In the wake of the worst terror attack waged on Jewish people since the Holocaust, the world has witnessed a shocking response from many in the western world.
How did so many young people come to justify inhumane acts against civilians as some type of resistance?
Today's guest is Asra Nomani: author, activist, feminist, and co-founder of the Muslim Reform movement, explains this situation.
A Muslim herself, Asra has become one of the leading voices speaking out against the expansion of Islamic extremism.
In this episode, you'll hear about:
Links:
Asra's Book: Woke Army
Asra's Organization: Clarity Coalition
Connect with us on Social:
Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/humanitypov
X: https://twitter.com/humanity_POV
Tik tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@humanity_pov
Support HumanityPOV by visiting https://tinyurl.com/humanitypovmovement
In the wake of the worst terror attack waged on Jewish people since the Holocaust, the world has witnessed a shocking response from many in the western world.
How did so many young people come to justify inhumane acts against civilians as some type of resistance?
Today's guest is Asra Nomani: author, activist, feminist, and co-founder of the Muslim Reform movement, explains this situation.
A Muslim herself, Asra has become one of the leading voices speaking out against the expansion of Islamic extremism.
In this episode, you'll hear about:
Links:
Asra's Book: Woke Army
Asra's Organization: Clarity Coalition
Connect with us on Social:
Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/humanitypov
X: https://twitter.com/humanity_POV
Tik tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@humanity_pov
Support HumanityPOV by visiting https://tinyurl.com/humanitypovmovement
Welcome to the humanity POV podcast. You're going to hear from a diverse array of morally courageous voices who understand that true humanitarianism is not selective. Together, we can amplify these voices for progress and shed light. On solutions to the issues. That affect all of us. Thank you so much for being here now, let's get started. My name is Dr. Ozzie Jankovic. I'm an educator. And I'll be hosting the first series of episodes.
Shure MV7-7:Today, we're speaking with us. Rhe. No money. So no money as a former professor at Georgetown university. And correspondent, the wall street journal. She has spoken about women's rights in Islam on every major news outlet. And she has. Co-founded the Muslim reform movement. Austria is the author of three books, including woke army, which details how radical Islamic extremism has made its way into the west by way of academia, media, and policy. Austria, we'll be sharing about the tragic kidnapping and murder. Of her dear friend, Daniel Pearl at the hands of Islamist extremists. And how this moment. Became her wake-up call inspiring. What has now been over two decades of activism? I am so excited to share this conversation with you. Now let's get started.
Azi:I came across your work after October 7th. And. And the reason why is because I was trying to understand, how is it even possible that young educated people with values, they value women's rights, they're feminists, they're anti racist. They're pro LGBTQ rights, all of the things, humanitarian people, and they're protesting in favor of a terror organization. And I did the deep dive. And so that's how I found you.
Asra:Yeah. I'm so glad. It's been exactly 22 years of my own meditation on that point. And so that's what I have carried into every like word that I say, every thought that I utter, and then, and then that's probably been my meditation on Israel has. It's been since my earliest days as a child, but then it really was crystallized after the 9 11 attacks.
Azi:Yeah, I've heard you speak about your friendship with Daniel Pearl, of course, and your connection with him. You were there with him right before he was killed. Brutally murdered, and you describing that as a wake up call. You also describe yourself, Asra, as a Muslim feminist, and I see you as such a unique, shining example of a true humanitarian in this age of so much confusion. Last week you shared with me that you were going to a protest, you were going to wear your IDF sweatshirt, Israeli Defense Forces sweatshirt. And I said to you, I'll always remember this by the way, I said to you, wow, that's so brave. And your response was, it's not brave,
Asra:it's just clear. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Azi:How does a young woman who grows up in a traditional Muslim family Get to the point where you can be so outwardly, publicly Zionist, feminist. Tell us, the whole thing, the whole journey. Your story is fascinating.
Asra:Wow. so what happened for me is that I was some 27 when I first met Danny cross paths with him. And and I was in a real state of crisis really. Who is the person that I was when I met Danny in the summer of 1993, I was a young Muslim woman who was born in India, grew up in New Jersey and then West Virginia. I think my Jewish family brothers and sisters can understand this and appreciate it because I think this is what brought Danny and me together on parallel paths, in just our. Our cultural attributes of of striving always striving, always trying to ascend. To a higher plane and always looking out for your core values and your core being and you're, in this constant state of of correction and mistake and recorrection and readjustment. And that was what my life was and probably is. Still today, it really is still today. But at that time it was much more complex in terms of my identity. I was raised in a very conservative, most socially conservative Muslim family. So when I arrived in the United States at the age of four, my parents were already here. At Rutgers University, and I was that immigrant vessel that children often are as a translator of American culture to my parents, trying to learn English myself and becoming best friends with this girl named Nancy Drew. Who was this girl detective books. Yeah. So she was always scurrying around her neighborhood and she always had an excuse to ask questions. And in her narrative I, found my voice because, like a lot of traditional families, the message for a girl and a woman is. To stay quiet. In my autograph book, a cousin actually literally wrote, silence is golden. And and I didn't take that to heat. I asked a lot of questions. I asked a lot of questions about the inequalities that I saw in front of me. Girls who were told to do chores that boys didn't have to do. Girls who didn't get mobility outside the home like boys got. And it was a real, crisis inside of myself, captures the struggle of a traditional society in conflict with modernity. And I was exhibit A and fortunately our experiences as Muslims from India is one in which we are a minority. So we are going to be soon the number one country with Muslims. Right now it's Indonesia and then Pakistan and then India, but in some years it will be India. And that experience meant that my parents knew very well how to navigate society. Without being bullies themselves about religion or tyrants in their philosophy and the Islam that I grew up with was really one that taught me incredible values that I carry with me today. My favorite word that I would open my hands and ask for in prayer was meaning God. Secundo, give me secundum, and I would always say, dunia co secundo, dunia is the world, and I would ask for peace of mind for the world and my family, the word Sukun means peace of mind. And so it's got many connections in Arabic words. Sakina is a common name. And Urdu is a merger of Arabic, Farsi, and Farsi. And, it's very parallel to Hindi also, but that was, that's always been my word of aspiration for internal self, and I didn't have a lot of subun when it came to issues of identity and culture, because, of course traditional conservative Muslim traditions are in conflict with a lot of Western actions and behaviors like, Friday night, date, night the prom,
Azi:dance. You didn't have a prom, but you celebrated your prom later. I know.
