The rising power of American Muslims
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Is power starting to shift for American Muslims? On a political level, Muslims like Minnesota Representative Elan Omar, New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani, and Michigan Senate Hopeful Abdul El-Sayed are either coming into power, attracting notice, or both. And on a cultural level, New York Magazine and The Guardian have reported on flourishing ecosystems of cafes, magazines, dance nights, meetups, and readings for Muslims andor people with heritage from the Swana region, meaning Southwest Asia and North Africa. This is happening especially in New York, but these meetups and groups are popping up in cities like LA and Chicago too. These places have had vibrant Muslim or Swana communities. for longer than they've been in the headlines, but the mainstream visibility is significant.
Quick note before we go any further. Muslim and swana are not the same thing, but they have a lot of overlap. I'm using Muslim here because we'll be talking a lot about Islamophobia, but Islamophobia affects a lot of people from the Swana region, whether they're Muslim or not. And they're also part of this story. So, on the one hand, this swell of Muslims coming up in politics and building cultural institutions is not surprising. There are over 4 million Muslims in America. On the other hand, this shift is pretty significant if you look at surveys. You study history, you pay attention now, and you see how deeply Islamophobia and racism are rooted in our culture. So I wanted to get deeper into what's changed for American Muslims in recent years.
Also, let's stay the same. What does it mean that Muslims are accruing a little more political and cultural capital now? And that non-Muslims are noticing.
What is the new era of cultural institutions emerging for American Muslims?
To get deeper into it, I'm joined by Dr. Donna Austin, cultural anthropologist. Welcome Donna. Thank you, I'm happy to be here, Brittany. So happy to have you. And I'm also joined today by Dr. Tazin Ali, scholar of Islam in America and Associate Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Welcome back, Tazeen. Thanks so much for having me. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
Okay, so I first wanted to talk about the culture aspect, to talk more about the cafes and meetups and dance nights connecting Muslims andor people of Swaned descent together in some cities. There's been a lot of focus on how that looks in New York because it's very robust here where I live. But I'm wondering if you've seen that at all elsewhere.
Oh, absolutely. I think we're seeing it all over the US. Where I live in St. Louis, there's also the cropping up of Yemeni coffee shops. We just got uh Muslims of the world M O TW Cafe opening. It's happening all over the country. The culture, the communities, they're not new. So Swana communities, Muslim communities have Been a part of the United States for a very long time. Immigrants have always operated family-run groceries and cafes and restaurants that were not just businesses, but really a part of community infrastructure. There were places where people were gathering and speaking their languages and passing on culture to the next generation. And so I think it's not suddenly emerging out of the ground, but the scale and the style of its public visibility, I think these spaces were.
once peripheral and now they have this mainstream appeal in in especially the urban centers that you're naming. So what We may have considered like the modest neighborhood restaurant we might call like a hole in the wall has suddenly manifested into something that's much more commercially mainstream.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:03
2
What is the new era of cultural institutions emerging for American Muslims?
2:03–7:02
3
How are Muslim‑American politicians like Ilhan Omar and Zohran Mamdani reshaping political power?
7:02–12:34
4
Why does the visibility of Muslim‑run cafés, magazines, and events matter for mainstream America?
12:34–19:26
5
How did post‑9/11 policies intensify Islamophobia and affect Muslim community strategies?
19:26–26:08
6
What role does race—and the Black‑White binary—play in the experiences of SWANA and Muslim Americans?
26:08–32:58
7
How has the Gaza conflict shifted public opinion and political engagement among American Muslims?
32:58–37:08