“The man of an age of dissolution which mixes races with one another, who has the inheritance of a diversified descent in his body—that is to say, contrary, and often not only contrary, instincts and standards of value, which struggle with one another and are seldom at peace—such a man of late culture and broken lights will, on average, be a weak man. His fundamental desire is that the war which is in him should come to an end; happiness appears in the character of a soothing medicine and mode of thought; it is above all things the happiness of repose, or undisturbedness, of repletion, of final unity.
Should, however, the contrariety and conflict in such natures operate as an additional incentive and stimulus to life—and if, on the other hand, in addition to their powerful and irreconcilable instincts, they have also inherited and indoctrinated into them a proper mastery and subtlety for carrying on the conflict with themselves, there then arise those marvellously incomprehensible and inexplicable beings, those enigmatic men, predestined for overcoming and circumventing others, the finest examples of which are Alcibiades and Caesar, and among artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci.
They appear precisely in the same periods when that weaker type, with its longing for repose, comes to the front; the two types are complementary to each other, and spring from the same causes.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
25 years after 9/11, the Muslim Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, presided over the memorial ceremony commemorating the tragedy and its victims. Standing vigil at Ground Zero from morning until midnight—the only publicly elected official to do so that day—Mamdani had attended the memorial Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral the previous evening and thanked the Catholic community for its service after the attacks; on the anniversary itself, he also spoke at the rebuilt St. Nicholas church about the New Yorkers who had helped one another through the destruction.
For a generation of Muslims growing up in the West, the destruction of the World Trade Centre cast a long shadow that has dominated most of our lives: the ensuing War on Terror with a seven-figure death count in several countries across North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, domestic securitisation of Muslim identity, and an increasingly charged atmosphere of fear and racial hatred. We have grown accustomed to the unreasonable demand to be held responsible for the conduct of distant strangers, for which one might be expected to provide an explanation at school, at work, or on television.
25 years is also enough time for children to become adults, enter professions, acquire authority, and inherit responsibilities that the political vocabulary of their childhood had scarcely permitted them to imagine. The society in which Muslims were so often discussed as a problem has become the society in which some of them serve as public servants. At the site most closely associated with the suspicion of their presence, a Muslim now represents the city.
This does not close the history opened by the 9/11 attacks. Objections to Mamdani’s attendance at the 25th anniversary show that such deep wounds do not easily heal. Nor should one expect them to any time soon. But his presence exposes a widening discrepancy between the categories through which Muslim life in the West is understood and the forms it has begun to assume, which have yet to be articulated. The perpetual outsider, obliged to explain himself before he can speak about nearly anything else, increasingly finds himself responsible for institutions whose problems cannot be answered in the language of identity. Belonging acquires a different meaning when one has to engage in public policy and service. One must speak of the commonwealth and be fluent in the procedural vernacular to deliver solutions to the everyday problems of society.
Across the West, a new generation of Muslims in the public sphere are navigating the development of a new modus vivendi for what it means to be both Western and Muslim. This process is far from clean, and these individuals are certainly not ideologically aligned. The fractious paths these individuals are pioneering reject the defensive posture many adopted in the shadow of 9/11 and advocate a new level of public engagement and negotiation for Muslims in public life in the West.
Late Culture & Broken Lights
The primary obstacle to a new modus vivendi has been that social integration does not resolve the problem of mixed inheritance. Even if an individual acquires citizenship or gains a share in public authority, they may remain internally divided between accounts of the world that make incompatible demands upon them.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes the man ‘of diverse descent’ who carries incompatible inheritances within himself. Opposing instincts and values struggle to possess him. This man of late culture and broken lights longs for the conflict to end and seeks a soothing medicine, some “final unity” in which the exhausting business of being himself can cease. Adopting identitarianism and ideology usually achieves this.
For many in the diaspora born and raised in the West, it is a common predicament. One inherits a religion with universal claims, an internal familial background with cultural expectations, an education that offers another account of human flourishing, and a public culture that regards parts of the whole arrangement with deep suspicion. The languages overlap imperfectly and create internal dissent. Each comes with its own set of judgements. One can spend a lifetime explaining oneself to people who suspect that the explanation given to one place is not necessarily given in another. This modus vivendi is no longer tenable.
