I sometimes say that I consider myself a junior-varsity Muslim. Whether this comes off as a joke or as an invitation for scolding (spoken or unspoken, loving or otherwise) depends entirely on the other Muslims in the room. But, hey, I say hands up and palms out: I take Ramadan very seriously, more seriously than I take anything. Inside me is still a child of rigorous routine. I don’t drink, or smoke, or use drugs, though I suppose that has less to do with my relationship to Muslimness, and more to do with my former commitment to being a high-level athlete and then, when that failed, to my enjoyment in a dalliance with a straight-edge girl in the punk scene. And then, when that failed, I found myself too anxious about how much stranger my already coruscating idiosyncrasies might become when surrendered to inebriation of any sort—which is to say, I have no faith in my own brain, but I do have faith I place elsewhere. I feel most Muslim when I am stunned by a moment of clarity within my own contradictions. Beyond whatever disconnects may exist in my faith practice, I still feel deeply connected to the ummah—the body, the community—and the responsibilities that this connection carries. A Hadith that I love, and which underpins many of my actions, states that “the believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.”
The Hadith says that, through our faith, the body is one, and therefore your suffering is inextricably linked to my suffering. When a beloved elder in my community, after years of illness, no longer recognized her own body and hardly recognized her own mind, she and I prayed together, seated in two chairs, because she’d decided that, if she was barely able to move, her movements should be toward God. It is in these moments, when I feel the distance between the ease of my life and the pain in the lives of others, that I feel both most and least Muslim. In the distance between holding my cellphone in a dark room and looking at the images on it: a starving baby in Gaza, a child being pulled from rubble, the ruins of a cancer hospital. In the distance between those ruins and my home. In the distance between not being able to fall asleep and the luxury of having a bed in which I am not able to fall asleep.
I have been talking with my Muslim friends about the specific brand of Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment that has recently arisen—or re-arisen, depending on how one chooses to look at it—in America. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who just secured an astonishing victory in the Democratic primary for the mayoral race, will almost certainly, for the several months preceding the general election, have to answer the same questions, repeatedly, about whether he’s antisemitic and about his plans to address the safety of Jewish New Yorkers (which he has detailed at length). But there’s no framework for any kind of parallel discussion about the fears or the safety of Muslim New Yorkers. Before the primary, a pro-Cuomo PAC prepared a mailer that appeared to thicken and lengthen Mamdani’s beard, and yet Andrew Cuomo was not repeatedly asked questions about how he might keep Muslims safe or about the dialogue he’s having with Muslim leaders. I’m not necessarily saying that there should be pressure on Mamdani’s opponents to answer these questions—what I am saying is that there’s not even a runway upon which such an inquiry could take off. It’s as if there’s an entire part of the population that remains invisible until feared.
I tend to find Islamophobia unspectacular. That doesn’t mean I don’t also find it insidious and of serious consequence. I simply imagine it, like other prejudices, as a kind of ever-present static in the American psyche, tuned lower at times and then growing cacophonous with even a light touch of the volume dial. This static is a not insignificant reason that I can, from a phone in my bedroom, see a school in Gaza demolished and know that most of the powerful people in the world will not be moved. Still, my friends and I, specifically those who were teen-agers or older at the time of 9/11, have been bewildered by the Islamophobia of the moment, which feels especially vintage and plainspoken, not massaged into obfuscatory rhetoric or angling for any greater point. Around the time of the Democratic primary, the actress Debra Messing claimed on Instagram that Mamdani “celebrated 9/11.” The far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted on X that Mamdani wanted to bring both Sharia law and communism to New York City.
Sometimes it’s funny, this Muslim Panic, or the absurdity of it circles back to a kind of comedy, or I laugh with friends who have a distinct understanding of the material harm caused by the static getting turned up. We laugh because, if we must live through it, we feel entitled to our laughter, unified within it. The night of the Democratic primary, a group chat of Muslims rapidly populated with examples of the overwrought panic on the internet, and we laughed at how quickly that panic was followed by Muslims, also online, mocking the panic. (“Get ready to pray 5 times a day NYC,” one X user posted.) In my laughter, I could almost feel everyone in the group chat laughing in separate corners of the world. If the body is one in suffering, it must also be one in pleasure.
On a recent Saturday night, at a sold-out show at the Beacon Theatre, in New York, the comedian Ramy Youssef paced the stage as small circles of lights danced on a wave of red curtains behind him. Youssef is a bridge of sorts between multiple modes of Muslim identity. During a three-season run, his TV series, “Ramy,” was praised for reframing depictions of Muslim life, grappling with faith, and family, and lineage, and failure. For this, he earned an enthusiastic audience of Muslims, many of whom were in the room at the Beacon, as evidenced by the sound that erupted, and then lingered, when we were asked, early on, how many Muslims were in the crowd. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and pro-Palestinian activist just released from ICE detention, was in the front row. To his right sat his wife, Noor Abdalla. To his left, Zohran Mamdani.
It was a delight to catch a glimpse of Khalil in the throes of laughter. He laughed as though each laugh were a physical vessel urgently exiting his body, or a secret he’d held for so long that it had forced its way out. Khalil’s body jerked forward when he laughed—his laughter was more of a kinetic event than a sonic one. He rocked, he shook slightly, and he smiled wide. One seat over, Mamdani laughed, too, with a bit more volume; his laughter seemed to arrive less like a long-held secret than like an idea that he couldn’t wait to share. Most of the audience didn’t know that the two men were in the room, and because of this most of the audience missed out on the small miracle of watching them share their joy at the scene before them.
