San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
New online publication Muslim aims to get Gen Z involved in community
as well as a newsletter (16,000-plus subscribers) launched last year in partnership with MuslimGirl.com — a now 10-year-old site founded by Al-Khatahtbeh’s elder sister and mentor, author and congressional candidate Amani Al-Khatahtbeh.
The idea for Muslim began in 2016. At the time, Ameer AlKhatahtbeh, who will graduate from Rutgers University in May, had just begun studying journalism in the hopes of becoming an entertainment writer.
The son of a Jordanian immigrant and a Palestinian refugee, Al-Khatahtbeh said the anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies he saw during the 2016 presidential campaign caused an immediate change in the direction of his writing.
Al-Khatahtbeh said that few mainstream news media organizations featured the voices of Muslims. Even on liberal news outlets, he said, Muslims rarely got a seat at the table.
“At some point I realized there needed to be a major change,” Al-Khatahtbeh said. “There needed to be a news publication for us.”
The site is currently an allvolunteer initiative, something Al-Khatahtbeh hopes will eventually change. The team consists of about 10 regular freelance writers, as well as an editor and graphic designer.
“Muslim has given us young writers a voice,” contributor Amirah Ahmed told RNS. “Instead of downplaying the youths’ experiences, Muslim is amplifying them and providing a much needed, all-inclusive platform.”
A number of Muslim-focused blogs and online magazines have popped up since the 2000s, from the Islamic Monthly to MuslimMatters to AltMuslim and AltMuslimah. Many have shut down. Some focus on religious content and others on women’s issues.
Al-Khatahtbeh’s project, however, is aimed directly at Generation Z, the demographic following millennials. Born between the late ’90s and the early 2010s, members of Gen Z are currently emerging into young adulthood, tend to lean left and have an incredible intuition for digital media.
But they’re also “super underrepresented” in politics and activism, he said, particularly within Muslim spaces.
“Gen Z is ready to be involved, but nobody is giving us an opportunity within our own community,” he said.
Nor, he said, are his generation’s needs being addressed by mosques.
“I don’t want to go to a mosque and hear a sermon about how to perform ablution,” Al-Khatahtbeh said. “I want to hear about hard-hitting topics. I want an engaging lecture that’s going to resonate with me.”
U.S. Muslims are, on average, significantly younger than the overall American population. About 42 percent of Muslims in the country are younger than 30, making Muslims the youngest major religious community both nationally and globally.
Many of his peers point to imams and mosque leaders who are more likely to scold young “Ramadan Muslims” — the equivalent of Christians who only attend church on Christmas and Easter — rather than hold their hand through their struggles with their faith, AlKhatahtbeh said.
Many of the Gen Z and millennial Muslims he met felt similarly disenchanted with the spaces available to them. That need for alternative sources of community-building has only grown during the coronavirus outbreak, which has shut down mosques and left many Muslims feeling adrift.
“I’m just so glad that Muslim is there, could be a community for Muslims during this time, as we’re experiencing the firstever digital Ramadan,” he said. “Inshallah (God willing), we can be that space for everybody.”