Hanif Abdurraqib writes:

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. [Continue reading…]