By LAURIE GOODSTEIN


For Khulsoom and Salman, hardworking immigrant Muslims from Pakistan, life in the American suburbs in the post-September 11 era is not working out the way they had planned.

Their oldest son is an unmarried playboy, and their daughter has become a student activist who wears a head scarf as a sign of her newfound religious fervor. And now their younger son, the good, obedient son, announces that he is abandoning premed courses to become a history teacher so he can help correct the misinformation being spread about Islam.

“You will get the blessings of my work,” the younger son tells his parents.

“We have enough blessings,” his mother says. “You can bless us by becoming a surgeon. You like kids? Become a pediatrician. Teach them Islam as you give them their lollipops.”

This family is at the center of “The Domestic Crusaders,” a play at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York. When the family reunites for the younger son’s birthday, conflicts erupt over everything from biryani to sex roles to Middle Eastern politics.

The play was written by Wajahat Ali, a young Pakistani- American who grew up in Fremont, California. He started writing it in the weeks after the terrorist attacks as a paper for a college class taught by the poet and playwright Ishmael Reed.

Very few dramas about the contemporary Muslim experience in America have made it to the stage. Muslims from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh have been slow to embrace writing and acting, which was not considered a viable profession by the older immigrant generation.

After the September 11 attacks, Mr. Ali, then a 21-year-old undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, stopped going to classes and spent the next three weeks organizing rallies and forums with friends to respond to what they saw as a growing tide of vitriol about Islam.

When he finally showed up for his English class, his professor, Mr. Reed, told him that if he wanted to pass he had to write a 20-page play.

“I said, ‘Do a family drama,’” Mr. Reed recalled in an interview. “That’s how immigrant playwrights have always dealt with these issues.”

It took Mr. Ali more than two years to finish “The Domestic Crusaders,” with Mr. Reed prodding him along.

“Take away the religion, take away the Islam, take away the politics, the Arabic and the Urdish,” Mr. Ali said, referring to the Urdu/English hybrid words that pepper the play. “What remains are universal themes like sibling rivalry, expectations of parents, conflict between the generations.”


“The Domestic Crusaders” portrays the generational rifts in a Pakistani-American family in the post-September 11 era.