Episode Transcript
MUTUAL AID IN ISLAM, PART TWO
Antifascist Dad, Episode 24
Matthew Remski: Welcome, Patreons, to part two of Antifascist Dad Podcast, episode 24: Mutual Aid in Islam with Mona Haydar. I'm grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your works and days.
You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as Antifascist Dad. The Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, and if you're not subscribed there, you can do that and hear part two at the same time as, or right after, you listen to part one on the main feed — because that's what subscribers get: early access. You can also support the show that way. Of course there is a link to pre-order my book in the show notes. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.
Now, in part one of my conversation with Mona Haydar — chaplain, spoken word artist, and activist — we talked about the month of Ramadan not merely as abstinence from food and water, but as a collective practice of discipline, solidarity, and withdrawal from consumerism that builds something called taqwa, or reverential consciousness. She also unpacked the Islamic notion of mutual aid through zakat, the mandatory redistribution of wealth whose root meaning is a kind of growth through purification. She argued that if Muslims fully practiced these commitments, global poverty would be eliminated. And then I prefaced the conversation with some local news about how my Muslim neighbors here in Toronto were just subjected to an Islamophobic smear campaign headed up by Ontario Premier Doug Ford and my own city councillor, Brad Bradford, who tried to violate their charter rights by seeking an injunction against the Al-Quds Day rally, falsely claiming it was associated with hate speech and violence. So another thing to be vigilant about during this broader weaponization of anti-Muslim sentiment by the American right, as ICE raids and travel bans accelerate.
Now we pick back up in part two with the question of how 9/11 shocked and transformed Islam around the world.
Matthew Remski: I'm listening to you and I want to describe the kind of framework that I have and that I'm hearing you in, which is a little bit more materialist. My sense of what this pressure does is that you're saying it forced us to go back to our texts, it forced us to go back to our practices. And I think you're saying it forced us to find what the real thing is — what was this meant to be? And I'm wondering if you also have this sociological perspective, that you've probably pushed your faith tradition, pushed your culture, in a particular way out of necessity. You've had to develop something. I find it's always tricky when I try to think about what was the original essence of a thing, because it seems like it would always have to develop. And I'm just wondering whether one irony of 9/11 is that it actually injected a certain amount of self-reflexivity and conscience-searching into a tradition that had that as a feature or an invitation, but maybe wasn't always as active. Like, this changed the culture. Is that fair?
Mona Haydar: The good Muslim/bad Muslim setup — the good Muslim was secular, apolitical, Western. And the bad Muslim was anyone who criticized, critiqued, discerned, spent time looking at things more deeply. And one of the problems with that whole framework is that it erases the history — the history that Muslims have always been real people. We're just, you know, complicated humans on an individual basis. And this whole term Islam — it's a banner, it's a badge of honor that we get to call ourselves submitters. We are people in submission to God's will, fulfilling his commands. That's all that means. And some of us do it better than others. It's a spectrum. And that framework treats Muslims in such a monolithic way on either end.
Matthew Remski: Let me ask you about rap, because I'm wondering whether when you started to rap with Black friends in Flint, Michigan, did that start to evolve your politics as well? I mean, 9/11 is a huge event, but then you've got all kinds of other things that you're doing — these cultural inputs.
Mona Haydar: I started out when I was around 14 years old doing open mics and poetry — spoken word, slams, things like that. It exposed me to conversations about power dynamics, race, culture, poverty, distribution of wealth. It was the first time I really saw what they call economic racism — what happened in the suburbs versus what happened in the city of Flint, where wealth and resources were distributed. That was my awakening to those realities, the realities of white supremacy in our society here in the US. And hip-hop culture is such a gift because it tells those stories and elucidates them for people in digestible ways. That's the beauty of hip-hop — it tells these stories in ways that people can actually see and understand through lived realities. You can absorb it because you're not just sad, you're not just getting hit over the head with a news story. It's something more.
Matthew Remski: That's the power of art, I think — the delivery, the way it can deliver something that regular words, news, and other media just can't. And even if the content is difficult or demoralizing or grim, it can exhilarate people through the catharsis of its passion.
Mona Haydar: Yeah. I really am who I am in a big way because of the Black community in Flint, Michigan, who saw this young Arab girl — not white, not Black, something other — and took me in and said: your stories matter, be vulnerable, tell them. And not just said that, but taught me how to do it. That was not just my introduction to hip-hop and hip-hop culture, but also my introduction into what it means to use your voice to make the world better, to use your life force, your sacred energy that you only have a limited amount of. We only have a limited amount of breaths. What are you going to use those breaths in service of? You may as well tell the truth. You may as well make the world more beautiful.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, when you put it that way. Were you the only Muslim girl there in that scene?
