Heaven, Hell, and The Pursuit of Happiness
Episode 02 | Shadi Hamid on God, Gaza and accountability, in this life... or the next
When
told us he likes religion, because “religion gives us hell,” he didn’t meant it more ways than one. Because religion’s hard, for one thing, and difficulty matters in a person’s life. But also because, without hell, without the promise of accountability, how can we come to terms with evil in the world? That’s the kind of conversation we had, which we’re so excited to share.A few weeks back, Joey and Haroon sat down with Washington Post columnist, author and fellow podcaster Shadi Hamid for an unexpectedly candid and sincerely searching conversation. If you already know Shadi from platforms like
, well… there’s a lot here you’ll love. We’ve got Shadi thinking America’s place in the world, about his place in America, and of course about Gaza.But we wanted to learn more about Shadi as a man and man of faith, to understand how he’s become one of our most important national voices without parking his creed, convictions or commitments at the door. So we asked hard questions — which Shadi gamely pursued. Is Shadi happy? Does Shadi believe that question really matters? How does Shadi feel about the choices he made earlier in his life?
Because we know and enthusiastically follow Shadi’s work, we chose him as one of our first guests. But this episode still exceeded our expectations.
We hope it’ll exceed yours, too.
Watch, Listen, Learn
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In the weeks ahead, we’ve got an incredible lineup of guests, from remarkable scientists, cutting-edge thinkers, comedians, religious leaders, writers, and more.
We’re Avenue M: Two men of faith in the Midwest, covering masculinity, meaning, and how to make the most of what we hope to the God is our middle age. Join the conversation!
Show Notes
This past fall, before the Presidential election, Haroon and Shadi pursued a vigorous debate: Would they vote for Harris, for Trump, for third-party candidate Jill Stein… or for no one at all? Was there any candidate they could endorse after the war on Gaza? The debate began with a back-and-forth at Wisdom of Crowds…
… then escalated to a podcast featuring Haroon and Shadi, making their respective cases, while Damir Marusic pushed them to unpack and justify their commitments:
Shadi is a part of the Wisdom of Crowds team (a Substack — and a podcast — you should subscribe to, too!) Haroon’s previously written for Wisdom of Crowds and earlier also appeared on the Wisdom of Crowds podcast to discuss his most recent book, Two Billion Caliphs: A Vision of a Muslim Future
Shadi is also a columnist at The Washington Post, “where he focuses on culture, religion and foreign policy”
If that’s not enough, Shadi’s next book, The Case for American Power, comes out this fall; he also has a personal Substack we likewise strongly recommend,
.
Note: We recorded before the Trump administration ordered strikes on Iran and the subsequent ceasefire. While we’d love to have had Shadi’s perspective on these events and their potential consequences, the Avenue M team has made a conscious decision not to tie ourselves too closely to the cycle of permanent emergency our legacy media seems unable to exit.
Avenue M is meant to be a platform for extended conversations. At a time when our national conversations have become excessively reactive, reflecting and reinforcing a culture that finds it hard to step back and process, Joey and Haroon are choosing to build a space that gives remarkable guests space to think out loud. For our benefit. For your benefit. And for theirs.
This episode is sponsored by Queen City Diwan, which leads travel adventures, immersive experiences, leadership retreats and religious pilgrimages. We’ve got an upcoming tour of Uzbekistan (September 7 - 13) with just a few seats left, an October ‘umrah in Saudi Arabia, a January trip just for college students who want to explore Andalucia—and over Thanksgiving break, we’re planning an incredible tour across three countries. Learn more on our website.
Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.
Episode Transcript
(This transcript is AI-generated.)
Joey: Welcome to Avenue M. My name is Joey Taylor…
Haroon: And I’m Haroon Moghul.
Joey: We’re two men on a journey of faith and meaning. In each episode, we sit down with a remarkable guest to unpack the moments that shape us, the struggles that build us and the questions that intrigue us.
A few weeks ago we sat down with Washington Post columnist, author and fellow podcaster Shadi Hamid for an unexpectedly candid and sincerely searching conversation. We got Shadi to talk apocalypse, America’s place in the world, democracy and Gaza. We wanted to learn more about Shadi as a man and person of faith, to understand how he’s become one of our most recognized national voices without parking his creed, convictions and commitments at the door. To begin we asked Shadi to share a personal moment that was an apocalypse for him.
Shadi: That is a tough question. Hmm. So, I'd have to go back to 9/11. Really, the moment that changed my life. I think for a lot of us, of that generation, there was a sense that an old era had ended and a new era had begun.
And I think that turned out to be true because my life did change in pretty profound ways, personally, religiously, politically. I decided to kind of go fully into politics because of nine 11, because of what happened that day. And it changed my relationship to Islam in the beginning. I, I sort of. Became more intensely religious than I had ever been.
I was living away from home for the first time, trying to find out who I was, where I belonged, who I belonged with, and I think Islam and a kind of a stricter, more narrow, let's say, version of Islam, was something that gave me comfort for both better and worse. How old were you? I was 17, about to turn 18.
Haroon: Were you in DC?
Shadi: Yeah, I was, my freshman year of college I was at Georgetown. We could see the smoke from the Pentagon at the top of my dorm. Yeah, it's, it's, it's still kind of visceral to me to this day. I mean, I really, obviously I, I wish it didn't happen for all the obvious reasons, but I also wish it didn't, well, I would've been a completely different person.
So it's also, it. I would, I would in some sense be negating myself and the person that I became. But I can imagine living a quieter life and a life that would I have been a writer? Would I have really gone in this direction? Maybe I would've still, somehow in a roundabout way, but it's also totally possible that I wouldn't have.
