Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment magazine. I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Together we research politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life.
Shadi Hamid:
We are writing a book together. This podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference. Thanks so much for joining us.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome back to Zealous at the Gate Podcast of Comment magazine. I’m Matthew Kaemingk and with me is Shadi Hamid. Together we research politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. We’re writing a book together right now and this podcast represents an informal space where we talk together and with other experts on how we can live together with deep difference. So thanks for joining us.
Make sure you subscribe wherever you listen. And please do give us a rating. Feel free to connect and share. We’d love to get your feedback. We’ll have more information on that on the back end of the podcast. But for now, Shadi, do please introduce our very special guest.
Shadi Hamid:
Yes, we have Dalia Mogahed with us today and we’re very excited. I think in some ways, Dalia, I see you as a kind of guru for the American Muslim community. Very few people that I’m aware of know more than you do about how American Muslims have changed and evolved over the past 20-25 years. Currently, you are an associate scholar at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Dalia was the former executive director of the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies, and that’s where she led analysis of surveys of Muslim communities worldwide. And she’s also the co-author of a book titled Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think. Now, that’s ambitious to know what they all think. Dalia was also previously appointed by President Barack Obama to his advisory council on faith-based and neighbourhood partnerships in 2009.
So, very happy to have you, Dalia. Maybe just to get us going, I actually haven’t talked to you in a while, so I don’t know really what you’ve been thinking and feeling these days about where the Muslim community is at. We definitely want to talk about how American Muslims are dealing with the fallout from the Gaza war and how that’s affected their own perceptions of where they fit in the political spectrum. As we’ve talked about before in this podcast, American Muslims soured on President Biden. And it’s possible now that Biden is no longer in the picture that some of that might ease. We’ll have to wait and see what Kamala Harris says and does on the issue of Israel-Palestine.
And I think that there’s also a really sharp contrast between this current period where Gaza is front and centre and what came before, because I think pre-Gaza, pre-October 7th, there was almost this sense, as I saw it, that people just stopped caring about us, at least in America, that we were no longer the focal point of big political debates. And in the 2020 campaign, Trump versus Biden, again, Muslims weren’t front and centre. And I think for me that was a relief. But there was also something that felt kind of weird about it because we had gotten so used to Muslims being a big part of American politics and American foreign policy wars in the Middle East from 9/11 onwards. So there’s a lot of different phases in the American Muslim experience. So maybe starting with Gaza and then broadening out as to how you see the last 20-25 years and what the most important eras are for you.
Dalia Mogahed:
Okay. Well, thank you so much, Shadi, and thank you for having me on this podcast to have this important conversation. I’ll start with Gaza because I don’t think we can overstate how pivotal and important this issue is. And I say that from surveys I’ve seen, from many, many conversations. I think there’s an impulse among pundits, among people in Washington, including Muslim thinkers, to say, “Well, it feels like it’s a big deal, but really at the end of the day Muslims are just going to vote for Biden anyway,” or we’re exaggerating what it really means to people. And that’s just simply not the case.
The war in Gaza has absolutely transformed and made Biden hemorrhage Muslim support. His approval rating in 2020 among Muslims was among the highest of any faith community. The vast majority of Muslims cast their vote for Biden unsurprisingly in 2020. And now he’s in the teens in terms of the percentages who say they plan to vote for him.
Shadi Hamid:
But we should know that’s for Biden specifically.
Dalia Mogahed:
That’s for Biden specifically, and that’s before he dropped out. So it’s still up for grabs what’s going to happen once the candidate changes. But he has lost tremendous support among Muslims because of his policy in Gaza.
What I think is so interesting about Gaza is that Muslims politically before this are actually quite divided when it comes to all the hot button issues. I’m always struck by how little Muslims have in common when it comes to a lot of things that you might think everyone agrees on, but they’re divided. They look like America. They look like the rest of the country. They don’t agree on where their alliances should be. Is it with the Christian right or is it with the progressive left? And it’s pretty much an even divide. Or do they find their safety with Civil Rights, the Civil Rights Act or with the First Amendment with religious freedom? Do they see their future as another racialized group or with people who are fighting for religious liberty and the right to refuse to allow certain things in their schools and so forth?
So all of those things are still there, those divides are still there. But where they have now sort of galvanized and it is like the most important issue is around Gaza. And so I think this is actually a moment that it’s like a milestone in that political timeline that you were asking about. It’s this moment of Gaza is the most important thing.
Shadi Hamid:
On Gaza specifically, can you say a little bit more about why Gaza has had such a profound effect on Muslim attitudes and perspectives here in the US? Because I think for outsiders they might say, “Well, sure, Gaza is important to Arabs and Muslims for some of the obvious reasons, but there’s been other conflicts that have taken a tremendous toll on Arabs and Muslims worldwide.” What is it about this that has such an emotional effect that it’s very hard for Muslim Americans to compartmentalize and say, “Well, we really don’t like Biden or the Democratic Party on Gaza, but we can sort of hold that and focus on other issues and then make that comparison between Biden and Trump on a larger set of concerns”? That this, for many Muslim Americans, is decisive and that they say that they won’t be able to in good conscience vote for Biden or perhaps even Biden’s successor, Kamala, in the coming election.
Help us think that through because I think for you and I it might be obvious because we’re a part of the community and we talk about these issues a lot and we hear why it’s so salient for people, but it might not be obvious for others.
Dalia Mogahed:
You’re right, Shadi, it’s not obvious to others and not even to all Muslims totally get it. They do ask rightly so, “Why not the emphasis on Sudan or the Congo or the Uyghurs?” Lots of other places where people are suffering. And I think the emotional impact of Gaza stems from at least three things. One is there is a tremendous amount of media coming out from Gaza onto our phones. I have never had this kind of access to on-the-ground realities as I have with this conflict. I have never seen the kind of graphic videos that I have this time. We’ve just never had this kind of minute-by-minute, real-time visual access to the suffering. So that’s number one.