Asra:Yeah. Yeah, that's what happened for me is that I kept negotiating this and, and didn't get to go to my prom. I told this young man named Steve. I can't go. That was my answer. I can't go. I still remember. Being at the lockers at Morgantown high school and and then what I did is what a lot of young people do, which is I started living a secret life. I started dating secretly. I had a double life and that is really in this pursuit of, Health, healthy life and healthy choices and healthy thinking something that I have come to recognize as such an important value how our city. This sense of well being is really, connected to our sense of self that children develop. And mine was a very complicated one. When I met Danny, I had just gotten married to the man that I thought I had to marry, that I should marry. I flew all the way to Pakistan to marry this Muslim man and I thought I was in love with him. It was an arranged marriage by choice, you could say. But it was a disaster. Marriage lasted a little bit longer than Kim Kardashian and my first marriage. What I learned Ozzy is that I couldn't betray myself when I lay my head to rest at night. I would weep because I had that conflict of self, I was lying next to a man that was not in sync with who I was and the fortunate blessing for me as a young woman was that when my parents saw me in the deep depression and anxiety that comes with not having a strong sense of self, my dad said to me, I want to save you. That's right. Not the marriage. And they helped me free myself. And that's when in the spring and summer of 93, I young reporter came into the newsroom with this wide smile that you've seen. And I was going to a great therapist at the time who gave me this idea that I think therapists do preach, which is you should do what you want to do, not what you should do. And what I wanted to do is play beach volleyball behind the Lincoln Memorial. And Danny, I learned played volleyball. And so every Saturday, I'd get into his pickup truck and we drive down behind the Lincoln Memorial. And then he heard from me that I had never gone to my prom and that was the summer then that I finally got my prom. And we had a great party called the Midsummer Night's Prom that the cops came, I had a keg. Yeah. Danny got this young Muslim woman to drink her first beer. And all hell didn't break loose. The lightning bolt didn't come down. I didn't become stupid. I just was experiencing life and he gave me that passport that I'd never been able to find myself into American culture. Wow. It sounds
Azi:like over your journey, Asra, as much as you grew up in this traditional Muslim home that as you made your choices, you had the support of your mother. What gave you the motivation to even go
Asra:a different route? I asked those tough questions as a girl, and my mother sometimes would say chup, which is a word that means be quiet just a short, quick, maternal rebuke, and yet, we would have the conversations. And my dad would be there too. He's a scientist. The immigrant experience, Danny was born in America, I wasn't. But. It's one of constant questioning and trying to make sense of the reality around you. And so I would go to our potluck dinners in Morgantown, West Virginia as a girl and see that the experience of our little Muslim community was very different than what I was allowed to experience in the larger American society. And I would start journaling. I started journaling. This Mrs. Alkey gave me. A my English teacher gave me a journal in seventh grade, along with my other classmates and I have my journal today. And in it, I wrote that the women and girls were told to go into a studio apartment that the graduate students lived in. The men got the huge hall in the, in the sort of common area and the, food that the women cooked was taken into the men's hall. We were given plates of food, platters of it, left at the door, as if the men would turn to stone, like we were Medusa and, could not cast an eye upon us, and what they were doing then is the 1970s, they were bringing this Saudi interpretation of Islam to my hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia, and and then on Friday nights, and, While I wasn't allowed to go to the dance, I also wasn't allowed to go to the mosque when the men would gather for prayer, because the men had brought into our mosque, the traditions that they knew back home, which was that women don't go into the mosque. There wasn't space for the women at the mosque. So that was the questioning that I had that brought me to my. My late 20s when my parents both supported me, like my father cooked me to get my first apartment as a graduate student in Washington, D. C. He helped me move out of that apartment that I was in with the man that I had married. And the lesson that I learned from them. Is the one that I think is true everywhere. And it is the gift that they gave me of unconditional love. It is what carried me through the darkest of moments, the most existential of crises, because I knew at the end of the day that I had these two beings in this world who loved me, no matter what decision I made. And and I went into our mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, through the front door because of an epiphany that I got sitting in Karachi, Pakistan. And and the story is, I work with Danny in the, in my late 20s and Danny's just a couple years older. And we, succeed as young professionals. Danny gets to go to London. I go to New York City for the journal, and then Danny he's such a good guy that this opportunity came up to be the South Asia Bureau Chief based in Bombay, now called Mumbai. And Danny asked me, do I want it? He, said, you're, you'd be perfect for the job. Do you want it? He was such a great feminist. He would make sure that he wasn't part of the new patriarchy the new men's club that got that ticket punched before a woman was even asked. And and I, had some stuff going on, writing a book and I said Danny, you please go for it. Raise your hand. And he got that job. And and I was reporting in India then on this book of really trying to reconcile issues of identity. Through the lessons that Hinduism and Buddhism give and and, so it was a great joy. I didn't get to cross paths with Danny in India, but I would always have beckoned him like come to the Dalai Lama's initiation ceremony or come to the banks of the Ganges River. And Danny always had something exciting that he was doing. But. Our paths finally crossed on the subcontinent in Pakistan. And that was when I had gone there as a reporter for salon magazine and Danny had gone as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I was on book leave and I 1st, went and did, a pilgrimage to my grandmother. who was also a feminist, my paternal grandmother. She was the first Indian woman in our Muslim woman in our ancestral village and town of Azimgarh to take off the face veil in the 1950s. The
Azi:first woman in your village to take off
Asra:the face veil. Yeah, So she was the one who raised me after my parents first came. They left when I was two in India and I stayed with my grandmother and grandfather. And so they really, it's memories that I don't even have, but values that. Sank deep into me of a self realized woman, a woman who had mobility. My grandmother was the first also to drive a car in the 1950s and 60s in the town of Heatherabad. And then she, we had these things called rickshaws that are peddled by. My men and she hit a rickshaw, apparently, and then her driving days were over, but she was a woman who traveled freely without a male chaperone, which was the tradition now of these antiquated ideas from Saudi Arabia. And there I was then after the 9/11 attacks traveling alone. And trying to understand this extremism how we could be at a place today in 2024, that young people or any people could support somebody like Hamas terrorists. There I was and the lessons I learned there are, true today. I believe in understanding the pathology that allows somebody to support Hamas. I went to Islamabad and in Islamabad I would go to these Quran study circles. And in those study circles I would hear the yehudi were to blame for the 9/11 attacks. And that was the first time Ozzy, that I even knew the word yehudi.'cause that's not a word that my parents used.
