Contemporary Chaos and Muslim Youth Getting beyond Defensiveness and Confronting Our Own Demons

Abstract

Why should I, your after-dinner speaker, a time for dessert – for sweetness
– be the bearer of exclusively bad news, of chapters from the contemporary
chaos that seemingly surrounds us. “The Darkness that Surrounds Us,” to
call upon the words of a great American poet Robert Creeley, who, I imagine,
never would have imagined that his own troubling personal vision
would become an easily recognized metaphor to be invoked, as I invoke it,
at a gathering of Muslim social scientists. Well, there are some good signs,
like a nice after dinner mint that one discovers tucked just under one’s plate
at the end of the meal, and I will get to them.
My assumption is that I am really not here to tell you of things you
know, living as you do in the United States … things you know far better
than I, particularly since, as a journalist, I feel on safest ground when I report
to you from personal experience. I cannot and will not even begin to address
the many moments of humiliation and pain that many American Muslims
have experienced in the backlash to 9/11 and the events that have followed,
precisely because I have been personally spared any those experiences. So,
I will address experiences from which I have not been spared.
I have lived abroad, in what could be called the Arab-Islamic world, for
forty years. And for me, the trajectory of contemporary chaos and the crisis
confronting the Muslim youth has been a long one, long before 9/11. More
than half of those years in the Middle East were spent as a journalist, mainly ...