the reason I went. If somebody needs you to do what you are able to do, I think that’s reason enough to do it!”
I’ll end by reiterating something I said in my APPNA Journal article: that, inshallah, I will continue walking the walk with you. I know it’s helpful to Pakistani-Americans to have outspoken and/or well-positioned gora allies, and this is one way I’m trying to make myself useful. On September 11, I’m scheduled to be in Milwaukee. I’m sure that, very appropriately, there will be a moment of silence at the Brewers-Phillies baseball game I’ll be attending that day with teenagers from the Pakistani community. More interesting to me, though – because it’s forward-looking and constructive – is that I’ll be in Milwaukee at the invitation of the local APPNA chapter, to speak to non-Pakistani Wisconsinites at a bookstore and a high school.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Home Free: An American Road Trip
Readers of my books Alive and Well in Pakistan (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010) know that what I do is a kind of journalism in the form of narrative travel writing. I’m doing something similar, albeit with a wider canvas and a longer timeline, in the book I’m currently finishing for March 2012 publication, Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in the Context of Haiti.
These books and my other writings have garnered some gratifying praise, which I take as validating my approach, telling me that I’m doing the kind of writing that I should be doing. Edwidge Danticat, for example, was kind enough to call Alive and Well in Pakistan “Wonderful … a model of travel writing. So worldly yet personal.” The Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa calls Overtaken By Events “compulsively readable.” About my June 1, 2011 TEDx speech “What Does Pakistan Have to Do with Haiti?”, Paul Farmer told me: “Your thesis about the myopic narratives assigned to both Haiti and Pakistan by the U.S. is a consideration whose day is long overdue, and I appreciate your bringing it to the forefront.”
A common thread in all my writing is an aspiration to see the world as fundamentally borderless – “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity,” as The Daily Telegraph put it – and an emphasis on meeting people where they live, both literally and figuratively, and on telling their stories (plural) through attentive listening and conversations. When I told a New York literary agent once that I had published a book on Pakistan and he asked me, “What’s your argument?” my response was: I’m not making an argument, I’m telling a story.
Pakistan and Haiti both are countries in perpetual crisis, so while my books aspire to be entertaining and to have literary merit, they’re also topical as well as inevitably political. Now there’s another country in incipient crisis, perhaps even on the verge of upheaval, that I’ve decided I must write about in the same way: my own country, the United States.
Such a book has been in my mind for several years, but events of this year have left me feeling an urgency to document this extraordinary time. There’s too much going on for me to discuss or even list it all here, but if you live in or follow events in America, you’re aware of all that’s going on. Earlier this year I felt compelled to write about the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson and the occupation of the state capitol in my home state of Wisconsin. Those two articles of mine, as well as some installments of the weekly column I write for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, suggest some of the themes I’ll be following in the book.
The title will be Home Free: An American Road Trip, and my methodology will be to buy a cheap but reliable car and drive around the periphery of the continental United States, starting and ending in Seattle, where I live. I’m planning chapters on Wisconsin; on Detroit, where I lived during a formative period twenty years ago; and on Florida, New Orleans, Texas, Arizona, and California. I’ll also, of course, be spending time in New England and New York as well as other places both metropolitan and provincial. And I’ll be writing about immigrant communities, including (but not limited to) Pakistanis and Haitians.
Because of other commitments, I can’t make the trip until the summer or fall of 2012. That timing will put my travel in the midst of the presidential election, though, and for a project this ambitious a bit of lead time and planning is helpful. In the wake of the 2012 election – whatever the result – there will be a great need for us all to understand America’s national situation and its impact on the world.
Before, during, and after the U.S. road trip I’ll be actively continuing to promote my Pakistan and Haiti books and doing article-length writing on www.ethancasey.com and elsewhere. I will be asking contacts around the U.S. for hospitality, speaking invitations, topic and interview suggestions, and other forms of support. I am also offering Home Free for pre-sale, for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping:
Your copy will be shipped to you as soon as Home Free is published, sometime in 2013, and you’ll be kept updated on its progress in the meantime.
Pre-sales and sponsorships of Overtaken By Events and Bearing the Bruise also support my livelihood and the budget for Home Free, as well as helping those books continue to reach their intended audiences: students, libraries, and opinion leaders around the U.S. For more information, visit the book sponsorship program page.
