For Thanksgiving this year, my entire maternal family in the US came over to my house. Despite our history of bickering, there was pretty much zero drama. My mother had recently returned from Bangladesh, fulfilling the sense of duty among the America-dwelling siblings to look after their parents. This duty, often a challenge because my grandparents generally reside on the other side of the world and when they visit, everyone has to share the responsibility of hosting them, is often the polarizing factor among my aunts and uncles.
At the beginning of break, before seeing most of my family, I'd seen the movie Infidel. In the movie, a pretty typical second generation Muslim man, Solly, finds out he is anything but and was only adopted by Muslim parents, though born to Jewish ones. Solly becomes obsessed with meeting his birth father, who is dying in a Jewish rest home, guarded by an Orthodox Rabbi who believes seeing his Muslim son will be too taxing on the father. The movie mainly deals with the casual anti-Semitic attitude of a lot of immigrant Muslims who did not grow up in environments conducive to learning how to be tolerant of people of vastly different backgrounds, never mind live harmoniously with them. By the way, this movie is a comedy and I highly recommend it.
The various nuclear families in my extended family and even the individuals within them vary in terms of religious observance. I was happy to see this aspect of Muslim life portrayed in Infidel, too. The imam in the movie is even portrayed as supportive of LGBTQ Muslims. Yet, the main character has very stereotypical views towards Jews.
The attitude of many Muslims towards Jews comes from narrow-minded or overly simplistic interpretations of the Quran, which mentions Jews both in the context of the history of Abrahamic faiths and in the context of the Prophet's interaction with them. Perhaps because they are foreign, though they play neutral, benevolent, and malicious roles in the Quran, the worst roles and actions are ususlly the ones that become most popular in retellings.
On Thanksgiving, among my cousins, we try to uphold the tradition of naming what we are most thankful for before eating. The first person to go was my 9 year old cousin. He said, "I am thankful that I'm a Muslim." Normally, we would have been happy to hear that, even though some of us are a little estranged from Islam and the feeling of thankfulness toward the faith that is an essential aspect of it. However, we had earlier heard of the younger kids say something along the lines of Muslims being better than all other people. Though we had not reprimanded whoever said it at the time, we, perhaps partly in our guilt of our own lack of thankfulness but mostly due to our anxiety about growing up Muslim in America with immigrant parents, brought it up now and failed to be supportive of our little cousin.
When you are not confident of your personal grasp of something, it is difficult to be supportive of someone to the extent that you can constructively disagree about that thing. The same goes for interfaith relations. However, within groups, there exists differences, creating instability in its group identity. In majority groups, this is usually not a point of insecurity and may not translate to normative measures.
However, in minority groups, who are often pushed to present a monolithic image of themselves to outsiders, this instability can either cause conflict within the group or cause conflict with another group as a way of identifying the group through the negation of the other. The latter is portrayed, I believe, in Infidel and is prevalent in my little cousin's experience with parents and Sunday school teachers who are immigrants with limited understanding or investment in American society, without which, there is very little imperative to understand and appreciate the common threads between many religions and people from many walks of life. The movie suggests that such a mentality can persist if people do not learn tolerance. The former-- the effect of tolerance of outside groups among the members of a minority group that is internally diverse, was probably the source of our failure to be supportive older cousins.
Still, we shouldn't let this stuff get to us. The base assumption of either option is that we have to present a monolithic image of our group. The assumption is that people would t understand and would believe us all to be radicals if our cousin were to express his beliefs around non-Muslims or non-immigrant Muslims. They might. But we also assume non-Muslims and people who are different from our family as our default audience in the performance of out identities, even within the safety of our home. Sure, the environment of post-9/11 America, particularly the existence of policies such as The Patriot Act, have set us up to perform this way. And sure, our lives might be easier in some aspects if we perform for those in power. But repeated and perpetual performance, like the Muslim prayer performed 5 times daily or the Sufi performance of dhikr, transforms the performer into a servant. If we practiced the perspective of our faith more often, we would be assured there is always a higher power and that we need not bow to or feel threstened by anyone lesser than God.