When Khalil was detained by ICE, in early March, he became the first and the most visible case of the Trump Administration detaining students on visas or green cards who had engaged in pro-Palestinian protests. Throughout his detention, which lasted more than a hundred days, Khalil wrote op-eds in his prison notebook, then dictated them over the phone. In one of these pieces, written after Abdalla gave birth to their son, he described the unfathomable heartbreak of being forced to miss the birth of his first child. But he also foregrounded his core political principles, continuing to center Palestine. He saw his detainment not as a reason to shrink from his beliefs but as an opportunity to stand firmly and publicly behind them.
If you are not careful, and if you are not tapped into your own humanity and that of others, it can be tempting to mistake people for symbols. It is easy to affix a political prisoner to his political positions, or to the horrors of his detainment, and to see nothing else. The government sought to make an example of Mahmoud Khalil, to show others what happens when you are vocal about the rights of the Palestinian people. In many ways, this is how the state distorts the perspective of even the most well-meaning people: if what you understand about Khalil is that he has suffered, and you believe that his suffering is unjust, and your heart aches for his suffering, that ache may overwhelm your ability to understand him as anything else. Such shortsightedness isn’t nefarious, but it does make a fraction out of a full life. I love the Hadith about a collective body because it is not just about pain—it is about sharing the full spectrum of human feeling. I am not drawn to action only because people have suffered or are suffering; I am drawn to action because I am distinctly aware of every inch of humanity from which suffering keeps people.
I met both Khalil and Mamdani backstage. At first, Khalil appeared to be equal parts overjoyed and overwhelmed. But after an initial rush of people taking pictures, a quiet settled over him, and over the space. Within that calm, Khalil seemed observant, open, and far more interested in others than they could ever be in him. When we found a secluded corner, Khalil wanted to talk about poems, about the wonders of early fatherhood, about what might await him in the coming months besides the exhaustion of his ongoing case against the Trump Administration.
Abdalla told me that her husband had been learning to hold their baby, and what rushed to mind was the reality that Khalil, who is thirty, is still so young. Left in peace, he would be devoting all his time to figuring out the world of new fatherhood and life after grad school. He didn’t ask to be made a symbol, even if he navigated becoming one with grace and care. It was blissfully surreal to be backstage, at a comedy show, drinking coffee with him. I felt such gratitude for the presence of his whole self that all I could find to say, during that first moment of calm, was “I’m glad you are here. I’m glad they couldn’t take you from us entirely.”
Khalil and Mamdani hadn’t met before, but I watched them flow into easy, often funny conversation. It was fascinating to watch two beacons of Muslim victory turned toward each other: one man tasked with reimagining a city, the other with making his freedom about something beyond himself. Mamdani was dressed in a dark suit with a patterned tie, as he often is on the campaign trail. He talked about the spike in death threats he’s experienced since his primary win and how differently he’s had to move now that he has a full security detail. I thought of the book tour that had absorbed much of my past year. As the crowds got bigger, the threats on my life increased, and I would now and then have to have some security personnel watch over a book-signing line or escort me back to a hotel. I would send texts to my group chat of Muslims, saying some variation of “I feel most Muslim when someone wants me dead,” and we would laugh. It might not be funny if you are not one of us.
Khalil said that he, too, has been inundated with threats, and that they’ve increased exponentially since his release. He said that he mostly just tries to ignore the threats, and to be careful when out in the world. After this, there was a brief silence among the three of us, a beat of shared recognition of the difficulties of staying alive. For some people, Khalil and Mamdani offer, in different though not unrelated ways, essential stories of endurance, a set of ropes to which so many are clinging to survive unsurvivable times.
In the lull, I found myself considering distance again—the distance that exists between two Muslim men who are navigating two distinct victories that thrust upon them similar concerns. I thought about the distance between the people who want you dead and the people who want you gone, vanished through deportation or a more mundane form of silencing. There might not be as much distance between those two groups as we’d like there to be, especially if their members are loud, have power, and are unafraid to publicly fantasize about material violence. The distance between both populations lessens even more in cases where someone seems to be getting gone and then has the nerve to come back—to be dismissed as a loser and then win a primary, or to be jailed for pro-Palestinian speech and, when freed, speak up for Palestine at the first opportunity possible.
After the moment passed, Mamdani smiled, put an arm around Khalil, and said, “I wish I could take you with me everywhere.” And the three of us laughed, even if there was a bit of heaviness within the joke. Laughter soiled with grief is still laughter.
There is another Hadith that I cherish. In it, a prophet who is delivering a sermon says, “Paradise and Hellfire were shown to me, and I have never seen such good and evil as I have today. If you knew what I know, you would laugh little and weep often.”
These days, all I talk about and think about is the cognitive dissonance required to move through the world. Increasingly, I struggle to disentangle my many selves, to get on with the day. All my selves weep often. I try to have grace. I tell my friends that I’m no longer sure how anyone just drifts through the days, the months, without acknowledging the horrors. I imagine what it must be like to be able to turn off the parts of the world that unsettle you. It must feel like existing in an animated universe that adheres to cartoon physics: you fall from an inconceivable height and, landing, a cloud of dust billows up from the ground, but then you shake yourself off and keep moving.
I convince myself that I still laugh enough. Everyone I love would like to see an end to wars, would like to stop people from being snatched off the streets and deported, but some days we can’t march, because it’s so hot outside where I am that it is dangerous. It is dangerously hot outside, in part because of the climate consequences of the wars; they don’t stop and haven’t stopped for as long as we’ve been alive. The masjid on my block received threats last year, so community members put our money together to hire security. One of the elders joked that as long as the masjid was empty someone should feel free to burn it down—it would give us a good excuse to finally remodel. We laughed. I feel most Muslim when others might think that the joke is on my people, but my people are surviving, and so the joke is actually not on us at all.