What I’m asking for starting now, if you want to support Home Free, is that you please do three things:
- Post suggestions and ideas on this page, as comments on this posting. I’ll read them all and follow up on whatever I can.
- “Like” my Facebook page and invite others to do so. I’ll be posting links and seeking interaction about this project regularly there.
- Spread the word by sharing this page’s link, interviewing me or asking me to write an article if you have a website or other media outlet, and contacting me privately if you want to share contacts or ideas that way. If you’d like to be added to my email list, please let me know.
Thank you for your interest and support, and I hope to see you somewhere down the road.
August 23, 2011
“What’s a Drone Attack?”: A Statement
I write a weekly column on the website of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. The latest installment, titled “Drone attacks are wrong and cowardly, regardless” and published Tuesday, July 19, has drawn far more readers and comments than any other. (It was republished on the Huffington Post, in the hopes of reaching an American readership, as “Pakistan: Drone Attacks Are Wrong, Regardless.”) I plan to write a column-length follow-up next week, but in the meantime I want to say some things.
The subject is too urgent and important for any of us to indulge in the predictable point-scoring and recriminations that are evident in many of the comments on my article. “He just wanted to sell his book,” alleged one commenter. Well, yes, I did and do – wouldn’t you, if you had written a book? – but believe me, I don’t do any of this for the money. It’s not about me or my writing, but I take the range of comments on my article as discouragingly representative. We urgently need to be having a much more robust and intelligent debate.
In order to have a debate, first we need to know what exactly it is we’re debating. The most urgent need is simply for more Americans to know that the drone attacks are happening. One of the most poignant messages I’ve received this week was from Tayyab Qader, who wrote:
Thank you for publishing the fact that drone attacks in Pakistan are killing innocent people and are counterproductive. They must be stopped before it becomes too late. I would very much appreciate if you could also publish this in some of the mainstream U.S. media to bring this to the attention of U.S. public.
That’s easier said than done, given the dreadful state of U.S. media and the many distractions Americans face. These range from the trivial (the usual insipid popular culture) to the earth-shaking (millions losing jobs and homes). But Americans need to know what’s being done in our name and the effects that it’s having, both on the ground and on Pakistani public opinion. As I’ve said many times to audiences and in previous writings, I believe strongly that trying to get Fox News, CNN, or “even” the New York Times to report more fairly and helpfully on Pakistan is largely a waste of effort.
The alternative is a grassroots campaign – “taking it to the people” through the Internet and in-person gatherings. Those of you who have been following my work, or working with me, know that this is what I’ve been advocating and doing. We should be doing it on a much bigger scale. If you agree, then please contact me and let’s do it together. If we do, then fewer Americans will ask the basic question that a woman at a Seattle church once asked me: “What’s a drone attack?”
Another message I received after my Dawn article was published was from a retired U.S. military officer, someone I like and consider a friendly acquaintance, who wrote:
I deeply disagree with almost all your points, and I speak as someone much more informed of the effects, results and impacts of the attacks than the average American, based both on my time in Afghanistan and my overall experience with “deep operations.” Next time you are in town we ought to talk [about] it some more.
I appreciate this person’s respectful willingness to engage me in conversation, which I’ve found characteristic of most U.S. military officers I’ve met. And I readily accept that there are people – both American and Pakistani – who know more than I do about what specifically is happening in Waziristan. But I won’t concede anyone’s right to make moral or political judgments on my behalf. If they want me to agree with them, they should share their privileged information with me and then hope to convince me. “Trust us, we’re the experts” or “We know best” doesn’t trump the individual citizen’s autonomous responsibility.
Finally for now, I want to acknowledge the excellent question that Muzaffar Ahmad, a leader of the Pakistani-American community in Indianapolis, asked on my Facebook page: “Ethan, if I am the U.S. president, what would you suggest I should do after I give orders to end drone attacks?”
I don’t have the answer to that; I’m not sure anyone does. History is inherently tragic, and the guilt of one party doesn’t let other parties off the hook, and sometimes there is no right thing to do. This in itself is reason enough to be gentle and cautious in our dealings with each other, i.e. not to do things like drone attacks.