Mona Haydar: In those early days, definitely. Yes.
Matthew Remski: I guess it brings me to gender stuff, because I think this is always in the background of the usually toxic culture war discourse around the meaning of Islam and its practice. I was thinking about how to address it from the perspective of this being a bridge-making project and an intercultural project — and I'm always upfront about my own blind spots and limitations. I just wanted to put it this way: if I imagine myself being 13 back in 1984, I'm a white boy starting to notice girls. I don't know anything about Islam, as a typical Canadian or American white kid. The girls I know in Catholic school have a kind of uniform modesty code, but this in itself becomes its own kind of ironic thing sometimes — sometimes it's fetishized. But let's say I ran into you at around the same age and had no idea why your clothing was so different from what the white girls were wearing or encouraged to wear. What would the best understanding be that I could take away from that encounter? Because when I think of myself at that stage, I just would have been confused. And then in that confusion, all of these cultural messages would have come in to tell me what I should think about this person I clearly don't understand.
Mona Haydar: It's funny, because there's this story — it's been so many years, I can't remember if it happened to me or a friend of mine. But there's a story of either me or my friend at a grocery store, and a little girl walked up to one of us and said: are you Mary?
Matthew Remski: Are you the Virgin Mary?
Mona Haydar: Yeah. Are you Mary? Because Mary is a hijabi. Exactly. And it was this kind of revelation for me as a Muslim, as a young Muslim woman in hijab, to have this experience of — yeah, people look at us like we're the evil foreigners. And here's this little girl in her beautiful innocence, instead seeing the divine, the opposite — seeing the reality of what this practice is about. There are so many layers to it. One of them is definitely about a deeper idea of dignity: that this body is only the most superficial introduction to who I am. My hair and my body are the most superficial part of me. And I ask you, as the person who is other than myself, to introduce yourself to me first as a soul. Introduce yourself to my soul first, and then we can discuss the rest later. That level of engagement is what hijab is calling us to. We're not — we're not materialists as Muslims, but we're also not spiritualists. It's something balanced between the two. We are souls having a human experience, and that human experience is the limited, ephemeral experience. The eternal one is the lasting one. And the eternal one is the one we're more interested in. So I ask you to engage with my eternal self first — engage with who I am and who I will always be in perpetuity.
Matthew Remski: And that's most embodied simply in the expression of your face, what's happening with your eyes, and the words that will come out of your mouth.
Mona Haydar: You're forced to engage with my intellect. You're forced to engage with my energy, instead of being permitted to objectify and sexualize at the first encounter. So it is very counter to Western culture around womanhood and femininity — what that shows up as, especially in consumer culture and capitalist society, where women's bodies are used to sell us many things and entire industries are built around the buying and selling of women's bodies. This is something that as Muslims we reject.
Matthew Remski: I'm starting to realize that Wrap My Hijab is a very complicated rap in that way, because I think what you're saying is this tradition is the way in which you can express a kind of beauty and dignity, but against the current of what is typically expected within this medium, on this platform, within this culture.
Mona Haydar: A mentor and friend, Dalia Mogahed, said this on, I think, the Daily Show. It was so brilliant. She said: hijab privatizes sexuality. And so of course Western society demands to objectify women. Feminism is built around the idea that you are only as free as, you know, the skimpiness of your bikini — that is the metric of your freedom, of your liberation.
Matthew Remski: In a certain strain of feminism, yeah. Certainly.
Mona Haydar: Yeah, I think the most common mainstream strain. And for us as Muslims, the idea of liberation is so much more profound, because it's about liberating the self from the ego, from the lower base desires that call you to be a materialist, call you to give in to your desires, call you to luxuriate and chase pleasure. And instead it calls you to something else. No matter where you are — you could be in prison, you could be on a beautiful beach — if you don't have a liberated soul, you can feel oppressed and sad and suicidal and terrible in your spirit while having the most luxurious experience. And you can have the most incredible, ethereal, wonderful experience in the depths of prison if you have a liberated soul. So hijab is a framework that is, yes, about rejecting beauty standards and insulating Muslim women from those pressures, but it's also about a deeper liberation. To say: I'm not going to spend time and money and effort filling my face with fillers and doing the kind of cultural practices that Western women and women all over the world are doing now. This body is going back into the earth. It's going to decompose, it's going to become dust. And I love that I have more breaths right now and more time, and I'm going to spend those breaths and that time building and investing in my eternity, not in something that's not going to last.
