KING OF THE WORLD
Episode 4: The Way They Saw Us: Muslims and The Media

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

Shahjehan and guests walk us through the abysmal to slightly less abysmal history of Brown representation in Hollywood, politics, and American pop culture, as the highly uncensored Kominas begin to cause a stir.

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021
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Chapter 1: INTRO

Shahjehan Khan
On May 14th, 1998, I was sitting on the floor of our TV room watching the series finale of Seinfeld.

[Music]

I’d never seen the show before (my ’90s sitcoms of choice included [The] Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Friends) but my parents were having a dinner party and I was bored out of my mind. So I joined some of our houseguests tuning in as Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George almost died in a plane crash and found themselves in a small boring Massachusetts town, not unlike mine. The characters break the town’s Good Samaritan Law and are subsequently put on trial for, well, basically being a bunch of assholes their whole lives.

[Audio]

I remember vividly as one of the witnesses who comes to testify about Seinfeld’s character walks down the courtroom aisle, in Pakistani clothes, and me thinking, “Whoa—wait a minute. Is that what I think it is?”

[Audio]

This was Babu Bhatt, the Pakistani restaurant owner on the show. And as soon as he opens his mouth and his apparently Pakistani accent comes out, the sitcom audience laughter begins. It kept going as he did what I’d later learn was his characteristic finger waving, calling Jerry a “very bad man.”

[Audio]

My first instinct was to laugh along with the rest of the audience, and I’m pretty sure there were a few other people in the room who were laughing, too, other Pakistanis like my parents who had now been in the U.S. for some time, had built a life here, or whatever. But there was one couple that didn’t find it funny at all, an older couple, relatives of my father who were in town for a visit. I can still remember to this day the look of disgust and sadness. One of them said something to the effect of, “Goddamn, so this is what Americans think about us? They just laugh at our clothes and our accents?” I was a bit confused and taken aback but kept watching, and attributed their reaction to them being old and weird and unable to take a joke.

I kept laughing all through my teenage years as friends would do “the accent” when talking about my grandmother or my mom (let’s be honest, I did it, too), and even found it amazing when the first Brown Canadian comic Russell Peters started to become an internet sensation for his routine about his father.

[Audio]

I thought it was something all Brown people were supposed to laugh at. The accent, the clothes, the stereotypes. I thought all of it was fair game.

[Music]

Eleven years after that Seinfeld episode, my band, made up pretty much of Brown dudes, and the one I’ve been hinting at this whole series, was about to go up on stage at a concert in Toronto, one of the most diverse cities in North America. The audience was pretty Brown, too; in fact the whole reason the show was happening was because we’d spent the last few years building an online community for so-called Brown kids like us.

The act before us were two Sikh MCs, and as they were performing, I yelled out from the crowd, “Hey man, you look like you drove a cab down here” or something to that effect, thinking that they, like most of the Brown people I’d encountered in my life, would find it as hilarious, tongue in cheek, and ironic as I did. One of them immediately stopped and said on the microphone, “Yo man, that’s fucked up. My dad drove a cab.”

[Theme]

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 4: The Way They Saw Us: Muslims and the Media

Chapter 2: ON-SCREEN

For those that weren’t around in the ’90s, it was a big time of transition in the media world, at least technologically speaking. People were starting to get the Internet in their homes.

[Sounds]

While the vast majority of us were marveling at cool stuff like cordless telephones for your house’s landline, cell phones had like literally just been invented.

[Audio]

Cable TV was becoming more ubiquitous. DVDs and CDs were making VHS and cassette tapes extinct. And while some groups were starting to make strides in front of the camera, Brown people were stuck mostly in the same old stereotypes and tropes that had been around since the dawn of Hollywood.

Taz Ahmed
The landscape of media pre-September 11th, as far as I remember…. As far I remember, there was none. There was no representation of Brown people in the media.

Shahjehan Khan
Taz Ahmed is an artist and activist from LA, who like me, is a product of that ’90s American pop culture.

Taz Ahmed
And when there was, it was always like an auntie/uncle character or someone with an accent. There was never anyone who was born and raised in America. There was a lot of Orientalization happening, a lot of exotification happening.

Shahjehan Khan
Quick note: Taz and I are both from South Asian backgrounds, so from here on out you’ll hear us use the term “Brown” a lot. To be clear, nonwhite representation is bad across the board, but Taz and I are just focusing on this specific area because we can relate with each other.

