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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
This is Nick Taber. I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Speaker 2:And my name is Daniel Simons Jenkins. I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, and this is Of This World. So we've been wanting to have on the show someone who could discuss the mayoral election of Zohan Mamdani and how it relates to the larger Muslim community in New York City. And we were scratching our heads thinking, who would be good for this? And then, of course, the war in Iran started.
Speaker 2:And we thought to ourselves, well, we need to cover this as well. Who would be a guess for this? And then I realized that I know the perfect person for this because I'm a former student of his, and he just happens to be one of the leading experts of the history of Islam in The United States and also knows Middle Eastern politics. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna email my old teacher, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and he gratefully has agreed to join us on the show today. So Kambiz's work focuses on Islamic studies, American religious history, Middle East studies, and their intersection.
Speaker 2:He is best known for his very important 2010 work, A History of Islam in America From the New World to the New World Order, which was published by Cambridge University Press, and I highly recommend this book. It's so rich and just provides a comprehensive account of the history of Islam in The United States. He's also written about Persian and Arab speaking worlds. And as I mentioned, for this reason, makes for such a perfect guess today as he can make connections between Muslim life in The United States and what is happening now, in particular in The Middle East. For years, he taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where as I mentioned, I had the pleasure of taking a class with him on what became this book on the history of Islam in The United States.
Speaker 2:And he's recently moved to Carleton College in in Minnesota where he's a professor of religion. His new project is a fascinating one, which is about the place of the mosque in Islamic history. Kambiz, thanks so much for joining us today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:You know, Danny's been telling me that in addition to the extremely high quality of your scholarship, that you're also just a genuinely kind and generous person. In fact, he said yesterday, something like, you know, to borrow a phrase from my younger years, he's a Christ like person. So we thought you might appreciate that.
Speaker 3:I was going say it's such an honor to actually be on your show and see Danielle that you've done. Yeah. Only only a person who's at this other end and has seen a student do so well would know what I'm talking about, you know. It's like when you finish a book and you hold on to a book and no one else can understand that feeling, you know, what it feels to see a printed pages together. It's something like that.
Speaker 2:That's very kind of you.
Speaker 3:It's truly an honor, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much again for being with us today. So I guess I wanna just talk about what I mentioned in the introduction. You taught at Reed College for a number of years and you were there to witness firsthand the first Trump administration. And of course, Portland became kind of a ground zero for the administration's crackdown on what it considered to be a lawless and disorderly city, and targeted leftists and anarchists, as the administration described it, and sent federal agents in, some of whom had connections to immigration and border security. And then, of course, you're now at Carleton in Minnesota.
Speaker 2:And kind of the same thing happens, but at a much higher level of lethal force, where you have the tragedy of the ICE killings. And this, of course, is connected to immigration raids and a protest against them. And Minnesota, of course, is, in terms of Muslim representation, one of the most populous places in the country in terms of the Twin Cities. So I guess maybe just to begin with, can you talk a little bit about how the Muslim community responded to the recent events in the Twin Cities? And maybe connect this to the so called Muslim ban, and then just in relationship to your historical expertise of the history of Islam in The United States, is there a historical backdrop that we can maybe understand the response of the Muslim community to to what happened in Minnesota?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the Muslim community in Minnesota is that's active is of two sorts. One is the Muslim American society that's active in building mosques and had several mosques in the region. And the other is the Somali community, which also has its own mosques and networks. And one of the things that happened prior to actually the raids was the when Trump made this comment about, you know, Somalis being trashed and the Muslim community is so well integrated into the larger politics of the region, particularly the twin cities, They all sort of came together with mayors and interfaith leaders coming together to talk about, like, this is not how we treat one another or talk about one another in Minnesota.
Speaker 3:And it was a lot of several Somalia moms got up to say like, in Minnesota, we dig each other out of snow. You know, know, we don't bash bash on each other. So you really got to see how Minnesotan, actually, the Muslim community has come in. It was one of the things I always talk about with you know, that people become, like, New Yorkers before they become Americans, or people become, like, Chicagoans or Angelenos before they become Americans. And you could totally see that, that there was a sense like the America we're participating is in Minnesota, and we don't know what's going on outside.
