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Fear of Muslims International Perspectives on Islamophobia 1st Edition Douglas Pratt
“ This concise, accessible and illuminating book meets one of the most urgent needs of our time Lean has provided a compelling counter-narrative that reveals the vested interests and highly organized networks of those who preach the virulent Islamophobia that is not only endangering world peace but is also corroding the tolerance and egalitarian ethos that should characterize Western society This book should be required reading ”
Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God, Islam: A Short History and Muhammad
“Islamophobia is not only about ignorance and fear. Some people purposefully nurture it and use it as a political strateg y. Nathan Lean’s The Islamophobia Industry shows what is happening behind the scenes. It is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand the rationale and objectives behind those who foster this new racism against Muslims.”
—Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporar y Islamic Studies at Oxford University and author of The Quest for Meaning and Islam: The Essentials
“ The climate of fear and cultural mistrust is one grim aspect of present-day society, but it doesn’t happen by accident. As this readable and wellresearched book demonstrates, hatred sells; it can provide both money and power to those who profit from it. This book exposes the dirty secrets of those who tr y to manipulate public opinion against Muslims. It should be read by policymakers, concerned citizens, and ever yone who values truth and intercultural understanding.”
—Mark Juergensmeyer, Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence
“Nathan Lean has written a book of immense importance for our times. By lifting the veil on the multi-million-dollar Islamophobia Industr y, Lean shines a light on the nefarious network of business, political, and religious organizations and individuals who employ rank bigotr y to promote their interests. A must-read.”
—Reza Aslan, author of No God But God and Beyond Fundamentalism
“In this provocative and engaging book, Nathan Lean meticulously untangles the dense web of fear merchants who have made Muslimbashing a cottage industr y He reveals the connections between them and the motives that animate their machine of propaganda. Lean’s is a battle against Islamophobia, one that he wages with a seamless and compelling narrative.”
—Juan Cole, author of Engaging the Muslim World
“So many of America’s mistakes and bad acts over the past decade are due to Islamophobia, and Nathan Lean’s new book traces the phenomenon’s genesis and its culprits. Those who have been spawning this all-toofamiliar demonization campaign have been hiding in the dark for too long. This book is so valuable because it drags them out into the light and thus performs a true ser vice for the nation.”
—Glenn Greenwald, author of No Place to Hide and co-founder of The Intercept
“In the months after 9/11, Americans took pride in defending Muslim neighbors in their own communities. Political leaders boasted about liberating Muslims overseas. So why are the politics of fear more intense a decade after the murders at the twin towers? Lean pins the blame on an Islamophobia industr y in a lucid and detailed examination of the dark side of our politics.”
—Richard Wolffe, MSNBC political analyst and author of Renegade: The Making of a President
“ The spike in anti-Muslim sentiment didn’t fall from the sky—it was manufactured by a shadowy network of bloggers, funders, pundits, preachers and politicians. In a tightly written, fast-paced narrative that feels like a thriller backed by the research of a doctoral thesis, Lean shows just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Essential reading for anyone who wants a window into the origins of contemporar y Islamophobia.”
—Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith and Sacred Ground
“Lean’s meticulous study is a convincing demonstration of the threat Islamophobia poses to a pluralistic society and democratic values. Rationalizing hatred of Muslims, well-funded ideologues also negatively impact civic discourse and push conser vative politics into the orbit of right-wing extremism. This is an important resource for all who wish to understand the forces that manipulate our political process and discourse.”
—Ingrid Mattson, Chair in Islamic Studies, Huron University College
“Nathan Lean has written an eye-opener—the most comprehensive book to date on a new and dangerous cycle of minority persecution in American society. Lean’s book exposes the key players, funders and enablers of Islamophobia in America and the destructive effect of their politics on our national fabric. It is worth ever y minute of reading.”
—Nihad Awad, National Executive Director, Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR)
“Absolutely indispensable … Any journalist, pundit, policy-maker or intelligence analyst who doesn’t read The Islamophobia Industry and take its message to heart is committing professional malpractice. Any citizen concerned about the future of this countr y and the world at large owes it to themselves to read this book, lest the processes Lean describes poison relations between the West and the Muslim world for generations to come. ”
—Mark LeVine, author of Heavy Metal Islam
“The Islamophobia Industry is a clarion call. It’s a necessar y and timely work that carefully dissects and exposes a cottage industr y of fear mongers who have deliberately manufactured hysteria and hate to divide Americans along religious and racial lines to promote their own self-profit and selfish, misguided politics.”
—Wajahat Ali, award-winning playwright and lead author of Fear Inc.: Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America
“Nathan Lean’s The Islamophobia Industry could not be more timely or critical. This is an extraordinarily important and groundbreaking study. It exposes the multi-million-dollar cottage industr y of fear mongers and the network of funders and organizations that support and perpetuate bigotr y, xenophobia, racism, and produce a climate of fear that sustains a threatening social cancer. ”
—John L. Esposito (from the Foreword to the first edition)
The Islamophobia Industry
How the Right Manufactures Hatred of Muslims
SECOND EDITION
Nathan Lean
Foreword to the First Edition by John L. Esposito
Foreword to the Second Edition by Jack G. Shaheen
First published 2012; new edition published 2017 by Pluto Press
The right of Nathan Lean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Librar y Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Librar y
ISBN 978 0 7453 3717 3 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3716 6 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0135 7 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0137 1 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0136 4 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the countr y of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Ser vices, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
For Naima: my muse, my love, and my life.
Acknowledgements
This book came about during a particularly important time in my life. One week after getting married, I penned the first chapter. Over the course of the next year, a time when most young couples would be basking in the newness of wedded bliss, I was often sitting at my desk staring blankly at the computer screen or lost in deep thought during dinner. For any other woman, such obsession would have spurred a quick exit. But my wife Naima has been my greatest ally. She has loved me beyond measure, encouraged me without ceasing, and inspired me in so many beautiful ways. Where most would leave their beloveds ’till the end, I shall place mine first—precisely where she belongs atop the list of those who have so profoundly shaped this book, and in some cases, my life.
My family, as always, was ver y supportive and encouraging They endured my endless rants and shared in my excitement as the various pieces of this project came together. My father Larr y, my mother Linda Rose, and my sister Katherine have each offered me, through their own lives, a vision of the type of person I hope to one day be. My grandmother, too, has a special place in my heart and constantly asked about my progress and expressed her excitement as only a grandmother can do. My parents-in-law, despite their distance, regularly asked about this project and beamed with pride when I told them about it. Since the time of the first edition’s release, my father-in-law passed away. His spirit is with me as I confront the injustice of prejudice in writing, and I aspire to be the type of morally upright and genuinely decent man that he was.
I am fortunate to have been surrounded by a wonderful community of friends and scholars at Georgetown University. Many of them offered valuable feedback and encouragement. I appreciate John Esposito contributing the Foreword to the first
Acknowledgements
edition. It is a ver y special honor to have Jack Shaheen, a pioneer in the field and a mentor to me, pen such a wonderful Foreword to this book’s second edition. My professors and former colleagues in the Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding contributed many meaningful ideas, connected dots where I did not even know they existed, and helped me clarify thoughts on a variety of topics.
As a graduate student in North Carolina, I was taken under the wing of my professor and mentor Derek Maher and guided along a path that led to many new and exciting opportunities. It was then that I discovered my love for writing. Patiently untangling my mixed metaphors and digging up meanings I had buried in verbosity, he made me a better student and scholar. More than that, though, his steadfast friendship is a dear treasure of mine. Ever y student deser ves a teacher and friend as generous and kind as him.
