A People Still Unbroken
Stories of hate, love, and the complexities of nations.
“Where are you from?”
This question usually flummoxes. Asking such a general question implies you’re expecting a simple answer. But most people who get asked that question don’t have a simple answer to give.
Rais Bhuiyan was flummoxed, and his confusion saved his eyesight. He was being robbed, he thought, for the third time in as many months working in a gas station convenience store in Dallas, Texas. When a man had walked in and pointed a gun at his face, Bhuiyan had immediately offered him all the cash in the register. But the man didn’t take the money. Instead, he asked the question.
Bhuiyan had too many possible responses, none of which came tripping off the tongue. He’d grown up in Bangladesh. But he hadn’t come to Dallas from Bangladesh, he’d come from New York City. He’d imagined himself as a New Yorker for years, and then finally won the visa lottery and a voluntary dismissal by Bangladesh’s air force, allowing him to come study tech with a path to permanent residency. He wanted to work in computers. New York had been everything he’d imagined…except he’d imagined he’d be able to afford to live there. After a little under a year, he accepted an old schoolmate’s offer to become a partner in his Dallas gas station, which he thought would make it easier to finish his studies.
Dallas was different. Better, in most ways, but not all. Cops would stop by the store for the chance to talk to a real live Muslim. To them, that was where he was from. He was a Muslim immigrant.
And were they wrong? Muslims use the word أُمَّة, ummah, to refer to all Muslims, collectively. Arabic-speakers in general use it to mean “nation”—e.g. it’s part of the Arabic translation of “United Nations.” So Bhuiyan was “from” the nation of Islam. The only problematic part of “from” is that it implies, maybe, that he’d left it. He hadn’t.
“Where are you from?”
Bhuiyan looked off to the side, struggling to find the words. Here. New York. Bangladesh. The Air Force. God. When the shotgun blast came, that look to the side meant that he only lost one eye. His interrogator was Mark Anthony Stroman, who was emphatically from Dallas. It was ten days after the September 11th attacks, and Stroman was out for revenge on all Arabs. Bhuiyan was the only one of his three victims to survive. None of them were Arabs.
Decoupling Nations and States
Until I started reading Daniel Boyarin1, I don’t remember ever thinking about the word “nation-state.” I should’ve, because I’m a programmer. In coding and systems design, we try to avoid “tight couplings,” where two distinct things become hard to change independently of each other. It could be convenient, if you had a very specific routine, to wire your bathroom so that the same switch turns on the lights and the shower. But we don’t do that, because that turns into a bigger inconvenience if you ever want to have one on and the other off.
A state is laws and power. A nation is people with some kind of bond. The citizenry of any large enough state is a nation, because that’s a powerful bond. But it’s not the only kind, and therefore a nation can outlive a state. If the United States ceased to exist, I’d still be an American.
And it’s pretty evident that you can be part of more than one nation at a time. That’s kind of the point of federalism. I don’t know whether all of the 50 states are nations, but New York and Texas sure are.
“Where are you from?” flummoxes because it’s mainly a question about nations. You rarely need to ask “are you subject to the laws of this place where we’re standing?” Bhuiyan and Stroman were subject to Texas state law, because that’s where they were. (Unfortunately for both, as it turned out.) Nations are complex, overlapping and shifting. Their borders aren’t always well-defined, either.
Different nations have different immigration processes. To become a Muslim or a New Yorker, you just have to declare that you are. Muslims call this “reverting” rather than “converting,” because everybody was born Muslim. New Yorkers, famously, secretly believe that anyone who doesn’t live in New York is, “in some sense, kidding.” The exact duration and boundaries of the residency requirement are controversial. In the Updike scene that line comes from, the people “kidding” are living where I’m living now, which is in New York State and has people with “New York accents.”
Becoming a Jew or a Texan is different. Some physical traits outside of your control can make it a little easier or harder—were you circumcised as a baby? Do you look like what your county thinks a Texan looks like? But either way, it’s a long, arduous process. According to one immigration requirement, you need to walk there over spikes.
The nation of America is too big to have lists like this. Thankfully, most of the country doesn’t have caltrops lying around, but that does mean we can’t use them as a rite of passage. We can only really feasibly define America by reference to the state, which makes it difficult to do anything useful with. We spend more of our time living in smaller, more particular nations.