Azi:When you were growing up, you were not indoctrinated with any hate
Asra:toward Jews, right? I was not. I was actually, indoctrinated or inspired with a completely opposite value system. And and I just, we always have to I think express gratitude sometimes for the, Script into which we are even born the life into which we are even born because I always am in such gratitude for that as many challenges as there have been. I had the gift of parents who not only gave me unconditional love, but also. This deep value in critical thinking which has a word in Arabic of Ishtihad that I learned later as an Arabic word, but knew as a, compass, an intellectual compass, and then my moral compass was, value of humanity, and it sounds so cliche, but my dad would literally say to me as I was growing up to the point where we would start making fun of it like kids, right? learn how you are going to serve humanity.
Azi:Learn how you are going to serve humanity. What a lesson for our
Asra:day right now. Truly. I do believe so because. We can do it each one of us, no matter how our lives manifest, whether it's giving the stray cat an extra bit of water when you see them in the alley or helping a cousin who's in crisis, giving a kind hand to your neighbor. And then if we feel Equipped and able thinking every step, another layer of serving humanity, perhaps we have a global mission. As Ozzy, the, I believe deeply that like every act, every voice that we express is changing the collective consciousness of our world. I
Azi:love listening to you so much because you empower every single person to do their part. I've heard you say again and again, really empowering everyone, whether it's liking a Twitter post or sharing a Twitter post or going to a protest or supporting a friend. You have such an empowering spirit and I'm thinking about your journey. First of all, you've written your story, as a feminist. You have this unbelievable book that you wrote called Woke Army
Asra:and you Subtle cover, right?
Azi:This really explains, this explains the madness that we're in right now. And I have to be really honest with you. I think that before October 7th I, we were following people who talked about mindfulness and all kinds of things. And they had good values. They were feminists and, really great liberal values. And then all of a sudden this happens and there's sheer silence and it's not silence. It's somehow they have these alliances. That weren't obvious before that, but now it is it is so clear, but you've known this for years you've, been working on this. Has this been so since Danny was murdered?
Asra:Really, it really was because what happened for me is I went immersed into the, this part of this, the The symbol of my Muslim community in India and in Pakistan after the 9 11 attacks, I heard that word Yahudi, which means Jew in Arabic in the Quran study circle. to blame them for the attacks on 9/11 So I saw this contradiction first with my Muslim community. I knew values that my parents had taught me in Islam, which meant humanity and honesty and truth. And there was no truth to the idea that Mossad was behind the 9 11 attacks. So I was just, I was disgusted. So I was really sick to my stomach. Like I sat in those study circles and I was sick to my stomach. And then what was so disturbing, Ozzy, was then I would hear children repeat that. And this goes to your first point in your first question. I would hear the children repeat this lie. I got on a plane and I went to Karachi as if that would become like a. Place of clarity for me. It became an ironic place of clarity in my confrontation in our confrontation with darkness. I got this house that I had rented and fell in love. Never having learned my lesson about my own judgment and romance and I thought I was going to write my great American novel in this house on the street called Zimzima. January 23rd, 2002, Danny Daniel Pearl was visiting with his dear wife, Marianne, and he went off for this interview from which he did not come back. That every day, these last few days, I've been trying to write at this diary of sorts to share with the world the lessons and the truths. From 22 years ago, and today, then, January 27th, it was day four of captivity. And this is a truth we did not even know that Danny was in captivity. But the next day, Sunday morning, photos start coming, and those photos are of Danny in captivity, a gun to his head, and I'm to this day convinced he was giving the terrorists and his captors the middle finger. And what I learned then was that later I learned those photos had been dropped off Ozzie. At a mosque in Karachi, the men who had held Danny thought that the mosque was a safe place for their hate and in the days that came, Danny went from being a spy for the CIA and America to the identity, his identity as a Jew being revealed in a newspaper article by a journalist without ethics. And then he became a spy for Mossad and and to your, question earlier, that is what prompted me, months, year, a year later, to walk through the front door of my mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, because I said these places of worship cannot be vessels for hate any longer. And this journey. Of contradiction and clarity has been these two decades plus because I would confront that misogyny and hate that I would hear at the mosque imported from Saudi Arabia, Iran, later Qatar, and the women's studies department academics and students. Would initially support me, as I protested, even the sheik who came and said that a wife can be beaten lightly as a way to put her in check. But then that silence, I'll never forget it. It's like it happened yesterday. I went to his lecture to confront this completely, criminal endorsement of domestic violence. And I, and he even said that women can be beat lightly with a yardstick. And so I went to the office depot and I bought a bunch of yardsticks to say do you know what this means? This is not correct. And that day, all those women from the women's studies department were silent. I was the only one who spoke up and and it was awful. I was just awful because they had championed. Challenging him. And then when it came time to challenge him, they were silent. So Ozzie this silence that you feel like I know it and and what is it this it's symbolized by this which is the hammer and sickle, which is an extreme version of the far left and the compromise of liberals. But to this day, I call myself a feminist, a classic liberal But this is the reality. I have some of the signs from the protests. This is, one of the signs, an idea that you have seen again and again, that resistance is justified when people are occupied. And who's it? Free Palestine? By whom? The U. S. Palestinian Community Network. So that is the Islam, the Muslim community metaphor in this idea that I have of the woke army. This is a sign from one of those actual protests and then this is the other signs the other side of the world army the far left. And with Palestine and the occupation now, and then you got to go to the fine print and you can see socialism and liberation and I'm a person who believes in social justice, who believes in equality, who believes in I said, help the cat and the stray cat and goodness, but this concept, then. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. This concept is now aligned and propelled by the far left in the world today.
