The rising power of American Muslims

(upbeat music) Is power starting to shift for American Muslims? On a political level, Muslims like Minnesota representative Ilan Omar, New York mayor Zoraan Mamdani, and Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El Sayyad are either coming into power, attracting notice, or both, and on a cultural level. New York Magazine and the Guardian have reported on flourishing ecosystems of cafes, magazines, dance nights, meetups, and readings for Muslims and/or people with heritage from the Swan or region, meaning Southwest Asia and North Africa. This is happening especially in New York, but these meetups and groups are popping up in cities like LA and Chicago too. These places have had vibrant Muslim or Swana communities for longer than they've been in headlines, but the mainstream visibility is significant. Quick note before we go any further. Muslim and Swana are not the same thing, but they have a lot of overlap. I'm using Muslim here because we'll be talking a lot about Islamophobia, but Islamophobia affects a lot of people from the Swan or region, whether they're Muslim or not, and they're also a part of this story. So on the one hand, this swell of Muslims coming up in politics and building cultural institutions is not surprising. There are over four million Muslims in America. On the other hand, this shift is pretty significant if you look at surveys. You study history, you pay attention now, and you see how deeply Islamophobia and racism are rooted in our culture. So I wanted to get deeper into what's changed for American Muslims in recent years. But also, let's stay the same. What does it mean that Muslims are accruing a little more political and cultural capital now? And that non-Muslims are noticing. To get deeper into it, I'm joined by Dr. Donna Austin, cultural anthropologist. Welcome, Donna. - Thank you. I'm happy to be here, Brittany. - So happy to have you. And I'm also joined today by Dr. Tazin Ali, scholar of Islam in America, and associate professor of religion and politics Washington University in St. Louis. Welcome back to Z. - Thanks so much for having me. - Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Loose, and you're listening to it's been a minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. (upbeat music) Okay, so I first wanted to talk about the culture aspect. To talk more about the cafes and meetups and dance nights connecting Muslims and or people have wanted to sit together in some cities. There's been a lot of focus on how that looks in New York because it's very robust here where I live, but I'm wondering if you've seen that at all elsewhere. - Oh, absolutely. I think we're seeing it all over the US where I live in St. Louis. There's also the cropping up of Yemeni coffee shop. We just got Muslims of the world, M-O-T-W cafe opening, it's happening all over the country. The culture of the communities, they're not new. So swana communities and Muslim communities have been a part of the United States for a very long time. Immigrants have always operated family run groceries and cafes and restaurants that were not just businesses, but really a part of community infrastructure. There are places where people were gathering and speaking their languages and passing on culture to the next generation. And so I think it's not suddenly emerging out of the ground, but the scale and the style of its public visibility. I think these spaces were once peripheral and now they have the mainstream appeal and especially the urban centers that you're naming. So what we may have considered like the modest neighborhood restaurant we might call like a hole in the wall has suddenly manifested into something that's much more commercially mainstream, right there. These are spaces that are suddenly more expensive. They're very Instagramable. - Yeah, like the aesthetic has changed. - Yeah, exactly. So there's been a mainstreaming of these kinds of establishments, which has, I think the change is the visibility and the legibility to mainstream consumers. - And Donna, what have you noticed? - Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that assessment. I think that we are seeing a real flowering of this type of activity, though in my experience, this is something that has been brewing under the radar for quite a long time. So I think one of the things that it is also important to bring into the conversation here is that not only is America itself, of course, very diverse, right, but the American Muslim demographic itself is also probably the most diverse Muslim demographic in the world. You also have a very long and vibrant African-American Muslim community, right? So Muslims in this country are not all immigrants. These communities also have a very long history of establishing public houses of worship, but also businesses and this idea of like Muslim culture foods, becoming a part of non-Muslims everyday life, things like bean pie. For example, is like, you know what I was saying? - Bean pie, yeah. - This is definitely a cultural contribution that has gone mainstream or at least it has migrated outward from the Muslim community, right? You know, broadly in African-American treat, particularly depending on where you live geographically, that has become something that is a cultural staple. Well, even to your point, Donna, about the cultural contributions of African-American Muslims, I think about like so many aspects of hip-hop culture also are intertwined with black American Muslim culture as well. - Absolutely, hip-hop has a long and very