What to Tell Your Muslim Daughters (and Sons)

I can't imagine what it must be like to be a Muslim child or a Muslim parent today.

How do I share with [my American Muslim daughter] that one of [her new president's] signature policy plans was to prevent her grandparents, her cousins, her uncles and aunts – basically every single Muslim relative of hers living abroad – from entering the US purely on the basis of their religion? (The notorious “Muslim ban” proposal is still up on his website after having temporarily disappeared the day after the election.)

How do I break it to her that the “ban” isn’t the only Trump proposal to brazenly discriminate against peaceful, law-abiding Muslims? That the president-elect has also said that my daughter and other Muslim Americans have to be registered on a database and, when asked by a reporter how his proposal differed from the Nazi registry of German Jews, he replied: “You tell me.”

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I can’t put it off much longer. At some stage soon I have to have the conversation with my daughter that all Muslim parents dread. The “Islamophobia conversation”. The discussion in which you have to ask your child to be restrained, to be careful when they talk about their faith and their beliefs in public because, unbeknown to them, there are people out there who see them as a threat; who fear Muslims and loathe Islam.

How do I tell her that one of those people now includes her own president?

  Mehdi Hasan

In the 21st century.  In America