Everyone wants to be Muslim until it’s time to be Muslim

Elmo knows how to say as-salamu alaykum. Anne Hathaway reaches for inshallah during press for The Devil Wears Prada 2 with an ease that would have you thinking she could lead Asr prayers at the masjid. New York was affectionately crowned Mamdanistan on the eve of the city’s mayoral election last year. New Yorkers won’t let us forget their mayor is Muslim; Knicks fans have made certain of that much. Riz Ahmed is making self-aware James Bond spoofs for Amazon. Major fashion houses put out capsule collections filled with crescent moons every Eid and Ramadan. Muslims, it seems, are in vogue. No one is more confused by it than young Muslims.

Do you know what it takes to survive as a Muslim kid in the West?

You try to get by, at first, by denying yourself. You shove your hijab into the Fjällräven Kånken backpack you saved for before first period. You take bites out of cold BLTs as a dare to convince classmates that you’re cool, that all these little trespasses upon your identity mean nothing. They are to think of you as one of those moderate Muslims. Of course, you never pray in front of them. You sit obediently through PREVENT seminars where all the pictures of suspected criminals look like your uncle, your brother, your mosque teacher, the boy you have a crush on in the year above you. You’re convinced that anyone who looks at you too long can see that you’re a freak; self-consciousness merges with resentment as you look around at your classmates who only have to worry about their grades and prom. The word assimilation has not made itself known to you yet, but when it does, it feels too contrived for the violent skinning you put yourself through every morning until the bell rings at 3:00 p.m.

A girl stands with her family who are wearing Yemeni traditional clothing during a Eid celebration, 2023, Brooklyn, New York.

It is a sense of alienation that many people have spent a lot of money on to make young Muslims feel. Turn on the television as a teen and there a Muslim goes, blowing up some plane with innocent Americans on board. Few case studies illustrate culture’s role as a shield protecting the hegemonic political order than Hollywood’s treatment of Muslims. The 2010s saw the release of thriller after thriller filled to the brim with the same stereotypical delusions about the scary Muslim who corralled the UN into supporting an illegal invasion of Iraq. Nori-paper-thin plots that boil down to scary bearded brown man deserves to die for laying a hand on the morally upstanding white victim won the likes of Bradley Cooper an Oscar nod and reinforced the Anglo-speaking world of its role as both savior and perpetual victim post-9/11.

"We have a right to representation, but before that, we have a right to life."

Of course, it did not matter that this narrative was entirely at odds with what we knew about Islam. The stories I have about the liberalism and equity decreed in our faith, the lectures I got about my responsibility as a steward over all people from my elders, over even the plants and the water, lessons on ethical consumption and inter-community solidarity as a child in the mosque, the generosity and warmth I saw firsthand and experienced in our shared spaces, watching working-class people give and give to those in need during Ramadan (Muslims are some of the highest charity donors in the country)—none of it counts. Facts do not matter in a propaganda campaign. Our capacity for multidimensionality doesn’t matter either. I grew up with anime-obsessed hijabis with Itachi Uchiha posters on their walls who would sneak to the bathroom during mosque to read Larry fan fiction on their A03 accounts. The women in these propaganda portraits are our counter: two-dimensional and ascribed a submissiveness that is laughable to anyone who actually knows a Muslim woman.

Girl takes a selfie during Eid al Fitr prayers in Diyanet Turkish Mosque. Lanham, MD, 2025.

Our communities live and breathe by the word of the women in our families. We are a people made up of matriarchs. It was my grandmother's village elders sought out for counseling and advice back home. The community stores and local businesses that keep diaspora Muslims connected to their faith and culture were started by women who sold their gold necklaces and rings to finance their work. We were leading anti-colonial revolutions and dictating policy in Somalia, Iran, and Pakistan before white female suffrage even took off in places like Britain and the U.S. The only place a Muslim woman is submissive is in the dark depths of the Western imagination.

Trumpian times came calling while these caricatures still ran rampant on screen, and a mirrored surge in anti-Muslim sentiment took hold in Europe and the U.K. It was then that the first tokenizing efforts to “include” Muslims in mainstream culture were made. On January 27, 2017, Trump issued Executive Order 13769, a “Muslim ban” that barred citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the United States. Less than a month later, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) rehung part of its permanent collection, choosing works by artists from some of the majority-Muslim countries he listed. The spaces held by Picasso, Matisse, and Picabia on the fifth floor were replaced with work by the likes of Sudanese painter Ibrahim el-Salahi, Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, and Iranian painter Marcos Grigorian. I remember reading articles about the decision by curators at the museum and questioning if I should feel grateful; all I could wonder was what hanging some portraits would do to stop men from pulling off my little cousin’s hijab on the way to school.

It is the same question I ask now as news pours in of illegal strikes in Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine. There is no way to capture the whiplash being experienced by Muslims who watch family members abroad flee drone strikes in this climate of collective cultural Muslimness. Prada unveils a viral Eid al Fitr collection; Israeli forces have killed another Muslim journalist. Bait goes number one on Amazon; here come reports of a shooting at a San Diego masjid that resulted in three casualties. Everyone is throwing mashallah and inshallah around online like those phrases are not sacred and specific. Muslims are worth emulating, and our collected culture is worth co-opting, but the systems and practices that endanger our lives are not worth interrogating to the West. Muslims are not the first group to be victims of this cognitive dissonance.

Eighth graders enjoy a game of basketball during a study break at Houston Quran Academy in Houston, TX.

bell hooks named this form of cultural appropriation the “commodification of otherness.” Stripping cultural (and, I add here, religious) elements from their original contexts and sanitizing them in the hopes of white ownership over them has given us a streetwear boom in high fashion that was unthinkable when poor Black kids were building their own fashion codes in the Bronx. Dupattas are renamed “Scandinavian scarves.” Chinese-medicine practices are parroted back by Instagrammers ascribing hundreds of years of holistic practice to a thin white girl who came across their feed.

There is an urge to feel grateful for the scraps of stolen representation we’re getting. These are value contradictions. You cannot place a plaster on a bullet hole and think the body healed. We have a right to representation, but before that, we have a right to life. There is a part of me that looks at Zohran Mamdani reciting a verse from the Quran in front of the world’s media with wonder and bewilderment. It is brave; it shouldn’t be. But we who watch him at home know what that could cost him. The 17-year-old Ayan, who had to sit in a classroom and defend her faith from parroted attacks calling Islam backward and anti-feminist, would have thought it impossible to hear Ramy Youssef end an SNL monologue with a dua. Even mediocre work like Ms. Marvel pulls at my heartstrings for the sheer indulgence of its Muslimness.

It is human to want to be understood. The weight of the other, of having to insist on your humanness, stifles and exhausts; it’s why it has been placed upon us. We cannot, however, settle for table scraps of acceptance when we should be insisting on our freedom the world over. The lives of so many of our brothers and sisters depend on our critical vigilance. Those who follow our practices now may not be around tomorrow. We will, once again, walk this path alone. We mustn’t forget that.

This article is originally from harperbazaar.com in June 2026

Lead image: Hearst Owned

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