KING OF THE WORLD
Episode 5: Watch Us, Listen to Us—Surveillance

Hosted by Shahjehan Khan, produced by Asad Butt, associate produced & researched by Lindsy Gamble, and sound designed and mixed by Mark Annotto

Shahjehan books a one-way ticket to Pakistan in search of a geographical cure as the United States—and Boston in particular—enters the era of Countering Violent Extremism.

Wednesday, September 29th, 2021
—————————-
Chapter 1: INTRO

Shahjehan Khan
So remember that mosque in Wayland, Massachusetts, that we’ve heard about a few times?

[Chants]

Basically the hub of my family’s social life? Well, there was a kid there, just a year older than me, whose name was Tarek. He grew up in a town called Sudbury, just a couple towns over from both Wayland and Acton-Boxborough.

Both of our dads were super active at the mosque; they were actually friends. Both are highly educated immigrants to the U.S.—Agha, my dad, from Pakistan, and Tarek’s dad, Ahmed, originally from Egypt. Tarek’s dad was even my teacher at Sunday school one year, and although Tarek and I weren’t like best friends or anything, we were, well, friends. He was into music; I can still picture his Black Sabbath T-shirt, which I thought was super badass to wear at the mosque. This was when we were both in high school, and once we graduated, we didn’t interact outside of saying hi occasionally at Eid prayers.

I remember last running into Tarek there, it must have been like 2003, and asking him about music. He was all smiles, gave me a hug, and said, “Bro, I don’t listen to that stuff anymore. But it’s so good to see you!” And then he was gone.

[Sounds]

Although I didn’t get a chance to dive deeper, the interaction stuck with me. Remember, this was around the time I was still barely removed from a serious suicide attempt, and although I was trying to start over, I was still pretty checked out a lot of the time. I just wasn’t genuinely happy like so many young people I grew up with seemed to be, like Tarek seemed to be; he was glowing that day.

[Audio]
I’m standing outside the Moakley Federal Courthouse, where Tarek Mehanna was just found guilty of seven counts related to terrorism. Uh, he was found guilty of conspiring to support Al-Qaeda, conspiring to kill in a foreign country, and also for lying to investigators who started to probe his activities around 2005, 2006.

[Theme]

Shahjehan Khan
From Rifelion Media, I’m Shahjehan Khan and this is the King of the World podcast, a historical, cultural, and personal look back at the 20 years since 9/11.

Episode 5: Watch Us, Listen to Us—Surveillance

Chapter 2: TRANSITION

Shahjehan Khan
By 2008, my life was at an all-too familiar standstill.

[Music]

Despite getting a ton of press coverage, our band, The Kominas, wasn’t really doing much. And it was mostly my fault. Around this time, my bandmate Basim—our lead singer, lead publicist, lead booking agent, okay, pretty much lead everything—had moved to Lahore, Pakistan, to pursue journalism because he felt like things were kind of going nowhere musically. The rest of us weren’t really taking much initiative, and in my case, the struggles with mental health often culminated in flaking out on the band.

Basim was my best friend, and knowing I had let him down was a tough pill to swallow. So when he invited me to join him in Lahore five months later to try and make more music together, I jumped at the chance.

Basim Usmani
I think it was because I wanted us to keep going somehow.

Shahjehan Khan
Unlike all those trips to Pakistan I’d done with my family since I was little, this one was a solo, one-way expedition as an adult, as someone trying to start the fuck over.

Basim Usmani
My attitude was that, like, it was just kind of gonna be probably me and you working on stuff. I thought it's got to, I guess, start another chapter and I really like you and you're a great guitar player and like, yeah, like I couldn't leave it behind. I think that we still have a musical journey to keep on going.

Shahjehan Khan
I checked a couple of bags, one of them filled with clothes, the other one with newly pressed CDs of The Kominas’ first album, “Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay,” a couple of speakers, a mixer, plenty of other audio gear, and of course, my beloved guitar.

[Music]

On the plane I decided I was gonna try super hard not to disappoint him, or disappoint myself, really. It felt like a second chance, sort of like what a lot of people in recovery circles call a “geographic cure,” something about movement and literally leaving your troubles behind, jump-starting yourself in a positive direction.

[Sounds]

Typically, as a kid, when my family and I would get to Allama Iqbal Airport in Lahore, we’d be able to see all of our cousins anxiously waiting for us. It would be super exciting to start madly waving at each other while fighting our way to the front of the baggage claim line (usually a pretty chaotic spot even at 2am when you’d normally arrive).

This time though, it was Basim who was there, along with a couple of his buddies. We lit up a few cigarettes in celebration

[Sounds]

(something I DEFINITELY wouldn’t have been able to do around my family) and sped home to the apartment, the flat, as it would come to be called. Our car was a busted-up old white Suzuki Mehran, and on the drive home I guess that clunker hit its stride because some police officers caught up with us right as we pulled into the apartment complex. They drew three huge guns on us. I nearly shat myself, but Basim calmly and coolly apologized, grinned, and then they let us go.

