Meghan: I went to college at Columbia University with a lot of Muslim students, and I am still friends with a number of people who practice the Muslim faith. That doesn’t mean I consider them my “Muslim friends.” In fact, religion rarely comes up in conversation with them. I believe that, unfortunately, when it comes to stereotypes about Muslims, a few radicals have severely damaged the reputation of an entire faith. Do I think there are Muslim extremist jihadists in the Middle East who want to destroy my way of life? Yes, of course, and it scares the living hell out of me. However, Islam is the second-largest religion in the world and the vast, vast majority of Muslims reject the extremists and agree that the radicals have done damage to their faith.
I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to go to a university that offered wonderful courses on Islamic history and faith. Not many Americans get the opportunity to advance their understanding of a religion they find mysterious and, in some cases scary. Through my different religion requirements at school, I read the Koran, studied Islamic art, and read Middle Eastern writings. I am grateful that I had the experience as a young adult to learn about the culture from educators in an environment that was safe and allowed open dialogue. I also feel lucky to have studied at a school with such a diverse student body that all races and religions are given an opportunity to share and understand each other. I had that luxury and that exposure; if you have not had that opportunity, it is easy to be scared of what you don’t know.
Cousin John pulls up in our giant RV and Eide A. Alawan greets us in the parking lot of the Islamic Center of America. He is a small man with a white beard and a warm smile. He’s holding a couple of head scarves and a shawl, and I suddenly realize that I’m dressed in leggings and an open-neck T-shirt. When I dressed this morning I was only thinking about this ongoing heat wave; I should have known better than to dress this way to visit a mosque. Mr. Alawan doesn’t seem to mind, but asks Stephie and me to put on the head scarves, and then hands me the shawl to wrap around my shoulders and chest. I am embarrassed and feel bad for dressing in a way I would never have to visit a church. The dress code slipped my mind.
We walk in and Mr. Alawan starts giving us a tour of the mosque. There is some kind of event going on in one of the larger rooms. There are tables and balloons, teenagers everywhere. It looks like it’s going to be some kind of a celebration. It reminds me of the events I used to go to at my church as a child.
Michael: The Islamic Center of America is not, as the name implies, the Islamic center of America. It’s just a grandiose name for a mosque that only represents its own community, those Muslims living in Dearborn and the surrounding areas. This is one of the first things we learn from Eide.
He explains the mosque’s name for us when we ask about it. Eide says it used to be Islamic Center of Detroit, but the imam thought the name should attempt to extend its reach. Personally, if that was the goal, I think they should have gone with “Islamic Center of THE UNIVERSE!!!”
Eide leads us on a tour of the mosque, which seems no different from any synagogue or church I’ve been to. We look in on a community room where a bunch of teenagers are hanging out getting ready for a program later in the evening.
Two young women in head scarves approach.
“Aren’t you Michael Ian Black?” one of them asks.
I say I am.
“That’s awesome!” the other says, and they walk away.
I did not expect to get recognized in a mosque.
“What was that all about?” asks Eide. I tell him they probably recognize me from VH1, but he seems baffled. “I thought maybe they were putting me on,” he says. “I was going to apologize. I thought maybe they were drunk.”
He is, of course, kidding.
We go into the prayer room, or maybe the prayer room is the mosque. I don’t know. It’s an enormous, empty round room lined with beautiful Arabic calligraphy around the perimeter of the ceiling. He asks if any of us have been in a mosque before. Stephie says she tried to enter one in Israel but was forbidden because they would not let women in. Eide seems particularly wounded by this.
“Did you have a head scarf?”
Yes.
“Were your legs covered?”
Yes, they brought clothing to cover themselves.
“I apologize,” he says. “That should not have happened.”
We sit in the prayer room for a long time talking. Eide tells us he’s had a busy decade since September 11, doing interfaith outreach to the community. He says the day after, on September 12, a thousand Muslims gathered in Greenfield Village for a candlelight vigil. He says he was just as appalled by the attacks as everybody else. That his religion should be associated with the attacks seems to deflate him.
“I’ve lived here all my life, and have been practicing Islam since well before September 11,” he says.
“But how do you feel about radical Islam hating what you love?” Meghan asks.
“Radicals come in every form,” he answers, a response I sense he has given ten thousand times in the last decade. “I do not accept that just because somebody says he is a Muslim—and the nineteen hijackers said they were Muslim—to me, they do not represent Islam.”
The subject of President Obama comes up.
“What were your feelings about the Obama Muslim controversy ?” I ask.
“I believe he’s a Muslim,” Eide says.
Meghan seems shocked.
“You do? Really?”
Eide laughs. He’s kidding. “No,” he chuckles. “I keep on telling people he’s a Muslim. An undercover Muslim.”
He says he voted for Obama, but not because of his religion. “First time in my history I voted for a non-Republican. Don’t tell your dad that,” he adds as an aside to Meghan. “I voted for a Democrat because I want to see change in this country. I want to see an African American be president. I would have voted for . . . what’s her name?”
“Hillary,” I say.
