Something that immediately stood out to me in the book was how the immigrant Muslims in the community felt a superiority to the established African Americans of the Mosque. “Meanwhile, earnest young Dawah members like the Shamys attended juma at Masjid Salam and felt free to tell the Afro-American brethren how to run things, despite the fact that, as far as the number of years in Islam went, many of the birth-Muslims hadn’t been awakened to their Islamic consciousness any earlier than the converts had converted” (31). It’s similar to what Karim wrote about how they looked for a purer “true” Islam, and looked down on the African American communities. This is also apparent in the briefly mentioned conflict between the majority Sunnis and the Shias, as well as most people mentioned in the novel, as all of them are different in some way, though connected through Islam. Khadra’s mother views Americans as undignified, uncultured, dirty, and overall sinful. Cleanliness comes up throughout the novel, and it is driven often by her. She sobs, “We are not Americans!” (67), driven by her fear that her children might be hurt in this seemingly “foreign” land, something which becomes all the more real when we learn of Zuhura’s murder and rape, as well as the constant bullying and threats that the Muslim community faces. It was also interesting how the police wrongfully suspected her husband in the name of fighting “honor killings” and “Islamic suppression of women”. This is such an accurate portrayal of how America pretends to care about oppressed minorities or suffering people around the world when they are often at the root of their suffering and only doing so to further their political agenda.
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