I’ve spent the last few months promoting a novel about young Muslim Americans coming of age in a post-9/11 Brooklyn. At every bookstore, radio interview, or university lecture hall, someone will ask me about the research I had to do for the book. I tell them about the NYPD police reports I read—these bizarre, chilling records of a massive law enforcement surveillance program targeting Arabs and Muslims in New York City. The reports are filled with awkward euphemisms to half-heartedly obscure the truth that they were spying on us for no other reason than we are Arabs or Muslims.

I explain what it was like to comb through these documents, to be riveted by them, to feel the pervading menace they so successfully instill. An undercover or an informant walks into an Arab-owned cafe and records the number of chairs inside, for example.

At this point in the book talk, I make a joke: “Oh, watch out for the Muslim chairs!” This always gets a laugh. The takeaway for audiences always seems to be: What a time that was! I can’t believe that happened. I’m glad it’s over. 

I’m not laughing now.

For the past four months, Palestinians have been begging the world to see a child as a child, a journalist as a journalist, a hospital as a hospital. I’m faced with the ugly realization that those decades of war against Arab and Muslim bodies have not ended. Part of that war is not only dehumanizing us so we can be killed en masse abroad, but also criminalizing us so we can be silenced at home.

To speak now about Palestine, especially for brown and Black people in America, is to knowingly put a target on your back. To code yourself as a threat, a barbarian, a terrorist, and an antisemite. To publicly grieve the lives lost is to submit yourself to a massive surveillance machine that will monitor your social media posts, your emails, your charitable donations, your friendships.

When I spoke to audiences about my book before October 7th, I urged them not to think of surveillance of Muslims and Arabs as a problem of the past. I reminded them how much better surveillance technology is now than it was in the years right after 9/11, and how the same methods used on Arabs and Muslims then are now being used to target Black Lives Matter or environmental activists.

But I think a small part of me did believe that perhaps things had gotten a bit better—that as the American public turned against the War on Terror, heard the lies about WMDs, wanted American troops out, that maybe Muslims and Arabs would no longer be so easy to use as a sort of global boogeyman.

Now, I’m forced to reckon with the crushing reality that nothing has changed. Because if we’ve learned one thing in these last two decades of the War on Terror, it’s that Arabs and Muslims are like a contagion. We must be surveilled and penned in; we must be stopped. Because what we have might catch.

The sensation of being watched is something I have carried around with me for years, trailing me like a shadow. To walk around in a state of perpetual paranoia, to speak and to simultaneously imagine your words being played back to you from a tape recorder. To imagine yourself moving through the world like a red dot on a surveillance map.

The main characters of my novel, two teenage sisters, also often feel watched and spend much of the book trying to escape that feeling—by being invisible, by transforming so radically that they will be unrecognizable, or by attempting to flee outside the radius of their surveillance. As teenage girls, there is the “ordinary” and universal form of being watched: they must exist under a patriarchal gaze. They are watched by men on the streets, by their older brother, by boyfriends, by neighbors.

But there is also another form of watching they must contend with: the invisible eye of the state. The girls often cannot see who is watching them. They are told there might be either informants or terrorists in their community, but they cannot tell who is who and which is more dangerous.

I often think about how those girls would feel if they were on a college campus today. We are now witnessing a robust build-up of surveillance programs designed to spy on Arabs, Muslims, and anyone who even vaguely supports Palestine. Officially, these programs are to combat antisemitism and support for terrorism on college campuses, but it’s not hard to imagine how this is going to go because it’s happened before.

I’m remembering the NYPD undercover who went on a 2008 whitewater rafting trip with Muslim students from City College. I’m remembering how in 2009 the NYPD set up a safe house near student housing at Rutgers University, and how when the superintendent of the building entered the apartment one day, he called the police because he thought it was a terrorist cell. I’m remembering my own college friends—how we would paste blank, unreadable smiles onto our faces whenever anyone new came around.

At a recent book event, a young man approached me from the audience and told me that he was one of the lead plaintiffs in a 2013 ACLU lawsuit against the NYPD. It was Asad Dandia. I recognized his name instantly, because I read about how an undercover cop befriended him when he was an undergraduate, claiming he wanted Asad’s help to become a better Muslim. Who will be the next Asad, I wonder now.

