Brooklyn , New York ( CNN ) -- We all have things that we ca n't stand but must routinely put up with . Here are a few of mine : slow elevators , outrageous bank fees and being asked the question , `` Where are you from ? '' Everybody hates the first two , but why am I so opposed to the last one ? For starters , I know the impatient looks that will follow when I answer with where I live ( Brooklyn ) or where I grew up ( Canada ) , or where I was born ( Switzerland ) . That last one , by the way , really seems to throw people for a loop . ( My parents were graduate students in Zürich when I landed on this earth . ) What often follows next is that the person asking me the question either congratulates me on speaking English well or , confused by my answers , looks at me like I do n't understand English . The next question , though , is always the same : . But where are you really from ? Of course I know what they mean , and the people who ask me this ( almost ) never have any real malice in mind . They 're not saying I could n't possibly be American . Rather , something about me -- perhaps my name or the color of my skin -- has lit their curiosity . Still , I 've always resented the question because it implies that I can only really and authentically be one thing , the one thing , incidentally , that I had no choice in choosing and have no power to change . I do n't want to be misunderstood . Like millions of other Americans , I , too , have a hyphenated identity . Left of the hyphen , I 'm Egyptian , and a very proud one to boot . But that 's not all I am . I 'm also a writer , a professor , a Muslim , a German speaker , a passionate ( but terrible ) singer , a lousy swimmer , a New Yorker , an Arab , the youngest of three children , a drinker of way too much coffee , a lover of W.B . Yeats ' poetry , a hater of injustice , a husband , a frequent flyer , and , according to my wife , a person in some serious denial that he 's getting older . The question `` Where are you from ? '' may help others locate me , but it will never describe me . It used to be the case that after I told people about my origins , I would invariably hear a wish to visit the pyramids or be asked my thoughts regarding certain Anne Rice novels . Yet lately , the reaction has changed . Now , after telling people I 'm Egyptian , I can almost see the news headlines and maps of the Middle East overlapping in their mind , and I 'm usually confronted with a statement like this : `` Oh . ( Long pause . ) Hey , I have nothing against Muslims . '' That 's precisely what a man I met in an Ohio restaurant recently told me . It was his pause that , well , gave me pause . Today , identity is too easily turned into a rallying cry for purity and violence . Think of the lunatics of al-Qaeda , like Adam Gadahn , who recently called on American Muslims to attack their own country . Al-Qaeda will never accept that Muslims ( or Americans ) can be more than what al-Qaeda determines them to be . Likewise , the anti-Muslim chorus led by people like Dutch politician Geert Wilders , who calls Islam a `` retarded culture , '' want to pigeonhole us into diametrically opposing identities that necessarily have to careen into conflict with each other . But this is nonsense . I know it because I live the many facets of my identity every day without succumbing to my own internal civil war . Millions of other Americans do , too . A few years ago , I heard a useful way of thinking about identity . I was in Ramallah , addressing a group of Palestinian university students , and with me was François Burgat , the eminent French scholar of the Arab World . Burgat began his talk about identity with a metaphor , asking the audience to imagine they were invited to a big international pot luck dinner . All the guests have brought their national foods to share . At that moment , our differences are the only things that matter , since from the differences in taste comes flavor . But if a fire were suddenly to consume that same house , trapping a baby in the flames , no sane person would hesitate to save that baby , regardless of its origin . In our choices for survival , our similarities simply must outweigh our differences . Burgat 's metaphor strikes me as a particularly powerful way of thinking about the United States . Yes , there are people around today trying to start that fire , but I 'm confident they are a few in an increasingly complex nation of over 300 million people , each of us with multiple identities . It 's up to us to douse the flames of hatred and intolerance before they start , keeping the party that is the United States going . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Moustafa Bayoumi . © 2009 AOL , LLC . All Rights Reserved .
Moustafa Bayoumi : Like many Americans , I have a hyphenated identity . He says he 's of Egyptian descent but that does n't fully describe him . Bayoumi was born in Switzerland , raised in Egypt and now lives in New York . He says , ` ` " , identity is too easily turned into a rallying cry for purity and violence . ''