Welcome to another deep dive. Today, our mission
is to explore what I can only describe as a really
profound, incredibly raw internal reckoning.
And this is happening right now within the American
Muslim community. It really is. It's a heavy
topic. Yeah, definitely. We're going to be unpacking
this deeply reflective. frankly provocative piece
of writing. It's titled Unchaining the Soul,
the Quest for an American Islam. And the goal
here is to explore this tension between a theology
that is fundamentally about profound peace and
the reality of extremist violence. Right. And
tracking this multigenerational quest to build,
you know, a truly indigenous American Islamic
identity, which is not an easy process. Not at
all. And to give you, the listeners, some context
on our source material today, the author is a
really prominent Muslim scholar. He actually
founded the East West Foundation. Yeah. He spent,
what, two decades in the trenches building interfaith
bridges. Exactly. And he even served in the U
.S. government after 9 -11. So he's looking at
his own community from a place of deep, deep
love, really. But he's asking some very hard,
very painful questions. He is. And, you know,
before we go any further, we really need to establish
some ground rules for today's deep dive. Right.
The disclaimer. Yes. The mandatory impartiality
statement. Right. We have to make something explicitly
clear to you. our listener. The source material
we're mapping out today, it touches on some of
the most highly charged geopolitical and political
issues of our time. Absolutely. We're going to
be discussing the Israeli -Palestinian conflict,
terrorism, domestic politics, U .S. military
policies, all as they are framed within this
specific essay. And we want to state up front.
In no uncertain terms that we are taking absolutely
no sides here. None. We're not endorsing any
viewpoints, left wing, right wing, pro this or
anti that. Our only job today is to impartially
map out the author's arguments, his historical
analysis, his internal community critiques, exactly
as he presents them in the text. Right. We're
essentially just holding up a mirror to his perspective
so you can understand his unique vantage point.
We're not here to tell you what to think about
global politics. Definitely not. We're just the
guides to the text. We're here to help you see
the the architecture of his argument. Exactly.
So with that mission established, I kind of want
to start by painting a picture for you because
there's this incredibly evocative image in the
Islamic tradition. It's a widely authenticated
hadith that from what the author says, pretty
much every Muslim child learns about the month
of Ramadan. Yeah. And the imagery is just intensely
physical. It really is. It says that when Ramadan.
It's a fascinating theological concept, right?
Because it's not presented as just a metaphor
for trying to be a better person during a holiday.
Right. It's presented as a literal shift in the
cosmic architecture. The idea is that the universe
itself is bending to facilitate human goodness
for these 30 days. It's this profound promise
of a designated protected peace, like a time
when the human soul is supposed to have this
unusual, unencumbered clarity because the darkness
is, by divine decree, locked away. And that promise
is deepened even further by the 97th chapter
of the Quran, Surah Al -Qadr. Oh, the night of
power. Exactly, which is traditionally observed
during the final 10 days of Ramadan. The text
says this one night is better than a thousand
months, angels descend to the earth, and the
chapter ends with this singular luminous guarantee,
it says. Peace it is until the rising of the
dawn. Peace it is until the rising of the dawn.
I mean, just hold that phrase in your mind, because
the author uses that exact promise to set up
the central, really agonizing paradox of his
whole essay. Yeah, this is where it gets heavy.
You have this guarantee of cosmic peace. But
then you step into the reality of March 2026,
right in the middle of those final, holiest 10
days of Ramadan, when millions of American Muslims
are seeking that exact promised stillness. The
peace is just completely sh**. shattered. Shattered
by a string of three horrific violent attacks.
Right. Committed by Muslim men within a single
week right here in America. which forces a truly
agonizing, almost unthinkable internal question
for that community. And it's the question that
drives this entire text. What happens when the
darkness persists and violence erupts during
the very munch when the chains are supposed to
hold? Exactly. The author sets up this really
jarring split screen reality. On one side of
the screen, you have the profound quiet of a
community fasting and praying. On the other side,
you have the chaotic, violent noise of these
distinct motivational. profiles. And we really
need to look at these three attacks because the
author uses them as the catalyst for his entire
critique. Let's walk through them, starting with
March 7th in New York City. Right. So on March
7th, you have two teenagers, Ymir Balat, who
was 18, and Ibrahim Kayyumi, 19. They drive from
Bucks County, Pennsylvania to Manhattan. And
they have homemade bombs, right? Yeah. Packed
with TATP explosives, nuts and bolts. And their
target is a crowd outside Gracie Mansion. Which
is incredibly specific because they were targeting
the official residents of Zohran Mamdani, who
had just been elected as the first Muslim mayor
of New York City. The context of the crowd is
also crucial here. There was an anti -Islam protest
happening outside the mansion. Oh, organized
by Jake Lang. Exactly. The text notes, Lang is
a pardoned January 6th rioter with a well -documented
history of extreme anti -Muslim and anti -Semitic
provocations. So that protest naturally drew
a counter -demonstration. You have a highly volatile
mix of people outside the mayor's residence.
And these teenagers intended to throw their bombs
into that crowd. Right. But the bombs malfunctioned.
Thank God. I mean, the devices failed to detonate
properly. But when the FBI arrested them, both
teens waived their Miranda rights and proudly
declared allegiance to ISIS. One of them actually
told investigators he wanted an event bigger
than the Boston Marathon bombing. Just chilling.