At another book event at a university, I met a young woman who told me a story about a man who often appeared and asked her and her friends odd questions. He had appeared again just that morning when he sat down next to her on the bus. “I’ve always thought he might be a—” she said, knowing I could fill in the blank. “Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”

The idea our governments have asked us to subscribe to is that all Muslims and Arabs (there’s not much point in distinguishing between them) are latent terrorists, as if we all have a ticking time bomb in our chests, just waiting to go off. As I witness the deaths of thirty thousand Palestinians, live-streamed from the phone in my palm, which is also a tracking device, I do feel an awakening in my body, and I wonder if the politicians are perhaps onto something.

I wander past my car in parking lots, forgetting where I’m going. I cry uncontrollably and without warning in the grocery store. I recently left a meeting with my boss about my professional goals and ran straight into the bathroom, kneeling over the toilet and dry heaving great gasps of nothing.

My therapist tells me these are physical manifestations of trauma. “What trauma?” I ask her. My children are not being bombed in their beds. I have water. I have food. And yet my body is remembering something it has felt before. You can’t grow up watching people who look like you, talk like you, and have names like yours die across your various screens without it changing you. To watch them die on a massive scale—a staggering, nameless, faceless death—and to listen to the world’s cheers of approval, or perhaps even worse, the roar of its silence, without something cracking inside of you.

You cannot feel any sense of certainty when you exist in a constant state of gaslighting, of wondering and doubting whether you are considered an enemy by your own country, by your own college, or employer. I feel it most as a lump in the throat, like I have swallowed something that has almost, but not quite, choked the life out of me.

At a virtual support group for Arabs and Palestinian Americans, I heard others describe similar symptoms. Taking a sip from a glass of water brings one woman to tears. Another breaks down in Costco when her child picks up a treat and asks if she can have it. Several describe walking around in a mental fog. One person says it sounds like he has white noise blasting between his ears. We go to work. We pick up our children from daycare. We cook dinner.

“It feels like I’m fine and like I’m dying inside,” someone says. “It feels like I’m screaming, but no one can hear me,” another one says. At one point in the meeting, an unidentified “Zoom user” pops up onto our screens. The group falls silent.

I eye the black square at the bottom left corner of my screen like it might shoot me through my laptop. We dry our eyes. No one will cry in front of the black box. “Identify yourself,” we ask it. We wait for the host to remove the user.

But it’s not the same after that. There are no safe places to grieve. More than seventy percent of the dwellings in Gaza have already been destroyed. The premature babies at Al-Nasr hospital were left to rot in their cribs. And we, the American Arabs, the American Muslims, scream into the void.

______________________________

Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad is available via Doubleday.

I like to write in the very early hours of the morning, before the sun has risen, when the house and the streets are quiet and it feels like maybe I’m the only one awake for miles. I enjoy the feeling of being very alone. But sometimes, as my fingers hover over the keyboard, about to type something into a search engine, I’m overwhelmed by the feeling of being watched. I write a lot about Muslims in a post-9/11 world. Of course I’m nervous.

The worst was the time I needed to look up the Islamic State flag for a scene I was working on in my novel. This is okay, I said to myself as I zoomed in on those crudely drawn black and white scrawls. It’s just a flag. But then I found myself needing to watch examples of ISIS recruitment videos. How could I explain this? I thought as a montage of bearded men firing machine guns flashed across my screen. Will they understand that I’m just a fiction writer, a high school teacher, a mom, a nobody?

I clicked out of the videos as soon as I had what I needed and cleared my search history. I laughed at myself afterward. But sometimes in that still, quiet house at 4 am, I imagine a boot kicking down my door, a bag over my head, a van waiting with doors open.

The two decades since 9/11 are the same two decades of the rise of social media and smart technology. Facebook was launched in 2003, the same year the United States invaded Iraq. I remember coming home from school as a sophomore in high school and flipping on the television to watch flashing black-and-green footage of bombs exploding over Baghdad. I ate my afternoon snack as people who looked like me, prayed like me, and had names like mine were killed in their sleep.