intimate relationship with hip-hop from the very roots of, you know, the beginning of hip-hop, and that also holds for jazz music. Yeah, so cultural production on the part of American Muslims, right, across all of these various segments of our own community, right? Is something that's been happening for a very long time. - That's so true. I mean, when I think about like my first introductions to Muslim culture were through black American Muslims, I'm from the Detroit area, but also I mean, I was born in the same state that Muhammad Ali is from. So obviously everybody in Kentucky is very proud of him. And also like, you know, growing up, reading some of a cream of Dolje bars, really excellent culture writing. I also want to note that there are people outside of these communities looking on at all the happenings and trying on some of the cool. Like, there's been some commentary on white boys who say inshallah. There was this kind of viral moment where in halfway said, you know, inshallah in an interview. - I want to have a long, healthy life. Inshallah, I hope so. I feel like bye. - Just the other day, Cardi B was on the cover of Vogue Arabia. And when she posted her cover, we're just covered. The caption that she put at least on Twitter was all caps. Everything, Mashallah. I was like, wow, we are in a moment right now. What do you all think about that? It seems like there's almost been a shift in the mainstream desire to borrow some of the aesthetics or language of, you know, Muslim or Swana culture. - You know, one of the things I think I would ask us to consider in this conversation is, what are we considering mainstream? - Because I wonder if some of the perception of Muslim culture and I'm using that in sort of the broadest sense of the word breaking into non-Muslim consciousness is like, which non-Muslims are we talking about? Are we talking about like white non-Muslims? Are we talking about right? Cardi B is obviously like not white, right? But you know, she's right in the middle of hip hop, right? So like that is not so much of a stretch. But I think part of what's happening here is that there are more white Americans sort of latching on or white American celebrities or like what role is race playing in our perception of this sort of expanding beyond, you know, Muslim communities proper, right? I don't think that's the whole story for sure. But I think culturally, I wonder if some of this isn't sort of connected to like, who is paying attention now, right? Because again, we have a history going back 50, 60 years of like openly Muslim musicians, right? In jazz and hip hop sort of bringing their Muslim aesthetic into popular consciousness, right? You know, I became Muslim, I wasn't raised Muslim and my own journey into Islam was facilitated by hip hop. You know, people like Public Enemy and who put Malcolm X's voice on a beat, right? That I dance to or like, you know, other rappers saying, "Asalamu alaikum, Big Daddy Kane" and other, these other folks have been sort of dropping Muslim references in popular culture for a very long time now. But I do wonder if what we're witnessing here is a shift in who is actually starting to pay attention now. - Yeah, I really love that framing. I guess the other point I wanted to raise is that I don't wanna conflate the wave of visibility or legibility with social and political acceptance, right? So Donna's asking these questions of like, "Oh, to whom is this now becoming mainstream?" Because cultural consumption can and always has coexisted with political marginalization, right? So even if we're thinking about, yes, yes. - Yeah, so even if we're thinking about something being considered culturally cool, blackness has always been considered cool in the US in terms of cultural production and that hasn't conferred protection from vulnerability on the ground. And so when we think about now swanaculture entering into this new cultural moment where it's considered cool, right? A community can be aesthetically celebrated while still retaining that kind of political and social vulnerability. Visibility and legibility can certainly kind of create a sense of social belonging, even for Muslims listening to hip-hop. It's exciting to hear Lauren Hill say things like, Don't forget about this. I mean, this is not the most the game, right? Those are exciting to hear yourself in pop culture. But also, like, I don't know that Anne Hathaway saying, "Masha'Allah and an interview makes me feel "as any safer reciting Quran with my child "on an airplane in public," right? So there's just a kind of, I just don't want to overstate what this newfound wave of visibility actually means for marginalized communities. (upbeat music) - We're gonna take a quick break, but first, if you're a long-time listener or brand new to it's been a minute, be sure to come back every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday for brand new episodes. And did you know you can make it even easier to get new episodes by hitting the follow or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app, whether you're a new friend or a loyal bestie, join the team by subscribing today. Coming up after the break. - One of the things that I think is a misconception about what race is. A lot of people sort of think about race skin color, but race has always included more than that. Religion has always come along for the ride. - Stick around. As I mentioned, there have been several high-profile politicians like Zor and Mamdani, Elan Omar, Abdul Al Sayed, all Muslim, and also all on the left. I think that part of