Assembly Address: Islamophobia At Exeter

Reproduced with permission of the speaker.

I had never experienced Islamophobia until coming to Exeter. In my three years here, people have said to me:

“Is your father a terrorist? Because you’re the bomb.”

“Your religion. Your people. It’s like modern day Nazis.”

“How does it feel to be a supporter of genocide?”

I grew up in a culture and household of religious belief in a community that was predominantly Arab and predominantly Muslim. I would hear the call to prayer from my house every morning and I would see people rush to the mosque as the sun began to set over the horizon. I prayed, I fasted, I donated to charity and I frequently visited Makkah to perform Umrah: a sacred pilgrimage. I was, by standard definition, a good Muslim. I carefully adhered to the myriad of facts and guidelines taught to me from a young age to earn a place in heaven, and I limited my definition of sin. I was faithful, I was practicing and I was sheltered.

Exeter changed me. For 16 years of my life I thought I knew what it meant to be Muslim, but it wasn’t until I was in a community that was largely not that I truly began to question the values that had for so long defined me. “If you’re such a feminist, how are you Muslim?”—this was a kind of question I had never really considered before. Ones that didn’t inherently diagnose my religion as incompatible with the new ideas I was learning at a school like Exeter, but did call into question how I wanted to define my identity, especially now that it lay at a crossroad of two separate worlds.

To the outside eye, I was either Muslim, or not. Veiled, or not. Feminist, or not. It was a suffocating binary that refused to acknowledge my nuanced experiences and perspectives. The same bigoted restrictions existed at Exeter. When I tried to speak, I was talked over. When I tried to engage, I was ignored. I was written off with 800 million other Muslim women as one body and one homogenous voice. Perhaps it was ignorance, perhaps a mechanism to make sense of something so alien. But either way, it—these feelings, these assumptions, these stereotypes—imprisoned me. They prevented me from discovering a path in which I reconciled my traditional religious belief with my modern life, and instead directed my attention to constantly having to explain and justify myself.

I’m lucky to have found places on campus like Baraka, an Islamic discussion group, and my dorm to talk about both. Yet in times like these the spaces that were once a haven for me quickly begin to recede. The hateful comments, the assumptions, the stereotypes—that’s the Islamophobia that makes what had originally been a home for me, feel so foreign.