I got my first smartphone in 2009 as a college graduation gift. I took it with me as I went to my first job post-college at the Arab-American Association of New York, a social services agency that supports immigrants. This was perhaps the peak of NYPD infiltration of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities, a time of great anxiety and paranoia for Muslims in New York because we didn’t yet have any proof of what we could feel every day–that we were being watched, recorded, and entrapped illegally by law enforcement.

I came of age right as these two great forces that have shaped contemporary American society converged. There is a palpable before and after of my teenage years–before 9/11 and after. Before social media and after. Both have shaped me into the adult I am today and cannot be disentangled. I resisted joining social media for as long as I could but eventually succumbed to pressure or temptation. The creation of my Facebook account felt like a submission, a moment of resignation, a failure to resist.

Among my Muslim friends, this feeling was normal. We all felt watched—we used to joke about it. Someone new and overly eager would show up at the campus mosque and we’d raise our eyebrows at one another. As our flip phones gradually began to be replaced by smartphones, we began to qualify our own jokes for the benefit of whoever might be listening.

“I swear, I could kill him right now,” one of us would say. And then, eyeing the phone sitting on the table between us warily, we’d clarify: “Just kidding!”

After the Associated Press broke the story in 2012 that the NYPD had indeed been spying on us, my friends and coworkers at AAANY would joke about which one of us was the informant reporting the mundane details of our daily work–the number of chairs in the lobby, the poster of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that hung on the wall. “You were the spy! No, you were the spy.”

Over the years, I developed different responses to this feeling of being watched. At first, I behaved sort of like the miniature American flag that my father planted in our lawn right after 9/11. I would be walking proof that Muslims were Americans, too. I would be the “right” kind of Muslim—moderate and apologetic.

This is around the time when I briefly pretended to love country music as much as my Virginia high school classmates. But the little flag became sun-faded, and Muslims were still being kicked off planes, deported, and detained. And then, in 2012, just a few months after the AP’s reporting on the spy program, my father and I traveled to Egypt together.

Our flight was out of Newark on Turkish Airlines. It was the airline’s inaugural flight out of Newark and they threw a little party at the gate to celebrate. There was Turkish music and food and even a whirling dervish spinning in the corner. It was fun and festive and such a welcome change from the usual anxiety I felt at airports. My father and I lined up to board the plane, tickets in hand, when a man wearing a t-shirt and jeans appeared suddenly and ordered us to step out of the line.

He waved a badge in our faces, but I was so disoriented that I can’t remember who he said he was. TSA? Homeland Security? He had a thick New Jersey accent and ruddy cheeks, and he started asking us questions about why we were going to Egypt and how much cash we had on us. The line moved forward without us. My father wasn’t having it. This agent—whoever he was—asked my dad where he was born. My father pointed at the U.S. passport in the agent’s hand. “You have my passport right there. Read it,” he said.

The agent kept asking us questions about money, and my father refused to keep answering him. “I’ll answer those questions when I come back through Customs like everyone else,” he said calmly and attempted to rejoin the line. The agent was furious. He started to yell and threatened to pull us off the flight altogether. At this point, he appealed to me: “You better get your father under control or this is going to be a very bad situation for him,” he said.

And to my shame, I did. I held my father’s cheeks in between both of my hands and I begged him to submit, to cooperate, to let himself be publicly humiliated. “Don’t let him scare you,” my dad said. “I know my rights.”

Because my father still fundamentally believed in American democracy, that his rights as a citizen were unassailable. He thought those rights would keep him safe. But I did not have faith that my father’s blue passport would do anything to protect him. I had visions of him being hauled away right there at the gate, the plane still humming outside the window. At that point, I knew enough to understand that “terrorists” are made in moments like these.

I knew that Muslims like my dad were being held indefinitely on baseless, amorphous and ever-changing suspicions. So I begged my father to back down. And this seemed to assuage the agent’s wounded ego. He wanted to humiliate us, and here I was begging and apologizing and pleading. Eventually, he let us go without any further explanation.