“Hillary. I would have voted for Hillary except I have a problem with her husband. I couldn’t stand the guy.” He laughs again. “But the point is, I voted for Obama because he’s an African American. I’m old, as you can see, and I want to see change in my lifetime.”
I find his words touching. Eide is old enough to remember a time when the idea of a black or female president was unthinkable. Meghan and I are both young enough to take for granted that the realistic possibility of both of those outcomes wasn’t always the case here. Of course we will have a female president, a Hispanic president, and maybe, sooner rather than later, a Mormon president. It doesn’t seem possible today, but I have no doubt that one day we will also have a Muslim president. For somebody like Eide, it must seem a little amazing that such things are possible. He is relentlessly upbeat about America and his community’s place here.
Stephie asks him if it troubles him that a contingent of this country is threatened by the belief that Obama could be a Muslim.
“To me, it doesn’t represent a large percentage of the community. Like you, I love America. I wouldn’t want to live anyplace else in the world. This is America, folks. I mean, Jews weren’t well liked. Catholics weren’t well liked by the Puritans, if you know any of your history. It’s our turn in the bucket.”
In a way, I find his optimism encouraging and in a way, I find it naive. My sense of what America thinks about Muslims is darker than his. He believes in America’s better angels, but I am not so sure. Why does anybody need to be in the bucket?
Yes, we want to welcome all faiths, but I also know that for all of our bravado, Americans are sometimes a fearful people. Even though we welcome outsiders, they often end up scaring us once they are here. It’s a strange dichotomy of the American character. I hope his vision of America wins out.
A larger concern for Eide seems to be tensions within the Muslim community, mainly between Sunni and Shia groups. He has a term for Muslims who can observe together: “Sushis.” His own mosque is Shia, and I ask him if Sunnis would fee
l comfortable praying there. “Maybe two or three percent would,” he answers. “But within ten or fifteen years, I think it’ll be fifty-fifty.”
I’ve met a lot of clergy. The ones I liked the most seem to radiate an inner calm. Eide is not a clergyman, but I sense a similar stillness within him. His life’s passion is this work, interfaith as well as in-trafaith. When I hear conservative talk radio blowhards railing against Islam, screaming about impending “Sharia law,” I wonder if they have met people like Eide or the girls who recognized me from VH1, or the teenagers grilling hotdogs and hamburgers out back.
For much of our time in the mosque I’ve noticed a little boy about two years old running around the big, empty room. He’s having a great time, just running and running, tripping over his own legs, laughing. His mother stands nearby, watching, but making no effort to stop him or silence him. Eide doesn’t even seem to notice the boy. But I do, because the idea of running and laughing in a place of worship is alien to me. Every church and synagogue I have ever attended has been a place of solemnity. It never occurred to me that a prayer room could also be a place for unbridled laughter and fun. But seeing this little boy acting that way, here, makes perfect sense to me. Of course a house of prayer should be fun. It should be a place where there is laughter and joy. Of course.
After we say goodbye to Eide we start to exit the mosque. Before we can, a burly guy enters the room and says, “As-salamu alaikum” as he passes. Eide responds, “Wa alaikum as-salaam.”
We pass. The man stops and calls to me. He’s pissed.
“I say ‘As-salamu alaikum’ to you!” he growls. I’m flustered and I feel my cheeks start to flush. I don’t know what to say. He stares at me. “Why don’t you say ‘Wa alaikum as-salaam’?”
Eide tries to interject, to explain that I didn’t know, but the man’s eyes remain hard and, frankly, scary. I mutter the phrase to the best of my ability, mortified. “Wa alaikum as-salaam,” I try to say, but it comes out more like “Wakka wakka salami.”
The man glares for a few more seconds, then grumbles away.
“I’m sorry,” says Eide. “He can be a little difficult.”
Maybe it seems stupid, but I’m actually kind of shaken by the encounter because, after speaking with Eide for an hour, my feelings about religion, all religion, have softened. After this encounter, though, I am again reminded how strident people can be, how unyielding and prone to offense. I tell Eide it’s fine. But it’s not fine.
All of us thank him for his hospitality and time. Before taking our leave we somehow get onto the subject of John F. Kennedy, and the uproar caused by his Catholicism.
“You read about it now, but if you lived at the time, it was news all over the place. ‘Catholics are going to rule the country now. He’s going to answer to the pope.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.” He pauses. “Of course, he wasn’t as good a Catholic as I thought he was.” He chuckles. “But the point is, Americans are always fearful. I think the fear should be in some other area . . .” he trails off.
“Somehow we survive,” I say.
“Yeah, we survive,” he agrees. “And we’ll survive when this Muslim gets out of office.”
He’s kidding.
Washington, DC
America, You Sexy Bitch
Meghan: It was an obvious and natural choice to wind down our tour with a stop at our nation’s capital. I used to hate Washington, DC, when I was growing up, but more recently I have come to love the city. I don’t know if it is a love that has evolved with age and wisdom or my continued path toward a deeper involvement with my role in politics, but somewhere along the way I’ve found a great appreciation for the city. Frankly, my relatively recent fondness for Washington, DC, sometimes still surprises me.