Azi:Growing up, you weren't taught to hate Jews, but somehow after 9 11, there's this shift in consciousness that somehow, these radical ideas about wanting to eradicate Israel, wanting to have this global jihad. Came into the Western mindset, came into politics, came into the schools and sneakily married itself with these liberal ideas, anti racism, LGBTQ rights. How is it even possible if someone is just waking up to this now?
Asra:I'm going to reach back, break the fourth wall if anyone has watched Deadpool. Okay, there's a couple books I'm going to grab. One is this book. It's called Critical Race Theory. And the other is, unfortunately, the Saudi Quran. Okay. The
Azi:Saudi Quran. So the Saudi Quran is not the Quran you
Asra:grew up with. Exactly. Oh, I brought the other one. This is the Saudi Quran. So this is the one, this is the one that I, interpretations that I had, which is from this translator named Yusuf Ali. Still some problematic translations and obviously just like the Old Testament, words that cannot be taken literally in the 21st century, there's no, way you can, evade words. Just like with the Old Testament, right? What you do is you value critical thinking enough to take the fancy word I learned of hermeneutics, the study of the sacred text. You can see my sacred text with the post it notes. And you say, no, it may say you can have sex slaves. It's a very painful, concept of reality for the women of Israel and the Yehudi women and, so many, you can, you can't translate your way out of it, but you have to do what I'm still waiting if somebody can ever find me the Quran in a word file, I am going to go through it with track changes. I just haven't gotten it yet. I'm. Working on it, and it must be done because there's just certain chapters and verses that are not compatible with the 21st century. So I want to just show what was the problem, because clearly since the birth of Israel, that there was an organization that had already been created before Israel and after the fall of the Ottoman Empire called Ikhwan Muslimin. It was a Islamic resistance exactly and it there was no Israel it was exactly like you said, British occupied Palestine. So, often today, they want to equate the violence and the terrorism against Israel and Jews to the birth of Israel. But in the 1920s, a man named Hassan Albana. A teacher in Egypt created this organization called Ikhwan Muslimin, and it was to create a new caliphate. The Ottoman Empire had fallen, and these were Ikhwan Brotherhood, Muslimin of Islam, Muslims, and their idea was Islamia, which means being Islamic, governance, and that is how we have now used this word to differentiate Muslims like my parents and myself from those who want Islam in governance and in and in a vision for a global caliphate, we call them Islamist. Yeah,
Azi:it's an interesting distinction because people are have been tiptoeing around the work. Is Islam Muslim and this term Islam a phobic. I was thinking it's Islamist phobic.
Asra:Yeah, but it definitely has its roots back. So I'll take you guys into my library, which is what I do is I organize it. Chronologically, so at the top corner is the philosophy of tantra, which predates Hinduism and then Buddhism and then Judaism and then Christianity and then Islam comes and with Islam, I have the Quran and then unfortunately, after that, you have all these. Scholars, it's nutty scholars who take different interpretations that become the playbook for the extremists. It's, their interpretations of the Quran that they use. To justify sex slaves, to justify quote all barbarity in quote, defense war, right? Defensive war. So there's, so many excuses that they make but, that's why this is a battle of ideas, right? So this is the quote, Noble Quran. And it is by the Saudis and the interpretation that they have of the first chapter and verse is it teaches us this is the first chapter and verse that my mom taught me to guide us on the straight way and what they add in a in parenthetical phrase here then not like the Jews and the Christians. They add that in here. So what are they doing? They're differentiating. They're, demonizing now the Jews and the Christians.
Azi:How long has this version of the Quran existed in
Asra:Saudi Arabia. They codified it in the early 70s when they were trying to one up the Iranians as the biggest, baddest extremists on the block so they were both having this Sunni, Iranian. Majority sect of Islam battle from Saudi Arabia with the Shia minority sect of Islam housed in Iran. And so this this interpretation comes out of this school of thought that many people probably have not heard about in a long time, but are familiar with called Wahhabism that is thought This guy, Ibn Wahhab everything gets the name from some guy all our schools of thought are from a man, the Maliki school, the Hanafi school the Shafi school they're all coming from some dude who interpreted the religion, but there was a time, that's what a lot of people have forgotten, we don't teach in our Muslim Sunday schools. There was a time when the critical thinking school was the dominant one. It was called Mutazilites. It was the 10th, 12th century. And women were actually clerics and leading thought. But then that was extinguished that the moment in history that's called is that the gates of Ishtihad were closed. And in some parts of our community, this goes back to your very first question like. Those gates are unfortunately still closed and and, the part that I have come to help that has helped me understand this so is this friend of mine, Dr. Orly Petter, who's got this great new initiative also that I hope you will join and others will support to bring healing to the victims of trauma from the October 7th attack through the practices of that She does in healing as a psychologist, a lot of biofeedback. But 1 thing that she taught me was that there's this concept that our amygdala or our empathy center can be hijacked. And and that's what I would argue had has happened these last 2 decades and that the Muslim community and this this, red green alliance has effectively done. They've hijacked our empathy so that when we cared on October 7th for the victims of the Hamas massacre, they didn't allow anybody to sit in that compassion and that sympathy and they hijacked brains immediately with it. narrative of a long occupation of by Israel, of the Palestinians, a a there's a demand that Palestine will be Free like who doesn't love the concept of free, right? But, what are they really hostage to what is Palestine and the Palestinian people and Muslims really hostage to they're really hostage to the extremists and the terrorists. And that's where they don't allow the brain to think. In the prefrontal with rational thought, and I have really appreciated that analysis because this next book, then the critical race theory became a Trojan horse in American society and in the West to make Islam a race and to racialize the Muslim and Palestinian, demand. And then force this use all of its like intellectual jujitsu to then put people into the oppressed and oppressor matrix and flip the narrative on Jews and Israelis and make it so that the Israelis were now the occupiers and the terrorists
Azi:to, take us back for a minute, we had this shift happen in the twenties in in British occupied Palestine, then we're talking about this radicalization in Saudi Arabia in the seventies. We have obviously the revolution in Iran in 79 and then has this just it's gone from bad to worse. What is the landscape actually look like
Asra:in terms of who's who? So, the who's who I have right here, I call it the woke army, needed to think of a symbol of what this is. And just know this has been 20 years in the composing in my head and in the experiencing. The, list is starts with our Muslim community. And the who's who from the top. It is the Althani family Qatar. That is so corrupt and the opposite of any idea of humanity or social justice that my parents taught me for Muslims to practice in the world because they are tyrants to their own people. They are tyrants to the quote guests that come into their nation as virtual indentured servants the laborers who they exploit. And so the young, women who they do not give freedom of choice.
