Pivot, Elena Scotti/FUSION

By Marisa Kabas

When Elhan moved to Washington, D.C. from Somalia, the United States was not at war with Iraq and Afghanistan and the Twin Towers still dominated the New York skyline. But just a few weeks later, on September 11, 2001, everything changed. Overnight, “Muslim” became a dirty word—and Elhan became “Amy.”

With this one day of terror, the nation’s attitudes toward followers of Islam went from fairly neutral to vitriolic, after the perpetrators of the most deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil were revealed to be Muslim. Elhan, a high school freshman at the time, could see the change happening before her eyes.

That’s when she decided that in public she’d be “Amy,” a normal American teenager.

For the next 15 years, Amy would go to school, hang out with her friends, and go to parties, never letting on that she was deeply attached to her religion. When she wasn’t at school, though, she was at her mosque, where she prayed regularly and engaged with a close-knit community as Elhan. Never did these two lives meet, she said—not even any close calls.

That all changed earlier this year, however, when Elhan finally worked up the courage to come clean to her friends about her double life—and the entire world.

“It felt like a very heavy rock was on my chest. I just didn’t know how to get out of it,” Elhan, now 32, told me in a phone conversation last week. “I was stuck. I got so used to it being my daily routine and it became a normal thing to be ‘Amy’ once I was outside the door.”

Not only did Elhan decide she was going to finally share her secret, but she elected to do it on the season two premiere of the Pivot network docu-series Secret Life of Americans. Each week on the show, a different subject reveals something personal they’ve been hiding from loved ones. On Friday’s episode, viewers follow Elhan on her self-filmed journey toward revealing her religious, Muslim self to her friends—and her secular identity as “Amy” to her family.

“My whole adult life, I’ve been living in fear,” she tells the camera, set in selfie mode. “Fear of rejection from society. Fear of being labeled as a terrorist. Fear that someone might hurt me because I’m Muslim. That fear is still there.”

While not all Muslims go to the lengths Elhan did to hide their religious identity, her story provides a vivid example of the conflict many Muslims feel in simply navigating daily life in this country. In the years since 9/11, racial tensions have arguably gotten worse, not better. This climate of intolerance has forced many, like Elhan, to hide in shame. But perhaps leading by example will encourage others to come out from the shadow of hate.

In the days following 9/11, Elhan made a few practical decisions that would affect her life and identity for the decade-and-a-half to come: She asked school administrators to officially address her as Amy and she began changing out of her traditional garments and into jeans and t-shirts before school. Once she began hearing mean-spirited jokes in the wake of 9/11, including insults about how Muslims look and dress, she became convinced this superficial assimilation was the only way to live a peaceful existence in this country.

“It’s not like I had two different personalities,” she tells me. “I was still the same girl.” But one of those girls—the real her—was only seen within the safety of her home and at her mosque. It was never a question of her commitment or love of her faith, but rather a paralyzing fear that left her, and so many like her, she says, feeling like she would be put in harm’s way by simply being herself.

This fear was not unfounded. According to 2015 numbers from the FBI’sUniform Crime Reports program, the county has seen five times more annual hate crimes against Muslims since 9/11. The group estimates that 100 to 150 have occurred per year, in contrast with 20 to 30 per year before the attacks.

Merely “looking” Muslim isn’t the only thing Elhan and fellow followers of Islam need to worry about—so-called “Muslim-sounding” names can also impact how others perceive you. In a 2014 study that analyzed the way employers respond to prospective employees whose resumes indicate a religious affiliation, the researchers found that resumes with one of the seven religions tested “received [on average] 29 percent fewer emails and 33 percent fewer phone calls than the control group.” But Muslims fared even worse, receiving 38 percent fewer emails and a staggering 54 percent fewer phone calls.

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Source: Fusion