It was the perfect shock to my system, with my bad-ass best friend saving the day. Who knew what adventures lay ahead for us after that?

Welcome to Pakistan?

[Music]

Chapter 3: PAKISTAN

Peezu
My friends led me through to Basim’s seedy flat complex. And we went up the stairs of this dingy looking complex.

Shahjehan Khan
That’s my dear friend Asif, who[m] we all call Peezu. If you know, you know; I can’t explain that nickname much more. Peezu and Basim actually went to elementary school together because Basim spent his childhood in Pakistan. Peezu remembers when we first met.

Peezu
After a while of waiting this shirtless, hairy-looking guy, a little disoriented, who had apparently just woken up, opened the door and said that you had some party last night. That was my first encounter, was you coming out of Basim’s apartment, a little bit shaken up.

Shahjehan Khan
I’d been in Pakistan for about a week or so. I had basically spent the whole time trying to adjust to not only to the time difference but also to a new lifestyle. Lahore is known for its nightlife, something that you really have to experience firsthand to understand.

[Audio]

A lot of stuff just gets going around 10pm, and our nights would usually begin with some kind of outdoor meal, lots of chai, followed by hanging out at other friends’ places, listening to music, and meeting this amazing community Basim had built. He was then and is still now one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met; he’s got this way of just dropping right into the middle of a conversation, giving you a grin, and putting his hand on your shoulder that endears you to him right away.

So, it was no surprise that in the months prior to my arrival, he had amassed an incredible network of fellow journalists, artists, and just interesting heady people who loved to be around each other.

[Audio]

Basim got me a job working at a newspaper, because, well, I needed a job, and I spoke English. I was able to walk into a place with literally zero journalism experience, no college degree, and start an entry-level job subediting stories. I’d also been designated the host of a weekly radio show shortly after, again because I was from America and fluent in English.

[Audio]

A difference I felt right away being in Pakistan was, at least initially, the lack of an agenda or like having to have a reason for hanging out with people. Friends would come by our place almost every day; they just wanted to be with me, to meet me, to hear me play guitar, and to hear about my experiences in the U.S. Let’s be real, it felt great to be the center of attention again after being cooped up in my room back in Boxborough, afraid to leave or to try new things or meet new people. Unlike in the States, it wasn’t at all weird to talk about politics; in fact, it was more weird if you didn’t in Pakistan. That’s just what everyone did. And Basim was right in the middle of it all.

[Music]

He was working as a correspondent at a huge news agency, going out and doing field reporting by day, then working on his Punjabi poetry skills by night.

Basim Usmani
To put it even more starkly, like, all of this other romantic stuff I had in my head about like, "Oh yeah, maybe I'll learn Punjabi, or maybe I’ll learn more about Pakistan,” like all of that stuff is like dwarfed in comparison to my love of music being important to me.

Shahjehan Khan
The music, man, that’s the main reason I was there. We soon began putting a new band together with a couple of other dudes, guys that had been around the block and were looking to do something new. They helped the two of us turn one of the rooms in our apartment into a dingy but cozy jam space—a super cheap, DIY recording studio with styrofoam boards hanging from all four corners and wooden paneling all around. And we just rocked the fuck out all night, every night. It was a dream come true, to be jamming in Pakistan with other Pakistanis. To have a whole new community, one that I really felt I could belong to. For a little while, it felt like I finally found my people and was right where I belonged.

[Music]

When you have something higher that calls you, like music for us, everything you do takes on new meaning and importance. It’s hard not to see some type of grand plan before you. Some call it faith; I think for me, at the very least, going to Pakistan seemed like part of the “plan” that was laid out before me, beyond my control, a natural progression of my life up to that point. And being there did, in the beginning, start to fill in some kind of deep hole within me.

But the truth is, that for many people like me, geographic cures only work for a little while because, like another saying I used to hear all the time in 12-step meetings, wherever you go, there you are.

Peezu
There's you know always so many layers behind the onion. Cuz I remember when I was first met [sic] you, everyone was making a big deal that like, “Shaj doesn't smoke joints.” And like, “Remember not to like pass Shaj any joints.”

Shahjehan Khan
Peezu left Lahore for a couple of months that summer to take care of some stuff back in the U.S., where he had recently quit a job on Wall Street.

Peezu
And then when I came back, apparently you started smoking again. And then that was like a regular thing. I remember a time when you'd shown up in front of my house, and you were wearing a leather jacket and you had like a huge grin on your face.

[Sounds]

And I was like, “Shaj, aren’t you supposed to be at work?” And you were like, “No, Peezu, I didn't go to work today, man.” And I was like, well, that's kind of weird, but like, whatever. We hung out that day. And then you were going in and out of periods of like smoking and not smoking. And I think that's what you were like struggling with.