Azi:This family must have an incredible amount of power because this is a country that is funneling billions of dollars as you've followed the paper trail. To American universities, all kinds of clubs for quote unquote justice in Palestine funding academia. We have all the issues now on social media, but this is a family. So let's for a second, talk about what is the psyche?
Asra:It's it is literally tribalism because these are tribes. The Al Thani family is a tribe. The House of Saud is a tribe. The Hashemite, quote, kingdom is a tribe. They have all the pretense of now royalty and and even the My pleasure. Hope metaphor in Islam of being the middleman between us, the ordinary people and God, because they come from these. Yeah the king of Jordan claims to come from the family of the prophet Muhammad. There's just so many tribal aspects and then it's about power and wealth. The story for me as a Muslim feminist of confronting this in my experience is that I got an invitation from the Doha debates and they were, wanted to debate this one argument, whether a Muslim woman should be allowed to marry anyone she wants. Literally, this is a question of debate in the 21st century, and I go, to Nordstrom's, I get this really fancy suit in order to look like a real professional making this argument, I go there, I'm facing off against a American Muslim cleric who has studied in Saudi Arabia, a guy by the name of Yasser Hadi, and he's got a partner. I've got a partner. But really, it's him and me against each other. And I say I There's first of all, there's interpretations out of the Quran that I argue justify a Muslim woman being allowed to marry anyone she chooses, but beyond that, and this is the concept that I've now settled on understanding we need in our Muslim community that my mother taught me, which is common sense. The common sense is that it is a personal private contract between a human being and another human being. And that is their choice and. He argued and I made my points and then it went to a vote students at those universities in campuses like Georgetown campus former students that I had from Georgetown University or in the audience and It went to their vote And lo and behold, I won. My side won. And yeah, it was such a moment. But just think this now. Think this. He's all over my book because he created a blog called Muslim Matters. His people are attacking me. They're using digital media to say Yasser Hadi, the, demolishes Asra Nomani and debate. I'm like, okay, you lost man. Like they're all about flipping the narrative.
Azi:The wounded male ego again.
Asra:Yeah, exactly. It goes back to wounds. How do we heal deal with wounds? So in this narrative, His wound is that nobody's going to tell him that what his, who his daughter is going to marry. And I really freaked him out because I said, she can marry whoever she chooses, whether it's a man or a woman. And he was like, No way in hell. I'm like, what are you going to do in America? He's in America, I can't do anything, but in a true Muslim country, I could, which is, as punishment. But I just give that example because that is there in the shadow of this Alfani family that is now presenting themselves as the people. Deal brokers to free the hostages when they are the reason why the hostages are being held how does that make sense
Azi:That Qatar is coming to Israel where they're actually the ones who funded the ideology and the terrorism that has created this problem and somehow we're negotiating with them it
Asra:just makes sense in the awful geopolitical alliances that nations and diplomats forge sacrificing humanity. We are left behind like how I'm sitting here. We created the Muslim reform movement. We created it in 2015 after another attack. This was the Bata Klan attack. We were working as Muslim leaders in our different, areas and in our communities. And we had a press conference at the National Press Club in D. C. and then, Our act of resistance to this this extremist ideology in our community is we took our declaration, which is a simple declaration for human rights, peace and yeah and tolerance of a real kind. And, and we posted it on the door of the embassy in Washington, D. C. that is run by the Saudis and we were yelled at, we were told the cops would come, because these people are centuries for that ideology in communities all across the world. This is in the United States of America. Yeah, and to your question, that's from the top, we have the House of Saud, we have Al Thani, we have the Ayatollahs of Iran, and then, they, turn out ridiculous websites, they and broadcasts of indoctrination, from my mosque in Morgantown. I would literally hear the. Friday prayer leader reading sermons that he downloaded from a website that had been created in Saudi Arabia with so much hate to the Jews and the state of Israel and I busted them on it and call the Saudi embassy for comment and the site still exists to this day so that those sermons can be downloaded. The Al Thani family funds their propaganda network, Al Jazeera, that is always flipping the net. They're the funders of Al Jazeera. Yeah, exactly. Then, of course, Iran does all of its PSYOPs within our world. Turkey, Erdogan, is funding. So much propaganda. He's built here in America now, one of the biggest mosque centers. I have all their names in here, but then my cast of characters then start with Hatem Bazian. He's number one. He is a Palestinian American from this town of Nablus in the West Bank and his imprint today is that in the 1990s, he created this organization called Students for Justice in Palestine, and then created American Muslims for Palestine. And they are the organizers for these marches on college campuses and in the streets.
