Muslims are terrified, but we won’t be intimidated by Trump

Once the election results became terrifyingly clear, I wrote this for The Guardian.

Early on election evening, my Muslim friends and I jokingly imagined the world after a Trump victory, where Muslim Americans were herded into camps, wondering whether we would have Wi-Fi there and who would water our plants after we’d gone. When the results began pouring in, the jokes stopped.

Anxiety replaced humour. My friends and I began exchanging furious messages. “Can you believe this shit?” a Yemeni friend asked. The shock turned to horror. We began discussing how to explain this all to our children, some of whom are already showing signs of internalising the country’s anti-Muslim sentiment.

This, the most frightening time of my life, is something I should have seen coming. On Monday I was talking with some of my students at Brooklyn College about what they expected would happen in the election, and they shocked me by launching into their stories of personal encounters in liberal New York with Donald Trump’s America.

Read the rest here.