Playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Ayad Akhtar discusses the meaning of marginalization and its implications for claiming power and disrupting systems.
Ayad Akhtar, American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter, joins Eboo Patel at the Chicago Humanities Festival to discuss art, creativity, and cultural sensitivity. They emphasize the need to engage with and respect different identities in a diverse democracy rather than resorting to simplistic labels like "victim" or "racist."
Bio: Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which The Washington Post called "a tour de force" and The New York Times called "a beautiful novel…that had echoes of The Great Gatsby and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life." His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations).
[00:00:00] Eboo Patel: This is the Interfaith America podcast. I'm Eboo Patel.
[music]
This spring, I was invited by the Chicago Humanities Festival to have a conversation with my friend, Ayad Akhtar, on this topic, On Offense: Creative Expression and Democratic Engagement Between Racism and Anti-Racism. Ayad and I took a look at what it means to express oneself freely, to be a part of an artist community, to be part of a democracy, and to share the designation marginalized.
Ayad is a writer, a novelist, and playwright. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Disgraced, and he's also written a number of well-received novels, including American Dervish and Homeland Elegies. He's also the president of PEN America. Our conversation is a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts through art, culture, and education, culminating with some incredibly smart questions from the audience.
This makes me so happy.
[00:01:08] Ayad Akhtar: Welcome. Me too.
[00:01:09] Eboo: Thrilled to have you here in Chicago. By the way, I have to tell you, should you want to experience a nuclear reactor's worth of intellectual energy, go for an hour-long walk with Ayad in Hyde Park.
[00:01:22] Ayad: I did tell you that my wife tells me I have to be nicer.
[00:01:27] Eboo: Plenty nice. Let me begin this conversation by reading a paragraph from Ayad's really brilliant and insightful Roth Lecture about the artist and the challenge of moral stridency. I think it sets the tone for this evening. Then what I'm going to do with this is walk through a set of scenarios, four of which had happened, one of which is invented, and we'll work through those with respect to how we think about issues of free expression, art, democracy, diversity, offense, marginalization, et cetera. I'm going to set the tone with something that Ayad said. How long ago was this, Ayad?
[00:02:14] Ayad: November of '21, the Philip Roth Lecture that is given every year at the New York Public Library, so it was '21.
[00:02:21] Eboo: Okay. "What do I mean by moral stridency? A fierce perhaps even punitive adherence to the collectively sanctioned attitudes and behaviors of this era, or any other. Act of clarity about what you feel to be right does not, of course, guarantee that you will write great sentences or craft indelible scenes. It gives you no edge in seeing a picture of the world that is dramatically or lyrically compelling.
Indeed, it is no real advantage to understanding at all. Knowledge of the world or of nature or of people is not aided by a foremost commitment to purity in one's moral approach. If anything, moral purity is only a liability in that regard, splitting the world into acceptable and unacceptable, defensible and indefensible. It impoverishes the artist's access to an ultimately knowledge of reality, rich and roiling as it is."
[00:03:27] Ayad: I do agree with that.
[00:03:28] Eboo: Yes. You know who wrote it?
[00:03:30] Ayad: Yes. Well, that was a year and a half ago, so I could have changed my mind, but I haven't.
[00:03:35] Eboo: I think if there's an overall theme to this is the notion of rigid dogmas, and required narratives serve neither the purpose of art nor of diverse democracy.
[00:03:49] Ayad: Or the inquiry into the nature of reality. I think as we enter into this era of socialist realism without genocide, I worry that we are going to really on a fundamental level lose our competitive edge. Because you can't do science, you can't have political emancipation. You can't do any of those things if there are codified representations that you have to hew to as a matter of first principles. The first principle has to be what's real, and can I make sense of reality by my own eyes? Dogma, ideology, moral purity, it's never helped anybody makes sense of that stuff.
[00:04:27] Eboo: Unsurprisingly, we're already off-script, and it's interesting.
[00:04:31] Ayad: Okay, sorry. We're going to start with him and I.
[00:04:35] Eboo: It leads me to one of the first times I think I realized this and then I want to go into to the scenes I want to present you with. When I was a graduate student at Oxford, I came into my PhD, which was on a group of South Asians in London with a very particular theory, which my PhD advisor encouraged. He was basically like, "Absolutely, go see if these young people feel like they're colonized living in England. If they're part of the Empire striking back," so to speak, "if they feel like the subaltern."
For six months, every which way, I asked them that in my ethnography. I would ask them that in interviews, I would follow them around in participant observation, and it wasn't coming. It wasn't emerging. I remember sitting at the home of my PhD advisor field notes on the floor, and literally wailing, I'm doing this wrong. My PhD advisor pauses, of course, he could have said this six days into my research, but he waited six months. He was like, "Well, maybe they don't feel that way. Maybe you want them to feel that way, but they don't." Then he said to me, "The cardinal sin in intellectual work is squeezing the world into your worldview."
[00:06:06] Ayad: I mean, we should just stop talking now. I think [laughs] that's what we're here to say.
[00:06:13] Eboo: Yes. There's a part of this that's descriptive. If you say, two plus two equals five, you're just wrong about something. If you say somebody feels like the subaltern when they don't, you're wrong about reality, but it's also like a deep moral violation. We'll get into this in the course of the scenes I'm going to present. Basically, you are telling somebody else how they should feel about themselves instead of allowing them to describe themselves. This isn't the work of ethnography, but I think also of journalism, also, perhaps of some forms of art is-
[00:06:49] Ayad: Natural science. [crosstalk]
[00:06:50] Eboo: -telling somebody how they feel or how they should feel.
[00:06:53] Ayad: Trying to project some picture, whether it's Lamarckian evolution on the data. It set Russian science behind at least 60, 70 years because it was in adherence to a moral position about the centrality of-- so the consequences are real.
