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Conversation with Hussein Rashid

Daniel Pawlus: It’s great to be with Hussein Rashid here in New York, who is a self-described, proud New Yorker and Muslim. Thanks for joining us today. Hussein, you have a fascinating background in academia—your work and your undergraduate work at Columbia University and with Harvard Divinity School. How does that background of theology help you to talk about commonalities among faith communities, especially when you’re in the interfaith space?

Hussein Rashid: To me, it’s not just my education but it’s my life experience. I grew up in Queens, New York: Rego Park, Elmhurst and Forest Hills. For people outside of New York you may not realize, but Forest Hills was, and in a sense still is, one of the most diverse Jewish communities outside of Israel. And so I had friends who were…I bought my comic books from an Iranian Jew; my favorite restaurant was run by a Bukharan Jew; my best friend growing up was an Ashkenazi Jew, an Eastern European Jew; and our concerts we went to were Sephardic Jews, you know, the Middle Eastern Jews who were running this music. So that was sort of the environment that helped me appreciate that you could have these different interpretations of a religion, you can have these different ethnicities of a religion, but when it came time to pray, you all prayed together. And that really helped me understand my Islam, when I think back, how formative that was in understanding, that sort of living together in difference.

And so when I went on to the theological degree, for me it was saying I need to understand how other faith traditions manage difference but also bring it back into my own tradition, because it was there. We couldn’t all go on Hajj if we didn’t all see eye-to-eye on something. And so for me, how do we make that a lived reality in America? So it is that life experience and it’s that academic experience and it’s the community of people I work with across faith traditions and within Muslim traditions that I think allow me to see that spread and allow me to think, well, what does it mean to be religiously Muslim and loyally American? I don’t see those in conflict, but how do I articulate that to people who do see that as being in conflict?

Daniel Pawlus: Can you tell me a little bit about your research into the representation of Muslims and the self-representations of Muslims in America that you’re doing?

Hussein Rashid: Yeah. As you said, my research is about the representation and self-representation of Muslims in American popular culture. I’m really interested in….you know, policy describes Muslims as one way and the popular culture, where people are really learning about Islam and Muslims, describes Muslims in another way. And Muslims are a part of the American landscape so how do we define our own definitions? I started with looking at music and looking at Muslim artists and hip-hop and jazz and electronica and seeing how they were trying to understand their religious identity through artistic creation and how they saw themselves fitting into the American landscape. Now I’m looking at the blogosphere, “blogIslam,” as I call it, the American Muslim blogging community and how they’re attempting to—these bloggers are attempting to—create a Muslim community, Muslim American community, as well. I’m both educating non-Muslims and Muslims themselves about what it means to be American and religious at the same time.

Daniel Pawlus: As associate editor for Religion Dispatches, I’d love for you to share with us a little bit about the website, what kind of content exists there and what people might find when they come to explore it a bit.

Hussein Rashid: Religion Dispatches—it’s a product I’m very, very proud to be associated with—is a project that launched several years ago as a way to talk about religion in America, in American culture. You know, part of the reason I was drawn to it is I believe that America is one of the most religious countries in the developed world, but at the same time we have one of the worst vocabularies to talk about religion because the two things you can’t talk about in polite company are politics and religion. And those seem to be the two things that really seem to define everything in this country! So for me, for Religion Dispatches to offer the opportunity to say lets build that vocabulary, let’s talk more intelligently about religion, so it allows me to put on and combine my academic hat and my activist hat quite nicely, I think. It lets me say, okay, this is what it means to be a Muslim as an academic and this is why I think that the way we talk about Muslims or Islam in America is a problem and that sort of bridges that academic/activist line for me. My activist voice appears in other places but Religion Dispatches gives me that happy medium.

Daniel Pawlus: Since 9/11, it seems as though the Muslim American community has perhaps been asked to define their own faith identity a little bit more. Do you think that’s consistent or accurate in terms of what’s been going on over the last decade?