Anyone who reads this statement should feel free to post a comment or to write to me directly. I don’t have any answers, but I do know that drone attacks are badly damaging the relationship between Pakistan and America, as well as what goodwill still exists between Pakistanis and Americans, and that makes me very sad. Both countries’ establishments had better wake up and smell the coffee, and soon.
I want to end by quoting in full the best of all the comments on my Dawn article:
Just as drone attacks are wrong and cowardly because [they kill] innocent people indiscriminately, the same holds true for terrorist attacks/suicide bombing, which are also a cowardly killing [of] innocent men, women and children. I’m an Indian and I sympathise with innocent people killed, whether they are in Pakistan or in India.
Hear, hear.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His account of his February-March 2011 trip to Pakistan, titled “After the Flood,” will be added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events. He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Pakistan and America Both Need APPNA’s Leadership
Central Punjab, March 2011. Photo by Pete Sabo.
The following article was commissioned for the APPNA Journal (Vol. 13 No. 1, Summer 2011, pp. 20-21), by its editor, Dr. Mahmood Alam:
This is a very difficult time for Pakistan, for Pakistanis and other Muslims living in America, indeed for all friends of Pakistan and of humanity and peace. Drone attacks, Osama bin Laden, Raymond Davis, the long-term damage from last summer’s severe flooding – which I saw for myself in February and March in the Swat valley and in rural areas of Punjab province – there’s no rest from the litany of crises Pakistan faces.
The Pakistani-American community, led by APPNA and other organizations I admire and support, is remarkably steadfast in addressing the acute and chronic humanitarian needs of Pakistani society. Year after year, crisis after crisis, fundraiser after fundraiser, my Pakistani-American friends walk the walk. I admire you enormously for knowing and doing what needs to be done for the men, women and, above all, children of Pakistan, regardless of the constantly changing and increasingly alarming geopolitical situation. And I want you to know that I will continue walking the walk with you.
One way I think I’m positioned to help is by educating the American public about the Pakistan I’ve come to know and love, since I first went there in 1995. We all know Pakistan is far from perfect, but the point I try to get across to mainstream America is that the real Pakistan is very different, and much more interesting and likeable, than the Pakistan they see on TV. That’s an easy and enjoyable thing to do if you know and like Pakistan as I do, and it needs to be done, because the American public’s attitude toward Pakistan greatly affects our ability to support all the urgently needed humanitarian work that must be done. This is so because, as I and others have diagnosed, the Pakistani-American community suffers from chronic and worsening donor fatigue, and the wider American public represents a largely untapped source of funds for nonprofits working in Pakistan. But even prior to that, we need to elicit the positive interest and human sympathy of non-Pakistani, non-Muslim Americans, for everyone’s sake.
And more than that, I believe the very future of Pakistan itself depends on the Pakistani diaspora’s ability and willingness to reach out assertively to mainstream America. I believe that the best defense is a good offense, and that if you want something done right – in this case, if you want Americans to have a correct impression of Pakistan and of Muslims – you’ve got to do it yourself. This is where I believe APPNA and its chapters and individual members can play a powerful leading role on behalf of the Pakistani-American community as a whole – and thus, by extension, on behalf of Pakistan.
To mainstream America, APPNA members are potentially the human faces of Pakistan and of Islam. I say potentially, because unfortunately the faces that the words “Pakistan” and “Islam” still conjure up to many Americans are those of people like Osama bin Laden and Faisal Shahzad, the disturbed young man who planted a bomb in Times Square in New York last year. This will change only if we make a concerted effort to change it – but we can change it. What’s called for is a very assertive public diplomacy initiative, to replace those faces with the faces of accomplished professionals, good neighbors, and active citizens – people like you. Each of you lives and works somewhere in America, many of you in very provincial and even remote cities and towns. And it’s exactly in those places that the need is greatest.
APPNA has the membership and institutional infrastructure to make a big difference throughout American society. What if APPNA were to do this systematically, encouraging and supporting members and chapters who take initiative locally by reaching out to churches, schools, civic groups like Rotary, and universities? And even if this were not feasible on an APPNA-wide scale, there’s no reason it can’t be done by regional or state chapters or individual members. It just takes initiative, resourcefulness, and imagination, all of which I know Pakistanis possess. Pakistanis are among the most resourceful people I know; you’ve had to be, because for 64 years your country has faced one enormous challenge after another. As author Emma Duncan pointed out more than 20 years ago, nothing is ever settled in Pakistan. That’s chronically frustrating, but it has also been good practice for our current and coming crises, both in Pakistan and in America. The Pakistani-American community, led by APPNA members, has a lot to teach other Americans about how to rise to a challenge.