what made them high-profile is the confluence of both of those things. What do you make of this more visible political power? - What we're seeing in terms of political coalescence in the form of particular candidates is a confluence of a few different things, organizing in political engagement within Muslim communities, but also some broader trends left as politicians of various religions and backgrounds, right? There are people who are sort of gravitating to that sort of politics in a way that they haven't necessarily before. Muslim leftist politicians are not the only ones winning seats in different races across the country, right? They are a part of that. You have to think about it within the total context of political activity, but also in the context of a longer trajectory of American Muslim organizing tour, trying to figure out what is it that our communities need, how is it that we can sort of get the things that we need? And one of those ways has been to advance candidates who come from our communities, right? Articulating values that many of us share. One of the things that I think is particularly exciting about this moment is that we're all getting to experience Muslim politicians who are running on a much broader platform than the limited discourse that Muslims broadly have taken up in a lot of American political conversations. By that I mean this tendency to sort of reduce Islam in Muslims to terrorism and national security issues, right? And that's kind of, that's the only thing that should be of concern when we're talking about these communities is actually brought in quite a bit to issues that everybody cares about. Affordability. Affordability, housing, education, right? Like infrastructure, whatever. Like these are broader concerns. And I think it's really exciting to see Muslim political concerns really like the door just sort of kicked open on that. - Yeah. - Yeah, I just want to pick up on that because I think it's so interesting now to see Muslim politicians as a kind of face of the progressive movement within the Democratic Party, right? - Yeah. - So as Donna was saying, this is a result of years and years of organizing, of mobilizing voters. And but it's so interesting again to think about going back to our earlier conversation. So the rise of these cafes and cultural centers and restaurants. So soft power can certainly translate into normalizing certain kinds of candidates, right? So they're normalizing them as not as foreign or scary. People can imagine a Muslim mayor or a Muslim senator. And so certainly there's a kind of shift. But as Donna's mentioning, what's so interesting is we shouldn't really think about their appeal of these Muslim candidates on the basis of their Muslimness or their foreignness or their different backgrounds. The candidates who are succeeding are succeeding because they've built these broad multi-racial, multi-faith coalitions around very specific issues like rent and health care and child care wages. These electoral victories are built through these intersectional agendas, not a single issue. So it's a really exciting moment to be thinking about Muslim politicians as a kind of face of the progressive movement within the Democratic Party. I mean, so much of what each of you has said is really important in terms of squaring sort of where we are now in terms of some Muslim-American politicians gaining real political power, which is really interesting considering several people we spoke to and preparing for this interview described how in the era of very heightened Islamophobia and racism, post 9/11, a lot of Muslims tended toward hiding assimilation. And I understand why many were profiled, surveilled, detained by the US government. I wanna get an understanding just how different were things, you know, 24, 25 years ago in this acute period post 9/11. - So as you just mentioned, there is a huge contrast with the post 9/11 period and it's very striking to think about that period compared to now. In those immediate years following 9/11, a lot of immigrant parents, first generation families, taught their children to keep a low profile to avoid drawing attention, visibility brought surveillance, harassment, and now many of those children are adults and they grew up facing all those things despite trying to lay low and trying to be inconspicuous. That didn't protect them from surveillance and profiling and harassment. And I think that's a generation that they're now building businesses, they're making art, they're organizing politically, they're running for office and they're being very public about who they are. And as I mentioned before, it's not to conflate a newfound visibility or legibility with a wholesale, social and political acceptance, but there is this kind of key difference in just the demeanor of how these communities in second generation or even just how public appetite has changed, we're still bombarded with Islamophobic, political imagery, political language. And I think that not only are Muslims and from swana communities behaving differently and being much more public about what their values are and what their identities are, but public appetite and public tolerance for Islamophobia has shifted certainly in urban politics, right? So we can think about like these dog whistles, like creeping Sharia and just the fear of, there's a whole, like, uproar over Campbell suit, maybe being halal and that was, you know, Muslims trying to take over the West and giving your children a halal food. - Okay. - Like a decade and a half ago to now the popularity