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My brother, who lives in Brooklyn, recently discovered that many of his Muslim friends in New York felt that the Islamic cultural center was a bad idea to begin with, for this sole reason: it was going to put them in danger. He and his friends feel a fear that they haven’t in ages, or ever.

During our late-night calls, my brother and I talk about nothing but what’s on the news, and we laugh a lot, but we laugh nervously. My sense of humor, honed in my immigrant childhood, was always my ultimate disarming mechanism, a handy way to infuse the blues with some off color.

This was my modus operandi during a book tour in 2007, when 90 percent of my Q-and-A’s were about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s notorious president, as my publication date coincided with his infamous visit to Columbia University. It was annoying and even baffling, because it had nothing to do with me or the book. But I laughed and joked with the audience so that it was clear to them I was, like, totally un-Ahmadinejad, dudes.

The hilarity started to curdle at the moment I was also feeling the most euphoric: during Mr. Obama’s bid for the presidency. It was around then that I began murdering whole days on the Internet, and not just on the Internet but in its dirty basement, the comments sections of blogs. There, an angry tribe of fake names spoke in misspelled obscenities and declaimed the true, evil nature of Middle Easterners and their intentions in this country. This is silly, I’d tell myself, these trolls aren’t representative of my neighbors or of Americans.

Then I’d go on Facebook, and engage in more online warfare with friends of friends, real flesh-and-blood people with real-life names, who a bit more politely and grammatically stated the same. And there was me — a non-Muslim, who has publicly criticized certain Islamic practices — flaccidly battling for Muslims worldwide. It got to the point that I was telling people I didn’t even know that their opinions were making my life downright “unlivable.”

It reminds me of how I used to experience so many mixed emotions when I’d see women in full burqa in Brooklyn: alarm at the spectacle (no matter how many times I’d seen it), followed by a certain feminist irk, and finally discomfiture at our cultural kinship. And then it would all turn into one strong emotion — protective rage — when I’d see a group of teenagers laughing and pointing at them.

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Every day, I lose America and America loses me, more and more. But I should still be in my honeymoon phase, since I’m actually just a 9-year-old American. And that’s my other association with autumn 2001. As luck would have it, my citizenship papers finally went through not long after the towers fell. That November, I was in a Brooklyn federal courtroom singing, along with a room full of immigrants, the national anthem that I hadn’t sung since K through 12.

I remember on that day, 9/11 leaving the foreground of my mind for the first time. I remember looking around that room and feeling, in spite of myself, a sense of optimism about the future. I remember feeling a part of something. I remember feeling thrilled at the official introduction of the hyphen that would from now on gracefully declare and demarcate my two worlds: Middle-Eastern-American. The same hyphen that today feels like a dagger that coarsely divides had once, not too long ago at all, been a symbol of a most hallowed bond.