I want to continue rising to our shared challenges with you, because I believe we’re all in this together. On June 1, I gave a speech at a prestigious TEDx event sponsored by the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey. In it I pointed out, to a mostly non-Pakistani audience, that many Pakistani friends of mine – many of them physicians who volunteered their time and lifesaving skills – responded immediately and with real sympathy, concretely expressed, after the earthquake in Haiti. I also said that I felt American society had missed the opportunity to show similar human concern for Pakistanis last summer, when 20 percent of Pakistan was under water. And I quoted from a message I received from Dr. Uzma Shah of Boston, after I had published an article titled “Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?” on the Huffington Post and on my website. “It’s hard to see pictures from Pakistan,” Uzma wrote, “and I can’t help but choke back tears when I see all that desperation. And amidst all the furor about all things bad and hard about Pakistan and ‘Islam,’ it’s comforting to read your article. Because at the end of the day, we are all human, living in one world, sharing the same life.”
This is the point we must keep making, as often as necessary. It’s easy to explain away America’s failure to respond adequately to the floods: Americans suffered from “compassion fatigue” after Haiti; Pakistan is farther from the U.S. than Haiti is; a flood is a slow-moving disaster whose effects are less immediately dramatic than an earthquake. But it’s also hard to avoid facing the effects of a decade-long national climate that has made Muslims the only group in America against whom it’s considered permissible, sometimes even fashionable, to be bigoted. I believe, though, that – like all people – Americans are capable of responding to what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, if they’re invited and given the opportunity to do so. Many of you know this from your own experience. As my friend Dr. Shahnaz Khan of Zephyrhills, Florida told me, “It becomes personal. [My patients] actually tell me they think of me when they listen to the news. In fact, a lot of them probably didn’t know I was from Pakistan before 9/11, or didn’t even care. They say, ‘Be careful, Dr. Khan. Come back safely. Don’t get lost, don’t get hurt.’ It’s a good feeling, a lot of goodwill.” Just as the real Pakistan is better and more interesting than the Pakistan we see on TV, so is the real America.
So how can we effectively engage with and influence the real America? One thing I do is give away copies of my book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, to students, libraries, religious and political leaders, and others in positions of influence in American society. The Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa understands what I’m trying to achieve; she says its “personal perspective … lends the book much of its charm and veracity and makes Overtaken By Events so compulsively readable.” The program’s potential is well illustrated by an email I received from Texas Christian University student Paul Jorden in January, just after I spoke to his World Religions class taught by Professor Mark Dennis. “Dear Mr. Casey,” Paul wrote,
Thank you very much for the copy of your book. I am thoroughly looking forward to learning more about life and the hardships of those in Pakistan and how terrorism shapes our (Americans’) perception of Muslims. Thank you for taking the time to speak to our class. I sincerely appreciate the importance of issues such as this, especially during times when it seems that our lives are permeated by a constant fear of terrorism via the news. Best of luck with promoting awareness.
The American mainstream media isn’t going to do the task for us, because – as Paul Jorden shows he understands in the quote above – the media is a major source of the problem. By all means, let’s try to influence politicians, policymakers, media moguls, and celebrities, but let’s not be seduced by the polite hearings and photo-ops that they offer us from time to time. We need to go over the heads of the American media and establishment, by reaching out directly to the American public. My public and classroom speaking and book sponsorship program are among the ways I’ve thought of to do this. I’m able to give away books thanks to the support of Pakistani-Americans like you, who sponsor multiple copies of Overtaken By Events. The more books are sponsored, the more I can give away. For example, I have an opportunity to give away 300 copies when I’ll be the keynote speaker at the annual Region III convention of NAFSA: Association of International Educators in Oklahoma City in October. I will also be at this year’s APPNA convention in St. Louis, speaking at the Fatima Jinnah Medical College alumni dinner on Friday evening and at the Social Welfare and Disaster Relief meeting on Saturday. Please find me there, or contact me any time on my cell phone (206-226-0509) or by email (ethan@ethancasey.com).
