September 11 accelerated young Arab Americans’ ethnic and media engagement

Evidence

For Omar, September 11 accelerated a process he’d already begun, his identification with his Arab ethnicity. He began attending a regular discussion circle in a Bay Ridge mosque, led by an imam who was popular with the young people. The youth liked this imam because he talked to them as if they were real people and addressed actual life issues, not just empty rituals or repetitive warnings about the hereafter, as too many others often do. The imam repeatedly told the youth about the importance of media, how the Muslims today suffer from a public-relations problem and how too many of them study engineering or medicine while not enough of them consider journalism or the arts. “We need to represent ourselves,” he argued, “and not always be represented.” — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 744

Categorization

• SEED: The imam’s call for Muslims to shift from engineering and medicine toward journalism and the arts is a neat angle for an essay on representation and professional self-image in minority communities.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the idea that the colonized cannot represent themselves; also to Saïd’s essay ‘Permission to Narrate.’