by Hamid Dabashi

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

On the evening of November 13, I flew back from Gwangju, South Korea – where I was invited to participate in Gwangju Biennale – to JFK airport in New York. Upon exiting the airplane I was met by two CBP (US Customs and Border Protection) agents who collected my passport and escorted me to their headquarters at the airport. I was then asked to empty all my pockets, and my small handbag was thoroughly searched. The agent in charge then picked a number of items in my possession – including my credit card receipts, driver’s license, Columbia University ID, iPhone, iPad, and a handbook in which I write my various notes.

“Have you ever been with us,” one of the two officers asked me at the airplane door. No sir, I said. They had come all the way to the very door of the plane, and were looking at people’s passports until they reached me and the instant they had me, they let the others pass unhindered. They were obviously looking for me. This was no random search. This was a deliberate and targeted search for me.

I was made to sit down while the CBP officers filled out forms for which they asked me detailed questions including my parents’ names, my height, weight, the colour of my hair and eyes, my home address, etc. Then photocopies of the items the officers had taken from me were made – including a full photocopy of my notebook in which I write anything from the daily chores I need to do, to the outline of a lecture I have to give to my class, the outline of my columns for Al Jazeera or other venues, and the outlines of arguments for more extended essays or even books. It is the closest thing a writer has to a Catholic confessional box – I pray, I play, and I think in the notebook.

He was a federal officer, standing over my tired bones and heavily jetlagged body with a gun and a handcuff and the full authority to do with me what he pleased. I was homo sacer incarnate, reduced to my zoë, full of fear and loathing – how could I grant or deny him “consent?”

After almost three hours, I was given back these items, was escorted to the exit, and was told by the accompanying officer that this was perhaps a case of mistaken identity. He also gave me a Homeland Security brochure which informed me as to how I might request a redress of the procedure to which I had just been subjected.

Travelling while Muslim

I make a note of this event because I am not the only Muslim being thus harassed when travelling from and to the US – a country I have called “home” for more decades than the entire lifetime of the officers who were interrogating me – as I told them so, and they did, in fact, acknowledge. “Getting through United States airports and border crossings,” according to a recent New York Times, report, “has grown more difficult for everyone since the terrorist attacks of September 11. But Muslim Americans say they are having a harder time than most, sometimes facing an intimidating maze of barriers, if not outright discrimination. Advocacy groups have taken to labelling their predicament ‘travelling while Muslim’, and accuse the government of ignoring a serious erosion of civil rights.”

Against these discriminatory behaviours, Muslims are taking collective action through various civil liberty venues. But I believe public awareness is the single most important course of action for us – and sharing the moral and psychological damages we and our families have to endure every time we face such ordeals.

Public awareness is our only haven

As soon as I came home I sent out an email informing a number of my friends, family, and colleagues of this incident – Kafkaesque incarnate – and the following day, I posted a note on my Facebook page and shared the incident with the wider world.

I have no idea what might have triggered this incident. Over the last almost 40 years that I have lived in the US, nothing like this has happened to me. I have no reason to believe or disbelieve the officer’s assertion that this might be a case of mistaken identity. The officer who was copying my notebook and who happened to be Muslim, asked me if I were critical of Israel – for, he said, he had seen “this happening before”.

Perhaps a warning of what was about to happen, or perhaps not, was when I received my boarding pass from Korea Air at JFK, I was given a “SSSS” designation, which I understand stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection”, and meant an intrusive and far tighter screening by the security officers before I entered the gate areas. The same thing happened to me on my way back from Seoul to JFK. Initially, I thought that this was perhaps a random designation by the airline’s computer, but for sure, the agents at the airplane door could not have been from the airline.

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Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author most recently of Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (Harvard University Press, 2011).

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

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