Reza Aslan gave generously of his time, even amidst the birth of his beautiful twin boys. He believed in this project from its nascence and propelled me down a path of writing that he has come to know quite well. Having his support is an honor. My former colleagues at Aslan Media graced me with their patience as I took time off from my duties as assistant editor to finalize the manuscript.
My agent Linda Langton navigated the often-rocky waters of the publishing world with skill and confidence and had faith in my ability as a writer early on.
At Pluto Press, Roger Van Zwanenberg kindly reached out to me just as I began the writing process. B efore I had even imagined that the book would be published, he happily corresponded with me and shared his ideas. He was, and is, a constant source of motivation and inspiration. My editor, David Shulman, helped me keep all of the moving parts together, balancing them with master y and charm. He also offered me an invaluable critique of the various drafts and proposed ideas that improved my writing and my message. Over the years, he has remained a supporter of this book’s message and has helped me find opportunities to spread it. Robert Webb’s eye for detail amazed me, as did the creativity of the talented design team that worked with Melanie Patrick. Emily
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Orford, Chris Browne, and Kieran O’Connor were more than helpful, as was Thérèse Wassily Saba.
A special word of thanks is also due to Dan Pawlus, Caroline Davis, and Nancy Roberts, as well as the team at Palgrave Macmillan. I’m also indebted to the University of Chicago Press for their distribution of this book in the American market.
Last, I owe gratitude to my many Muslim friends here in the United States and throughout the world. In my travels and studies, our interactions have always been rewarding They have treated me with grace and kindness and, in turn, I feel that is it my duty to combat the stereotypes to which they and others like them so easily fall victim. For they know, if anyone knows, that, as the Prophet Muhammad once said, “ The wounds of words hurt worse than the wounds of swords.”
Washington, DC 2017
Author’s Note
As the second edition of this book went to press, I received the sad news that Jack G. Shaheen, who wrote the Foreword, had passed away. It is likely one of the last things he wrote—a brilliant sur vey of his long career, an uneasy eye on the future, and expressed hope in a new crop of scholars who would carr y the torch for ward.
It is difficult to describe his influence on my life and work simply because there are too many moments along the way that stand out as significant. For all who toil against injustices that target Arabs, Muslims, and others, Jack’s scholarship doesn’t simply line the shelves—it forms a rock-solid foundation on which we stand. B ehind the books and lectures was a man of moral courage and genuine human decency—a man who saw a younger version of himself in a rookie scholar like me and reached out to give me a leg up in the field. He didn’t have to. That was just the kind of guy he was.
I’m inclined to say that the world is a bit dimmer today without him. But I know that’s not true. It’s a hell of a lot brighter, actually, because of the commitment to social justice that he inspired in so many, and the message of compassion, understanding, tolerance, and neighborly love that he left behind. And so I’ll say to him here what he said to me so many times: Well done, my dear friend. Well done.
Foreword to the First Edition
John L. Esposito
Islamophobia did not suddenly come into being after the events of 9/11. Like anti-Semitism and xenophobia, it has long and deep historical roots. Its contemporar y resurgence has been triggered by the significant influx of Muslims to the West in the late twentieth centur y, the Iranian revolution, hijackings, hostage taking, and other acts of terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s, attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and subsequent terrorist attacks in Europe.
What are the Roots of this Modern Epidemic?
Most Americans’ first encounter with an unknown Islam occurred with the Iranian Revolution of 1978 and the taking of hostages in the American embassy, which resulted in an explosion of interest and coverage of the religion of Islam as well as of the Middle East and the Muslim world that has increased exponentially over the years.
Today, Islam and the Middle East often dominate the negative headlines. Despite the fact that Islam is the second largest religion in the world and the third largest religion in the United States—as well as the fact that American Muslims are an integral part of the American mosaic in the twenty-first centur y—the acts of terrorists over the last three decades have fed the growth of Islamophobia in this countr y.
The Post-9/11 Climate
The catastrophic events of 9/11 and continued attacks in Muslim countries, as well as in Madrid and London, have obscured
many positive developments and have exacerbated the growth of Islamophobia almost exponentially. Islam and Muslims have become guilty until proven innocent, a reversal of the classic American legal maxim. Islam is often viewed as the cause rather than the context for radicalism, extremism, and terrorism. Islam as the culprit is a simple answer, easier than considering the core political issues and grievances that resonate in much of the Muslim world (that is, the failures of many Muslim governments and societies, American foreign policy of inter vention and dominance, Western support for authoritarian regimes, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, or support for Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon). It is not difficult to find material that emphasizes selective analyses of Islam and events in the Muslim world, material which is crisis-oriented and headline-driven, fueling stereotypes, fears, and discrimination. Islam’s portrayal as a triple threat (political, civilizational, and demographic) has been magnified by a number of journalists and scholars, who trivialize the complexity of political, social, and religious dynamics in the Muslim world.
The result has been to downplay the negative consequences of Western support for authoritarian regimes, and the blowback from American and European foreign policies in the Middle East, from the Palestinian–Israeli conflict to the invasion of Iraq. Anti-Americanism or anti-Westernization (which has increased significantly among the mainstream in the Muslim world and globally as a result of these policies) is often equated simply with Muslim hatred of our Western way of life.
Today, Islamophobia distorts the prism through which Muslims are viewed domestically. Anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate crimes proliferate. Legitimate concerns in the United States and Europe for domestic security have been offset by the abuse of antiterrorism legislation, indiscriminate arrests, and imprisonments that compromise Muslims’ civil liberties. Mainstream Islamic institutions (civil rights groups, political action committees, charities) are indiscriminately accused of raising money for
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extremism by individuals and sometimes governments without the hard evidence that would lead to successful prosecution.
Significant minorities of non-Muslim Americans show a great tolerance for policies that would profile Muslims, require special identity cards, and question the loyalty of all Muslim citizens. A 2006 USA Today-Gallup Poll found that substantial minorities of Americans admit to having negative feelings or prejudices against people of the Muslim faith, and favor using heightened security measures with Muslims as a way to help prevent terrorism. Fewer than half the respondents believed that US Muslims are loyal to the United States. Nearly one-quarter of Americans—22 percent—said they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbor ; 31 percent said they would feel ner vous if they noticed a Muslim man on their flight, and 18 percent said they would feel ner vous if they noticed a Muslim woman on their flight. About four in ten Americans favor more rigorous security measures for Muslims than those used for other US citizens: requiring Muslims who are US citizens to carr y a special ID and undergo special, more intensive, security checks before boarding airplanes in the United States. When US respondents were asked, in the Gallup World Poll, what they admire about the Muslim world, the most common response was “nothing” (33 percent); the second most common was “I don’t know” (22 percent). Despite major polling by Gallup and PEW that show that American Muslims are well integrated economically and politically, a Januar y 2010 Gallup Center for Muslim Studies report found that more than four in ten Americans (43 percent) admit to feeling at least “ a little” prejudice toward Muslims—more than twice the number who say the same about Christians (18 percent), Jews (15 percent), and Buddhists (14 percent). Nine percent of Americans admitted feeling “ a great deal” of prejudice toward Muslims, while 20 percent admitted feeling “ some ” prejudice. Surprisingly, Gallup data revealed a link between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, that contempt for Jews makes a person “about 32 times as likely to report the same level of prejudice toward Muslims.”
Foreword to the First Edition
The extent to which the religion of Islam and the mainstream Muslim majority have been conflated with the beliefs and actions of an extremist minority can be seen not only in major polls but also in opposition to mosque construction, in locations from Manhattan and Staten Island to Tennessee and California, which has become not just a local but a national political issue. In the 2008 US presidential elections and the 2010 Congressional elections, anti-mosque and anti-Sharia hysteria have shown that Islamophobia has gone mainstream.
