In the autumn of 2001, Amira Hassan was forty-two years old and she was exactly where she had always wanted to be. She was a tenured associate professor of comparative literature at Galena College, a small liberal arts institution in the rolling cornfields of southern Wisconsin, ninety minutes from Madison and a world away from everywhere else. She had arrived in 1989 as a visiting lecturer, fresh from a dissertation on the ghazal form and its influence on the Spanish lyric, and she had stayed because the department was good and the students were earnest and the town of Galena Falls, population eight thousand four hundred, had accepted her with the slow, slightly suspicious warmth that Midwesterners reserve for anyone who was not born in the county. By 2001 she owned a white clapboard house on Elm Street with a porch swing and a maple tree that turned electric orange every October. Her husband, Farid, was a civil engineer who worked for the county roads department. Her daughter, Leila, was twelve and played clarinet in the middle school band. Her son, Sami, was nine and collected baseball cards and believed, with the absolute conviction of a nine-year-old, that the Milwaukee Brewers would win the World Series.

She was, by any measure, embedded. She had served on the library board, had chaired the faculty curriculum committee, had brought a dish of her grandmother's maqluba to the annual church potluck even though she did not attend church, had attended PTA meetings and soccer games and the Fourth of July parade where Sami rode his decorated bicycle and Leila marched with the band. She was not the Muslim professor to most of Galena Falls; she was Amira, Leila's mom, the woman who grew the tomatoes that won second prize at the county fair in 1998, the neighbour who shovelled Mrs. Henderson's driveway when the snow was heavy and Farid was out of town.

Then the planes hit the towers, and everything that had been solid for twelve years became conditional.

The first week was kindness. Her colleagues brought casseroles and concerned expressions. The college president issued a statement condemning anti-Muslim violence and affirming the values of the institution. A candlelight vigil was held on the quad, and Amira was asked to speak, and she stood at the microphone in the September chill and quoted Rumi and said that her faith, like every faith, was held hostage by those who had stolen its language, and the students applauded and the faculty nodded and the local newspaper ran a photograph above the fold with the headline PROFESSOR CALLS FOR UNITY.

The second week, two students transferred out of her seminar on postcolonial narrative. They did not say why. The registrar's office sent her a form with the word "enrolment adjustment" and no explanation.

The third week, the department chair, a man named Harold Bendix who had hired her in 1989 and had attended her wedding and had once described her to the dean as "the finest mind in the department, no question," stopped making eye contact in the hallway. She assumed he was preoccupied. The college was reeling, budgets were uncertain, everyone was preoccupied.

The fourth week, she was not invited to the ad hoc committee on diversity and inclusion. She learned about it from a memo in her mailbox, addressed to the committee members, which listed eight names and did not include hers. She told herself it was an oversight. She had been on every committee for a decade. An oversight.

In November the letters began. They arrived at the college first, addressed to the president, typed on a manual typewriter, unsigned. They cited verses from the Quran, translated badly, and implied that Professor Hassan's courses were a vehicle for anti-American indoctrination. The president, a decent man named Arthur Caldwell who had been a history professor before he became an administrator and who genuinely believed in the liberal arts, called Amira into his office and showed her the letters. "I want you to know we're taking this seriously," he said. "We support you completely. These people are crackpots." He put the letters in a folder and the folder in a drawer and nothing else happened, and Amira understood, in that moment, that the college's support was a statement and nothing more, a flag planted in sand.

That winter a police car began parking on Elm Street. It was a patrol car from the county sheriff's department, not the Galena Falls police. It arrived at approximately nine in the evening and remained until approximately midnight, idling, its headlights cutting two yellow tunnels through the falling snow. Farid called the sheriff's office to enquire. The dispatcher said it was "routine enhanced patrol" and hung up. Leila asked why the police car was always there. Amira said she did not know. Sami said maybe they were protecting them, like on television. Amira said maybe they were.

In the spring semester of 2002, enrolment in her courses fell by forty percent. The college had not changed its registration policies. The course catalogue had not changed. The students had simply stopped signing up. Her seminar on the ghazal, which had run every spring for eleven years with a waiting list of eight to twelve students, enrolled three. One of them was an English major who confessed on the first day that she had signed up by accident and was waiting for a transfer into Victorian poetry. Another was a young man from the ROTC programme at the state university who took notes in a spiral notebook and never spoke. The third dropped after two weeks without explanation.

Amira went to Harold Bendix. She sat in his office, which was the same office she had sat in a hundred times for department meetings and tenure reviews and curriculum planning sessions, and she said: "Harold. What is happening."

Harold looked at the window. Harold looked at his desk. Harold said: "It's a difficult time for everyone, Amira. The students are, well, they're processing the national trauma. They're making choices about their educational priorities. I'm sure it's temporary."

"It's not temporary," Amira said. "It's been seven months."

Harold said: "I'm sure it will stabilise."

It did not stabilise. In the autumn of 2003, a parent called the dean's office to complain that Professor Hassan had assigned a novel by an Egyptian author. The novel was Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel laureate, but the parent had not read it and did not care who had written it or why. The parent had seen the word "Cairo" on the syllabus and had made certain assumptions. The dean called Harold. Harold called Amira. "Perhaps," Harold said, into the telephone, his voice thin and apologetic, "perhaps we might consider swapping that text for something, ah, less likely to raise concerns. Just for this semester. Just while things are sensitive."