Haroon: I was actually talking to Joey. I think you're, I think you're the most kind of within the mainstream media and, and traditional media as well as new media. You're one of the most prominent, openly confessionally Muslim voices in the United States. And, and it makes me think that it's a very unique position to be in. I'm sure at times it's, it's a difficult position to be in. Do you think that this is true to who you are or is it fundamentally a response to that moment?
Shadi: I think who we are is always contingent. And I, I can't imagine counterfactuals, I think counterfactual reasoning is a helpful thing to do, to imagine the other lives that we could have lived. 'cause we could have lived other lives and we may, you know, we may have lived them if things had turned out differently.
I always liked writing. I mean, I, I definitely took pleasure in words from an early age and I wrote for the high school newspaper, but I wrote about things that maybe were a little bit different. We had, me and a friend of mine, we had a newsletter called In the Paint, which was about basketball and NBA stuff.
And I was really into sports back then. And then I totally lost interest in sports after nine 11. It was like, this is silly, like the world is falling apart. That sort of thing. Uh, you know, I think that I'm grateful for the position that I'm in. I'm lucky to be able to reach a wide audience and to have a lot of people reading and listening to what I say.
Does that necessarily make me happy? Was this the happiest outcome? Because success, I think the kind of intense success that we experienced in a place like Washington DC where we always have to be on our game. We always have to, in some sense, be performing. We develop a public persona and people are always expecting us to say things and express things publicly.
And even if you're speaking privately, that can also have public implications. So I think for a lot of us who are really in the public eye in that respect, it, it comes with a little bit of, I don't wanna say sadness, but it doesn't always make us happy to be on our, on our game and on our guard all the time.
That can actually be very much in contradiction to happiness or it undermines our happiness. Because we have trouble kind of resting as is and letting go of things, and just being present with the people that we love, because we're always thinking about the next article or the next book. There's words that are always being processed in our minds and words that are like filling us up in a kind of almost literal sense.
So if I had taken up a more boring occupation or one that was less public, it's totally possible, and maybe even more than likely that I could have been technically happier. Now, is that what I would've wanted is happiness, everything. Not necessarily. And we always dece, we make choices about what's more important to us.
So at some level, I'm accepting a little bit of a lower level of hows and satisfaction. Because I have something important to say, and I think that I have a greater obligation and a partly religious one when I think about my own chances in the afterlife. I want my, I, I hope you know, God willing, that my words can be a positive thing in the ledger.
You know, for all the, you know, for all the sins we commit and for, you know, for all of that, you know, oh, at least you know, I'm speaking to hundreds of thousands of people and writing to these audiences that don't know much about Islam, that don't know much about the Muslim world, and if they can come out of it with a somewhat better and a somewhat more accurate understanding of our world, I hope, I don't know for sure, but I hope God will be like, okay, that was kind of good, chatty.
Haroon: No, I I get you. I I, it's funny, you know, you said well maybe not funny, but it's, it's interesting to me 'cause I sense the parallel I've noticed, I feel that in the last few years you've become more open about being Muslim as a personal project. And I don't mean a project isn't something untoward, but in the sense that it's a commitment that you are actively pursuing.
And I'm curious is, is that something that you feel the environment shifted such that you could talk about it? Or is it more an inward compulsion to feel like you, you want to, or need to talk about it? 'cause I, that's what I thought I heard at the end of that, that you're saying that hopefully this counts for me. That at the end of it, at the end of all of it, I can say I did that. I said that I made an effort towards that end.
Shadi: I don't wanna say it's like a very recent change. It's probably in the last few years though, that I've become more, I. Open and forthright about my own religious background, the things that I believe to be true, and also the struggles that I have religiously.
I mean, religion hasn't necessarily been easy for me, I don't think. Sometimes I wonder if I'm temperamentally suited to submission because I may not be. I have to work at it and I have to really struggle. I guess that's the internal jihad, if you will. Then maybe at some level, all of us have to go through.
It's not supposed to be, well, some people say that Islam is supposed to be easy. I, I don't, I don't love that line of thinking and I think it's fine for something to be hard. Often the things that are more difficult are the most worthwhile. So, by writing and speaking more openly about some of these things, I can work through my own challenges in like.
That's kind of what I'm doing right now on this podcast. I'm thinking through things with you and that helps me in my own endeavor. There was an editor who once said, this is an apocryphal, this is actually a real person who said this. That we write the books that we need to read, authors write the books that they need to read, and I write the articles that I need to read.
If I'm thinking about it on a weekly basis, I write a weekly column for the Washington Post. I'm working through things, so that's why when I write about my struggles with fasting in Ramadan, or the fact that I have regrets that I'm not married right now, and that I think about if I had prioritized marriage, family, and kids at an earlier age.
And maybe if I wasn't so ambitious, maybe if I wasn't so lost in words, I could have had a more traditional trajectory of, oh, normal job, nine to six or seven or five even. Who knows? And the job isn't a calling. The job is just something I do to make money. And if that is clear, then I have to find meaning elsewhere.
And maybe then I would be more likely to find that meaning in family. And it would've been really a top priority from like not my twenties. There's no, I can't imagine at all getting married in my twenties. I find that like somewhat hard to even like fathom. But early thirties could have been possible.
Mid thirties could have been likely, but I had other things that were consuming me and I could find meaning elsewhere. So I think that the total amount of meaning that we can kind of count in it at any given it's limited. There's only so much meaning we can take at, at any particular moment. And I just, I found a lot of that elsewhere.
And it was only later on starting in my mid thirties, but really intensifying in my late thirties that I was like, this is not enough. It's never going to be enough. And wow, I wish I had realized that earlier. 'cause then, you know, I could have made different decisions.
