Less than two months before his ninth birthday, our son Youssef began to suffer from insomnia. From 9:00 PM, his bedtime, till midnight or even later, the door to our room bursts open at regular intervals. "I can't sleep" he says. Our voices with gentle parental concern or the irritation of interrupted sleep, tell him to go back to his room, shut his eyes, count sheep...etc. and sleep will surely come.
It doesn't work.
The mornings after are a nightmare for the whole family.
It doesn't take a genius to see the link between Youssef's sleep disorder and the events of September 11th. The harrowing images of that fateful day are seared on the minds of all people, particularly us New Yorkers. Clearly, his decision to ignore the events and pretend they never happened was too much for his system.
Having dinner one evening, it came as a complete shock to us to hear our child saying that he does not want his name to be Youssef nor does he want to be a Muslim anymore. Because one of the suspects is called Youssef and because "they don't like Muslims in this country".
We asked him repeatedly if something had happened at school to make him feel that way. His answer was a categorical "no". We believed him. It was highly unlikely that he was subjected to racist comment at his international school. He is also the class clown. To the chagrin of his teachers, Youssef uses his great sense of humor to make his classmates laugh at the "wrong" time. They call him our Billy Crystal. So, where did such thoughts come from? After a thorough interrogation he mumbles: all that stuff on TV".
We have taught our children Islam as we understand it; compassionate, tolerant, humane and deeply respectful of all other faiths. We tell them the words of Prophet Muhammad "the gravest sin is for one of us to go to bed with a full stomach while his neighbor goes hungry. I stress (in almost exactly the same words my parents had used more than three decades earlier) that he spoke of the "neighbor" not the "fellow- Muslim". We told them the story of the Prophet helping to build a house for a poor man in Medina. In the sweltering heat of that day the Prophet was sweating profusely. He wiped his brow. His sweat fell on a thorn bush transforming it into a tree of magnificent flowers. We point out that the labor of love, of helping those less fortunate than yourself is alone capable of changing the world; of turning prickly thorns into roses in full bloom
This is what we have taught Youssef.
This is what he wants to renounce.
In response to his bombshell, I said that his favorite actor, Billy Crystal, did not change his name because he shared it with the notorious criminal Billy the Kid. I spoke to him of the Olympic Torch, how it travels from city to city and how it is the greatest honor for any athlete to be chosen to light the Olympic Flame at the beginning of the games. I told him that in the Atlanta Games, that honor fell to a man by the name of "Muhammad Ali", arguably the greatest athlete in US history. I concluded by saying that it is not your name or your faith that matter, but only who you are and what you can do.
He calmed down a bit. He has not talked of changing his name or religion since.
But the bouts of insomnia have not disappeared. When the door to our bedroom bursts open in the middle of the night, he is no longer told to go back to his room or count sheep. Instead, I take him in my arms and I sing our favorite Bob Marley song:
"Don't worry
About a thing
'Cause every little thing
Is gonna be all right"
Even after he falls asleep, I continue humming the song to myself. Images flash before my eyes. I see myself in New York the most tolerant and cosmopolitan of all cities, my home for the last 19 years, being told to go home for committing the crime of reading an Arabic newspaper on the bus. I hear the woman sitting next to me in the Japanese restaurant on 44th Street saying (matter-of-factly between bites of Sashimi: “after what happened, we must kill an awful lot of Arabs". I see the taxi driver who felt compelled to post a sticker in his car declaring his pride to be "an American and a Sikh". Undoubtedly for fear of being mistaken for an Arab or a Muslim with all the grievous, sometimes fatal, consequences that might entail.
I continue humming the song to myself. Perhaps because I really want every little thing to be all right. Perhaps because I do not want Youssef to sense that, in my heart of hearts, I'm no longer sure that will be the case.
HOSSAM FAHR
New York, October 2001
[1] This article was sent to more than 50 US publications. None of them saw fit to publish it.