Matthew Remski: I think my last question is for people who are listening who are not religiously minded, and who may not feel the connection that you're describing to a kind of divine sense of life, and who yet are committed to social justice and to revolutionary struggle — and who do that specifically from a Marxist point of view, which tends often toward a kind of — I mean, Marxism itself I don't believe is atheist, but there's a strong tendency within that. Where do you think the points of contact are most clearly between the kind of mutual aid community you've been describing and the theology that backs it up, and the person who — either because of past experience with institutional religion, or because they were never brought up within it, or because they find themselves too skeptical — where are the places where you meet that person most closely and maybe realize you're doing the same thing anyway?
Mona Haydar: We can have shared goals and shared visions for the world, and I'll work together with anyone who upholds justice, who seeks to create greater justice in the world. The intention, the greater intention, doesn't have to be the same for us to collaborate, for us to work together. It isn't that I feel the need to have perfect alignment on our ultimate goals in order to build something beautiful in this world right now. We can collaborate and build regardless of what our ultimate intention is. And I feel like people — I know I've been talking about a more esoteric side of Islam, and I think people feel like: how could I ever get close to that, or how could I ever incorporate that into my life? It feels so far away.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, many people feel that way.
Mona Haydar: I'm a chaplain, and so I get that question all the time. People say to me: you seem like you have a kind of peace, and that feels so far away from me. And what I say to them is: even if that feels very far away from you, ask for it. Ask for it. So if you are interested in those greater intentions, in those goals that go beyond just this world, let's do that together. I don't have a lot of familiarity with Marxism, I'll be honest — it's not something I've ever really studied. And it's something I know has some truth to it because of the people I know who adhere to it. I know it has some good principles, that there's some good there, because the people who are working for that cause are doing their best to create something beautiful for our children, for our neighbors, for ourselves.
Matthew Remski: And something that has a theological resonance to it, or a teleology to it — I'm working towards something I can't quite see, but I'm pretty sure it's there, because I feel that human beings are capable of so much more than we've allowed ourselves to accomplish so far. And that's the kind of structural parallel that I see — regardless of how we name our greater end point, it's something we have to conjure, something we have to do some kind of practice to be able to reassure ourselves of from time to time. My sense is that people would have a lot to learn from a Muslim community dedicating itself to mutual aid, because they're reminding themselves five times a day who they are, what to do, what the greater message is — and when they're meeting each other in the street, they're realizing: I'm compelled to pray for you, because we're on this journey together. My impression from leftist organizing, from Marxist circles, from socialist organizing, is that the utopian vision is something that is referred to but not fully practiced toward. And I think many people feel it, but there isn't any real system for imagining it into being. I don't know how anybody sustains themselves in social work without having some idea of how to do that. But this is one of the reasons I wanted to learn from you.
Mona Haydar: It comes back to the question of materialism versus spiritualism. There is a beautiful balance between the two. When humans are reaching for that balance, we are able to produce harmony on earth and peace and justice on earth, while also becoming enlightened — becoming something much greater than what these bodies are. And I love what you said about not being able to see it, but we know it's there.
Matthew Remski: Oh, yeah.
Mona Haydar: Because that's what all of this is about. It's about trusting. Trusting that just because I plant this seed and can't see it after I bury it — I cannot see it — but I trust that it will sprout and it will grow and it will produce fruit. Even if I never taste it in my lifetime, someone will come along and eat from that tree and be benefited by it. And that is, I think, the goal of anyone seeking light.
Matthew Remski: There's an incredible book called They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us by Peter Gelderloos — his memoir of activism over the last 20 years. He specifically addresses how hard it is for justice communities to maintain a memory of where they've been, what they're doing, and what they must do, because there are so many failures, so many interruptions, so many attacks. This is another reason I wanted to talk with you and with others who are doing similar things, because the other thing that you've got is a series of memories and cultural practices that move your community toward its own longevity. And I think that's incredibly powerful.
Mona Haydar: And my hope is that we are able to utilize those beautiful memories and aspirations and hopes to establish something beautiful on the earth. That's the goal — khilafah. People are afraid of this word, caliphate. But the truth of it is that those people who walk upon the earth in gentleness, that's who they are. They walk gently upon the earth, knowing that this is not the whole story, there's more to it, there's more coming. And so we walk in a balanced way, carrying ourselves with dignity, establishing justice and equity, and moving forward as a human culture as much as we can.
Matthew Remski: Mona Haydar, thank you so much for your time today. It's great to speak with you.