Across the USA, a major debate erupted over the building of an Islamic community center a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center. A June 22, 2010 New York Post editorial said, “ There’s no denying the elephant in the room. Neither is there any rejoicing over the mosques … because where there are mosques, there are Muslims, and where there are Muslims, there are problems … ” The author warns of New York becoming “New Yorkistan,” just as London has become “Londonstan,” “degenerated” by a Muslim community “into a launching pad for terrorists.”
Nathan Lean’s The Islamophobia Industr y could not be more timely or critical. This is an extraordinarily important and groundbreaking study. It exposes the multi-million-dollar cottage industr y of fear mongers and the network of funders and organizations that support and perpetuate bigotr y, xenophobia, and racism, and produce a climate of fear that sustains a threatening social cancer. Islamophobia, like anti-Semitism, will not be eradicated easily or soon. Islamophobia is not a problem for Muslims alone; it is our problem. Governments, policy makers, the media, educational institutions, and religious and corporate leaders have a critical role to play in transforming our societies and influencing our citizens and policies to contain the voices of hate and the exclusivist theologies (of militant religious and secular fundamentalists alike) if we are to promote global understanding and peace. As we know from the histor y of anti-Semitism and of racism in America, bigots and racists aren’t born. As the lyrics from the musical South Pacific remind us: “You’ve got to be carefully taught to hate and fear, you ’ ve
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got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear, you ’ ve got to be carefully taught.”
John L. Esposito is a university professor and founder director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, at Georgetown University, Washing ton, D C.
Foreword to the Second Edition
Jack G. Shaheen
To paraphrase Plato, those who tell the stories rule society. For decades, the stories told by individuals and special interest groups have created phantom images of the evil enemy Other : the Muslim. These hateful images have become rooted in our minds and are indistinguishable from reality. Headlines are dominated by stories of terrorism, and fear of Arabs and Muslims is at an all-time high. In fact, polling shows it is significantly higher today than in the years following 9/11. This fear has consequences: A resurgence of the political far-right, increases in hate crimes, vandalism and the destruction of mosques, and blatant bigotr y. In recent years, a slate of innocent Arab and Muslim Americans, and others who look like them, have been murdered in cold blood—the victims of intolerance.
Since the publication of its first edition in 2012, Nathan Lean’s The Islamophobia Industr y has proven to be a prescient work. Today, more than ever before, we see the presence of anti-Muslim prejudice in our countr y—the manifest ugliness of discrimination that targets minority communities in ways that are both subtle and blatant. Importantly, we are learning more about the concerted efforts that exist in American and European spaces to advance these harmful narratives and promote discord between Muslims and others. Indeed, while racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia may appear to some as simply natural tendencies by which humans react to differences, the protracted histor y of these forms of prejudice indicates that we appear not to have learned lessons from our bygone days, and that, most unfortunately, targeting vulnerable populations is, for some people and organi-
The Islamophobia Industry
zations, a successful strateg y, resulting in dehumanizing a people and their faith.
In the 40-plus years that I have spent documenting the stunning breadth of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim images in American popular culture, one fact is clear : Stereotypes do not exist in a vacuum; they injure innocent people, often permanently. As a young father in the 1970s, I was surprised to hear my children run up the stairs to my office and report that their Saturday morning cartoons featured “bad Arabs.” This was, of course, before the days of DVDs and so, in an effort to document what appeared to be a trend at that time, their weekend cartoon-watching sessions came with an assignment: notifying me of such villainous characters. B efore long, the lists added up and the cast of iniquitous Arabs and Muslims that dominated playful animations soon appeared in television advertisements, daytime television programming, and film. The stereotype was spreading and robbing an entire group of people of their humanity.
The images were quite simple, and the narratives were too. In fact, with few exceptions over the years, the depictions have simply been repeated—structured images of sameness: angr y Arabs, oil sheikhs, terrorists, and other wise violent people that erase the nuances and diversity of entire ethnic and religious groups. The threatening desert of “Arabland” is always the backdrop, and whether Body of Lies, The Bonfire of Vanities, or Disney’s box-office hit, Aladdin, barbarism and exoticism on the part of Arabs and Muslims is usually the order of the day for Hollywood imagemakers. In some cases, the inclusion of these offensive stereotypes transcends the world of money-making and bleeds over into the world of politics, where domestic narratives about homeland security and overseas threats are not only spun as entertainment, but are, in fact, sanctioned by government agencies. The 1986 thriller, Iron Eagle, which tells of a hotshot teenager who learns to fly a fighter jet and bombs Arabs, and the 1990 flick, Navy Seal, featuring Charlie Sheen, which dramatizes the Lebanese Civil War, though with a gor y salvo of American-dropped bombs, were
Foreword to the Second Edition
produced in cooperation with the Department of Defense. The war film, Rules of Engagement, which was released in 2000, stands out as among the most racist of them all in its crude depictions of Yemeni citizens, including children, and the stor y was written by former Secretar y of the Navy and Virginia Senator Jim Webb. Rapidly, a litany of anti-Arab stereotypes that smacked of overt racism were replicated and mapped onto Muslims. Arab-phobia became Islamophobia. Driven by the same underlying animus, the ethnic enemy became a religious one.
With the attacks of 9/11 and the for ward march into sustained war with Iraq beginning in 2003, damaging stereotypes escalated. In addition to media images of supposedly dangerous Arabs and Muslims “ over there,” Americans were subjected to narratives that decried the possibility of lurking threats among them—wild-eyed super villains that are well positioned to wreak unthinkable havoc lest they are discovered and stopped in their tracks. Fox-T V’s 24, Showtime’s Homeland and HB O’s Sleeper Cell are but three examples of television series that stripped communities of their identities only to assign to them a threatening character—the American Arab/Muslim neighbor as terrorist—that reinforced prevailing political positions.
Today, as ISIS and other groups present real threats to people all around the world, violence remains the primar y lens through which Muslims and Arabs are portrayed in entertainment media and discussed in the news. This monolithic discourse has resulted in a false dichotomy of “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” whereby all Muslims are viewed with skepticism and are perceived as potentially “bad” until they prove to non-Muslim arbiters that, indeed, they are “good.” Black-or-white views of this sort blind us to the multidimensional realities of others, and do not bode well for increased understanding, pluralism, and meaningful engagement.
Part of what is so disheartening—and harmful—about these images is that they are neither a matter of life imitating art, nor of art imitating life. Rather, they are the product of sick minds who have learned that fear of the Other, as my late friend, Professor
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Edward Said, has so eloquently discussed, is a tool that can be used to achieve desired ends. The Islamophobia industr y exploits race, ethnicity, and religion for political and ideological gains, and it just so happens that this disreputable enterprise is also materially rewarding. In a world in which so few people admit to knowing Muslims, and so many admit to harboring negative sentiment toward them, intentionally negative stor ylines and depictions about Islam and Muslims are effective.
While Hollywood is a big part of the problem (raking in billions of dollars in silver-screen flicks that entrench dizzying stereotypes within paranoid-driven tales of a gloom and doom to come), the issue of Islamophobia runs deeper than the entertainment industr y. As Nathan Lean has outlined in this brilliant, informative, and groundbreaking work, it has become a well-funded and tightly organized industr y that spans people, purposes, and even continents. Combatting this ugly form of prejudice, then, involves more than simply countering the claims that its various pur veyors make. It involves first recognizing anti-Muslim prejudice as a systematic, political, ideological, or financial tool, and calling out those who seek to use it for their own benefit. To not do so is to risk the stability and peace of our future.