[00:07:15] Eboo: By the way, when I discovered that theory, post-colonial theory, intersectionality, et cetera, as an undergrad, it did describe significant parts of my identity. This isn't a problem with the theory, it is a problem with the dogmatic application of any theory everywhere. To my PhD advisor's very wise point, absolutely use the torches you have to illuminate the world. If you find out that a particular torch doesn't, go to another torch, otherwise, you are squeezing the world into a worldview. Okay, scene, number one, shall I?
[00:07:57] Ayad: Yes.
[00:07:58] Eboo: We have this friendship where we'll go for this intense walk in the west village for two hours, and say all kinds of nuclear things and then we won't talk for two years. That's how it is. It had been a minute since we had talked, and then the situation with the Prophet Muhammad and Hamline emerges, and we have a typically intense Eboo, Ayad conversation. I want to summarize the situation, and I want to ask you what about this bugged you so much? Then I want you to give me an opportunity to tell people what bugged me so much afterward.
Here's the situation. This happens maybe six months ago, or it comes to light about six months ago, a professor in an art history class at a small liberal arts college in the Twin Cities, Hamline University, shows a 14th-century image of the Prophet Muhammad, an image that has been shown in countless art history classes. It is very much centrally a part of the scholarship of Islamic art, et cetera, et cetera.
She gave warnings to the students first knowing that there are sensitivities around showing images of the Prophet Muhammad in certain Muslim Madhhab, mean schools of law and cultures. She had a warning in the syllabus, and she noted it at the beginning of class. I'm not saying that that was the most important thing, I'm simply noting it as a matter of fact.
A student after the class decides that she's deeply disturbed by this. Goes to the chair of the department or the dean of the particular college at Hamline and goes to the diversity director and says that this has harmed her, made her feel marginalized. The diversity director and the president of the college host a public town hall in which they call in a local Muslim activist from-- An activist organization called Care who compares showing images of the prophet Muhammad to pedophilia, et cetera, et cetera. When a professor at Hamlin stands up and says, "Listen, this is actually part of canonical traditions in Islamic scholarship, and in our history scholarship, we should look at the scholar resources on this."
The academic dean of the college puts her hand on his shoulder and says, "This isn't the time for those type of comments." The professor gets-- Her contract does not get renewed. In colloquial terms, that means in adjunct world, you've been fired, right? This hits the Chronicle of Higher Ed. This is a Sunday New York Times front-page story. I call you and you have an Ayad moment. What bugged you about this?
[00:11:06] Ayad: Well, I think everybody, but what bugs any sensible person, is the university there to make people feel a certain way? It's not clear to me that that's what pedagogy is about. It's like teaching a class in molecular biology and saying, "Well, look, I know we have to-- We need to take 10 minutes to talk about creationism." What's the relevance? There's no relevance. We're talking about punctuated equilibrium and random point mutations on the genome. Why are we talking about creationism? Well, because some people believe in creationism and they're offended that you are not giving them space.
In this particular instance, even worse because they're saying, "Don't do it." It's not clear to me. In this particular example, we talked a little bit about it with Tony last night, and we got a little bit more color about some of the things that are going on at that university and the makeup of the student body and how there's a lot of East African Black Muslims in that student body and how they're very tuition-dependent, the university is.
There're deeper structural economic, it seems to me, incentives to be currying favor with the students that maybe at another university would not have gone that way. I think what bothers me-- Look, there's a lot about it that bothers me also because of the ignorance around Islam. You have a lot of liberal supporters of this kind of nonsense, and those liberal supporters, well-intentioned, however, they may be, don't even understand the stakes.
They don't understand that what we're talking about is believing the dogma of a medieval way of thinking is totally counter to everything that those so-called liberal people stand for. If you're going to go to university and you're going to be confronted by ideas you don't like, I don't think that the legitimate response is to get somebody fired or to get somebody to stop doing it, or to stop saying it.
That's just not the way it works. I'll just add one addendum, one little footnote to that, which is that the attack on Salman, I'm actually not going to be the president of Penn. I've been the president of Penn for three years. I think the introduction was a little old, which is all good. I've been dealing with the free expression stuff now for some time. Salman's attack, the attack on Salman in August, really, really brought home on a fundamental level how in commensurate the demands of harm, recognizing the harms of speech are in comparison to the essential nature of the freedom to speak, the freedom to think, the freedom to express.
I grew up in a community, in Muslim community, which felt that Satanic Verses was harm speech. It was trafficking in tropes that the West had used for 300 years to discredit the prophet, to make us look backward, to take our oil, to attack us.
Salam was using all of that stuff, and he was doing it consciously, was using all of those tropes to make fun of us. Of course, he's going to get retaliation. You know what, as far as they were concerned, their offense was deeply felt, that community, the community that I grew up in and I understood it. Then I read the book and it was a sublime broadside against my own childhood faith that awakened a artistic and moral conscience of another nature in me.
I really date my birth as an artist to reading that book. Confronting that hate speech to me-- Example, for some reason, it took this many years to understand the harms of speech are not only not equal to the importance of free expression, they're totally incommensurate. For us to be having culturally, this conversation, to me, it's indicative of a kind of intellectual atmosphere that at best I would say is lazy. That's my deepest feeling about it. That's a lot of what I said to you on the phone.
[00:15:41] Eboo: I want to take the moment of reading an offensive book, which The Satanic Verses is, and it is also a work of art, which The Satanic Verses is-
[00:15:55] Ayad: Sublime work.