I’m finding young Americans the most receptive to learning about the Pakistan I know and love, and this brings to mind another asset we have to work with: your own community’s younger generation. When I spoke at the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit in January 2010, I was so moved by the efforts and accomplishments of the young volunteers there that I felt compelled to include in my speech this line: “We all know that America is a nation of immigrants. As an American whose ancestors came here in the 19th century from Ireland and Germany and France, I want to thank you for contributing not only your talents and material resources, but also your impressive children, to help build a new, improved America in the 21st century.” I’ve re-used that line many times since then. On this important level, America’s gain doesn’t have to be Pakistan’s loss. In my observation, Pakistani and other Muslim families give their children precisely the confidence, moral education, and sense of purpose and direction that are sorely lacking in all too many other American families. Your children are poised to become real leaders of American society, and that bodes well for all of us. And they are already in positions of influence with their peers at many of this country’s greatest universities. Congratulations – and let’s continue enlisting and empowering them.
And let’s continue working together to reach out to mainstream America, with the confidence that this country is in great need of your visible and vocal presence and leadership. I say that as an American who worries about my own country at least as much as I worry about Pakistan. By virtue of your profession, you enjoy a position of prestige and trust in American society, in cities and towns from coast to coast. If you invite me to your city, I’ll do my best to visit. And I invite you to make use of me, as a gora who enjoys sharing his friendship and appreciation for Pakistan and Pakistanis with other goras. Together we can change the relationship between Pakistan and America – one church or synagogue, one Rotary Club, one high school class at a time.
Ethan Casey is the author of the books Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He is currently writing a new chapter, “After the Flood,” to be added to the next edition of Overtaken By Events. He is also writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in 2012. He is on the Web at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com.
Terry Jones’s America: A Dangerous Place to Be
SEATTLE, April 3 – There are so many reasons to feel alarmed, worried, and/or confused at the moment – Japan, Libya, Obama, take your pick – that it seems almost quaint, “so last year,” to single out the Quran-burning pastor in Florida. But his latest antic, and the resulting deaths of innocent people in Afghanistan, leave me feeling angry and disgusted. When will we in America begin taking responsibility for our own extremists?
As the riots in Afghanistan show starkly, this is a matter of life and death. By the time you read this, the two days of riots I’m referring to might have swollen into a major crisis – or they might have been subsumed and forgotten in the din and onrush of mayhem in Libya and Syria, radiation in Japan, or whatever’s next. Either way, the people who died in them will remain just as dead. And it will remain the fault of Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida.
It would be nice if we could ignore Jones and his ilk, but we can’t afford to. “The local strategy of everybody was to ignore this,” the Rev. Lawrence D. Reimer, pastor of the United Church of Gainesville, told the New York Times. “It’s just a horrible tragedy that this act triggered the deaths of more innocent people.” It’s understandable that well-meaning Gainesvillians would be embarrassed, and a tactic of declining to dignify Jones’s stunt with attention is defensible. But some of the comments responding to my article “Is America Any Different from Pakistan?” – published in January, just after the killing of Salmaan Taseer in Islamabad and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson – are telling. One reader wrote (anonymously of course):
Yawn yet another typical leftie more than willing to jump on the bandwagon of blaming the right, America, and any other group he/she opposes for the actions of a mentally insane person. Jared Loughner appears to have been a psychotic, I suspect a schizophrenic. Please wait for the facts instead [of] falling into your own biases.
It’s plausible to dismiss Loughner and Jones as nuts, or me as “yet another typical leftie,” but I don’t buy it. Ever since Ronald Reagan’s henchmen coined the phrase “plausible deniability,” that’s become our national motto. Contrast the anonymous comment with this, from reader Arif Humayun:
Right-wing extremists are made of the same stuff; geography does not matter. This breed in the US is no different from that in Pakistan or the one in India. They exploit the religious sentiments for votes and refuse to take responsibility when their rhetoric causes extreme reactions like the killings in Tucson AZ or the murder of Governor Taseer in Pakistan or the Gujarat riots in India.
And this, from Tess Abidi:
The American rightwingers deny the shooting of a liberal politician had anything to do with their hate speech, and denounce anyone who dares even remotely suggest otherwise. The Pakistani rightwingers proudly acknowledge – nay, take credit for – their speeches that led to the shooting.