The images and narratives that have taught us to hate a people and their religion, over time, have desensitized us to human suffering and what I believe is the innate goodness of mankind. Instead of seeing commonalities and shared experiences in the lives of Arabs and Muslims, we see those things that we have been conditioned to see: violence, hatred, conflict, and otherness. If the totality of our view is an inhumane portrait, the totality of our interactions may well become inhumane, too, with violence and discrimination toward these marginalized groups becoming little more than quotidian affairs that don’t affect us.
Indeed, today, more than ever before, Islamophobia must be addressed Politicians, news organizations, television writers, directors, and major television networks should immediately expose this hateful virus released by the Islamophobic industr y.
Foreword to the Second Edition
They should keep in mind the wisdom of the journalist Edward R. Murrow, who said: “What we do not see is as important, if not more important, then what we do see. ” They have a role to play in squashing prejudices by allowing us to see and experience Arab and Muslim humanity, not just skewed images of the lunatic fringe that are promoted by special interest groups.
With the arrival of a new European populism and the election of Muslim-baiting politicians from Washington to various European capitals, it is clear that xenophobia and racism remain successful strategies for some. Despite that disconsolate view, I remain optimistic. I have faith in young film-makers, writers, and scholars who are dedicated to destroying these baleful stereotypes and presenting Muslims and Arabs as neither saints nor devils, but as fellow human beings whose lives are as beautiful and complicated as all of ours are.
Lean’s compelling book, The Islamophobia Industr y, represents that kind of bold, conscience-driven leadership. In the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it calls us to speak out at an urgent moment—to become “ movers and shakers” and to stand up as “people of good will” and help put an end to the divisive forces that have segregated us for far too long. If not us, who? If not now, when? This is a great book. I encourage you to read it and share its crucial message.
Jack G. Shaheen
(author of Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People)
Introduction Islamophobia from the War on Terror to the Age of Trump
When Craig Hicks, a burly 44-year-old gun enthusiast living in the Finley Forest apartment complex in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, showed up at Deah Barakat’s doorstep the first time, he grumbled about the subdivision’s parking rules. Barakat, a lanky and charming student whose parents were immigrants from Syria, didn’t make much of it. Life was too exciting to worr y about grumpy neighbors. He was just moving in and getting ready to start dental school at the University of North Carolina that fall. If that wasn’t enough, he was also set to marr y the love of his life, Yusor Abu-Salha, a shy but affable undergraduate student at nearby North Carolina State University, to whom he was engaged. Abu-Salha’s family was Palestinian, and while she wore the hijab, or Muslim headscarf, she fit in seamlessly with the southern community that she called home: she loved Call of Duty, had attended a public high school, blasted Nicki Minaj from her car ’ s sound system, and though she didn’t drink alcohol, she loved sweet tea, or “southern table wine,” as it is often called in North Carolina. And college sports, too. “I love my sweet tea and football as much as anybody. But at the same time I appreciate that it’s ver y diverse in this part of the South,” she said.1
The Research Triangle was indeed a diverse part of the state. The opportunities for Muslim and immigrant families to connect with one another at local mosques, Islamic schools, or businesses created a sense of community within community—Palestinians and Syrians enjoying the specificities of their religious or ethnic
traditions while also seeing themselves as fully American. But not ever yone saw them that way. Craig Hicks, for instance. His vigilante-style policing of the apartment complex parking spaces may have occasionally targeted other residents, but he seemed to have an odd obsession with Barakat. Nearly ever y month, he would show up and complain that the 23-year-old’s friends or family members were parking in his reser ved spots. On one occasion, he wanted to make the message especially clear, and so rather than shouting or making a scene, he simply pulled up his shirt to show Barakat the pistol that hung in a holster on his belt.2
On another occasion, shortly after Abu-Salha had moved in with Barakat following their honeymoon, Hicks knocked on their door. This time, he was unner ved. “You were too loud—you woke up my wife,” he shouted at them, angrily And again, he flashed his gun—a black .38 revolver with an extra five rounds of ammunition and a speed-loader, all nestled in a slim sheath. Images of the weapon and its accessories were featured on his Facebook page.3 Barakat, in his usual manner, was polite and calm, and tried to alleviate the tense moment. Inside the apartment, though, Abu-Salha and their guests were rattled. Hicks’s warning wasn’t difficult to understand: He’d happily discharge the firearm if they didn’t comply with his demands.
On Februar y 10, 2015, that moment came. In an unthinkable act of rage, the former auto-parts salesman and self-described “antitheist” stormed upstairs and pounded on the door of Barakat’s apartment, rattling a nearby plaque that bore the phrase “Praise be to Allah.” Barakat, Abu-Salha, and her sister, Razan, a confident and family-oriented architecture student at North Carolina State University, who liked to wear snapback caps over her hijab, were inside Police discovered their bodies later that evening, after calls reporting the sound of gunshots. Barakat was lying dead in the front door way, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head, and several others to his body. According to the autopsies, Abu-Salha and her sister Razan were also shot in the head, execution-style, one in the bedroom, the other on the floor of the kitchen. A
Introduction
witness told police that he “noticed a white male, approximately in his mid-forties, wearing a beard and with a balding spot on the top of his head, wearing a gold Carhartt coat, walking fast from the back of the apartment.” Eight shell casings were discovered in the living room. They matched the .357-caliber handgun that Hicks had in his possession when he later turned himself in for the three murders.4
A hate crime investigation was opened, though after initial investigations, a US Attorney for the state of North Carolina said that the murders were “not part of a targeted campaign against Muslims.”5 Instead, they suggested that a parking dispute spurred the crime. Tellingly, in the span of one week following Hicks’ rampage, a handful of other anti-Muslim acts reverberated across the countr y. A Houston man set an Islamic center on fire; two Michigan men beat a Muslim father who was grocer y shopping with his children; vandals spray-painted the phrases “Fuck Allah” and “Now this is a hate crime” on the walls of a Rhode Island school; a Hindu temple, which vandals mistook for a mosque, was emblazoned with the words “Muslims get out”; and two Muslim men were stabbed outside of a Michigan shopping mall.6
The political and social climate that gave birth to the Chapel Hill massacre was ripe for such expressions of hate. Fourteen years after September 11, 2001, a time when many would have expected anti-Muslim sentiment to be in decline, it was not. In fact, it was rising, and in the wake of a surge of European populism, and the burgeoning 2016 American presidential election, which was beginning to strike a similar nationalist chord among potential voters, immigrants, and religious minorities of many different stripes were placed in the crosshairs. Pew Research Center polls from 2001 show that 59 percent of Americans that year expressed a favorable opinion of Muslims.7 In fact, in March of that year, six months before hijacker-pilot Mohammad Atta and his repulsive
The Islamophobia Industry
terrorist comrades ever entered the collective psyche of the republic’s populous, 45 percent of Americans suggested that their views of Muslims were generally positive.8
With the first decade of the twenty-first centur y, though, things soon began to turn south, despite the fact that violence perpetrated by Muslims was at notably low levels. In 2002, an annual report released by the FBI showed that hate crimes against Muslims had increased by an eye-popping 1600 percent; 28 incidents were reported in 2000 and 481 were reported two years later.9 In 2004, a mere one in four Americans expressed a positive opinion of Islam. Forty-six percent, according to a Pew Research poll, believed that Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence.10
Pew was not the only organization to notice an upward trend. The following year, AB C News released a report showing that 43 percent of Americans still believed that Muslims had little respect for people of other faiths. By 2005, nearly six in ten Americans thought that Islam was a religion prone to violence; half of respondents held Muslims in low regard.11 In five years, the numbers had completely flipped—the same percentage of Americans that once viewed Islam in a positive light now held the exact opposite opinion.