Hussein Rashid: I think that after September 11th, Muslims across the board are being forced to be representatives in the faith that people of other traditions are not. My example is, if you stop a Catholic on the street and ask them to explain the concept of the Trinity, you’re probably not going to get a definitive answer. But every time you stop a Muslim on the street, they’re expected to know 1,400 years of history, theology, law, current political events, and I think that’s problematic.

The two places that I felt most comfortable traveling after September 11th were the two places that were hit directly by the attacks: New York City and Washington, DC. And I think it’s because both of these cities have large Muslim populations. People recognize these Muslim populations, recognize that Muslims were victims during those attacks, continue to be victims after those attacks. And I don’t think that. . .when New York and Washington moved forward, the way we moved forward was to say we are New Yorkers or we are Washingtonians and we’ll build up from there. I think the rest of the country had a hard time with that because of knowing a Muslim, because it was a threat that, “Are we next?” I think that a lot of the healing that we did, the rest of the country couldn’t relate to.

But I think that one of the things that has come out of it for the Muslim American community that has been positive is that, amongst second generation immigrants and third generation immigrants, a lot of the divisions that kept our parents generation apart have really been erased. Not that we don’t hold on to our identities, but we want to do better work. So it doesn’t matter if your Sunni or Shi’a, whether you’re Arab or South Asian or African American, that there is a project of making an American Islam that we are very much actively engaged with and that work has gained more prominence. I think people are now starting to realize that. The joke used to be the imam, the priest and the rabbi walk into a bar. The funny part was not the imam walking into the bar, but that the imam would be with the priest and the rabbi. But I think this idea that the imam is not necessarily the same as the priest and the rabbi. We’re now getting seminaries like Hartford Seminary, Zaytuna College, Yale is interested in this space, Claremont Theological Seminary is interested in this space, and creating the American imam who is essentially an academic like a priest and a rabbi. But really the better partner is not necessarily the imam, but is the academic like myself who does theology, who can sit with the priest and the rabbi and have those conversations. I think we’re seeing that acknowledgement in the American society, as well.

Daniel Pawlus: Hussein, I’m sure we could spend a great deal of time together, but I’d like to close out our time today by asking you how your specific faith tradition really informs your work and how you feel your work is really going to impact the next generation?

Hussein Rashid: When I think about my religious tradition, I look at the Koran like any scripture as being full of ambiguities, contradictions and tensions within itself. And to me being religious is being comfortable with those tensions and creating something out of that. I look to the Koran as that source of that ambiguity. I look at the prophetic role model as a way to say this is how the Prophet lived with these ambiguities and know that there is a moral message, and I look to the guidance of my imams—I’m Shi’a—the guidance of the imams as descendants of the prophets, to say this is what it means to lead a moral and ethical life and to build that better community. For me, the ultimate goal is to build a better and more just society not only for my children but for everybody’s children.

 

Conversation with Manya Brachear

Lillian Daniel: We welcome Manya Brachear. Manya, we know that in Chicago we’re really very fortunate, but in a minority in that we have a strong newspaper that has a religion reporter covering that beat. Can you tell us something about your life as a reporter and what a week looks like for you?

Daniel Pawlus: The day to day, I guess, we’re curious about. We saw the overview there and how you were inspired, but how do you go deeper?

Lillian Daniel: What are you doing in that cubicle?

Manya Brachear: Well, no offense to my colleagues who cover cops or transportation or other beats, but on the religion beat I feel like I wake up every morning and try to figure out ways to go deeper, to try to get to the “why,” what motivates the people that I might have talked to the day before, what really is behind that and try to explain that to readers. And, of course I do breaking news. There’s breaking news, especially in Chicago, on the religion beat where religion is practically just like covering politics or sports. There are breaking news stories that you have to jump on and turn around quickly. But I really try to focus every day on one particular story and just really try to explore something in depth.

Daniel Pawlus: On a practical level, you and I have had conversations in my other role at IFYC to try to give you information that might be of interest for a story that you’re working on. You have to vet things in a certain way, right? You work with an editor. You don’t get to write anything you want.

Manya Brachear: Right.

Daniel Pawlus: And you have certain criteria that you’re looking for. So I don’t want to be too inside baseball here, but maybe for the folks that are watching, how does that work for you?