Shahjehan Khan
Living in Pakistan was pretty hard actually. I wasn’t well equipped for it.

After a couple months, those jobs that had seemed shiny, perfect, and new were now insurmountable daily struggles. I just stopped showing up. My anxiety made me withdraw and go into hiding, just like I had with The Kominas, or my attempts at college, or even the way I was in high school.

Theeeen one afternoon I got robbed at gunpoint.

[Sounds]

I didn’t get hurt physically, but I fucking cried my eyes out afterward, an unexpectedly stressful event just piled onto my paranoia, which was starting to tell me that I was again trying to be something or someone that I wasn’t.

There was also this one really weird and fucked-up night that kind of changed the mood of the whole trip. After an all-night jam session, there was a group of kids we hadn’t met before, like friends of friends, that were sitting with us. We were sitting in our main living room around a table with this old clay pot which was the centerpiece—but really a nasty, gnarly makeshift ashtray.

[Sounds]

The power was out, so candles were burning everywhere, an eerie yet beautiful yellow glow upon all our faces as the embers of our cigarettes and joints moved back and forth between sips of water and chai.

We started talking about The Kominas, and it was clear they had some strong opinions about it, at least from what they had read about us. In both American and Pakistani newspapers we were being hailed as Muslim punks, which on the outset seems cool. But there was another way it was being spun. We were also being called American Muslim reformers involved in some kind of ultimate clash of civilizations. Like only in America could you be a Muslim and listen to punk music. All of that, along with us supposedly coming across as critical of practicing Muslims, was rubbing this group of kids the wrong way. They were basically like, “Why are you doing this type of shit? You’re being positioned as caricatures for American and other non-Muslim news outlets to be able to reinforce deeply entrenched stereotypes.” They even used the term faida, which in Urdu means “benefit,” jokingly calling the real rulers of the world the “Al-Faida” group. While everyone in the West was worried about Al-Qaeda, the kids said, we were completely unaware of Al-Faida laughing, watching, and moving us all like chess pieces in some master plan. A plan in which we were the fucking pawns in the white man’s game.

[Sounds]

What they said really stuck with us, with me. It freaked me out and made me question the power of media and information; like, if there really was an Al-Faida group that was watching and playing us, who else might be? And what if we suddenly started to make music that the “white media” didn’t like? Could they spin it in a different way, and make us appear to be like anti-state actors instead of the rosy reformers of Islam for the West? I mean, we absurdly rejected popular notions all the time in Kominas songs, but shit, what if we pissed off the wrong person?

[Sounds]

And like more than that, what if I was nothing more than a caricature stoner guitar player in this manufactured Muslim punk band? What did that say about me?

The rest of the Pakistan trip wasn’t exactly a resounding success. We did wrap up our documentary, the one that featured the scene with my Nana’s portrait, and played a few gigs around Lahore and a few other cities. But for me, if I’m being honest, it was a lot easier to be happy when there were cameras around.

[Sounds]

When the lights were off and the gigs were over, when it was just me alone looking at myself in the mirror, I was still a mess. While I wasn’t suicidal, it certainly became another low point for me. There was something extra shitty about having failed in Pakistan, too, one that I couldn’t quite put into words but that lived in the pit of my stomach every day, all day.

It got so bad, that by the end of the trip, one of my uncles decided he was gonna move me into his house and sober me up. I ended up sneaking a big ball of hash into his home all the same.

[Sounds]

Chapter 4: HOMECOMING

Shahjehan Khan
And so, by November of 2008, after pleas from my mom, who had found out about the recurring depression and drug use, I left Pakistan.

I landed at Kennedy Airport in New York,

[Sounds]

where my dad was planning on picking me up and driving me back to Boxborough.

Malik Khan (Agha)
As I was waiting in the international arrivals terminal, I noticed that the rate at which passengers were coming out from the immigration processing area was small and it did not improve as the time passed. And the wait kept on getting longer and longer.

Shahjehan Khan
And I ended up getting detained for the first time. (It wouldn’t be my last.)

Malik Khan (Agha)
I just cannot tell you how uncomfortable it was. And how worried I was.

[Sounds]

Shahjehan Khan
It started in what felt like a hotel room lobby, but one that was completely stale, with white walls, white lights, and rows of chairs filled with passengers like me from all over the world. And at that point, it seemed like maybe it was a random search. But eventually, once they narrowed down the group (aka let all the white people go), it wasn’t so random anymore. We were escorted out of the room and made to just sit in a cordoned-off area, right in front of the final customs counters. I couldn’t use the bathroom the whole time, couldn't get my bags or check on my fucking guitar, which was sitting right in front of me, and I couldn’t use the phone.

Malik Khan (Agha)
Stories of all types that I had heard were circulating in my mind, as I was trying to deal with the mental anguish that was being caused by your not having come out.

