Laith Saud, 38, was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1978, and immigrated to Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1979. Today he’s a visiting assistant professor of religion with a focus on Islamic studies at DePaul University, and the coauthor of An Introduction to Islam in the 21st Century. Here he describes how his hyphenated identity shifted his perception of America—and what he describes as its propaganda—during the first Gulf War, and what it’s been like to witness the rise of Islamophobia and xenophobia in the age of Donald Trump.
As Iraqis, our whole family became more critical of everything. Dinner revolved around discussion on politics and current events in Iraq, and I was suddenly seeing my father [then president of the Islamic Center of Fort Wayne] do media and television interviews to speak out as a representative of Iraq. Politics became the focus of my own conversations with friends. I can recall being 12 years old and talking about the war with my Christian friend, Mike, from Jordan. We were just children, and suddenly geopolitics were shaping the destinies of our lives.
I thought about how these individuals would be as violent as ISIS if you put them in a different social context, such as in Iraq or Syria. If your brain is already there, [and] you live in a society where there is no rule of law and violence everywhere, and you are susceptible to threats of violence, what separates them is environment—not ideology.