Joey: We both read this piece that you wrote recently about, about marriage, and you wrote this line that you said, strong commitments have a liberating effect. Strong commitments have a liberating effect. And that just really jumped out at me.
It sounds to me like you have made a strong commitment to this calling that you've perceived, and not to get into the grasses greener kind of, kind of thing, but there are some other commitments that you could have also made that would've had a similarly kind of a liberating effect. So just unpack that, that kind of frame for us and talk about how that connects to your life right now.
Shadi: Okay. This is actually, that line is a perfect example of me writing the words that I need to hear. There's almost a certain, kind of like Shay, remind yourself through what you're writing. And if you say it publicly, then you can, people can hold you accountable for it and you can hold yourself accountable to it because you can sort of think back and be like, well, I wrote that I should probably live up to it.
So I think that strong commitments have a liberating effect. No, I know that they do. I'm kind of joking there. But there's certain kind of strong commitments that I haven't experienced that I can only guess at. So marriage, being one of them and having kids and how that, it, it shapes how you, how you use your time, how you think of your time.
And I think anyone really knows this. You don't have to be married, but anyone who spent a lot of time with another person in a relationship, for example, having someone else in like a 20 foot radius a lot of the time it changes how you, for example, like in that case, I wouldn't be just like blobbing on my bed and watching a show, like binge watching a TV show on my laptop.
I. Because there's someone else around and I have to think about how they're situated in my world and that sort of thing. So I think there's just like, there's things that I have like an inkling of, although I haven't experienced them fully, but that seems really appealing. For example, to be married all of the time and to be with someone, to live with someone in a kind of constant way.
And that would have a profound effect on how your time is structured. For example, it might seem constraining at first blush, but I think there's something liberating about that, right? It liberates you from having to think about all the time how you're gonna spend your time. You wake up if you're alone, you wake up every day and you have unlimited choices.
You literally, like, especially for me because my work is somewhat flexible. I'm a writer and I have basically one main deadline a week, which is my column. Beyond that, it's really up to me how I structure my days. But that is really a heavy thing that can almost feel burdensome to wake up and to feel that anything is possible.
But of course not anything is possible. So it's this kind of paradoxical way of being that you feel that everything is before you, but, but it's also constraining in, its in its own way. And this is where freedom can, this uh, this kind of modern liberal notion of freedom can end up feeling like a prison.
But then the kind of constraints that Islam imposes upon us. It can feel liberating, but you have to buy into the premise. You have to buy into the paradigm. An example that I sometimes use is the keto diet, which I did a few years back for, for a significant period of time actually. And keto is the most restrictive diet imaginable.
It's crazy when I think about it in retrospect, like, why would anyone do this? But I remember that once I actually said I, like, I had to make a decision. And that's why people sometimes will refer to a keto as the Islam of diets. That's a real thing, actually,
Haroon: is is that a real thing?
Shadi: Yeah, yeah. And some peoples, yeah. Yeah. It's actually, it's actually a quote from my brother, I think. Okay. I was gonna say,
Haroon: You've got your next Washington Post column.
Shadi: Exactly.
Haroon: Hey man, branch out. You never know.
Shadi: And Islam is the keto of religions. I guess you could sort of reverse it. Where was I going with this? I dunno. I dunno. It was the Washington Post column at some point,
Haroon: I'm telling you, shut off a whole new, A whole new column.
Shadi: Yeah. Yeah. the way the keto works is that it actually, you find freedom and constraint, but you have to accept the constraints willingly as the first step a decision has to be made. And I think Islam is like that as well, that for the outsider who's not like fully into it, or if you have one foot in, one foot out, it can seem like.
Wow, this is really hard. There's, there are, you do have to restructure your life if you, if you want to do it right. Of course, there's a lot of us who are, you know, not everyone has to be a hundred percent practicing all the time, but if you really wanna get the full benefits of it, not to instrumentalize religion here, but if you want to think about it as how, how do you get the most out of your relationship with God?
Or how do you get the most out of um, your religion? You gotta do the submission part. The submission part means that you have to actually make concessions and compromises, and those are real. But once you do that, there's a kind of ease, there's a kind of peace that can come out of it and you can actually be like, wow, this isn't as difficult as I thought it would be.
Because God opens up doors for you once you, you know, you, you meet him halfway and then he meets you halfway. Right. That's sort of the ideal here. This is a way of thinking about a lot of things, and religion gives us a window into it, which is that constraints are good. We should embrace constraint even if it seems difficult at, at first.
Haroon: I have a follow up on that, that, sometimes people ask me, are you happy? You know, are you where you want to be? And I am where I want to be, and I don't want this to be misunderstood, but I don't, find the question of happiness to be meaningful to me. Not in the sense that I'm unhappy, but in the sense that the way I now conceptualize of purpose and direction, guess I like what you're saying. It feels like there's an obligation or calling and you're, you're just pulled towards that and it's kind of like, I can't be except where I am. I don't know. But it, that took a long time. You know, there were moments along the way that kind of opened certain doors and closed certain doors. But I'm wondering for you, is there a moment where you felt like I. You know, in writing more openly about religion, for example, you've got a podcast wisdom of crowds where you guys tackle really hard questions from very diverse angles, intellectually, culturally, spiritually. Like what took you to that point, you know, or what opened that perspective for you?
Shadi: Yeah, I think there was a moment, I think it was when I turned 38, or maybe it was 39, where something just hit me and I was on, um, I was on a solo trip along the Californian coast and I sometimes would do these solo trips back in the day, time for reflection.
