A simple perusal of recent events in the United States reveals that we still have a very long road to travel when it comes to leaving behind unabashed, bald-faced, old-school hatred and bigotry.
One need only witness the frenzied hysteria (and traumatizing police detention) that greeted young Ahmed Mohamed after he innocently brought his homemade clock to school to realize that far too many Americans are comfortable and complacent in regards to the myriad forms of dehumanizing prejudice that transform our fellow citizens from neighbors into fearsome stereotypes to be feared and reviled. The disgraceful fact that in 2015 a candidate for the Republican nomination for President, Dr. Ben Carson, would denigrate our Constitution by stating that a Muslim cannot serve as President just shows how mainstream this monstrous sectarian bigotry – often rooted in fundamentalist Christian supremacy – remains.
Tragically, nowhere is this horrific state of affairs more evident than in the U.S. Armed Forces. As the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the only non-profit solely devoted to defending servicemembers of all faiths and no faith from the predations of religious (usually Christian dominionist) extremists within the armed forces, I’ve seen some of the worst of it: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQ hatred, misogyny, unauthorized and coercive proselytizing, all alongside a seething religious zealotry that seeks to merge the identity of today’s modern American warfighter with the bloodthirsty Christian mercenaries of the Medieval Crusades. Predictably, our Muslim brothers and sisters within the armed forces have seen some of the worst expressions of these tendencies, a subject about which I provided Congressional testimony on Capitol Hill in 2011 and 2014, respectively.
It is for these precise reasons that I’m sharing the following heartfelt letter written by a Muslim-American officer in the U.S. military. All personal details have been removed from the letter, due in no small part to the justified fear of draconian retribution and rapacious reprisal experienced, to some cognizable degree or another, by nearly all Muslim servicemembers. Let this poignant and most moving letter serve as a reminder of the sacrifices borne by our compatriots of the Islamic faith who are so honorably serving and sacrificing in our armed forces, the vast majority of whom remain fervently devoted to the cherished promise of religious freedom and equality that remains embodied by the U.S. Constitution.