Living My Life as the “Muslim Ron Swanson” in the Age of Digital Surveillance

I like to write in the very early hours of the morning, before the sun has risen, when the house and the streets are quiet and it feels like maybe I’m the only one awake for miles. I enjoy the feeling of being very alone. But sometimes, as my fingers hover over the keyboard, about to type something into a search engine, I’m overwhelmed by the feeling of being watched. I write a lot about Muslims in a post-9/11 world. Of course I’m nervous.

The worst was the time I needed to look up the Islamic State flag for a scene I was working on in my novel. This is okay, I said to myself as I zoomed in on those crudely drawn black and white scrawls. It’s just a flag. But then I found myself needing to watch examples of ISIS recruitment videos. How could I explain this? I thought as a montage of bearded men firing machine guns flashed across my screen. Will they understand that I’m just a fiction writer, a high school teacher, a mom, a nobody?

I clicked out of the videos as soon as I had what I needed and cleared my search history. I laughed at myself afterward. But sometimes in that still, quiet house at 4 am, I imagine a boot kicking down my door, a bag over my head, a van waiting with doors open.

The two decades since 9/11 are the same two decades of the rise of social media and smart technology. Facebook was launched in 2003, the same year the United States invaded Iraq. I remember coming home from school as a sophomore in high school and flipping on the television to watch flashing black-and-green footage of bombs exploding over Baghdad. I ate my afternoon snack as people who looked like me, prayed like me, and had names like mine were killed in their sleep.

I got my first smartphone in 2009 as a college graduation gift. I took it with me as I went to my first job post-college at the Arab-American Association of New York, a social services agency that supports immigrants. This was perhaps the peak of NYPD infiltration of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities, a time of great anxiety and paranoia for Muslims in New York because we didn’t yet have any proof of what we could feel every day–that we were being watched, recorded, and entrapped illegally by law enforcement.

I came of age right as these two great forces that have shaped contemporary American society converged. There is a palpable before and after of my teenage years–before 9/11 and after. Before social media and after. Both have shaped me into the adult I am today and cannot be disentangled. I resisted joining social media for as long as I could but eventually succumbed to pressure or temptation. The creation of my Facebook account felt like a submission, a moment of resignation, a failure to resist.

Among my Muslim friends, this feeling was normal. We all felt watched—we used to joke about it. Someone new and overly eager would show up at the campus mosque and we’d raise our eyebrows at one another. As our flip phones gradually began to be replaced by smartphones, we began to qualify our own jokes for the benefit of whoever might be listening.

“I swear, I could kill him right now,” one of us would say. And then, eyeing the phone sitting on the table between us warily, we’d clarify: “Just kidding!”

After the Associated Press broke the story in 2012 that the NYPD had indeed been spying on us, my friends and coworkers at AAANY would joke about which one of us was the informant reporting the mundane details of our daily work–the number of chairs in the lobby, the poster of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that hung on the wall. “You were the spy! No, you were the spy.”

Over the years, I developed different responses to this feeling of being watched. At first, I behaved sort of like the miniature American flag that my father planted in our lawn right after 9/11. I would be walking proof that Muslims were Americans, too. I would be the “right” kind of Muslim—moderate and apologetic.

This is around the time when I briefly pretended to love country music as much as my Virginia high school classmates. But the little flag became sun-faded, and Muslims were still being kicked off planes, deported, and detained. And then, in 2012, just a few months after the AP’s reporting on the spy program, my father and I traveled to Egypt together.

Our flight was out of Newark on Turkish Airlines. It was the airline’s inaugural flight out of Newark and they threw a little party at the gate to celebrate. There was Turkish music and food and even a whirling dervish spinning in the corner. It was fun and festive and such a welcome change from the usual anxiety I felt at airports. My father and I lined up to board the plane, tickets in hand, when a man wearing a t-shirt and jeans appeared suddenly and ordered us to step out of the line.

He waved a badge in our faces, but I was so disoriented that I can’t remember who he said he was. TSA? Homeland Security? He had a thick New Jersey accent and ruddy cheeks, and he started asking us questions about why we were going to Egypt and how much cash we had on us. The line moved forward without us. My father wasn’t having it. This agent—whoever he was—asked my dad where he was born. My father pointed at the U.S. passport in the agent’s hand. “You have my passport right there. Read it,” he said.

The agent kept asking us questions about money, and my father refused to keep answering him. “I’ll answer those questions when I come back through Customs like everyone else,” he said calmly and attempted to rejoin the line. The agent was furious. He started to yell and threatened to pull us off the flight altogether. At this point, he appealed to me: “You better get your father under control or this is going to be a very bad situation for him,” he said.

And to my shame, I did. I held my father’s cheeks in between both of my hands and I begged him to submit, to cooperate, to let himself be publicly humiliated. “Don’t let him scare you,” my dad said. “I know my rights.”