But what the author finds so deeply disturbing
here is the target selection. This wasn't just
an attack on a random crowd. No, you have ISIS
-inspired teenagers. targeting the home of America's
first Muslim mayor during the holiest month of
the Islamic calendar. The author describes this
as a very specific kind of intra -communal horror.
It's like the extremist fringe of the religion
violently attacking the very concept, the very
possibility of Muslim civic leadership and integration
in America. It's literally an attack on their
own representation. Like they're saying, your
success in the American system is a betrayal
to our ideology, so we're going to kill you for
it. Exactly. Yeah. But then, just five days later,
on March 12th, the motivation for violence completely
shifts. We go to West Bloomfield, Michigan. Right.
Eamon Muhammad Ghazali. Yes, a 41 -year -old
naturalized citizen from Lebanon. He rams his
truck through the front doors of Temple Israel,
which is one of the largest reformed synagogues
in the country. And his vehicle was loaded with
gasoline and commercial fireworks, right? Yeah.
He fired a rifle through his windshield and then
took his own life as the truck burned in the
hallway of the synagogue. And the detail that
just, I mean, it stops your heart. There were
140 children inside the building's early childhood
center at that exact moment. By some absolute
miracle. All 140 children survived. One security
guard was injured. But when we look at the motive,
as outlined in the text, it's entirely different
from the New York teenagers. Right. He wasn't
ISIS. No, Ghazali was not acting on a director
from ISIS. He was acting out a profound, grief
-driven vengeance. His two brothers had been
killed just days earlier in an Israeli airstrike
in Lebanon. Which the text links to the broader
geopolitical conflict with Hezbollah. Exactly.
He took his geopolitical grief and violently
projected it onto American Jews. And then on
that exact same morning, March 12th, we have
the third attack down in Norfolk, Virginia. Ahmed
Baylor Jalloh. Yeah, 36 -year -old army veteran.
He walks into an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion
University and he explicitly asks twice if it
is an ROTC class. Then he shouts Allahu Akbar
and opens fire. He murdered Lieutenant Colonel
Brandon Shaw, who was a decorated officer. I
think he had flown helicopters over Iraq and
Afghanistan. He had. And Jallow wounded two cadets
before the students managed to subdue and kill
him. And again, Jallow's profile is entirely
distinct. Because he was a convicted ISIS supporter
who had just been released from federal prison,
what, three months prior? Right. This is a case
of jihadist recidivism, specifically targeting
the American military apparatus. So think about
what we just laid out for you. Think about looking
at the split screen. It's deeply disorienting.
It really is. You have a holy month dedicated
to cosmic peace interrupted by ISIS ideology
targeting a Muslim mayor. Hezbollah linked geopolitical
grief targeting an American synagogue and violent
jihadist recidivism targeting the American military.
And if you're sitting in a mosque leadership
meeting trying to make sense of this, how on
earth do you process it? How do you grapple with
the fact that your own faith is being weaponized
in three completely different ways in a single
week? Well, the author points out that the immediate
instinct for many in the community is to point
to statistics. And he actually validates that
instinct, right? He establishes a vital statistical
baseline in his essay. He says unequivocally
that the overwhelming majority of American Muslims,
over 99 .99 % of the roughly 3 .5 million co
-religionists in America, are peaceful, law -abiding
citizens. Right. He makes the point that America
has many forms of violence. We have school shootings,
white supremacist massacres. No single religious
or ethnic community owns a phenomenon of American
violence. Right. He isn't saying Muslims are
uniquely violent, but he is saying that these
specific attacks in their variety and their timing
highlight a unique failure. And that's where
his thesis pivots. He asks, if these acts represent
a statistically microscopic fraction of the community,
why are they happening at all? His argument is
that these three men represent a mass. Okay,
so if the institutions are failing these vulnerable
individuals, we have to ask... What exactly is
the nature of that failure? And that brings us
to the author's critique of how the major American
Muslim organizations have historically responded
to these exact types of crises. To understand
that critique, we have to look at how these institutions
were built in the first place. Over the past
four decades, major Muslim organizations were
constructed. Groups like ISNA, the Islamic Society
of North America. KR, the Council on American
Islamic Relations. And MPAC, the Muslim Public
Affairs Council. And the author pointed out a
really fascinating sociological parallel here.
They were consciously modeled after American
Jewish institutions. Right. The text quotes Imam
Faisal Abdulrof noting the direct parallels.
Like the American Arab Anti -Discrimination Committee
mirrors the Anti -Defamation League, the ADO.
ISNA parallels the Union for Reform Judaism.
AR echoes the American Jewish Committee. They
looked at a minority religious group that had
successfully integrated into America and built
incredible civil rights infrastructure, and they
basically copied the blueprint. They did. And
the author acknowledges they've done critical,
necessary work defending civil rights, fighting
workplace discrimination, combating bigotry.
But his critique is that because they were built
primarily as civil rights and political advocacy
organizations, their response to internal crises
has calcified. Right. Specifically regarding
violence committed by Muslims. It's turned into
a rigid, predictable playbook. He calls it. The
distance, deflect, defend formula. Distance,
deflect, defend. When I read that, I instantly
thought of corporate PR crisis management. I
mean, think about the last time you saw a massive
corporate brand deal with a scandal where a rogue
employee did something terrible. I would absolutely
see the exact same playbook. Right. Step one,
distance. This person does not represent our
company's values. Or in this case, this act does
not represent Islam. Step two, deflect. Look
at these other external factors that caused this.