And I just found, I also found them like really enjoyable to just have rent a car somewhere where there's not a lot of people. I used to do this thing where I would go to obscure Island Archipelagos. Like the outer Hebert in Scotland is incredible. The Pharaoh Islands are incredible. Corsica I love, but, so I would do those kinds of trips and anyway, at this particular moment when I was 38 or 39, I was just like, wow, I'm actually like pretty down even though I'm on this supposedly fun trip that, that I was excited about.
I don't know, it, it's sort of this also being midway, where the average life expectancy is, you know, mid to mid to late seventies, not to get in, there's debates about how to think about life expectancy. But you know, you start to think about, okay, I have the second half coming up.
I. And you take stock of where you've been and where you want to go and all of that. So I think that there have been moments like that that I, that stick out in my memory. But you know, I think at the same time, this question of happiness is really a tough one. 'cause I relate to what you're saying, Harun, that is happiness the goal?
And is happiness something that we can reasonably expect to experience in a constant way? I mean, some might argue that the whole point of happiness is that it's not constant, that those moments of true happiness stand out precisely because they're rare and that's something that we should be okay with.
Life is struggle. I. Life is suffering, or at least life does include a lot of suffering. It does include a lot of sadness, and I'm sure that was the way it was in the pre-modern era. We didn't really have words for depression or we had melancholia, which makes it sound nicer. Who doesn't want to be melancholic?
That sounds like an, an intellectual should be melancholic. You know, how, how else will you write? Well, happy people don't write. There's also this sense that as artists or creators or writers, that being happy is almost a little bit, gosh, you know, it's like, oh my, you know, oh, like how can, what will you draw on?
You have to have a reservoir of experience, of difficulty to be able to write with passion, with meaning, and to feel the words that you're feeling when you're writing them. Right. So the other thing that I would just say is that this point about people told me. Things about prioritizing marriage a long time ago.
Should I have listened to them? But I think the more interesting question that you're gesturing at here is that could I have listened to them? Like was it even within the realm of possibility that I could have just been like, Hey, I hear what you're saying. I'm going to change my wants. This isn't really, really interesting question.
Can we change our wants easily? There's also the difference between wanting and wanting to want, I wanted to want to get married for a long time, but I didn't want to get married. And the question is, how do we remove one of those two wants to get to the real thing? Um, you know, and it, it sort of brings to mind, Augustine's famous quip make me chase, oh Lord, but not yet, you know?
But he got there and he did that by altering. His wanting structure, his structure of wanting really. But that's not an easy thing to do. And I don't think we often think of it in those terms, but it's helpful for me. How do we get from wanting to want to, wanting, So I think that if I had prioritized marriage earlier, I think that there could have been problems too.
So for example, just to be more open. I mean, the person that I would've imagined marrying a long time ago wasn't Muslim.
And I think that could, that have created problems if as I had become more religious over time, would she have been, she was the right person then, or I thought she was, but would she have been the right person for me now? And as I've sort of become more persuaded that I need to be with a Muslim, that, so that changes that would've really changed my life if I had married a non-Muslim and someone who wasn't even really, I think on the same page spiritually and religiously.
Not just that they weren't Muslim, but I think there was actually like a deeper disconnect there. So that would've had major implications for the trajectory of my life. And I can imagine in this alternative life that I could have lived having major regrets after having kids. That happens to a lot of couples.
That one, person in the relationship, their religious state changes and the other person's religious state stays the same. Then the gap grows between them. Then you have a real problem. Now I know that I want someone who is aligned with me. Spiritually and religiously. So that maybe puts me in, in better stead for a healthy marriage.
Hyper just, I don't know, just thinking out loud here. So maybe it was better that it happened this way, not to get into the kind of like, oh, everything happens for a reason. I think that's something people use to make themselves feel better about things that didn't go well in their lives. Actually, maybe it didn't really happen for a reason.
Maybe you just made a mistake.
Joey: I've heard, I think David Brooks said that happiness and meaning aren't correlated. Um, and, and he uses the example of marriage and kids. I guess people were surveyed and they report lower levels of happiness after being married and having kids, but higher levels of meaning.
So, um, there's something there that I think that relates to this apocalyptic moment that you shared earlier. I think it's really difficult, maybe it's more difficult to find happiness in these apocalyptic moments, but in some strange ways actually, meaning is more accessible because there's an, there's an obvious kind of call there, there's an obvious point of action.
In moments where the world is being destroyed around us. So, I, I wonder if you could just introduce us a little bit to your, to your understanding of what apocalypse is, and then talk about how you make sense of meaning within a world that is going through an apocalyptic moment.
Shadi: An apocalypse is an, is a sort of ending to just use the term in, in the broadest sense possible without getting into the religious or eschatological aspects of it. Something is ending, and that's how I feel in some, well, I kind of waver on this and I go back and forth. Certainly an old era has ended. Well, I already said that a previous old era ended with nine 11.
So I guess this is a sort of recurring cycle in a way that old eras are constantly ending. And then we're always thinking about things as beginning, what are new beginnings for us and what are these cycles of change and so forth. But we can think of it a little bit more broadly now in the sense of whether the American idea or the American project, as we have known it is coming to an end.
I wanna resist that. I wanna fight that, and that's where I find my meaning. I'm not content with resigning myself to that fate. I. I can't really change the world, but I can change how people think about things. I can at least try and I see my calling now as a, kind of battle to keep America what I, what I believe it is.
I think America's already great. It was already great and I feel pretty passionately about that. I should say that I'm, you know, as Harun knows that my, my new book, which is coming out in November, is really like a love letter to America, but it has a title that might put some people off, especially Muslims and Arabs, but hopefully I'll be able to explain it to them.
