October 9, 2008

Domestic Crusader

Posted by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam at 12:16PM

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The presidential candidates don't argue over whether it is right to bomb Muslim countries, but rather over whether they’ve chosen the right Muslim country to bomb. A special interest group commanded by Israeli ex-officials unloaded 28 million copies of an anti-Muslim hate film in swing states to titillate idle exurban imaginations. The hammer of the “war on terror” is wielded against an ever-expanding pool of people who conveniently appear as wayward nails.

As these ominous realities unfold before their eyes, some American Muslims appear resigned and fatalistic.

Wajahat Ali is not among them. The 27-year-old California-born Muslim with Pakistani roots takes an aggressive but level-headed approach to politics and the arena of ideas. An attorney, activist, writer, journalist, and playwright, Wajahat aspires to the dynamism and versatility of Muslim scholars and poets of past ages.

“There’s no rule that say you only have to be one thing,” he says, emphasizing the need for American Muslims to become valuable leaders within their own communities—and to make their own communities leading examples of Muslim values: tolerance, justice, and scholarship.

“Prophet Muhammad said, ‘Seek knowledge, even if you have to go as far as China.’ You want to be part of a renaissance, you want to be part of a cultural, spiritual, intellectual revolution, where you revive Islamic scholarship,” Wajahat says.

The Bay Area resident says he never sought out to take up that path; rather, the path sought him out.

“It was when I went to preschool and realized for the first time, like most minorities do, that you’re different,” he notes. Born into a traditional South Asian family and living with both his parents and grandparents, he spoke Urdu exclusively the first four years of his life, entering ESL in the first-grade.

“From elementary school, and even in high school, I ended up being the token Muslim guy” who teachers and classmates approached for knowledge about Islam, Wajahat explains. Sometimes, they also came for pranks: “Some of my friends would put bacon bits in my salad to see if I would go to hell,” he says in a bemused tone.

“It’s not that I wore religion on my sleeve…when you’re growing up as a minority, all you want to do is fit in like everyone else. You want the cutest girl to talk to you and you want to be one of the cool kids.”

But Wajahat quickly learned he could leverage his uniqueness. “You become an exotic…but you make a decision whether you’re going to be hermetic with your Otherness or whether you’re going to be proactive.”

Choosing the latter route, Wajahat wrote his debut American Muslim play, Domestic Crusaders, when he was 23. The play was produced by his writing teacher and Pulitzer-prize nominee Ishmael Reed.

Developing his repertoire through improvisational comedy (“I started doing jokes because I was a fat kid, and I saw that humor really worked”), he created the post-Sept.11th superhero “Captain Islam” and played an active role in the Muslim Student Association.

An associate editor of the publication AltMuslim.com—“it’s neither too apologetic nor too antagonistic”—Wajahat exhorts wealthier American Muslims to invest in their own future by creating think tanks and scholarships in art and media instead of collecting luxury cars. “We have to break out of our culturally isolated bubble,” he says.

Wajahat knows that Muslim mobilization will not immediately alter the political landscape—but he understands that the Muslim landscape must be altered by political mobilization.

“As the joke goes, the question is, ‘Who is going to kill us less?’,” he says of the candidates. “But [Obama] is the lesser of two evils. You have to be strategic. I’m a strong believer that Muslims have to engage.”