I’m not really someone who reads the news religiously. But the past couple weeks, like many of my peers, I have been glued to my computer. Clicking every news article that is posted to Facebook, watching every video clip in gchat statuses, fervently posting articles and links to my Twitter page, I find myself going from page to page as I lose sense of what it is I’m trying to find.

The potential of a divided America has my undivided attention.

Being an American Muslim is something I have always been extremely comfortable with, maybe too comfortable with in retrospect. I knew very well that September 11th substantially changed the state of Islam in America, but I was lucky enough to never directly experience the repercussions of that change. I gained consciousness in a wealthy suburb of Chicago. Naperville is a moderately diverse community that was more than accepting of my Muslim background. Values of inclusivity, toleration, and mutual respect were present amongst my peers, and my environment granted me a strong sense of self identity and self confidence. All of my closest friends from high school were non-Muslims. When I started to wear the hijab, these friends served as my core support system during that transition. My best friend to this day is a non-Muslim, French Lebanese Christian girl. Religious differences rarely, if ever, negatively impacted my life.

But now I know that just because I didn’t see any problems did not mean that there was not something festering under the surface of the American psyche. The compounding of poor foreign policy decisions, fear mongering, and a sensationalist media was feeding an Islamophobia that was waiting to rise above the periphery of the unstated to become painfully explicit.

Enter Ground Zero.

Watching the Ground Zero controversy from Istanbul has been frustrating, upsetting, and honestly makes me feel like I am going home to a foreign country in three days. I know that life goes on in America, but the Islamophobia I am witnessing everyday from thousands of miles away suggests to me that the Muslim American reality has changed a lot since I left.

In Turkey, people often ask me what it is like to be a Muslim in America. Without any hesitation, I would reply, that there are indeed isolated instances of discrimination and sustained stereotypes, but there was still more good than bad. I would often use the example of the hijab, arguing that it is easier for me to attend my university and even apply for jobs than it is for women who wear the hijab in Turkey. Although a “secular” state, religion is uncomfortably political in Turkey, and as a practicing Muslim, I most definitely feel that it is easier to openly practice my faith in the United States than here. Although I know the Eastern world has a deep distaste for American foreign policy and sometimes culture, I unabashedly call America home, and unapologetically introduce myself as an American in Turkey.

Earlier during my travels I got into an intense argument with a respected journalist who was adamant that as a Muslim I could never truly be American. I refused to accept his argument at any cost. I repeated again and again, that although the dynamic was complicated, the Muslim narrative was inextricably tied to the narrative of the American nation. My experience as a Muslim in America is nothing like the experience of a Muslim in any other country. Although I am of Pakistani descent, I identify America as home, and root who I am today in American soil. I refused to accept that America didn’t belong to me, or that I didn’t belong to America.

Ground Zero: You didn’t change my mind.

There is no clash of civilizations, there is no contradiction in the phrase American Muslim.

I know America will overcome this, because there is no other choice for America. I’m not going anywhere. I love Istanbul but I love you more America. Let’s hope that this is our first and last lover’s quarrel.