[Sounds]

Among other things, Taz is the cohost of the immensely popular podcast called Good Muslim Bad Muslim. It’s a fucking awesome title and very indicative of how Muslims have been viewed in America. It’s a really simple way of saying something really powerful, namely that Muslims, like other groups and ideas, have historically been designated to one of two camps. Shitty cultural representation and its ramifications, although certainly exacerbated for Muslims by the 9/11 attacks, are NOT a new discussion, nor are they exclusive to Muslims. There are countless movies, shows, books, and perhaps more importantly, schools of thought, that subscribe to this familiar trope of heroes and villains, good and bad, civilized and savage, probably because that’s one of the most basic plots out there.

An example of that good Muslim, bad Muslim dichotomy at play is actually one of my favorite movies as a kid. Allah Din, or as it’s known in the U.S., Aladdin.

[Music]

When Aladdin came out in 1992 it was a huge hit, to say the least, and attracted millions of kids and their parents, including a lot of people from the Muslim community. That’s because Aladdin is based on a story from a collection of folktales called 1001 Nights, also known in English as The Arabian Nights. It's considered a literary classic, some say one of the greatest Islamic contributions to world literature.

So yeah, Muslim kids were excited to see it—and themselves—on screen finally, in a positive light, in a Disney animation, no less.

Taz Ahmed
I was really excited about Aladdin. I saw myself in that movie, even though it feels so silly to say that, but like, I was so excited to see a Brown princess finally, and to see someone with dark hair not blond hair.

Shahjehan Khan
But right from the start its portrayals of Muslims, and Arabs in particular, were problematic.

[Aladdin Audio]
Oh I come from a land from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam. Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.

Shahjehan Khan
That’s like the first minute of the movie. Literally a guy on a camel in the desert singing about how his people are so barbaric they’ll cut off your ears for shits and giggles. But, you know, no biggie.

You know how Disney songs just become embedded into the minds of kids? My sisters and I used to sing the songs in the car all the time. Well generations of young people have grown up singing those fucking lyrics. In fact, at the time, because so many people complained, especially Arab Americans, Disney ended up changing the lyrics for home videos and all future releases.

But really, that was just one of many problems with the movie. So many of the Arab characters were portrayed negatively and with ethnic stereotypes—big hooked noses, beady eyes, violent, and grotesque. But not Aladdin or the princess, who had American accents and “look[ed] like white American teenagers” according to film critic Roger Ebert.

[Audio]

Regardless, Aladdin went on to make half a billion dollars at the box office, win two Oscars and a Grammy award, all the while illustrating to millions of impressionable children that most Muslims are barbaric, shady, or just one-dimensional. For Brown kids like me and Taz, even though they were horrible representations of us, we were just thrilled that someone who looked vaguely like us was on the big screen.

Taz Ahmed
When I would watch TV when I was younger and I saw a Brown character, even though it sucked, it was still really cool. You know, even though Apu was patanking and racist and a terrible character, it was a Brown character on TV.

[Audio]

Short Circuit, there was a Brown guy, you know. Gandhi, everyone was talking about Gandhi. They were like, “Oh, you're Brown. Let me bring up this movie Gandhi that just came out.”

Shahjehan Khan
Us Brown kids from this generation know EXACTLY which characters she is referring to—that’s just how few Brown characters there were on TV. One of the worst offenders during that time was Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Taz Ahmed
Indiana Jones, like eating the monkey heads. And I remember getting that a lot when I was a kid, too. Like, “Does your family eat monkey heads?” And I had no idea what they were talking about.

[Audio]

All of these things were just so ridiculous, but at the same time for me, I was like, “Oh, I'm being represented in media.”

Shahjehan Khan
Taz is hitting on a really important generational divide.

[Audio]

When we were coming of age in the ’80s and ’90s, those of us that were lucky enough to have cable had a larger selection of shows like [The] Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Family Matters, Full House, the whole Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. catalogue, and of course, VH1’s Behind the Music.

And there were a handful of cliché Brown characters with bit parts. But when it came to Muslim characters with any real depth, or nuance, there just weren't any. Regardless, just like Taz was saying, at that point I think I was so desperate to see something even tangentially like me that I could see something of myself in Babu’s character in that Seinfeld finale, who in reality, was played by actor Brian George, who was neither Pakistani nor Muslim.

I think it would be easy to lay all the blame on someone like Brian, when he was just a product of his environment, and at the end of the day, trying to do his job. A job in an industry that has always thrived on simple portrayals of complicated people.