When I was a little girl, Washington, DC, was the place that took my dad away from me and would make me cry on Sunday nights or Monday mornings when he would have to leave to fly back. I have distinct memories of watching my father on CSPAN in our big Spanish-style kitchen. My mother would be cooking dinner and something would be steaming on the stove; she would make us “watch for Daddy,” and then after he left the floor of the Senate we would call him on the phone. It was a fun game we used to play and I give it up to my mother for always keeping my father’s presence around even when he wasn’t physically at home.
My father always looked so serious on television, sometimes visibly agitated or passionate about whatever issue he was speaking about on the Senate floor. I think he looks unnatural in a suit and tie. It’s a running joke in my family that my father puts on his “uniform” nearly as soon as he gets through the door of our house in Phoenix, his uniform being really old Levi’s jeans and some form of a raggedy, disgusting T-shirt, normally with a Far Side comic printed on the front or something else equally cheesy. Whenever he comes home and changes his clothes, our dogs start barking at him like crazy and jumping around, as if they are anticipating playing with my dad or going up to our cabin in Sedona to run around and get dirty. Every time this happens, it still makes me laugh.
Normally, my mother, brothers, sister, and I would go visit my father at his office in Washington three times a year: during Christmastime, the spring, and summer. The strongest memories I have are of the bitter-cold trips in the middle of the winter. I used to hate having to get up so early in the morning to go visit my dad at his big office, inevitably growing bored sitting and waiting around for him to go vote on a bill. The best part of visiting him was eating the navy-bean soup at the Senate dining room, and getting to eat a handful of chocolate-covered mints as we went out. I also loved riding on the train that’s in the basement of the Senate building and finding it funny that the conductors knew my father by name.
Michael: After a couple of thousand miles in a stinky RV, we’ve finally reached the belly of the beast. I’ve been to DC many times before, but always as a flag-waving tourist, never as an insider. This time, escorted by Meghan, I feel like one of the elites everybody hates, somebody with access to congressmen and senators, and I have to admit, it feels pretty cool.
We knew from the beginning of this trip that we’d eventually wind up here, and would eventually sit down with politicians to get their take on the current political environment. We’re not reporters and our goal is not to engage in “gotcha” journalism, or even journalism at all. We just want to hear them out as people and as citizens. One of those people will be the 2008 Republican nominee for president of the United States, John McCain.
I’ve been dreading meeting Meghan’s father from the get-go. I don’t know why. I was far less nervous meeting the fathers of actual girlfriends than I am about meeting this guy. I’m not usually intimidated by people in positions of power and influence, but I am this time. Probably because I’ve been living with his twenty-seven-year-old daughter for a month under what could be construed as dubious circumstances. Were I the father, I can certainly envision myself being (to put it mildly) suspicious of the dude in linen pants and Crocs my little girl was dropping by the office with to say hello.
Thankfully, our meeting with the senior senator from the great state of Arizona is still a day away. Before that, we’ll be hanging out with another father: Dr. Charles Grob, proud papa of our very own bride-to-be, Nermal.
Meghan: I am forever grateful that my parents elected not to raise me in Washington, DC. I think if they had I would probably be an entirely different person, or at the very least have an entirely different view of politics and my unorthodox approach to fighting for my side of the Republican Party. It may be just my perspective, but many of the children of politicians that I have met over the years who were raised within the Beltway have a whiff of entitlement about them, or at least some jaded attitude about DC culture. I imagine it is probably a similar experience to growing up in Los Angeles with a famous actor as a parent.
Instead of being in that political bubble, watched and coddled, I got to have a more traditional childhood with more freedom: running around and
getting dirty in the desert, falling out of trees, getting stitches, riding horses, going to Catholic school down the street, skipping Catholic school down the street, making best friends who I still cherish today, barbequing with my family, hiking, swimming, being allowed to grow and live on my own terms. There really are not too many bad things I can say about my childhood in Arizona. I was allowed to make my typical childhood mistakes without the prying eyes of reporters or other political families all around me. Most important, I truly believe there is something about growing up in the Wild West that has given me an independent perspective. One of my father’s strategists once described me as “unnaturally fearless for a politician’s daughter.” It’s one of the weirdest, yet also one of the best compliments anyone has ever given me. Something about being raised in the desert in Arizona directly contributed to that fearlessness.
I simply do not believe I would be as open with my life or as independent with my opinions if I had grown up with the kind of pressure from DC culture that I have only come to know in my twenties. On the stump, my father often quotes the line “Politicians came to Washington to change things and Washington changed us.” That’s the weird thing about Washington, DC: it’s filled with hopeful dreamers, oftentimes new to the Hill, who come bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with the greatest of intentions, wanting to change the country and make it a better place. Sometimes they do, but a lot of times they don’t. Washington, DC, is a city where you can quite literally change the world and make it a better place, or you can get your soul absolutely corrupted and end up doing irreparable damage to America and your life.
America, You Sexy Bitch Page 29