And I think we can’t discount that. When you look at how media impacts people’s opinion, it’s very clear that when folks are getting their media from social media, especially TikTok and to some degree Instagram, they have a very different opinion than those who are getting their news from TV, whatever the TV news. Whether it’s CNN or Fox News, it almost doesn’t matter. But where we get our media matters. And Muslims as a group are just on average younger and more likely to get their media from social media and are naturally very sceptical of mainstream media because of the way it has demonized our community for so long. So that’s number one is we have a lot more visual access.
Number two, we are so complicit in this conflict, which is not the case with a lot of other conflicts where people are suffering, including Muslims. We are directly arming and funding and providing political cover in a way that is so overtly biased and so overtly enabling of this genocide. I mean, we just witnessed an absolutely stomach-turning visual of the house of the people giving literally a wanted war criminal a standing ovation. I mean, imagine seeing that.
Shadi Hamid:
And to be clear, you’re referring here to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who did address-
Dalia Mogahed:
That would be the one, yes.
Shadi Hamid:
… Congress because of-
Dalia Mogahed:
It’s hard to-
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Dalia Mogahed:
… keep the war criminals straight. But yes, I’m talking about Benjamin Netanyahu. We just witnessed that. And so you see these split screens on your phone of children suffering and dying, and then this standing ovation, it’s visceral. It’s on a primal level, the reaction you have to that where you feel so dehumanized. And then your identity, that part of your identity is amplified, right? When you see people that look like you and pray like you killed on TV or on your phone, on your screen, and then you see your elected officials or representatives, I know that half of Democrats boycotted, but the ones that were in that room giving the person responsible standing ovation, imagine the emotional response to that and a feeling of complete alienation and being like, “I don’t care what happens. I’m not going to vote for this guy.”
And then finally, and I think we need to be honest and recognize the third reason, which is faith, religion. This is a holy land. That’s not something we can sort of brush under the rug. Jerusalem is a holy land for Muslims. Now, this conflict is not a religious conflict in that the issue is not between this millennia-old conflict between Muslims and Jews. That’s not the issue. The issue is it’s an occupied holy land. And so the fact that Christian and Muslim Palestinians and their allies have a special place in their hearts for this land cannot be ignored as well. So those are the three main reasons that I see this issue having such emotional resonance among American Muslims.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, that’s wonderful. That’s really helpful. One of the curious things for me when I very first started studying Islam and learning about American Islam in particular post 9/11, one of the surprising things for me to learn was that there were so many Muslim Republicans in the 1990s and I see that there are a number of them supporting Donald Trump now. I’m wondering if you could just share with us what would be some of the key reasons that Muslims would support a more conservative or a Republican candidate? Are there particular issues that have drawn Muslims into that voting block? What would they point to?
Dalia Mogahed:
That’s a great question. Let me just take a step back though and maybe widen the lens a bit. So if we’re talking about Muslim immigrants or children of immigrants, I think that that would be a very accurate statement that they mostly voted Republican in the ’90s. Now, when it comes to African-American Muslims who make up about a third of American Muslims and they are the plurality, that was not the case. They have been voting Democrat from the beginning.
So what happened with 9/11 and then the ensuing wars and crackdown and civil liberties is that American Muslim immigrants joined African-Americans in realizing that the Republican Party may not be the most friendly place for a minority of any kind. And so that was really the switch. It wasn’t that Muslims overall did follow or supported the Republican Party, but rather that Muslim immigrants or the children of immigrants did.
So if I could just maybe draw a picture of our demographics so that I can explain what the key pivots from the community were. A third of American Muslims identify as Black or African-American. Around 25% identify as white. That’s not Arab but white non-Arab whites. And that would include Turkish Muslims, Bosnian Muslims, Iranian Muslims, Albanians, Chechens, all of that. All of those people are identified as white. And about another 25% as Asian. Of course, those are mostly South Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladesh. And then about 14% identify as Arab, okay? So it’s a minority within the American Muslim community. About 9% are Latino Muslims. And then we have 1% who are Native American and then the rest are mixed race or other.
So if you think of the American Muslim community as essentially being made up of four main groups in terms of race; Black, Asian, Arab, and white, what happened with 9/11 is that the Asian, Arab, and white groups for the most part switched from mostly voting Republican to voting Democrat because of the way that George Bush persecuted Muslims in America with the Patriot Act, with the crackdown on Muslim organizations, with, of course, the Iraq War and the Afghan War. So that was the key change in 2001 where non-Black Muslims joined black Muslims as mostly Democrats. However, as you pointed out, around a third of American Muslims in 2016 voted for Trump.
Shadi Hamid:
It was that high in 2016?
Dalia Mogahed:
It was. It was around that high. And it went up slightly in 2020. Not a lot, but a little bit. So why would a Muslim vote for Trump in 2016? The main issues that drive Muslim Trump voters are really around social conservatism or social moral issues around traditional family structures and traditional structures around gender.
So before October 7th. And the problem is that as these kinds of debates started seeping into the school system, although the president really has no real direct influence over what happens at your school, at your school district, but people… And I saw this very clearly, Muslim parents started getting more and more panicked about the way their children’s curriculum was changing to redefine what a family was. The way that just at the very basic level of who gets to be in the girls’ locker room, it was absolutely freaking many parents out.
So this is the reason mostly of why there was a slight increase because this started happening more and more at the end of the Trump presidency. And so people were willing to vote for Trump to save their children from what they felt was indoctrination that was inconsistent with their values and with their religious understandings.
Shadi Hamid:
How do you see that evolving from this point on? Because as we’ve talked about, Gaza has scrambled some of these previous dynamics. And I remember that I had written a piece the summer before the Gaza War started talking about what could be the signs of a realignment. Or especially as you mentioned, you had these protests that were happening around school curricula, around questions of gender identity. And I remember that really being front and centre in the debates we were having as a community with Muslim family members and friends, and especially as you got older, where some of the discussion around trans rights was just very hard for older Muslims to really get their heads around.
I think there was also a sense of exhaustion with all the kind of woke developments, if I can call them that, that there was a sense that most Muslims had reluctantly come to terms with gay marriage or the kind of new social consensus around gay marriage. But then there was sort of this sense of, “Well, oh, you’re asking us to make another jump and to be more in this direction.” It was a lot for people to take on in a relatively short span of time. And again, I think there’s an important generational divide here.