Or they'll just, like, titles are titles, you know, and I, the title is accurate. It's not like it doesn't describe what the book is about, but it's called The Case for American Power, and I believe in American Power, and I want to keep that. I, I wanna maintain that I have a different view than a lot of people about how American power should be used.
I believe American power can be used for just ends, for moral ends, for Islamically aligned ends. That requires a lot of change. And my, my book is an effort to lay out what that different vision would look like. But to go back to the theme of Apocalypse, I feel like more is at stake than I've ever remembered.
And that's really frightening. Something that we loved might be taken away from us. I struggle to even put that into words, just the feeling of loss. But to see someone attack everything that you hold dear. By this, I mean, I'm referring to Trump here and his, his, his administration, that's a personal thing.
The personal is political. I've often argued that the political shouldn't be personal or the personal shouldn't be political, but IW I'm, I haven't been able to maintain that own distant that di I'm questioning whether the things that I argued before, I thought that I could rise above some of this, but sometimes I wake up and I think to myself, resistance is like, I was never a big fan of the first resistance against Trump.
Thought it was just like, I think it, I think it actually was over the top. I don't think the first term really was the end of America. I. I think the first term actually worked out better than a lot of us thought it would be. I think a lot of us were going into it thinking that it would be like really a lot worse than what it actually was.
But then I think Trump 2.0, it's like, okay, this is worse. This is worse than this is what we thought it was gonna be. Yeah, yeah. You know? now I'm more sympathetic to the idea of fighting. I don't like the resistance whole, I don't like that whole scene, but the idea of fighting you have to fight for your, for your family, for the people you love, for your, for your religion.
And I'm not talking here about like through violence or anything, but I mean in a, in the more sort of str like things are worth fighting for and things are worth believing in. And I put America as a kind of, almost as a kind of article of faith in its own right. America is itself a kind of faith.
Haroon: You know, it's, it's interesting when you said that because I didn't like Trump 1.0.
I, I do think, I thought that Trump 1.0 would be like Trump 2.0. Right. Um, so I'm not quite sure how to feel, you know, this time around in, in the sense that, you know, it's kind of like a delayed reaction or, or delayed realization. Um, or, or maybe it was when the Republican party, you know, had finally fallen apart that Trump, that that was the apocalypse, and Trump was able, like, we could see Trump for who he was when there was no longer, you know, a whole scaffolding around him that was kind of inhibiting and restraining him.
But I, I, I think that in this moment, I, I do feel like you, a sense of loss, a a sense of grief and sadness. I also feel a sense of hope. I think that a lot of people are pushing back and fighting back in different ways. And, and I do think to some extent that is contagious. But it's interesting. Something you said to me, uh, or you said that that kind of struck me, is that.
I feel like the country is kind of like a family, specifically our family, right. Collectively, the three of us, but obviously not just the three of us. Is that too much to like, it it feels like a family member is being attacked.
Shadi: Yes. And, and so there's a's why we're using that kind of visceral language, because it's not an attack on a country.
If the country is, America is not an attack on a co, we're not like Germany or Sweden. For us, there's a sense of ownership that you can become American. It's very hard for a Muslim to be fully German or fully Swedish. Right? That's what makes our country so special. And in one of my recent Washington Post columns, I reflected on a very powerful moment I was abroad, a few weeks ago and I came back and I.
It's not the first time I've made a note of this. I've thought about it before and it's wonderful and I look forward to it. I think it's really at the heart of what makes America, what America is. But I was coming back on the border and the immigration official, he said to me, welcome home. And it felt like he wasn't an immigration officer, he was part of our family and he understood what America meant.
And welcome home is actually a, a, quite rare thing to hear in other countries in Europe. From the research that I've been able to do, it is rare to non-existent in many of these countries in, in Western Europe. That is, that is something worth protecting and preserving.
But just to say like, I think that that moment for me captured exactly what you're saying. Harun.
Joey: I have a question for you. I mean, you're making reference to your faith throughout this conversation, especially as it relates to finding meaning, making sense of this moment that we find ourselves in now. Do you think apocalyptic moments demand a kind of faith, religious or otherwise to be able to navigate them meaningfully?
Shadi: Yeah, I think it's a lot harder without faith. We need something beyond politics that guides us, that gives us a sense of grounding because there is a temptation to make every, as I sort of alluded to earlier, to make everything political. But I think what religion offers is a kind of space. I. Religion can be political of course, but there's an important part of religion that is away from that.
It's not about whatever the current policy debate happens to be, it isn't about Trump. It transcends Trump and any other human being on, on this planet. So it gives us a different time horizon. And I think the temptation for us moderns is to be very presentist, to be obsessed with the moment and to not be able to see beyond the moment that we're in religion allows us to take a step back and to maybe chill a little bit because in the end, God is sovereign, not Trump.
Now it's unfortunate that many Republicans treat Trump as sovereign and not God. And I think there's something idolatrous about the Republican parties embrace of Trump as this monarchical figure. They're elevating him almost on par with a religious faith or with God himself, and it's blasphemous and we should call that out.
So I think that faith is really helpful in that sense. I think it's also helpful, for less. Okay. This might come across as some of your listeners and viewers as a little bit, a little bit problem. Problematic to use the phrase, but I think that religion is great because it gives us hell, it gives us an afterlife.
And I say hell specifically because I think heaven, most people are open to it or okay with it doesn't, it doesn't sort of provoke the same sense of discomfort that hell does. But I'm really, I find solace in the fact that there is hell as Muslims, we believe in hell.
That's an article of faith for us because I, I believe that some people need to need to be punished. So when I think about Trump, I think about people in this administration. I think about leaders, Israeli leaders, the Israelis who are committing mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians daily.