Separatism
Mark Stroman, the shooter, thought he had a simple identity. He was from Dallas. He was a True American. And he was White. People like that, from the stepfather who beat him as a child to the woman who married him when he was 15, were his people.
In that simplicity, he thought then, was strength. Strength of body, mind, and character. People trying to complicate his identity were a threat. He’d been a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas for a whole lot longer than the ten days since the attacks. A foreigner, he wrote, was someone “whose own people had now sought to bring the exact same chaos and bewilderment upon our people and society as they lived in themselves at home and abroad.” The clerk at the register wasn’t really an immigrant, to Stroman. He was a foreigner living abroad, literally taking Texans’ money. When he asked him where he was from, the clerk’s momentary look of bewilderment was all the answer he needed. Anybody who didn’t know how to answer that question lived in chaos.
Separatism is the most instinctive response, the simplest answer, to the realization that other people nearby aren’t like you. “They shouldn’t be.” You can’t count on them sharing your values, which makes them a threat. You can’t count on them sharing your language, which makes them a burden. They need to be assimilated, expelled, or killed.
Or you need to escape, or carve out an enclave. As Malcolm X put it in a speech at Michigan State University,
We don't go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything. You have yours and you control yours; we have ours and we control ours.
By this, he didn’t mean Liberia, necessarily. He cited New York City’s Chinatown as a model of a healthy separation. The difference between Chinatown and a ghetto, to him, was that Chinatown had more money, power, and autonomy.
Separatism isn’t inherently violent, but the logic of it seems to lead inexorably to violence. Malcolm X wanted things for the Black community that their oppressors weren’t willing to just give them. Or if you escape, if you create your own separate community far away…well, there’s a fantasy of nonviolence, but the reality is that wherever you go, you’ll find foreigners already living there. At which point, you either abandon separatism or you abandon nonviolence.
Separatism by the majority, of course, is always about genocide, no matter what hood it’s hiding under. When Stroman saw the towers fall, he saw an excuse to purge Dallas of all foreigners. They’d drawn first blood, so now he could be justified in doing what was best for his nation.
Escape To New York
Separatism isn’t the only way to seek safety. In the twenty years after 2001, the percentage of residents of the New York metro area who practiced Islam tripled, according to some rough estimates (the U.S. Census doesn’t ask). In the rest of America, Dallas included, the percentage doubled. It’s a testament to how much opportunity there is in America, and especially New York. We’re so rich, and so welcoming, that even during our nastiest peaks of Islamophobia, Muslims still came here, and still thrived.
Bhuiyan, who turned 50 last year, is one of them. He was strong, in the ways that actually mattered. He played dead until Stroman left, then leapt to his feet. With shot embedded all over half of his face, he stayed upright through sheer force of will, convinced that if he passed out, he’d never make it to a hospital. He ran to the barbershop next door and asked them to call an ambulance, then, as he puts it, “ran around screaming in the parking lot” until it arrived, then ran to it, having already removed some clothing to save the paramedics time. He kept himself awake in the ambulance by reciting the Quran. Only once he was actually in the hospital, five hours after the assault, did he allow himself to lose consciousness.
The following six months of recovery cost him all of his savings and then some, his fiancée, the use of one of his eyes, and the green card he’d otherwise have been able to claim. He didn’t understand why this had happened, and why he’d survived. So, when he was financially and physically able, he undertook the hajj, and his life changed again.
A year after he made that speech about separation, Malcolm X, too, had made the pilgrimage to Mecca expected of all Muslims. He returned with a new vision. While there, he wrote
In fact all I have seen and experienced on this pilgrimage as forced me to “re-arrange” much of thoughts pattern and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This “adjustment to reality” wasn’t to difficult for me to undergo, because despite my firm conviction in whatever I believe, I have always tried to keep an open mind, which is absolutely necessary to reflect the flexibility that must go hand in hand with anyone with intelligent quest for truth never comes to an end.
(A lot of other great thinkers say this too. It’s a mindset I aspire to, but struggle with.)
Once home, he said this in a press conference:
When I was on the pilgrimage I had close contact with Muslims whose skin within America be classified as white, and with Muslims who are themselves would be classified as white in America but these particular Muslims didn't call themselves white. They looked upon themselves as human beings, as part of the human family and therefore they looked upon all other segments of the human family as part of that same family. Now, they had a different look or different air or different attitude than that which is reflected in the attitude of the man in America who calls himself white. So I said that if Islam had done that for them perhaps if the white man in America would study Islam perhaps it could do the same thing for him.