Speaker 3:But in terms of the I think the historical backdrop is super important that some of the things that were happening in Minnesota in terms of people being picked up, families being worried about whether or not their loved ones are going to show up, come home from work, and things of that sort. I went back and read Muslims talking after nineeleven about their experiences with immigration in places like New York, you get exactly the same Like you could, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, right? They're talking about like, and at that time, you know, they're talking about like, you know, someone called us saying, you some of some activist organs, they're saying someone called us to say, like, my dad went to work this morning, he has not come back, it's been too, know, or like two days that my son is not back and there were these concerns. Then the Muslim community started organizing in Minnesota in particular to, that people started organizing as a way of responding and providing support for people, so legal support for people. So in some ways, the Muslim community in Minnesota was much more prepared for what had happened.
Speaker 3:People were the overwhelming majority of Somalis in Minnesota are naturalized citizens. Really? Okay. And yeah. So that becoming citizens no.
Speaker 3:Actually, a citizen was and making sure that you become a citizen as soon as possible was kind of a response to what people had seen before, right? So that there was a push to make sure that people become citizens, your family members become citizens, even if they want to travel back and forth or maybe, and in the past, if they would have felt like where they're fine being permanent residents because of these types of issues, they became citizens. So the, you could, in terms of the locally in Minnesota, the Latino community felt the impact of the surge much more than the Somali community had or the Muslim community had, simply because they were a lot more organized and they also had experiences with these things before.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 3:know, one of the things that we saw what that happened in Minnesota is like local governments standing up against the federal government, right? Like, actually people not looking to the government for support, but thinking about like, how do we as a community organize government, against the infringement of our rights. Guess who was doing that for a long time? Uh-huh, uh-huh,
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Muslim Americans for a very long time had been this experience of like the government doesn't actually support us, it's not the place we could go for help, and how do we actually like support each other and develop networks to support each other? So there was a lot of that. So very quickly, there's a Somali mall of sorts where there are a lot of Somali owned shops and restaurants and coffee shops and so on. People, there were no customers in there, but like shops had been opened, like had gone there open, they all had signs in Somali about like ice out, went to meet to talk about immigration issues and things of that sort because the community had developed these networks that wish they could talk about these types of issues and come together to support one another, lot more than what we ended up seeing, especially in the twin cities among Latinos. Uh-huh.
Speaker 3:They're the equivalent of, like, the Mercados that they have just emptied out.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:You know, people had either left the shops, people had, like and they they had to figure out like how to come together in a way that like the Muslim community had done so
Speaker 1:many Right, fascinating. So to be clear, you're saying that they established these patterns and these networks in the years after nineeleven Or did I I miss okay. Yeah. So so okay. So yeah.
Speaker 1:So going back more than twenty years. Yeah. Interesting. And that and that was all a response to the the Islamophobia that that rose up after the the attack on the the Twin Towers.
Speaker 3:Not just Islamophobia. There were there were actually, like, governmental programs. Right? Immigrate you know, people being picked up for immigration reason and for immigration, people having to register, places that were means of sending money back home, you know, being attacked, charities were being attacked, this sort of experience of with immigration. And here when we talk about immigration, like people think like, well, if the people have immigration issues, it's because they're doing something wrong, but that's not actually the case.
Speaker 3:Like if you have applied for a permanent residency and had been approved to receive it, it takes many years before you could actually go get your permanent residency. And so you're in a limbo state, And generally, the government left you alone in You're that working, you're paying your taxes, everything is fine, right? Until you could come to like do whatever interviews you need to do to be able to get your permanent residency set, so that a lot of people were in these types of states like where they were, you know, it's not that they were coming in illegally, but they were like, they were approved, but they didn't have the paperwork because it takes a long time to get them. So they're in these types of and those people after nineeleven were being picked up and deported. So they had already these experiences, not just with Islamophobia as a social phenomenon, but actually in terms of a thing that's shaping governmental policies.
Speaker 2:It is interesting, I mean, the role that religion has played in these anti ICE movements. I'm more familiar with the Catholic response, but it does seem like religious community provides resources, pivotal ones, actually, for these kinds of initiatives. So I think in this country, we might be so inundated with evangelical MAGA ism that we usually think of religion in the exact opposite way as being anti immigrant. But here we have the role of the church aiding and assisting people who are under attack. And I guess, obviously, I'm thinking about Pope Leo too in many ways, but it's fascinating.
Speaker 2:It would be interesting to learn more about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and in fact, gonna ask to Danny's point, you mentioned people, Somalis gathering in these malls, these places of commerce. Did mosques and faith communities play a significant role in this response?