A fellow Muslim detainee snuck me his cell phone and I hid behind a pillar to frantically call Agha. All of us—by this time narrowed down to the Muslim or visibly Muslim or seemingly Muslimish-looking passengers—staring at all the “normal people” passing us by, and them staring right back at us. I wondered whether they were oblivious or maybe thought that we deserved it, even if they felt safer seeing us like that.

Malik Khan (Agha)
God only knows how happy I was when you finally emerged from the immigration area, almost five hours after your flight’s landing. You're an American citizen born and raised here in the USA and you've lived here all of your life. So there was no reason for such a long delay.

Shahjehan Khan
Well, some of us knew exactly what that reason was. The truth is, by this point, seven years post-9/11, stops at the airport were a rite of passage for most Muslims regardless of age, gender, or nationality.

Noorjehan Khan
We've landed in JFK, and we're gonna go jump on the bus and we're going through customs, and—

Shahjehan Khan
Fucking JFK. Oh my god.

Noorjehan Khan
—who’s the only person they pull out? Me.

Shahjehan Khan
My sister Noona again, talking about returning from Italy after a school trip with her high school chorus club in 2007.

Noorjehan Khan
So they take my passport and they take me and I'm like, “Can I tell my chaperones that you're taking me?” And they said, “No.” And they put me in a side room and I wept because I was like, “I’m a high schooler. The buses are gonna leave without me. No one knows who I am.” I'm openly weeping in this room. No one does anything.

Shahjehan Khan
In my case I was among a group of people, so although it sucked, I wasn’t alone; I was surrounded by others who were going through the same thing.

Noorjehan Khan
So I'm crying. It felt like an hour passed by. It was probably 10 minutes. And they handed it back, sent me out of the room. No one directed me, like here’s where your group is. Anything. They literally just bounced me out of the room. I like ran around until I found someone and they were like, “Where were you?” And I was like, “Well, customs took me” and they're like, “Oh, that's bad.” Stuck me back on the bus. Like I think the part for me was that I was like, I'm a minor traveling with a school group. There should be some system to protect minors in that. And then secondly, and this is more retrospectively, when I got back to my school group, no one was like, “Are you okay?” I just remember no adult like came to calm me down. Like even from my school group, everyone was like, “Oh, that's fine.”

Shahjehan Khan
And man, it didn’t stop there. Not with my family. And not with other Muslim families.

Studies show that racial profiling is no more effective than random profiling. But a decade after 9/11, Muslims were 12 times more likely to be profiled for secondary screenings by the TSA.

[Audio]

A report around that time done by Muslim Advocates found that Muslim travelers got asked all sorts of fucked-up questions by customs agents for no reason:

[Music]

“What’s your religion?”
“What mosque do you attend?”
“How often do you pray?”
“Why did you convert to Islam?”
“Do you recruit people for Islam?”
“Do you think [insert name of American Muslim religious scholar] is moderate, or an extremist?”
“What charities do you contribute to?”

Nor did it end with just teenagers.

[Audio]

And you know what fucking sucks just as much? Americans as a whole were okay with it.

[Music]

A 2010 poll by USA Today showed 71% of Americans were in favor of more intensive security checks for people who fit a profile of a terrorist based on age, ethnicity, and gender. What the hell was going on?

[Commercial]

Chapter 5: CVE

[Audio]

Shahjehan Khan
2008 is a pretty important year in both my story and that of post-9/11 America. President Obama had just been elected, and a lot of non-white Americans, including many Muslims, felt seen in an unprecedented way. After the war-mongering trash fire of the Bush presidency (yeah I know, it’s a bit hyperbolic, but you can quote me on that—I’m going there), President Obama seemed, at least outwardly, very supportive of American Muslims.

[Audio]

What a lot of us didn’t realize though was that President Obama would expand on a lot of super problematic policies already in place (like The PATRIOT Act and the surveillance capabilities of the NSA)—policies that would directly impact the American Muslim community in extremely severe ways. In fact, directly impact the Boston Muslim community.

Amira Al-Subaey
Boston was named a pilot city for the Countering Violent Extremism program, which was started under President Obama.

Shahjehan Khan
That’s Amira Al-Subaey of the Muslim Justice League, a Boston-based nonprofit whose mission “is to organize and advocate for communities whose rights are threatened under the national security state in the United States.” She’s an expert on Countering Violent Extremism, also known as CVE. Although CVE wouldn’t be formal policy until 2014, the stuff Amira is talking about here had its roots in activities that were well underway by the time Obama was elected.

Amira Al-Subaey
So CVE is really a campaign, a program, a framework, driven by national security and intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies that purports to steer people off of pathways of radicalization or extremism. And ultimately it falsely legitimizes discrimination against Muslims and other people who are involved in political organizing and advocacy.

Shahjehan Khan
Amira is referring to the often-cited but since debunked “radicalization theory” of terrorism, which, while appearing to be universally applicable, was almost exclusively applied to and said to originate with Muslims and Muslim-related political violence.

