Let me tell you how I feel...I feel like digging my feet into my all-American backyard soil and screaming in agony. I feel like like throwing more and more dirt upon them until they're firmly in place, secure, home. I feel like crying Allahu Akbar, hearing it echo down the railroad tracks under the bridge behind the fence, soar through the trees and send the birds flying, climb to the highway above my house and silence the commuters. I just completed a questionnaire for the cinema-television school's big sister/brother - little sister/brother program, which asked me to describe what I did before I entered the MFA program. Yeah. Meanwhile I was reading an article about British Muslims, reminded heavily about how congested the Muslim community felt, how excruciating their clinging to the culture of the motherland, and how needlessly palpable the West vs Islam dichotomy was present. Why cant you people get over it? Drop the "dar-al-harb is evil because the motherland was once a stupid chunk of british empire" mentality! Dar al harb is a historical term, not a fundamentally islamic one, you git! stop drawing divisions where there are none. Muslims in America are fully, culturally American while being fully practicing Muslims. Our mere existence is evidence that your entire form of polarized self-identification is a big fat unislamic waste of time! People are suffering, poverty is rampant, people are dying all over the world, and you, living in one of the most influential nations in the world with the opportunity to benefit humanity with stellar islamic acts of compassion and justice sit on your isolationist ass, neglect the educational well-being of your children until they become frustrated jihadis, and insult the injustices committed by the "West"?? YOU ARE THE FRIGGIN WEST. Deal with it. If you don't show investment in the well-being of your society, you don't deserve to live there. YOU ARE NOT CULTURALLY SUPERIOR. Learn from the West, because it sure as hell has a lot to offer that you lack (and vice versa). The Prophet (saw) said to seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. Avoid the aspects of western culture that are haraam (just as you would the haraam aspects of the culture of the motherland), yes, but quit limiting yourself needlessly. Alhamdulillah for being a Muslim American...I feel sorry for you British Muslims, and I'm a little saddened that we can't relate as well as I thought we could. I feel like American Muslims are more isolated culturally now than many of us realize. We truly are alone as bearers of a fully western Islamic lifestyle. It may be cheesy and cliche, but we're a new Andalus of sorts. I just hope our fate is more than a fleeting romance. Perhaps this is why I'm so attached to my Americanness now and pulled toward the farthest west mainland America can take me, Los Angeles. I dont want to leave. I dont want to go abroad for a very long time. I want to appreciate what Allah (swt) has given me, the chance to live at this time in history, in this place that holds so much hope for the Muslim world's identity crisis and for humanity, which can only be delighted when billions of its members finally gets its act together.