Azi:Of course we want are these people who are student for students for What does justice look li
Asra:do they really want? Yea from the river to the
Azi:They want to eliminate Jews. They don't want two states. Two states
Asra:is not in the vocabulary. No, that's the biggest. That's the, the fallacy that I, I'm so glad actually for the sake of truth telling has now been laid bare. Even in the news the recently. Israel under attack for not accepting Netanyahu supposedly under attack for not accepting 2 state solution, but you have people who oppose you who do not accept the 2 state solution. This, mythology of the 2 state solution has long departed and and I know this personally, because I me I, have to know things firsthand and my 1st journey to Israel was when we went on the pilgrimage to Mecca and my son was just a few months old. So we went to Mecca and Medina and I went on this journey and I had to go to the West Bank. I had to see for myself how life is. And do you know, Ozzie, I went with a sleeping bag. I had a, student. From Georgetown, who lived and taught at Bethlehem University. And I was going to say at our house, but all the talk was like the refugee camps and the this and the that. And I'm like gosh, I might have to sleep in a sleeping bag. So I took a sleeping bag to the West Bank. And of course, anybody who's traveled there knows. Is nothing like that. And while there are grievances that we still need to settle, of course, they're complicated. I grew up in West Virginia and the roads in the West Bank are better than the roads we have in West Virginia. I went into the homes of Palestinian families and they live in wealth. The olive trees are in the backyard. The home is at the front, as mansions, marble floors. And and then this is a key that I brought back. This is a necklace, and it was made by a very talented artist but in this key is the politics of these, this new, movement in America, it's not a new movement, but this exploding movement, and this is the key, and a young Palestinian woman pulled out a key from her own pocket and said, this is the key, and this is another one that I got, and we will return to our home right on the Israel side. And I was like, girl, that is not going to happen. I went to Nablus because of Hatim Bazian being from there. This is a man who's on the streets of San Francisco screaming about the Israelis and how he can't return to Nablus. And I was like, let me check it out. So I got on a bus from Bethlehem, went through Ramallah, passed the sign for the laser tag, place that they've got in the bowling alley. And I was like, whoa, okay, this is like its own communities of normalcy, on all levels. I went into the communities there. And then I went to the blues for lunch. And I had a lovely lunch. I went shopping. I got a shirt and I was like, man, like there's a whole life. There's a pulse of life here. There's community. There's business. There's enterprise. There aren't guns at the heads of Palestinians I went to the shopping center at the round and I felt that experience of the roundabout where it's you take a turn this way. I remember that turn. Exactly. I go this way and I go to the Jewish community. And exactly. I didn't use the word settlement because these words are used to be vehicles to hijack our, Empathy and that's what I recognize. So clearly as a writer and and I recognize I've studied propaganda all my life from press releases to add campaigns like by corporations, right? It's all propaganda to hijack people's brains but there I was in the blues and I'm like, hot than Bosnian you can get a ticket back to the blues and do your little. War for liberation from here. How about that as a concept, build up your home, your ancestral home, but his power base is here and where is it now? It's at the University of California at Berkeley, where it is yeah, where Jewish students have had to go through checkpoints on Intifada week. and and his call for quote resistance, his call for boycott, divest and sanctions against Israel is, birthed from here. And then the last part that I think is just so, important to recognize is that you have the highest levels we've talked about from the emirs to the kings and the sheikhs to these. Fake academics in from U. C. Berkeley to Harvard and Rutgers in between. And then you have the politicians and the political apparatus that the money from the foreign governments and these. Logs have penetrated and that was to me one of the greatest betrayals. I felt because I'm a West Virginia Democrat. I pro union pro choice for women's rights fought to have the right to walk through the front door of my mosque and had a baby. That was the greatest gift that the universe gave me and his name is Shibley, which means my lion cub in Arabic and it's a Bedouin village actually north of Haifa. And then the middle name I gave him was Daniel for Danny. That's so beautiful. God is the judge and, it's metaphor for. Daniel and the lion in the lion's den. But that little boy became my clarifying vision for the future. Danny became my clarifying vision for truth. I just wish for the Jewish community and the Israelis, a, capacity to really speak to people so that the brain is able to function in a way that they can hear the truth of the Israeli and Jewish experience in the face of this extremism. And that's the voice that I've been trying to land. Also. You're doing
Azi:such a phenomenal job. And when October 7th happened, and we were here in shock locking our homes for our lives, and we were going out to buy these apparatuses to lock our safe rooms from the inside we really were afraid of infiltration and, everyone is touched, family or friends, you name it. But
Asra:This, war
Azi:on thoughts that's happening and watching all of these. These thought leaders, these people who I knew personally, people who I admired, were just silent. And I started asking myself what's going to help? What's helping here? And I started searching for these moderate voices and I found you and I found Dr. Dalia Ziada and Yasmeen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And it's like a short list, like it's not so many people.
Asra:Yeah, I know. And I get so sad about that because, we are up against such a machine it is the Islamist industrial complex and it is supported by governments. It is accepted and enabled by. Organizations from the ADL, quite honestly, the American Defamation
Azi:League,
Asra:Everybody knows that the Anti Defamation League by its own name was created to counter anti Semitism and to stand up for Jewish rights. But as this hijacking happened of the far left and then the political apparatus of the Democratic Party, they started to appease that faction. And, Refused to call out the Islamists also because the Islamists have penetrated into the Democratic Party that they were trying to now get money from donors. Let's be honest that's a lot of it and build its quote base in the United States with the liberal Democrats. And so every compromise that the. Islamist organizations were demanding of America and the West and the Democratic Party. They were now demanding of the Jewish community. But then over the last two decades, those reformed synagogues from which I got inspiration, the liberal Jewish community, the academics, the thinkers, the writers They ended up having to make compromise after compromise because otherwise if you were to call out Islamism or Islamic extremism you were a racist right because they were now using the hijacking, And that was a I write about it in the book that I found the press release and the resolution by this other organization that everybody should know about called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 2005 in the face of the quote Danish cartoon scandal in which there were cartoons made of the Prophet Muhammad. They, and it was fake. It was a fake portfolio that any mom from Denmark admits. Moved from mosque to mosque in Egypt and the Middle East trying to inflame people, the organization of Islamic cooperation that December 2005 issued a resolution that it was going to fund the quote Islamophobia Observatory, and that was the beginning of the end of critical thinking among the liberal community and the left about Islam, I know this from my own experience because in 2003, I walked through the mosque. I was a hero. I was literally a Glamour Magazine, Hero of the Month. But I went from hero to zero because, the Muslim