If the Gaza War sort of retreats from the public consciousness, which it already is at least for Americans writ large. I don’t think that’s quite the case for Arab and Muslim Americans. But if we’re talking about next year or two or three years from now, God willing, if there’s actually less violence in Gaza in the West Bank and presumably, hopefully, there’ll be some kind of rebuilding or reconstruction, perhaps for being extra hopeful, a “revitalized Palestinian authority governing Gaza,” if that happens, do you see that some of these older trends around social conservatism could reappear as a driving force? Or will something about the experience with the Gaza war just scramble this in some fundamental way that we can’t fully digest or anticipate yet?
Dalia Mogahed:
Shadi, I think that it is always there and it’s an underlying issue even while everyone is focused on Gaza. I say that because Muslim Americans didn’t put up any kind of protest when it came to gay marriage. It wasn’t a topic of conversation. It wasn’t something people were voting on. They had an attitude of live and let live.
Where they started to get very activated is when it came to their children. This whole idea of it’s coming to the schools and it’s changing the curriculum and someone else wants to raise our kids with different values is where people started to get very emotional about it. I don’t want folks to hear this as just a universal Muslim desire to tell other people how to live their lives. What I’ve heard over and over is, “Whatever people want to do in their personal life is up to them, and we’re not worried about that.” But when the government or someone else is trying to dictate or indoctrinate our children into believing a certain way or normalizing certain things that we don’t agree with, we don’t think are part of our values, this is where people are getting activated.
So is that going to remain an issue? I think it’s going to only increase. I actually think it’s something that I’m even hearing among younger people, younger parents. So I consider myself an old parent in that my son, my youngest, just turned 18, so I’m done. Whatever happened happened. I have nothing else I can do. It’s like they’re done, they’re baked. But people my age and younger who didn’t start as early as I did are very activated. These are American-born Muslim Americans, right? These aren’t older uncles or whatever. These are people who are my generation. Not just Gen X but Gen Y. They’re concerned about public school curriculums and what their kids are learning. So I think it’s going to continue to be an issue.
Now, what the Gaza War has done, and this is something I think that people need to understand, it’s not that it’s driven Muslim American voters that used to vote for a Democrat or vote who were aligned with sort of democratic ticket. It’s not like it’s driven them into the arms of Trump. That’s not what it’s done. Very, very few people who have sort of left Biden’s camp because of Gaza are delusional enough to think that Trump is better on Gaza than Biden is. But they’re willing to take or risk a Trump presidency in order to punish Biden. And so that’s different. They’re not going to vote for Trump, but they’ll vote for a third party, which they know how this works. They know that that will allow… So it’s the idea of willing evil and allowing evil, right?
And so in Islam, God allows evil but doesn’t will it. And this is sort of how it’s going. It is working for them. They are not willing that Trump is going to be president, but they’re allowing it to happen because they feel they must take some kind of action to hold Biden accountable for enabling genocide. So they’re leaving the Democratic Party mostly over Gaza, not over social issues.
But when you look at Muslim Democrats or Muslims who are still voting for Biden or were going to vote for Biden before he dropped out, they are also alienated from other Democrats around these issues of family and gender structures. Muslim Americans do not have a party where they fit in completely. When it comes to even Muslim Trump voters, yes, they’re aligned around these family issues, family values, but they are very alienated from other Republicans around military aid to Israel, around supporting Israel in general and a ceasefire and so forth. And they’re also very alienated from other Republicans around Islamophobia. They are not cool with how the rhetoric that gets thrown around among Republicans. So they’re holding their nose and accepting these things because this other issue around family and gender is so salient for them.
The other side with Muslim Democrats, the gender and family stuff is also important, but they’re willing to tolerate it because of stuff like Islamophobia and other things that they care about that Democrats stand for like environmental protection, like affordable healthcare. Muslims care about those things too. So it’s really about where is their emphasis. On what topics are they most passionate about and what are they willing to compromise in order to vote for a specific candidate or another?
Shadi Hamid:
Matt, I have a lot of follow-up questions, but I want to make sure that… I’m curious what you think. You’re sort of hearing to American Muslims going back and forth on this. What do you think about all this?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, I mean, it’s all very fascinating. And I think I can actually identify with some pieces of what you’re talking about here in feeling like you don’t belong in either party, actually.
I’m an evangelical Christian, and I have a number of political opinions that would put me on the conservative side, but I also have some political opinions that would put me on the more progressive side. And so I regularly feel out of place. And my political opinions are very driven by my faith. And so that means that when I cast a ballot for a Democrat or a Republican, I feel torn. And I feel torn not simply politically, but I also kind of feel torn spiritually because I’m morally connecting myself to a political force that I have real problems with.
So a little story here to kind of demonstrate this tearing and then I have a question for you on it, Dalia. So in 2016, I was in the Netherlands doing some research and I unwittingly agreed to give a lecture on American politics the day after the 2016 election. I just thought I would do sort of a debrief on the election, assuming Hillary Clinton was going to win, and woke up and had to adjust like many others did.
Shadi Hamid:
Oh, so Matt, you only realized it when you woke up that morning because of the time difference?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Right, because of the time difference, I woke up and I saw what happened.
Shadi Hamid:
Wow.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I saw what had happened in Pennsylvania and I was like, “Oh no, it’s switched.” So I’m in Amsterdam and I’m getting all of these questions as an American evangelical. “How on earth are evangelicals voting for Donald Trump? He doesn’t sound like Jesus. He doesn’t smell like Jesus. How is this the case?” So I had to answer all of these Dutch people about Donald Trump. I don’t recommend it. It’s not fun.
But in the Netherlands, you have 13 political parties that you can choose from. So you can choose a political party that’s relatively close to your particular convictions. There’s actually three different Christian parties to choose from. So you can pick a party that you really love and then they will go and do the compromising for you. But the way that I described it was in America, the political parties don’t compromise their convictions. It’s actually the voter that has to compromise their convictions when they sign up for one person or another.
And so this brings me back to this thing of this experience of tearing, of not feeling “at home” in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. That’s something I experience as a Christian, and it sounds like that’s something that some American Muslims feel as well. Of course, there are some American Muslims that feel very at home in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, but many of us have these sort of deep convictions of “Ugh.”
And so this all kind of brings me back to I hear your passion about Gaza, but I also hear your concern about these family and these moral issues. And I want to ask you something a little bit more personally if I could, and that is how do you personally deal with that sense of tearing of your sort of torn convictions as a person of faith? I wonder if you could just share a little bit from the Muslim side about how you deal with that with us.
Dalia Mogahed:
Yeah, thank you so much, Matthew, for sharing that. And I think it is the case for actually a lot of people of colour who tend to be more religiously conservative but also care about civil rights and racial equality and things like that. So they’re always trying to figure out where to vote and where they belong.
The way that I address it is I have to do a calculation every time as to how do I minimise harm. It’s always about minimising harm to the most people or to the most I can. And it’s not an easy question. I mean, it was very easy in 2016 that minimising harm for me was not voting for Trump. In 2020, same thing. Minimizing harm meant voting for Biden. But this time… And people ask me all the time, “What should we do? What are we going to do about this election? What are we supposed to do?” And it’s really hard to answer that question, quite frankly. It is really, really hard because when you’re trying to minimize harm and you’re basically choosing between, until Biden dropped out, but before that between two people who either one has caused a great deal of harm to innocent people in Gaza and elsewhere, or one who’s promising to. So it’s a very difficult place to be.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So I know some Christians who will pray to God and ask God for guidance. I know of other Christians who will pray to God and ask God for mercy. So a sense of, “I’m going to make this choice. I could be wrong about it and I don’t want God to be angry with me, so I ask God for mercy about my choice.” Do you hear any of that within the Muslim community of asking God for direction or asking God for forgiveness, or is that something you guys talk about?
Dalia Mogahed:
Well, asking God for guidance is absolutely something we talk a lot about. Asking God for forgiveness for who we voted for, I don’t actually hear that much. I don’t know, Shadi, if you do, I don’t hear it that often. It’s more asking God for guidance, asking other people who are more versed in political calculations for advice.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
I would just maybe add to that, and I’m just thinking out loud here, I don’t think there’s certainly for me, but also the Muslims who I speak to on a regular basis, I don’t think there’s any sense that voting for one candidate or party or another could ever rise to the level of sinful activity. And certainly I would never have the view that as much as I dislike Trump, that if an American Muslim voted for Donald Trump, that would somehow be violating their trust with God or somehow rising to bad or immoral activity. I mean, I personally see it very much as a secular sphere. We live in a secular country. We got two parties to choose from both-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, but just to press you, just to press both of you for a moment, just for the sake of conversation, when you were talking about Gaza and the horrors that are happening there, continuing to vote for Biden and support him, you could imagine one of your Muslim, a Muslim feeling a sense of guilt. “I think this is the right thing to do, but also I am supporting a man who is supporting genocide.” And-
Dalia Mogahed:
Right. So, Matthew, I’ll say that I’ve never heard anyone say, “I hope God forgives me for voting for Biden.” But I certainly have heard people say, “It is a sin if you vote for Biden.” I’ve heard people say that in their sort of passionate sort of condemnation. I have heard that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Right. Because don’t you have a duty to defend Palestinians? And if you’re voting for Biden, aren’t you abandoning your brothers and sisters of the faith? Isn’t that a sin?
Dalia Mogahed:
Right. Or endorsing genocide or something like that. I mean, I would never say that myself. That’s not where I stand. I think people vote for a lot of different reasons and their calculations are all different. That’s a very bold statement to be making, but I certainly have heard it.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, I was going to just ask about the concept of minimizing harm because I think that to take it from another perspective and this upcoming election, I think there’s a strong argument that as bad as Biden has been, if the goal is to not make things worse, there’s a strong argument or at least a legitimate argument that Republicans have less empathy for Palestinians. Republicans have more unquestioning support for Israel, that there isn’t the kind of internal divide in the Republican Party around the right course. And as you noted, Dalia, about half of the Democratic caucus when Netanyahu came to speak to Congress refused to be there. I mean, that shows you that there is more feeling for Palestinian rights in the Democratic Party by really any measurable metric.
And we’re not just voting for a candidate, we’re voting for a party, a party apparatus. And the fact of the matter is that most pro-Palestine voices are on the left side of the political spectrum, not on the right. So if we want to minimize harm, then the Democratic Party would be preferable considering we only have two choices.
But I’d go a couple steps further that we also want to minimize harm to American citizens on other issues of equity and justice, on things like affordable healthcare, combating poverty, of providing more social services and a stronger social safety net for Americans who are left behind. All of that would seem to be served more by the Democratic Party if you take the premise that the Democratic Party is better on those issues of social and economic justice.
I mean, how would you respond to that? I think I remember that when a lot of Arab and Muslim Americans were saying, “Hey, we don’t know if we’re going to vote for Biden,” and this would’ve been now seven or eight months ago, I think there was a lot of anger and a sense of resentment that I saw from members and leaders of the Democratic Party where it was like, “Hey, we’ve been supporting Muslim rights for the last five, 10 years. We’re the ones who spoke out against Trump’s Muslim ban. We’re the ones who have been calling for Muslims to be a full and equal part of American public life. Now you Muslims..” And sometimes it became a very patronizing tone. “Now you Muslims are threatening to turn your back on the Democratic Party because on one issue? You’re angry about it? You should be team players.”
And I think that I also heard a lot of this on the trans rights, gender identity, school curricula stuff that, “Hey, you Muslims are part of the Democratic Party along with Blacks and Hispanics and others. And in the spirit of allyship and intersectionality, you might not get all you want, dear Muslims, but we’ve been supporting you, so you got to support the progressive causes on gender and gay rights and woke stuff and so on and so forth.”