His immediate agenda, and most of his beliefs about the best methods for it, didn’t change much. Nobody outside his community could be trusted, right now—allying with other minorities was like “running away from the wolf right into the arms of the fox.” Integration efforts didn’t seem like they were likely to bear fruit any time soon—if we can’t get integration right in New York City, he said in that conference, we can’t get it right anywhere in America. But in the future, who knew? He’d seen how diverse his Muslim brothers were, and he’d spoken to African leaders too. Africans know a thing or two about pluralism, its challenges, and overcoming them. Some day, maybe, we’d get it right.
Many of our models for pluralist societies come from Islam, which was founded in diaspora. Finding Mecca insufficiently tolerant of his beliefs, Muhammed emigrated to Medina. With the Arab and Jewish tribes there (possibly after killing or driving out some), he created the Constitution of Medina—defining in careful detail the terms of their federation. He wasn’t there as a colonizer. Each member tribe was free to remain as culturally and economically distinct as it wanted. Crimes committed between tribes were to be met with justice via binding arbitration. But, the Constitution is careful to point out, that justice is about the criminal, not the tribe. Tribes were not to be punished as a group for the actions of some members. If anyone attacked a tribe as a whole, all the others pledged to come to its defense.
The federation as a whole is referred to as an ummah in that text. It was meant to be a nation that contained other nations.
It didn’t last long—a few historians doubt it ever existed. This is not some alternate, or alternative, history where Jews and Muslims coexisted peacefully and averted centuries of feuds and wars. But it wasn’t forgotten, either. Almost every version of Islamic law that came after had some kind of provision granting rights and quasi-independence to Jews, and later to Christians. It wasn’t always honored, and it was rarely, if ever, full equality. But it was pluralist.
And sometimes it worked. We can tell how pluralist New York City is by watching Muslims, during some of their worst years in this country, preferring the scene of the crime for which revenge was being taken on their entire tribe. In the same way, we can look at historical Jews, and see them fleeing Christian states for Muslim ones. Jews immigrated to Spain when it was Muslim, then fled when it was conquered by Christians. If you can’t get equality, legal protection is much better than nothing.
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: the most stable safe haven is a pluralist one, not a separatist one. Historically, separatist nations are conquered by empires, because empires can grow and they can’t. That’s if they survive the pretty fundamental tension between wanting to be homogenous and there being other people wherever they go. But anywhere that takes in Muslim refugees today would take in Jewish refugees tomorrow.
Why is this the story God chose for me?
Rais Bhuiyan, scarred and lost, came to Mecca with a more personal question than Malcom X had. It’s a familiar one, expressed also in a traditional Jewish song Boyarin translates in The No-State Solution.
Mai ko mashma lon my life?
What does it teach us?
Our youth is rotten and withered,
And we become old before our time.
We eat at others’ tables and wash it down with tears.
Boyarin doesn’t consider the first few words to be fully captured by any English translation, usually “What is the meaning of…” The phrase is drawn directly, he says, from the Aramaic phrase Gemoro loshn, which is used in the Talmud to transition from a story to its moral. “Why is this the story I’m being told? What am I meant to learn from it, that I could not have learned if anything had been different?”
Why had Bhuiyan been shot? Why had he survived, and with his good looks marred, among many other losses? What was this experience for?
The answer he received makes me think of a dream I once had. I was born in New York City, but I wasn’t living there when the towers fell. Still, I sometimes have nightmares about it, which I doubt is unusual anywhere in America. In this one, I was standing in an office high-rise, watching an explosion race toward me, knowing it was too late to run. I thought, as I think in real life when basically anything bad happens, “this is my fault. I could have stopped this, or at least saved myself.” Then I woke up, in a hospital. My face was badly burned, but my hands were intact—I’d instinctively protected them. I thought, still dreaming, “It’s good to know this, about my true self. My hands are what I value.”
What Bhuiyan still had was love. Why else would this story be worth telling? If he was supposed to take vengeance, why was his killer already caught and headed for Death Row? If he’d survived to live a normal life, why had it happened at all? This had happened so that he could forgive it. This had happened so that he could help the world heal.