Takeoff was delayed because of us, and I remember feeling the eyes of all the other passengers on us as we walked down the aisle to our seats. We were almost-terrorists, and now we were flying across the Atlantic with them. My father and I were silent for most of the plane ride, and we have hardly spoken of the incident since.

I’m no longer trying to prove myself as good or moderate. Now I’m just mad and weary. Because I’ve realized that it’s actually not about what we do or don’t do. We’re watched all the same. So I decided to write a novel about the watching.  When I was doing research on the NYPD “Demographics Unit,” the euphemistic name for its Muslim surveillance program, I devoured documents detailing the ways law enforcement had been tracking us with a perverse sort of pleasure. As I combed through the inane, often typo-ridden reports, I felt vindicated for every creeping, paranoid moment of the past ten years.

Once, when I was at an artists’ residency in an idyllic corner of rural New Hampshire, I printed out every NYPD report that the AP had managed to publish–dozens of pages of maps, interviews with informants and  “mosque crawlers,” databases of Arab or Muslim-owned business within 100 miles of New York City. I spread them out on the floor of my cabin and began annotating them. Even the most innocuous details–the types of flyers pinned to a bulletin board, the TV channel playing in a deli–were imbued with menace.

According to these reports, danger lurked everywhere. We–Arabs and Muslims–were latent terrorists, all of us. We had to be watched very carefully, because at any moment, the violence inside us might hatch. As I was lying on my belly on the floor, scrawling like a madwoman on a map, I heard a rustling outside my door. I froze. Then I heard tires crunching on the gravel driveway. It was just the daily delivery of lunch in a wicker picnic basket.

After that, I bounced to another artists’ residency, this was one even more remote with no cell phone service or wifi. It was glorious. I was untrackable. I often think back to that week off the grid and wonder why I don’t just unplug from technology more often.

Sometimes I’ll muster the strength to quit social media. I was off it entirely for a few years, and then the pandemic and lockdown happened, and I found myself, filled with a deep sense of self-loathing, opening an Instagram account late one night in April 2020. I wanted to see people’s pandemic puppies and their pandemic babies; I wanted to see people. But it didn’t take long before I was delivering hypocritical rants about cookies and location trackers, vowing to quit the internet and drown my phone.

I’m still stuck in this cycle. I eye teenage cashiers with suspicion when they ask for personal information like my phone number or email at the check-out. My husband calls me the “Muslim Ron Swanson,” after the lovable libertarian character from the show Parks and Recreation who tries his best to live off the grid and hides the most basic details of his life from even his closest friends. Leslie Knope, after years of sleuthing, finally discovers his birthday because he signed up for a free ice cream at Baskin Robbins. This sends him to a tailspin of paranoia and panic–what other information about him is floating around out there?

We recently got a letter from the city where we live informing us that appraisers would be in our neighborhood soon and might walk around our properties, or even ask for permission to enter our homes. “Did you see this?” I waved the letter in my husband’s face one night after we had put our children to bed. “Does this even look real to you? They want to come inside our house?”

I know better than to let authorities into my home. When I worked for AAANY, I used to pass out flyers in Arabic instructing people on their rights if the police or FBI ever knocked on their doors. “Come back with a warrant,” I’d yell at the appraiser, slamming the door in his face.

In the end, when he showed up, the appraiser didn’t even ask to come inside. He drew his wheel across our driveway and was gone again. The whole encounter lasted sixty seconds. Which is good, because of course I’m not the Muslim Ron Swanson. Ron Swanson is a straight, red-meat-eating white man born in America. If he threw the appraiser off his property, he’d be exercising his god-given rights as an American. As a Muslim woman, the daughter of immigrants, I’d be declaring myself an enemy, finally admitting to what this country has always known about me since I was fourteen years old (and even before).

Now, I’m a writer trying to make my debut and reach an audience. People do that with social media these days. So I have the author’s Instagram page (I’ve since shuttered my personal accounts). You might find me there. You might even see me post occasionally. And there is something thrilling about gaining a new “follower,” someone who’s read my book or who wants to. What a dream! But you should also know that every time I hit “publish,” I still feel like I’m baiting my own trap.

______________________________

Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad is available via Doubleday.