12/7/41 and 9/11/01 “I knew something was wrong”

I got a couple of phone calls. I hadn’t woken up, it was 8:30 in morning or something like that. And first, my husband called and said, “You’ve got to turn on the TV, something’s happening at the Pentagon.” And I was sleeping and I kinda said, “Yeah, yeah whatever, I’ll look later.” And then maybe ten minutes later my dad called. And so obviously I knew something was wrong, dad calling in the morning, this cannot be good. And he was like, “Ahh, you should turn on the TV, there’s some major activity going on on the East Coast and when you go to school today I want you to be really careful because there’s this stuff going on and we don’t know who did it and we don’t know who got blamed and we don’t know what the repercussions are going to be, so just be careful.” And I said okay and I went and I turned the TV on and pretty much got glued.

Being American “I grew up here. This is my home.”

I’m a citizen of this country. You know. I’ve lived here since I was 10 years old. I grew up here. This is my home. But at the same time, I can’t take for granted the things that other people take for granted because I just don’t feel safe in doing that. You never know when something that you say or something that you do is going to get you in trouble essentially.

Identity “I never really thought about taking the scarf off”

I started wearing the scarf a week before I graduated from high school. So I’ve been wearing it for about seven years now. I don’t think that there would be any way for me to ever take it off at this point. It’s part of how I dress, you know. It’d be like someone getting ready in the morning and going to school and not putting a shirt on. That’s how I like to analogize it. So, I mean, I never really thought about taking the scarf off, but I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t go to the grocery store by myself. I didn’t really go to the mall. I couldn’t study in coffee shops for awhile. And it wasn’t just me, even my friends who don’t wear scarves. We called ourselves as being put under house arrest for a little while because of what was going on in the country and the uncertainty of whether or not people on the street are going to react negatively to you because either you wear a scarf or you just look foreign. We didn’t want to put ourselves in that kind of danger.

Loss “I thought my phone might be tapped”

I went through a period where I thought my phone might be tapped. That’s the worst feeling. It’s the feeling that no matter who you might be talking to, there’s someone on the other end listening. It made me just not want to talk on the telephone at all.

Never Again “I’m not any different”

The fact that I’m a Muslim doesn’t make me, as a person, any different from anybody else. You know, the fact that I wear an extra piece of clothing on my head doesn’t make me any different. And people don’t seem to understand that. I’ve lived here all my life and even if I hadn’t lived here all my life, I’m not any different.