So I guess what I’m getting at is a bigger question of what does it mean to be part of a political coalition? Because the Democratic Party is not a very ideological party in the sense that there’s one clear line. There’s different minority groups and it’s a kind of messy, chaotic patchwork. And then it’s expected that each individual group will toe the line at the end of the day. So even if Blacks are generally more socially conservative on an issue like abortion, they’re not expected to raise that as a kind of divisive issue. And Hispanics who tend to be more Catholic, more socially conservative, a similar line would apply. How do you see that kind of give and take? And then in the context of minimising harm just to bring it back to the original premise.
Dalia Mogahed:
Yeah, there’s a lot there, Shadi. Let me start at the first part of what you said, which is, “Yeah, this one issue. And so what about all the other ways that we’re minimizing harm?”
Shadi Hamid:
Or even just that the Republicans would be worse. Even if we keep it just to Gaza, the argument that there would be less harm-
Dalia Mogahed:
Republicans would be worse even on Gaza. So there’s a couple of things I do want to point out. First, I don’t know the answer to how Muslims are going to vote now that Biden has dropped out because there was a very personal offence taken by Muslims against Biden as a human, as a person in terms of what he said, what he did and so forth. So now that he’s out of the picture, I simply don’t know the answer. So that’s one thing I want to say.
The second thing I wanted to point out is that Muslims are sophisticated enough to know the difference between voting for president, voting for Congress, voting for a school board. So many people who have absolute passionate objections to Biden are fully planning on voting for their democratic member of Congress. So it’s not of a rejection wholesale of sort of an entire party. A lot of Democrats have called for a ceasefire months and months ago and did so in response to a lot of lobbying from their Muslim constituents and from other constituents who aren’t Muslim.
So that’s the second thing. It’s not about a rejection wholesale of the party in every way, but it is a, “We will hold this genocide enabler accountable” is the thought, is the rhetoric. It’s like, “He cannot do what he just did and get our vote.” The way that it’s phrased, “My self-respect is more important than my self-interest.” So it’s a very primal… It’s deeper than reason and it’s deeper than self-interest in terms of this political calculation of refusing to vote for Biden when he was still running.
So all of those things I think are important to note. The piece about coalitions and allyship, I think it’s still a debate around how much is it reasonable for folks to be asked to compromise because I don’t think it’s black and white. And so what is real allyship? I mean, if to be your ally I have to cut off a part of my limbs, I mean, if to fit into your little box you want me to cut my arms off, that’s not being an ally. That’s being a part of a very oppressive system. I need to be able to be fully myself and still be your ally.
And so there are places where even very conservative Muslims are fully willing to support equal dignity and safety of people of all genders and all sexual orientations. But they will draw the line around what they will call indoctrination of children as early as five years old on what is a family and what does gender look like and is it a choice and so forth. So I don’t think it’s black and white. I don’t think it’s about Muslims just simply wholesale not wanting to be team players. But I think it’s a question of what does that compromise look like? And is it fair to ask for a compromise at a spiritual and values-based level when it comes to something as important and as sensitive as how children are being educated?
So I don’t think it’s an easy answer. And I also don’t want to leave your listeners with the wrong idea around these are bad allies or bad team players or we’re supporting this whole idea of like, “Well, we recognise that Ramadan exists. Now you must do this activity around Pride month.” Well, I get it, but it’s sort of this idea. It’s like, “Well, I can sit it out. I’m not asking you to not do Pride, but it’s totally unfair to force a child to sort participate in an activity that they may not…” We need to have to opt out. And we’re not asking people to take their Shahada. It’s like that is literally the equivalent of what it feels like.
Matthew Kaemingk:
The profession of faith for listeners.
Dalia Mogahed:
Profession of faith. We’re not asking people to become Muslim. We’re asking them to recognize we exist. That’s all I need. I don’t need you to opt in for me, right?
“So you you are opting out from Ramadan in that you’re not fasting.” And so it should be just as acceptable for a child to say, “You know what? I’m not going to participate in whatever Pride month activity that the classroom is doing today.” I don’t think that that should cause people to believe that Muslims aren’t good allies. I think we just need to redefine what an ally is.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Man, this is so fascinating. And I think that juxtaposition of the place of Ramadan in public life and the place of Pride month in public life juxtaposing those two months is I think that’s a really great sort of thought experiment about the place of religion, morals, and public life. Yeah, I think there’s a lot to that.
Given your study around the political behaviours of Muslim Americans, I’d love to hear more about how those political behaviours are shaped within the Muslim community itself. Within my own evangelical Christian community, Christian political perspectives are often shaped by their pastor or by theologians that they read or Christian radio or Christian podcasts and things like that. Of course, American Evangelicals, we also watch cable news and do social media like any other American, but I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the role of the political formative role of the local mosque, local Muslim student associations, Muslim podcasts. How are Muslim Americans being shaped in their political behaviour by their own institutions? How would you talk about that? For those of us who are not Muslims who are not hanging out at the local mosque, what does that look like in terms of how Muslim political behaviour is being taught and shaped and formed?
Dalia Mogahed:
Matthew, it’s a good question. And probably the answer will be just as fragmented as the community is in that Muslims are as likely as mainline Protestants to say that they attend a religious service once a week. So evangelicals surpass Muslims in that regard.
Shadi Hamid:
What’s the number for Muslim attendance?
Dalia Mogahed:
I believe it’s around 60% say that they attend a religious service once a week. And that probably sounds very high too, but it’s every poll I’ve ever seen, whether it’s Gallup or ISPU or Pew, it’s around that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I think that would be a lot better than mainline Christianity.
Dalia Mogahed:
Well, mainline Protestants say that that’s around what they do. And then evangelicals are in the 80s, 80%, 85%.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Liars.
Dalia Mogahed:
Liars. They’re all inflated then, but we’re talking just relative. So whatever the real number is, it’s similar to mainline Protestants.
So not everyone goes to the mosque, but when they do go to the mosque since 9/11, this has been my observation, imams and khatib or people who are giving the sermon are very shy about talking about politics. I mean, sermons are very tame. They’re discussing either spiritual issues around being closer to God or things like that, or just very parochial issues of law. They’re not talking about politics. People are for the most part afraid to do so. They sort of just want to leave that alone and feel like they would get in trouble for it.
