BEIRUT, October 31, 2008 (MENASSAT) – Karim Ben Khelifa, 36, was born in Brussels, the son of a Tunisian father and a Belgian mother. Growing up, he was mostly in denial about his Arab roots – an identity crisis familiar to many Arabs with one foot in the West and the other in the Arab world.

When I met him some ten years ago, at the beginning of his career as a photojournalist, Ben Khelifa preferred his friends to call him "Ben" rather then "Karim."

But as he climbed up the ranks, leaving the Belgian media behind to work for international publications such as Stern, Newsweek, Time and The New York Times, current events increasingly took him to Arab and Muslim countries.

Gradually, and much to the surprise of his friends and family, Ben Khelifa began to cherish his Arab origins.

These days, as Ben Khelifa divides his time between homes in Yemen and New York City, nobody calls him "Ben" anymore.


It is a similar search for identity that Ben Khelifa has tried to document in Fundamentally American, a photo essay in which he portrays the lives of Arabs and Muslims living in the United States.

Europe vs. the States

Iraq, which we both covered throughout 2003 and 2004, was a transforming experience for many writers and photographers.

But if Ben Khelifa did his share of "bang bang" photography – not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Balkans as well – he was always looking for that extra bit of meaning in his work.

At one point, he photographed every mosque in France – a low-paying job for a community publication – just to get a better sense of how Islam is experienced by immigrants in Europe.

On assignment for Time magazine during the 2005 riots in the French housing projects, he met Médine, a French rapper of Algerian origin from Le Havre who had set off public concerns by releasing two consecutive albums, called 9/11 and Jihad.

But Médine turned out to be a very nice guy with a bright analysis of the situation of French Muslims, and with Ben Khelifa's help he went on to publish a one-page opinion article in Time under the title, How Much More French Can I Be?

It was an experience that drove Ben Khelifa to further explore how Arab and Muslim identities were shaped in the West.

Shortly after the French riots, Ben Khelifa and I rented an apartment in a troubled French housing project for two months to get a first-hand glimpse at "ghetto life" French-style. It was one of our most difficult assignments ever, not because it was dangerous – it was mostly boring – but because of the extreme reticence of people to talk to outsiders.

It was a far throw from Iraq, where even the fiercest pro-Saddam resistance fighters never failed to provide a spread of food.

The American dream

When Ben Khelifa embarked on the Fundamentally American project in 2007, his initial approach was inspired by our time spent in the French housing projects.
"Five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the resulting separation between the Muslim world and the West, I wanted to see what the effect had been on America and on the Arabs and Muslims living there," Ben Khelifa said during a recent interview in Paris.


"I started out very cautiously at first because I assumed that people would be very reticent to talk about this. But I quickly found out that the Arab-American community was in fact very open – much more so than in Europe."

The differences between the Arab communities in Europe and the States go a long way in explaining Europe's current problems. As Ben Khelifa discovered, mosques in the US are actually open to non-believers, and there is an active inter-religion dialogue going on between the Islamic, Jewish and Christian communities there.

"On top of that, because they are Americans, they have a deep sense of what their rights are."

And then there is the cliché of the American dream, which Ben Khelifa – not your America-loving neo-con – found to be very much alive, despite the obvious limitations.

"There is definitely a feeling that nothing is impossible here provided you respect a few ground rules. In Europe, by contrast, you can respect all the rules and still find the door shut in your face."

In terms of integration, Ben Khelifa says, "one generation in America equals three or four generations in Europe. If you go to Arab neighborhoods in European cities, they look like Marrakech. Not so in the States."

Of course, the picture is not all rosy. If Arabs in Europe face discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere, it is in America that they are most confronted with the label of "terrorists."

Muslim Punk

"If you see these signs in shop windows or on bumper stickers, saying 'They will not destroy our spirit,' many Arab-Americans feel that the 'they' is directed at them and not just at the actual terrorists," Ben Khelifa says.

"This has created great confusion in the generation of Arab-Americans who were 12 or 13 when 9/11 happened. They feel they don't entirely belong to one or the other, so they look for a third way, taking elements from both cultures to create a new culture of their own."

One example of this is the band Al Thawra (Revolution), which Ben Khelifa portrayed in Albany, a majority Arab neighborhood in Chicago. "They're a punk band but they scream things like Allahu Akhbar."

Or there is the young boxer whose Yemeni parents named him Saddam after Saddam Hussein, and who went on to represent the United States at the Beijing Olympics.

But there is also much evidence of what Ben Khelifa calls "an astonishing degree of successful integration."

For instance, he celebrates Thanksgiving with a Yemeni family in Brooklyn. "They do it every year. They felt it was only natural for them to celebrate American traditions now that they live in America. But they also made it their own by adding traditional Yemeni dishes to the turkey."

Another example is the picture of the Empire State Building lit up in green for Eid Al-Fitr, the celebration of the end of Ramadan.

"It is something they do for other religious holidays as well, so when the Muslims asked, the authorities naturally agreed. Of course, most Americans probably didn't realize that the Empire State Building was green because of Eid al-Fitr. But it is hard to imagine France doing the same with the Eiffel tower."

In the end, Ben Khelifa's favorite picture is one of a pair of US flag-themed sandals left outside a mosque.

"You can read into it what you want: Muslims stepping on the American flag, or Arab-Americans searching for and expressing their dual identity."