Manya Brachear: I’m fortunate in that my editor actually gives me a lot of autonomy because I’m a specialist, right? I’m a religion reporter and nobody else in the newsroom wants that job! It’s a touchy, sensitive topic. I think Hussein mentioned in his segment that there are things you don’t talk about: religion and politics. I would add baseball to that!

Lillian Daniel: In Chicago.

Manya Brachear: In Chicago, especially. But, yeah, nobody wants to talk about religion. So on one level, my job is to get people to talk about it. First you have to get people to actually break down that barrier and talk, and then really talk honestly and try to explain their thoughts to you. People just don’t particularly want that job, especially if they don’t have a religious background of their own. They might not get it necessarily. So they don’t typically…religion writing is not a really coveted beat in the newsroom. People are really glad that I’ve taken it on.

Daniel Pawlus: We live in the most dynamic time when the things are happening in the name of religion around the country and around the world. So I would think, you are one of the privileged few in a major market to have a great job. Do you want to talk a little about some of your colleagues or how you’ve seen this kind of shrink a little bit? How important is it to have someone covering religion in a market, to address and be able to pivot off of these current events like you’re talking about?

Manya Brachear: Yeah. I think it’s important no matter what size market you’re in. Religion is a motivator; it’s a driver of people across this country, around this globe. And so I think having someone in a newsroom who understands religion, who gets it, who doesn’t mind having those sensitive, touchy conversations is very important. It’s important for different reasons, though, depending on the market. There are smaller markets where people are very insular, where they understand their religion quite well but they don’t understand others or they are very stubborn and they don’t want to understand others. So they need a reporter for their local media organization—newspaper, television stations, you name it—who can try to get them to understand, who can explain those types of things to them. In Chicago, religion is such a player. I mean it’s such a part of the landscape here and it’s so incredibly diverse. So I think it’s important to have a religion reporter in the newsroom who’s on top of what’s hopping in Chicago.

Lillian Daniel: Manya, it used to be in the Chicago Tribune there was a religion page or religion section and you’d go there for the information on that. If you didn’t want to hear about it, you could avoid it. Now we don’t have one. What happened?

Manya Brachear: Right. So like a lot of major newspapers, they are cutting their religion writer. Fortunately, the Tribune kept a religion writer on staff but they did cut the religion section in terms of that was one way in which it redesigned and downsized. I actually wasn’t all that disappointed. I thought that the people who read that religion page, it was kind of like preaching to the choir. They were the people who were interested in religion already, had a curiosity, a natural curiosity about other faiths and what other communities were doing. If they weren’t interested in religion, if they were quite comfortable in their own viewpoints and didn’t really want to learn much they just didn’t read the religion page. So I’m a big fan of integrating religion stories into the main pages of the newspaper, which is, of course, now de facto what has to happen at the Tribune. I’m a big fan of that because it gets people who are reading the news that they might ordinarily care about and then all of the sudden they scan a religion headline and they are almost forced to read it.

Daniel Pawlus: That’s fascinating because I think you’re suggesting—correct me if I’m wrong—that it used to be packaged in a very separate way. Right? If you are interested in religion then here’s where you’ll find it.

Manya Brachear: Right. Exactly.

Daniel Pawlus: That was, in fact, a disservice in some ways because the integration wasn’t happening for people. Do you think people are seeing the larger connects now? We’re going to talk about some of the headlines that you’re covering. By that integration model, are people—I don’t mean to get too in the weeds here— are people seeing the connection between current events, world events and the role that religion plays in that?

Manya Brachear: I think they are. It’s not going to happen overnight. But, yeah, I think people who wouldn’t ordinarily read religion stories are reading them. Sometimes I get notes from readers saying, “Why was this a story? Why did you write about this?” And I actually turn around and explain to them why I wrote about it and this is why you should care about this. So I think it is reaching an audience that wouldn’t ordinarily be reached and I think that will increase over time.

Lillian Daniel: So there seems to be in the country a group of people that are increasingly suspicious of religion in general and think that if we could remove religion from public discourse we would remove eighty percent of our conflict and the world’s problems. You saw some of this come out in the memorial celebration on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 when the religious community was not included in the memorial. What did you make of that question?