Speaker 3:So they played a significant role in the sense that they're part of a larger Muslim coalition group that was had been built up that in itself is part of another religious community called Isaiah that works with various communities to be able to get people to get involved in politics. So a lot of the type of work that this larger broader religious organization does is talk with varying communities about like what sort of needs they have and what sort of problems they're facing and starts helping them figure out how you could turn that into platforms that then could be like translated into elections
Speaker 1:bringing
Speaker 3:about new laws and new resources and things like that from from the the government. And one of the things that since 09/11, this organ one this organization had done was provide the same type of work for Muslim community in in in Minnesota. So they established as part of Isaiah this thing called the Muslim coalition, and a lot of the mosques are hosting meetings with these groups. And then there were also a lot of churches that members of churches that were coming to mosque parking lots to just to be there, to be witnesses at the times of prayer and things of that sort. We also had, you know, like these groups of people in Minnesota that were would be on rotation, standing outside of stores and things of that.
Speaker 3:So not just Muslim places, but also Latino places or other places that were being attacked by ICE. And then blowing whistles when ICE would come around so that people could lock their doors or go and not come out and things of that. So a lot and the mosques were not at the forefront of organizing these things, but we're working in coalitions with other groups that were working doing this type of work. And religion was forming, was facing us, Danny, were saying, like a bridge to churches and synagogues and other organizations so that people could learn how to participate in the political And particularly in Minnesota, where there are these caucuses that people do to create platforms, and then they have to choose the people for primaries and things of that sort that really are at the grassroots level. And, you know, organized groups could then have a lot of influence in the state politics.
Speaker 2:Well, that kind
Speaker 1:of sets us up for the the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is mayor Mamdani here in New York. You know, something I've been saying to Danny for the last few months is that in in the election in November, I think something like nine out of 10 Muslims voted for Mamdani. And of course, these are not all people of a single ethnic group. They're from all over the world. They're not all from the same economic stratum.
Speaker 1:They live all across the city. Yet, so their faith is actually, nevertheless, it's like a very strong predictor of how people were gonna vote in this election. And I think it's rare that you see that kind of political unity with other faith groups. You know, it's it's not very often that you see all, you know, all Catholics vote voting for the same candidate. Danny and I talk a lot about the like the you know, the past and future of the religious left, whether it does have a future.
Speaker 1:And I think this is one of the strongest examples of faith based organizing on the left that I've that I've seen in my lifetime. So I wonder if you could help us understand what accounts for it. Like how much should we attribute this to good organizing? How much of it is just people being outraged about like the war in Gaza? How much of it is people feeling like Mamdani represents them as Muslims in a way that other candidates don't?
Speaker 1:What would you chalk all that up to?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Can I So I'm being a historian, I think I could go back? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Please, by all means.
Speaker 3:That's what we brought you on for. It's hard to remember this now, but if you went, like, to 2015, 2016, any Muslim speaking out against some sort of government policy would would have immediately raised questions about their loyalty to the state. Like, there would have been all of these sort of questions about, like, how loyal are you to the country if you're gonna you're gonna question something that a president is doing, and and then and that's that would have come from the right or the left. Mhmm. And greater involvement of Muslims in American politics on the left has always been suspect in a couple of ways.
Speaker 3:One is because, like, Islam being seen as illiberal or, you know and then that that's been one of it one one aspect of it, going back to the Salmon Rushdie affair, things of that sort. Like, people think having those thing things in their mind, but then Muslims can be democrat, like women's rights issues and things of that sort. And then the other part has been the left's position on Israel with greater Muslim participation in American politics mean taking different types of added positions vis a vis Israel. So there's always been this kind of imbalance. And then when Trump got elected and the first thing he did was sign the mess the so called Muslim ban.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Mhmm. Right? And then so the people who were opposed to wanted to to respond to him and resist on the left came out in full force defending Muslims. And you could really see, you you could really see a lot of Muslim organizations like, oh my god, like, can we actually like oppose something that the government is like, is this okay now?
Speaker 3:Like people at ACLU are trying to get Muslims on their board, like all these leftist organizations are appealing to Muslims to get them on their board, you know? And and you could see where the tension that I was talking about came up with the women's marches. Linda Sassir was She part of was there was a lot of opposition to her, right? Like, Brooklyn, like, was a lot of opposition to her because people of her positions on Palestine. And and so like so you could see that uneasiness did not completely go away, but there was all of a sudden, like, this sort of change Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That had happened that brought Muslims into American politics on this and and incorporate them into, like, leftist politics.
Speaker 1:Oh, oh, in in the first Trump presidency.