Mona Haydar: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.
Matthew Remski: So I have one closing thought about myself as that 13-year-old. I imagine myself in that question I put to Mona about the hijab. She said I would have been encouraged to engage with her mind and intellect first.
In the interview, I juxtaposed that experience with growing up here and starting to learn about gender and attraction as a Toronto Catholic. I said that the girls had a uniform and a modesty code. But I'll add now that what that meant was that some of them would do what they could to stand out, which often meant raising the hem on the kilts and doing other things. As boys, we had uniforms too — not as much about modesty as about discipline — but I had my own version of raising the hem. I remember learning that white dress shirts could come with a variety of fancy collars and with cuffs instead of buttons at the wrist, which meant I could wear my grandfather's cufflinks, but also look for other sets of cufflinks in the pawn shops down on Church Street. Also on Church Street, there was a very old store — narrow, three stories — called Frankel's. Vintage or tuxes or something like that, but basically three stories of very old but well-preserved formal wear from the 1920s through to about the 1950s. He also had zoot suits and a whole range of hats — it was incredible. I have no idea how he assembled all of that, but it was just him. He was ancient. I think the store was gone by the time I was in my 20s. But I would go there all the time and look at the regalia that was available. That was also a kind of enhancing of performance, I think. I spent a lot of attention on my hair before any social event at which there was a chance of talking with girls.
So that was my heteronormative experience, especially going to Frankel's, where everything was vintage, everything had come out of a much earlier era. But that wasn't the only experience I had. When I was 16, I started taking literature and creative writing classes at an alternative school here in Toronto called SEED. There was a teacher named Harriet Wolf who was teaching a course in Russian literature. The class didn't happen at the school but in her home in Cabbagetown, which is one of Toronto's oldest neighborhoods, with narrow Victorian houses that in those years weren't yet gentrified. When I signed up for the course, I started going on Thursday evenings. We would sit in her living room in front of a cheerful fire. She would serve tea, and then we would read and talk about Dostoevsky and Gogol and Turgenev and Chekhov — even if we hadn't done all of the reading. And I loved it, because it was books, but also just so emotionally and intellectually warm.
Now, Harriet was gay, I found out later — I think the first gay woman I had hung out with or known in any way. I knew something was different about her. There was short hair and corduroy slacks and turtlenecks and loafers and wool blazers. She had reading glasses on a chain. She didn't wear jewelry. And that kind of set the tone aesthetically, alongside the literature.
The class was coed, and I would arrive in my Catholic boy's uniform — probably with cufflinks — and feel very odd and shy around these very smart young women who were not in kilts because they were wearing Goth gear or thrifted menswear and turtlenecks and Doc Martens. They had paint on their fingers from art class. And they didn't seem to notice me much at first. These kids just didn't notice each other in those very heteronormative ways. And that meant that we all sort of became friendly first before noticing anything else, and relaxed as we pored over these old books. We would go out for coffee together, we would hang out in the park. I didn't have siblings my age, but at that point it felt like I had just gotten some.
Now, my classmates obviously weren't religious. They weren't wearing hijab. But they were doing something to either challenge or ignore the gender cueing I was used to. And I remember feeling attraction, but it was not like what I'd felt at the Valentine's dance at Catholic school. It was my nascent understanding of what it meant to be attracted to a person regardless of gender — to their ideas and quirks, to take as much interest in their inner life as I had in my own.
Now, over on Conspirituality this week, we're doing a review of Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere documentary on Netflix and how it shows this accelerated monetization of misogyny. One feeling that the documentary has haunted me with — which doesn't quite fit into the analysis segments in that episode — is that watching the Manosphere influencers hit on but also mock and degrade the OnlyFans workers who are trying to earn a living, it's like being transported back into this heteronormative pressure cooker in which the inner lives of young men and women are so obscured by their conventional regalia, their meticulous looks, their maxed performances of gender, that they are endlessly trapped on the surfaces of each other's lives. They never relax into the deeper layers of friendship.
And so I realize that through Harriet Wolf's class, I did have some access to what Mona described — not through a tradition, not something consistent, not something that could be talked about openly, because it was very subjective, very individualistic. It happened through a kind of countercultural improvisation. I didn't know at the time what this was, but I never forgot the feeling it gave me, because later on I went through years in much straighter spaces without really touching that again. But then I felt it again when I met my partner. And for me, it has been a defining aspect of the only mature relationship I've had. And I think that aspect of attraction has only grown — maybe because it starts, as Mona and other religious people might say, with the soul.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Talk to you soon. Take care of each other.