community knew that the women's issue, these Muslim leaders knew that the women's issue is Achilles heel. You cannot tell women And to walk through the back door of a mosque and go in the basement and claim to be a religion of women's rights. So they knew that this was the Achilles heel, but then, and I was very effective in asking liberals the question that I had always confronted in my own identity, right? Of getting congruence between your values and your words and your actions. I have discovered in my own life experience, how you get peace of mind. You have congruence and it is when you have conflict like I knew in my 20s that I ended up in depression and anxiety and and it was only that journey that I started playing beach volleyball with Danny and really questioning my, what do I care about? What are my values that I came to this point in my late thirties? When poor Danny was murdered that I was like, no, actually, I don't believe in slaughtering someone because of their religion or and I'm not going to stay silent. I don't believe that a woman should be killed if she has a baby in her belly, but no wedding ring on her hand. I do not believe that a woman should have to walk through the back door and. And so I said, forget it. I can't live a lie. And from that moment, I spoke my truth about Shibley and my circumstances of birth. And I was free to circle back to that idea of second and peace of mind. I learned that like when you carry the shame and the secrets and the double life, it is a burden upon your psyche and your soul and it hurts your brain. And so with my parents loving unconditional support, I came to that place of true personal and spiritual liberation allowed me then in the face of this October 7th massacre and this multi million dollar effort to hijack our brains to speak with the clarity that you found then Aussie, and I have been so touched by every Jewish person who has written to me and also so deeply. Saddened by the fact that this entire community feels so lonely and isolated and, and hurt really that its own pain cannot be seen and felt and is erased really by the hijacking of the narrative. It has been. It has
Azi:been. You're a leader in now what's the muzzle reform movement. You have done such incredible work in the space of justice, and like you said, so many Jewish people, so many Israelis do feel so abandoned and so alone. And at the same time, I have to tell you, when I woke up after October 7th and I realized very quickly, okay, this is what Hamas did. On Israeli soil. Okay. Now, if you look at the Israeli population, we're only 80 percent Jewish. 50 percent of Israelis are non white. So here you have this terror group who took out an act on, just people, humans, because we're here. And it's happening in their own societies, the same abuse is happening to the women in their societies, to the children in their societies. It's happening in my neighboring countries. In Iran, people are getting executed every single day, and these are brother organizations. And how about in Sudan? And how about in Lebanon? And the list goes on and on, and we are not alone. We're not alone at all. I'm a woman, and I'm a Jewish woman, and I'm an American Israeli. This is not a war just on Jews, or just on Israel, this is a war on
Asra:freedom. That's such a great, epiphany that you had because so often we can see tragedy and injustice just from our personal experience of that lens, but you widened your lens and I appreciate what because It really is a values struggle and it is a struggle of over people by people and they could be anyone they could be the ideologues of any extremism, right? Any extremism that wants to deny people their freedoms, but that is what it does amount to. You're completely right. Ozzy because Israel is a claim, but they will not end with Israel. And that's what's so critical to understand for anybody who feels the existential threat as a Jew. And as an Israeli, whenever they what they did also in the last decade, because I sat at a hearing and I was, arguing with I on her next to me about the tyranny on Muslim women's lives by this interpretation of Islam and the Democratic women like, Senator Claire McCaskill, Senator Kamala Harris back then, the And a couple others was to ignore us and to shift the narrative to the threat of white supremacy. So that same fight that they want against any type of supremacy of a person over another should be parallel in their battle against Muslim supremacy. And that's where they stop short because of funding from Qatar, Saudi, Turkey alliances with Iran, the need to make a nuclear Iran deal over actually getting human rights for the women and men of Iran. So all those compromises end up for me on a global and societal level. Leading to the same struggle that I had within my soul and my life and my identity of a contradiction and and I really do believe that like each one of us as citizens, we, can raise our voices at least to challenge those contradictions. Try to elect people that actually practice the congruence that we believe and then act in our own lives to support the vision that we want of a reality in which we don't have any kind of a hierarchy of human value whether it's presented by a quote white supremacist or a Muslim supremacist, and I hope really I, I still struggle with figuring out how to bring to scale our ideas.
Azi:That is exactly what's been on my mind since this started finding people like yourself. And there there are others like the Imam of Peace in Australia is on my list. I have a list and I'm curious to hear like the people who should be famous, the people who should be leaders let's find all of those people and get them together. That's what's been on my mind.
Asra:Yeah. And, like one vehicle we have that we've created is the Muslim reform movement to include Muslims. And then there's a new effort that Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Yasmin Mohammed have helped to spearhead along with a Muslim physician named Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. And it's called the Clarity Coalition. And it includes Muslims, ex Muslims, Christians, Hindus Jews beyond just Muslim identity. So people can find it as the ClarityCoalition. org, and then, Muslim Reform Movement so that people can see our values. It's called muslim reform movement.org. Scaling so. What does that mean? Like getting digital footprint, consolidating the ideas into one, messages. Yeah, messaging, right?
Azi:Like how you talk about the women's march, how they got together and they got their messaging and black lives matter. And all of these movements it's like, where's the movement for humanity? What are the values we want our grandchildren to, to be able to live in a world
Asra:with? Yeah. And literally where we're at is, I just, we don't have staff. We don't have an institution. We don't have bill. Clarity Coalition, Muslim Reform Movement I've got the Pearl Project also that I've helped, that I created, that investigated Danny Pearl's murder and now, through the Pearl Project, I've been doing the work against anti Semitism, exposing this network in the woke army, what happens is that we try, but we do it with day jobs. And, and we don't have the staff and the organization building that is required. Sometimes I wish and I tried, I've tried that the last two decades to just do it just do it, write, the books create a website, do the writing. I know I've worked in institutions and organizations Ozzie, and you need like your digital team you need, to build that all up and. And I'm not, I'm just trying to be practical when I say all of this, and this is a move. This is a shift for me to be even to acknowledge this kind of limitation that we face right now. And the need we have, but I think it's just. What anybody with an MBA would say or a entrepreneur, because you have to scale, you have to keep figuring out how am I going to get these books? How am I going to get these ideas? We don't tweet out because we don't have our social media campaign, our digital camp.
Azi:We have to make this global. This is not just a Jewish thing. This is not just a Muslim thing. This is not just a female thing. Everyone has so much on the line. I'm going to keep pointing these people in your direction, because you are such a good spokesperson. And you've done so much and you're so knowledgeable and you have, you've connected the dots that you've done the work.