Speaker 3:More than was possible.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 3:During the first Trump presidency. So some of that was already happening. And then so people started going more into politics, putting forward candidates and things of that sort that and the idea that Muslims are illiberal or, like, things of those types of questions were not at the forefront on the left at least in the way in which they had been prior to Trump's first presidency where, like, these issues would have come up about, like, if you're gonna have a Muslim candidate, where do they stand on LGBTQ issues or things of that sort were were a little less prominent than they would have been before. And part of it was because the people who are engaging with the left were also Muslims on the left, right, that were engaging on these sort of issues. And some people, because of wanting to be more involved in politics, they started actually saying, like, I remember actually one prominent national Muslim leader who who's I'm not gonna mention his name, but who I had talked to in the nineties.
Speaker 3:And, you know, he wasn't, like, he wasn't even, like, open to, like, she Sunni differences. Uh-huh. Now saying things like, you know, when he was being asked, like, is it okay for us to vote Democratic given, like, where they stand on issues of gay marriage and things like that, So like, are you, like, they're not making you gay, what do you care? So there was also this sort of switch that had happened. And then at the same time you had community organizations that were developing against the crackdown on the Muslims and Muslim organizations in The United States after nine eleven, like charities and surveillance of Muslim groups and all these things that had led a lot of Muslims to come together to see community organizing as a way of engaging in politics more than appealing to the state for rights.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So rather than appealing to the state for civil rights, they had they had come to develop this politics of taking care of one another. Mhmm. Because people, you know, both society is kind of Islamophobic, and and then you build allies, you find the, you know, rabbis, ministers, and priests to agree with you, you you find the politicians in city hall that agree with you, form relationships with them, and, you know, that had done that type of politics.
Speaker 3:And that had been done in doing it actually even before 09:11, but it just people are more receptive to it after nine eleven and after Trump's election even more, right, where people are courting Muslims to participate in politics and and bringing their voice more into into the Mhmm. And I see Mamdani to get back to like Mamdani coming straight out of that kind of Yeah. Like, that's what that's the politics you grew up with. The Muslim politics who grew up in New York was organizations seeing community organizing as politics, creating allies at the local level as politics, and seeing the ideal role of the government as giving people the resources they need to be able to take care of each other and to to be able And to I see him really coming out of that that type of politics as the other Muslim organizations that had supported them. I'm thinking of like Desi's Rise Up as one of these prominent organizations, where that are Muslim, but they're not actually organizing around being Muslim, but like they're doing the organizing out of being the the faith commitments that they have and sense of ethic that comes from Islam, but they're actually serving South Asian communities more generally.
Speaker 3:Those groups are that supported them, that he was courting, like, we're doing this type of politics. That's exactly what he's he's doing. So while it is a faith based organization that's coming together, it's also a faith based organizations whose political activism had been shaped in a particular way because of the circumstances, the political circumstances of the of the country. So I wouldn't read people, the nine out of 10 people were voting for Mamdani as some sort of like agreement or homogeneity among Muslims in New York, more as sort of institutional developments and political developments in response to the political conditions that Muslims had faced. So it's it it could it could easily tear apart.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, the infrastructure was there. And I guess, you know, to that to that point about how these people come from these, you know, these nine out of 10 voters come from different parts of the world and and have different economic situations.
Speaker 1:I guess we could say that the US government and the press to a degree kind of treated them as a political entity, you know, a unified political entity on its own, like by declaring Muslims terrorists or by by going after people on the basis of their faith and by instituting a Muslim ban, you know, banning people from all these different countries that that what they had in common was that they were predominantly Muslim. So I had not thought of it from that perspective, but it all makes sense.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say the other part of this was that I think like if we step back and look at the larger picture, like that idea of like pathologizing Islam, that often the largest society was often doing like, we need the right kind of Muslim or like, what kind of understanding. I think the history that we've seen is showing us that like Muslims are responding to the way in which governmentality has worked in The United States. And it's actually like that's a common factor, right? Like that there isn't there wasn't there was like not an ideological or theological position that Muslims were adopting. It's actually a governmentality that's driving the history.
Speaker 2:I guess I don't know if I'm gonna, me and Nick discuss this question, maybe it's good to ask it, but Mamdani is a democratic socialist. And he essentially during his commencement talk or when he became mayor, talked about the goal ultimately being a kind of loving collectivism. It sounded very Marxist. You know, this is, you know, the, I think as Nick alluded to, you know, this show is kind of not entirely based on the question of, is there a progressive religious left that's viable in this country? But it's kind of very much interested in that question.