I think to myself, they're never gonna face justice. There won't be any justice for them, most likely not in this world, in this life. That can give us a sense of hopelessness and despair. They're going to get away with it. They're going to get away with it. The list is longer. Obviously, Putin, all the Arab dictators who also compare them basically are doing idolatry.
They're associating themselves with God. They're saying that the supreme value is the state. The supreme value is the sovereign, the supreme value is the leader. That, to me, is one of the greatest sins that can be committed in this world, in this life, because you're associating partners with God. It's called shi in Arabic.
it's the worst of sins, you know? And not to get into like specifics, but just to say that these people, some people need to be punished. And that gives me solace in these times of difficulty that there will be a reckoning. There needs to be a reckoning. They won't get away with it.
Haroon: It is a really weird moment in America. It's a weird moment in the world. I, I feel, I don't wanna say conflicted, 'cause conflicted imp implies, I don't agree with myself, but I, I kind of feel like two different things are happening at once and I don't know which one is actually happening and which one might be happening.
You know, I guess it's kind of like looking at different timelines. Like I can see, I can see a future in which, you know, the Republic rallies itself not to make this sound like Star Wars. Sure. Um, and, and, you know uh, and, and you know, we kind of put this particular genie back in the lamp, so to speak or one where, you know, the harm that's been unleashed can't really be contained.
Right. So I, I often find myself driving through some beautiful neighborhood in Ohio thinking maybe this was as good as it got. And I got to live the first half of my life, you know, in, in peak empire. Now I'm just kind of watching it fall apart and, and I don't know. Be, I mean, no one can know, right, which of those two or maybe something else would happen.
But I've also noticed it affecting me on a very personal, granular level, like what I do in my daily life, like how I act, how I prioritize things. Do you feel that happening to you as well? That, that there's this sense that because there is this kind of American reckoning, shall we say, obviously not on the metaphysical level, but in this kind of day-to-day level where we're forced to make really hard choices and take very strong stands at, at apparently greater and greater risk that you feel like your own personal life has changed in some way or your relationship to faith or even how you practice your faith or think about faith?
Shadi: Yeah. Well, I'll say that what's happening in Gaza. Has been probably the hardest political thing for me to, it. It doesn't even feel political. It's a, it affects me on a daily basis in a way that's kind of hard to put into words. I feel a weight, a kind of heaviness, and I ask myself almost every day, how is this even possible?
And I don't know the answer to it actually. I do know the answer to it. And it's actually a very, it's a very difficult answer to reckon with that. There are a lot of people, including people I know well, including friends of mine, who simply don't value Arab and Muslim lives. They're, we're not equal.
The friends I have in mind would never admit this to themselves or even, certainly not to me. But deep down, I think that's what's driving a lot. There is this sense that Arabs and Muslims represent a kind of sea of barbarism, and Israel is the western liberal outpost in the middle of it.
It's a civilizational thing for a lot of people. once you sort of process that, it's hard to kind of be in the world with that knowledge that there's millions of people and they're allowed to say and do and support the things that they support and openly in the mainstream.
I suppose it's fine to have terrible opinions as long as they're not in the mainstream, as long as there's a kind of gatekeeping. But here it's just totally okay. So I think that's been hard for me to process and I think it has changed it's introduced limits to my own principles.
So, for example, I was always someone who thought. That like no holds barred. You can talk to anyone short, short of an actual open admitted white supremacist or an actual terrorist who's a, who's literally a member of a terrorist organization that we should be able to discuss and debate with everyone in anyone.
I'm less comfortable saying that now, and what I've done to preserve my own friendships, and here I'm talking about my friends who have terrible opinions when it comes to Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians. I've decided that it's better to preserve the friendship by agreeing not to talk about these things, because the more I hear what they're gonna say, the more I'm gonna be persuaded that they might actually be genuinely bad people.
And I don't want to believe that about friends, especially close friends. So I had to make a choice there, but I don't think it's helpful. I. To debate these things with people. I'm not interested in debates about whether what Israel is doing is justified. I think that's, for me, that's beyond the pale. If you think that ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities are justified, then I think we've reached a limit.
You know? So I think that it's showing me what my own limits are in that regard, and perhaps that's a helpful, productive thing. But that also, I think, in those times of difficulty, you also wanna maybe, um, be around your people a little bit more. And here, I mean, people in the, I suppose it's in the somewhat tribal sense, I think the tribalism is fine as long as it's not like taken to extremes and you don't let it distort your own view of the world.
But sometimes you just want to be around Other Muslims who are sort of on the same page, not, I'm not even talking about Palestine as much, but who are finding resilience in their own faith that gives you strength to see other people who are finding strength in their faith. That's a point of religion, I suppose.
So there's nothing really controversial about that, but I think that that impulse is heightened for me in the, in these times of reckoning, you're like, okay let's pray together. Let's sort of be in community. And that's why I have made a more conscious effort to, to be in Muslim spaces, to go to Muslim events I'm not talking about like the kind of like fluff, fluffy, suf sufism, but deepening my, in my involvement in a particular, Sufi order or path. Those are things that I think they seem more urgent to me now than they did three years ago.
I think part of that has to do with the moment that we're in, that I'm seeking some, I'm seeking solace, and then that might, feed into this idea that religion is a crutch for the weak minded or something like that, that we, oh, you're weak, so you need comfort, or you need a crutch. I, I like the analogy of the crutch.
I think it's a very powerful one because actually, you know what? I do need a crutch. My leg is broken some of the time a lot of us, well, well by definition we're all broken in some sense. We're, we're, we're not perfect. Yeah. We're imperfect able. So to be, to be broken is actually an invitation to say, give me that crutch, God give me that crutch.