of these cafes where people are seeking out Yemeni coffee shops and a lot of those kinds of pejorative Islamophobic terms in urban politics in New York City certainly have lost their power to dissuade the average voter. The idea of calling New York City Mamdanistan was intended as a slur, but people are really excited about it now. They're like, oh, take me to Mamdanistan. Now, you know, take me to that socialist caliphate. And it's kind of, it's just taken the wind out of those pejorative terms. - Thank you so much. You painted such a really clear picture of the contrast between that period of time and now, but also, I mean, history for American Muslims didn't start at 9/11. How did 9/11 accelerate the Islamophobia and racism that already existed in America before them? - One of the things that I, I mentioned this frequently and I did mention it in sort of the pre-interview conversation was something that I go back to a lot, which was a quote from Imam Talib Abdul Rashid, who was an Imam in Harlem up until his passing last year. He was interviewed, you know, soon after 9/11. And one of the things that he said in response to that question was that, you know, it was like being black twice. - Mm, mm. - That's a word. - That's a bar. (laughs) - Yeah, for real. - I mean, and I returned to it frequently because yes, 9/11 was a moment. It's really a moment and a timeline of moments. Like it wasn't nothing, but it also wasn't everything. We could talk about like Islamophobia at the foundation of the United States as a political project, right? Because you had enslaved African Muslims who were brought here as chattel, right? And there are ways that how their spiritual practices were policed along with the spiritual practices of all of the Africans brought to this part of the world forcibly, as one of the early places where Islamophobia as a US phenomenon was planted. But then you go to the 1920s and you start to see the emergence of African-American Islamic movements and you have FBI surveillance and profiling that happens, right? And this is sort of a matter of course. You have the Iranian hostage crisis, the Iranian Revolution in 1979. And then you have 9/11 and policy wise, you had detainment, you had extra surveillance, you had the passage of the Patriot Act. Like you had all of these things that happened in this immediate post-9/11 period, which are of course very intense, laying some additional layers of infrastructure, right? [BLANK_AUDIO] or Islamophobia that function at the state level, 'cause it's really important for me to think about like these types of prejudices, not just the sort of individual acts, but there are practices and policies that are implemented with state authority. Like racism is most dangerous because it's systemic. Islamophobia is most dangerous because it's systemic. And I think 9/11 was a very intense period of tightening and heightening and ramping up of the infrastructure of Islamophobia on a state level, which has only continued into the Trump era. - Yeah, thank you. I think that's such an important context and insight, everything that Donna just shared in terms of, you didn't start 9/11. There's all these moments that we can look at American history that paved the way for the kind of acceleration that we saw post 9/11 or post 2016. But again, these weren't moments where Islamophobia first appeared. One thing that it's making me think about is the way that 9/11 sharpened a lot of internal tensions in Muslim communities in terms of, there was a greater erasure of African American Muslims in the US. And so after 9/11, the spokespeople for Islam on media outlets, the people who are being asked to weigh in on Islamophobia, on Islam in general, in the public sphere tended to be those of immigrant backgrounds. So then the face of Islam became the immigrant brown face, as Donna has mentioned, like the first Muslims to arrive in the US were those forcibly brought in the transatlantic slave trade. There was this broader erasure that I think exacerbated internal tensions within Muslim communities that highlighted anti-blackness within Muslim communities. And race has always been very central to understanding swana communities, which again, include, it's not a singular race. It includes black Arabs, other black swana people. But anti-blackness has always existed within those communities. And I think that was sharpened in the 9/11 period where certain people became sort of the face of Islam erasing that before 1965 black Muslims were the face of Islam in the US. - That's so interesting. That's so interesting. I mean, that actually leads into our next question. I mean, one thing we also wanted to get into with this conversation was the way that race works in America. I mean, like the black white binary that we have, part of why many people of swana descent are counted as white in the senses is because some fought legal battles in the past to be legally recognized as white during the Jim Crow era for naturalization purposes, right? Because if you're looking at Jim Crow, it's like, you don't want to be on the bad side of this. It don't feel so great. I understand, even if I may not necessarily love it, I understand some of the thinking behind that, right? And obviously, that didn't work for everybody. There are plenty of Muslims and people of swana descent who have never been seen as white. But Tizin, you mentioned to my producer that 9/11 also really changed how some Muslims or people of swana descent were racialized in America. How does race factor into the treatment of these overlapping