Raising My Kids to Be Unapologetic American Muslims
This article is part of Parenting in an Uncertain Age, a series about the experience of raising children in a time of great change.
Growing up in North Dakota in the 1980s and 1990s, there was nobody who shared my family’s last name. “Husain? Hoooooo-sayn? You’re not related to … ?” teachers would sometimes ask.
No, I would explain, I wasn’t. My name was spelled differently from the then-dictator Saddam Hussein, and, either way, it’s a very common name in the Middle East and South Asia. Sometimes teachers would half-laugh; sometimes they would just look me over with a hint of skepticism. If they had taught one of my brothers before me, I could guess I was pretty much in the clear. But, if the Husain family was unknown to them, I never knew which way it was going to go. My best bet was to lie low and be a good, diligent student.
I was entering 10th grade at Central High School in Grand Forks, North Dakota, when the first Gulf War broke out. I was one of the only Muslims and brown kids there (save for my older brother, who was a senior in