In the corporate world, it's a failure of a third
-party vendor. In this context, it's American
foreign policy or systemic Islamophobia. And
then step three, defend. Our core brand, our
religion, is fundamentally one of peace. It is
exactly a PR strategy. And the author is very
careful to note that each of these three steps
contains a kernel of objective truth. Right.
Islam is a religion of peace to its adherents.
Aggressive foreign policy does impact radicalization
cycles. And terrorists do not represent the majority.
But his profound critique is that when you rely
solely on a PR playbook, you're evading the deeper
theological reckoning required. You are treating
a spiritual crisis like a public relations problem.
And that's exactly where I wanted to push back
while reading. I mean, doesn't a religion require
deeper soul searching than a PR playbook? You
can protect a corporate brand with a well -timed
press release, but you can't protect a human
soul that way. Precisely. If a teenager is being
radicalized online, a press release distancing
the community from his actions doesn't actually
solve the spiritual void that led him there in
the first place. It doesn't. And this is where
the author draws a really poignant, albeit uncomfortable,
parallel between the Muslim experience post 9
-11 and the Jewish experience post October 7th.
Oh, this part was fascinating. He argues that
October 7th did for American Jews what 9 -11
did. for American Muslims. It cracked open a
crisis of identity and exposed institutional
inadequacies. He argues that in both communities,
there was a historical overinvestment in universal
public engagement. Like they got really good
at speaking the language of universal human rights,
civil advocacy and political mobilization. Yes.
But in doing so, they neglected the particular.
They focused so much on how they related to the
outside world that they forgot to nurture their
own internal ecosystem. They neglected the deeper
work of cultivating a particularistic, spiritually
grounded, civically rooted religious identity.
The author essentially says that when you spend
all your energy defending the fortress from the
outside, you forget to tend the garden on the
inside. Defending the fortress while neglecting
the garden, that is a perfect way to conceptualize
it. But the decay in the garden isn't just about
PR. The text brings in another scholar, Khaled
Abu al -Fadl, who diagnoses this internal decay
as a crisis of authority. A crisis of authority,
yeah. What exactly is the mechanism of that crisis?
Like, how does authority break down in this context?
Well, Abu al -Fadl points to a dangerous gap
in modern Islamic discourse that fundamentally
alters how the religion is understood. by its
own followers. To understand this, we need to
look at classical Islamic thought, which makes
a sharp distinction between two concepts, Sharia
and Fiqh. Okay, unpack that for us. So Sharia
is understood as the divine, perfect, unalterable
law of God. Fiqh, on the other hand, is human
jurisprudence. It is the fallible, constantly
evolving human attempt to understand and apply
that divine law to daily life. OK, let me make
sure I'm wrapping my head around this. Is it
kind of like the difference between the abstract
concept of justice and the actual American legal
code? Oh, that's an excellent analogy. Yes. Like
justice is this perfect divine ideal we all strive
for. But the legal code is just a bunch of flawed
humans trying to write rules to get us as close
to that ideal as possible. And sometimes the
legal code gets it wrong. Exactly. But Abu El
Fadl argues that. Modern Islam has been flooded
with self -declared experts, internet clerics,
and political activists who blur this crucial
line. They present their flawed human rulebook,
their fiqh, as if it is the flawless divine concept
of shara. Right. They substitute shallow apologetics
and political sloganeering for rigorous classical
engagement. And his devastating critique is about
scale. The scale of the information ecosystem.
Exactly. He says you can publish 100 rigorous,
nuanced academic works from a small Muslim press
explaining these classical distinctions, but
it won't shape public understanding the way a
single mass market book from a major publisher
can. Or the way a viral TikTok from an extremist
preacher can. Right. The scale of their intellectual
production simply does not match the scale of
the ideological crisis they're facing. So you
have a PR focused. Institutional leadership and
a fragmented, easily manipulated theological
authority where literally anyone with a microphone
can claim to speak for God. It's a dangerous
combination. Very. And if we want to understand
why the institutions default to this, we have
to look at who built them in the first place
and perhaps more importantly, who got left behind
when they were being built. Yes. And this takes
us to a really eye opening part of the text about
the history of Islam in America, which honestly,
I think most people just don't know. It is a
critical. piece of the puzzle. To explore this,
the author leans heavily on the work of scholar
Sherman Jackson, specifically his book Islam
and the Black American. Right. Jackson outlines
a history that subverts the common American narrative.
Prior to the mid -20th century, Islam in America
was not primarily an immigrant religion. It was
overwhelmingly dominated by an indigenous black
American presence. We are talking about a deeply
rooted American tradition. And Jackson describes
this early American Islam as being rooted in
black religion, which he defines as a God -centered
protest against racial injustice. It wasn't an
imported theology. It was a theology forged in
the crucible of the American experience dealing
with American problems. But then comes 1965,
specifically the 1965 Immigration and Nationality
Act. Which fundamentally changed the demographics
of the United States. Right. It lifted the old
national origin quotas that heavily favored northern
Europe, and it led to a massive wave of immigrant
Muslims arriving from the Middle East, South
Asia, and elsewhere. And according to Jackson,
this new wave of immigrants essentially executed
a hostile takeover of the narrative. They assumed
a monopoly over what constituted proper or authentic
Islam in America. Because they came from the
quote unquote Muslim world, they brought the
Arabic language, they brought cultural authority,
and they marginalized the indigenous black Muslims
who had been practicing and building Islam in
America for decades. The quote Jackson uses to
describe this dynamic is just, it's gut -wrenching.
