Building an American Muslim Political Agenda for 2021
“This is not just the fight for our lives. This is the fight for our democracy. This is the fight for a better future, one that we can all be proud of.” - Rep. Ilhan Omar
Most people don't get it, and maybe we didn't believe it until we saw it with our own eyes but Muslims in the US and around the world are majority under 23. This is the generation that will build the community that will become the largest religious group on the planet by 2070 making up more than 1/3rd of humanity, according to pew surveys. India and Indonesia will be the largest Muslim populations in the world.
Islamophobia cannot be a permanent reality. We have to get busy building relationships with one another across borders, across faiths, across ideologies and we have to learn how to deeply care for and love one another so we start focusing on the most serious issues of our times. We have to be deeply committed in each of our lives to ending war, climate change and dismantling white supremacy and racism in the world and in our hearts. Our prayer is to be a servant of this generation of global youth and the good they are building in the world.
In building a powerful and strong community we understand that youth organizing is key to the potential of our community as Muslim youth have been at the center of the Islamophobia our community has faced over the last two decades and they are ready to build political power strategically.
The 2020 election was one of the most important elections of our lives, this is especially true for the American Muslim community who have been banned, and targeted with Islamophobic vitriol by the Trump administration. One of the ways the Muslim community has responded to this moment is through unprecedented mass community organizing, mobilization, and electoral campaigns that saw 323 Muslim candidates run for office between 2016-2019 across the United States.
Muslim political power has increased across national, state, and local levels. However, so many stories about the rise of Muslim Americans in civic and political life have yet to be told. Indeed, what is needed is a clear strategic narrative campaign that combines data with storytelling to show how Muslim communities are creating progressive electoral change.
Building an American Muslim Political Agenda for 2021
There is a lot to reflect on as we end one of the most chaotic years of any of our lives, nearly a year into this global pandemic and at the end of the fourth year of this presidency built atop white supremacist fascism. We believe the time is now to think about what our collective future looks like in the United States while also considering the global role that the US plays around the world. As American Muslims, over the last twenty years our communities have been spied on, infiltrated, bombed, and banned. Our identities have also been policed over the last two decades as some in the community have wrapped themselves in the American flag. As Muslims our hearts live beyond the borders of this country, this diaspora of hearts connects us to our brothers and sisters in humanity around the world, as we showed last year with the Border Mosque work we created in the San Diego / Tijuana borderlands and through our short film, “A Prayer Beyond Borders.”
This past April, we launched the Center for Global Muslim Life, to get out of the endless reactionary work our communities have been stuck in and to create a future oriented media production lab, research center, cultural incubator & cultural preservation hub. One of our primary goals is to amplify the untold stories of diverse Muslim communities around the world, and to build connections through our digital work, and digital conferences. As we come to the 2020 US presidential election, anxiety of very real violence, and a stolen election is all too possible. No matter the outcome, either way our communities will have an uphill battle to dig out from the last twenty years of policies that have damaged Muslim communities in ways we still don’t fully understand.
In thinking about the future, we have put together an agenda that we believe is broadly representative of issues facing our diverse Muslim communities both in the United States and around the world. This agenda is reflected in the issues presented in the “Muslims in America Policy Poll” conducted by our partners at MPower Change with more than 1500 participants across the United States.
In the days leading up to the 2020 election we created an important series on this agenda with our partners at the Muslim Caucus & JetPAC, titled, “American Muslim Political Issues & Organizing for 2021.” This series featured nearly 50 speakers from throughout the United States working in community organizing and electoral politics.
1. Poverty, Growing Inequality and Access to Healthcare & the Crisis that is Neoliberal Capitalism
Like all communities in the midst of this pandemic our top priority should be focused on policies related to poverty alleviation and the gross inequalities in this country that has made the United States the global epicenter of this pandemic. These issues have to do with stagnant wages, and job creation. Universal basic income, tax relief, student debt alleviation, universal health care and universal access to education from preschool to university. This must also include issues of rent control, and a moratorium on evictions. In short this is putting necessary regulations in place and government support for the tens of millions of Americans in need who have been left behind through 40 plus years of neoliberal policies that have made the United States one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world.