The year 2006 came and went with little change in Americans’ personal discomfort with Muslims. A Washing ton Post poll showed that as the war in Iraq grinded into its fourth year, half of Americans had a negative view of Islam.12 As the 2008 American presidential election came to pass, Barack Obama was inundated with growing anti-Muslim fer vor. For some, his unfamiliar name and a background that traced through Indonesia and the Kenyan homeland of his Muslim father, made him an easy target for portentous narratives that warned of a Muslim takeover in Washington. The fact that Obama, who would become the nation’s first African-American commander-in-chief, was labeled a Muslim by his opponents (who intended the inaccurate description as a slur) only aggravated anguish among some quarters of an already-paranoid electorate. So sensitive was the political climate that candidate
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“Ah, you know very well, proud beauty,” said Vickers, waving a fork at her, “that there is only one woman in all Spanish-America for me— the only woman who knows how to cook, this side of the San Pedro. If you choose to call this our betrothal party, yours and mine, Ascencion——”
It was a perfectly safe joke, for Ascencion was a wife, the mother of fourteen, and the grandmother of a whole village. She did not even notice the last part of his sentence.
“And who is there can cook like me on the other side of the San Pedro?” she asked. “I don’t know her;” and she hobbled away
After breakfast, Vickers with the assistance of two or three native boys, Ascencion’s grandchildren, who came and went about the house like stray dogs, hung the court and corridors with paper lanterns, and moved the furniture so as to leave the sala free for dancing.
These preparations occupied so much time that he was barely able to finish his report for the government before dinner, and almost immediately afterward his guests began to arrive. He had not had time to write the letter, and he could not now catch the mail unless he sent a boy down the trail to the coast. He actually thought of doing this in order to catch the steamer, for his conscience reproached him, but Ascencion absolutely refused to be deprived of any of her working staff on so great an occasion.
Cortez was the first to arrive. He was carrying his talking-machine in his arms as he entered, and he and Vickers had a great many jokes to exchange as to the rolls fit for the ears of the señoritas.
“It is going to be the making of the party,” Vickers exclaimed, “and I can’t thank you enough for bringing it.”
Cortez replied politely that everything he had was equally at the disposition of his friend, but presently it appeared that it was within the power of Vickers to do a reciprocal favor. Cortez was going the very next day on a long shooting trip. But he feared he would be short of cartridges. Doubtless Don Luis knew the delays in the
custom-house. Was it possible that he could borrow a hundred or so?
Vickers asked the caliber, and noted that it was the same as the new government rifle.
Cortez shrugged his shoulders. “It may be,” he said. “You forget that I am not in the confidence of the government. But we will say no more. If it is not convenient——”
“My dear fellow,” cried Vickers, clapping him on the shoulder, “it is perfectly convenient; take as many as you want,” and summoning one of Ascencion’s descendants he gave orders that as many boxes as the señor might want should be carried out and put in his coche.
Almost every one had come before the arrival of the Señorita Rosita and her papa, which partook of the nature of a rite. He was a little man, very erect, possessed, in Vickers’s eyes, of that inscrutability which even the remnant of an older civilization has for a new one.
The girl was reputed a beauty, small, round, barely seventeen, with a pair of black eyes which languished so sweetly and so easily that one scarcely wondered that their owner never used them for anything else.
As his eyes met hers, Vickers cursed Ascencion in his heart for having instilled her suspicions into his mind, for it seemed to him that the lovely Rosita had never languished quite so openly upon him before. The thought affected the cordiality of his manner. His greeting was formal. Then seeing that she looked hurt, and reflecting that, if she had given her friends the notion that he was hers for the asking, it was very hard to be contradicted by his manner, he sprang forward and led her away to dance.
Soon afterward, having surrendered her to another partner, he found himself standing beside her father, and never at a loss for a pleasant word he observed that the señorita was undoubtedly the handsomest girl he had ever seen, and how did any one support the responsibility of having such a pretty daughter?
The old gentleman smiled.
“It is not a responsibility which I look forward to supporting very much longer, Don Luis.”
“Oh, I suppose not,” said Vickers, and he thought with some annoyance of the good-looking native for whose destruction the party had been planned.
“You give me,” went on the other, “an opportunity of saying what has long been in my mind. You know, Don Luis, that many of my countrymen are not friendly to the North Americans. I do not share the prejudice.”
Vickers bowed in his most florid manner. “I felt sure of that, sir, when you did me the honor of accepting my invitation for this evening.”
“Yes,” said the other thoughtfully, “the acceptance was as significant as the invitation itself.”
The phrase struck Vickers disagreeably, but he bowed again, and prepared to move away, but the old man stopped him.
“I was glad it should be so, Don Luis,” he said. “There is no one to whom I should more trustfully confide my daughter’s future. I am sufficiently Americanized to believe that marriages of the heart are the best marriages. My wife cries out for a man of our own country, but I say, ‘No, let the hearts of our children speak.’ I do not mind telling you that the heart of the little Rosita has spoken. Her mother has not the pleasure to know you, Don Luis, but we must alter that, we must alter that.” He smiled up at Vickers and perhaps saw something written upon his countenance, for he added hastily:
“Perhaps I mistake your sentiments. I have been warned that it is the habit of your countrymen to engage a young lady’s affections and to ride away. But I can not think that of you, my friend. I can not believe that I have mistaken your sentiments.”
“Oh, my sentiments,—not a bit,” said Vickers hastily. Even in English he might have found himself at a loss for the right word in which to decline an offer of marriage, but in Spanish, well as he knew the language, he floundered hopelessly. “My sentiments are as
I told you, that the señorita is the most adorable young lady in the world, but——”
“Enough, enough, my young friend,” said his companion, laying a hand for an instant on Vickers’s arm with an incomparable gesture. “Obstacles are for old heads, love for young ones. See, she glances in our direction. She perhaps guesses what is the only topic that would keep you from her. Go to her. I will not be cruel. Go to her.” And he turned away, waving his hand.
Vickers sprang after him, but as he did so he felt his arm caught, and turning saw Doctor Nuñez.
“I must see you alone for an instant, but at once,” he said, in a low tone.
“More trouble!” said Vickers, leading the way to his old bedroom, which was the only spot in the house secure from the inroads of the party. He shut the door behind them, and invited the doctor to sit down, but Nuñez did not notice the suggestion.
“I have just come from town,” he said. “Your immediate arrest is decided on. The police may be here in a few minutes.”
“My arrest? Well, what the— Why in thunder am I to be arrested?”
“On suspicion of conspiring against the government. You are thought to have great influence with the men, which, taken in conjunction with your friendship for Cortez, makes you dangerous.”
“Well, if that isn’t the darndest,” said Vickers. “I have not conspired against their old government.”
“That, my dear Luis,” said the doctor gravely, “has nothing whatsoever to do with it. They are coming to arrest you. The mere presence of Cortez in the house will be enough. They can not arrest him without precipitating immediate trouble, but they can arrest any one who will be of assistance to him. It seems he has boasted openly that he could get all the ammunition he wanted from you. I do not say I believe it.”
“I have just sent all the cartridges he wanted out to the coche which is at this moment standing before my door,” said Vickers.
“Then you must certainly go at once.”