communities? - Yeah, so as you just mentioned, these communities have never fit neatly into American racial categories in the black white binary. And so as you mentioned this important history, a lot of immigrants from the swana regions pursued legal classification as white as you're saying, not just as a matter of personal identity, but it was a legal and political question that's tied to citizenship and survival, right? Whiteness is what terminate access to naturalization to having the full gamut of legal rights. Legal whiteness didn't translate into social acceptance, right? So people could be categorized as white on government forms and still be treated as suspect or just generally outside the fold of national belonging, especially if they're a Muslim. So a Muslim is something that racialized some of these immigrants as non-white, even as their Christian counterparts within the same ethnic identity could be considered white. And so we start to see the whiteness in America being very closely tied to Christianity. - One of the things that I think is a misconception about what race is, a lot of people sort of think about race is skin color, right? And that's sort of the defining thing that helps us to understand whether prejudice is happening, you know, along racial lines or not. But race has always included more than that. It's always included, you know, particularly if you're talking about American whiteness, religion has always come along for the right with that, right? You know, Irish immigrants were considered, you know, not quite white because of the Catholicism, right? In the US, you know, this idea that whiteness is tied to Christianity, I mean, if you think about the ways that extremist groups like the KKK have used like religious imagery, right? And the current administration is really doubling down on a lot of that, like, you know, white plus Christian type of, you know, paradigm, right? And so like, this has always been along for the right. Race is also sort of governing, as Tessine mentioned, you know, relations between segments of the American Muslim demographic, right? It's structuring so much of this conversation, right? I mentioned with this idea of anti-blackness existing within the communities partially informed by this aspirational whiteness, aspiring to be, to have proximity to whiteness. But at the same time, you know, there are also real histories of solidarity. So we're talking about the black power movements of the '60s and '70s, even the non, like, not just black Muslim, nationalist movements, but the black power movements of the '60s and '70s, really connected civil rights to our African-Americans, to anti-colonial struggles overseas, including the struggle for Palestinian liberation. So although this is a history of racial hierarchy and exclusion, there are real moments of coalition and solidarity, and then we see that in our recent history, and there are a few moments where those connections become especially visible. So in 2014, I live in St. Louis with the police killing of Mike Brown. This was a moment when Palestinian activists had expressed solidarity with Ferguson protesters. There was a whole from Ferguson to Palestine. And they were sharing this really practical advice about responding to tear gas and police violence. And so thinking about, as Donna mentioned, racism as state sanctioned and as structural, that history helps us explain even politicians who aren't a swana or from the swana identities, including, like St. Louis figures like Cory Bush. That's how they could understand Palestine as connected to these broader struggles against racialized state violence. And so that's not to erase any of the tensions and this sort of complicated history of race and swana communities. But it reminds us that there's been a politics of solidarity for many, many decades, and it didn't just begin in our current moment. As we've been discussing, I mean, things seem like they're changing, not only the shifts in cultural capital and political power, but also public opinion. We have to talk about the Warren Gaza here and the sea change of public opinion around Palestinians. I don't want to suggest that all Muslims or people have swandered to set feel the same way or even feel passionately about this issue. But I think it's fair to say that there's been a lot of solidarity, a lot of organizing among these communities around advocating for Palestinian safety and freedom. And a lot of Americans have changed their sympathies, either through the effects of that organizing, or through witnessing videos or accounts of what's happening in Gaza, in which a UN commission's investigation has called a genocide. The international court of justice also found that acts of genocide were plausible, though, of course, Israel strongly denies that charge. And I think this is relevant to the conversation we're having here because a lot of the rhetoric that's been used against Palestinians and those that advocate for them is a racist Islamophobic rhetoric. What does it mean that many Americans have started changing their sympathies? Tazeen, we'll start with you. There is a scholarly consensus around a term genocide to describe what has happened in Gaza. And that matters. That legal determination is relevant for international legal processes. But politically, the important point is that the language itself has entered mainstream American debate in a way that would be almost inconceivable even just a few years ago. So scholars, including myself, who use the term genocide just based on the sheer scale of civilian