It won't come from within. It won't come from being an individual. It'll come because we have a relationship to God and we, we ask him for that kind of assistance. There's nothing to be ashamed about in that.
Joey: Shadi, do you know this guy named Peter Rollins? Do you know this name?
Shadi: No, I don't actually know.
Joey: He is a Irish philosopher and theologian. So I, I went to Fuller and I spent a summer in, in Palestine with Christian Peacemaker teams came back and they had me do like a little talk one night about my experience there, and nobody came to it because Peter Rollins also had a thing that night at Fuller. And so everybody went to his thing and no one came to buy thing anyways. But I actually really love Peter Rollins a lot, and he talks about this, this, this thing, kind of like a parable of sorts where there's a, a guy who grew up in a tea, totaling family, so his family didn't drink alcohol.
But then when he got older, he started drinking alcohol. And whenever his parents would come over, he'd always hide the alcohol. Right. Because he would say, it's not worth the, the argument just not worth it. And what Peter Rollins says is that this guy is trying to maintain the relationship by not talking about the thing that they'll disagree about.
Shadi: Yeah.
Joey: But in actuality, for Peter, the relationship was already broken because they're not willing to talk about the thing that they disagree about. I just wonder How do you make sense of what does friendship look, look like, in this moment of maybe, maybe this moment, is the moment that that is apocalyptic for those friendships, like how, how, how do you de, de decipher or determine which friendships are worth hanging onto and avoiding the, the difficult conversations versus diving into the difficult conversations and kind of determining if there's really something there that's worth saving.
Shadi: I think close friendships are al always, almost always worth preserving. Unless the particular person is like, actively doing harm against you. That hasn't been my experience. I mean, the question of why otherwise good people support evil things is sort of the eternal question. It's a very important one.
It's hard to answer, but I also have loved ones in Egypt. I mean, I'm born and raised here, but originally Egyptian, who support things that are comparable in some ways to what's happening in Gaza, but just in a different conflict. So, you know, when you have family members who support mass killings of their fellow countrymen, and there were mass killings in Egypt at the end of the Arab Spring.
Okay. They're your, they're your uncle. They're your aunt, your cousin. You're pretty sure that they're good. Or you, you think that they were good or are good in some sense? How do they support, you know, so you get into, you get into that question, and I think that it's better not to end these relationships if you can avoid it, because then you'd have to end a lot of relationships.
We live in times of such political tumult that we're gonna know more and more people who believe in abhorrent things, and then we have a choice. Are we just gonna cut people out one by one? If we really think that Trump is approaching evil or supporting evil things in our own country, if he's, if he's a waging war on the American idea, does that mean that we're gonna start casting out people who support that?
Because just by extension, people who are waging War on America and what it stands for or support that, that seems pretty bad. But then we'd, we'd start casting out tens of millions of our fellow Americans. There would be no end to it. So I think that as a general principle, we should maintain those relationships.
But sometimes we just have to say, listen, it's not gonna be helpful for us to discuss our differences, you do your thing, I do mine, and then God will be the arbiter at the end of the day and perhaps call you. And I'm not, I'm not talking here about like going to hell in in that sense, but you know, there's a question and answer session with God in the day of judgment.
And you have to have a conversation with him. All of us do. even the good ones do. So, you know, I think there's gonna be a lot of awkward conversations on the day of judgment, like how did you sir, believe in this? How did you sir, support this mass killing? why did you not, like, did you not fear me like that?
I'm just imagining here not to like, I don't know. None of us know what it's gonna look like, but I can imagine that there's going to be difficulty on that day.
Haroon: I could see conversations like that being part of a larger, uh, Netflix series that you and I write kind of with a Muslim spin on the good place.
Shadi: Right.
Haroon: I like that. I'm gonna, a lot of awkward conversations with the day of judgment is a, is a good way to put it. Right, because you don't wanna be too judgmental, but it is gonna be weird. But, but I do have, um, a question I want to go back to on the question of faith. and I'm gonna preface this 'cause it's gonna sound like the most first world.
Framing ever. And I, I, I don't want it to be that way, but, we had a family vacation recently. We went to Hawaii. You know, speaking of archipelagos and remoteness, and actually one of the reasons why we went to Hawaii, uh, is because we, we didn't wanna deal with the question of what happens when we try to reenter the country, right?
Because, in part, because you know, I'm a stepdad, so the kids have a different last name. And we just thought there's a lot of ways in which this could go wrong, you know, in an ordinary circumstance, let alone an extraordinary circumstance. So, you know, why, why poke that particular bear? And so we went to Hawaii, and again, I mean, enormously blessed to even be able to, you know, talk about going on vacation.
And I found it a really painful experience in part because it felt, it just felt really heavy to be in a place that was really beautiful and yet had its own particular history of colonization and marginalization and, and all of that. And, you know, there's an expectation that you should feel a certain way because you've spent a lot of money and you're in a certain kind of place, but you're not feeling that kind of way.
And, i, I had this kind of, you know, moment and, and, you know, later I talked to my wife about it where I, you know, I kind of went out to the seashore, you know, early in the morning around fudge time, around prayer time. And, you know, she, she laughed and said, you know, as, as Muslims, we microdose, right?
Like we have a few minutes every day, um, that we kind of reconnect to ourselves and we don't need big, and I think anyone who lives a life of faith, you know, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever it may be, you, you kind of learn that those moments actually, ultimately become more meaningful because as you said, rightly shadi, life is really hard, right?