Just take a quick walk through Hollywood history.

[Music]

Whether it’s the 1921 silent film The Sheik that includes title slides referring to “the land of peace and flame” and a white lead assuring people that he is not a savage because of his education abroad, “Kali Ma” chants in Temple of Doom that Taz was mentioning,

[Audio]

or the classic Muslim Achilles’ heel film, The Siege, just over two decades ago that is filled with tired juxtapositions of prayer and terror (among many others), it was basically unnatural for Muslims NOT to be the bad guys.

As we got closer to 9/11, Muslim representation in American media became even more abysmal. We were basically an afterthought, at the whims of white Hollywood executives trying to capitalize on pop culture, and had very little say in how we were portrayed.

[Music]

Now imagine you’re a Muslim actor trying to break into Hollywood after 9/11. We were basically terrorists or swarthy villains that oppressed women. There was so much of that good Muslim, bad Muslim stuff going on, and the only parts really available were on shows like 24 or Sleeper Cell where you were just like Mohammed or Ahmed the terrorist.

Chapter 3: DOMINIC

Dominic Rains
I'll never forget watching [The] Insider by Michael Mann. Do you remember that, The Insider?

Shahjehan Khan
One of my favorite actors of the last decade who I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know firsthand is Dominic Rains, originally from Dallas, Texas, by way of Iran. He’s talking about the movie [The] Insider, which had a huge Hollywood theatrical release in 1999.

I didn't see that, no.

Dominic Rains
There’s this horrible moment at the very beginning of the film where they were completely oblivious and they had absolutely no shame whatsoever. Basically, the main character, Al Pacino’s character, was interviewing some kind of terrorist cell, right? This is about insider journalism and all that.

[Audio]

And basically end up talking to this guy. Well his henchman or whoever it is—the two people who are arguing [with] each other—one’s talking in Farsi and one's talking in Arabic.

[Audio]

That's how they're talking to each other. They actually did not even take the time to go, “Oh, you speak Farsi, you speak Arabic. Oh, we need an Arabic actor, not someone who….” They just didn't care. It was just like, “Oh yeah, let's just take someone…they sound the same, so just have them speak.” That's what it was. That's where we've come from.

[Sounds]

Shahjehan Khan
It should be kinda obvious by now that names are sort of a big deal to me, and a huge part of this show. Dominic’s birth name is Amin Nazemzadeh. Amin means “trust” and nazemzadeh means “child of the school principal.” While he was in college, his elder brother convinced him to go in for an audition for a TV movie called, Saving Jessica Lynch. Amin booked the role of an Iraqi guerrilla officer, and soon got his first agent. He moved out to LA in 2004 and started making the rounds. But it was pretty tough right away.

Dominic Rains
As an actor, it became very clear to me that I'm always gonna be viewed a certain way. You know, your name is gonna tie you to someplace and the way you look is gonna tie you. And I always wanted to shed that and just go, “I'm an actor. I can do anything you want me to do. I can be anyone you want me to be. Give me the opportunity.”

Shahjehan Khan
Amin did become a “working actor” in LA, but the kinds of roles he was getting weren’t super complex. His second credit was on the immensely popular show 24,

[Audio]

right alongside agent Jack Bauer (played by the actor Kiefer Sutherland) as—you guessed it—one of two of alleged terrorist conspiring brothers.

I don't know how else to ask this question, so I'm just gonna ask it. I didn't watch it because I kind of didn't want to, but what was it like being in the Flight 93 movie, being one of the hijackers?

Dominic Rains
Yeah. Definitely don't watch that. That was just, like—

Shahjehan Khan
I'm not planning on it.

Shahjehan Khan
The movie Flight 93 written by Nevin Schreiner and directed by Peter Markle was the first Hollywood film to draw its narrative directly from the 9/11 attacks.

[Audio]

Dominic Rains
Look, man. I was 22 years old. I was new to the business. I got three weeks of work in Vancouver, making, I don't know, something like $3500, $4000 a week. And at that time you're just like, “Oh my God.” But more so, you know, you gotta live and whatnot. And this was back in 2005, right? So I jumped on it and I wasn't thinking down the road. It was just like, you know, like anybody in our business at that time from our background is going, “Where can I get the next job, you know? Terrorist? Sure. What do you want us to do?” I mean, it was all over the place, you know, post-9/11. All these shows were coming out and movies were coming out that were, you know, they needed their bad guys. And a bunch of us who were in the business at that time were making our bread from portraying these bad guys.