He writes that black American converts had simply
moved from the back of the bus to the back of
the camel. Wow. From the back of the bus to the
back of the camel. I mean, it implies that they
escaped white American racial hierarchy only
to find themselves subjected to an imported religious
hierarchy where they were once again relegated
to the bottom, viewed as less authentic by the
new arrivals. It captures a profound structural
injustice. But the author goes further to explain
how this demographic shift was so damaging to
the creation of a healthy American Islam. These
immigrant institutions didn't just bring people.
They brought ideological and political baggage.
Right. The text mentions the Muslim Brotherhood,
Jama 'at Islami and various forms of Salafism.
But let's pause here. OK. Because for someone
who only hears those terms on the evening news,
what is the actual theological mechanism there?
Why do those specific schools of thought make
it harder to build a thriving community in Michigan
or Virginia? To understand this, we have to define
those terms. Salafism, broadly speaking, is a
movement that seeks to return to what it considers
the pure, unadulterated practices of the earliest
generations of Muslims. It tends to be highly
literalist, very rigid, and deeply suspicious
of cultural adaptation. And the others. The Muslim
Brotherhood and Jama 'i Islami emerged in the
20th century in Egypt and South Asia. Respectively,
primarily as anti -colonial movements. They were
inherently political. They were formed as resistance
movements against British and Western imperialism.
So their defining characteristic, their origin
story, is rooted in viewing the West as the ultimate
civilizational nemesis. Precisely. If your entire
religious framework is built on resisting Western
imperialism, you are going to struggle to build
a thriving... integrated religious life inside
the West. By sidelining the black American Muslim
tradition, which, as Jackson points out, was
already Western, already American and built to
engage with America's unfulfilled promises, the
immigrant institutions essentially threw away
the very blueprint they needed to survive and
thrive here. They imported an opposition based
theology instead of utilizing an integration
based theology. OK, let me play devil's advocate
here for a second, though. Were these immigrant
communities intentionally trying to marginalize
black Americans or were they just in survival
mode? I mean, think about it. You move to a new
country. You face discrimination. You don't speak
the language perfectly. You naturally cling to
the familiar. That's very true. You build institutions
that look and sound like home. Is it possible
it was less of a malicious, calculated takeover
and more of a tragic sociological collision?
That's a very fair distinction. And sociology
certainly plays a huge role. It's entirely natural
for immigrant groups to insulate. You see it
in Little Italy. You see it in Koreatown. But
the result is what the author was critiquing.
Right. Whether the marginalization was intentional
or accidental, the result was an American Islam
that became defined more by imported political
ideology than by civilizational ethics. It created
this bizarre irony where you have institutions
living in the West, benefiting from the West,
raising their children in the West, but harboring
a theology that is fundamentally suspicious of
or even anti the West. It's an unsustainable
contradiction. You can't build a healthy home
if you fundamentally believe the ground it's
built on is your enemy. And this sidelining of
the indigenous history didn't just marginalize
people. According to the text, it marginalized
a crucial theological tool. It hollowed out the
spiritual core of the faith. Yes. The author
argues that mainstream institutional life began
to heavily favor legalism over mysticism. It
became all about the rules. What is halal? What
is haram? Maintaining political solidarity and
defending the borders of the identity. What was
lost was the older tradition of cultivating the
self toward moral perfection. The tradition of
Isan. The text talks extensively about Sufism
here. Now, I have to admit, when I hear Sufism,
my mind immediately goes to whirling dervishes
and poetry by Rumi. It feels very, I don't know,
aesthetic, like the artistic wing of the religion.
But the author is talking about it as a structural
necessity, right? He is. And he does acknowledge
the danger of how Sufism is perceived in the
West. He cites scholar Omid Safi, who warned
against the weaponization of Sufism by Western
think tanks, specifically mentioning the RAND
Corporation. Why would a think tank care about
Sufism? The idea was that Western governments,
during the War on Terror, wanted to cynically
promote moderate, posh rereading Sufis as a counterweight
to dangerous legalists. They wanted to domesticate
the religion to serve American foreign policy.
Which is incredibly patronizing. It treats a
deep spiritual tradition like a geopolitical
pacifier. Highly patronizing. But Safi and the
author both clarify that Sufism isn't some separate
mystical sect you can just carve out and use
for PR. Until the middle of the 19th century,
Sufism was the mainstream devotional life of
the majority of the world's Muslims. Wow. The
majority. Yes. It is the beating heart of Islamic
civilization. It is the rigorous discipline of
purifying the ego, the nafs. OK, but I want to
push back on this because I want to understand
the actual mechanism here. I hear that purifying
the ego sounds great. But practically speaking,
how does reading mystical poetry or meditating
stop a teenager from being radicalized by a slick
ISIS video on TikTok? That feels a bit idealistic.
What is the actual link there? Think of it as
the psychological immune system. The author paints
a picture of a young person who is educated in
this deeply rooted civilizational Islam, say
the Zanzibari Koja or Punjabi traditions, which
are historically very pluralistic. This young
person is taught from childhood that the ultimate
spiritual battle is not against an external political
enemy. The ultimate battle is against their own
arrogance, their own greed, their own ego. They
internalize the Quranic idea that God created
humanity in diverse nations and tribes specifically
so that you may know one another. That's Quran
49 .13, right? To know one another, not to conquer
one another. Exactly. If your entire religious
education is fundamentally about humbling your
ego and seeking divine love and diverse humanity,
your psychological immune system is robust. When
ISIS comes along with their slick, nihilistic,
simple -minded propaganda that says, here's a
gun, here's the enemy, kill them and go to heaven,
your spiritual immune system rejects it. Because
it looks spiritually shallow and grotesque to
you. Right. But if your Islamic education was
nothing but political grievance, rigid black
and white rules, and anger at the West. Then
you have a void. And the violent propaganda fills
that void perfectly. It gives you a sense of
cosmic importance without requiring any actual
internal spiritual work. You don't have to fix
your flaws. You just have to attack the enemy.
Exactly. So if his mystical center was lost in
the mainstream, were there any movements trying
to keep an indigenous, spiritually grounded American
theology alive? The author identifies three peripheral
movements that offer genuine resources for this
kind of grounded theology, but notes that all
three were sidelined by the mainstream for different
reasons. First, there was Warith Dean Muhammad's
movement. Right. He was the son of Elijah Muhammad.
Yes. And he famously transitioned the Nation
of Islam. toward mainstream Sunni orthodoxy.
He essentially tried to synthesize the Black
American indigenous experience with classical
Islam, offering a truly American theological
language. But the text notes that his movement
largely fragmented after his death in 2008, losing
much of its institutional momentum. Correct.
Second is the Ahmadiyya community. They have
been in America for a century. Their motto is
literally love for all, hatred for none. This
sounds perfectly aligned with what the author
is calling for. It is. They are deeply civically
engaged. They run hospitals. They emphasize peace.
But they are rejected by the vast majority of
Sunni Muslims because of their founders' messianic
claims. They are considered heretical by the
mainstream, so their model of integration is
ignored. And the third? The Hizmet Movement,
inspired by Turkish scholar Fethullah Gulen.
This is a movement focused heavily on education,
working within democratic institutions, and robust
interfaith dialogue. But they were sidelined,
too. Yes, it operates in a parallel lane rather
than integrating fully into American Muslim life,
largely because it has a very specific Turkish
ethnocultural character and more recently because
it has been consumed by the political persecution
it faces from the government in Ankara. So you
have these three distinct models, one black American,
one messianic pacifist, one Turkish educational,
all of which possess vital pieces of the puzzle
for building a healthy American Islam. But they
are all marginalized. So the mainstream is left
without this ego -purifying spirituality. And
what fills that void for the next generation?
According to the author, the void is filled by
geopolitical grievance. And this brings us to
what the author calls one of the most sensitive
yet critical dynamics in contemporary American
Muslim life. And listener, this is where we want
to remind you of our impartiality pledge. We
are going to discuss the Israeli -Palestinian
conflict as it is framed in the text, analyzing
the author's critique of how it functions within
his own community. Right. We are not making value
judgments on the conflict itself, but rather
exploring the sociological impact it has on American
Muslims, as argued by the source. Yes. The author
is careful to state clearly that the suffering
of Palestinians is real, and the destruction
in Gaza since October 7, 2023, has been catastrophic.
He also states unequivocally that anti -Semitism
violence is unacceptable and that American Jews
are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli
government, just as American Muslims are not
responsible for foreign terrorists. But his core
critique is about identity formation. He argues
that Palestine solidarity has mutated. It has
shifted from being a legitimate, urgent political
cause into something approaching an article of
faith. He cites a stunning statistic to back
this up. 61 % of Muslim voters in swing states
named Gaza as their top priority, above health
care, above the economy, above local schooling.
He argues that something breaks in a religious
tradition when political solidarity displaces
theology, ethics, and spiritual formation as
the primary marker of what it means to belong
to the religion. He quotes scholar Tom Fichine,
who observes that some of the most famous spokespeople
for Palestine use a purely secular framing. language
of decolonization, intersectionality, and Marxism.
And that actually supersedes Islamic sentiment.
And he also brings in Einat Wilf, an Israeli
writer. Now, even though she writes from a completely
different vantage point, the author finds her
observation about semantic manipulation crucial.
Semantic manipulation is the idea that words
can be emptied of their original meaning. and
weaponized for a new purpose. And the author
believes American Muslims are practicing this
when they hollow out the rich, complex language
of Islamic ethics and replace it entirely with
the vocabulary of political mobilization. Because
the cost of this displacement is massive. If
you define a religious tradition primarily through
geopolitical opposition to something happening
thousands of miles away. Rather than by a moral
vision for human flourishing where you actually
live, you cannot build a sustainable future.
Right. You fail to answer the critical questions
for the next generation. Like, what is our ethical
contribution to America? How do we build resilience
against extremism? How do we interact with our
neighbors? It goes right back to Sherman Jackson's
warning. If your primary identity is anti -Western,
you are fundamentally alienating yourself from
your own home. And there is perhaps no arena
where this tension between being an American
citizen and harboring an anti -Western grievance
is more dramatically and tragically unresolved
than in the military. This is a profound and
uncomfortable contradiction the author highlights.
The United States is a nation that projects military
power globally. That is an inherent dimension
of American identity. And American Muslims are
part of that apparatus. There are over 5800 self
-identified Muslims currently serving in the
U .S. military. And the text points out this
isn't some post 9 -11 attempt to prove loyalty.
This is a deep tradition. Scholar Edward Curtis
has documented Muslim military service in America,
stretching all the way back to the Revolutionary
War. The author brings up Captain Humayun Khan,
the Muslim American soldier who sacrificed his
life in Iraq to save his men. His parents were
so movingly honored at the 2016 Democratic National
Convention. That represents a deep. honorable
tradition of service. And yet the author points
out that the dominant discourse within American
Muslim institutions largely treats American military
engagement as something to be either opposed,
evaded, or quietly endured. It's almost never
theologically engaged. There is no robust intellectual
framework provided for a Muslim who wants to
serve their country. And that theological gap
is a canyon that people fall into. That is exactly
the gap that Mohamed Bilirjalo, the third attacker
from March 2026, fell through. Think about his
profile. He was a veteran. He enlisted. He served
honorably. But because there was no robust theological
framework in his community to help him reconcile
his faith with his service, he was incredibly
vulnerable. He went online. found the radical
black and white lectures of Anwar al -Awlaki
and was essentially brainwashed into believing
his service was a betrayal of God. The author
also links this to the tragic 2009 Fort Hood
shooting where Major Nadel Hassan explicitly
concluded that he could not balance being a Muslim
with his obligations as an American military
officer. The failure of institutions to provide
a theological framework for citizenship in a
powerful nation state has lethal consequences.
When the community doesn't answer the question
of how to serve, The extremists answer it for
them. So the question isn't whether Muslims have
to become uncritical warmongers to be good Americans.
It's whether they can develop a sophisticated
way to handle the moral complexities of citizenship.
And the author offers an incredible historical
analogy here. The Quakers. The Society of Friends.
This is perhaps the most instructive parallel
in the entire text regarding how to handle this
tension. Right. Because the Quakers have maintained
an absolute uncompromising peace testimony since
1660. They are deeply theologically anti -war.
They will not fight. And yet nobody questions
their American -ness. Exactly. They founded the
state of Pennsylvania. They were the engine behind
the Underground Railroad. The American Friends
Service Committee won the Nobel Peace Prize for
doing global humanitarian work. The Quaker model
proves that you can have an anti -war conviction
and still possess deep, undeniable civic belonging.
They are not mutually exclusive. But, and this
is the author's crucial point, reconciling those
two things requires massive institutional infrastructure,
incredible moral imagination, and generations
of hard intellectual labor. The Quakers didn't
just protest. They built alternative ways to
serve the nation. The Quakers did the work. American
Islam, the author argues, has not done the work
yet. As he puts it, you can be anti -war and
deeply American, like the Amish or mainline Protestants,
but you cannot be vaguely anti -American and
expect to build a sustainable religious community
on American soil. So this leads us directly to
the author's proposed solution. If the current
trajectory is unsustainable, if the PR playbook
is failing, what is the blueprint? He calls his
solution... Covenantal pluralism. Covenantal
pluralism. Oh. It sounds very academic, but it's
actually rooted in some ancient fundamental Abrahamic
history. Right. He is arguing that Muslims don't
need to import Western liberal values to figure
out how to live in a diverse society. The tools
are already inside their own tradition. He starts
with the Hebrew Brit, the concept of the covenant.
God made a covenant with all humanity through
Noah, and specifically with the Jewish people
through Abraham and Moses. This establishes the
theological precedent that a relationship with
the divine is not exclusive to one single community.
Pluralism is baked into the monotheistic DNA
from the start, but he also brings up a specific
Islamic historical event, the Medinan Mythok.
The Constitution of Medina, drafted by the Prophet
Muhammad in 622 CE. This is a foundational document
that is often overlooked in modern political
discourse. Tell us about that. When the prophet
migrated to Medina, he didn't create a theocratic
ethnostate exclusively for Muslims. He drafted
a political constitution that united Muslims,
Jewish tribes, Christians, and pagan tribes into
a single political community. They shared mutual
defense obligations while maintaining their own
religious autonomy and legal systems. So pluralism
was literally the prophet's own political innovation.
It wasn't forced on him by a modern U .N. mandate
or Western pressure. It was his idea. Exactly.
And the author connects this back to that Koranic
verse we mentioned earlier, 49 .13, where God
says, We created you from a single pair of male
and female and made you into nations and tribes
that you may know one another. Pluralism is a
divine mandate, not a reluctant afterthought.
To operationalize this today, the author brings
back Imam Faisal Abdul -Rauf, who talks about
the concept of nativization. I love this concept,
trimming the sociological edges while keeping
the theological core. Right. Rauf points out
that Islam has done this successfully all over
the world. As Islam migrated out of the Arabian
Peninsula over the centuries, it underwent a
transformative fitting in. It became culturally
Senegalese or Turkish or Indonesian or Chinese.
The core theology, the belief in one God, the
daily prayers that remains pristine, but the
sociological expression, the architecture, the
clothing, the cultural idioms that adapts to
the soil it's planted in. So the goal isn't a
Protestant -style reformation where you throw
out the tradition. It's an Americanization. It's
allowing the tree to grow in American soil. And
to understand how long this takes, the author
lays out a really fascinating timeline comparison
between American Judaism and American Islam.