Speaker 2:And I think of Mamdani, and just based on what you said about how the othering and the governmentality kind of created this kind of cohesiveness. But I mean, he has very particular political views, right? I mean, they're quite leftist. You're in religious studies. There was this tidal wave of literature in the 2000s about post secular moment and the turn of political theology.
Speaker 2:And is there a political theology at all with Mamdani? Is there I mean, beyond what you said about how the conditions were in place to create a cohesiveness that would allow for that level of voters, that percentage, that high percentage. Is there, with him at least, something theological at the core of his politics you know, that's beyond just DSA, beyond just democratic socialism. You know, the DSA had a, you know, if we go back to the DSA, there's a lot of left, I think it had kind of, Mike Harrington was like
Speaker 1:the Oh, yeah. Was at the Catholic worker before he became an atheist. But yeah, definitely has religious origins.
Speaker 3:Yeah. One of the things I would say about the release of a nice mosque project that I'm working on is that a lot of the communication and organizing that happens among Muslims and in Islam more generally actually happens in these processes of like participating in a mosque, right? Like when you go to a mosque, there are no queues you could hide on behind. You're like, there's no place that you could choose that like, I'm going to go be in this corner with my fellow CEOs or something of that sort. You kind of go, there's an open space and the call to payer comes, everybody's supposed to create form lines, those lines need to be straight and complete, like anything I have gap between them.
Speaker 3:So they change, you know, you could be like sitting, know, standing next to a family member, but then you would have to move because that family member had to step up to fill up gap in that line in front of you, and everybody's supposed to stand toe to toe, shoulder to shoulder in some ways. And I think those that that communicates a sense of what community quality and community means in a visceral Right? That shapes months, Muslim sensibilities. So I think there's definitely that, right? So that simply being part of the community involves, you know, this isn't being theologized, but it's being a through practice inculcated in people about, you know, equality and who who's in your community and who you need to take care of and and I think he's definitely been participating in those, right?
Speaker 3:And he's definitely had home in those and people notice that the reason why he gets his support is because he's not uncomfortable in those spaces, right? You know, to go back to like, someone like Saba Mahmoud's work about like how people by participating in mosque movements inculcate a particular types of ethics in themselves. I mean, and I think that has, that is definitely there. And someone someone who's not part of those communities, you could easily tell, like, if someone does not regularly go to a mosque and pray, they can't sit like there's someone who has. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yes. When you have to sit on your knee Mhmm. You know, Malcolm X has those famous statement he makes about, like, Western knees were not can't remember actually whether he says Western or American knees don't bend the same way Muslim knees do bend. Like Uh-huh. Funny.
Speaker 3:So you could kinda tell. Like, you could you could tell. And and people part of the letters part of the support he's getting is that he could you could tell
Speaker 1:on it.
Speaker 3:He's been part of those communities. Yeah. And and, the sort of grassroots support support that he's got. Another thing is that, like, the Muslim organizations that much more had been centered around civil rights issues and then and also had been much more ideological or had a particular ideology in terms of their participation in American politics supported Mamdani, but there was a lukewarm support. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:These sort of national organizations, they didn't come out and say like, even today, they're not coming out and saying, like, look. The you know, one of the biggest cities of New York is the biggest city in America US now. Like, pop like, has a Muslim mayor. Right? And some of that is because of his socialism.
Speaker 3:Some of his attitude is because of his attitudes towards social issues and things of that sort. But some of it is also, I think, that I don't see him as being ideological in his approach to politics from a religious perspective.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh. Right.
Speaker 3:There are Muslim commune pockets of Muslim communities that are doing those types of that type of, like, work on the ground. Mhmm. There's, a community in Cleveland that's been
Speaker 2:doing
Speaker 3:work in terms of, like, buying property and trying to use Islamic ethical means of like dispensing with those properties in a way that's like, that could be collectively owned, where people could come and live in a community together, where like you're not making profit out of selling your house and things of that sort, so that the focus could be much more on like taking care of one another than like buying a house in a place that's gonna make me richer. So there've been people who are thinking along these lines too. And so it's not absolutely that there isn't sort of support in Muslim communities because there are these types of Muslim community. It'd be interesting to see that whether the success of Mamdani also brings more attention to these groups. There's like another organization that's been very successful out of Chicago and Atlanta, the inner city Muslim action network that has similarly been doing a lot of this type type of work.
Speaker 3:And so there are pockets of these sorts of communities, but they're not the ones who are activists like building mosques and, you know, you know, doing that type of Muslim activism.
