Look Out, a Muslim!
One afternoon this past October, I was sitting at the bar in a packed out Starbucks when a young, Middle Eastern man tapped me on the shoulder. "Is it okay if I sit here?" he asked in a thick accent, pointing at the chair to my immediate right.
I nodded my head and told him that was absolutely okay. I was kind of taken aback that he had even asked. Most people would have quickly hopped up into that chair without a word (seats at Starbucks are hard to come by!).
I scooted over to give him some room as he situated himself and pulled some materials out of his bag — an iPhone and a spiral notebook. Being the nosey person that I am, I eyed the content of his notebook as he flipped through the pages. I saw lots and lots of written lines — one sentence written in a foreign language, the next sentence written in English — repeated continually down each piece of paper. The thick accent combined with what looked to be efforts to learn the English language led me to suspect he had just freshly landed on American soil.