Starting with Mark Stroman.
The People of the Book
Mark Stroman was caught, but not before killing Vasudev Patel, a U.S. citizen and a Hindu, and his enemy all the same. He was planning on shooting up a mosque next.
But what others had found on the hajj, Stroman found on Death Row. Sentenced to death, treated terribly, he watched the people in neighboring cells suffer the same fate. He watched them plead for mercy, and be taken to their deaths anyway. It was impossible not to empathize with them. Even though many of them weren’t White, weren’t “from here.” Even though many of their tormenters were.
Stroman blogged about it by mail. Spitting in defiance, at first. Gradually, evolving. I’ve always found this the most horrifying part of the idea of an inescapable Hell—the very moment you directly perceive the true reality of the world is also the moment when it’s too late. Stroman was working his way towards redemption. Anyone could see it. But he’d committed a capital crime in the state of Texas. It was too late. In his nightmares, he saw the fires of Hell coming for him while the poison was injected.
Rais Bhuiyan tried to save him anyway. He organized an international campaign. Then he learned about a Texas law granting rights to victims, including “the right to request victim-offender mediation coordinated by the victim services division of the department” (the tenth clause of Article 56A.051 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure). He formally made this request, including a note that as he could not have mediation if the offender was dead, the execution needed to be postponed.
The law was pretty clearly intended to promote vengeance, not mercy. The legislators were trying to empower victims to demand restitution, and to be present at important court dates to argue against clemency. Bhuiyan hoped the letter of the law mattered more than the intent. This is a common attitude among Americans. Especially, I suspect, people who grew up being taught that the exact phrasing of the laws in the Torah or the Quran was what mattered. The People of the Book. If it’s a perfect book, all the loopholes and surprising implications must be there by design, for us to find and use.
But that’s rarely how states actually operate. I served on a grand jury once in Brooklyn, voting on indictments in maybe twenty different cases. There, the accused has basically no rights. The only lawyer in the room is the prosecutor. They would fulfill their legal requirement to read us the literal text of the law in question, then have us vote on whether a violation of it was implied if you believed all the evidence presented. Sometimes, it blatantly wasn’t. A prosecutor would read a law about “assault with a sharp object,” and then present evidence about an attack with a blunt object. When I’d point this out, they’d shrug. “Sharp object, blunt object, whatever” is in my memory a direct quote. Some of the other jurors had the same attitude as the officers of the law, enough that I didn’t win all of these battles. The only juror who reliably agreed with me wore a yamaka.
Texas denied Bhuiyan his rights, because he wasn’t using them the way they wanted. Part of the official ruling read, as these rulings often do, like this:
[W]e dismiss the application as an abuse of the writ without considering the merits of the claims.
Brotherhood of Man (for whatever that means)
In 1777, representatives of thirteen nations wrote another federated constitution, very similar in wording and intent to the one at Medina. They wrote and signed it in Philadelphia, a city named, very intentionally, for the Greek for “brotherhood.” (There’s a very stupid part of me that thinks if I point out that “adelphia” is closer to the Ancient Greek for “sister,” often used in a gender-neutral way, than the one for “brother,” sexism will be ended forever).
Brotherhood is an ancient and natural way to describe a bond. Growing up along with someone, as I can personally attest, can create a uniquely powerful kind of philos. When you declare someone else your brother, you’re promising to act as though you you’ve known, and loved, each other all your lives. Stroman, struggling in court to justify his sense that he was entitled to take vengeance for killings a thousand miles away, invented (probably) an imaginary sister who had died in one of the towers.
Organizations that call themselves “brotherhoods” are automatically at least a little scary—an all-male nation that sees itself as different from you in important ways. 1964 saw the creation of both the Aryan Brotherhood and Stan Lee’s fictional Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, for example. For a third example, the Muslim Brotherhood is, at minimum, a popular target of conspiracy theories. Brotherhood is good vibes, until you see an adjective in front of it that doesn’t describe you. Or until you start seeing the word itself as too gendered to include you.