Asra:Yeah. And I just welcome any ideas on how we can scale and how we can make this the normative. You can't even imagine that I have written proposals that I even sent to the, Far liberal communities like the Open Society Foundation, I sent them a proposal about a new school of jurisprudence that would make normative ideas of women's rights and human rights and they rejected it because the classic liberals cannot even support or fund this any longer. Unfortunately, if you have the politically conservative, I don't see the full support there either. So it's us in the middle. It's like us and common sense majority that have.
Azi:Yeah it's, interesting. I asked someone I've been trying to consult with people as smart people, like yourself. And I asked someone here in Israel who's a thinker and I said, what is going on right now? What do we need to do to win this war on ideas, to win this war against terror? And he said, you have to split the left. Split the left, right? And that's exactly what you talk about. You talk about this left that has gone absolutely extreme, that's been hijacked by Islamist extremism, pro terror. But then what do you do about all these people now who are waking up? They're looking for something
Asra:to belong to. Yeah, we have to create it. Clearly, like Gandhi said, be the change you want to see in the world. And, let's do it. Let's create that institution. Let's get the. mechanics in place. I'm a writer and editor and I have this dream. I've had this dream for 20 years to codify the positive interpretations of Islam that so many different scholars have expressed, like the right of women to marry whoever they choose.
Azi:For the future of humanity, what are the values that are going to sustain the lives of our grandchildren, our great
Asra:grandchildren? Yeah, absolutely. We need that letter to humanity. That expresses beyond our places of identity the values that connect you and me that connected me with Danny that connect me to this day with Danny's dad, Dr Pearl, who has given me a lot of courage, strength and clarity these last two decades. And so a generation divides us entire biography separates us, but we're connected. And I agree with you that we need that. We still obviously need that to be like a moral compass for us and, this, book, Critical Race Theory became a Bible for the far left ideologues and we have to give the young people, the blueprint in my Muslim community for an Islam that we need. My parents taught me that allowed me to come to personal liberation, freedom and empowerment and including the great gift of not only my allowing me to have my son in my life, but this is a big issue that I will, fight for it to my last breath. And that is the Islamic fighting for the Islamic interpretation that we are allowed to have a dog in our home because all of the Maliki school that allows dogs inside the home as a pet. And they claim that the angels will not visit a home in which there's a dog. Just my mom and dad, my mom, when I told her that, or when I was about to get a dog said, I said mom, what do you think? We might have relatives that might not want to come over or friends that believe that. And she's I don't want them over then and that's what I learned in the denying of something as well. Beautiful, innocent and unconditional, a symbol of unconditional love as a dog is that that's a denial of love and happiness, and that any interpretation that of religion or faith that denies you happiness and joy. Is one that's crushing to the soul and and it murders the spirit and the soul. That's, one of the chapters that I want to have in this new school of jurisprudence. It's a universal struggle in so many communities and societies and the one that the one that unfortunately one of the most antiquated right now is in my Muslim community. Because so many, fundamental ideas of equality are denied women from the idea that we're allowed to have equal inheritance as daughters to our brothers. The idea that a woman is equal witness to a man in a court of law, that is not. Adjudicated in most Muslim countries, the idea that a child born without a father on his birth certificate is a quote. Legitimate citizen of society that's still being denied human beings born into this earth because the mother is a supposed criminal. I come from India where in my childhood, poor widows were still burning themselves to death because they were accepting this. Tradition and Hinduism that they had to do that, that they're a sacrifice after their husbands died and the progressive thought in Hinduism made it so that is not today a practice. All of our societies have had to negotiate. And and I think we're the we're the vehicles for. The progress. We are the progressives and I will like never ever allow the regressive thinkers in society to steal that from my own sense of self. From tragedy must come hope and we have to create this opportunity for, bringing people who have seen too much of the brutality to ever go back to that old normalcy. Like they want a new normal. And, you probably saw the good news today. It was just weird news. I know, but that the store in Jordan that called itself October 7th. Supposedly put the name down because of pressure. Yeah, so that's great. That's people course correcting right in each of our lights. Like Yasmin reacted like, oh, it's so sad that that's a moment of triumph. But hey, if somebody moves out of myopic negative wrong thought to to human humanity, that's a success. So that's a good thing. You've created your Instagram. We've met. And and I'll give everybody my email address. It's asra@asranomani.com I'm just a S. R. A. at a S. R. A. and as a Nancy. Oh, and as a Mary and I dot com,
Azi:everyone needs to buy Woke Army. And you're on Twitter. Your Twitter is
Asra:amazing. Yes. So my Twitter, I really use it today to do the first step of what Martin Luther King said. You need a nonviolent movement, which is education. So you'll see long posts there. So it's just at us for no money. And and please do go on Amazon by the book. And most importantly, also, if So Give it a review because the my haters, you can see them. All I stood up one day to this young woman at our school board who hates Israel comes as a daughter of the Muslim brothers in northern Virginia, and I exposed her antisemitism and sure enough, all her little fangirls and fanboys gave me the one star review, which And which they, like everything, they try to control everybody's narrative. And so let's, steal that back from them and go in there and give it a five star review. But learn, I wrote the book because I wanted people to learn from my own journey of, understanding this this network that we're up against. And I want everybody to know these names. The the, Linda Sarsour and their allies people that you would not imagine, like Glenn Greenwald, who people fancy as a civil libertarian, the Democratic Party officials, the funders, the academics know them because Sun Tzu said in the art of war you have to know the enemy. And unfortunately, they are enemies of humanity. And if you even slide into my DMs Ozzie, that's how we connected. you'll see that. I will always write back. It might be 3 in the morning, but I, yeah. I do I do love to be connected because, my hope and my goal is that we will be the ones that dominate our, earth and our wisdom and compass. For morality and intellectual and spirit even will be the prevailing one. Amen.
Shure MV7-14:To learn more artist support our growing movement. You can visit tiny url.com. Backslash humanity, POV movement. That's tiny url.com. Backslash humanity, POV movement. Thank you so much for tuning in. And we'll see you on the next episode.