Are Muslim millennials the last generation to know “Islamophobia”?

I was born in 1995, which, by internet-ubiquitous estimates, makes me a millennial. When the invasion of Iraq took place, I asked my mother if everything happening on television—among other iconic images that of soldiers tearing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdaus square—meant that I might get the following day off from school. She said ‘no’, but I got the next day off anyway: shaken by the invasion, my mother kept us home with her the day after America invaded Iraq. But because we lived in Dubai at the time, a comfortable 1,400 kilometers away from Baghdad, her concern was solely motherly.

I have no memory of the day 9/11 happened. But I do remember, a few years after 2001, the airing of a certain episode of Digimon—which I’d waited all day for—being interrupted in favor of a one-time show with panelists discussing the state of the ‘Muslim world post-9/11’. It was that one day a year when everyone addresses the collective condemnation of Muslims. And it was also the first time I heard the word islamophobia.

{mosads}And yet, for a generation so uninvolved in the events leading up to both events—9/11, the invasion of Iraq—Muslim millennials have suffered the short end of the resulting shift in public opinion towards Muslims: they got to grow up amidst global public opinion that, since conception, branded them as undesirables, les enfants terribles, both figuratively and literally since they are the children of other undesirables.

In other words, what some call the islamophobia of it all.

This year, New York public school students will get two days off for Eid ul-Adha, one of two major Muslim holidays (the second, Eid ul-Fitr, will also get two days off starting 2016). It’s hard to imagine many people objecting to getting two days’ holiday, but that’s not the major point: a holiday for Eid in New York would have been unthinkable a few years ago, especially to Muslims for whom, on some level, islamophobia has not been a reactionary response to their existence, but a viscerally present, constitutive force.

When I say that Muslims are viscerally affected by islamophobia, I don’t just mean in cases like Ahmed Mohamed’s, who was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school. I mean that every Muslim’s psyche, whether practicing or non-practicing or even just distantly a cultural Muslim, incorporates a certain measure of siege mentality. The awareness, or belief, that islamophobia exists and is an inherent disadvantage.

A few days ago, U.S. GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson emphatically opined that he “absolutely would not agree with” having a Muslim be “in charge of [this] nation.” Since making his equivocation, Carson went on to say that donations “[have] been coming in so fast, it’s hard to even keep up with it.” Sound like much reassurance in terms of equality, acceptance, or integration?  Probably not.

Except that it is. The backlash Carson faced upon making his statement is nothing if not reassuring; fellow senators and presidential candidates criticized Carson, while the first Muslim member of congress, for his part, released a statement condemning Carson’s statement. And even though this blacklash—as well as Ahmed Mohammed’s #iStandWithAhmed campaign—don’t mean that the problem has vanished, they are signs that progress has been made.

There was a time when sentiment towards anything and anyone Jewish was indiscriminate contempt and, if not so harsh, then dismissal. But as any Jewish person will tell you, times—as well as prevalent sentiments—have certainly changed. And it’s not without irony that Muslims, so traditionally perceived as rivals and enemies of Jews, are now engaged in the same challenge Jews once bravely and patiently undertook: legitimizing their rhetoric as well as their identities, and consolidating their moderate voices, which must be heard.

Amin Maalouf, a decorated Lebanese novelist who writes in French and who, by his own admission, is “poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions,” asserts in his book On Identity that “everyone must be able to assume, without fear or grudge, every single one of their allegiances.”

And that is exactly the goal: that Muslims, like denizens of other religious communities, be able to assume proud allegiance to their faith together with their other, equally formative allegiances. And that includes getting two days off to invite your non-Muslim friends over during Eid, wearing a burqa while playing lead-guitar in a heavy metal band, and yes, Mr. Carson, as hypothetical as it remains, also running for president.

Perhaps then post-millennials will recognize the word “islamophobia” as the relic of a time that was perhaps inevitable, but which has also irrevocably passed.

Samir is an undergraduate journalism student and journalist-under-training at the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper.