Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning writer, and associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he currently lives in Brooklyn. Bayoumi completed his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2002), editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israeli/Palestine Conflict (Haymarket Books, 2010) and has published academic essays in publications including Transition, Interventions, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Asian American Studies.
His writings have also appeared in The Nation, London Review of Books, and The Village Voice. His essay "Disco Inferno", originally published in The Nation, was included in the collection "Best Music Writing 2006". From 2003 to 2006, he served on the National Council of the American Studies Association, and he is currently an editor for Middle East Report. He is also an occasional columnist for the Progressive Media Project, an initiative of The Progressive magazine, through which his op-eds appear in newspapers across the United States. Bayoumi's work, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, traces the experiences of seven young Arab-Americans navigating life in a post-September 11 environment, where complicated public perceptions of the attacks gave birth to new brands of stereotypes, fueling widespread discrimination. It is the story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. His title is a reference to the W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America was awarded a 2008 American Book Award and the 2009 Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction.
The author was recently a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation. On the program, he said this: Feisal Abdul Rauf, yes. I think the idea of - behind the project from the very beginning was precisely to model a place like the 92nd Street Y to have some place where we can see - Islam, see American Muslims and the rest of American society come together and create a culture together. And, in fact, they did everything, as they should have, according to plan. They bought the building. They went to the community board and such things. And the project was announced in December of last year to little ado. But then, somehow, in the early summer, it started to generate a lot of hostility. And by the end of the summer, you saw huge crowds around that site in New York to the point where, around the anniversary of September 11th this year, there was a significant demonstration in opposition to it, where - and I went, actually, to see that demonstration, and I've never really seen anything like that in New York City before. I mean, there were thousands of people on the street just yelling, no mosque, no mosque, no mosque, and - a kind of blatant in-your-face anti-Muslim sentiment that really left me quite depressed. On the other hand, there was another demonstration just two blocks away that was a pro - you could call it a pro-Park51 demonstration that was very typical of New York City. It was loud. It was rambunctious. It was very diverse. And that one, to me, seemed much more representative of what New York City was all about. And that one didn't leave me depressed. That one left me quite optimistic. Below is the podcast of that show, in full.
In December of 2010, The Jewish Week wrote this, in mentioning and invoking the author: Howard Wohl, president of Tanger Hillel and a 1964 graduate of Brooklyn College, attributes much of the atmosphere to an episode that took place this summer, when the college instructed all its incoming students to read a controversial book edited by Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English at the school. The book — “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America” — is a collection of personal stories by and about seven Arabs from Brooklyn. Critics objected to the assignment, saying that Bayoumi takes up the Palestinian cause in his final chapter and provides a decidedly slanted view. Recalling the episode earlier this month, Wohl said his greatest concern is that Brooklyn College doesn’t start to resemble “too many other campuses in North America,” where, in his view, anti-Israel rhetoric has morphed into anti-Semitism, and hate speech has blossomed under the guise of academic freedom.
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