[00:15:56] Eboo: -which is to say it is not a pig's head on the doorstep of a mosque. There is a difference. We can get into that later, right? There are forms of expression which are just meant to offend. That doesn't mean they should be outlawed, although I probably think they should be, but the point is that there is a difference between a work of art that is offensive and a pig's head on the doorstep of a mosque or- [crosstalk]
[00:16:21] Ayad: Yes. Charlie Hebdo would do a cartoon of a pig's head on the doorstep of a mosque, and that would not be an act of aggression. That's an act of vandalism, right? I think that I understand the point, but that's part of what art is always supposed to have done is to challenge our received ideas.
[00:16:44] Eboo: I think this is a different conversation. Let's just mark the territory. There has to be a way of saying, I'm going to use the example again, a pig's head in the doorstep of a mosque is a hate crime or something. A book and Goodbye, Columbus is something that deeply offends, it could deeply offend on the surface--
[00:17:07] Ayad: Portnoy's Complaint.
[00:17:08] Eboo: What's that?
[00:17:08] Ayad: Portnoy's Complaint more.
[00:17:11] Eboo: Portnoy's. It's different. I want to take the moment of-- The example of I read the book and I was born again. That is, in part, what art and education is supposed to do. It's part of what makes me so sad about the Hamlin situation. A huge part of it made me mad for all the reasons you said, and others as well. A part of it made me deeply sad because what else is a college education except for confronting things you would not have learned about at home? Oh my gosh. My parents' understanding of Islam is legitimate.
It's legit to think that there shouldn't be pictures of the prophet, and nobody told me where I grew up, that for over a thousand years, pious Muslims have been beautifully depicting the prophet that the Ottoman Caliphate would commission images of the prophet. This is not a minority tradition in earlier eras in Islam. The notion of not depicting the prophet was a minority church.
Isn't that what you are supposed to do in college? Isn't that what art is supposed to be? It feels like a deep failure of the educational enterprise and the notion that it would be done for the protection and benefit of people with extra pigment in their skin. Like us, people of color, so to speak, a category, as I've told you before, I dislike, and we can get into that. I think to myself reading this, I'm like, "Are the only people who are actually going to get a college education these days rich white people because everybody else can claim that something on the syllabus offends them and then they won't have to read it?"
[00:19:10] Ayad: I think rich white people say that too.
[00:19:14] Eboo: Say what?
[00:19:14] Ayad: That there's stuff on the syllabus they don't like. I think it's a cultural atmosphere. This is a debate you and I have. I don't want to commandeer and take this in a different direction than the script we've got, but the reality is there are some ideas in the groundwater at this point. Those ideas have something to do with the central protagonist of history or the central social protagonist of our time as the victim, not the hero.
I think as a dramatist that it presents a particularly pregnant challenge for me because the victim-- Anything that's interesting about a victim's situation is stuff that's happened in the past, whereas the hero actually has to do something. That's a much more interesting story. I think that this claim of what my identity is or what my pigeonhole is or what it is, what entitles me to feel that I have been somehow mistreated or I have been victimized, this is a central part of the discourse center. This is part of the construction of the self.
It is, of course, a problem in universities and universities increasingly are having to deal with it because their students are customers and this is the inversion of hierarchy that's happened in pedagogy. Universities didn't, but we're dealing with it. You're dealing with it in institutions, you're dealing with your institution, I'm dealing it at Pan America, I'm seeing it in the culture at large.
[00:20:45] Eboo: What is this idea on the groundwater and how it manifests itself at Hamlin? This is the way that I think about this. I'm seeing this as a play, although I recognize the danger of saying that in front of you [laughs] the play. Student is deeply uncomfortable with something, which I understand. I'm a Muslim and I have great respect for the variety of understandings in Islam, even the ones I disagree with. Those are legit understandings. How much they can impose themselves on others, I think is another question.
[00:21:22] Ayad: Can I make a comment to that? Sure, it's legit, but just to cut to the chase, then my response is, make a better argument. Then make an argument why showing an image of the prophet is part of a tradition of desacralizing images in a post enlightenment West which has no understanding of the sacred anymore. Make an argument for something. Shutting down speech because you don't like it is absolutely unacceptable. It's just not acceptable. It's not democratic. It's not smart.
[00:22:00] Eboo: It reminds me of something to invoke a Voldemort name in some circles. It's part of what Dave Chappelle says when he goes back and he gives the talk at his old high school, and he says, "Listen, here's the thing with The Closer," the closer the Netflix special of his that generated a lot of controversy, he's like, "you're welcome to do your own response to it." Then he says, "You will not see its equal." That was the point that I want to make on that. Seeing the face- [crosstalk].
[00:22:30] Ayad: Promoting himself.
[00:22:32] Eboo: He's saying in effect what you said at the beginning here, which he was like, I put out what he viewed-- people can disagree with it. He puts out what he views as a piece of art, as an intellectual text. Go ahead and disagree with it as an intellectual text. Go ahead and put out your response to that. You are welcome to do that. I want to go back to the framework in the groundwater. I want to turn two things here before moving to the next scene. If I were to write this up as a play, the crucial moment happens when the student goes to the diversity director, and the diversity director gives that student a framework for which to see the situation.
[00:23:25] Ayad: God help us when we get reported to the diversity director. [laughs]
[00:23:28] Eboo: The framework is victim and racist. Part of my concern is the framework in the groundwater is you wake up in the morning and you are looking for a victim and a racist. The reality that unfolds before you, back to your opening quote here, moral purity is a liability because it splits the world into acceptable and unacceptable, defensible and indefensible. Every situation has a victim and a racist. Even something that is highly ambiguous, and which by the way, it would take you two seconds to Google images of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic art, 10,000 commissioned by the Ottoman Caliphate, a central part of Shia Islam available in the markets of Tehran, a huge part of Sufi Islam.
