For the last 5 weeks, I’ve lived and worked with the Muslim Peacemaker Teams and my host, Sami Rasouli. Tomorrow I fly back to Minneapolis.

It has been an eye-opening and life-changing experience. The many Iraqis that I’ve met have invariably been welcoming, generous, and kind. This despite the fact that the illegal U.S. occupation of Iraq continues, and despite the death and destruction that my country has brought to theirs.

My visit was very different than the “visit” of most Americans. I came to Iraq as an unarmed guest seeking to build respectful relationships between people. My American counterparts in military uniforms came to Iraq armed to the teeth, seeking to storm the country into submission.

American soldiers are still here and Iraq is still an occupied, “war-torn” country. When Sami and I visited Baghdad, he said, “Look what’s happened to this city. It was such a beautiful place when I visited it growing up.” Now buildings are destroyed or riddled with bullet holes. Concrete walls and military checkpoints divide neighborhoods. Garbage and rubble are everywhere and roads are in disrepair.

Among the most frustrating effects of the war and U.S. occupation are the lack of electricity, which comes and goes every couple of hours, and the lack of clean water. The American occupiers and the Iraqi government have not yet been able to restore basic services.

Despite the death and destruction of the war (at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, perhaps more than 1 million), daily life continues and Iraqis are working hard to rebuild. In the English class that I helped teach, Sami and I taught the word “resilience” to our students. It was ironic that we were the teachers.

As Iraqis work to end the occupation and begin to rebuild, Sami and MPT are doing critical work to help ensure that what is rebuilt is a peaceful, nonviolent civil society. The sectarianism ...

If there’s one general insight that has stayed with me from the IR501 (International Relations and Religion) course I took in grad school, it’s that categories suck. “Christian,” “American,” “Arab,” “Muslim,” “Liberal,” “Friend,” etc. serve an important purpose of helping us order the complex information we process every day, but they also simplify and homogenize that complexity.

One example is the category of “Iraqi” in American media. When the majority of printed pictures of Iraqis portray “terrorists” or scenes of death and destruction, “Iraqi”–which is an incredibly diverse category–can be reduced to “violent terrorist” in the minds of those who digest media uncritically.

During my month here in Najaf, my host Sami Rasouli has introduced me to many Iraqis who don’t fit the category, “Iraqi” (as it has been defined in America). For the sake of exploding / adding nuance to that category, I’d like to share a little about a few of these people. They have invariably been generous, welcoming, and kind—perhaps better descriptors for the category of “Iraqi”–but they are also diverse.

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