Stroman, though, lived in the nation of the condemned, which cuts across race, religion, and gender. With a month to live, he shared a poem he’d been sent, written by Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jew, while she waited to be executed by the Nazis who had captured her. It’s not her most famous poem, just a few lines jotted down in a cell. (Her most famous poem, written in safety before she decided to come back and fight, starts with “Eli, Eli”). This poem spoke to him, at the level of bluntness and simplicity he needed. Here’s how it appears on his blog:
One…Two…Three…Eight feet long…
Two strides across…the rest is dark…
Life is a fleeting question mark.
One…Two…Three…Maybe another week,
or the next month may find me here,
But Death, I feel is very near.
I would have been 23 next July,
I gambled on what mattered most,
The dice were cast, I lost!
When he learned about Bhuiyan’s efforts, his circle of empathy grew again. The two exchanged letters, in which Stroman begged for his victim to forgive him, and it was only then that Bhuiyan realized he had. He’d forgiven him years ago, he wrote. He just hadn’t realized it. Forgiveness isn’t a conversion. It’s a reversion, to the natural state of love.
On the day Stroman was executed, the two spoke over phone. Bhuiyan said “I never hated you.” Stroman said “I love you, bro.” Bhuiyan cried.
Nationalism Without Separatism
The last thing Stroman wrote, that same day, is worth reading in full, but here are some excerpts.
Amongst a world full of hate the power of love and friendship will prevail…and I’m proud as ever to have had the chance in this life to see both sides of the coin.
From Iran to Brazil and almost every other country in the world has responded with words of love and support. Every race of mankind, several types of faith and religious beliefs have entered into my zone of death…and the one message that all of these different people are saying is awesome and speaks of the power of this story….of Forgiveness, worldwide peace and how this story of death has some way changed the views of the reader…that’s powerful folks.
….from all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world but only these two, the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. With all that said let me say farewell to all and should I be granted a Stay and handed back a chance of life, I will return with a story that will be even more powerful. Still Unbroken…Texas Loud & Texas Proud… True American Mark Stroman 2011
He’d held on to most of his identity. He’d always said he’d love America, and be a Texan, even if Texas killed him, and that’s what happened. He’d held on, also, to the idea that the world was divided into good people and evil people, his brothers and his jailers. He just no longer thought you could tell which was which just by looking, or by asking where they were from. But he still felt like he knew where he was from, and that it was important.
It may be an essential aspect of a nation, Boyarin suggests, that membership is mostly not by choice. There need to be obstacles to immigration, at least for adults, and/or to emigration. He argues that this is the point of infant circumcision for Jews. You were born as one of us, it says. Your consent was not required, and it still isn’t. Nationalities happen to you, and you learn from them. The first and most important lesson is always that you are connected to others. After that, the lessons diverge. Every nation has its own, unique teachings.
Nations with useful lessons, then, can be assets worth preserving. And worth spreading. They should not be coupled to places, genetics, or states. Nation-states, Boyarin argues, should not exist, and I think I agree. The identity they create is too large, and too awkward. We can have states and nations without conflating them.
He argues that this is historically how Jews viewed their diaspora—not an exile, but as the intentional founding of colonies. Colonies that were not states, and were not separate. They were meant to intersect with other nations. Not assimilation or conquest, but dual citizenship.
It’s easier to make this case for the Muslim diaspora, which he does as well. Diasporas are all very different, he says, and it’s problematic even to analogize them. But, in his formulation, they’re “good for thinking” about each other. “Let there arise out of you a nation,” says the Quran, “who invites to goodness.” It’s a commandment to engage in diasporic nationalism, and in that it can act as a model.
Bhuiyan, like Stroman, remained a Texan. He wasn’t one of those who escaped to New York, or to Bangladesh. He didn’t want his story to be that of a victim. Plus, Texas was hot like he was used to, and he’d grown up watching westerns. He finished his studies, with help from a Texan Islamic community, and had the career in tech he wanted. He also started an organization called World Without Hate, and these days it’s that work that defines him. As much as he can, he spends his days promoting empathy. His latest major work, the documentary "Pain and Peace," has interviews with the victims and the perpetrators of hate crimes. “This person could be a white supremacist, could be an extremist, but still he's a human being,” Bhuiyan is quoted as saying. “His action did not cancel his humanness.”
Humanity is the only nation from which it is impossible to emigrate.
Sorry about writing a post with two such similar surnames, Bhuiyan and Boyarin. I didn’t notice the problem until I was committed. The two names were both originally titles of nobility, in different cultures, but I don’t think we know whether or not they’re true cognates.