Muslims retain a deep historical memory, which adds its own burden. They remember what they once were, or at least know enough to feel a deep humiliation over their current state as a global underclass. This creates a deep malaise that fuels friction between Muslims and others in Western societies. Often, the resulting attitude is: we do not belong, and we can never belong. ‘Diaspora-ness’ becomes a permanent outsider identity, a coagulated remnant of one’s ethnic inheritance, elaborated indefinitely through resentment-fuelled activism, conferences, and the adoption of various hamstrung ideologies that no longer have real power or currency in the world. All this creates an ever-expanding vocabulary of wounds and a shrinking capacity to imagine life beyond them.
Nietzsche introduces another possibility. The conflict that exhausts one person becomes, in another, an additional “stimulus to life”: with sufficient self-mastery, the contradictory inheritance produces what Nietzsche called those ‘strange, enigmatic individuals’ capable of opening paths others could not imagine. The passage ends with one of Nietzsche’s most important observations: both types, the weak man seeking repose and the enigmatic individual using the conflict within himself to create new things, arise in the same periods and spring from the same causes. One necessarily comes with the other.
In an age of late culture and broken lights, a different path is possible: the contradictions could serve as a stimulus to innovate and create new forms of culture, belonging, and engagement in the body politic of a city or nation, as a means to serve everyone, rather than one’s in-group alone.
Tanfiris & Lahabites
The quest to create a new modus vivendi for Muslim existence in the West is opposed by two archetypes: Lahabites and Tanfiris.
To the latter, their internal contradictions indict the world around them. They weaponise religion into a purely Schmittian in-group/out-group distinction, turning every ambiguity into a hard boundary and stripping away the particularities of living culture in pursuit of a prepackaged, legally purified identity.
At its ugliest, this posture produces the extremist who treats the suffering of strangers as a means of resolving his own inner disorder. More commonly, it produces a religious manner so suspicious, punitive and joyless that anyone approaching it sensibly backs away. In Travelling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe, Abdal Hakim Murad introduces the term Tanfir to capture the dynamic created by this pathological subversion of faith: to repel people from the religion one claims to serve. For Murad, it is Tanfir on the part of certain Muslim elements which is the cause of some (but not all) of the often loosely held ‘Islamophobic’ sentiment towards Muslims across much of the West.
Murad introduces Lahabism to distinguish definitive hatred of Islam and Muslims from the fear, suspicion and repellence often grouped under ‘Islamophobia’. This hatred that characterises Lahabism cannot be attributed to ignorance, which mere familiarity and kindness can resolve.
The anti-Muslim Lahabite and the Muslim Tanfiri have a remarkably durable relationship, usually sharing the same personality type and differing only in affirmed creed and skin colour. They circle and feed off each other, ensuring a steady supply of evidence they each take back to their gaggle of followers: one insists that Muslims are incapable of belonging; the other performs Tanfir as if it were the sixth pillar of Islam. Between them, the space for an ordinary, generous, recognisably human Muslim presence becomes harder to maintain.
The trap between Tanfir and Lahabism becomes especially effective when the reasonable middle majority loses confidence in its own judgement. People who privately dislike the ugliness of Tanfiris and the subculture that has grown around them in parts of the Muslim community begin defending it because progressive principles require it. A criticism which ought to prompt reflection is rejected because a Lahabite might exploit it toward illiberal ends. Before long, broad accusations against an entire group prompt the defence of things few of them particularly admired until they were attacked.
This does not make the middle majority equally culpable with the extremists, or explain away the agenda of organised hatred. However, a community should be careful not to let its enemies determine its ambitions. If the next hostile provocation is always required to provoke a reaction, our opponents have acquired considerable authority over our lives.
Escaping this reactive cycle where religion has been enlisted in the service of wounded identity requires a new way to position, express and think about Muslim life in the West. Murad’s Travelling Home offers one. “This is what is called tanfir: repelling souls instead of attracting them,” he writes, but the indictment also reaches beyond extremists: an inherited religious culture can become so absorbed in its own preservation that it forgets the neighbours.