Shahjehan Khan
Muslim male characters were cab drivers, terrorists, or swarthy villains. Muslim female characters were submissive and voiceless, with their hijab or burqa being the most important thing about them. And as far as nonbinary Muslim representation, you wouldn’t even know that it’s a thing.

[Music]

Amin was quickly learning that in an industry where “people like you” don’t call the shots, these types of roles were about as good as it’s gonna get.

Dominic Rains
I’ll never forget walking into a casting session and I had a really great read.

[Music]

I had a fantastic audition. There's a bunch of people in the room and they were like, “That was really good. Your name—where’s that from?” And I was like, “Oh, that's, I’m Iranian.” And he just looked at me and goes, “Oh. Okay, thank you.” And in that moment I saw in his face that, “Nope, you're not gonna be the guy for this part.” Cause he sat back and that was the end of the conversation. He went from like interested/“I want to get to know you,” and then as soon as he knew where I was from the conversation ended and I came out of there and I knew it, and I felt it.

Shahjehan Khan
For those of you who have never been in a casting session before, or have never attended an audition, it’s sort of like a job interview, but if you had to hop right into your first day of work, and do it perfectly as they literally watch your every move. It’s an art, and there’s nothing like having a great audition. So just imagine if you did everything right, you checked all the right boxes, had all the right skills, but then you suddenly realize they don’t care about any of that.

Dominic Rains
I said, “Fuck that. I'm gonna break that. I'm gonna beat you at your own game.” So I thought, at that time, the way I was gonna do it is, I’m gonna change my name. And I'm gonna come up with a name that no one can tie to anyplace or anywhere. It's just gonna be just out of the ether—let it confuse you—because all it's gonna do is give you an opportunity to see my work. And that's all I want you to see is my work.

Shahjehan Khan
And that’s when Amin Nazemzadeh became Dominic Rains, the “ethnically ambiguous” actor that could now be cast as anybody. Sort of like the way I tried to change my name from Shahjehan to the cooler-sounding “Malik” that everyone knew how to say, but in Dominic’s case it was an attempt to fucking get work that he knew he was losing out on. And, things picked up for him. In 2007, he got a huge breakout recurring role, not as a terrorist, not as violent person, but as a doctor on General Hospital’s Night Shift, a highly coveted role for any actor.

[Audio]

Chapter 4: REBIRTH

Shahjehan Khan
Studies have shown that most Americans get their first and, well, probably lasting impressions about Islam and Muslims from the media. And American Muslims wanted a seat at the table. The early 2000s were a rebirth of sorts; we started to see a new wave of Muslim entertainers, politicians, and others in the public eye.

In comedy, you had stuff like the Allah Made Me Funny tour:

[Audio]

Folks like Aasif Mandvi become mainstream faces on late-night television:

[Audio]

You had Amna Nawaz and Fareed Zakaria breaking into television newsrooms:

[Audio]

And books like The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid became international best sellers:

[Audio]

And in Canada, the sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie debuted to record ratings in 2007, becoming the largest audience the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, had reached for an entertainment program in a decade.

Also in 2007, The Pew Research Center released the results of the first-ever poll of Muslim Americans and “[found] them to be largely assimilated and happy with their lives.”

[Audio]

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Keith Ellison became the first Muslim U.S. Congressman. Ellison was able to overcome a last-minute smear campaign by his opponent who tried to use the fact that he was Muslim against him. And, in maybe one of the most iconic moments in American Muslim history, Ellison was sworn in on a Quran rather than a Bible, and not just any Quran.

[Audio]

That pissed off a lot of people though, and you can definitely tell this if you take a look at the YouTube comments section of his swearing-in ceremony.

Keith Ellison has gone on to have a remarkable career, most recently he was elected Attorney General in Minnesota where he prosecuted the murder of George Floyd.

[Audio]

So yeah, there was this sea change of sorts when it came to Muslims in pop culture and in the public eye. But Islamophobia wasn’t exactly over, and there’s no better example of this than the presidential campaign of a young senator from Chicago:

[Audio]

Throughout his campaign, his actual presidency, and beyond, Barack Obama was rumored to be a secret Muslim. “Was he educated in a madrassa? Damn! Look at this photo of him in traditional Kenyan dress! Oh shit, maybe his middle name is Muhammad, too?” These rumors were so deep, pervasive, and systematically supported by right-wing media that in August 2010, a Pew Research poll showed that 18% of Americans and 30% of Republicans believed that Obama was a Muslim.