Amira Al-Subaey
Really what these CVE programs do is recruit non-law enforcement professionals, like doctors and counselors and mental health providers, teachers, imams, and other community leaders, to engage in soft surveillance to basically report on our community and refer folks based on this junk science, based on this list of indicators that are deeply Islamophobic and also incredibly vague.

Shahjehan Khan
According to this theory, things like becoming religious, growing a beard, and wearing a hijab are among the vague-ass determinants, the first steps on a supposed path that eventually leads to all-out super terrorist. It started to become popular in 2004, and soon became like THE THEORY.

[Audio]

Amira Al-Subaey
These programs are really just giving police and law enforcement access to spaces that were previously unavailable to them and are really having an impact on how Muslims and other communities access social services that we need, right? Like, how are you going to talk to your therapist as a Muslim if you know that the hospital where your therapist works has a multimillion-dollar grant with DHS to report on you, because you fit this vague list of indicators that could make you a potential violent extremist?

I think it's really important for us to know that safety in our communities is never going to come from more police and more surveillance.

Shahjehan Khan
CVE and all of its future iterations is nothing more than government-sponsored spying. And man, was it about to hit close to home.

Chapter 6: TAREK

[Audio]

Shahjehan Khan
Let’s go back to the beginning of this episode, where I introduced Tarek Mehanna, that kid from the next town over from AB, who was in my Sunday school class and whose dad was and still is my dad’s good friend.

While I was bouncing in and out of colleges and starting my band, Tarek was getting his PhD from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. And while in college, like many of us at that time, he spent a lot of time online, as it was becoming more and more of a thing to connect with people both in your immediate circle as well as across the globe. He started to openly engage in political debates, as many young people do while their identities are being shaped and they begin to establish their core values, like Rania Mustafa talked about in episode 2. For a lot of us children of immigrants, this is the point at which we can find ourselves either conflicted, parallel, or integrated in who we think we are,

[Sounds]

what we think we are supposed to be, and especially, where we sit as Americans, how America relates to the places our parents come from. And that’s where Tarek’s story starts to get complicated.

Just days after Obama’s election, Tarek was arrested and charged for allegedly translating and posting documents written by Al-Qaeda (aka providing material support), lying about why he went on a trip to Yemen, and having a supposed plan to blow up a shopping mall. Many people, however, feel like there just wasn’t enough evidence there, that whatever was found was not solid enough proof of actual intent to harm.

[Audio]

Essentially—as one article called it—he was “arrested for a thought crime,”

[Sounds]

for having opinions that our government found to be unpopular, namely that sovereign nations like Iraq and Afghanistan ought to be allowed to defend themselves from outside forces. It looked like his arrest violated his first-amendment rights as an American citizen.

Tarek and his family, not to mention the ACLU, spent the next four years fighting for his release. His brother cited the anguish of being a Muslim living in America and watching certain atrocities occur in occupied Muslim-majority countries, violence that is often censored by our mainstream media, though his parents had cautioned Tarek about being so vocal. But Tarek was found guilty and officially sentenced in April of 2012.

This is Tarek’s actual sentencing statement:

[Sentencing statement audio]
Tarek: I was finishing a work shift at a local hospital. And as I was walking out to my car two federal agents approached me. They said that I could do things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. The "easy" way, as they explained, was that I become an informant for the government, and if I did so, I would never have to see the inside of a courtroom or a prison cell.

Shahjehan Khan
Tarek, no surprise, refused. He was subsequently charged with supporting the Mujahideen and locked in solitary confinement for much of the four years leading up to his trial. He goes on to explain his beliefs, beliefs he says that he will always hold and that are neither terrorism nor extremism but logic that anyone with common sense and humanity would agree with.

The prosecution constantly stated that what Tarek did was not important; it was what he believed. Lacking a legal precedent, even the judge may have been conflicted.

[Audio]

[Sounds]

[Sentencing statement audio]
Tarek: So in more ways than one, it's because of America that I am who I am. When I was six years old, I began amassing a collection of comic books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed....
By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was learning just how real that paradigm is in the world….
I learned about the Persian Gulf War, and the depleted uranium bombs that were dropped all over Iraq that killed thousands of people immediately and caused cancer rates to skyrocket around that country…. I learned about the American-led sanctions on Iraq, that according to the United Nations itself, resulted in the deaths of over half a million children under the age of five because they made it illegal for food and medicine and medical equipment to be imported into the country….

The government repeatedly says that I obsessed over violence, and I obsessed over killing Americans. But there is no lie more ironic that I have ever heard.

[Sounds]

Shahjehan Khan
Now obviously, I don’t know what Tarek did or didn’t do other than what is publicly available...whether there’s more to the story. I haven’t talked to him in at least 18 years. But what I do know is that a lot of people were and continue to be super vocal about their anger and disgust with the War on Terror.

