What Country Are My Children Inheriting

A new Supreme Court ruling chips away at birthright citizenship. For families like mine, the promise of America has never felt more fragile—or more worth fighting for.

In the ‘80’s in Queens, New York City

The slurs thrown at me in 1990s New York weren't about being Muslim. Greek, Colombian, and Puerto Rican kids called me "bindi" and "Hindu"—generic insults for anyone who looked South Asian. The irony was lost on them: they thought "Indian" and "Hindu" were damning enough without bothering to learn the difference. My actual faith didn't matter on the street. What mattered was my skin.

That changed after September 11, 2001.

I was seventeen when the towers fell, and suddenly my spiritual identity became a political liability. My mother had started wearing hijab just a year earlier, making our family newly visible in ways we were still learning to navigate. But after 9/11, visibility became danger. We weren’t just immigrants anymore—we were suspects in our own country.

The mysticism and poetry of Islam that ha…