death and displacement. The broader political point is that Americans are now debating Palestinian life and US military support and accountability in far more public ways than they ever have before. And so in terms of thinking about what has shifted, there is a discrepancy between voters and policy. So I think democratic voters are shifting in ways that the democratic party is not necessarily shifting. And so there's a difference here between public opinion and policy. And I wanted to circle back to Muslim candidates becoming the face of the press of movement. So I think Gaza can and has become this important test of moral clarity for voters. So acknowledging the history of solidarity of organizers on their ground who have worked tirelessly for this public opinion to finally start to shift in some ways, I think what's interesting about these swana Muslim candidates who are winning elections or putting on competitive elections are sometimes winning despite their stance on Gaza. It's not because of their stance on Gaza. And I think that they're winning in places when they can translate that moral critique. So people for whom Gaza is this important test of moral clarity, the candidates were succeeded. have translated that moral critique into thinking about these questions of everyday governance. Like, can people afford rent, can people afford child care, health care, when can we eat salad again? Like, people who are really invested in these very everyday questions of governance are now connecting that to, well, where is our government spending going? And that's directly correlative to being much more critical of the Israeli government. Despite all the complexities of these shifts that we're unpacking here, we still see a lot of Islamophobia and racism today. >> Absolutely. >> Asma Khaled, co-host of the BBC show The Global Story and former NPR correspondent, aka, she used to be my colleague. She argued in the Atlantic that American Islamophobia is worse than ever. She cited Tennessee representative Andy Ogles saying, quote, "Muslims don't belong in American society," and South Carolina representative Nancy Mace tweeting, quote, "Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our public," end quote. This is me saying this, me, Brittany. These are incredibly Islamophobic statements. Beyond that, Asma felt her own home state Indiana had grown more Islamophobic since she grew up there. I think it's certainly true. It's become worse among some, but maybe it has less rhetorical power than it used to among others. Many have pointed out that it's plainly ridiculous that New York mayors on Mamdani would, for example, in state Sharia law in New York. You know, as you mentioned, Tazin, and I hear and see every single day, many people even make jokes about wanting to live in Mamdani's done. What do you make of the possibly uneven rhetorical power that Islamophobia has? And what does that actually mean for the safety of Muslims? >> Going back to this question of visibility, and what does visibility and public legibility confer on these communities? I think any time there are these, we're experiencing, right now, a particular moment of cultural visibility, cultural celebration even, political visibility. I think with that, that comes hand in hand with increased backlash, and increased waves of Islamophobia. It's a double-edged sword, right? So I think that it's a sign that these communities have been successful in establishing themselves and becoming a part of the mainstream, but there are more folks from these communities who now have more political and cultural capital to actually resist or fight back against those kinds of narratives. >> These cycles of backlash, as Tazin pointed out, are very much a feature of American racial history. But dances on the part of marginalized groups, typically, there's a backlash that happens, and that's something that's a discernible pattern throughout American history. Like you know the constant, right? You know that prejudice and backlash is somewhat predictable, right? But the task, I guess, for us is always been to sort of think about ways that we create a different set of principles by which we organize ourselves and live our lives. That's what I'm interested in, right? I'm interested in figuring out how do we create conditions in which all of us can live lives that are freer and safer and more secure. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm slightly less interested in the question is whether or not Islamophobia is better or worse than it was 20 years ago or it's 40 years ago or whatever. It's different, at least in its particulars and how it shows up. But the task is to sort of capitalize on these openings and to figure out ways to create conditions by which people can live better lives. This conversation has covered so much ground, and I just want to say how much I appreciate having had it with the both of you. Tazine, Donna, thank you both so much. Thank you so much for having me here. Thank you so much. That was Dr. Donna Austin, cultural anthropologist, and Dr. Tazine Ali, scholar of Islam in America and associate professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis. This episode of it's been a minute was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by Nina Patuck. Engineering support came from Ted Mibain. Our supervising producer is Sheriff Vincent. Our executive producer is Barton Gurdwood. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right, that's all for this episode of it's been a minute from NPR. I'm Britt Elus. Talk soon.