I recall reading Edward Said's memoir, Out of Place, as a college junior. His experience as a stateless Palestinian, living in the United States but always longing for the home from which he was displaced, resonated deeply with me. I was not Palestinian, but an Egyptian and Lebanese American, raised on the west side of Detroit, and unlike Said, a man I consider an intellectual hero, I grew up on welfare and without the means he had. But his story spoke to me, and his experience made sense of that incessant circumstance, feeling, or spirit of perpetually being out of place: not Muslim enough in some spaces, not Arab enough in others; not Shiite or Sunni enough, cultured or sophisticated enough, or down or radical enough. Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicana feminist and one of my favorite thinkers, articulated this feeling of perpetual flux best, writing, "Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element." These intellectuals articulated what I was, at that point, unable to, and just as importantly, they gave me community.

DEFINE: Defines the experience of hybrid identity — not belonging fully to any single community — through Said and Anzaldúa's articulation.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 336