This was a mistake.
I hadn't done my research. I'd rushed everything. I was naive.
This was a terrible idea.
All of these thoughts went through my head boarding my flight to Istanbul.
When I booked the trip last month, I was ecstatic to see a totally different part of the world. But boarding my flight, this newspaper headline greeted me.
Picking up the paper, I saw that just hours ago a popular tourist attraction had been attacked by militants. Istanbul is already one of the most heavily used routes for westerners hoping to join ISIS, and this was the last thing I wanted to see before heading to Turkey. I was kind of freaking out about the terrorism threat, and being on an airplane only made me more paranoid.
My flight landed, and I met up with my friend Javier. Wandering around a foreign city where I knew zero of the language, few of the customs, and many different ways to embarrass myself is bad enough. But this was my first time in a Muslim country, and it was intimidating. I had never before seen women in the traditional naqab, covered head-to-toe with only their eyes visible.
As horrible as it is to say, with the ISIS headline fresh in my mind and soldiers with assault rifles stationed everywhere, I was uncomfortable being surrounded by so many people so different from me.
Then, walking through one of the main squares of Istanbul, I saw two Muslim women, both totally covered with only their eyes showing, taking a selfie on a Samsung Galaxy.
That was such a humanizing moment, I kind of snapped out of my trance. I realized these are people just like me, who have lives and take vacations and need the right angle in their selfie before they post it to Instagram. It had been embarrassingly easy for me to forget how we have different traditions but the same humanity.
Whenever we project one person's actions onto an entire group, we risk dehumanizing them, as well as ourselves. Americans, myself included, let the sliver of Muslim extremists dictate our opinion on the over 1 billion Muslims around the world. A Mexican immigrant murdering a woman in San Francisco has been used as a proxy to discuss the citizenship status of 11 million people. These types of broad generalizations aren't just distasteful, they're dangerous. Many of history's most painful chapters begin with distorting differences and forgetting similarities between groups of people.
It's really hard to break out of our prejudices, but when we do it turns ignorance into empathy, which is the best way to fight extremism in any form. Watching a fully covered Muslim woman take pictures on her Galaxy, I felt my universe expand.