Speaker 1:You know, Danny and I have also been been talking and and thinking about the relationship between Islam and and democratic socialism. As you said, over the years, the left has often had critiques of of Islam or, you know, it's at least of its perception of Islam. There are these widespread perceptions in The US that it it's that the faith tends to be repressive and illiberal, you know, perhaps misogynistic. Of course, you know, to the extent that you can say that about about the whole faith of Islam, I think you can say it about any faith. You can certainly say it about Christianity.
Speaker 1:But maybe you could speak to that relationship a little bit between Islam and democratic socialism. You know, it's certainly most Muslims are not socialists, but I I guess there is some tradition of it. Right? Mamdani is not the first one to take that position.
Speaker 3:I mean, there there has there has been a leftist socialist wing to Muslim thinkers, and some of them actually find themselves inspired by people who would be, like, considered to be, you know, more militant in their approach and interpretations of of Islam simply because they were articulating how religious beliefs could come into politics and the ways in which they could they could shape politics. Generally, these groups or individuals, I'm thinking of like Iqbal Ahmed, were influential much more outside of Muslim communities than they were even though they were acting as Muslims and then within mosques and Muslim organizations and things of that sort. And I think to a large extent, that's true for Mamdani too, that while he has the support of Muslim organizations within New York and mosque communities within New York, it's insofar as like he's participating in them, not because like they had read his, you know, or they're like thinking alongside the same, like, or agree with his platform fully and things things of that sort. That's why I was saying that the the coalition you're saying is rather fragile, that under different political circumstances, it could break apart. And Sure.
Speaker 3:I don't if that helps answer your question that there have been these there have been these groups and but their support is not from within the Muslim community Mhmm. Itself, even though they're inspired by Muslim ideals. And they won't they might have faith commitments themselves.
Speaker 2:Heading towards the end of our conversation, but I Kambiz, I want to ask you about what's going on in The Middle East right now. I know you're very much interested in Iran. And Trump ran on an anti war campaign that now looks utterly ridiculous and hypocritical. And basically promoted this as an easy war to win. Within a very brief period of time, this will resolve itself through US military intervention, which is not the case at all.
Speaker 2:It seems like we're repeating the same air we made under the Bush administration in Iraq, the same kind of assumptions about what American military might accomplish. And a lot of Americans have no idea of the depths and the scope of Iran as a country, but its civilization as well. It's just complete ignorance, which could lead some to think the very way that the Trump administration has, which is will be no problem. And now it is, of course. So what do you take away from all of this?
Speaker 2:In terms of you being here, the war going on over there, the Muslim community here, or communities, do you have any, when you wake up and you think about what's happening, are there certain thoughts that go through your mind about this and where it's heading and historical lessons that haven't been learned?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the historical lessons that haven't been learned are so obvious and also heartbreaking, right? Like I was talking with some students whose mother is Iraqi here at Carlton and he was telling me like a million people died in Iraq, like, you know, the column pal come and apologize. And then the people who did, like there's the consequences of this is that the circle lessons not being heard are also bloody, right? Thinking about the Muslim politics of the region is, I think, telling.
Speaker 3:And of course, because that's what I look at, maybe that's why I think it's telling, you could check me here, that the war would not have happened if Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates were not in support of it. Mhmm. Right? Like that given given the relationship they have and and also they have for a long time seen as Iran as an enemy, the whole idea that even when UAE signed the Abraham Accord with Israel, a lot of the impetus behind that, we have this common enemy in And so you could begin to see, like, if we're talking about like this politics in terms of like Muslim community or a Muslim, you know, anti imperialism versus imperialism or something of that sort, that's not really actually operative here. Right?
Speaker 3:Rather what we are seeing is billionaires coming together to think about what the region ought to look like for their own interests. And then everyone else is paying the price in some in a lot of ways. And again, the Abraham Accords are an interesting thing to think about because one of the things most people in UAE and Qatar or like in Bahrain and most people in the region, even Qatar is not part of the Abraham Accords, know, Moab and Sudan are against normalization of relationships with Israel. But these countries have learned that they don't actually need to they could do these things if they think it's good for them and what they're trying to achieve for their countries irrespective of the popular support that they may have. So that scares me, That's what scares me that there are people who are operating in the region for interests that are not like national interests or state interests, but interests of billionaires and companies.