Amira hung up the telephone. She did not swap the text. But she understood, with a clarity that felt like the moment a fever breaks, that she was no longer a colleague but a problem to be managed, an irritation in the body politic, a foreign object that the organism was slowly, patiently, inexorably surrounding with scar tissue.

The process was never violent. No one threw a brick through her window. No one spray-painted a slur on her garage door. No one confronted her in the grocery store or at the gas station or in the parking lot after the faculty meeting. The process was quiet and procedural and utterly deniable. It was the meeting she was not told about until after the minutes had been distributed. It was the university committee that revised its membership criteria to require "demonstrated engagement with American civic traditions." It was the student evaluations that described her as "biased" and "political" and "difficult," words that had never appeared on her evaluations before 2001. It was the neighbour, a retired high school teacher named Shirley Kowalski who had borrowed Amira's snowblower every winter since 1994, who stopped waving from her front porch. It was the PTA meeting where the other mothers formed a conversation circle that somehow, impossibly, did not have room for one more person.

In 2004 the tenure review committee received an anonymous dossier. It was forty-seven pages long. It documented every speaking engagement Amira had accepted since 1995, every conference panel, every community lecture. It highlighted the phrase "Islamic literary tradition," which appeared seventeen times. It noted that she had once, in 1998, given a lecture at a university in Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a large Arab-American population, as if this were evidence of something. The committee chair, a chemist named Roger Kim who had no particular feelings about Amira either way and was simply trying to do his job, forwarded the dossier to the dean. The dean forwarded it to the president. The president called Amira into his office again, and this time he did not say "crackpots." He said: "We need to discuss some concerns that have been raised."

Amira sat in the same chair she had sat in two years earlier, the green leather chair with the brass studs, the chair she had sat in when Arthur Caldwell offered her tenure in 1997 and said she was an asset to the college and a credit to her field, and she listened to the president read from a list of questions that had been submitted by an unnamed party, questions about her political affiliations and her religious practices and the content of her private correspondence, and she answered each question calmly and completely and watched the president's face and saw, beneath the careful neutrality of his expression, the exhaustion of a man who had not signed up for this, who had wanted only to preside over a small liberal arts college in a quiet corner of Wisconsin, who had not expected to spend his afternoons interrogating one of his best faculty members about whether she belonged here, whether she had ever belonged here, whether she had been, all along, something other than what she appeared to be.

In the spring of 2005, Farid was laid off from the county roads department. The official reason was budget cuts. The unofficial reason, Farid believed, was that he was the husband of the controversial professor, and the county board had received letters, and a man who had spent seventeen years designing culverts and grading intersections in three Wisconsin counties was suddenly a liability. He found work in Chicago, a three-hour drive from Galena Falls, and came home on weekends. By summer he came home every other weekend. By autumn he was talking about moving the family to the city, starting fresh, leaving behind a town that had decided, without ever saying so, that the Hassans were a problem that would not resolve itself.

Amira refused. This was her home, she said. This was the town where her children had learned to ride bicycles, where she had planted the tomatoes that won second prize, where she had shovelled Mrs. Henderson's driveway. She would not be pushed out. She would not give them the satisfaction.

But the organism was patient. The immune system did not rest. The quarantine tightened.

In 2006 the college eliminated her position. The official reason was declining enrolment and shifting curricular priorities. The comparative literature programme was being folded into the English department. The ghazal seminar was cancelled. The postcolonial narrative course was reassigned to a junior professor who taught it as a survey of British imperial fiction and never once mentioned the word Islam. Amira was offered a termination package that was generous by the standards of such things, eighteen months of salary and continuation of health benefits, and a letter that thanked her for twenty-one years of service and wished her well in her future endeavours.

She signed the papers in Arthur Caldwell's office. The president did not look at her. The green leather chair was the same chair. The window behind the desk looked out on the quad where her colleagues were walking to class in the September sun, carrying briefcases and coffee cups, living their lives as if nothing had happened, as if no one had been expelled, as if the body had not just rejected a cell it had once called its own.

Amira moved to Chicago in 2007. She took an adjunct position at a community college, teaching composition to immigrants and first-generation students who did not know who she had been or what she had lost. Farid found work with a firm that designed highway interchanges. Leila went to college in California and became a marine biologist, a profession with no political valence, a profession where no one asked about your faith. Sami joined the army. He enlisted in 2013, at eighteen, and served two tours in Afghanistan as a translator, and Amira learned about this from a letter he left on the kitchen table, a letter she read seventeen times in the first hour and then folded carefully and placed in the drawer of her bedside table, next to the unsent letter she had written to Arthur Caldwell in 2006, a letter that began, "Do you remember when you said I was a credit to my field," and ended with a sentence she had never been able to finish.

She did not return to Galena Falls. The white house on Elm Street was sold to a young couple who painted the shutters blue and cut down the maple tree to make room for a garage. Mrs. Henderson died in 2010 and her obituary in the Galena Falls Gazette listed her survivors and her church affiliations and the prize she had won for her rhubarb pie at the county fair in 1962, but did not mention the neighbour who had shovelled her driveway every winter for twelve years. The college renamed the comparative literature programme the Global Anglophone Studies programme and hired a specialist in Australian fiction who had never read a ghazal and did not intend to start.

And Amira, in her apartment in Chicago, in the evenings after her composition classes were done and the papers were graded and the city had settled into its low electric hum, would sometimes open the drawer of her bedside table and take out the unsent letter and read the sentence she had never been able to finish, and try, one more time, to find the words that would explain to a decent man who had done an indecent thing exactly what it felt like to be slowly, patiently, inexorably removed from the only place you had ever called home.