DAYTON, Ohio — Munis Faruqui carries no visible scars from the month he was delayed in Germany, waiting to pass a security check and get his visa stamped so he could return home to Dayton.
The Pakistani-born Faruqui, an assistant professor of history at the University of Dayton, returned home Tuesday night to his wife, fellow UD professor Clare Talwalker, and taught classes first thing Wednesday morning.
"It meant I missed two weeks of classes and I'm slightly jet-lagged," Faruqui said. "That will be soon forgotten."
What won't be forgotten so quickly is a sense of diminished security. "It brought home to me that I shouldn't be under the illusion that just because I've lived in this society since 1986 that I'm protected," Faruqui said. "I must be careful not to be too strident in my opinions. It was a critical reality check that I am foreign and must be very careful."
Faruqui arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on Dec. 19, expecting a routine stamping of his preapproved work visa. He noticed the country of his birth — Pakistan — circled in red ink on his documents. A visa stamp from a research trip to Iran also caught the eye of embassy officials.
He was going nowhere until he passed a background check by U.S. officials in Washington. He was told to expect a delay of six to eight weeks.
When he heard the news, "I was weak-kneed," Faruqui recalled.
Faruqui stayed for an additional month with his sister in Bremen, Germany. He agonized about when he would be able to return to his classes and to his wife. The couple were in the process of closing on their first house, so he faxed paperwork and signatures to Talwalker.
He e-mailed lectures to his students. Other professors in his department filled in for him; David Darrow, who specializes in Czarist Russia, took over five of his courses on Southeast Asian history.
The son of a Pakistani father and a German mother, Faruqui, 35, first came to the United States as a freshman at Oberlin College. Other than two years spent studying in England, he has lived here ever since.
He is a German passport-holder who has lived and worked in the United States for 17 years. He carried with him a stack of 120 documents proving his long history as a taxpayer and academic.
He says he thinks his visa approval was delayed for one reason only. "I'm a German citizen educated in the United States and abroad," he said. "I'm married to a non-Muslim woman. You will never find my name on a fundamentalist Islamic or Jihadi Web site. So what is it other than being born in Pakistan and being a Muslim man? I'm not guilty of anything else."
Faruqui acknowledges that the United States has valid security concerns. '
Like many noncitizens from Muslim countries, Faruqui must now register with the INS in Cincinnati. "Among the classes who are required to register with the government are sex offenders, paroled criminals and Muslim men," he observed.
Faruqui knows that conditions are far, far worse in his native Pakistan and many other countries. But he expects better of the United States: "People like myself believe in the rhetoric that America is about decency, human rights and fair treatment for all."
Now he's faced with the memories of being held in Germany despite paperwork that was meticulously in order. He and Talwalker worry about the long-term implications for their Green Card applications.
What if Faruqui expresses the "wrong" opinion about Israel and Palestine? What happens if he says the wrong thing about the war against Iraq? What if he goes to the wrong countries to attend conferences or conduct academic research? These are the questions being posed by professors at an American university. And that ought to give all of us pause.
Mary McCarty writes for the Dayton Daily News. E-mail: mmccarty@coxohio.com New York Times News Service