I recently told my parents that I regret the hundreds of pepperoni pizza slices I passed on throughout the ’90s. All the birthday parties, last day of school parties, middle school play cast parties — “I grieve the loss of the flavors I never had!” I exclaimed. Their sympathies typically fall short of my emotional needs.
My parents, Egyptian immigrants, raised my sister and me in the Muslim faith. We memorized passages of the Quran, visited the mosque and, yes, abstained from pork due to the association between its consumption and an eternity in hell. This was particularly painful to me because Michelangelo, my favorite “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” character, loved pepperoni pizza.
Now, as a nearly 40-year-old man, I’m not sure I’d call myself a “believer” in Islam — hence the regret — but I still feel like a Muslim.
Because, even if I turned out to be a pepperoni-eating heathen, I still huddled with my wife and led us in the recitation of my mental catalog of Quran passages before she was rolled into the operating room for her cesarean section. I still pray two rakat (prostrations) before bed if I’m feeling a little lost, or put on audio from the holy book when I can’t sleep.
That’s why I bristle when non-Muslim friends push back on my identification as a Muslim with smug reminders of lifestyle choices like drinking alcohol, or eating bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches. These experiences came to mind when I watched Tommy Teepell, a former staffer for far-right Sen. Josh Hawley, ask the Democrats’ then-nominee for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. These kinds of comments stem from the same American propensity to replace the character, individuality and complexity of the marginalized with their identity.
But El-Sayed is riding last week’s blue wave to Congress as the soon-to-be first Muslim senator in history, while Teepell’s plan backfired as a blatantly racist stunt that emphasized labels over values. If anything, Teepell’s far-right positions on women’s rights, the LGBTQ+ community, and the fusion of church and state qualify him as an ideal recruit for the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, El-Sayed was onto something when he retorted, “Have you disavowed them?”
The recent successes of Muslim progressive candidates like El-Sayed, Adam Hamawy in New Jersey and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are symptoms of the slow death of identity politics in America. Muslims candidates and politicians on the left do not primarily associate themselves with their faith, nor do they solely adopt policies that are sanctioned by Islam. More importantly, they are just as unbothered by their prospects of electability with the average American as they are with their credibility among fellow Muslims. For example, Abdul El-Sayed, Rashida Tlaib and Zohran Mamdani are all vocal supporters of transgender rights. But these politicians never disavow their religion either. For someone like Abdul El-Sayed, it’s not so much “I’m Muslim, but”; it’s “I’m Muslim, and.” El-Sayed is Muslim and, to quote his campaign message, wants to “get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, and pass Medicare for All.” For Hamawy, the message was, simply, “healthcare not bombs.” They are the sole owners of their relationship with their faith.
Growing up Muslim, there was no Tlaib, El-Sayed or Mamdani. I felt stuck between what felt like the acceptable extremes of Muslim representation. Celebrated newscasters like Hoda Kotb, who anglicized my own last name, sterilized themselves to assimilate, while the Islamic Society of Baltimore’s monolithic representation of Islam was celebrated by mainstream Democrats when Barack Obama paid them a visit in 2016.
It wasn’t until Muslim, Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib’s election in 2018 that I saw a path forward. Tlaib was the first prominent Muslim figure to focus on her community and progressive values first and her religion and heritage second, without ever compromising on any of it. Tlaib didn’t just validate my desire to coalesce my political positions around values rather than identity, but she opened the door for a new sense of ownership of my Muslim identity.
I think about this when I look at the framed photo of Tlaib on our wall from the time she remained seated in Congress, donning her keffiyeh and holding a sign that read “guilty of genocide,” amid a sea of standing colleagues smacking their hands together in exorbitant praise for Benjamin Netanyahu. This was a rare intersection of her identity and values, a reminder that the two can be messy, but that it’s up to us to understand the relationship between them. It is that sense of ownership that allows us to transcend our labels and reclaim our humanity, a phenomenon a growing number of Americans seem to appreciate.