They were two women of a certain age, members of my extended family who had grown up in white, working class neighborhoods in New York, where most people were named O’Brien or De Luca.  The three of us sat watching a slideshow of photographs from Kenya on my MacBook and eating cold turkey sandwiches.
It had been my second trip to the Kenyan coast.  I was cosmically attracted to Swahili culture, a parallel universe that hinted at how African Americans might look if, instead of European Christians, we had been bought and sold by Arab Muslims.  One photograph was of a light-skinned woman, head shrouded in a black veil and a niqab pulled across her face.  You could see her eyes, but just barely. 
They gasped.
“They look spooky.”
“Like bandits!

Not that I had reacted all that differently at first.  I was in Qatar, a tiny, egg-shaped emirate that juts out into the Persian Gulf from the Arabian Peninsula.  Its capital, Doha, was for a long time little more than a fishing village on the edge of 11,000 square kilometers of sand and screaming winds; but with oil came five-star hotels, luxury shopping malls, and non-stop service to London, Rome, Riyadh, Beirut, Bangkok, Guangzhou, Jakarta, Khartoum and Houston, TX.

Launch Slide Show! 

We touched down at 4am and the transit lounge was already bustling.  A Swahili woman, veiled in a kanga with bright yellow pineapples, was cooing at her baby.  An old and dour Iranian, cocooned in a black chador, stared at me for twenty minutes without blinking.  A young Egyptian wife in hijab with thick eyeliner scrutinized the bottle of Chanel No. 5 she’d just bought at the duty free.  A fat man in an old pair of olive trousers peeled red pistachios, letting the shells scatter on the floor. There were two Pakistani sisters in glittering, sequined Punjabi suits, a tallish man from Mali dressed in wide, lavender robes, and a few Saudi oil men wearing red and white-checkered ghutra on their heads.  (The oil men from Houston and Beijing wore suits.) A wedding party of five or six sat in a far corner, their entire bodies shrouded in Japanese black polyester, except for the elaborate henna patterns trailing up their hands and feet.  There were Kenyans, Tanzanians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Sudanese, Lebanese, Iranians, Albanians, Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, and Indonesians. They were Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Persians, Hausas, Somalis and Swahilis, and Uygurs from Western China.  There seemed to be a representative of every culture that has ever embraced Islam.

I love cosmopolitanism, under ordinary circumstances.  I am American, after all, and we are supposed to if not love, then at least tolerate the strange tongues and the funny outfits.  But this was 2007, a very long time since ordinary.  I was the only American woman in that transit lounge.  I was the one who looked funny.  I wore a t-shirt and jeans, and those six hours, it was as though I was trapped in one of those dreams where you wake up at the supermarket in your underwear, unable to push the shopping cart.  I wanted to throw a burqa over my head.  It was the kind of uncomfortable, squirmy fear that made me entertain as possible that anyone—the fat man peeling pistachios, the dour Iranian, the Swahili woman in pineapples, even the baby she was cooing—could at any moment come charging at me with a giant saber, crying “infidel!” 
 
Mind you, my higher brain functions weren't really functioning.  This was reptilian reason, fight-or-flight, Pavlov's dog salivating at the sound of a ringing bell.  See a veil or a robe or a beard, think stonings, beheadings, honor killings, mortal danger.

Battle of the Sexes