The Women's March in San Francisco on January 21, 2017. Photo by Sahar Habib Ghazi. Used with permission. Allow me to take you back to the Women’s March last January in San Francisco. I was there with a neighbor and dear friend. I trust her with my 4 year old daughter, she trusts me with her children; she’s my rock. One minute we are shouting slogans for women’s rights. The next we are chanting for trans rights. We are in a sea of umbrellas and people, some carrying the iconic image of a hijabi wrapped in an American flag, some chanting slogans against Islamophobia. My friend looks at me and says, “You don’t have to deal with that stuff, right?” “Why, because I'm not Muslim?” I ask? I have had this conversation before. People I work with, or people who have known me for years, separate me, the Sahar they know, from the popular idea of “Muslims” built in their imagination. They de-Muslim me. There are 1.7 billion Muslims worldwide. We don't all look the same. We practice our religion differently. We identify with being Muslim differently. But somehow we all get packed into the same Muslim box. This box is so well constructed in our collective imaginations that when Muslims like me don’t fit in it, we get de-Muslimed. I am not alone in this. It's even happened to the best-selling poet in America: Rumi. What images come to your mind when you think of him? Love? Peace? When Jalaluddin Rumi was my age, he was an orthodox Muslim preacher and scholar. Islam, the Quran and Prophet Muhammad were central to his poetry until the day he died. But Rumi’s religion has been erased from Western imagination and most popular translations of his poetry. This erasure is a big part of the story of the world's 1.7 billion Muslims. Another is the reductionist images of Muslims that have colonized western books for centuries. This seductive imagery is defined by the dark men you should fear and the exotic women you should save. The path-breaking Palestinian American scholar Edward Said deconstructed the history behind these images in the 1970s. But these images stand tall today. Our politicians, the news industry, and Hollywood all continue to perpetuate them. Take the 1998 film The Siege, where Arab American men are actually rounded up in an internment camp in New York. On the right, you'll see Denzel Washington with the bad dangerous Muslim at the top and the good patriotic Muslim FBI agent below. Screenshots from the 1998 film The Siege. I’ve worked in the news industry for 13 years, and I’ve seen this powerful flawed narrative dominate our newsfeeds. This narrative overshadows the reality that nine Muslim women have led their countries in the last three decades, while the US couldn’t even elect its first real female presidential candidate in 2016. This narrative fails to recognize that French Muslim women prevented from wearing their hijab in public buildings and Saudi Muslim women forced to cover their bodies by their government, are two sides of the same coin. It’s one powerful group exerting its “control” on the “other”. This powerful narrative diminishes Muslim women leading movements for change. It ignores that the first Muslim prayers on American soil were said by Africans brought here on slave ships. It erases the existence of Queer Muslims. This narrative has captured our collective imaginations so deeply and so inaccurately that Sikh men and children are often targets of anti-Muslim attacks and bullying. Because of the stories we tell, and the way we tell them, Islamophobia today, isn’t just fear of Islam, the religion, it is fear of the “other”. In the news industry, we tell more than just stories based on facts. Or alternative facts. We also build narratives that help you make sense of the world. And my industry has epically failed at capturing the narrative of the 1.7 billion. And we’ve failed them here, where 7 million Muslims make up the most “diverse” religious group in America. About a third of the total Muslim population here is made up African Americans. Six out of 10 American Muslims are first-generation immigrants who come from 77 countries. The author's parents in 1976, in New York. Used with permission. Four decades ago, my immigrant parents arrived in New York to live their American dream. My mother placed her first jewelry designs on 5th Avenue, and my father worked hard in the skyscrapers of New York; skyscrapers made possible by a Bangladeshi Muslim American structural engineer named Fazlur Rahman Khan. Back when Khan was reimagining the skylines of the world, my parents were unapologetically Muslim and American.