Manya Brachear: It’s interesting. I just listened to what you just said, “removing it from the public discourse,” but that doesn’t remove it from life here on Earth.

Lillian Daniel: Everybody was talking about its absence.

Manya Brachear: Right. Right. I think that when I watched that ceremony on Sunday morning, they did quote scripture, they did have some religious reflections in the ceremony, which actually surprised me and I thought, well, what was all the fuss about because they had incorporated religion here into the ceremony. They didn’t have religious clergy included in the ceremony. And I think that Mayor Bloomberg made the decision to let religious clergy do their own thing in their own environment and let this be a more universal type, secular, if you will, type of ceremony so that people weren’t offended because there is a contingent out there that is not religious. The atheists, agnostics, secularists, humanists, whatever they call themselves, they don’t necessarily think God has or should play a role in the public square and in the public discourse. That doesn’t mean that they’re not reflective. But it also doesn’t mean that religion has to be included in everything, in every public event. I think that the way that that was handled was actually pretty appropriate. They incorporated scripture—you could tune it in, you could tune it out—but they didn’t offend any particular faith community where that might have been a risk.

Daniel Pawlus: So let’s dive into the headlines a little bit, okay? I looked at the recent articles that you’ve written and you are a Chicago reporter so you’re covering the Chicago scene. I’m seeing some themes there: the Catholic Church, gay rights happening in the Muslim community. Do you feel like you’re constantly being pulled in those directions and trying to find an interesting personal angle in? Good journalism is always about finding that interesting perspective, right? Is it constraining to you or is it just what the beat is?

Manya Brachear: I appreciate constraints sometimes because the religious landscape here is so wide and the number of stories I could do is just endless. And there are only 24 hours in a day, sadly, I’m reminded every day. So actually the constraints are kind of nice. When something happens in the news, okay, that’s what I’m going to focus on and I’m going to talk about where religion plays a role, how is it motivating here, and how is it integrated into this situation.

Lillian Daniel: What’s one of the surprising, interesting stories that you’ve covered in the religious landscape, one we may not have heard of?

Manya Brachear: The one that comes to mind is, I would say, after 9/11, after the tenth anniversary…I should say before the tenth anniversary. I went in search of Muslims in the Chicago area who were suffering anxiety and nervousness, they were afraid that all of this horrible tension that surfaced right after 9/11 was going to be stirred up again at the tenth anniversary. I went out in search of that because I wanted to illustrate that for readers. Again, as Hussein said, there were people who were victimized by 9/11 and there are people who are still victimized today. But, Eboo Patel, who guest hosts this show sometimes, told me you’re not going to find it. You’re going to find an amazing resilience, especially in the Chicago Muslim community and he was completely right.

I found a film maker who had invested his own personal savings that he and his wife had put aside for a new house to make a film about fasting and football, to explain this whole tradition of Ramadan and how these very All-American young men who played football in Dearborn, Michigan observed that tradition of a Ramadan fast for thirty days and still practiced football and play this all-American game. I found in the course of my reporting Rohina Malik, who does the reflections on this show, a playwright who decided that she was going to tell Muslim stories on stage and has done so, so eloquently. It’s that resilience that, I think, I found to be quite honestly surprising and that I think readers may have found surprising, as well.

Daniel Pawlus: Manya, you’re on the front lines every day with this. Are you hopeful with what’s going on, because there is a lot of divisiveness out there, especially in the news that love to play to those polar opposites? On a personal level and a professional level, how would you answer that? Are you hopeful about what you’re seeing?

Manya Brachear: I’m always hopeful, whether it’s part of my nature. And I think if people…yes, I’m very hopeful. I’m hopeful for journalism because journalism is seeing some kind of tumultuous changes and sometimes disheartening changes. But, yeah, I’m hopeful for the religion world as well, that people will read quality information, will soak it up, take it to heart and behave.

Lillian Daniel: Thank you so much for keeping us informed here in Chicago and for the work that you do.

Manya Brachear: Thank you.

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