anger

AHMAD | Death Threats Don’t Scare Me

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Long before I became a regular columnist for The Sun, I sent in a letter to the editor about being a Muslim student at Cornell. If I’m being honest, the article could have been a feel-good piece, but it turned out to be more of an angry rant about a series of unpleasant interactions I had during my first year. I’ll admit that it was written somewhat from a place of cynicism, and most definitely from a place of bitterness. Some things weren’t phrased in as polished a way as they could have been, but can you blame me? I was a furious freshman, and an idiot.

Columns

AHMAD | Is It A Bad Time to be Muslim?

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When I decided to put on the hijab, I was 18 years old. It was the summer of 2015, right before I left for college. It also just happened to be before Donald Trump announced that he was running for president, before Ahmed Mohamed’s arrest, before the hashtag “Stop Islam” trended, before the Muslim Ban made headlines, before countless anti-Islam protests and hate crimes, and certainly before I overheard a professor saying, “it’s a bad time to be a Muslim.”

And even before all of that, I had prepared myself for the worst. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before wearing a hijab began to feel like I was voluntarily putting a target on my forehead. Walking around campus my first few weeks at Cornell was intimidating to say the least.