Speaker 3:And one of the things I think like Iran's responses has been doing is exactly attacking those types of interests. Right? And they're one of the reasons why I think like Trump is extending the ceasefire and is because those those interests have been are at stake. Mhmm. My sense is that the if you're at you're asking like what I wake up thinking that I wake up thinking that the world is not gonna be the same, the world I knew has ended.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And the world that we're emerging into is really an unknown. Yeah. And it looks it looks scary if it means that it's serving the interests of these conglomerate organizations that, you know, and the allies that they have made and the relation the economic relationships that they have considered that they have created. Because ultimately, like, that's the only thing that's holding those relationships together.
Speaker 3:Those agreements together are economic relationships from which the people aren't benefiting. And if they are benefiting and it's on this trickle down model of like, Uh-huh. You know? Yeah. If the millionaires and Emirates do well, then the society would also look good.
Speaker 3:But that that's not speaking to the workers who are building those countries. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh. You
Speaker 3:know, that it's not serving them at all. And they're being sacrificed in the middle of all of all of this. Yeah. And I don't see a I don't I don't see a possible, like, a neat end end to any of it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think I'm I'm really worried that this is gonna go on for a long time and get worse.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh. Well, I would
Speaker 3:yeah. I hope I'm wrong by technicalities, but that's that's why. I'm not very hopeful.
Speaker 1:I hope you'd be able to reassure me that that wasn't the direction things were headed, but it yeah. That's the that's that's kind of been my my gut feeling too.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then then when you think of, like, who could interfere, I don't think there's any If we think about the interests that are not taking into consideration the lives of the people, right, that are actually operating here, There's no one who would stop it because China benefits from this. Russia benefits, is benefiting from this. The oil prices are going up. They're able to sell their oil.
Speaker 3:Israel benefits that both Iran and the Gulf States are getting weaker. Who would start and then the only people that I could think of, like, would start worrying would be, like, The Gulf States and Saudi Arabia and places like that that would get inter intervene in some ways, but then that would also mean that they would have to think of stop thinking about their own their own interests and start thinking about, like, the people of the region. And
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which
Speaker 3:And I haven't I haven't seen that I mean, could see from the the brutal crackdown on the all the revolutions.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:The leftist kind of revolutions in the region, that that's not what they're thinking about, right? They're thinking about how they could control their population much more than they're thinking about how they could help them.
Speaker 1:One more question, if I may, to tie this to some of the things we were talking about earlier. We've been discussing, you know, events in the world, events at the national level in The US and the ways that they've reverberated through, you know, Muslim communities here and the ways Muslim communities have reacted. I'm curious about what you're seeing now, if you're seeing much, yet since this war has broken out. I that I have seen some reports of increased FBI raids on mosques and the homes of Muslims and things like that. But what are you seeing?
Speaker 3:There is an increased surveillance of Muslim organizations and Muslim individuals, and there are I'm hearing reports about people who, like, if they leave the country, are unable to come back being questioned, like even people who have citizenship or permanent residency started being questioned about like whether they ever served in the in the Iranian military service that it's mandatory. And often it doesn't mean that like you're actually fighting, it means like you're going and teaching somewhere or something of that sort, like providing medical service depending on your profession or something of that sort that those things are being seen as disqualifying you from being able to be a citizen or being able to be in your primary residency. And the way that US borders work is that the person at the border has authority to allow or deny entry according to the law. So one of the reasons why the Supreme Court approved the Muslim ban was that if you have given the people at the border the authority to be able to decide who can come in and who can't, irrespective of their legal status, then the executive ban by extension, the executive ban should have the authority to decide arbitrarily who can come in
Speaker 1:and who can't. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And that's what that was the reason one of the major reasons why they upheld the the and so that a lot of this stuff, it might not be legal, but it's happening. Yeah. And there hasn't been a there hasn't been a a coordinated response to it, partly because the Iranian American community in United States is not, doesn't have self help organizations in the way in which the Muslim American communities have had, and then a lot of Iranian Americans are also because of their experiences with the revolution, even if they're of Muslim heritage or anti Muslim themselves, so they're not they're not appealing to those types of organizations, And it'd be interesting to see how any of that changes if things get worse. And then one of the other things that's making it more difficult to know what's going on is because a lot of this surveillance could happen behind the scenes and no one could know.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh. True.
Speaker 3:Right? So like someone someone not being being turned away at the border, unless they go and make a public issue out of it, we wouldn't we wouldn't know
Speaker 1:Right. About Uh-huh.
