I Will Never Forget…
I will never forget the look on my English professor’s face when he started class on 9/13/2001. On 9/11, his class was in session when the attacks occurred, and none of us found out until the next period, when it was announced that classes had been canceled for the rest of the day (and the next day too). Class resumed on Thursday.
My English professor was an Iranian Muslim.
The look on his face that morning was a profoundly moving combination of fear and shame. He sat up at the front of the class of around 20 students and dazedly stared at a fixed point on his desk until it was time to begin class. He slowly rose to his feet, and raised his head. He eventually spoke, slowly and quietly. “I am sorry, for what has happened,” he said. “I hope that all your friends and families are safe.”
He said this while facing the class, and looking at the class, but without making eye contact with any one person in the room. He was not a traditional Muslim by any means. He dressed in Western clothes and subscribed to a mildly socialist, Western enlightenment political view. Two of our readings dealt with the issue of equality for women. He had no reason to think that we regarded him as a subscriber to the extremist views of the 9/11 terrorists.
Still, there was that look in his eyes. I saw in that expression shame… shame that people had committed such atrocities in the name of his religion. I also saw fear… fear that we would not be able, or not be willing to distinguish extremist Muslims from moderate Muslims. When he said that he was sorry for what had happened, it didn’t seem as if he was empathizing with us, but rather apologizing on behalf of someone else. I remember that I very much wanted to tell him that I didn’t blame him in the least, but it didn’t seem appropriate. He hadn’t explicitly said what he communicated to us, and I didn’t want to detract from his message’s humble subtlety.
Part of the semester’s assignment was a series of open topic short essays. He stressed that they should be informal… merely a stream of consciousness taken down on paper. My first essay dealt with the distinction between Muslim extremists and ordinary Muslims. He did not return our essays, as they were not a graded on their content. Still, I think he got the message.