So I don’t believe that that’s where people forming their political thoughts or their political identities. I think they are getting them much more often from influential influencers on social media from Sheikh Umber Sulaiman or from Sheikh Yasir Qadhi or others, people with huge social media following who do talk about, but who have that enough clout, enough courage, enough of a platform to be very openly… I mean, they’re not telling them who to vote for, but they’re discussing issues around political engagement and how people should be thinking about issues around gender and family.
There was that document that was released. I think, Shadi, you must know what I’m talking about. It came out before October 7th, and it was the only thing people talked about, and now no one’s discussing it at all. But it was basically a position paper signed off by many, many, many Muslim scholars on how Muslims should sort of think about sexuality and gender in terms of their orthodox, normative teachings of their faith. That was a very hotly debated and hotly discussed document, but it was something that people were literally begging for. And I have witnessed that. “What should we be telling our kids? How should we be thinking about this?”
And so those kinds of things are much more influential around how people are thinking about these things than what their local mosque or their local imam might be saying. So there are these national voices that are extremely influential, and I think people are looking to them much more often than local imams. And then everyone has their favourite pundit or podcasters. Some are very, very right wing to the point of being incredibly toxic. And then there are people who are a lot more progressive and so forth. So there’s people who are non-scholars. These are not scholars at all. They’re just good at social media and good at YouTube. And those are people who are, to some degree, also influencing Muslim American thought.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay, so this is a fascinating connection for American evangelicals because in large part, American evangelical political opinions are shaped by national celebrities, thought leaders, podcasters. And their local pastors are often nervous to talk about politics and pretty quiet about these kinds of things. And so within the Christian community, we talk about, “Is this actually a good thing that our politics are being formed by people we have no relational connection to whatsoever, and that we’re not talking about politics in our local faith communities in these kinds of ways?”
On your side of things, I’m curious, I’d love to hear Shadi’s thoughts on this as well, is it a good thing for local imams to be so quiet on politics? You didn’t say why they’re afraid to talk about politics, but is it a good thing for Muslims not to be shaped and formed by their local religious community on these political things as opposed to sort of nationwide Muslim celebrities and thought leaders? I’m curious how you all think about how we should be formed to vote. Let’s put Shadi on the spot. Shadi, do you want your local imam telling you something about politics?
Shadi Hamid:
No. No. I mean, for me, it’s clear, but also because I work in politics and I write and think about it and debate it all the time. The last thing I want to do is go to Friday prayer and hear a sermon about the things that I write about in my professional life. But also, I think these are people who are generally not qualified to speak about politics.
Politics, and maybe this is me betraying some of my secular or liberal influences, but particularly in the US, politics is a different realm with different calculations and considerations. And I’m just not sure I trust… So the imams that I hear locally at the place that I go to here in DC tend to be younger because it’s sort of like a younger kind of community vibe. But back home in Pennsylvania, our imams were usually older. And the last thing I want is an uncle who just came to America, I don’t know, 10 years ago or something just spouting out usually tone-deaf views about America and that sort of thing.
And then there’s a risk too that just opens up the space for division because you don’t want to be in a situation where the people who are listening to a sermon, they start to get a little bit jittery. You can hear almost the grumbling. I’ve been at sermons where there’s a sense of unease because there’s a perception that the imam has stepped beyond his jurisdiction. And so maybe as someone who writes about the importance of conflict and that conflict can be generative and that deep difference shouldn’t be shied away from, I’m not particularly comfortable with conflict in the moment, which is sort of like an irony. I actually am very pretty conflict-averse in my kind of personal interactions a lot of the time. Anyway, that’s just a little bit-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay, but what about the other part? How do you feel about American Muslims having their politics shaped by podcasters and celebrities?
Shadi Hamid:
Well, it’s great because I’m a podcaster.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. I mean, look-
Matthew Kaemingk:
You’re part of the elite.
Shadi Hamid:
But I think it’s better in the sense that a lot of these podcasters aren’t claiming religious authority. I guess what I’m trying to say is I would prefer them to be somewhat separate and that people can distinguish. They go to their imam for religious or spiritual guidance, but then for their politics, they don’t even have to listen to Muslims. I mean, I’d say that I’m shaped primarily in my own politics by non-Muslim writers, philosophers, intellectuals, podcasters, whatever it might be. There’s a lot there. So I’m very curious with Dalia, how you respond to all of that from your perspective.
Dalia Mogahed:
No, I agree with you on a lot of that, Shadi. I don’t think the local mosque is a good place to be discussing politics because I do think it’s divisive. And you do need a place of spiritual community where you can come together with people and feel like you belong, feel like you have something deeply in common in terms of your devotion to God and service to humanity. And maybe the mosque should just take that as their mission and kind of leave detailed political discussion to people who make that their profession. It’s a science, right? Political science is a thing, right? So let’s leave it to that. You’re not going to tell someone how to manage their diabetes in a sermon. It’s not your specialty. It’s not what you do.
And so in some ways, I think political issues are a specialty. There’s something people study and write about, and maybe just leave it to the specialists and focus on what you are trained to do. I think that’ll keep communities safe and harmonious, which we definitely need a place like that. And there’s enough polarization and conflict outside. And Muslim Americans are very diverse in their political views. So there isn’t sort of going to be one view that everyone’s going to resonate with. And kind of leaving that out of the congregation, I think is a good thing so that we can have a moment of some semblance of unity and belonging before we go out and fight for our lives and the rest of the day.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. And to press the second part of it, can you see any particular danger in leaving this to social media celebrities like Shadi Hamid and others? Like the sort of digitizing of Islam, like Islam becoming this global online like, “I connect and I’m shaped and formed via social media Muslims who I’m disconnected with.” Can you see a downside to that at all?
Dalia Mogahed:
I definitely see a downside when it’s your only connection to the community when you’re this hyper individual. YouTube. “I do it my Islam through YouTube-type situation,” which is growing. And it got even worse with Covid, where you have a celebrity sermon going on 10 minutes away, but you’re just going to catch it online. And you could go and sit and listen to Sheikh in person, but you’re too lazy and you don’t want to deal with parking or whatever, so you’re just going to watch them on YouTube. Well, that creates this disconnection. And so there is definitely a danger in that. And that’s more on a social level and a psychological and with mental health.