[00:24:25] Ayad: All of that is in English. It was engineered by a non-Muslim engineer at Google. You could go on forever with this shit. You can deconstruct why everything is constructed in a way that is in opposition to what it should be because it makes me feel a certain way when it's said a certain way. As I said, this is not rocket science. Anyway, go on.
[00:24:53] Eboo: I think the point of this here is that even situations in which the fact pattern is very clearly, this is a legitimate expression of one identity to believe that images of the Prophet Muhammad are sacrilegious. It is also a legitimate expression of other Muslim identities.
[00:25:16] Ayad: Why does it have to be legitimate? Why does it matter? That's the thing I don't understand.
[00:25:21] Eboo: I think that there are different categories that can matter. It's not the only category that matters, but I think the reason it matters is, one, because it makes it impossible to say this is about the West oppressing Muslims. By the way, that's not the only category that matters. It is a recognition that in a diverse democracy, there are a range of identities that are going to have a range of expressions and very often those expressions are going to conflict with each other in legitimate ways. Let's work it out as opposed to victim and racist, victim and racist, victim and racist.
[00:26:06] Ayad: I think there's a central divide between how you get your bread buttered and how I get my bread buttered. You expand consciousness through cooperation and building consensus and helping people see other points of view. I get my bread buttered through transgression. At the end of the day, I hear you talking and everything you're saying is great. I don't understand it.
[laughter]
[00:26:35] Ayad: What does it matter that there's a legitimate-- how about even better there's no legitimate tradition in which you can show an image of the prophet. Yet it is our job to show images of the prophet.
[00:26:49] Eboo: What I would say is that is a different category. It's another, but even on the terrain of is this the disparaging of an identity by a different and "more powerful identity"? Even on that terrain a two-second Google search. Instead of disparaging a second Midwestern college and a situation that happened there, I want to jump straight to the- [crosstalk]
[00:27:17] Ayad: Folks in the Midwest are very good people.
[00:27:19] Eboo: They're very good people.
[00:27:21] Ayad: Very good people. [laughs]
[00:27:22] Eboo: I'll just leave the second scenario. A very similar scene unfolds at Macalester College a month later when an Iranian American artist puts up an exhibit called Blasphemy. A set of Muslim students say that it's blasphemy, that it feels blaspheming, and that the presentation of the borka and a hijab, which is "a sacred symbol to billions of Muslims has been presented in this sacrilegious way".
The college in totally perfect apropos fashion veils the exhibit, puts curtains outside of the exhibit. A different group of Muslim students says that they are deeply disturbed that an art exhibit whose purpose was to challenge the Iranian regime during a time when it has murdered a young woman for not wearing the hijab correctly and there are protests roiling the nation in favor of just basic decency towards women, that they felt that that exhibit expressed their Muslim values and that they're confused as to why it's being shut down. That was a second scenario where we were going to jump into. I just want to leave it at that, that it's fascinating that that occurs a month later. The thing that I love about this is that there are different views by the same category of people, Muslims in this case, about what it means to represent Muslims-
[00:29:09] Ayad: Who the real victim is.
[00:29:11] Eboo: -and who the victim is.
[00:29:12] Ayad: The victim in one case is billions. I don't think there are billions of Muslims or whatever.
[00:29:16] Eboo: There are not.
[00:29:17] Ayad: Billions of Muslims who believe the veil is really important. Then the other group thinks that the real victim is folks who are suffering under the Iranian regime. We happen to probably have a little bit more sympathy for the latter group rather than the former group. In both cases, we're simply trying to identify the victim.
[00:29:36] Eboo: I think this is such an interesting question of our era. Which is, if you can claim marginalization, do you win?
[00:29:49] Ayad: Yes. We're well situated to be winning, so we should take advantage.
[00:30:00] Eboo: That's right. [laughs] If we unspool that, and by the way, what I want to do here, I grew up and the middle school lunchroom was not nice to me. Let me put it that way. Tribe being named Eboo in the late 1980s in the western suburbs of Chicago. I know that it's different to be named Eboo and to have parents who are Ismaili Muslims and to bring St. Moses to school than it is to be named John. My point here is not to play fast and loose with this.
[00:30:32] Ayad: A pigeon-toed John. This goes on for a while. It's true what you said. I don't mean to take away the hardship you went through.
[00:30:44] Eboo: I say that to say that I have a window into this, but I think it's interesting to ask just basic questions about the category of marginalization. Who can claim marginalization and what license or powers does that claim give you? If we think about the standard litany here, women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, there's others, Muslims, religious minorities, you are getting up to 85% of the population.
That's a lot of people who can say to you, take this book off the syllabus or I don't want this professor teaching my class, or I am going to protest a speaker by saying, I quote from the protest at Stanford against Kyle Duncan, I want your daughters to get raped. That is a lot of people. If the category marginalization is allowed to include that wide range of people and it is given that license and power to disrupt or whatever the term might be, I'm just not sure you have an order anymore.
[00:32:18] Ayad: That's a good point. I think it's a good point. I think just one addendum which is related and not related. I think that there is an increasing focus on difference and we are focused on our differences. I see this in the publishing world, for example. What is distinguishing in many cases, a new book or a new author is that they're different. Then the message is somehow about people we don't know. To me, I'm in the racket of making art because I'm interested in what is the same about us. I'm interested in the human. I'm not particularly interested in Muslims per se.
Sure, I write about Muslims because those are the people I grew up with and that I see and my parents and all of that. That's what I know, but I'm not writing about them or us so that people can understand how different we are or how similar we are to them. My point of view is not focused on difference. To me, I don't understand all of this focus on, well, I'm this identity and therefore, and I'm this identity and therefore, as if the difference is the essential and the central defining characteristic.