Admit there is a difference. But if things stay as is, it wouldn’t take much for the Americans to become more and more like Pakistanis. It doesn’t take much, you know. I left Pakistan during the 90’s. It’s a very different country now. Didn’t take that long.
Arif and Tess both are Americans who are Muslim and of Pakistani origin. In our national and international conversation, it’s important for their voices to be heard. Here’s another voice I’d like you to hear – my friend Todd Shea:
Right now many people’s reality is rooted in misconceptions on all sides, and that’s a dangerous place to be. And somebody somewhere has to take initiative in presenting information that people need to have in order to have a better understanding. In this case, educating Americans about the reality on the ground in Pakistan, the history that they don’t understand, our culpability, and our need to do something about it.
Huh? Our culpability? Here’s part of what Todd means:
If U.S. leaders had treated them as important in a human way [after our successful proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s], then society in Pakistan and Afghanistan would be far further along today, because we would have helped them avoid all the things that are happening now. If you remember, at the time, we were loved. Both countries were in such a state of need, and then we just left. ‘We got rid of our big enemy, let’s get outta here,’ and boy, wasn’t that a strategic error.
Contrast Todd’s emphasis on historical context and self-examination with Pastor Terry Jones’s excuse for putting the Quran “on trial” and then burning it: “It’s time to hold Islam accountable.”
Is it also time to hold America, and Americans, accountable? It had better be. Accountability begins at home. It’s fine, and important, for people to write and read edifying primers like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s recent Washington Post op-ed “Five Myths about Muslims in America.” But that’s not enough. As I told a right-wing friend of mine recently in a different context, I’m ready to fight for the America that I want to live in. More of us need to find the courage and strength of character that my fellow Wisconsinites have been showing lately, or we’ll end up living in Terry Jones’s America. And that’s a dangerous place to be.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
What Does Egypt Mean for Pakistan?
One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received for my work was when a Pakistani journalist, a young woman, told me I’m not afflicted by what she called “Have pen will write syndrome.” I write when I have something to say, or a story to tell, that I believe others will find helpful and worth reading. Lately I’ve been itching a little to write about Egypt, but so far I’ve concluded that the world doesn’t need my gratuitous drop in the ocean of commentary, particularly given that I’ve never been to Egypt.
But I have been to Pakistan, many times since 1995, and I’m going there again for three weeks starting February 18. And I can’t help wondering what kinds of conversations I might have there in the wake or context of the Egyptian revolution.
This will be my first trip to Pakistan since the visit almost exactly two years ago that resulted in my book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. I flatter myself that, whatever its other merits, my book has a well-chosen title. As Zaka Shafiq, a young man I met in Karachi, told me at the end of the trip and the start of the book: “It’ll be out of date by the time it’s published.” But I’m not worried about being overtaken by events, because I’ve resigned myself to it as a condition of being alive in this world, especially these days. I figure my job is to listen, pay attention, and take notes. There’s a lot to be learned about where we’re at and where we’re headed, if you stay alert.
My coming trip hasn’t even started, and it’s already been overtaken by events. When I began planning it several months ago, its purpose was to witness and write about the grossly under-reported effects of last summer’s historically severe flooding – and that remains an important goal. But then, in early January, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated and, in a shockingly parallel incident, US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson. And, now, Egypt is in upheaval.
But what does Egypt have to do with Pakistan? Well, I’m hoping you can help me answer that question. Particularly if you’re Pakistani, but even if you’re not, I invite you to post a comment on this article or on my Facebook page or, if you prefer, to write to me privately with your thoughts. And please forward this article far and wide. I want to read and hear as many voices as you can help me gather about Pakistan’s future and the implications – for Pakistan, for the Muslim world, and for all of us – of the Egyptian revolution.
My starting point is that, in what I’ve been reading, Western writers are starting to speculate – ominously and/or hopefully, depending on their loyalties – on the wider implications of Egypt for the Arab world. Even factoring in the Western public’s fuzziness on the distinction between Arabs and Muslims, it’s striking to me that few seem to be wondering, in this context, about Pakistan. The American public has had a lot on its plate lately, what with Egypt, severe winter weather, and the Super Bowl all happening at the same time, but Frank Rich’s bracingly unsparing February 6 column acknowledges the stakes:
The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.