We need physical congregations. We need physical connections with other human beings. There’s a reason why Muslims pray shoulder to shoulder, foot to foot. Because we, on a neuroscience level, our nervous system needs touch and human interactions in real space. So to just rely on sort of digital religious instruction only is terrible, is very, very bad for our community.
And then there’s the danger of who gets the most clicks, it’s very extreme voices. And then not everyone who is not qualified will tell you they’re not qualified, right? They’re not qualified, they have no credentials whatsoever, but they present as if they were authoritative and a scholar and so forth. And so there is that danger of where are you getting your information, where are you getting your opinions, and what is this person’s credentials. So that is all a danger. I don’t think it’s solved by putting politics in the local masjid. I think it’s solved by people being educated on who a scholar is, who they aren’t.
And then the other thing that I think is very important, which we haven’t discussed yet, but I’m going to bring it up, is not only should we know who is a scholar, who is not a scholar. But what is a scholar in our lives? Is a scholar our connection to God? Is he an intermediary and therefore when he has some kind of a scandal, now I’m having a crisis of faith? No, right? A scholar is a resource. They are someone who provides insight and information. But you have your own relationship with God. So when that person falls in your eyes because whatever is revealed about them or whatever they’re doing in their personal life, that should never become a crisis of faith. That should be, “That person is a human being and they’re not perfect and now I’m going to move on and learn from someone else if that needs to be the case. But I’m still connected. My connection is with God, not through this person who now is no longer a perfect person in my eyes, therefore now I have a crisis of faith.”
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I do want to add that it’s not just local imams staying away from politics. I think there’s also tension around certain religious issues that can come up that I think generally speaking, imam steer away from. We had a bit of a conflict in our little mosque community briefly in Pennsylvania just a few months ago, where one of the imams that we have, it’s sort of a rotation, was speaking and he actually said something pretty conservative about wearing the headscarf. He sort of admonished women. There were some people in the space, not necessarily in the prayer space, but in the overall area who weren’t wearing the headscarf and he felt a need to actually admonish them in front of the whole group.
I wrote about this sometime back. I actually interrupted what he was saying and I was like, “You’ve crossed a line.” I didn’t really know him particularly well. And then my mom, who wears the headscarf, also spoke out. So part of our family pretty much said, “Stop. What you’re saying now to this group is not appropriate and we’re not going to stand for it.” And we actually walked out. Anyway, that’s just some little background that what this imam said, I find to be really rare that people step into these issues of how moral or immoral are you if you’re being more conservative or less conservative. I think that’s good because we’re a very diverse religious community, especially here in the US.
I don’t mean diverse just ethnically or geographically or whatever it might be, but we’re also diverse in terms of level of practice. There are a lot of American Muslims… And I want to turn this to you, Dalia, and get your thoughts on it. There are a lot of American Muslims who just are less religiously orthodox or less strict in their observance. There’s even a growing phenomenon of Muslims who will self-identify as Muslim, even if they’re not technically believers. They’ll say, “Oh, I’m culturally Muslim” or “I’m a secular Muslim.”
Dalia Mogahed:
Right.
Shadi Hamid:
I’ve also heard, I remember being somewhat surprised about it at first, atheist Muslim. So someone who will say, “I’m a Muslim, but I don’t believe in God” or something because they’re emphasizing that for them it’s a cultural identity that they’re proud of. And this, I think, is where the American Muslim community is really, I think, at the cutting edge for better or worse. I mean, some people really don’t like this and I think criticize American Muslims for being more religiously lax.
But I’m curious, Dalia, how do you view that? I mean, because we’ve been talking a lot almost under the presumption that American Muslims are properly religiously orthodox Muslims and that their faith practice is what’s fundamentally defining them. But there are American Muslims who for them it’s not really about theology or religion, but it’s about an identity marker that they’re proud of. It’s part of their heritage or culture, but not something that’s actually reflected in their everyday life in terms of observance. How do you sort of make sense of that?
Matthew Kaemingk:
And just for context, we just had a conversation a month ago with Russell Moore about secular evangelicals. These are people who call themselves evangelicals, but they don’t go to church. They’re not really familiar with the tenets of the Christian faith, but they see it largely as a cultural marker, particularly attaching themselves to Donald Trump and populism. And so they call themselves of evangelical-
Shadi Hamid:
They might not even believe in the divinity of Christ. And there’s some really interesting polling about that as well, that being evangelical doesn’t even mean that you have basic credo beliefs about Christ.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, but let’s talk about the cultural Muslim phenomenon, but just to make you aware that this is sort of a larger point of interest for us.
Dalia Mogahed:
Yeah, no good questions. I always do things in terms of comparisons. When you look at surveys of American Muslims compared to American Catholics, American Jews, American Protestants, perhaps less so evangelicals, but mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, Muslim identifying people in America are far more likely to say religion is an important part of their daily life than American Jews for sure, and more so than American Catholics. And perhaps on par… Well, they’re on par actually with evangelicals and more so than mainline Protestants.
Now, that’s one point of data that I think is important. Yes, there are a growing number of Muslims who say they’re Muslim, but they’re just culturally Muslim and it’s not part of their daily life. And you’re right, I’ve met people who say they’re Muslim and they’re atheists, which I was surprised by that. They exist. They exist. And they antinous. They’re not anti-ism. They’re not sort of these “former” Muslims who are sort of at war with the community and at war… They’re not. They’re very positive. They’ll defend Islam, they’ll defend Muslims, but they are themselves on a personal level, their ideology now is more around atheism.
But Muslims are still far more believing than other people in America, other faith communities. A, that’s one thing. They’re far more believing. And Islam is still more important to them or an important part of their daily life more often than in other faith communities where you still have more than 80% who say, “Islam is an important part of my daily life as Muslims” compared to in the 60s. And for Jews it’s in the 30s who say the same about their faith.
