As once written by author bell hooks, “Living with many bodies in a small space, one is raised with notions of property and privacy quite different from those of people who have always had room.”

Space is a powerful thing. It’s an emptiness with consequences. It shapes who feels stable and who’s peripheral. It determines who grows and who must negotiate. Consider how important it is that The Daily Northwestern has its own dedicated newsroom. It’s not just a place to write and work, but a base signaling institutional legitimacy, belonging and continuity. If every moment required the making of space for others, the considerations, compromises and self-minimizations would be built into the architecture of the room.

Minority and cultural groups all over campus have long fought for their own rooms — literally and metaphorically.

Literally, affinity spaces throughout campus provide the rooms necessary for multicultural groups to create community. But the fight for visibility is still ongoing.

In 2024, during the pro-Palestinian encampment on Deering Meadow, Middle Eastern and North African and Muslim students joined that fight. The University’s line of defense was a single, merged space for both communities.

In the agreement to end the encampment, University officials promised to “to provide and renovate a house for MENA/Muslim students that is conductive to community building as soon as practicably possible.”

But metaphorically, what does it mean to be MENA and not Muslim, or Muslim and not MENA? What systems justify collapsing these two groups into one temporary room in Norris University Center? Why is it easier to mesh these groups together instead of learning about their dramatic differences? And isn’t this ease itself, the instinct to streamline into sameness, a powerful reason to resist imposed interchangeability?

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My first tattoo was a cross on my right wrist. Shortly after that, I got butterflies on my collarbone. The cross was first, though, because I am a Coptic Egyptian woman.

Coptic refers to the Christian Indigenous people of Egypt whose heritage traces back to the ancient Egyptians. The term also describes the final stage of the Egyptian language, written in the Coptic script, used by these communities. Today, “Coptic” primarily denotes Egyptian members of the Coptic Orthodox Church and their ethnoreligious identity.

As a Coptic woman, I find a combined MENA and Muslim space deeply problematic because I don’t belong there. I have so much love and respect for my Muslim brothers and sisters and still know that, at the end of the day, Islam is not my religion. Having a space that forces both MENA and Muslim identities onto me simultaneously does not allow me, a person who only holds one of the identities, to exist.

Copts are not the only Indigenous people in the Middle East. North Africa has Berber communities and Indigenous traditions like Kismet, a Kushite mythology that traces its origins back to the ancient kingdom of Kush, and Punic religions exist from the Levant. Some Iranians practice Zorinastrinism, an ancient monotheistic faith that pre-dates and influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The Levant is also home to Arab Christians. There are Druze in Syria, Mizrahi Jews throughout the Middle East and Chaldean Christians in Iraq. Assyrian Christians live in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Yazidis originate from the Kurdistan region and practice Yazidism, a monotheistic and syncretic religion with Kurdish roots.

Countless groups solely hold the MENA identity, maintaining their own histories and traditions.

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The most genuine thing I can say is that it’s tiring.

Growing up South Asian feels like a crash course in calculation. We’re often not considered Asian. What can we do to reclaim this entire part of our identity? If enough of society would rather group us elsewhere, at what point is accuracy no longer worth the fight?

In the same ways I’ve fought for my Asianness, I’ve simultaneously gotten used to being grouped into identities that aren’t my own.

Including the South Asian Muslim community I’m part of, as of 2020, an estimated 1.7 billion non-MENA Muslims make up 80% of the world’s Muslim population. But this space at NU will not be my first introduction to the MENA-Muslim merging. I’ve lived in the overlap crafted for us — not out of not kinship, but of white comfortability.

That’s why the idea of a “shared space” can never be neutral. Building a “shared space” for communities who’ve always been forced to share space isn’t equitable. It’s a continuation of overgeneralization and minimization.

I imagine it comes down to convenience. Inherent to our humanity is categorization — the simplification of identities in the name of making the world feel more manageable isn’t unfamiliar. It makes sense that this space, created as a peace offering to contain and quiet the voices of protesters, would conveniently stifle the voices in the room itself.

There’s no issue of willingness between our MENA and Muslim communities to make space for each other. Every invitation sent and received between our spaces is deliberate and meaningful.

The act of extending a bridge to build connection is profound because it is a choice. But when the same four walls confine all of us, the bridge becomes the shared space itself. What could have been a gesture and opening becomes the ceiling.

It’s the respect that we have for each other that inspires us to give each other room. And it’s the respect we have for ourselves that insists we deserve more than what the University is offering.

Sophia Memon is a Medill sophomore. She can be contacted at [email protected]. Ereny Tanious is a SESP and Medill sophomore. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.