Because my father still fundamentally believed in American democracy, that his rights as a citizen were unassailable. He thought those rights would keep him safe. But I did not have faith that my father’s blue passport would do anything to protect him. I had visions of him being hauled away right there at the gate, the plane still humming outside the window. At that point, I knew enough to understand that “terrorists” are made in moments like these.

I knew that Muslims like my dad were being held indefinitely on baseless, amorphous and ever-changing suspicions. So I begged my father to back down. And this seemed to assuage the agent’s wounded ego. He wanted to humiliate us, and here I was begging and apologizing and pleading. Eventually, he let us go without any further explanation.

Takeoff was delayed because of us, and I remember feeling the eyes of all the other passengers on us as we walked down the aisle to our seats. We were almost-terrorists, and now we were flying across the Atlantic with them. My father and I were silent for most of the plane ride, and we have hardly spoken of the incident since.

I’m no longer trying to prove myself as good or moderate. Now I’m just mad and weary. Because I’ve realized that it’s actually not about what we do or don’t do. We’re watched all the same. So I decided to write a novel about the watching.  When I was doing research on the NYPD “Demographics Unit,” the euphemistic name for its Muslim surveillance program, I devoured documents detailing the ways law enforcement had been tracking us with a perverse sort of pleasure. As I combed through the inane, often typo-ridden reports, I felt vindicated for every creeping, paranoid moment of the past ten years.

Once, when I was at an artists’ residency in an idyllic corner of rural New Hampshire, I printed out every NYPD report that the AP had managed to publish–dozens of pages of maps, interviews with informants and  “mosque crawlers,” databases of Arab or Muslim-owned business within 100 miles of New York City. I spread them out on the floor of my cabin and began annotating them. Even the most innocuous details–the types of flyers pinned to a bulletin board, the TV channel playing in a deli–were imbued with menace.

According to these reports, danger lurked everywhere. We–Arabs and Muslims–were latent terrorists, all of us. We had to be watched very carefully, because at any moment, the violence inside us might hatch. As I was lying on my belly on the floor, scrawling like a madwoman on a map, I heard a rustling outside my door. I froze. Then I heard tires crunching on the gravel driveway. It was just the daily delivery of lunch in a wicker picnic basket.

After that, I bounced to another artists’ residency, this was one even more remote with no cell phone service or wifi. It was glorious. I was untrackable. I often think back to that week off the grid and wonder why I don’t just unplug from technology more often.

Sometimes I’ll muster the strength to quit social media. I was off it entirely for a few years, and then the pandemic and lockdown happened, and I found myself, filled with a deep sense of self-loathing, opening an Instagram account late one night in April 2020. I wanted to see people’s pandemic puppies and their pandemic babies; I wanted to see people. But it didn’t take long before I was delivering hypocritical rants about cookies and location trackers, vowing to quit the internet and drown my phone.

I’m still stuck in this cycle. I eye teenage cashiers with suspicion when they ask for personal information like my phone number or email at the check-out. My husband calls me the “Muslim Ron Swanson,” after the lovable libertarian character from the show Parks and Recreation who tries his best to live off the grid and hides the most basic details of his life from even his closest friends. Leslie Knope, after years of sleuthing, finally discovers his birthday because he signed up for a free ice cream at Baskin Robbins. This sends him to a tailspin of paranoia and panic–what other information about him is floating around out there?

We recently got a letter from the city where we live informing us that appraisers would be in our neighborhood soon and might walk around our properties, or even ask for permission to enter our homes. “Did you see this?” I waved the letter in my husband’s face one night after we had put our children to bed. “Does this even look real to you? They want to come inside our house?”

I know better than to let authorities into my home. When I worked for AAANY, I used to pass out flyers in Arabic instructing people on their rights if the police or FBI ever knocked on their doors. “Come back with a warrant,” I’d yell at the appraiser, slamming the door in his face.

In the end, when he showed up, the appraiser didn’t even ask to come inside. He drew his wheel across our driveway and was gone again. The whole encounter lasted sixty seconds. Which is good, because of course I’m not the Muslim Ron Swanson. Ron Swanson is a straight, red-meat-eating white man born in America. If he threw the appraiser off his property, he’d be exercising his god-given rights as an American. As a Muslim woman, the daughter of immigrants, I’d be declaring myself an enemy, finally admitting to what this country has always known about me since I was fourteen years old (and even before).

Now, I’m a writer trying to make my debut and reach an audience. People do that with social media these days. So I have the author’s Instagram page (I’ve since shuttered my personal accounts). You might find me there. You might even see me post occasionally. And there is something thrilling about gaining a new “follower,” someone who’s read my book or who wants to. What a dream! But you should also know that every time I hit “publish,” I still feel like I’m baiting my own trap.

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Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad is available via Doubleday.