Speaker 3:At all. And people don't do that because they're embarrassed by it or they don't wanna deal with it, they don't wanna draw more attention to themselves. Right. So there's a there's a lot that type of anxiety that that I think exists in the Muslim American communities. Then there's this other part of what I was talking about looking at the politics of Islam that a lot of more national organizations in The United States receive support from Gulf States.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Sure. You know, or have relationships with them, so they're concerned about, you know, how they how to speak out in this space. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Speaker 3:Right? If you follow you could see this also, like, if you Al Jazeera, like, ways in which Al Jazeera is trying to report about the issue is very careful. Like, on the one hand, like, they're trying to say what's happening. On the one hand, they're trying to say things that are neither against Iran nor against Qatar. Uh-huh.
Speaker 3:So there's a lot going on and what sort of politics emerges out of that too would be interesting to see, but there's this element of not wanting to draw attention to yourself because of what the consequences would be, not wanting to bite the hand that feeds you possibly, or could feed you possibly. And then also a sense of like, we've been here before, we know the consequences, you know, we know what's right and wrong this context. And I think again, lot of it goes to like, there isn't a group that can speak out for what's happening to the people of the region and how they're actually suffering that has become almost inconsequential in a lot of ways, we have become more and more used to just seeing the people of the region as always suffering, right? You never see a Palestinian who's not suffering. Right, right.
Speaker 3:You never, you know, so that people have come used to be saying like, is maybe this is how they've always lived, or this is how they this is these are the these are these are the sort of bodies of the region that we are used used to seeing and and have become, and that that has become normalized for us. That
Speaker 1:that tracks Yeah. For
Speaker 3:Do
Speaker 2:you wanna we can conclude by just asking you one question. Tell us about very briefly, if if you want about your your new book.
Speaker 3:Yeah. My current book comes out of this realization I had a little while ago that there's a lot of discussion about not being a center to Islam. In Islamic studies, we often think the Muslim population of the world is so diverse and have so much different regions. I always tell people you could think of the poorest, most downtrodden community, and you'll find Muslims that fit that bill, and you could find the most, like, hyper postmodern communities, and you'll find Muslims that will find that kind of bill too. So it's hard to think about Muslim.
Speaker 3:There's been a lot of discussions about, like, well, how do you talk about Islam in that context and how how whether Islam is even the right way of thinking about it, like, and whether we should think about Islam as a plural. And then I came to see like, oh my god. Like, mosques have been there since the inception of Islam. Actually, they predate Islam and have always been there. Why won't we look at the role that they have played in actually shaping communities?
Speaker 3:And they you could find them wherever Muslims have gone. So why don't we not look at them as an institution, a central institution of the Islamic tradition to understand better? And I thought this would be like an easy I was just able to communicate it very easily. I thought this would be an easy, quick book to write. It's a conceptual book.
Speaker 3:I could get it out there really quickly. And then I started when I got reviews of my proposal, people were thinking like, is he essentializing Islam through the mosque? Is he offering like a theological definition of the mosque? Which made me really stand back and think like, need to be much more careful about how I do this. So my contention that the mosque is a central institution of Islam through which we could understand it, Islam on its own terms hasn't changed.
Speaker 3:Now I feel much more confident, I feel like I've done enough of the legwork to be able to, like, write it on the right register that people don't think I'm essentializing Islam through the mosque rather than I'm actually saying the mosques are media through which Muslims have dealt with differences and have have have created community in the midst of difference and have also translated cultures into which they emerged or conquered into their own and vice versa, so that it's a side of translation. So that's the project. And it's one of those things that I have written a summary of the book that has come out as a form of a podcast called The Mosque as an Islamic Institution that people can see while I'm still working on writing the book.
Speaker 2:Excellent. That's great. Yeah, because we were in this very, and for good reasons, you know, because the centralization of Islam has political motives and I was a big fan of, and I actually got to know Jamil Ida in his book, The Idea of the Muslim World, you know, and it's a kind of, you know, a deconstruction of that idea. But then, yeah, it does lead to this other extreme where there, where what holds everything together? And it sounds like this is brilliant stroke of just focus on the mosque itself, which that's incredible.
Speaker 2:So I very much look forward to the coming out and I didn't know, you said you had a podcast or a website about this too?
Speaker 3:There's a website called Muslim Pathways that has been providing resources for studying Muslims in America. And I have a podcast on there, like a fifteen minute podcast on it that's called it's a video podcast, like, so with images of mosques called mosque as an Islamic institution. Okay.
Speaker 2:Mosque is an Islamic institution listeners. You please log into that and watch it. Thank you so much for joining us. It was just such a pleasure to have you on the show, and it was it was very informative. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This has been great. Thanks so much.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for having me. It was a joy talking with you.
Speaker 1:That's all the time we have for this episode. We wanna thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time. For joining us.