Azzi: Free no longer - Dhimmis in America
Last week I drove to Massachusetts to attend an academic gathering, to be followed by dinner with old friends and colleagues. A reunion of sorts, it was wonderful to be there. The topic was engaging and challenging and was enlivened by discourse with a thoughtful group of scholars and friends whom I had not seen since the pandemic so drastically limited our engagements and exchanges.
One million dead Americans later we were back together.
Insurrection. Sedition. Big Lie. Antisemitism. Xenophobia: We were back together.
With shared interests in Middle Eastern politics, energy, security, colonialism, conflict, cultural exchange, and good food, it was wonderful to be back in personal contact - renewing life beyond Zoom - with everyone. My companions included Algerian, Armenian, American, British, Iranian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian students, faculty, consultants, journalists, and investors - an affirmation of the continued presence of pluralistic and creative communities who have helped build this nation since 1619.
I felt embraced by the Beloved Community.
We gather infrequently - perhaps five or six times a year in Metro Boston, and the next time I see them will most certainly be after the Nov. 8 mid-term; perhaps even after the swearing-in of the 118th United States Congress.
After an election I fear bodes poorly for America's democracy.
Regardless of who wins the most votes, the 2022 election will certainly drive the United States not just further from its democratic ideals but closer to becoming a Christian Nationalist state dominated by Americans who believe that white supremacist evangelical Protestants should be at the center of American life and institutions.
Who believe that everyone else - people like me and the Beloved Community - should be second class citizens.
Such was a feeling of foreboding as our evening ended and I looked around the room and wondered about the possibility of a continued shared future for Muslims, Jews, Catholics, non-Born Again Protestants, secular humanists, and so many others in this country committed to the belief that all people are created equal, who believe, as the Qur'an informs us, that “ ...We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another.” (49:13 Asad)
Such is the foreboding I feel as I wonder if the Beloved Community are destined to become dhimmis in the Land of the Free.
Dhimmi were non-Muslims living in Muslim-ruled lands who had fewer legal and social rights than Muslims but, in exchange for paying a special tax, jizya, were promised protection by the state. They did not serve in the military, and who did not have to pay zakat, the obligatory tithing of a Muslim's wealth. The protection of dhimmis was never applied equally from state to state and there were places where non-Muslim subjects faced various forms of institutional discrimination.
Separate, not equal.
Since the 18th century, when America's Founding Fathers imagined a white, Protestant, culturally homogeneous state - built for their benefit and profit by enslaved labor on land stolen from Indigenous peoples upon whom genocide was committed - where only “free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States” were eligible to become naturalized citizens, where the concept of melting pot and assimilation was never meant to include non-Europeans, we have yet to confront the reality of our creation.
Where too many were separate and not equal.
“Conquerors, my son," Emile Habiby wrote in "The Secret life of Saeed," consider as true history only what they have themselves fabricated.”
Rather than confront reality what has today been fabricated is an increasingly accepted colonialist myth based on racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and ignorance designed to disenfranchise, marginalize, and delegitimize the Other.
Separate, not equal.
A narrative that says America should be divided between "America First-ers" and dhimmis, and it is that narrative - not inflation and crime, not mortgage rates and fossil fuels - that underlies this election.
A narrative driven by people who think of themselves as avatars of glory and virtue who believe, as Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in 1782, that " ... What, then, is the American, this new man? He is either a European or the descendant of a European ... The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared."
They never considered this "new man" might be my father, an olive-skinned 9-year-old Semite from the south of what is today Lebanon who was sent, alone, to America by his family because they thought he - and perhaps they - would have a chance of a better life than their marginal existence under Ottoman rule.
He made it.
Most people don't choose to be immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented travelers. Most are desperate sojourners who don't expect to witness their children die, as did Alan Kurdi, on a Mediterranean shore en route to Europe.
My father made it, as have I, and in his memory I will again vote in two days.
I will not be voting against the lies, the deceits, the calumnies and violence being visited upon America by seditionists and insurrectionists, by liars and Christian supremacists who want to reduce the Other to dhimmis, against unqualified, ignorant people, whose loyalty is not to America or democracy but to a cult of hatred and bigotry.
I won't vote against them because they have removed themselves beyond the realm of consideration of what it means to live in a democracy.
They are not worthy of consideration.
I will, however, be voting for the Promise of America; for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness for all Americans - All Americans.
They are worthy.
Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: Free no longer - Dhimmis in America