I think ultimately it is probably a very destructive social dynamic because we're not able to find mutual. Everybody's trying to figure out how to get heard and seen for their difference as opposed to trying to figure out what we can do together or what it is that we share in common.
[00:34:00] Eboo: Look, part of what I find refreshing about this is that you are not following the required merit, the required script. If there was somebody on stage saying, this is what I'm especially interested in as an artist, as a rejoinder to you, that would be great also. I just don't think that if you have a thousand artists on stage, all thousand should be saying that because that's a required script.
When you go to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and you say, "The person I read every day is, it's Shakespeare." and a student comes up to you and whispers, "Mr. Akhtar, I can't say this too loud, but that Shakespeare thing you said, thank you for saying it and thank you for saying it without irony because I love Shakespeare too, but you're not allowed to talk about that at the University of Iowa Writer workshop anymore." This notion that you don't feel like you have to follow that required script, that as a Muslim writer, you might say that as a preface, but what comes after is not what's in other people's heads.
[00:35:09] Ayad: I do have friends, some very accomplished friends who hue to the script very well, and they do quite well for doing so. I won't impute that there's a cynicism or a canniness to it, though I do believe that there is that. The Shakespeare example is particularly interesting because Stephen Booth, the great Shakespeare scholar in Berkeley, whose edition of the sonnets is probably the best how-to manual for any writer. One set of Shakespeare comparing Shakespeare to other poets is like comparing King Kong to other monkeys. It's true. Deep immersion and absorption in Shakespeare has been without any close second the best education in rhythm, the nature of language, the cognitive processes of narrative. He is able to do so much so completely that immersion and absorption in his work is an incredibly instructive tool.
It's a great treasure. It's a great human treasure, especially for a writer. Nobody's even close. I don't care what identity you are. At least in French and English, those are the only two languages I can make this claim for. There's nobody in English or French even close. What relevance is it that he's white? What does this have to do with anything? Why do we have to listen to this nonsense?
It's particularly incensing to me around Shakespeare because it is such an extraordinary treasure. When the student comes up to me afterwards and says that there's a part of me that's just in disbelief, "This is the Iowa Writers Workshop? This is the great school of creative writing and folks are afraid to talk about Shakespeare?" To me, it's an astonishment.
[00:37:16] Eboo: For me, the theme here is that somebody who looks like you, who writes in many of your novels and plays about Muslim American families with deep references to the Quran and the Hadith and et cetera, et cetera, that a professor should not make an assumption about what should be put on the syllabus based on your religious and cultural identity.
It could well be that other people walk in and they say, I want to read only writers who look like me and who grew up with my faith, et cetera, et cetera. That is a totally fine line if that is what somebody actually tells you. To assume that about somebody, to assume what you want to read and write based on your identity, it is this rigid dogma and required narrative that I think is a violation of people's agency. The part of this that I think I dislike so much is the invitation into people seeing themselves as marginalized.
I have some experience with this because I have two teenage boys who are going to school in this moment in which there are all of these assumptions about kids with brown skin and minority faiths. My son comes home after a diversity workshop as part of a diversity fellowship one day and he says, "Hey, Dad, how come only the straight Christian White males get to call themselves privileged?" In this diversity workshop, there's two circles. It's straight, white, Christian male over here. You're the privileged circle and you're supposed to narrate the script of what it means to be privileged which is mostly to apologize for your privileges.
Then there's this other circle of the rest of us and we're supposed to narrate, tell all these stories about how we feel wounded all the time. I'm tired of telling people about all of the Islamophobia I've experienced because mostly what we talk about at home is loving Islam. It strikes me that there is this world out there that thinks Muslim identity is mostly about hating Islamophobia, not loving Islam. It is according to script.
[00:39:47] Ayad: I don't love Islam, but yes, I got you. [laughs]
[00:39:50] Eboo: I love Islam.
[00:39:51] Ayad: Another loving disagreement that we have.
[00:39:56] Eboo: It is the assumed, deep assumptions being made and the required script being put in front of people as opposed to the person who wins the Pulitzer for disgraced would spend his days reading Shakespeare. That's fascinating, as opposed to only writers who came from the same homeland that he did and prayed in the same way that his parents prayed.
[00:40:27] Ayad: Yes, I would much prefer the rough and tumble of the marketplace of ideas. I would much prefer someone who has studied whatever they've studied with passion and conviction to hold forth about what they believe. I would much prefer to challenge them when I disagree and to be proven wrong or to win the argument or just to continue the conversation. I don't understand, and, really, this is not figurative speech here. I really don't understand what we're talking about. [chuckles] Like on some fundamental level in me, I don't understand this moment. It doesn't make any sense to me. It's contrary to every value I have of intellectual inquiry. It's confusing and I think there's lots of interesting-- we probably want to go to the Q&A, but the thing that I would say, one of the things that confuses me about all of this is something that maybe goes all the way back to college and my encounter with the extraordinary work of the French deconstructionists. The notion somehow that critique or problematization of a narrative or deconstruction per se is somehow a creative act. It's not.
[00:41:57] Eboo: Somebody else does something and you tell them what they did wrong.
[00:41:59] Ayad: That's not a creative act. That may be an important analytic stage. No is no, no is not yes. We don't get anywhere without yes. Everybody has to get to their yes. The challenge of the intellectual life, the challenge of the spiritual life, of the moral life is to understand the nature of your yes and to commit to it. All of this no is not getting us to a yes.
[00:42:32] Eboo: I want to tell a story about a person who gets to his yes in a moment of a different dogma. Then I want to quote from you and then we'll go to questions, how's that sound? One of the things you and I have spent quite a bit of time talking about these past couple of days is how every era has its stultifying dogmas and the people who broke out of them.
