Some 25 years ago my wife and I decided to visit the UK. At that time she had a US passport but I still carried a Pakistani passport albeit as a permanent US resident. So I applied for a UK visa. I was asked to submit all sorts of financial documents and, of course, send in my Pakistani passport to the UK embassy. I was surprised when I got my Pakistani passport back with the visa and a small piece of paper in it saying: “Thank you for visiting the UK”. After I got my US passport a few years later, every time I returned to the US after a trip to Pakistan or Europe, the immigration officer at John F Kennedy Airport in New York (JFK) would say, “Welcome back, sir.” But 9/11 changed everything. Being a Muslim and being from Pakistan is now a bit difficult for those of us who live in the US. Perhaps the most illustrative comment on this ‘situation’ is a court case going on in the New York area about the legality of Muslims being kept under surveillance by the police just because they are Muslims. Mosques were infiltrated and members of the Muslim community were ‘encouraged’ by the police to become informers. Interestingly, over the last decade or so, the few ‘successful’ cases against Muslims planning terrorist activities in the US are based on testimony from such informers. Not being a lawyer it is perhaps inappropriate for me to comment on this situation. Nevertheless, Muslims in many parts of the US are looked at with suspicion just because they are Muslims. Travelling from Pakistan to the US has become quite tedious especially for those without a permanent resident status. I still remember the last time I entered the US. The immigration officer at JFK asked me which airline I had arrived on and when I told him that I had come on PIA, the man just held his head in obvious dismay. Obviously not because he hated Pakistanis — after all, my passport clearly states that I was born in Pakistan but for the reason that he would have to look at every Pakistani passport holder with the suspicion that there was something wrong with the visa and worry that every bearded sort was entering the US for ‘dubious’ purposes. And that meant a lot of passports, visas and passengers that needed to be checked very carefully. Hard work that. After 9/11 there have not been any major attacks on civilians in the US that can be blamed on Muslim terrorists or on those from Pakistan. And for all the bad press Pakistan gets in the US, the fact is that most Pakistani US citizens, even the Muslims among them, are a peaceful lot. Another advantage Pakistani immigrants in the US have is that most of them are reasonably well integrated and there are not enough second and third generation Pakistani US citizens to start thinking of themselves as purely of US origin. When that happens we will start seeing disaffected groups of such people but, till then, there are just too few of them to become united in a commonality of despair. And that brings me to the recent happenings in France. First, I must strongly condemn the targeting of unarmed civilians for any reason whatsoever. More importantly, I believe that nobody should kill or be killed in the name of religion. Here, I think it is important to point out an important difference in this context between a Muslim from a country like Pakistan and a French citizen. In Pakistan, blasphemy is a crime under the law and is even punishable by death. In France, on the other hand, freedom of speech is, if I may say so, an important part of their secular religion. After all, one of the most famous quotes about freedom of speech is attributed to Voltaire, a French philosopher who, while addressing Rousseau, another French philosopher, said: “I might not agree with what you have to say but I will defend to death your right to say it.” It is such differences between believing Muslims and the secularist countries they live in that are a serious problem. Western secular countries that are willing to accept Muslim immigrants as full citizens and ‘believing’ Muslims who decide to immigrate to and live in countries that are secular will have to learn to accept each other. First generation Muslim immigrants rarely have this problem since most of them are economic refugees and when they arrive in their new homeland they are deferential and often willing to subserviate personal beliefs to enable assimilation and economic wellbeing. However, in countries like the UK and France, which once had colonies, many of their Muslim citizens are originally from those colonies and are by now third or even fourth generation citizens and no longer have any emotional connection with any country where their ancestors came from. These young men and women think that they are as French or as British as any other citizen. Yet if they are still being discriminated against for their geographical origins, their faith or the colour of their skin, clearly they have good reason to be upset. And such discrimination whether perceived or real may drive some of them to reactionary ideas that in those of Muslim origin could lead to identification with or support for extremist Islamic groups. Just as I expect a non-Muslim living in Pakistan to respect Islam and its holy figures and scriptures, I also expect that Muslims living in secular countries of the west will respect concepts like freedom of speech. Of course, hate speech aimed at denigrating or insulting members of a particular religious or ethnic group is not free speech. That said, for Pakistani US citizens and Muslims living in the west, every incident like the recent one in Paris makes life just a little more difficult. The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians of North America (APPNA)