These are my favorite posts of yours.  When you articulate that double perception.

You wish they'd profiled those guys better before 9/11, but not you. 

You show the tension in these moments so well.  

Why, thank you. I suppose its the contradictions and complexity of being human; I love giving the lie to black-white world views.

- A Salafi in worship, a Sufi in society, a Secularist in government.

Interesting, I find this story interesting.

I find the border checkpoints along the southern border differently than you I guess.

I’m half Mexican, the son of a Mexican immigrant from the state of Jalisco, but my father being from Jalisco, many Mexicans there are “fair skinned Spaniards.”

I always notice the apparent ethnic make-up of the Border Patrol, and I’m astounded by the number of Border Patrol agents of Latino descent.

In Mexican Spanish, we have the term “malinchista” which means “traitor.” Immigration is something I cannot discuss with out being biased and emotional, to be honest.

As for being Muslim, most people don’t even know, not even fellow Muslims. I don’t seem “Muslim” since I don’t dress the part or sport the whiskers.

I thought your wife was born here. But she does wear the hijab correct?

When you become a Muslim, you do sacrifice white privilege to some extent.

You lose some social whiteness when you don outward Muslim identifiers or when your wife is a hijabi in public, you negate your white identity in America since being Muslim in America is seen as a foreign religion synonymous with a pedophile, anti-Semitic butcher, terrorist, polygamist, and war monger.

It is unfortunate that people mischaracterize the Prophet, but since we know so much about his biography, it is more easy to beat on him then Christ, who is for all intensive purposes seen as a pacifist and asexual wondering sage.

You wrote " asexual wondering sage"

Perhaps you mean WONDEROUS or WANDERING.

I suppose sages such as Socrates and Aristotle WONDER, since Aristotle said "Philosophy begins in wonder."  Such sages were also called "peripatetic" since they WANDERED ABOUT. 

There is supposedly one Hadith that is cited to prove that Muhammed was white (caucasian), in which one person inquires who, among a gathering, is the prophet, and the answer is "that white man over there." But then, white is a subjective and relative notion.  Germanic peoples consider various mediterranean peoples to be "swarthy" or "olive complexioned".

I meant wandering Sitaram . . .

Thanks for this pointing out to me . . .

OmarG uses the term "swarthy" to refer to his father's Sicilian heritage.

But modern day Saudis are not WHITE, they are DARK, most of them are that is.

Salams Gustavo,

No, my wife was born in Brazil, but is Arab and/or Egyptian by ancestry (I’m never sure just how arab some egyptians are, as if the Ancient Egyptians just disappeared and enver contributed any DNA). There’s more Lebanese and thier descendants in Brazil than in Lebanon; wierd! Also, no, she doesn’t wear hijab anymore for a bunch of reasons that, after a while, sound pretty damn good to me now that I’ve gotten over the shock and decided people are more important than a god damn cloth, and people don’t ahve to have a god damn cloth on thier heads to be moral and modest.

- A Salafi in worship, a Sufi in society, a Secularist in government.

Well yes, she is still American hemispherically speaking by birth since in Spanish America refers to everything in the Western Hemisphere.

So she speaks Portuguese then?

Well of course the Arabs never replaced the Berber North Africans, they simply became ethnically Arab through culture and language usage.

The Egytpians are Copts, but by the time of the conquest the Egyptians were Christians and culturally Hellenized.

Though the indigenous peoples of Egypt are Semites of Afro-Asiatic descent who over the course of recent centuries have become “Arabized” but we see a resurgence in “indigenous” pride in one’s ancestry, especially in places like Algeria and Morocco.

That’s the main tension in Islam, the theological impulse to homogenize Muslims coupled with the human drive to self-differentiate.

I don’t think modesty can only be achieved via the veil, to me hijab is more about persoanl demeanor and manners, not merely outward cloth.

You know, maybe you might know, but is the Arabic alphabet derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics?

And even names like Rahman in Arabic for God, could these be linked to the ancient Egyptian worship of Ra (a supreme diety in the Egyptian pantheon and normally associated with the Sun)?

Even the supplication for ending prayer in the Ibrahamic monotheism, Ameen or Amen, could this be a linguistic reference to the Egyptian god Amon who became associated with Ra in the form of Amon-Ra?

Latin America is a magnet for Middle Eastern immigration.

The nation of Suriname is 25% Muslim in South America. There you have Muslims of mostly South and Southeast Asian descent.

The mosques there echo the Mughal period in Indian architecture.