[Sounds]

There were at least a million of us at that anti-Iraq War protest, the one where the horses charged at Noona. And right before I had gone to Pakistan, in 2007, my sisters convinced me to start using Facebook, on which I definitely had started posting Kominas music, all those Myspace hits like “Sharia Law in the USA,” “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” and “Wal-Qaeda Superstore,” which were all part of my own awakening and resistance to the effects of American-led wars and our continued imperialist presence. Even today as I’m speaking these words, following our defeat by the Taliban, people are desperately trying to flee Afghanistan, a country that we have been occupying and “liberating” for the last 20 years. At the end of the day, a lot of Americans don’t think that our government’s intentions have been as noble as we’ve all been led to believe.

[Audio]

As Tarek said in his sentencing statement: “America has historically supported the most unjust policies against its minorities—practices that were even protected by the law—only to look back later and ask, 'What were we thinking?' Slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of the Japanese during World War II…. One day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the U.S. military in foreign countries.”

[Audio]

I’ve been suspicious of the government ever since those three kids asked me what my people did and I finally learned some history. I’ve sympathized with countries America considers to be our enemies. I’m a Brown man from a Muslim family who has been very outspoken in my opinions following 9/11. So does that make me a dangerous person?

[Sounds]

Will the FBI come after me for my thoughts...my music...this podcast?

Tarek, whom I saw every Sunday for many years of my life, will remain in prison until the end of 2029.

[Sounds]

Chapter 7: ASAD

Shahjehan Khan
An important thing to remember about Tarek was his assertion that it was his refusal to become an informant that led to his eventual arrest. The idea of turning folks against each other, of community surveillance for whatever supposed end, really makes me uneasy. I like to think of myself as someone that pretty much wears their emotions, core values, and ideals on my sleeve, but I’m aware of a lot of my privileges as far as safety and security, as well as just being socially connected, thanks to where I grew up and where I’ve ended up through a series of decisions and many, many lucky breaks.

It’s not really that much of a stretch to envision a slightly different scenario. I mean, if I was a young Brown Muslim man that grew up somewhere else and ran into the same problems, how would I have reacted? What would I have done to get out of it?

Asad Dandia
I always like to say that our surveillance apparatus is so damn huge that they're there isn't even a need for CVE; they just send the informants directly to our masjids.

Shahjehan Khan
In 2011, Asad Dandia was just another brown dude in Brooklyn. Just a quick note, we are not talking about Asad Butt, who is my coproducer and the CEO of Rifelion Media. Different Asad.

Asad Dandia
How old was I? I think I was 18 years old, I want to say. I cofounded a charity with some friends. At the time it was called FSNYC, Fesabelillah Services of New York. We later changed it to Muslims Giving Back, MGB. But basically the purpose of the charity was to offer services to those who were less fortunate than us.

Shahjehan Khan
Starting a faith-based youth group that does charity work is pretty much the most unassuming, benign, positive thing you can do. I know my parents would have killed for me to do something like that at the mosque during high school instead of smoking all that weed (or at least in addition to it).

Asad Dandia
The base was young people, late teenage, early twenties. You got 10 people, 10 brothers. Each person chips in $10, we got a hundred bucks. We can use that to buy groceries and we can deliver these groceries to undocumented families in the community who we knew needed help.

Shahjehan Khan
So before long, Muslims Giving Back becomes pretty well established and starts gaining a lot of prominence locally. They start to get volunteers from all over the city, and Asad is psyched about it. He’s finding a real sense of purpose in this work, and it’s also fulfilling the “spiritual credits” of being a decent and kind Muslim, you know, the real, good wholesome shit they never tell you about in the fucking news.

Anyways, about a year later, a kid from Jackson Heights in Queens, one borough over from Brooklyn, asks if he can volunteer with them.

Asad Dandia
He says he comes from a troubled background, wants to be part of the community effort of service. And so I happily welcome him. You know, he enjoys my friend circle and, you know, just like many of the other volunteers who joined, he actively participated in the work that we did, started showing up to all of our events.

Shahjehan Khan
This kid soon becomes enmeshed in Asad’s life. In April of 2012, the same year that this kid comes into Asad’s life, Asad gets a message from someone in the community, sort of like a mentor who happens to be a New York City police officer at the time. They meet up, and he says they have to talk right away.

Asad Dandia
So we're walking towards his car and he actually asks me, he says, “Do you have your phone on you?”

[Sounds]

I said, “Yeah, I have my phone on me.” So I give him my phone. He takes his phone. He wraps them both in a cloth and he throws them in his trunk. “Cause I need to speak to you without these present.” We get in the car, he starts driving. Says, “Okay, listen, just came back from the precinct.” I said, “Okay.” He said, “You're being watched.” I said, “What do you mean? What the hell are you talking about?” He said, “Asad, I am risking my job and potentially my life telling you this, but there is a file with your name and your photos in it in the police precinct that I was just in. They are following you as we speak.”