It's, it's very rare that you have like a whole week to just kind of, you know, reflect on yourself, right? And that's why I love what you said about the nation being family and that you have to fight for this thing. Um, and, and that's the part we have to play in this moment.
And I'm wondering for you in this moment when you talk of faith, what specifically in faith. Is it a text, is it a practice? Is it a a community? Is it a person, is it a memory, maybe even from family or friends that you feel propels you forward? Because it is a really difficult moment. And, and what you said about Gaza really hit home.
It blows my mind. I, IUI usually don't even read the news from Gaza and I, I'm, I'm admitting that because it's really, really heavy. Yeah. Just in passing you know, yesterday or the day before, I think it was Pod Saves America, you know, and, and someone said something on the order of, at this point Israel is just bombing tents ' cause there's no buildings left.
Yeah. And you don't know how to, like, as a human being, I don't know how to, and I know historically things like this have happened in, unfortunately, you know, in a lot of places. But it's still happening right now. And so I think in that, in a moment like this of such heaviness, what gives you light.
Shadi: Yeah. I think that for me, when it comes to faith prayer, if I'm in the right mood can be very powerful and sustaining. There's always a difficulty though when you're just sort of consumed by thoughts when you're trying to focus on prayer. It's the same issue I have with my meditation practice, which can also be very nice and, and very generative if I'm in the right state of mind.
I think also that, um, remembrance of God, and there's different ways to do it in the Islamic tradition, but I think daily remembrance when you're just kind of, um, naming the names of God or naming his attributes or naming your thankfulness and gratefulness to him. That's a way of grounding yourself because you're reminding yourself that there is something beyond you and there is something more important than politics and there is something transcendent.
So I think those are things that can really feel powerful for me. Again, maybe not as often. I don't, I don't experience the transcendence. Transcendence is hard. Again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier. I don't think I'm temperamentally suited to like sustained feelings of transcendence. They're quite rare for me.
I know people who apparently experience them on a regular basis. I'm envious of them. But God gives us different gifts and at some point you have to accept that you can't be someone other than you are. You try your best, but there might be limits, you know? Some of us approach Islam in a more intellectual way, and this is all, I've always been very intellectually attracted to Islam that I feel it in my mind, and less so in my heart, and now I'm trying to reverse that a little bit.
But I've always been a kind of rationalist, I think Islam is the most rational religion. That's one of the reasons that I'm convinced that it's true. But rationalism, you can only go so far with rationalism, especially when it comes to matters of faith. And I think that some of us can fall into this trap of like a two plus two equals four approach to religion.
And transcendence isn't about that.
Haroon: I'm in the same boat. I, I overthink everything as it is. And I often find, I find submission very hard, right? Because the other part of me is trying to, you know, constantly articulate everything. And quieting that is, is very, very difficult.
Joey: So my question for you is, if we're living in an apocalyptic moment how does that affect you and your daily life and more specifically.
This is an apocalyptic moment we're living in right now. What are you gonna do with the rest of your day shoddy? Like, what's the rest of the day look like if our world is coming to an end in some meaningful way?
Shadi: Well, the good thing is that it's not coming to an end in any kind of like full or absolute sense.
At least not that I'm aware of. Obviously anything can happen. I mean, I still have a kind of faith in America that in our resilience and, and America does have a way of muddling through every generation, acquaints itself with its own conception of decline. I mean, you know, as part of, as part of my new book, I was looking into the history of decline and, and dec decline and every decade there's all these books talking about the end of the American idea, the end of the American project.
The end of something and there's something very American about that. To be optimistic, you also have to be pessimistic I think there's something about getting very close to that line of losing faith that gives us a kind of urge to continue and urge to redefine and renew that we see the precipice and because we see it, we are reminded that we have to act that uhoh we're getting close to something really, really bad.
So I think that there's something distinctly American about this conversation, and I do have this sense, this suspicion that in four years we're gonna look back and we're gonna say. that was a really bad interregnum. That was really frightening time to be alive. But you know what? We got through it somehow.
Maybe we're damaged as a result, and maybe some of that damage will be very difficult to undo. But we're still in some sense, America, and I think once we get to that point, and once we realize what we have, we're maybe going to realize that we should never take it for granted again. And there will be a new generation of Americans who will have been forged by this experience, and they'll come out of it stronger, and they'll never forget this moment.
They'll also never, I hope, forget Gaza and a generation will be defined in this manner. That maybe doesn't get to your question of like, what does a day look like? It's more of like, what do the coming years look like? But that's kind of another thing that gives me hope. We are a democracy for all of our faults.
We still are. I'm not like interested in this like, oh, America is a dict. No, we're not a dictatorship. I've lived under several, you know, we're not that. this democracy is still alive. People are still resisting, if you will, through peaceful democratic channels. And that's a beautiful thing.
The fact that we can, I mean, if you're on the Columbia campus, maybe you can and on on different universities, freedom of speech is under attack perhaps for a lot of us, there are considerations we have to keep in mind. Now when we say certain things. But for the most part, this is still a free country.
And I think that's just something we have to remember every single day. What do we do with that freedom? We organize, we participate, we advocate, we fight. And if we do those things, I think that it won't be the end. It won't, at least it won't be the end of America.
Joey: Thanks for listening and thanks to Zach Swelbar for recording our theme music. If you enjoyed this episode, please don’t forget to like and subscribe – and let us know what questions we should be asking… and who else we should be talking to. Next episode we’ll be talking to Peter Block about aging and death.
I’ve been a fan of Shadi’s work for quite some time. I wanted to invite him to Chautauqua, but didn’t have the opportunity. I met his mom on an interfaith trip last year, which was a cool discovery I pieced together