One of my favorite examples of this is Dylan in the early 60s. Dylan is a hero of the folk scene in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and the blowing in the wind, Dylan, and when your ship comes in, he plays at the march on Washington. He is like the key symbol of the early 60s folk scene. The early 60s folk scene is not just an aesthetic scene, it's also a moral and political scene. Its principle, moral and political commitment is nuclear disarmament. It believes that these two things a purely acoustic focused aesthetic and nuclear disarmament are inextricably linked.
People will remember this, but Dylan plugs in at the Newport Folk Festival in '64 or '65 and he plays an electric version of Maggie's Farm. People boo and Pete Seeger threatens to cut the cord and then Dylan goes on tour in England with the band. Robbie Robertson and crew and first set is all acoustic and he's heralded as a conquering hero. Second set is all electric and people boo the entire time. The dogma of the era is if you are not staying straight acoustic, we will not rid the world of nuclear weapons and people genuinely believed it. They genuinely believed it and here's a guy who is literally inventing a new form of music in front of them.
That's what Dylan does in Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisted. That's what he's inventing a new form of music and people cannot take it. They are enveloping him. They are suffocating him with a dogma that forget 60 years later, seven years later people think is ridiculous. What are the dogmas of our era that are suffocating people that seven years, seven months, seven weeks from now, we're going to be like, "That was ridiculous."
[00:45:17] Ayad: I know the dogma that many do not think is a passing dogma which is that there is always a victim and there's always an abuser. The reason that we've had the conversation about this very brilliant example that you brought up as not for me resonating with the moment we're living in I think because there is not that. Because some part of me is listening and I'm thinking, what's the analogy? Thank God Dylan won the Nobel and didn't end up like Al Franken because we wouldn't be talking about it.
[00:45:50] Eboo: The analogy is obviously- [crosstalk]
[00:45:52] Ayad: Then I thought I shouldn't talk about Al Franken because Al Franken was accused of something that he may not have done. There was a victim and an abuser. I was like, "Oh, right, that's the difference." The difference is that Dylan was not seen as abusing somebody. There's a lot of folks out there right now who think that we have stumbled on an ontologically primary category of human existence.
[00:46:17] Eboo: Victim and abuser.
[00:46:18] Ayad: Yes. They should read Hagel.
[00:46:21] Eboo: [chuckles] With that audience questions.
[applauding]
[00:46:33] Moderator: Thank you so much, folks. If you have a question, please raise your hand and a staff member will come around with a microphone for you. We do ask that you keep it to questions only. Try to keep commentary limited to allow for more questions and try to keep those questions brief and clear for ease of communication with our panelists. Your first question will be down here to your right.
[00:46:56] Speaker 4: Thank you. I wanted to return to a comment from the top that if you can claim marginalization you win and ask you just to break it down in a little bit more detail. What are the specific context in which marginalization connotes a social capital, what can that capital be used to accomplish? What if anything, do you believe it still can't accomplish?
[00:47:25] Eboo: Let me just say a couple of things here. Number one, as I said before I do think it's harder for some people based on their identities. As I said, I grew up with the name Eboo in the western suburbs of Chicago in the late 1980s. It's different than being John, right? It's different being Zaden, Khalil, my kids' names in the 2020s, growing up in the 2010s under the shadow of 9/11. It's different. I want to absolutely say that.
The thread that I want to unspool is if you are a student of Stanford to get directly to your question. If you are a student of Stanford Law School and you belong to a category that you can claim is marginalized, you are able to say things to another human being, disrupt an event, put your fellow students' names on literally a wanted poster.
The students who invited Kyle Duncan, their faces are on a wanted poster posted all around the law school that says, "These are the people who invited this evil character who also happens to be a federal judge." Who you will probably have to argue in front of if you are going to be a lawyer. To say things to that person that over the course of the event the federal marshals who accompanied him felt like his body was under enough threat that he needed to be ushered out.
Then the next week when the dean of the law school writes an apology letter to this individual you line the halls with masks on and you stare the dean down as she walks through the halls in an intimidating fashion, six to 80 students. There is no repercussion except for a training and free speech. If that group of people could not claim marginalization, there's no way they could have gotten away with that had they belonged to an identity category that is not coded as marginalized.
The ability to report a professor who teaches a book you don't like or that makes you uncomfortable to a dean and then have the dean remove that person, only people who are coded as marginalized can do that. Now, my point here at this point is more descriptive than argumentative. I want simply to make a motive inquiry into this. Maybe this is a good idea. Maybe this is a good idea, but maybe we should ask the question, what's the reference point of marginalization? If you're a Stanford law student, you're in the top 0.0001% of educated people in the country. Forget the world. How do we constitute marginalization? What's the reference point? What license does it give you? I think we ought to have that inquiry instead of invoking the category without discussion.
[00:50:48] Ayad: I think you're very earnest and well-articulated framing of the question points a difference in the use of language that I intended, which is somewhat ironic and also to lay bare the underlying assumption, if you are in a position of privilege and you can claim marginalization, you really win. That's what I meant.
[00:51:12] Eboo: I want to say one more thing on this, which is, I think the thing that bothers me about this so much is I can't stand when people call me marginalized. I code that way. Not only am I Muslim, I'm an Ismaili Muslim, small Shia community of Muslims. That's not comfortable anywhere, really, honestly.
[00:51:34] Ayad: (Wisconsinites) [unintelligible 00:51:34] don't think you're a Muslim.
[00:51:36] Eboo: What's that?
[00:51:37] Ayad: (Wisconsinites) [unintelligible 00:51:37] don't think you're a Muslim.
[00:51:39] Eboo: This is part of my marginalization. It could be a second--
[00:51:41] Ayad: You even got a weird not-so-Muslim name, Patel. Come on.
