Riz Ahmed

speaker

1,209 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 10 Jun

Riz Ahmed’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Fresh Air · Riz Ahmed is chasing acceptance in 'Bait' · 23 Mar 2026 podcast

I was like, this is crazy.

How do I make sense of this?

And comedy is really my first love, you know.

So I decided to kind of write this satirical rap song.

It did kind of like unofficially.

There was a sense amongst radio DJs that they cannot play it because it's too politically sensitive.

Let me tell you, the best thing you can do to an artist who's trying to start out and get some attention for their work is ban their work.

This is in the era of MySpace that the song very quickly went very viral, and it gave me a lot of confidence and excitement about, wow, maybe I can... If I say the thing that I feel but that no one else is maybe saying, then that is...

I can really travel, you know?

I feel that...

the poetic metaphor of love and relationship and longing is something that I grew up around in the tradition of Urdu poetry and then reading it and studying it a little bit more as an adult.

You know, a lot of Sufi poetry, if you look at Rumi or if you look at Ghalib or if you look at, you know, Ghazal writing from South Asia, the Middle East, from Iran, is often love poetry.

And love is used as a metaphor and the relationship and the beloved is a metaphor for God.

but it can also be used as a metaphor for other things.

So I kind of feel like it's something that I wanted to borrow from that poetic tradition.

And in fact, the breakup, it has an alternative title in brackets, which is Shikwa.

And Shikwa means complaint.

And that's because a very famous poem by Muhammad Iqbal, he has a famous poem called Shikwa and then Jawabi Shikwa, which is complaint and response to complaint.

And in that he's actually complaining to God saying, God, you've forsaken us as Muslims.

Like, you know, we've been colonized and destroyed and wrecked.

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