“Do you really advise me, Doctor, to run away from a couple of policemen with handcuffs and a warrant? No, no, I shall stay My conscience is clear. I shall appeal to my own government. You know they can’t go about arresting innocent Americans without getting into trouble.”
Nuñez raised his eyebrows. “And through whom will you appeal? Your American consul?”
“I suppose so.”
“And do you happen to remember the last time you saw Meester B. Wilkins Smith?”
“Oh, thunder!” returned Vickers, “that was the time I dipped him in the San Pedro, for saying I cheated at cards. Well, he richly deserved it, Doctor. No one could deny that.”
“Perhaps not,” returned the doctor, “but I do not think he will break his neck to save you. I think he will write home that it is unfortunate that a better type of Americans do not come down here. I think he will think it right to let our law take its course.”
Vickers had begun to look grave, but at the word law his face brightened. “Ah, there you are,—law!” he cried. “They can not prove anything against me. They will not dare to ventilate their case in court.”
“I do not think they will try,” replied Nuñez gently. “I think they will send you down to a little prison on the island of Santa Maria, while they investigate your case. And I do not think, my dear Don Luis, that you will ever come back from that little island. A lovely spot, a paradise, but not healthy, it seems. It is very far away,—so far that sometimes the jailers forget to come to feed the prisoners for months at a time.”
“Well, in that case,” said Vickers, with a laugh, “I should think the prisoners would not have very much trouble in making their escape.”
“Not the least; they do not have the least, not the least little bit. But the channel is broad there, and the sharks are very hungry, Don
Luis.”
“Gee, you are a cheerful companion! You put new life in a man, don’t you?” said Vickers.
“You must go, and go at once.”
“I suppose,” he answered, “that I might slip over the border for a day or two.”
“You would be sent back at once. We have a treaty with our neighbors, and it is strictly kept,—especially in regard to those they have no interest in protecting. You must go home, Don Luis. You can catch to-morrow morning’s steamer, if you are quick.”
For the first time the countenance of Vickers really clouded. “I can’t go home,” he said; and then, noting the surprise on the doctor’s face, he burst out: “Why, Heaven help you, don’t you suppose I would have gone home long ago, if I could? Did you think I was here for love of the damned country?”
“I did,” returned the other simply. “Yes, I am not ashamed to admit that I did. I find my country beautiful,—my countrymen attaching. I believed that you felt it too.”
“And so I do, so I do,” said Vickers, “but, man, I’m a northener, and I’d give every palm and orchid in the place for the noise of wheels creaking on packed snow.”
“All the more reason, then, why you should go home.”
“Look here, my friend,” the other answered, “if I go home I run a fair chance of being electrocuted. If I stay here the sharks get me, or if I escape the sharks, the Señor Don Papa is going to marry me to Rosita. There are three uncomfortable alternatives for a man to choose from.”
“I should choose electrocution,” said the doctor.
“I think I shall choose a pot shot at the police.”
There was a moment of silence, then the doctor asked,
“Did you send that letter to Lee’s family?”
Vickers shook his head absently
“Then,” cried the other, with decision, “you shall go home as Lee. Ten years might change a man so that not even his own father would know him,—especially ten years in this climate. Beside, there was a resemblance, you know.”
Vickers had lifted his head to laugh at the project for its impossibility, and paused to listen further, attracted by its sheer folly.
“You must have observed,” the doctor continued, “that fugitives are caught for the simple reason they go into a new country as strangers, and strangers are always objects of suspicion. Strangers always are called upon to give an account of themselves; strangers always have to explain why they have come. Now all these difficulties are obviated if only you can take up the life and personality of some one else. You are Lee, you go home to see your father. Nothing could be simpler. Well, yes, I admit that there is a risk, but——”
“But,” said Vickers, “there is also a Nellie. I told you, didn’t I, Doctor, that it is a name I am fond of?”
“It is a risk,” Nuñez went on, “but to stay here is a certainty.”
“To go back,” murmured Vickers, “to a real home, even if it belongs to another man, and a father, and above all an affectionate cousin ——”
“Order your horse,” said Nuñez, “and I’ll take care of your guests, and of the police, and of Rosita, and Cortez, and all the other follies you have committed.”
“And of Ascencion,” Vickers added. “She is worth all the rest, the nice old hag. Well, I’ll try it, Doctor, on your advice. By the way, thank you for not asking why I don’t go home under my own name.”
The doctor smiled. “We learn not to ask that question of our visitors,” he said; and then at Vickers’s request he went and routed out a small boy and gave orders to bring the patron’s mare at once to the front of the house.
When he returned to the bedroom, Vickers had changed into his riding clothes, and was stuffing a pair of saddle-bags.
“I want you, Nuñez,” he said, “to take anything you have a fancy for in the house, and give the rest to Ascencion. There’s a check for her, and here’s another for all I have in the bank. It will more than pay my bills. If not, write me to an address I will send. Be kind to Ascencion. She won’t like my going off like this, without saying goodby, but I don’t dare. She will have hysterics, as sure as Fate. Tell her I love her fond. Good-by, Doctor.”
The last Nuñez saw of him was a long leg quickly drawn over the window-sill.
The night, fortunately, was fair, for the rainy season had not regularly set in. As Vickers rode, he thought neither of the dangers he had left behind nor of the risk before him. It seemed as if the fierce homesickness of the last five years had suddenly broken out now and that his face was for the first time turned northward. He could not believe that within a week he would see the tops of New York’s tall buildings rise over the horizon like an immense castle set on a hill.
He reached the sea at four o’clock; at sunrise the vessel sailed. Then only, as he saw the gray water opening out between him and the shore, he felt an emotion of gratitude to the country that had sheltered him and which he never expected to see again.
Chapter III
Every one knows that there are palaces in Fifth Avenue which contain no one of social note, while there are houses no wider than step ladders in the side streets for admission to which one would give one’s eye-teeth. The Lees’ was of this type.
At ten o’clock on the evening of the twenty-second, the groom came out of the area gate. He knew, and the Lees knew, that no one would be going home for an hour, but he obeyed his orders to be on hand at that time in order to open the carriage doors, and generally speed the parting guest. He had already unrolled the red carpet down the entire length of the steps, and was walking up and down, debating whether he could squeeze in another five minutes for an extra plate of ice-cream (the cook was his aunt), when his attention was attracted to an approaching figure. It was that of a tall man in not ill fitting blue serge clothes, but, though the month was March, and a cold March at that, he seemed to feel no embarrassment over the fact that he wore a Panama hat of large, of almost blatant, variety. The groom counted up—at least two months before such a head-gear was even permissible. He had never supposed that such ignorant human beings existed.
At this point his scorn was changed to surprise by observing that the barbarian was actually ascending the Lees’ step, treading lightly upon the red carpet. The butler opened the door promptly with smiling grace. He had observed Miss Lewis among the guests, and knew her maid—a vivacious French-woman. His manner grew sterner when a stranger in a Panama hat asked for Mr. Lee. His gaze, starting at the Panama hat, sank slowly to the newcomer’s feet, noting on the way the pair of saddle-bags so casually held.
“Mr. Lee is entertaining friends at dinner,” he said coldly.
“Still eating at ten o’clock?” returned the stranger.
“No, sir The gentlemen have just joined the ladies in the drawingroom.”
“Tell Mr Lee I should like to see him,” said the other, and stepped, without invitation, inside the door. Plimpton, who in the natural course of his profession had become something of a judge of men, looked at the stranger critically, and came to the conclusion he was not a thief. Further than this he refused to go.
“What name shall I say?” he inquired, and was confirmed in his fears when the stranger answered,
“No name. Say I have a message from his son.”