[00:51:47] Eboo: The story behind that.
[00:51:49] Ayad: "What? That friend of yours, Eboo Patel, he's Muslim? What kind of Muslim name is this?
[00:51:58] Eboo: I think the thing that bothers me about this so much is that there is an enticement into this. People will say to me, well, as a marginalized person, they think they're doing me a favor. There are powers to be having claiming that. It cuts against the heart of my being, which is a spiritual understanding, which is Muslims have the last prophet, the final revelation, Ismailis have God's living guide on earth. I was raised believing literally no matter what your socioeconomic position is, you have such profound spiritual privilege and you should always lead with that. I do not want any of this. The purpose of this is not at all to be dismissive of very real factors in American life.
How much harder it is to be black than white, how much harder it is to be poor than rich. These are very real factors. I think we should have an inquiry into it. I don't think it should be a category that is invoked without inquiry, particularly when the standard invocation would literally include 80 or 85% of the population. If roughly half the population is women, if 40% of the population, 30 to 40% is people of color, half of those are women. You get to 65 or 70% and then you include the LGBTQ community, and then you're including immigrants, then you're including religious minorities. You're pretty quickly up to 80%. We should at least talk about this.
[00:53:55] Moderator: Your next question right here.
[00:53:58] Speaker 5: Hi, I'm mostly focused on the image of the book burning because that's the most frightening thing. My question as head of pen, there's so much concern about banning books, but I'm thinking about books to come. I'm wondering if you think today The Satanic Verses and so on, Portnoy's Complaint could even get published?
[00:54:20] Ayad: Well, it's a good question. Chimamanda gave a speech about this in London recently, and she says she doesn't think the book would be written today. I think it stands to reason that all of this is impacting creative production profoundly. I work in Hollywood and I work in publishing and I work in the theater. I work in three spaces and it's transforming so much of what is possible to say and what is possible to. In some cases, I think maybe there's some good coming of it. Maybe there's something interesting about digging into the granularity of things you don't know with greater understanding.
There's a consequence on the other side if you don't get it right and I'm all for competitive headwinds to make you better. That to me, I see that sometimes happening. I'm like, "Okay, there's maybe a net positive there." For the most part, it seems to me that this conversation about appropriation has gone way, way, way too far because art is appropriation. That's what it is. Are we problematizing alterity? Does everything have to be me? Does everything have to be only what I know, what I experience? Am I the only authority from my own experience? Again, it goes back to this idea of difference, this focus on difference as opposed to unity. Thank you for the question.
[00:55:53] Eboo: I will tell you a movie that I don't think could get made right now, but which was a profile movie in its time, Dead Man Walking. Ask yourself this, could Dead Man Walking, which is fundamentally the story of a white racist supremacist rapist and the Catholic nun who insisted on seeing his humanity. Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn. Major stars. Music done by Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Probably won Academy Awards in its time. Could that movie get made right now? I don't think so.
[00:56:36] Ayad: No. I don't know why you would want to.
[laughter]
[00:56:40] Eboo: He means that in a different way than what you think actually.
[00:56:45] Moderator: All right. Your next question comes from about middle of the house to your right over here.
[00:56:53] Speaker 6: Hello. Thanks for joining us today. I'd like to bring it back to a concept that was discussed earlier that brought a little bit of disagreement between you two, and that was the term legitimacy. I personally think, or I would like some more clarity on the term itself, how you would define it and what it's backed by, what it really means to you. The reason I'm asking is because, Eboo, you mentioned in an intellectual competitive atmosphere where two groups with legitimate views are able to articulate and have a discussion or argument, but they're backed by legitimate traditions. Ayad, you said, what if they're not legitimate? Should it even matter? With that tension there, I'd like to explore what exactly that legitimacy means to you and where to draw the line between what is legitimate and what is not legitimate.
[00:57:58] Eboo: I had to grade that young man's papers when I was-
[00:58:01] Ayad: Oh, you know that guy?
[00:58:01] Eboo: -a guest professor at WashU and he also worked at Interfaith America. I'm going to let you take that question.
[00:58:09] Ayad: It's a great question.
[00:58:10] Eboo: They were excellent papers, by the way, as you could tell.
[00:58:13] Ayad: No doubt, no doubt. I'm going to go sideways from the question to try to answer it. Famously, Antonin Artaud, the great theorist of French theater from the early part of the 20th century found himself at world's fair of sorts in Paris, where a Balinese dance group was performing an old ritualistic form of performance that he had no context and no way to understand what it was he was seeing. He was so extraordinarily inspired that he wrote the book The Theater and its Double as a result of this encounter with Balinese dance, in which he made all kinds of claims about what he was seeing that were totally illegitimate. There was no foundation to any of it.
It was classic appropriation 101, misreading, whitewashing, colonization, I don't know, whatever metaphor one wants to use. Yet, that book went on to sow seeds for the next 50 years that created a flourishing of the Avant-Garde Theater in Europe and the United States that we hadn't seen since the English Renaissance. That to me is an indication that legitimacy is an irrelevant category if the quality of the ideas is generative for the future, misreading the past is the nature of consciousness. Misreading your partner, your neighbor is the nature of language. What you do with that misreading to me is what defines you. This is where we go back to that idea of yes versus no. We have to get to a yes. Antonin Artaud saw in Balinese dance a yes that made no sense to the Balinese, but it made a new sense to the West at that moment.
[01:00:13] Eboo: Quickly on this. This is where we have a fundamental difference. Not a disagreement, but Ayad is an artist. That's what his principle concern is. My principle concern is diverse democracy. What I mean by legitimate identities is the Muslim who believes you cannot depict the prophet Muhammad. There are multiple traditions in Islam.