Nietzsche’s exceptional figures include Caesar and Alcibiades, men whose capacities were hardly confined to healing their neighbours. Creative force alone leaves the question of its proper use unanswered. For Nietzsche, Will to Power was a sufficient reason. For those with a higher moral calling, this is insufficient. Nor can we simply follow Nietzsche in suspecting the desire for peace as the product of “slave morality”. Murad joins inward surrender to “an acceptance of His (God’s) command to act to heal the world”, which enables a person to bear difficulty with patience, without transmitting it to everyone nearby. Other people’s hostility no longer provides the organising principle of his existence in a reactionary cycle.
However, Murad’s call to engage and become healers of the world, Islam’s raison d’être, has not filtered through to the general culture of Islam in the West. We treat the places where we are born and raised almost as a waiting room, where institutions and freedoms are conveniences to be enjoyed. While we may be grateful for what it provides, we remain largely incurious about the work required to sustain it, such as participation in the body politic, beyond pet issues that directly affect ourselves.
Islam’s universality ought to disturb this arrangement. The ummah cannot be reduced to an ethnic coalition whose concern is the defence of its members’ tribal interests. Its religious meaning extends beyond the fortunes of any existing collection of Muslim societies. There are human beings all around us whose lives demand our conscience and good works.
Yet, consider how much attention is comparatively devoted to some minor insult to Muslim identity, and how little to a ruinous feature of ordinary life that affects everyone. “Islamophobia” has become a cause célèbre among various political activists and lobby groups, reducing the appearance of Muslim talking heads in the media to permanently defensive, narrowly self-interested outsiders threatening freedom of speech. Society around us becomes lonelier, uglier, more exploitative, lower-trust; gambling and pornography are exploding, inequality is rising astronomically, and all the while community spokesmen remain preoccupied with the latest identitarian slight. Eventually we must ask what our presence has made possible for anyone beyond ourselves—before others force this question on us.
The question then is what space Muslims can, and should, negotiate in the public life of Western democracies.
Between Gurbet and Hijra
Negotiating that space requires confronting a persistent feeling that our proper home lies elsewhere. Gurbet is a Turkish word describing the condition of being away from one’s homeland, with its accompanying alienation and longing. For those born and raised in the West, gurbet is compounded by the fact that one can inherit the feeling of exile without ever having lived in the place imagined as home. Long before the far-right’s enthusiasm for remigration, Muslims have been having their own recurring discussions of departure, explicitly called hijra, driven by the exhaustion induced by the cognitive overload in having to negotiate every (rapidly changing) norm of daily life, of belonging imperfectly—or not belonging at all.
Permanent estrangement and imagined departure share the same premise: our life as real Muslims can only happen somewhere else. A third possibility begins when the place we actually live in, which has given us a certain quality of life—access to healthcare, education, professional advancement, and a rule of law relatively more just than in many of our countries of heritage—becomes a place whose future we accept responsibility for. This requires more than acquiring citizenship or succeeding professionally. It requires entering the arguments, institutions and reciprocal obligations through which a society governs itself.
The public figures considered here—Sadiq Khan, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and Arwa Elrayess—offer uneven examples of this possibility. Their politics differ, and aspects of their conduct or convictions will trouble some, if not many, Muslims. Yet, they need not resolve every contradiction of their inheritance before they can act within it. What matters here is how they exercise public responsibility, and what that responsibility requires them to negotiate.
Sadiq Khan’s mayoralty shows one consequence of belonging: the possibility of being judged unfavourably. Arguments about transport, housing and policing concern how he has used his authority and whether Londoners should continue to entrust him with it. Anti-Muslim hostility remains part of the picture, but it cannot explain every objection to his record. Distinguishing prejudice from an ordinary demand for better government is essential to the political maturity this position requires. A Muslim mayor must be allowed to be a disappointing mayor.
Zohran Mamdani’s “pothole politics” and permanent smile approach the same obligation through New Yorkers’ everyday concerns. Affordability, childcare and functioning services give households with little investment in Muslim identity a reason to care about his programme. They also impose a discipline on his supporters: the gestures that satisfy a political subculture must compete with responsibilities to the whole city. Winning office creates obligations to people who did not vote for you, do not share your convictions, and may never particularly like you.