Shahjehan Khan
Asad can’t believe what he’s hearing.

Asad Dandia
Of course I was shaken up, really mortified. Here’s someone on the inside telling me that I'm being surveilled. He said, “I know you're not doing anything wrong, but I urge you to be cautious and to take care of yourself and your family because family comes first and I don't want you getting hurt.”

Shahjehan Khan
He’s shaken to the core, and reaches out to close friends within Muslims Giving Back to figure out what the fuck they’re gonna do, what this all means. After all, they are running a fucking nonprofit—why would they be under surveillance??

Asad Dandia
Many of the people we are offering services to are not making more than 25 grand per year. Many of them are undocumented, so they're not getting government assistance. We’re talking people with three or four children. No beds at home to sleep on and we're essentially fulfilling the job of the government, we’re literally—that’s what we're doing as a bunch of teenagers. And the world's largest police department is spying on us.

Shahjehan Khan
I suppose that seeing mosques as breeding grounds for terrorism rather than gathering places for communities should not be a surprise in the context of post-9/11 Islamophobia and the NYPD. There’s no better example of this than the Cordoba House Project, or as it was known for a while, the Ground Zero Mosque:

[Audio]

An 1850s-era building, just two blocks or so from the World Trade center, was damaged on September 11th. It had initially housed a shipping company and eventually was vacant and used as an overflow prayer room for the al-Farah mosque in Tribeca. In 2009, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf from the Tribeca mosque proposed the construction of a community center there, a place open to everyone, and his nonprofit invested in the project.

[Audio]

It was initially called Cordoba House in reference to the peaceful cohabitation of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Cordoba, Spain. The proposal spurred a nationwide controversy.

Most New Yorkers (city and state) opposed the building, while most Manhattanites supported it. The project gained the nickname "Ground Zero Mosque” even though it was neither directly at Ground Zero nor primarily a mosque.

[Audio]

This issue featured in the 2010 midterm elections and coincided with protests of mosque projects in other states. Many at a protest in New York City believed the mosque should be built, but not in the proposed location. The New York Times countered that Muslim prayer rooms previously existed in the World Trade Center itself, and at least two mosques were formerly nearby. Muslim groups noted that they had the right to worship on a site where other Muslims were killed and where their prayer space was attacked. Ironically, the groups behind the project said the intention had been to promote peace between communities.

[Audio]

[Music]

In September 2011, the year that Asad and his friends would start their charity in Brooklyn, the space was renovated and temporarily used as both a prayer room and public exhibit space. As of 2021, after 12 years in limbo, the space appears to have been made into condos but is still listed as being in planning stages online.

Asad Dandia
So what do we do? We decide that we're not doing anything wrong.

Shahjehan Khan
Asad again.

Asad Dandia
We continue to do the work that we were doing, went forward with it. We expanded our operations as an organization because we were growing. The way we saw it, we were accumulating good deeds, you know, in our worship.

[Sounds]

Shahjehan Khan
I couldn’t help but be in awe of Asad and his friends when he told us this part of the story. Like what a middle finger to the NYPD. Like KNOWING FOR CERTAIN that they’re watching you and still carrying on. They continued doing their thing, not having forgotten about the surveillance, but trying their best to move on. Then later that same year, it all came right back.

[Sounds]

Asad Dandia
One day I'm coming home from a delivery in October. I get a message telling me to check Facebook. And the first thing I see is the young man who had messaged me in March confessing to have been an NYPD informant. Says, “I was an informant sent by the NYPD to investigate terrorism. And I'm coming, basically, I'm coming out to confess that this is what I was doing.”

Shahjehan Khan
After catching a drug possession charge, the police had threatened the young man with 15 years in prison if he didn’t agree to become an informant. So he fucking took the bait and started spying on Asad and the other volunteers in Muslims Giving Back.

Asad Dandia
I do feel a sense of pity towards him because that's precisely the type of person that should be receiving help. He was diagnosed with two or three mental illnesses, he had drug use problems. He was kicked out of school, got into fights. They told him, “You're either going to face 15 years behind bars or you,

[Sounds]

or you can spy on, you know, X, Y, Z communities for us to save yourself.” How do you do that to someone, right?

Shahjehan Khan
After revealing his role as “a mosque crawler” and being contacted by news outlets, the informant said his NYPD handler stopped texting and disconnected that number. He said the NYPD considered being a religious Muslim an indicator of terrorism, and alleged that his handler said the groups being spied on hadn’t done anything wrong, but the police wanted to be sure. Upon quitting, the 19-year-old told the Associated Press he planned to move to the Caribbean.

Asad Dandia
That's the problem, right? It's a problem with the institution of surveillance itself, not how the surveillance is done. Some of my relationships have never been the same ever since. And that stuff is really hard to quantify. Because like how do you measure a loss in trust? How do you measure a loss in relationships? How do you measure breakdown in community bonds? Right.