Can you trace that back? If you can trace that back instead of it's something that you just made up, I think that that constitutes an identity which ought to be taken seriously. You are an interlocutor. In a diverse democracy, that's what disagreement in a diverse democracy is, as we've discussed many times. It's people with different identities that lead to disagreements that are figuring out how to have a common life together.
By legitimate in the name of religion, it means, can you trace it back to something as opposed to I just made this up? By the way, I just made this up is still fine for other reasons.
[01:01:15] Ayad: It worked for Joseph Smith and Mormonism.
[01:01:17] Eboo: What's that?
[01:01:18] Ayad: I just made this up worked really well for Joseph Smith and Mormonism.
[01:01:21] Eboo: My Mormon friends would disagree with that. That's an excellent example. The last thing I'll say in this, we should try to take one or two more questions that I see like eager arms up. Let's try to do that. Joseph Smith claims to be a post-Muhammad prophet.
That's something very difficult for believing Muslims like myself. That's a legitimate identity. My favorite scene in Angels in America is the gay guy, they get one of the gay characters, Louis, meets one of the Mormon characters, Joe, and the Mormon character says, "Oh, you're gay. We don't believe in gay people." Louis says, "We don't believe in Mormons." The thing that's brilliant about that scene is, in a diverse democracy, you can't not believe in other people. There they are. You got to deal with their identities.
I think that that's the fascinating wonderful thing about building a diverse democracy, but the notion that the easy way to do this is victim and racist, victim and racist? I don't think that's the way to do it.
[01:02:19] Moderator: All right. We have time for one last quick question, folks. Right here in the center.
[01:02:25] Speaker 7: Is one of the reasons we have the rise of this rhetoric is that there's been an erosion in the belief of the whole idea about diverse democracy.
[01:02:38] Eboo: That's an excellent, do we want to take two quick ones? Then I'll answer the easier one and Ayad will answer the harder one. The gentleman right behind you, just seeing a very--
[01:02:49] Speaker 8: Yes. the words courtesy, dignity, and respect, we just want to throw in there from the conversation. Keeping in mind the 50-year growth in wealth and income inequality, especially in the United States. Please address the perception of marginalization and victimization that many white working-class Trump supporters feel. How does that fit into this conversation?
[01:03:16] Ayad: How does it not fit in? [chuckles] It's what we've been talking about the whole time if it's good enough for the goose, it's good enough for the gander. If we're going to find victims, anybody can find a victim. If we want to look for an abuser, anybody can find one. It doesn't matter if you're white or you're Black or what color you are, you can use this logic to understand the social ontology that has created the interiority you don't like.
To me, it's disqualifying. Unfortunately, this disqualification is what we call our politics, and that's the dilemma that we have to live with because on some fundamental level, I think we all know there's some deep illegitimacy to this and the underlying problems, and they are real. They do have to do with inequality, and they have to do with some idiotic cockamamie economic ideas that started in this city, actually, the Chicago school. That's my opinion. I still like Chicago, but--
[laughter]
[01:04:19] Eboo: I walked by the building that the Chicago school was housed in out there. He's spat on the porch.
[01:04:24] Ayad: I did not.
[01:04:28] Eboo: I think these are quickly. You'll remember this line. Then I got Mary pregnant, not me, that this is the line. Then I got Mary pregnant, and man, that was all she wrote. For my 18th birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat. Who knows that line? That's Springsteen from The River, 1980. When he wrote that, it was a lament for the grinding nature of factory life. In 2023, it's a dream because that world has disappeared. Honestly, maybe the most important identity in a knowledge economy is being book-smart.
If you're book-smart in a knowledged economy, you got a fighting chance.
[01:05:19] Ayad: That's pre-GPT, though. That's going to change really quick.
[01:05:22] Eboo: Well, it hasn't quite taken over yet. To Ayad's point, if claiming that is a mantle by which you can then do anything, like Trump says to people, I am your revenge, it couldn't be any more obvious than that. I am your justice, I am your revenge, claim the victim mantle, and I'll be your son of a bitch in the world. If you hold that up as something that is elevated and has power, people will seek to claim it. I think that there's a poison dimension to it because the foundation for any healthy psychology is a steaming agency. It's what can I do? Not what has been done to me.
[01:06:23] Ayad: That's what's defined America. That's why my dad was so inspired to come to this country. It's like the country that he came to was a country in which Kennedy could say, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. That was the central political question at that moment, at least that he wanted it to be. Today, the central political question is, what is my country not doing for me, goddammit? What does he change?
[01:06:50] Eboo: To this gentleman's important point, and we'll close here. That is I think the lost possibility of diverse democracy in this moment. That diverse democracy fundamentally has to be about respect, relate, and cooperate. How does the identity that I'm proud of relate positively to the identity that you're proud of, even the dimensions upon which we disagree and what can we do together? That has to be the DNA of a diverse democracy, not demonize, demean, divide. What is it about you that has hurt me? Demonize? What is it about me that can claim victimhood?
That is a demeaning of one's own identity? Islamophobia is more important than Islam. That is a demeaning of Muslim identity and divide. Victim, racist. That's the danger. It is fixable, and we can fix it and we will send the people off in a note of hope because that is what we do.
[applause]
Thank you to the Chicago Humanities Festival, to my friend Ayad and to the audience for this engaging discussion. We'd love to hear your takeaways. Let us know in the comments or wherever you live on social media. You can find us on Twitter @interfaithusa and Instagram @interfaithamerica. To read more about this conversation and to find resources and stories about bridge building in our religiously diverse democracy, visit our website, interfaithamerica.org. I'm Eboo Patel.
[01:08:27] [END OF AUDIO]