“Art is in the eye of the beholder,” as the saying goes. What is deep and profound to one is just a meaningless mess of images to another; or in some cases, smut.

The same goes for terrorism — one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and the distinction is based as much on perception and personal bias as it is on facts.

Unfortunately, for many Americans, a dark-skinned Muslim with a name like Mohammed, Ali or Hasan warrants suspicion for being a terrorist, to be detained and questioned at places like airports and be sent on their way, sans dignity. In some cases, people have been jailed and harassed because their name resembled someone else’s on a watch list.

One such Hasan who suffered this misfortune is Hasan Elahi, an assistant professor of art at Rutgers University, a Bangladeshi immigrant who came to the United States in 1979 at the age of seven.

In June 2002, as his flight from the Netherlands landed in Detroit Metro Airport, he was detained at the airport’s INS detention center — despite being an American citizen — and led to an interrogation room.  There, an FBI agent asked Elahi a number of questions about his travel plans, where he’d been and who he had met, when suddenly the agent asked him: “Where were you September 12?”

In an interview conducted by email, Elahi described himself to me as “neurotic” about his personal record keeping, and his PDA helped him answer the agent’s extensive questions. The reason for the stop was a tip called in in Florida where the caller identified Elahi as an “Arab” storing explosives at a storage facility in Tampa, near the University of South Florida, where he used to teach. USF is, incidentally, where Dr. Sami Al-Arian taught as well.

Elahi’s experience at the airport paled in comparison to what happened at the Tampa Federal Building a few weeks later, when he was called in for further questioning. Once inside, Elahi was confronted by a white federal marshal who repeatedly yelled at him in Arabic despite the professor’s contention that he didn’t speak the language.

Following an interrogation by another FBI agent and deputy marshal, as well as a polygraph exam, Elahi was told everything would be ok and that making a phone call would clear up any problems he had had coming back into the country. That first call, according to Elahi, was the beginning of Tracking Transience.

Tracking Transience is satirical art at its most potent — its purpose is to protect Elahi from being detained again, and to protest the racist and ridiculous abuse of human rights known as the “war on terror,” through his favorite medium — art.

The web-based project documents everywhere Elahi goes, literally; from everything he eats to the urinals he relieves himself at, Tracking Transience is all about taking the intrusive “counter-terror” measures introduced after 9/11 one step further, to the point of absurdity.

By showing every little detail of Elahi’s whereabouts, no one, not even the CIA, Dept. of Defense or the President’s Executive Office — to name a few who visit his site — won’t know what Elahi is actually up to. The project shows that intrusive measures contained in anti-terror legislation not only fail to protect people from terrorism, but also needlessly trample on their civil liberties.

The obvious question, however, is why does an artist who travels to exhibitions worldwide and showcases his art has to rely on such a project to keep him from being detained?  After all, such a high profile individual would be the last person suspected of any ties to terrorism, right?

“Our anti-terror policies defy reality and logic,” Elahi responded.

Whenever he flies into the United States, the Customs and Border Protection (formerly the INS) stop him for hours until they get the phone call to clear him. He describes it as more of a nuisance than being afraid of detention without due process somewhere outside the United States (remember two other Americans who experienced this – Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla.) The project is as necessary for Elahi now as it was almost six years ago when he was fist detained.

“In fact, we’re going in the opposite direction,” he wrote. “We live in a society where everything is now accounted for and much more than before. Now with the current state of affairs with our government, I certainly see what I’m doing being imposed onto other people.”

At the end of the day, the harassment, detention and the deportation of Muslims — a violation of basic human rights — is justified under the pretext of “national security.”  It’s a problem of institutionalized racism, highlighted by the Democratic and Republican primaries and the campaigning that made use of Islamophobia to score points with voters.  Elahi, as much of a victim of racism as anyone, had a truly frightening experience that no white person would ever experience, either since the Oklahoma City bombing, or in the aftermath of another such attack.

“I’m sure our lawmakers and our fellow citizens know the difference between the Irish and the English, or between the French and the Germans…so why can’t they figure out the difference between Indians and Saudis?” he wrote.

Tracking Transience can be seen at trackingtransience.net.