Only days later, during a three-hour layover after my connecting flight was canceled, did it really sink in.
Until then, I had been like countless other Americans for whom the oft-repeated video of the Sept. 11 airliner attacks had the incredulous feel of a trailer for another overhyped made-for-TV movie, Americans who were too numb to consider how Lower Manhattan would smell today. While I was sitting in an airport with other pensive passengers, a USA Today article helped bring home for me the magnitude of this crime against humanity. Though the timing of the attack, shortly before 9 a.m., had spared tens of thousands who typically would have been at work, the article said the toll remained horrific: 4,763 people missing, only 35 bodies identified . . .
That is when I began to reflect, particularly as a Muslim and an American of African descent, how much had changed.
How much had changed, for example, since the first weekend in August, when a chartered busload of New York relatives again celebrated with my grandfather, the family’s 90-year-old patriarch, at our annual reunion in Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park. During that reunion, I promised my Uncle Tyrone, my late father’s youngest living brother, who at 58 was getting married for the first time, that, God willing, I’d be back to help him and his wonderful bride celebrate on Sept. 15.
At the Charlotte airport last Saturday, however, on the way to the wedding, I wondered whether some of the New York family would be missing at next year’s reunion. My previous day’s direct flight to Reagan National Airport had been canceled, of course, and now my connector was canceled, too. But the next plane would get me to Baltimore Washington International in plenty of time for the wedding, and the three-hour layover gave me plenty of time to think.
There was time to reflect, for example, on the Muslim family retreat several months ago in St. Petersburg, where someone had passed out the lyrics so no one would have an excuse to mess up as we were singing God Bless America.
There was time, too, to recall the wonderful Muslim American Society Islamic Convention in Chicago this month, where my oldest son, his sincere Christian wife, their son and my three other children and I shared a hotel suite. How deeply touching it was to see these young people cheering as Imam W.D. Mohammed, leader of America’s largest group of indigenous Muslims, said that there were lessons for the world in how blacks had embraced white America after the horrors done during slavery. He also said:
“Thank God we’re in Great America, that defends freedom of choice. I can choose the temple, I can choose the Muslim mosque or the church. I can choose what I want to in America, as long as it’s decent and honorable. . . . And thank God our choice is excellence, our choice is righteousness, our choice is to be God’s servants.”
There was time to reflect on a photo near my desk, taken several years ago on a cruise around Manhattan during a previous Islamic convention. I carefully had framed the World Trade Center towers behind my daughter’s face.
There was time, too, to reflect on my dear mother, who passed almost a year ago to the day that our world again changed forever, and how she, among the best of Christians herself, had come to appreciate my choice of Islam as a natural extension of the good Christian upbringing she had given me. My relatives, too, have made their peace with my choice, largely because of the improvement they have seen in me. Cousins look out for me as I traverse the buffet line, pointing out the dishes cooked with pork that we Muslims are enjoined not to eat.
Just as important was the opportunity to reflect on the phone calls out of the blue from people I know only in a professional capacity, seeking reassurance that I wasn’t experiencing any abuse as a Muslim. There was also pause to recall the reassuring words of co-workers who said “We’re with you” while hiding their concerns that I’d even think of traveling at such a time, and, worse, flying – with a name like Hanif.
How to explain, however, that as a black man in America, I’ve been walking through the valley of the shadow of death all my life? That nobody has a greater claim to the promise of America than my grandfather and his children. That I believe nothing happens without God’s permission, and therefore what happened had to happen, what didn’t happen couldn’t have happened, and in between is where we train our individual wills to get ourselves in harmony with the Divine will, which will be done.
This American’s perspective is gratitude that much has changed in just the past decade. Fading away is much of our society’s Crusades-old, anti-Islam spin. Even the president says – as he did to the applause of the Congress, the nation and the world Thursday – that those who would commit such atrocities “in the name of Allah, blaspheme the name of Allah.” Many schoolchildren today are learning, unlike in my school experience, that Allah is the Arabic word for God. Countless other Americans have come to recognize, as one commentator said, that “long before they hijacked American airliners,” the fanatics “had hijacked something more potent and precious – the religion of Islam.”
It clearly wasn’t what the attackers intended – to have helped to bring Muslim Americans and the rest of America closer. But God has brought about a new climate in America, one in which racists and other bigots no longer find overt support in the laws and hearts and minds of American society and must perform their acts of hate only from the shadows.
While that change is worthy of reflection, however, we all must work to overcome the cultural arrogance we still harbor. Many Americans acknowledge and are struggling against hateful impulses toward people they see in Eastern dress. Similar arrogance makes some immigrant Muslims feel superior to African-American Muslims or had other Muslims looking down our noses at those in Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, though many of us came to Islam via a similar path.
Yes, the climate in America has changed, but as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said during a visit with The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board last year, Americans know too little about Islam. While Imam W.D. Mohammed has been an unparalleled pioneer in this area, other leaders must step forward now to say more publicly and more forcefully not just what Islam is not – a religion that sanctions killing innocent men, women and children – but what Islam is – among other things, a faith whose prophet fought for freedom of religion.
I credit Islam for guiding me to transmute many of my own ignorant impulses, to curb much of my arrogance and express the best of my Christian upbringing. I’m not mad at the madness. I don’t even want to get even. I want to get ahead of the cycle of ignorance and disobedience to our true human nature and to the God that most Americans claim.
Oh, “Uncle Tidy’s” wedding? It was a joyous occasion, during which the minister remarked: “This is the beginning of a new life. It never existed before this time. In the early stages of a new life, much care is necessary, much prayer is necessary. It is to be entered into reverently, discretely, advisedly.” In the wake of senseless death, that is my prayer for America and the world.
