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So even if you hate it I still rap my hijab Wrap my hijab Wrap my hijab wrap Rap my hijab Swagging my hijabi Swagging my hijabi Swagging Swag in my hijabi Me and my hijabi ladies we was born in the 80s so pretty like the Euphrates and party like some Kuwaitis Deeper than some diplomas Current like some hot yoga Taking back the misnomers and teleporting through trauma Teleporting through trauma Teleporting through trauma I've.

B (12:29)

Been stacking my karma that is Mona Haydar, a Syrian American rapper, poet and activist whose work blends spirituality, feminism and social justice. She was born in Saudi Arabia she was raised in Flint, Michigan and that was a clip from her 2017 viral hit Hijabi or Rap My Hijab and I'll come back to this and I want to note off the top that one has to work harder as a white commentator to survey and understand progressive, radical or revolutionary Muslim thought. If one is writing in English within reach of American news sources, one has been inundated with decades of Islamophobic rhetoric and framing that relentlessly characterize the Muslim world as uniformly backward and incorrigibly violent or terroristic by nature as opposed to in rebellious and agency seeking response to imperialism. I was in my 50s before I learned that there is a vibrant tradition of Islamic socialism. Now often this isn't so much Sam Harris style explicit as the result of liberal or mainstream gatekeep on information sources. One recent example I can give is that reporters at Jacobin magazine studied MSNBC's coverage of Gaza over a six month period in 2024. One of the things they did is they reviewed the guest list for Morning Joe, which attracts up to a million live viewers every day, including at that time Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other top Democrat officials who watch the show religiously. In the lead up to the 2024 election. As part of taking the pulse of current events, Jacobin found that when it came to segments on Gaza, Joe and Micah did not talk to a single Palestinian guest during that entire six month period. But this is changing and quickly, and one driver is the growing visibility of Muslim student associations joining forces with Jewish anti Zionist groups in the campus protest efforts that surged the to their peak in the spring of 2024. On my other podcast I interviewed Muslim organizer Sarah Rasik from the U of T encampments here in Toronto and she gave a rich description of the ecumenical rituals that gave the protests grounding and momentum. The Jewish students hosted seders for all campers and the Muslim students invited their fellows to Friday prayer. A more globally visible shift for the portrayal of Muslims is the rise of Zoran Mamdani, whose campaign has really exploded the culture war fiction of a singular Muslim politics. He embodies a lineage shaped by art scholarship, anti colonial struggle and urban material politics. Through the films of his mother Mira ner, and the scholarship of his father, Mahmoud Zoran's South Asian and Muslim heritage is dynamic. It's internally complex. It's inseparable from history, power and class considerations. I think that for a lot of Americans, those reels of Mamdani walking Manhattan's neighborhoods for grounding, housing, transit health care, Gaza and queer safety provided a new view that Muslim political expression can be plural, modern and materially grounded, not reducible to religiosity or foreign policy. Loyalty tests Mamdani's refusal to perform the good Muslim script as defined by his father, Mahmoud, in compliance with US Empire or Israeli policy exposes how culture war discourse erases Muslim agency by treating a poorly understood faith as destiny rather than as a language used for diverse political ends. Now back to Mona Heydar. She's 37. She got her artistic start performing Arabic poetry at open mics as a teen in Flint, where she hung out with the black spoken word community there. And in 2018 she completed an MA in Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, studying under the Reverend Dr. James cone, who is the founder of Black Liberation Theology. Now for those of you who recall my episodes on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Union Theological was where his life and theology got turned around and radicalized back in 1935 and then influenced his entire promotion of the Confessing Church movement back in Nazi Germany. Haydar's last decade has focused on public theology, chaplaincy, artistic and cultural outreach projects like she had in 2016. She set up this stand in front of Cambridge campus with her husband and it was called Ask a Muslim and she put out coffee and donuts and the whole thing was this effort to generate just open conversations between Muslims and non Muslims. And this was with her husband and it was during a spike of media attachment attention directed at Muslims prompted by tragedies like the massacre at San Bernardino. She told People magazine at that time, quote, I'm in deep mourning for the loss of life and violence and for the continued hijacking of my religion. It's so heartbreaking and furthers our drive to wholeheartedly stand up against any and all acts of violence, no matter the perpetrators. Our Ask a Muslim project was us standing up to ISIS and their sick and twisted understanding of what Islam teaches. Anti violence and pro justice acts of love are a part of my path and work in the world as a Muslim. As Americans, we have to stand up to dog whistle politics and the fear mongering rhetoric that separates us. Acts of violence make it all the more obvious that those of us who believe in love need to work even harder to counter hate and violence to manifest our more beautiful world. Unquote. Now with Robbins, her husband, she went on to film something called the Great American Muslim Road Trip for PBS in 2022. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to it now by the way Robbins is a Muslim convert and a jazz drummer, and he has this whole argument that the reason that black American Muslims, a lot of them converts themselves, rose to prominence in modern jazz because Muslim worship, in his view, is this perpetual balance between rules and improvisation. So that's very cool, and I'd like to learn more about that at some point. Now, across songs and interviews, Haydar presents Islam as a chosen pluralistic devotion that women can own, but also, contra to fundamentalist streams, can find public moral authority within. But not because Western liberalism gives her permission. Quote, even if you hate it, I still wrap my hijab. She sings, I'm not your oppressed woman. In 2017, she quipped to Marie Claire. It's really entertaining to me that the music has created this bridge between the alt right, white and conservative Muslim communities. The alt right says she's a terrorist, a mouthpiece for isis. We hate her. Conservative Muslims say she's not even Muslim. Look at this liberal feminist. She's watering down everything we believe in. She's pandering to heathens. We hate her. Suddenly these communities have this shared love of hating me. I think it's fabulous. Now, I'm pretty ignorant in this zone, but I know enough to know there are many Muslim influencers and mutual aid groups out there that I could profile with more time and study, and I intend to keep up with that project. I'm focusing here on Haydar because three things stood out to me when her page came across my Instagram feed, and the first thing I saw was a story she posted that I didn't capture. But it was in the week that Trump allowed SNAP benefits to lapse, and she went onto her feed to ask her almost 100,000 followers who are Muslim to figure out how they could quickly mobilize mosques as food banks, appealing to the notion of ummah, or the global spiritual nation of mutual aid in the Muslim Imaginarium. From there, I found her pro Palestine and anti genocide work. She's writing, she's singing, she's speaking at protests. The focus is always on decolonization. But thirdly, I also found her public chaplaincy sermons to her fellow Muslims filmed in selfie style in her home or her car. And the subjects range from existential, as in the value of trusting in the goodness of God on the path to social justice, to logistical tips for women who are Muslim who want to date and they want to have the most respectful and dignified experience in finding a mate. But then I noticed something else that was interesting. In one of her videos. She fielded a question from a viewer about quantum entanglement, and then she went to her Quran and she found a verse to speak to the interconnection of all things. Now on this podcast, this sort of thing usually activates some heavy side eye a progressive using science type terminology to validate a progressive reading of a medieval text for spiritual reasons. I mean, we know that this has many bad applications, but this is the first time I've heard New Age tropes providing theological support for decolonial and anti genocide politics. Marianne Williamson at times comes close to this, but then she's got this whole emphasis on miracles that just really tips the scale toward the magical. Haydar's theology of interconnectedness is really focused on Community Bonds. Part 3 Pope Leo finally, and to follow up on some earlier predictions, including notes on his first encyclical delexite on loving the poor, it's increasingly clear that Pope Leo will be a thorn in the side of the Trump administration for the foreseeable, as he calls on U.S. catholics, who make up about 20% of the population, to think carefully about what their faith means and how consistent or hypocritical they are as they evaluate the progress of fascism. The first direct political intervention he makes comes in September of 2025 in a news scrum outside his residence in Rome, in which he remarked, quote, someone who says I am against abortion but am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States. I don't know if that's pro life, unquote. In November, he continued with his comments on ice, asserting that migrants were being treated in a manner that was extremely disrespectful. He urged Catholics to work for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with dignity that they have. In December, Reuters reported that at least 10 of Leo's first 13 U.S. bishop selections had publicly called for better treatment of immigrants or had criticized the administration's approach. One notable case was his replacement of the conservative Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who led prayers at both Trump inaugurations with Bishop Ronald Hicks as archbishop of New York. Now Hicks is a fellow Chicagoan of Leo's, but he's a Cubs fan, not a White Sox fan. But like Leo, Hicks spent years in Latin America El Salvador, to be precise, and he's not a social media guy. But he has spoken out about the importance of welcoming migrants and upholding human dignity, and he endorsed a viral U.S. conference of Catholic Bishops message condemning ICE raids and the climate of fear around immigration enforcement. Dolan signed the statement as well, but he didn't publicly endorse it. Now with regard to Venezuela, Leo grabbed the mic before the fires in Caracas were even out. To say we must not delay in overcoming violence and embarking on paths of justice and peace while guaranteeing the country's sovereignty and the good of the beloved Venezuelan people must prevail over every other consideration. Now he's going to have to be very persuasive, especially in the face of pro maga bishops in the UCCB like Robert Barron of Minnesota, who tweeted out the following roundup of many of my subjects today to his 400,000 plus ex followers. Barron, who like Dolan has lent his voice to many Trump events, is responding to Mamdani's inauguration in the following quote There was a line from Zoran Mamdani's inaugural address yesterday that took my breath away. He said he intended to replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people in the last century. By the way, he's quoting from the Black Book of Communism, which is statistically very dodgy. Many of its theses have been debunked. But anyway, that's another issue, he goes on. Socialist and communist forms of government around the world today Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, et cetera are disastrous. Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy, which people like Mehr Mamdani caricature as rugged individualism. In fact, it is the economic system that is based upon the rights, freedom and dignity of the human person. For God's sake, spare me the warmth of collectivism. Now a lot of us Catholics agree with Barron, and so we'll have to see whether they remain a majority as American fascism continues to reveal itself and as Pope Leo continues to spotlight liberation theology and also anti fascists around the world are going to have to continue to grapple with how to effectively organize with a church that still suppresses the reproductive rights of women while excluding women from theological leadership. Now I want to throw in a last minute addendum here. On January 9th at a vigil for Renee Goode, Episcopalian Bishop Rob Hirschfeld of New Hampshire gave a speech in Concord that didn't pull any punches on the responsibilities of clergy in a time of crisis. And I've asked them to get their affairs in order to make sure they have their wills written. Because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable. Thanks for listening everyone.

A (28:08)

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C (28:39)

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