Salaam all,
A few months ago I setup an account on twitter and grabbed the muslims4joe domain because I thought that we would need to eventually make a case to the Muslim American community to get behind Joe, since most of the community was still pining for Bernie. As it turned out, 200k dead Americans later was just icing on the cake of Trump being Trump, so I guess there isn’t that much need to motivate the community as there was before. However, I am a veteran of 2000 — we lost the official vote count by 537 votes there, so the Muslim community could have delivered the election to Gore. We have more influence than we think we do — especially since this year MI is a must-win state, and GA and AZ are in play. The potential gains this year mean that we have to step up.
I will probably start collecting content about Joe and the Muslim community again and publishing it so we have a nice record — and a way to hold Joe accountable as well. However, my interest is now more focused on, what exactly does the Muslim American community itself need? What is our identity?
We certainly do have our pundits — Wajahat Ali, Deasn Obediallah, Hasan Minhaj, etc. — but in many ways our political identity often feels like an appendage to the progressive movement as a whole. I personally have stopped identifying as a progressive lately. I have been AWOL from DKos for a few years while I blogged elsewhere but I would like to start some conversations about our political identity here, if anyone would like to join me.
At any rate, lets talk about stuff. Would love to hear your thoughts on this basic question for starters: what are the issues that we, as a politically active Muslim American community, should prioritize? What are our issues? And how do we factor in our faith to reconcile it with our liberal and progressive allies?
I’d also like to share this link about Catholics in the NYT that I think is very highly relevant to our experience as well. I Will post excerpts in the comment thread.