Plimpton bowed very slightly. Be sure he knew all about the scandal about Mr. Robert. His curiosity was so much aroused that a weaker man would have mounted the stairs with a quickened tread. Not Plimpton. He rose grandly from step to step like a swimmer breasting slow waves.
Arrived at the top, he stood a minute in the doorway, fixing his employer with his eye, as one who would say, “Yes, it is true that I have important news, but do not be alarmed; you are in safe hands.”
The next moment he was herding Mr. Lee downstairs like a faithful sheep-dog.
Mr. Lee paused two steps from the bottom, and stood looking down at the newcomer. He was a tall man, and the two steps gave him extra height, so that in his close evening clothes he appeared almost gigantic.
“You wished to see me, sir?” he said politely.
“You have a son in South America, Mr. Lee?”
The old man bowed.
“A man about my age and height?”
“Not quite so tall, I think, sir.”
Vickers was silent. He had hoped the suggestion would be sufficient. He looked at the old man steadily. There was no
recognition in the eyes. Vickers felt half tempted to throw over the whole game. It was indeed a mad one. He contemplated reporting the death of Lee, and going away. Then something in the face of Plimpton, peering over his master’s shoulder, encouraged him. Plimpton had guessed. Plimpton would believe him. He hazarded a bold stroke.
“Don’t you know me, father?”
The old man caught hold of him with a cry.
“My dear Robert! My dear son! To think of my not knowing you. But how you have changed! You have changed immensely.”
“Ten years do change a fellow.”
“Ten years, my boy? You keep no count. It will be twelve in June.”
Even at seventy Mr. Lee must have retained some love of the dramatic, for he insisted on taking Vickers upstairs, and entered the drawing-room leaning on his arm, and saying suavely,
“Ladies, I want to introduce my son to you.”
Vickers had been away from home for seven years, and in that time the highest type of feminine beauty which he had seen had been little round-faced Rosita, with her coarse muslins and cotton lace. And now he suddenly found himself the center of interest to a group of half a dozen women, to whose natural beauty care, taste, fashion, and money had added everything that could adorn. Their soft shining dresses, their pretty necks and arms, their endless jewels dazzled him. He thought of his own little party—of Ascencion’s efforts, of the phonograph, of the macaw.
The room, too, was incredibly warm and bright and luxurious in his eyes. The Lees prided themselves on its simplicity. It was more of a library, Nellie always said, than a drawing-room. But on Vickers, who had lived seven years with tiled floors and stucco walls, the dark red hangings, the shaded lamps, the books, the heavy rugs, made a profound impression.
Even in the first excitement, his prudence and his curiosity alike suggested the importance of at once discovering the identity of
Nellie. His eye fell on Mrs. Raikes, sleek, dark, well bred as a fox terrier. She was the most cordial of the little group. Again his glance turned to an exuberant blonde, who stood with large blue eyes fixed upon him. Every man has it in him to admire an exuberant blonde. He wondered rather hopefully if it could be she.
“I am so glad to see you, Mr. Lee,” Mrs. Raikes was saying. “I had heard of you, but I had begun to think you were mythical, like King Arthur.”
“Why not say like all great heroes?”
The little group of women about him smiled. Only, he noticed the men stood apart—the men, and one girl, who had never moved from a sofa in the corner.
Vickers turned and looked at her, and as he did so, Mrs. Raikes exclaimed:
“What a shame it is! We have monopolized him so that his own cousin has not had a chance to speak to him. Come, Nellie, we’ll make room for you.”
Thus challenged Nellie rose very slowly, and Vickers’s eyes rested on her long slim figure, and immobile little face.
“Why did not you cable, Bob?” she said.
He had on his voyage home imagined every possible sort of meeting between them—meetings which ranged from frenzied reproaches to caresses, but he had not imagined just this.
Even the rest of the company seemed to feel it was an inadequate greeting to a cousin who had been away twelve years, and they turned with some amusement to catch Vickers’s answer.
“I did not cable,” he said good-temperedly, “because I had neither the time nor the price.”
There seemed to be no answer to this, and Nellie attempted none. Her eyebrows went up a little, and she returned to her sofa. Mrs. Raikes hastily followed her to say good-night.
“I suppose we must leave you to a family reunion,” she said, and added, lowering her voice: “Such a nice prodigal, Nellie. If I were you, I should fall in love with him at once.”
Nellie’s eyes dwelt on her cousin with an amusement worse than anger. “I don’t think I shall ever fall in love with Bob,” she answered, and Emmons, who was sitting beside her, could not repress a slight sniff of contempt.
Mrs. Raikes approached her host.
“Good-night, Mr. Lee. Thank you for such a pleasant after-dinner surprise. Good-night, Mr. Robert Lee. Will you come and dine with me some night? I always keep a fatted calf on hand.”
Vickers laughed. “Don’t you think I’ll get it at home?” he asked.
“Well, you know, Nellie is the housekeeper,” They both glanced at the girl’s impassive countenance, and smiled at each other. They, at least, were going to be friends.
Even after the guests were gone, and the three stood alone on the hearth-rug, Nellie remained silent.
Vickers could not resist saying lightly:
“You don’t seem very glad to see me, Nellie.”
“On the contrary,” she answered, with meaning. “Don’t sit up too late talking to Bob, Uncle Robert,” and with the curtest of nods she was gone.
He turned to Mr. Lee and observed with some bitterness that Nellie’s manner was not very cordial.
The old man shook his head. “No,” he said; “I was afraid you would notice it. You must not expect too much of Nellie. She is a good girl, but she has not a warm heart.”
“She has an attractive face,” said Vickers.
It was after midnight before Vickers found himself alone; he had sent the servants to bed, and was standing a minute in the act of
turning out the lights. Plimpton had shown him—as one who bestows the freedom of the city—where the switch was to be found.
His brain still reeled with the success of his venture—a new name, a northern home, an affectionate old father, and—above all—New York under so friendly a guise. He was no reader of the social items in the newspapers. Names which had become familiar to half the country meant nothing to him; but there had been something about the people he had seen that evening which could not be mistaken by a man of any perception—a certain elegance and courage which together make the faults and virtues of good society. He had never in his wildest dreams imagined Nellie a woman of this type. He had hoped she would be pretty, but he hardly knew whether or not he was pleased to find this cool, perfectly appointed creature, with a full face like a boy, and a profile like an Italian saint. What bonds or barriers were there between them? And if such existed, was he ever to know them? He thought of her letter. “If it was on my account that you went, you need not have gone.” What did it mean? Had there been coquetry on her part? Had there been brutality on Lee’s?
And as he wondered he looked up and found himself face to face with her.
She had changed her elaborate evening dress for a scarcely less elaborate dressing-gown. She came in, sat down opposite him, crossed her legs, showing a pair of red-heeled bedroom slippers, and said briskly,
“Well, Bob?”
He attempted to respond with a smile that should be as noncommittal as her words, but finding that she continued to stare at him he said,
“You were not very cordial in your greeting, Nellie.”
At this she laughed as if he were making the best joke in the world, and as if she were most fittingly replying to it when she said, “Ah, but you see I was so surprised.”
“Did not you know that I would come back?”
“So little that I can still hardly realize it.”
Again the doubt crossed his mind whether or not she believed in his identity with her cousin.
“It is incomprehensible to me why you did come,” she went on reflectively.
He answered truthfully: “Because I wanted to. Heavens, how I wanted to!”
“I am glad to hear it,” she returned. “I am glad you acted on a whim rather than from a belated sense of duty, for otherwise it might seem rather ungracious for me to say what I am going to say.”