Abdul El-Sayed’s statewide ambitions require coalition-building beyond the Muslim community’s parochial interests. His campaign emphasises healthcare for all, household costs and corporate power, addressing circumstances shared by people whose religious commitments and foreign-policy views may differ sharply. Such a coalition requires persuasion across those differences and an ability to sustain cooperation without demanding agreement on everything. Muslim concerns enter a wider political argument in which other people also have claims upon the outcome.
The tenacious Arwa Elrayess, who served as the Oxford Union’s president earlier this year, faced a more explicit test of reciprocity when she invited Tommy Robinson to the Oxford Union and defended the invitation against demands to withdraw it. As a 19-year-old student and a Palestinian-Algerian Muslim, she contested his claims on the floor, demonstrating greater courage and social nous than many of her detractors twice or thrice her age, including those within her own community. The freedom that allowed her to speak also accommodated an opponent whose views she had every reason to find objectionable. Taking responsibility for the institution meant upholding that freedom under pressure from her own community, while also using it herself.
These are practical disciplines through which a new belonging can acquire substance. Contrary to the Tanfiri disposition, being likeable matters. Competence, too. There’s a reason someone like Donald Trump cannot help but praise Mamdani and is willing to cooperate with him. People must be able to work with us, disagree with us, and hold us responsible for what we do. None of these figures needs to be a philosophical disciple of Nietzsche or Murad for their experience to illuminate the problem both help us articulate.
These figures also face a more sweeping accusation from the Lahabites: that their participation in Western politics conceals a project to undermine the societies they claim to serve. In this conspiratorial account of “thirdworldism”, Muslims build coalitions and seek office only to advance the interests of an alien bloc, perhaps with an eventual “Caliphate” waiting in the wings.
Here, the Lahabite and the Tanfiri arrive at the same conclusion: a Muslim cannot truly belong to the West. The possibility these public figures explore is precisely what both deny—that Muslims can participate in good faith, with commitments to the freedoms, institutions, and common life of the societies they inhabit.
Beyond Fear & Subversion
Nietzsche’s “two types” offer language for the diaspora’s malaise and the possibilities it contains. The same mixed inheritance can produce a retreat into the consolations of identity, or the self-mastery to create new forms of belonging. Both emerge from the same conditions. The contradictions of Muslim life in the West need not be resolved into a theoretically coherent whole before something worthwhile can be made of them.
Murad gives this possibility a moral direction: the capacity to act must serve the work of healing the world. His vocabulary helps us to distinguish what obstructs this mission. Lahabism and Tanfirism articulate what we find reaching fever pitch in social media and public life: two extremes feeding off each other and harming the reasonable middle majority.
By naming a thing, we can confront organised hostility, answer ordinary suspicion with generosity, and recognise faults for which we must take responsibility. A community needs language adequate to all three if it is to escape the cycle in which every criticism reinforces its sense of persecution and every failure becomes somebody else’s doing.
Khan, Mamdani, El-Sayed and Elrayess are uneven, often contradictory examples of the alternative taking shape. They are only some of the Muslims now emerging as mainstays of Western public life, and do not represent the entire Overton window of Muslim opinion. Their significance does not depend on their satisfying an ideal Muslim archetype, or on our agreeing with every belief or policy they espouse. In different ways, they are attempting to turn mixed inheritances into a capacity for public action. The space they are negotiating requires Muslims to become proactive members of the body politic: to govern competently, be likeable, defend freedom of speech even when it accommodates our opponents, and accept accountability for our own conduct and failures. The commonwealth must become our concern beyond those moments when Muslim interests are directly at stake.
That such a space can be negotiated 25 years after 9/11 should reduce the confidence with which Islam and the West are pronounced mutually exclusive civilisational worlds. Some differences remain, and we must be honest and frank where we agree and disagree, but the lives and obligations being formed between and beyond those differences increasingly exceed those categories.
At Ground Zero, a Muslim mayor stood among the people of his city, sharing in his public duty of remembrance. That some still regarded him as an intruder made the contradiction visible; the office itself had already placed him inside the obligations of their common life.
Words: Ahmed Askary is Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian.