Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

While issues of allegiance are brought up in “Faith,” Lalami’s second essay focuses on the ways that religion and faith differ and emphasizes that individual members of any group cannot be held up as representative of it. Opening with Lalami’s reading of The Moor’s Account, the essay draws an immediate contrast between the novel’s context and an audience member’s question regarding ISIS. Though ISIS is not relevant to the topic of the reading, Lalami’s presence as an Arab American marks her as one of the few sources this audience will have direct access to regarding Islam and Middle Eastern affairs. Though Lalami makes the illogical nature of the question clear, she answers it in this essay by presenting a brief history of the conflicts that led to the creation of ISIS, after noting that she should not be held as an expert source of information on Arab and Muslim conflicts and cultures.

Delving into her own history, Lalami contrasts faith and religion as two different elements of culture; faith does not require adherence to dogma, or prescriptive acts and behaviors, but religion does. Her faith does not interfere with her life, but religion would prevent her from spending time with boys or leaving the house alone. Unlike faith, religion “emphasized strict adherence to texts, and failure to abide by them was perceived as a moral failure” (33). These personal issues with religion extend into the political as Lalami discusses the increase in religious rhetoric in Morocco in the 1980s, as well as the conditions of those living under ISIS in the Middle East. Religious celebrations become extremist, and the restrictions placed on citizens likewise increased in severity, with Lalami noting that friends and family suddenly began behaving in a more religious manner to avoid persecution. Again, questions of allegiance arise, as religious behavior becomes an indicator of patriotism under King Hassan II, who ruled Morocco from 1961 until 1999; this prefigures ISIS’s mirroring of President Bush’s rhetoric in its declaration that all Muslims should side with ISIS as part of their religious adherence.

The issue of representation, the practice of holding one member of a group responsible for educating others on the practices and beliefs of that group, highlights the discrimination experienced by people of color and non-Christians. Lalami notes how white, Christian authors are not asked to explain the actions or beliefs of the KKK, a white supremacist group, in open forums such as her reading, but she was asked to answer for the Islamic State. The assumption is that the white race is taken as a default race. All other races and ethnicities fall outside that default and, thus, require some sort of justification. There is a general understanding that a white author is “an individual, responsible only for his or her own creative work” (43), but the opposite is assumed of people of color. Lalami is “a specimen, culled from a group of people these readers found mysterious and perhaps dangerous” (43), which, in turn, makes her mysterious and potentially dangerous. This issue entwines with allegiance and citizenship; targeting individual Muslim or Arab people as representative of entire nations or organizations places a degree of blame or suspicion on the individual as supportive of or complicit with the actions of the group.

By ending the essay with an anecdote regarding her daughter saying that she wants to run for president, Lalami focuses on the ways in which general societal perceptions affect the individual. Her daughter is an American citizen, and both of her parents are American citizens. The distinguishing factor between her and her peers is that her mother is Arab American. She will have the right to run for president someday, but Lalami understands that her daughter’s citizenship, like her own, with be conditional as she ages, reducing the likelihood that she could ever attain such an office. Reiterating the “gray area” argument made by ISIS, Lalami acknowledges that she and her daughter live in a “gray area,” neither buying into the religious lifestyle demanded by ISIS nor entirely dismissing Islam as a matter of faith. Most Muslim Americans reside in this space, but they are pulled on both sides, torn between the US government’s demand for support in attacking the Middle East and the insistence of groups like ISIS on strict religious adherence, to the point of committing violent acts and relinquishing rights.