The second thing that’s really important is age. So in other faith communities, with perhaps the exception of evangelicals, but most definitely when it comes to the general public, mainland Protestants and Catholics, it’s a very clear age differential where the younger you are, the less likely you are to say that you are religious or you identify with a faith, that religion is an important part of your daily life.
When it comes to Muslims though, that age differential simply doesn’t exist. And this is always a surprise to people, but 18 to 29 year olds are as likely as older people to say religion is an important part of their daily life. So this dying of religion among young people has not happened in the Muslim community at all. There’s literally no difference across age cohorts when it comes to professed religiosity in terms of religion being an important part of your daily life.
Now, frequency of mosque tendency, yes. Younger people are less likely to say they go to a mosque than older people, but yet they’re as likely to say that religion is important to them. So that disconnect says to me mosques are alienating for young people rather than just that they don’t care about religion.
So are there cultural Muslims and so forth? Of course, of course. Not everyone who identifies as being a Muslim is like praying five times a day. That’s absolutely true. But Muslims are still, compared to everyone else for the most part, with the exception of perhaps evangelicals who surpass Muslims in practice, the most practicing of their faith and the most believing, absolutely the most believing in their faith. And we’re not anticipating that changing that much just because the age differential isn’t there as it is with everyone else. I mean, in the general public, young people are like half as likely to even profess their religion as 60 year olds, they’re half as likely. So there is the fastest growing religion in the West is non-affiliated? It’s not Islam. It’s “I don’t believe in anything or at least I don’t associate with any organized religion.”
Shadi Hamid:
But Dalia, isn’t there a concern though that if young Muslims are spending a lot of their time in secularised spaces, because if young Americans overall are increasingly not religious, that sort of affects the general environment that young Muslims, especially in major cities and urban areas, find themselves in. And I think it’s something that I hear from older Muslims on a regular basis, that this sense of secularising drift and a fear that their children and grandchildren are going to sort of be sucked in to this very powerful American engine of assimilation and just being like everyone else and following in the footsteps of American Jews and Catholics who, as you noted, have significantly lower levels of regular practice.
And maybe just as we close here, I’d be curious how much… You’ve raised two or three or-
Dalia Mogahed:
Two.
Shadi Hamid:
Two? Okay. So two, I guess what generation would that be. I forget how the generations work, but Gen Z, I guess. How worried are you? How much have you thought about your two children and then subsequent generations? And as you said earlier, at some point they’re out of the house and they’re at college and then the rest is up to God, so to speak, and then there’s only so much you can do. But how much has the experience of having your own children sort of affected how you view the role of secularisation?
Dalia Mogahed:
So, Shadi, I think that how long it will be before Muslims succumb to the momentum of secularisation that every other faith group has sort of fallen into remains to be seen remains to be seen. I’m not saying that they’re immune, I’m not saying that it won’t happen. It just hasn’t really happened yet to any measurable amount just in terms of how young people compared to older people when it comes to their profess religiosity, how important their faith is to them and so forth. So that’s that.
And also keep in mind that we’ve undergone a very secularised Muslim majority society trend, and you’ve written about this, that has been reversed. So some people are more religious than their grandparents, some people are more religious than their parents. So there is a resurgence of religion in some parts of the world versus the opposite, right? And so there’s that phenomena.
And so I don’t know. I can’t predict the future. I don’t know how long Muslims are going to be able to kind of hold back the dam. I feel like it’s like a dam of like, we’re sort of holding back the river of secularisation from the community. I don’t know how long that dam is going to hold up. But so far it looks like it’s holding up right now.
My children, yes, raising them to be practising Muslims was a huge concern of mine, a huge time commitment, a huge investment in blood, sweat, and tears. I didn’t always think it was going to happen. There were definitely patches of rebellion and scariness, but we’re kind of on the other side of that now, 18 and 24. Alhamdulillah, right? Thank God they’re both still practising Muslim men. So, so far, so good. But it took a lot of work. It took a lot of work.
I actually think that it’s a little easier for me than it was for my parents in that I had a lot more resources. And now people even have more resources. Because when my parents were raising me in the United States, there were no Islamic schools. And then there weren’t very many Muslims around me. I mean, I was one of very few Muslims at my school. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. Now when I go back to Madison, we had one mosque, now we have five in this tiny small college town. There’s a full-time Islamic school that didn’t used to be. There’s places to buy halal meat. All of that didn’t exist. We were sort of completely on our own in the wilderness. And now there’s more resources.
So I think there’s some factors that actually make it easier than it used to be to normalise this thing called being a Muslim in America. There are more camps, there are more English-speaking, American accented preachers. There didn’t used to be. So there’s a lot of ways to be both Muslim and American that feel organic and natural than there were when I was young. So I think there are reasons to be optimistic if your goal is to maintain a Muslim American identity into the next generation.
Shadi Hamid:
Amen to that. That’s a good optimistic note upon which to end that yeah, religion can and perhaps even will survive and prosper under secularising conditions. Not that everyone has to be religious. We don’t want to… To each… Wait, do we really… I want to say to each their own, but I’m not even sure if Matt and I really are into that whole kind of live and let… No, we can live and let live, yeah, to some extent for the most part.
Well, look, this was such a rich conversation, Dalia. I absolutely loved it. Fascinating on so many levels. And honestly, we could have gone on a lot longer. So I just want to thank you for taking the time to join us. And I wanted to thank our listeners and hope you all found this as enjoyable of a conversation as I did.
Dear listeners, if you liked what you heard with Dalia, please do check out our other episodes and also check out our host Comment magazine at comment.org. And we do want to hear from you. You can find us on Twitter at for me @shadihamid and @matthewkaemingk.” Note the Dutch spelling, please. Or you can use the hashtag #zealotspod. And we do keep an eye on that, so do feel free to say hello and tell us what you thought. You can also send us an email at zealots@comment.org.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And thanks as well to our sponsor Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment magazine, produced by Allie Crummy. Audience strategy by Matt Crummy with editorial direction by Anne Snyder. Until next time, I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
And I’m Shadi Hamid. Thanks so much for joining us.
Matthew Kaemingk:
See you.
