veiled4allah: U.S. no longer a haven

I am in receipt of three different invitations to join American academic institutions. This should have meant spending the whole of the current academic year in the United States. In this era where Muslims are faced with a widening intellectual desert at home, such opportunities to conduct serious work are more than welcome. But it would now appear that I am not going to spend even a single day in the US this year ? indeed maybe never. Four months after lodging a visa application at the US Embassy in London, I have yet to receive a reply. And following news last week about how two prominent Muslim intellectuals living in the US (both of them friends of mine) were arbitrarily detained and questioned by American security agencies, I am no longer that eager to take up the academic positions I was offered...

...Later, I sensed some alarm in academic circles about the status of civil rights, but I was convinced that their worries were exaggerated.

Today, I no longer believe so. There are countries I would not visit under any circumstances. I was never tempted to visit Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and over the past two years I have declined a number of invitations to visit Libya. Egypt, Syria and Tunisia I also consider no-go areas, given the influence of their shadowy and unpredictable security agencies. Visiting those countries is like venturing into an uncharted jungle where dangers lurk behind every shadow.

That is now the feeling Muslim visitors get when traveling to America. US security agencies now seem to wield influence that dwarfs that of elected officials, while existing legal safeguards no longer afford protection to the innocent. For Muslim intellectuals who used to regard the US as an oasis and a haven from the unpredictable and paralyzing climate of fear at home, the country now seems more like a jungle that is both an extension of home and the locus of new uncharted dangers.

If this situation persists, America could become a lost continent, giving the Sept. 11 terrorists their greatest success by blowing America off the face of the earth and replacing it with an alien entity that bears only a passing resemblance to its former self. Under those circumstances, the terrorists would have received plenty of help from those in Congress, the White House and the media, not to mention triumphant right-wing hard-liners, who like the new America much more than the old.

We beg to differ.