"I feel most Muslim when I am stunned by a moment of clarity within my own contradictions."

Writes Hanif Abdurraqub, in "Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil Are in on the Joke/What it feels like to laugh when the world expects you to disappear" (The New Yorker).

Beyond whatever disconnects may exist in my faith practice, I still feel deeply connected to the ummah—the body, the community—and the responsibilities that this connection carries. A Hadith that I love, and which underpins many of my actions, states that “the believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.”...

I have been talking with my Muslim friends about the specific brand of Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment that has recently arisen—or re-arisen, depending on how one chooses to look at it—in America. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani... will almost certainly.... have to answer the same questions, repeatedly, about whether he’s antisemitic and about his plans to address the safety of Jewish New Yorkers (which he has detailed at length). But there’s no framework for any kind of parallel discussion about the fears or the safety of Muslim New Yorkers. Before the primary, a pro-Cuomo pac prepared a mailer that appeared to thicken and lengthen Mamdani’s beard, and yet Andrew Cuomo was not repeatedly asked questions about how he might keep Muslims safe or about the dialogue he’s having with Muslim leaders. I’m not necessarily saying that there should be pressure on Mamdani’s opponents to answer these questions—what I am saying is that there’s not even a runway upon which such an inquiry could take off. It’s as if there’s an entire part of the population that remains invisible until feared. 

I tend to find Islamophobia unspectacular.... Sometimes it’s funny, this Muslim Panic, or the absurdity of it circles back to a kind of comedy.... There is another Hadith that I cherish. In it, a prophet who is delivering a sermon says, “Paradise and Hellfire were shown to me, and I have never seen such good and evil as I have today. If you knew what I know, you would laugh little and weep often.”...