And listener, I want you to really pay attention
to the dates here because it completely reframes
the scale of the challenge. Let's look at the
Jewish timeline first. The major waves of Eastern
European Jewish immigration to America began
in the late 19th century, around the 1880s. Right.
This was a volatile time. You had massive immigrant
populations trying to figure out how to be Jewish
in a rapidly industrializing Protestant majority
nation. Barely a generation later, in 1885, you
have the Pittsburgh Platform. Walk us through
the Pittsburgh Platform. Why was that such a
big deal? It was a landmark document where American
Reform rabbis formally articulated distinctly
American theology. They explicitly differentiated
the enduring ethical core of Judaism, the moral
laws from the political or geographic laws of
the ancient past, like dietary restrictions or
priestly purity laws, which they argued were
no longer applicable in the modern era. Okay,
wow. Then, in 1902, Solomon Schechter reorganized
the Jewish Theological Seminary, creating a robust
pipeline for American -trained religious leaders.
In 1913, the Anti -Defamation League was founded.
By 1955, when the famous book Protestant Catholic
Jew was published, Judaism was fully institutionally
integrated into the American civil religion.
So that process from the arrival of the major
immigrant wave to full institutional maturity
where they had their own seminaries, their own
theological platforms and unquestioned civic
belonging took roughly 120 years. Yes. Now let's
look at the Islamic timeline. The major wave
of Muslim immigration didn't start until after
the 1965 Immigration Act. So we're only about
60 years into that journey. Exactly. basically
only halfway through the biological timeline
of integration. And you can see the delay in
the institutions. The author points out that
America's first accredited Islamic seminary,
Zaytuna College, wasn't founded until 2009. Compare
that to the Jewish equivalent, Hebrew Union College,
which was founded in 1875. American Muslims have
ISNA. founded in 1982, but they have absolutely
no equivalent to the Pittsburgh platform. Right.
There has been no formal, agreed -upon theological
declaration by mainstream leadership that says,
here is what is eternally Islamic, and here is
what is just Middle Eastern or South Asian politics
or cultural baggage. There is no denominational
creativity yet. Judaism developed reform, conservative,
and reconstructionist branches, each representing
a different, thoughtful negotiation between ancient
tradition and American modernity. But the author
is very fair here. He doesn't just blame the
community. He points out five massive structural
complications that make this process so much
harder for American Muslims than it was for American
Jews. We should go through these deeply because
they explain why it's taking so long. Let's start
with the first one, extreme racial diversity.
Yes. There is no racial majority among American
Muslims. You have roughly equal proportions of
white, black, Asian, and Arab -identified members.
Think about the logistical and cultural challenge
of that. It's staggering. If you were building
a synagogue in 1900, mostly everyone speaks Yiddish
or German and comes from a similar European background.
If you were building a mosque in 2026, you might
have congregants who speak Arabic. Urdu, Somali,
and English, all with vastly different cultural
expectations of what a religious service should
look like. Building a unified identity across
that level of racial and linguistic diversity
is incredibly complex. It's like trying to build
an airplane while you are also trying to invent
a common language for the mechanics. Which leads
to the second complication. The pre -existing
black indigenous tension, which we discussed
earlier with Sherman Jackson. Exactly. Judaism
didn't have a massive pre -existing indigenous
American population that clashed with the new
immigrants in the same way. The collision between
immigrant assumptions of authority and black
American indigenous traditions created a profound
internal fracture that still hasn't healed. The
third complication is massive. The post 9 -11
security state. The development of Muslim institutions
was profoundly distorted by the. War on Terror.
How exactly did that warp the timeline? It forced
the community into a defensive crouch during
its most critical developmental phase. Just as
they needed to be having robust, open theological
debates, mosques were being surveilled by informants.
Charities were shut down or prosecuted under
material support laws. An entire community was
placed under a cloud of suspicion. People became
afraid to debate controversial topics out loud
for fear of government reprisal. The author notes
that while early 20th century anti -Semitism
is an instructive comparison, the apparatus of
the post -911 national security state applied
pressures and surveillance that have no precise
parallel in Jewish American history. It's hard
to have a vulnerable internal reckoning when
you know the FBI might be listening in the back
row. Definitely. The fourth complication is something
I find fascinating, the lack of centralized ordination.
Right. Unlike the Catholic Church. where the
Vatican can defrock a rogue priest, Sunni Islam
has no central authority. It doesn't have a centralized
rabbinical system like the ones that emerged
in American Judaism. So if a guy in a basement
in Virginia declares himself an imam, sets up
a YouTube channel, and starts preaching a highly
politicized, extremist interpretation of the
faith, there is no structural mechanism to revoke
his credentials. How does a community build a
unified, moderate American identity when literally
anyone can claim to speak for the religion? They
can't. Not without building new institutions
of peer review and accreditation, which is exactly
what the author is calling for. And finally,
the fifth complication, geopolitical entanglements.
