As a Muslim, Farid Alvie finds himself constantly having to clarify that he is a "moderate", knowing that there is just that hint of disbelief that any of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims can be anything but "fanatic".
Over a decade before the tragedy of 11 September occurred, I first encountered a phenomenon, which, until then, I had only read about in newspapers or heard bandied about by visibly irate members of assorted political, religious or social organisations. For the first time in my life that day, I was slapped, without having done anything, with a "label".
Walking down Main Street (and that is exactly what it was called) in "Ruralville", Pennsylvania, that winter evening, minding my own business, I got called a wide variety of names by a group of half-drunk, halfwitted university students, probably on their way back from a fraternity party. Among the many labels that were generously thrown my way that evening, two still stand out in memory. One was "Commie Cuban ****" (asterisks denote the word that rhymes with duck) and the other was "Stinky Pedro".
There were others as well, but these two epithets confused me more than they angered me. Here I was, a 17-year-old Pakistani Muslim student, who had spent more years living in the Middle East than in my native Pakistan, being told to go back home to Papa Fidel or to my vast ancestral estate spread out all over central and South America. All because of the colour of my skin and the way I looked.