0 PUBLICATION DATE:
August 18, 2008 HOW
DOES IT FEEL TO BE A PROBLEM? Being
Young and Arab in America by Moustafa
Bayoumi Advance Praise for How Does It Feel
to Be a Problem? Ò[BayoumiÕs] absorbing and affectionate book is a
quintessentially American picture of 21st-century citizens.Ó ─Publishers Weekly, starred review ÒBayoumi offers a revealing portrait of life for
people who are often scrutinized but seldom heard from.Ó ─Booklist, starred review ÒBayoumi poignantly portrays young people coming of
age.Ó ─Kirkus Reviews ÒWholly intelligent and
sensitively-drawn, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? is an important investigation into the hearts and minds of
young Arab Americans. This significant and eminently readable work breaks
through preconceptions and delivers a fresh take on a unique and vital
community. Moustafa Bayoumi's voice is refreshingly frank, personable, and
true." ─Diana Abu-Jaber,
author of Origin, Crescent, and The Language
of Baklava ÒIn relating the gripping personal stories of seven young Arab and
Muslim Americans from Brooklyn in How Does it Feel to be a Problem?, Moustafa Bayoumi reveals the feelings and frustrations
of the current era's scapegoats, who can be demonized, profiled, and reviled
without fear of sanction. His book shows both the dimensions of this new
problem for American society, and the hopeful signs that this problem too can
be overcome.Ó ─Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab
Studies, Columbia University, and author of The Iron Cage ÒSuspenseful storytelling and rich detail make How
Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
required reading for Americans yearning for knowledge about Islam and their
Muslim neighbors in the United States. In a series of fascinating narratives
about the horrors and conflicts young Muslim-Americans faced after 9/11,
Moustafa Bayoumi has written a work that is passionate, yet measured, humorous,
and above all enlightening.Ó ─Geneive Abdo, author of Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11 ÒWith deft prose, acute insight, and extensive
reporting, Moustafa Bayoumi has produced truly engrossing portraits of young
Muslim Americans about whom we usually hear only empty polemics. With a
light touch, he gives voice to people who are referred to often and heard from
rarely. The result is a sense of the tentative resistance of a besieged
generation, as well as their determination to force America to be true to its
promise even if it means confronting prejudice in its practice." ─Gary Younge, author of Stranger in a Strange
Land: Encounters in the Disunited States
and No Place Like Home How does it feel to be a problem? How does it feel to
be forced to resign as a class officer at your public high school because you
are Muslim and your faith prevents you from attending mandatory dances? How
does it feel to be an Arab-American Christian soldier fighting in Iraq? How
does it feel to be released from prison three months after you and your family
are rounded up in the middle of the night and incarcerated, when your only
ÒcrimeÓ is being an Arab-American in post-September 11th America?
How does it feel, to be a problem? W.E.B. Du Bois first posed this question in
his seminal treatise The Souls of Black Folk, and now, over a century later, Moustafa Bayoumi
explores the same question through the first-hand accounts of seven young
Arab-Americans living in Brooklyn. Their answers reveal the passions,
frustrations, struggles, aspirations, and ultimately, the undeterred hope
harbored by the inspiring young people featured in BayoumiÕs portraits. In HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A PROBLEM? Being Young
and Arab in America (The Penguin
Press; August 18, 2008; $24.95), Bayoumi introduces us to Rasha, Sami, Lina,
Akram, Yasmin, Omar, and Rami, whose stories reveal complex individuals behind
the stereotypes that plague Arabs and Muslims in the United States. Since
September 11th, these two groups have reluctantly formed what
Bayoumi calls the first new community of suspicion to emerge since the hard-won
victories of the Civil Rights era. The lives of BayoumiÕs subjects are
complicated by adversities that are at once familiar and unprecedented:
government surveillance and detentions, workplace discrimination, warfare in
their countries of origin, threats of vigilante violence, the infiltration of
spies and informants into their midst, and the disappearance of friends or
family. And yet each of BayoumiÕs portraits is a
quintessential American story of race, religion, and civil rights, full of
struggle and also hope. This is a community that lives next door, and yet a
world away, and the combined testimony of BayoumiÕs subjects begins to bridge
this distance. HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A PROBLEM? is an important and necessary book, in which
BayoumiÕs subjects answer Du BoisÕs century-old question, just as they start to
grasp how it feels to be a part of the solution. About
the Author Moustafa
Bayoumi was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and raised in Canada. He earned his
Ph.D. at Columbia University and is an associate professor of English at
Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. He is coeditor of The
Edward Said Reader, and his essays
have appeared in The Best Music Writing 2006, The Nation,
The London Review of Books, The
Village Voice, and other
publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A
PROBLEM? Being Young and Arab in America by
Moustafa Bayoumi The
Penguin Press August
18, 2008 304
pages * ISBN 978-1-59420-176-9 * $24.95 For more information or
to schedule an interview with the author, please contact Caroline Garner at
212-366-2814, or by e-mail at caroline.garner@us.penguingroup.com.