Rich notes the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir and remembers that, like the events in Cairo, the bombardments of Iraq that Rumsfeld ordered
were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We [Americans] lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.
So there is a lot of work to do, to continue educating the American public – I include myself – on our steep learning curve about the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular. What do Americans need to know about Pakistan? And, most pressingly at the moment, what are the similarities and differences between Pakistan and Egypt? And what might the events in Egypt portend for Pakistan?
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Is America Any Different from Pakistan?
Postscript, January 13: By all accounts, President Obama rose to the occasion in his speech in Tucson. Garry Wills is calling it Obama’s finest hour. Maybe, just maybe, this will be remembered as the moment Sarah Palin overreached, like Joe McCarthy, and America suddenly became sane again.
SEATTLE, JANUARY 12 – So now we know: The American right wing knows no shame and apparently will stop at nothing to bully the rest of us into shutting up and taking whatever they dish out.
On the sound principle – understood by right-wingers but not by liberals – that the best defense is a good offense, Sarah Palin has released a self-exonerating video statement asserting that “acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own.” The right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin has coined the phrase “Tucson massacre opportunists.” And the tendentiously “moderate” New York Times columnist David Brooks – whose previous low point, a year ago just after the earthquake, was blaming the victims in “places like Haiti” for lacking “middle-class values” – writes of “vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.” Meanwhile, a CBS News poll tells us that 57% of Americans reject any connection between the attack and the country’s political atmosphere. That’s the problem with democracy: sometimes the majority can be dead wrong.
And, as I said in my last article, if we Americans are going to dish it out to countries like Pakistan about how they should keep their radical elements in check, we need to be able to take it too. “The best way to forestall the development of a scenario is to keep your events episodic,” wrote Norman Mailer in his book Oswald’s Tale. This is what the American establishment and its media machine are masterful at: chopping the world up into distinct “stories” and doling them out severally, semi-intentionally creating what Ronald Reagan’s people called plausible deniability. But, as someone who grew up deep within white America and who knows Pakistan well enough to have written two books about it, I see all too many parallels.
What brings these into stark relief is the spooky coincidence of the assassination of Salmaan Taseer in Islamabad and, days later, the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. In an analysis in The Times of India to which I contributed a comment, Atul Sethi wrote:
The slow death of outspoken liberalism out in public [in Pakistan] has meant that clerics refused to lead the prayers at Taseer’s funeral, fearing reprisal from Islamist hardliners. The mood, says an observer, is one of extreme caution and “even moderate groups do not want to appear to be supporting Taseer’s cause.” The murder was not mentioned at all in the many sermons delivered after Friday prayers in mosques across Islamabad. [G Parthasarthy, former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan], for one, is not surprised. “When it comes to the blasphemy law, nobody is going to question its premise after Taseer’s killing.”
The analogy in America is to the right wing’s systematic encroachment on all public discourse, appropriation of all patriotic symbols and words (including “tea party”), and brazen aggression in accusing others of playing politics with a tragedy, when that is exactly what they themselves are doing. Those of us who instantly noted the Tucson attack’s political context were correct in doing so, and Paul Krugman was absolutely right to say this:
It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.
That should go without saying, and the fact that it needs to be said at all is an indicator of the national climate. What’s even worse is that America’s radical elements, led by Sarah Palin and her ilk, are trying to stigmatize stating the obvious and enforce a corrosive, de-politicized national piety, whose effect would be to leave them dictating the terms of any conversation. Within 48 hours of the shooting, Krugman had predicted precisely such a move:
So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?
One more thing needs to be said. An American friend of mine, of Pakistani origin, asks why, in all the commentary that’s spewed forth since Saturday, no one has used the word “terrorism.” What is it that allows us to consider Jared Loughner a mentally troubled young man acting alone and Faisal Shahzad, the mentally troubled young U.S. citizen who tried to blow up Times Square last May, a terrorist “Made in Pakistan” (as he was portrayed in breathless TV reports at the time)? We need to accept responsibility for the fact that Jared Loughner was made in America.
