His name is Mohammed Naseehu Ali. He now teaches creative writing at NYU. He came to America from Ghana to spend three years at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, and then attended Bennington College.
What is more unusual is his background, and what his father thought about America. You can read about that in a piece posted yesterday at The New Yorker, titled My Muslim Father’s Faith in America.
You will learn in that piece that his father was the emir of Ghana’s Muslim Zongo people. You will further learn that he came to the US in 1988, during a period of time of great hostility between Ghana and the United States, after Jerry Rawlings seized power in 1982 and tilted the country more towards the Soviet Union. After a leak exposed an intended coup to overthrow Rawlings
Ghanaians were all but mandated to hate the United States, the No. 1 enemy of the People’s Revolutio.
I want to share two things, one is a paragraph about his own experience, the other where he writes what his father told him when he went home in 1991, the year he began at Bennington.
Here is his experience:
For much of the three years I spent at high school in Michigan, I experienced the ambivalence that most people from the so-called Third World feel toward the United States. I was seduced by the glamour, the coolness, and even the excesses of American culture, yet irked by the country’s military might, its enormous wealth, and, especially, by the manner in which it flaunted both around the world. My negative impressions of Americans themselves—as greedy, selfish, and arrogant—were consistently undermined, meanwhile, by the people I met at school. Knowing I was far away from home, students would compete to invite me to their homes during Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Eventually, a woman who worked in the admissions office practically adopted me, offering me room and board and the same love and affection she and her husband gave their two daughters. To this day, I call Janice Crockett “Mom”; my three children call her “Grandma Michigan.”
I’d like to comment on this. The Interlochen Arts Academy recently celebrated 50 years of existence having begun in the 1962-63 school year. I was invited, as a high school senior, to be part of that first year, which for a variety of reasons my family and I turned down. I had spent 8 summers at what was then the National Music Camp in Interlochen — 1954-60 and 1962. The camp opened in 1928. as the result of other endeavors by its major founder, Joe Maddy. My time at Interlochen was very seminal in shaping me from my childhood, and I am still in contact with people I first met there all the way back to that first summer in 1954. It has always been a welcoming community. The kinds of warmth Ali describes was very much a part of my experience, and while I have not been back in more than 50 years, those I know who have stayed more connected than I can very much vouch for that sense. I have seen similar kinds of things throughout my life while at college, in various communities in which I have lived, in the various religious communities in which I have participated. It is part of what is best about America.
So in a sense reading that paragraph did not surprise me. It also did not prepare me from what I read about Ali’s father.
Allow me to offer two paragraphs where Ali quotes his father explaining why he had been sent to be educated in America. Remember, his father was a leader of a Muslim community:
“Allah has blessed that country,” he told me. Knowing that such declarations were usually preludes to lengthier reflection, I assumed a ruminative posture and waited for him to continue. “One must wonder why Allah chose to bestow such abundance of wealth and glory on a nation of unbelievers,” he said. “Remember, they don’t worship Allah; they don’t pray five times a day like we do. And yet Allah continues to bestow his blessings on their country.” The reason, he said, was very simple: Americans were the ones doing Allah’s work, by steadfastly upholding the Islamic tenet of zakat—a form of alms-giving that makes up one of the Five Pillars of Islam. “Their government welcomes people who are seeking a better life,” my father said. “They shield and protect the weak, the poor, and the persecuted from all over the world, and, the most important of all, they support orphans and protect the rights of women, as instructed by the Prophet Muhammad in his last sermon.”
Father was quick to remind me that, despite the enmity between the Reagan Administration and Ghana’s military leadership, “it was America, and not Saudi Arabia,” that sent shiploads of food to Ghanaians during the famine that struck our country in 1982. I was only twelve at the time, yet the image of bags of rice and corn and canned Dutch cheese, delivered to our local mosque with “U.S.A.I.D. FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE” emblazoned in blue and red, remained vivid in my memory. “All of these are good deeds we Muslims are required to practice, but we have allowed the Americans and Europeans to lead in this effort,” my father said. “And that’s why they are blessed with peace and prosperity while we are afflicted with social distress and civil strife all over the Muslim world. If you think deeper, you’ll realize that Americans are the true followers of the Islamic doctrine of peace, charity, and respect for human dignity.”
I have taught many Muslim students. It is obvious from my last name I am of Jewish background. Despite the hostility over Israel for many, and the US support for Israel, that has never been a barrier to warmth from my students and their families towards me.
It is also I think instructive in reading this peace for Americans to grasp how much of what we value is considered important in Islam, a religion about which so few know anything except how it can be distorted. We have far more in common, if we are good people, with the vast majority of Muslims than most Americans realize.
Go read the entire piece. There is more.
Peace.
Shalom.
Sala’am.