“IAmMohammed” on display
new york » The blueeyed Iowan shares a name with people of all ages and many races, in countries all over the globe. By most estimates, the name they share is the most common in the world.
And yet the Iowan feels isolated.
“The greatest challenges in my life are really tied to my name,” KhalidMohamad El Khatib said.
Mohamad. That’s how Khatib spells it. From Afghanistan to Alaska, there areMohameds, Mohammads, Mohammeds and Muhammads. They are a diverse and growing group — in theUnited States alone, more than 2,600were born in 2015. Theirs has been called the most popular baby name in Oslo, Britain and Israel. They’re also stigmatized: In tests with identical résumés, candidates namedMohamed were invited to job interviews three times less often.
A new museum exhibit brings together 14Mohammeds to display the variety of their religious beliefs and their home communities— and their shared unease about bias against their religion, Islam, whose prophet they are named for.
“IAmMohammed” is one of several exhibits organized in the past three months, since President Donald Trump issued an executive order suspending travel to theUnited States from certain majority-Muslim countries. Although the travel ban has been blocked by federal judges, the fear it raised in the AmericanMuslim community has not died down.
Muslim and non-Muslim artists are responding to that fear through art.
At the Museum ofModern Art in New York, cura- tors hung up works by artists from the affected countries as a form of protest after the executive order, replacing works in the galleries by Picasso, Matisse and otherWestern artists. The Davis Museum in Massachusetts did the opposite, draping black cloth over about 120 works by Muslim and other immigrant artists to protest Trump’s order.
TheMuseum of the City ofNewYork, which normally plans its exhibits for months, threwone together in 2½ weeks titled “Muslim inNewYork.” The photography curator at the stately museum overlooking Central Park combed the archives for images of the city’sMuslim communities.
The faith has been practiced inNewYork since the 17th century, when the city was stillNewAmsterdam, chief curator SarahHenry said. In this exhibit, which the museum will keep until the end of July, the earliest images date to the 1940s, when Alexander Alland captured scenes of Syrian immigrants praying and Turkish-American Muslim children doing their schoolwork around a table.
Henry said curators at the museum felt the need to quickly provide more information aboutMuslims as they heard people debating whether Trump’s travel order amounted to a “Muslim ban.”
“We’re trying to reveal the history and the facts. The history is that Islam has been woven into the history of the city for as long as there’s been a city here,” she said. “It’s never been monolithic. It’s more variegated and complex.”
Henry said that many of the photographs were taken for the same purpose: dispelling bias against Muslims in earlier eras. Ed Grazda took photographs to show the normalcy of New York’s mosques after the firstWorld Trade Center attack in the 1990s provoked anti-Muslim sentiment. Mel Rosenthal embarked on a similar project after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, capturing images that included aMuslim mother solemnly holding a photograph of her son in his U.S. Army uniform.