Brooklyn’s Muslims make history
Zaheer Ali has been living and working in Brooklyn as a Muslim for over a decade.
This past year, in creating an archive of local Muslim voices, he’s learned a lot about the lives of the diverse communities who call the New York City borough their home.
As the Brooklyn Historical Society’s oral historian, Ali launched its yearlong flagship project, Muslims in Brooklyn.
“Brooklyn is a gathering place for Muslims from all over the world,” Ali said. “This project reinforced the multidimensionality of these communities, that we should not collapse or f latten the experiences of Muslims.”
Fifty interviews, ranging from 90 minutes to three hours, will be collected in a permanent, searchable archive paired with educational and arts programs.
The participants are from a variety of ethnic backgrounds — African American, Yemeni, Palestinian, Moroccan, Kashmiri, Bangladeshi, Tatar, Haitian and Puerto Rican — and 18 Brooklyn neighborhoods. They range in age from 24 to 74, from unobservant to conservative Muslim and everything in between, and are entrepreneurs, community organizers, clerics, medical professionals, homemakers, business owners, laborers, educators, musicians and artists.
Among them are “Muslim Cool” author Su’ad Abdul-khabeer, Bangladeshi Feminist Collective founding member Shahana Hanif, 9/11 first responder Stacey Salimah-bell and Asad Dandia, a Columbia University graduate student who was a plaintiff in the 2013 class-action suit against New York Police Department surveillance.
An estimated 22 percent of America’s total Muslim population lives in New York City, in every borough. Brooklyn is home to the most mosques — nearly 100 — and one of the country’s oldest. The Brooklyn Muslim Mosque was established in the Williamsburg neighborhood by a community of Eastern European Muslims, who in 1907 founded the Lithuanian Tatar society — later called the American Mohammedan Society.
The State Street Mosque, based in Brooklyn Heights, was founded in 1939 by Sheikh Daoud Ahmed Faisal and his wife, Sayedah Khadijah Faisal. Now known as the Islamic Mission of America, it was a spiritual nurturing ground for African-american Sunni Muslims, as well as for many immigrants arriving in the mid- to late 20th century, Ali explained.
Brooklyn also boasts Masjid Abdul Muhsi Khalifah, one of the mosques that Malcolm X founded while part of the Nation of Islam, in Bedfordstuyvesant. Muslim musicians like rapper Mos Def have played key roles pushing the boundaries of art.
In July, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding published the second edition of its Muslims for American Progress impact report, quantifying Muslims’ contributions to New York City and pairing the statistics with personal narratives from some 80 of New York’s most prominent Muslim voices.
ISPU measured Muslims’ contributions to life in New York in everything from civics to medicine to philanthropy to education. Two years ago, about 770,000 Muslims resided in New York City, 9 percent of the city’s population, and 12 percent of all pharmacists, 9 percent of all doctors, 11 percent of engineers, 40 percent of taxi drivers and 57 percent of street food vendors.
Ali’s team worked with communities to choose the interviewees to help capture three ideas: that Muslims have a long history in the U.S., in New York and in Brooklyn; that Muslims represent multiple ethnicities and nationalities; and that they have shaped Brooklyn as much as Brooklyn has shaped them.
For Ali, the anxieties of the political moment made the project feel more critical than ever.
He cited the ugly rhetoric about Muslims, policy-based and legislative attacks on Muslims and a rise in antimuslim bias incidents. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the White House’s travel ban, the Brooklyn Historical Society’s president published a statement underscoring the organization’s commitment to highlighting the stories and contributions of local Muslims.
The interviews reveal a resilience that’s inspiring, Ali said, but the “intimate conversations” within the oral histories also “challenge Muslim exceptionalism” by exposing the vibrancy and mundaneness of Muslims’ lives.
“We see that Muslims are certainly very concerned by Islamophobia, but they don’t define themselves by it,” he said. Oral history as a medium for the project allows communities to document their experiences in their own voices, giving them the space to speak freely without being cut and framed by editors and curators.
The project kicked off with a free public listening party on Thursday at the Brooklyn Historical Society’s office in Brooklyn Heights.