There was something slightly sinister in her tone, but his curiosity had reached such a point that he forgot to be alarmed.
“Go on,” he said.
“I have done your work for twelve years, Bob, and I don’t mean to do it another instant.”
“Done my work?”
She went on with the utmost deliberation. She made not the smallest emotional appeal. Vickers had never heard a woman speak more calmly.
“I see that you think that I ought to have been grateful for a home. I wasn’t grateful. I have worked my passage. It was not desire for a home that has kept me here year after year, but a thing perhaps you don’t know very much about, Bob—a sense of duty. At this moment I have no idea whether your father is a ruined man, or whether his mind is slightly unhinged on the subject of money. He will not cut down the household in the smallest particular, and yet there are times when I can not get enough money from him to pay the servants’ wages. It is not an easy task, Bob, and such as it is I make it over to you.”
He glanced at the room—at her own extravagant clothes.
“Do you mean to say—” he began, but she interrupted him.
“Don’t pretend to be surprised. As if I had not written to you often enough, as long as I had any hope you would come back.”
“I never got your letters.”
“Odd, for you always cashed my checks.”
Vickers was silent. His experiment began to look less promising. It irked him inexpressibly to be obliged to bear such a tone from any one, more especially a woman. If Lee’s villainy had been on a larger scale he could have supported it better.
“You have got to stay at home, Bob,” she said firmly.
He could not help smiling. “It does not sound so alarming,” he answered.
“You don’t suppose I meant stay and be idle?” she asked. “No, we don’t think idleness agrees very well with you, Bob. You are beginning work on Monday.”
Her tone as well as her words irritated him. “I shall begin to look for something to do,” he said gravely. “And perhaps I shall find something to help the family resources out.”
“You need not look about. Your place is waiting for you. Mr. Emmons has very kindly offered to make you a clerk in his office.”
He laughed. “I think I can do a little better than that,” he said.
“You are hardly in a position to choose. The family resources have had enough of your higher finance, Bob. You must take what is offered to you.”
“It does not attract me—to be Mr. Emmons’s clerk.”
“I am sorry to hear it, but you must do as I tell you, remember.”
“Nellie,” he said, standing in front of the elegant and autocratic creature, “does it occur to you that a man may change in twelve years?”
“It does not seem to me that you are essentially different, unless perhaps in your appearance, which I really think has improved a little.”
“Thanks for the compliment. But I am changed to this extent—you can not dictate to me as you seem to imagine you can. I shall work, because I happen to prefer it, but I shall work how, when, and for whom I please.”
She shook her head and smiled. “How like you that is, Bob—to imagine that fine talking will help you. You will have to do as I say.”
“If you were a man I should call that a threat.”
“Oh, it is a threat. Don’t you understand of what?”
“No.”
“That if you make any effort to shirk the clerkship—if you don’t behave well in it, even—I shall have you arrested.”
Vickers, who had just sunk into a chair, appreciating that the conversation was likely to be a long one, sprang up. Did she then know his story? Had she recognized him from the first? He made no effort to conceal that her threat alarmed him.
“Arrested for what?” he asked.
“For stealing everything that I had in the world, Bob,” she returned almost conversationally.
Chapter IV
It was a long time since Vickers had spent a sleepless night—a night, that is, on which he had designed to slumber,—but now, in the little mahogany bed something too short for him, he tossed all night. Contempt was a sentiment he was not accustomed to inspiring, and it sat very ill upon him. Fear, dislike, and even distrust he had had occasion to deal with, but contempt he had never, to his knowledge, had to brook. His good looks and his ready tongue had gained him an easy sort of admiration from women. His great bodily strength had enabled him to insist on a certain civility even from his enemies. Indeed, he had an almost childish belief in the efficacy of physical force.
He had been born and bred in a country town in the northern part of the State of New York, near where his father and his grandfather had been gentlemen farmers. He had gained, too early, a reputation in the neighborhood, as a good sport, and the best amateur boxer in the countryside. He had, besides, a certain social prestige, for his father’s family had once been very rich and very much respected. A new town, a lake, a street, all bore the name of Vickers; and, though this had been over for a generation, some legend of greatness still lingered about the name.
It was all the worst possible training for a man of his temperament. His father sent him off—a little too late—to study scientific agriculture at a neighboring university. After three years Vickers was expelled owing to some trouble over a boxing-match. This was the beginning of his quarrel with his father, who could not stand seeing the name of Vickers in the newspapers—particularly in connection with what he preferred to call prize-fighting.
The two men had struggled on together in spite of constant disagreements, until Vickers’s final catastrophe had put an end to the situation. His father did not support him even in this, and Vickers
had not been surprised to hear that when the older man died, a few years later, he had left his little property to a niece and nephew.
Lewis Vickers had left his native town by night—a fugitive, and yet a certain glory had still attached to him. He had none of the bitterness to look back to that slights and small insults bring to a man. Never in all his life had he been spoken to and looked at as Nellie had looked at him and spoken to him the evening before. His blood was poisoned at the recollection. It was an insult he could not wipe out—an insult, moreover, delivered by a woman,—a creature he had been in the habit of subduing with a glance.
It did not take all night to bring him to his resolution. Risk or no risk, he would tell her the truth. He would explain to her that he was not the poor wretch she took him for.
He could wish, of course, that, to make his revenge complete, a year or so had gone by, during which time she and the forlorn old man would have lived upon his bounty. This would be perfect; but in the meantime he expected to derive a sufficient amount of satisfaction from her expression when she realized that he was a total stranger. Having reached this conclusion, he fell asleep, only to be wakened by Plimpton.
Plimpton, though he had now spent many years in America, had not sloughed off his British tradition. The eldest son was the eldest son. Scandal or no scandal, he respected the heir of the house. He pulled up the shade and drew aside the curtains with the air of one performing a religious rite.
“If you would leave me your keys, sir, before you go out, I would unpack your trunks as soon as they come.”
Vickers watched him. “Plimpton,” he said, “I have no trunk.”
He was very much mistaken if he had expected any expression of surprise from Plimpton. He had duly unpacked the saddle-bags and knew their meager contents by heart, but he made no comment. He merely bowed.
“No,” Vickers went on, “I have no bag, but in that belt, Plimpton, which I notice you are regarding with so much disfavor, is some four
hundred dollars in American gold. I am just making up my mind to go out and spend it all upon my back if I knew where to go.”
Here Plimpton felt he could be of use. He had not valeted some of the best-dressed men in London and New York for nothing. He instantly named a tailor.
“And for immediate use, sir,” he added, as he hung the blue serge trousers over a chair, brushed beyond their deserts, “for immediate use I think you might find something that would fit you at Hooks’s. I should not recommend it for most gentlemen, but with a figure like yours, sir——”
“Thanks, Plimpton.”
“And will you breakfast downstairs or here, sir?”
“Where does Mr. Lee breakfast?”
“Not before noon, in his room, sir.”
“And Miss Nellie?”
“Miss Lee, sir” (Vickers noted the reproof), “breakfasts in the dining-room at nine.”
“I will breakfast in the dining-room at nine,” said Vickers, and sprang out of bed.
When he came downstairs, she was already at table, sitting imperturbably behind the high silver coffee urn.
“Good-morning, Bob,” she said, as calmly as if they had parted on the best of terms; “I hope you slept.”
Vickers was still conscious of the excitement of his situation—the strange room, the silver, the pretty woman opposite him.
“Thank you,” he said, “I slept something horrid. My temper was only restored by Plimpton. Plimpton is much the nicest person in the house. He admires my figure.”
“Really,” said Nellie, and took up the morning paper.