This is why it’s especially important – as I’ve been tub-thumping for a while now – for Pakistanis and other Muslims who are members of American society to continue becoming more visibly active, not only in civic affairs but in this country’s political life. If you lie low, you will continue to find yourselves silenced, caricatured and scapegoated. And America needs your involvement, because this society urgently needs to rediscover its conscience and its soul.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Will the Real America Please Stand Up?
SEATTLE, JANUARY 8 – Those of us who are concerned about the fate of Pakistan were still reeling from the January 4 assassination of Punjab governor and liberal newspaper publisher Salmaan Taseer in Islamabad, when we heard about the shooting of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. What does one have to do with the other? All too much.
On Friday I responded to a query from a Times of India reporter by calling the Taseer killing “extremely ominous.” I followed that statement of the obvious with this sentence: “An aggressive, self-righteous and over-confident radical element, a feckless and compromised central government, and a brave but besieged liberal class add up to a country in severe crisis.” That’s accurate enough as a description of Pakistan, but Americans who can dish out this sort of thing need to be able to take it too (and I’m not sure I’m so generous as to call my own country’s liberal class “brave”). What kind of society are we willing to allow ourselves to live in? At the very least, it’s high time we Americans knocked off the self-righteousness that permits us to judge Pakistan and took a long, hard look in the mirror.
In April 1995, I was in Lahore when I learned about the bombing in Oklahoma City. You’ll remember that the widespread initial assumption was that it must have been the doing of Islamic fundamentalists – and it wasn’t, was it? In Delhi a few days later, a Kashmiri friend exclaimed to me: “There was bomb blast in America!” What struck me was that he was surprised not that there had been a bomb blast per se, but that there had been one in America, of all places. In my travels to that point, I had come to know that bomb blasts happen all the time around the subcontinent. Now they happened in America too. This was why I had left Wisconsin: to learn that the serene small-town world I came from was of a piece with the world at large. Oddly, I found my new awareness comforting.
Why comforting? Because it’s better to know the truth than to live in a fictionalized world where everything’s all right. Why is that better? Because wishing doesn’t make it so. We’re all in this together, and everything is very far from all right. And the truth is that America isn’t any different, after all, from the rest of the world. We’re just another Third World country – only bigger. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
These are truths Americans have been learning the hard way in the long years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. When a radicalized lumpen member of American society’s mainstream blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, I thought of something Norman Mailer had written in 1962: that ”so long as there is a cold war, there are no politics of consequence in America.” Not to put too fine a point on it but, since we stopped having the Russians to kick around, American politics have become all too consequential. We now kick each other around instead – as well as, of course, vulnerable minorities like Latinos and Muslims.
Just the other day, the New York Review of Books blog published an item by Christian Caryl titled “Pakistan: When the State Loses Control”:
It has become extremely hard to see how anyone can pull the country’s political culture back from the brink. … No, what’s particularly worrisome about this [Salmaan Taseer] case is the failure of the Pakistani political system to protect one of its own. When the state surrenders its monopoly on violence to those who stand outside of it, it can no longer be described as a functioning state. Pakistan’s political institutions are supposed to represent the many different parties and groups that participate in the country’s civic life, yet now state power is succumbing to the demands of an exclusionist view of the world that can benefit only a particular few. In the weeks and months preceding his assassination, Taseer had been courageously campaigning—in the face of direct threats—to overturn an anti-blasphemy law that had been frequently abused to condemn people of minority faiths.
Substitute “America” for “Pakistan,” read that passage again, and recall that Congresswoman Giffords has been an outspoken opponent of Arizona’s new immigration law and received death threats and attacks on her office after voting for the Obama administration’s health-care bill.
Sarah Palin, whose publication of a map depicting crosshairs targeting Democratic members of Congress, including Giffords, has been noted since the shooting, infamously spoke during the 2008 campaign of “the real America.” I don’t concede Sarah Palin’s right to identify or speak for the real America. In fact, I insist that she does not. But will the real America please stand up?
Those of us who would speak for the real America need to bear in mind, though, that this isn’t cold war-era armchair politics anymore. Are we prepared to show as much physical, moral and political courage as Gabrielle Giffords and Salmaan Taseer did? And the next time we go to Safeway to buy groceries, will we remember to feel compassion for the millions of innocent Pakistanis who put themselves in harm’s way from suicide bombers every time they do the same?
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
