I have a pen pal, except he’s not a pal. My pen pal is not the kind you’d wish to meet in person or whose letters you’d cherish, the way I did when, as a teenager in a small town in Kurdistan, Iran, corresponding with an Austrian girl of my age, dreaming of spending an exciting life, dancing and singing with her and our many children in the rolling green hills below the Alps, mimicking the happy scenes of the popular movie “The Sound of Music.” This pen pal is anonymous, probably a man, an angry dude, hiding behind a pseudonym, expressing anger and hatred toward everything foreign, including my religion, and my being a Muslim. His words hurt like sharp needles.

He writes religiously every time a terrorist attack, committed by criminals claiming to be Muslims, happens in the Western world, and not elsewhere, as if to suggest it is geography that decides whose lives matter or not. His violent language, darkened by the lack of lucidity, makes me see him as a fearful man terrified by the demographic changes taking place around him and the world passing him by. Reading between the lines, I could feel his desperation, missing the time when Maine was as white as the snow on Mount Washington’s summit.

His emails; long texts, words I picture were stabbed angrily on a keyboard, show up on my inbox, every time my writings in support of immigrant causes, or to showcase the interfaith efforts, multiculturism, or to counter stereotypes that target minorities, including Muslims, appear in the local newspapers. His words are as toxic as the newspapers’ reader comment sections.

Every time I sit to write, as I do now, I shudder to think how he’d respond, and what would he label me next. I know outing him in this column, though no reader could possibly know who he is, would not please him.

I write back when I can, pleading, with no success, to have him see the oneness and the sameness of the core values that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share. In my responses, I gently invite him to feel the beauty that each faith tradition, despite its historical or contemporary shortcomings, has to offer. I suggest why and how distinctions have to be made between a faith and the criminal thoughts and actions of its followers. He dismisses my pleas, mocks me, and lectures me, repeating the lies, myths and ugly accusations he finds on dubious, and biased, websites. I imagine him not to read much history, for he’d have known of African Muslims’ presence in the New World, starting in the 14th and 15th century, before the birth of the Republic, or, the story of the Founding Fathers exchanging letters with Muslim rulers of that era. He might be a coffee drinker, use alphabet to write to me, add zero here and there, enjoy alcohol, all Arabic words borrowed by English, and not realizing these were given to the West by the early Arabs and Muslims.

I know his America has no room for me, and people like me. To him, my humanity is eclipsed by my ethnicity, faith, and race. He sees me representing some 1.5 billion Muslims, and billions more non-white persons, living across the world.

In his words, I hear the echo of a past where immigrants coming to Maine were met with distrust, hostility, and violence. I hear the ghosts of a troubled history here, when members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in cities across Maine, mostly targeting Catholics and Jews, for there were few African Americans here back then. He might have been there, in spirit, when in 1854 an angry Know Nothing mob burned down a Catholic church in Bath, or centuries and decades later when synagogues were desecrated, and a severed pig head was rolled inside a mosque in Lewiston.

A cyber-stalker, or a pen pal, he’s no pal.

Reza Jalali, a writer and an educator, is the author of “Homesick Mosque and Other Stories” and “Poets and the Assassin,” a play about women in Iran and Islam.