Shahjehan Khan
Rather than building or strengthening communities, CVE programs have divided them, breeding mistrust, fear, and avoidance of important social services like counseling, healthcare, and spiritual guidance for fear of being reported and facing the worst consequences. CVE has disproportionately targeted and incarcerated minority groups, especially Muslims, and legitimizes discrimination against them.

[Sounds]

And a lot of people are compelled to be informants because they are threatened by authorities with going to prison if they don’t. Muslim organizations, on the other hand, often accept CVE grants and thus agree to refer individuals for “deprogramming interventions” because they are chronically underfunded.

[Sounds]

Under Obama, 31 federal CVE grants totaling $10 million were awarded by the Department of Homeland Security to local government agencies, nonprofits, and universities; only one went to a group that even partially focused on far-right violence. Under Trump, 85% of CVE grants awarded openly targeted minority groups, including Muslims, refugees, queer Americans, BLM activists, and immigrants.

There is no cohesive way to evaluate the success of various CVE programs with any metrics or hard data. I mean, how can you prove that violence or radicalization would have occurred without intervention?

Asad Dandia
God knows how many millions the NYPD has wasted on spying on everyday Muslim life. Like it's maddening, right? You know, we're seeing calls to defund the police and to reallocate that funding towards social services. And I'll say I am a hundred percent behind that.

Shahjehan Khan
As I was listening to Asad speak, I just thought about Wayland, man.

[Sounds]

I’m definitely not the most avid masjid goer by any means, but damn, the minute you walk into that place, you are overcome with warmth, community, and charity. I’m literally on their website as I’m writing this, and in the midst of this pandemic, there’s a listing for a meal drive, and right under that one, another for a food drive. This is true of virtually every single masjid, church, synagogue, or any kind of temple I've ever been to in the U.S.

I wonder how many informants were running around our masjid after 9/11. Or, if any are there now?

The ACLU invited Asad to join their lawsuit against the NYPD, which was finally settled in 2017, and helped to pass some pretty epic reforms, like

[Music]
no more investigations motivated solely or mostly by race, religion, or ethnicity;
they gotta get their facts straight first before launching investigations into organizations like Muslims Giving Back;


they gotta exhaust all possible less intrusive options before using informants;
and no more references to the fucking useless radicalization theory of terrorism—not on the website, and most importantly, no more using it as a philosophy.
Asad is now the Executive Director of the nonprofit, faith-based organization Cordoba House, the very same project started all those years ago to replace a damaged, vacant building with a community center. It is not—we should note—at the original location proposed.

[Audio]

Chapter 8: CONCLUSION

As I rode home from Kennedy Airport that day with my father, I thought about lots of stuff. I wondered what my grandfather would have done in my situation, whether he would have spoken up and demanded a phone call, or whether, as a judge, he might have trusted that eventually the law would protect him.

[Sounds]

No matter what Nana would have done, it seemed like I was coming home to a new sort of America, some of which I’d tried to run away from by going to Pakistan in the first place, but now it felt like I needed to be present in a way I hadn’t before. I think that, combined with a new desperation to get back to my first love, music, helped me avoid what had clearly become a pattern—what could have easily been another lurch into more drug use and solitary depression.

The next year and a half was a welcome high for me after the Pakistan experience. Basim eventually came back to the U.S. and we got The Kominas back together.

[Theme]

We toured around the country several times; it started to feel like we were building the sort of musical and artistic community none of us had growing up. Our documentary was released to international acclaim, we got to play SXSW for the first time in Austin, and soon after that came our first offer to play overseas, in fucking London, at not one but two festivals. And yeah, it was because of all the Muslim punk media hype, but a chance to go on a European tour? Holy shit, you better believe we were gonna do that.

I decided, well, fuck everything: fuck meetings, fuck school, and fuck therapy.

The world was telling me loud and clear: It was time to be a full-time rock star.

END


Next time, on King of the World:
“The Islamophobia network is really good at spreading lies and then Muslims have to kind of scramble to go and set the record straight. And it’s always really hard because lies can be super simple; the truth is always more complicated.”


Thanks for listening to today’s episode. King of the World is a production of Rifelion Media. Today’s show was produced by me and Asad Butt, and with sound design and sound mixing by Mark Annotto. Lindsy Gamble is our associate producer. We had production help from Isabel Havens, Mona Baloch, and Erica Rife. Theme song by me with production help, mixing, and mastering by Nick Zampiello. Original music by Simon Hutchinson. Thanks again to my family—Amma, Agha, Meryum, and Noona. Special thanks to Peezu, Basim Usmani, Amira Al-Subaey, and Asad Dandia. We’ll have links to each of them in the show notes. We’ll also have links to where you can learn more about Tarek Mehanna and updates regarding his case. Thanks again for listening. I’m Shahjehan Khan.

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