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Melody Moezzi likes answering questions as much as she likes asking them. She is a vocal champion of her faith and of America, and she does as much asking as answering while trying to reconcile the two. Melody does a good job doing both in her book War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims, a collection of profiles of young American Muslims, full of everything from identity deconstruction to hip-hop lyrics. The chapters are conversational, serious yet humorous, and at the same time lyrical. In 2008, Melody won Georgia’s Author of the Year Award in the category of "Creative Non-fiction: Essay" for the book.
Melody’s flair for the English language comes across in speech just as much as her writing: describing the American embassy’s attempts to put her parents’ documents back together after the Iranian hostage crisis as “people making Persian rugs,” or recalling why her family didn’t need to go back to their hometown mosque after it was mistaken for a Jewish temple and vandalized with swastikas by explaining, “God is as close to you as your jugular vein.”
Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, it was Iranian culture — not Islam — that shaped Melody’s identity. Her family ended up there because of a wealth of good jobs and the large Iranian community. “Nobody ever talked about religion,” she recalls. “We didn’t know which families were Jewish or Muslim or Baha’i.”
As Melody reconnected with the infinite dimensions of Islam as she interviewed and wrote for War on Error, she struggled to remember the lesson of her childhood: that it didn’t matter what religion you are or how you practiced, but that you were a good person.
When asked by a subject — “one of the most observant Muslims I know” — if her parents were religious, she said no because they drink alcohol and smoke. She was shocked when he responded that that didn’t necessarily make them any less religious than he.
“Faith is like an orange,” Melody now explains. Focusing on who follows the rules of prayer, hijab, fasting and avoidance is like peeling the orange and contemplating the rind. “God is not happy that we are talking about clothing instead of talking about honesty, dignity, integrity, compassion,” she asserts.
After 9/11, Melody was confronted with so much misunderstanding about her faith that she was determined to reach the people who knew very little but wanted to learn more. So she quit her job as an estate planning attorney to freelance, write her book and communicate her message. “I have no problem with ignorance as long as you have an open mind,” she says.
She’s also taken the answers and questions posed by War on Error to high schools in Dayton, where she compares the struggles of American Muslims for acceptance to those of gay youth growing up in the Midwest. If anyone has the capacity to change, she believes, it’s young people, whose prejudices have yet to solidify.
Melody credits America — its laws and its people — for her ability to ask the questions, draw the comparisons and tell the stories that she continues to tell. “Americans are very open,” she says. “That’s why I’m able to say the things I’m saying.”
War on Error, University of Arkansas Press (October 2007)
Updated June 16, 2008
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