My colleague, Eamon Ismail, has always felt different all his life.

Even though he grew up in Newark, New Jersey, playing basketball and mixing it up with the other first-generation American kids in his neighborhood, he felt different.

And it's because his Muslim community told him he was different

and told him to be confident in his difference.

It was like stupid stuff.

Like, well, you guys are Muslim, so therefore you do not drink alcohol.

You don't eat pork and you don't curse

and that you respect your parents and you don't

date and then have sex and then get married.

You get married first.

For us it was very much you're Muslim, you live life this way and that's very different

than anybody else that you're going to meet out there.

Amon is a staff writer at Slate Magazine.

I love it when he tells stories about his parents.

They've popped up in his journalism from time to time.

His folks came to the states from Egypt.

They worked really hard, raised four kids, sent them all to a private school that would teach the kids Arabic and make them study the Quran.

The school I went to was called Al-Ghazali. It's this private Muslim Islamic school out in

the middle of the hood in Jersey City.

In a lot of ways, it was like this insular separate community from the rest of like civil

society at that time.

You know, we did everything there from learning to read the Quran to, you know, like we had

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