From the war on terror to the current conflicts
in the Middle East, the external pressures on
American Muslim identity are intense. Again,
he also compares this to the pressure Zionism,
the founding of Israel, placed on Jewish identity,
but notes the modern Muslim context is qualitatively
different. It's highly fragmented, involving
multiple state actors and proxy wars, making
it almost impossible to detach American religious
life from global headlines. So if you take a
step back and look at this logically, despite
all these massive complications, the racial divides,
the surveillance, the lack of hierarchy, the
basic biological timeline of a religion taking
root in new soil still holds true. They are,
as the author says, simply behind schedule. But
the tragedy is that the cost of that delay isn't
just academic. Exactly. The cost of that delay
is measured in the bloodshed in March 2026. Every
year without this infrastructure leaves another
teenager like Mir Balot or another veteran like
Baylor Jallo vulnerable to the void. The attacks
are the tragic symptoms of a community that hasn't
finished its nativization process. Which brings
us to the urgent call to action. If the timeline
is lagging, how do they catch up? What does the
blueprint for the future actually look like?
The author lays out a very clear four -part blueprint.
First, he says mosques have to fundamentally
change their function. They can no longer just
be ethnic prayer halls where people pop in, pray
in Arabic, and leave. Right, they have to become
true community centers, places of worship, yes,
but also centers for education, social service,
mental health counseling, and active civic engagement.
They need to be rooted in their local ZIP codes,
not just in the old country. Second, they need
seminaries. They need institutions like Zaytuna
College to multiply. They need to train religious
leaders, imams, and chaplains who are deeply
grounded in the classical Islamic tradition and
fully fluent in the American context. An imam
needs to understand both the intricacies of fiqh
and the realities of the American constitutional
system. Exactly. Third, philanthropic institutions
must pivot. Money needs to shift. Right now,
the author notes, so much funding goes toward
political advocacy, anti -defamation work, and
legal defense. While necessary, he argues philanthropy
must prioritize funding scholarships, spiritual
formation, youth programs, and interfaith partnerships.
They need to fund the garden, not just the fortress
walls. And fourth, Intellectual infrastructure.
The author proposes a new intellectual journal.
He calls it Suf, which means scrolls or pages.
He wants to create a dedicated space for rigorous,
self -critical theological conversation. He wants
to move the debate off of fragmented, algorithm
-driven social media and into a serious, dedicated
forum where scholars can do the heavy lifting
of defining American Islam. It's all about building
a foundation that can support a multicultural,
intellectually robust American vision of Islam.
And the timing of this is crucial because, as
the author points out, the nation is preparing
to celebrate its 250th anniversary in July 2026.
This is a pivotal moment. The author insists
that American Muslims don't need to invent a
new story for the 250th anniversary. They already
have a profound, deeply American story to tell.
They just have to claim it and elevate it over
the noise of the extremists. And the history
is incredible. We're talking about Omar Ibn Said,
an enslaved African Muslim who was writing his
autobiography in Arabic in North Carolina in
the 1830s. We are talking about Bilali Muhammad,
who maintained his Islamic practices on a plantation
in Georgia, writing manuscripts on Islamic law
while enslaved. Fast forward to the 20th century.
You have Abdullah Igrim, an American veteran
who successfully petitioned the secretary of
the army and later President Eisenhower in 1953
to officially add Islam as a religious designation.
nation on military dog tags. You have the Mother
Mosque of America built by immigrants in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa, in 1934. These are not people who
are fighting America. They were weaving themselves
into its fabric. They were demanding that America
live up to its own ideals of religious freedom.
And the author's plea to his community is this.
Show up to the 250th anniversary, not as supplicants
asking for tolerance and not as angry protesters
demanding recognition, but as co -authors of
the American experiment. Show up and articulate
how 14 centuries of Islamic civilizational ethics
can actually contribute to the betterment of
American democracy. But that requires moving
beyond the defensive crouch. It requires a willingness
to do the hard, quiet, sunglamorous internal
work. It means elevating the spiritual depths
of the tradition, the Sufi emphasis on purifying
the self, the Quranic insistence on mercy over
the thin, reactive religiosity that is defined
only by what it opposes. It's a daunting task.
The author admits that when asked if American
Islam is currently adequate to the demands of
this moment, given the violence of March 2026,
his honest answer is not yet. But he is hopeful
because the resources are already there, the
tradition is deep enough, and the American experiment
is flexible enough to hold this. He changed his
whole life's trajectory after 9 -11 to do this
work of translation between America and Islam.
And 25 years later... Those attacks showed him
just how much work remains. So as we wrap up
this deep dive, I want to leave you with a thought
experiment. Think about what we've discussed
today regarding nativization, trimming the sociological
edges while keeping the theological core. What
if the ultimate success of an American religion
isn't measured by how fiercely it defends itself
from the outside culture? That is the ultimate
question of covenantal pluralism. What if success
is measured by what entirely new ethical vocabulary
contributes to that culture? If American Judaism
gave us a profound framework for civil rights
and social justice through the 20th century,
and American Quakerism gave us a framework for
pacifist civic action and abolition, what if
American Islam's greatest gift to the 21st century
hasn't even been articulated yet? What if it's
still waiting to be born from this exact crucible?
It's a powerful challenge to leave with. Thank
you for joining us on this deep dive into a really
complex, heavy, but ultimately hopeful text.
The author ends his essay by returning to that
beautiful promise of Ramadan we started with,
and it feels like the only right way for us to
close today as well. Peace it is, until the rising
of the dawn. May we all build institutions worthy
of that promise.