There is No Such Thing as an Identity

the notion of in-group comity is a check reality can't cash

Via Reddit, I find this genuinely sad 2019 story from Fatima Asghar, an American Muslim woman who traveled to Jordan and was surprised and hurt to find that Jordan’s Muslims acted according to the dictates of both typical human behavior and their tradition of Islam.

[Jordan] was not all that different from America….Boys will be boys, as they say, and reap the benefits of a patriarchal world. A world that is built on “boys will be boys” violence; a world where women, femme, gender nonconforming, trans, and queer people, by design, can never fit safely inside.

The street harassment in Jordan was only surprising to me because my naïve self expected more from Muslim men. I was so excited to be living in a Muslim-majority place for the first time in my life, I hadn’t even considered that would happen. I expected it to be more like a family reunion, where we would all dance and sing together and practice Islam in whatever way we saw fit. Aunties and uncles would greet me at the bus stop with sweets. We would all roll out our prayer mats in the streets and pray together, delighting in how our relationship with God was our own and free from judgment. That was far from the case. On sight, many people judged me as a haraami, a Muslim woman brimming with sin, going straight to hell. My uncovered hair, my sandals showcasing my exposed feet, and my Western clothes were all sites of scorn.

I thought this was ragebait, at first, but Poetry.com isn’t exactly in the business of publishing arch parodies and the author appears to be legit.

I feel a number of ways about this. I genuinely do have sympathy for the author, as that must be a very alienating experience. It reminds me of what I was saying about the paradox of assimilation not that long ago - Americanized children or grandchildren of immigrants will often embrace the culture of their “home” country, but reject the assimilationist tendencies of their parents/grandparents, despite the fact that those assimilationist tendencies arose from people who were more authentically part of the lionized culture. The inevitable result is that these first/second generation (the terms are annoyingly inconsistent sorry) Americanized people fall in love with an idealized vision of their ancestral cultures that has little to do with the actual place and its actual practices. Completely independent of politics, the tendency to romanticize any place that is not here - and by here I don’t mean “New York” or “America” or “the developed world” or any other specific place but rather here, wherever you are - precisely because it is not here is very common, very understandable, and very misguided.