[Audio]

What you’re hearing is what was widely considered to be one of then candidate John McCain’s crowning political moments, when he tried to correct a voter during the 2008 presidential campaign. I don’t know, I don’t think it was a crowning political moment at all though. I mean, what if he had said something like, “Uh ma’am, he’s not Arab. He’s actually not even a Muslim, but fucking so what if he was?”

Prior to 9/11, many Muslims tended to vote Republican—attracted by their socially and economically conservative stances. In the 2000 election, American Muslims overwhelmingly voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore by a more than 2:1 margin. It's been reported that Muslims in Florida came out in droves to support Bush, a crucial state he won by just 537 votes that eventually gave him the White House.

A strange and pretty sad coincidence is that there was supposed to be an initial meeting between the newly elected Bush administration and American Muslim leaders. It was supposed to happen at 3pm on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.

[Music and Commercial]

Chapter 5: BASIM

[Audio]

Shahjehan Khan
Following the 9/11 attacks, as anti-Muslim fear mongering stuff really took hold in right-wing and conservative media, the Republican party lost the support of American Muslims.

[Audio]

In 2004, more than 90% of Muslims voted for John Kerry. And in 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama received more than 85% of the Muslim vote each time.

[Audio]

Whatever you feel deep down inside will end up in what you create. And that was no different for us American Muslim artists attempting to carve out space for ourselves post-9/11.

For me, while all this was happening, I was struggling to keep my head above water. I had NO IDEA that I was about to be right in the middle of this surge in Muslim creativity, not just riding the waves, but making really, really big ones.

[Music]

Let’s return to late 2004 for a second. The person known as Malik or Saj or Shahjehan was sitting in the library of UMASS Lowell wondering, for like the fifth time, if I was really gonna last in college when an old friend walked in and forever changed my life.

Basim Usmani
My first memory of you would probably be moving to Massachusetts when I was 16 and then seeing you probably in Wayland at the masjid on like a Sunday.

Shahjehan Khan
Basim Usmani’s mom and my mom decided that their two sons were just weird enough to maybe become friends. This was at a time when I was really into weed, cigarettes, and setting fires, and Basim was a super-slick goth kid, with a leather jacket, long hair in a ponytail, which he’d occasionally spike into a mohawk, along with a face full of white makeup. I remember this one time we were both so bored of going to Sunday school classes at the mosque that we thought it would be hilarious if we hid in the closet of the classroom inside of a cardboard box.

[Audio]

We were 16 years old at this time. So yeah, we were pretty weird. But it didn’t really matter because we bonded over music right away.

Basim Usmani
I had a mix tape that some kid at my high school had made me of like a bunch of random metal and hardcore-type stuff. And we sat down in a car and we just like listened to it, eating like, whatever, halal hotdogs, and just chilling.

Shahjehan Khan
It felt really good to be with somebody that just kinda got me, who didn’t care that I was weird, was kinda weird himself, and made me excited and curious in a way that I’d forgotten how to do. The fact that we had both tried out college the first time only to move back home was also pretty serendipitous.

Basim Usmani
That definitely helped because we didn't really know what the future held.

Shahjehan Khan
Even though school wasn’t working for Basim, he had found some underground success with his band “Malice in Leatherland” (still one of the coolest band names I’ve ever heard). They had done some touring, played in New York City regularly, and had some pretty amazing band photos out there on the Internet. But he was now looking to start a different type of musical project, something that spoke a bit more about the cultural and social moment we both found ourselves in at the end of 2004.

Basim Usmani
So like 9/11 pretty much happened at the end of our time in high school or in the middle of it. And then we go to college. I mean, I was definitely fucked up in a lot of ways.

Shahjehan Khan
You might remember from the last episode, we talked about how we were in the midst of a new wave of Islamophobia in America. A lot of us felt this way and were either running away from it or trying to face it head on. And when it came to Basim, he was ready to fuck shit up.

Basim Usmani
It was just unavoidable, like just the atmosphere. In my class, there was a girl whose boyfriend had been deployed in either Iraq or Afghanistan. And she would bring that up. Like, I think that it was real, you know. And there was [sic] flags everywhere and it was like, I think a lot more jingoistic, you know, during that era than anytime since.

[Audio]

Shahjehan Khan
We were inseparable on the UMASS Lowell campus, and that naturally led to the idea to start a band. Basim’s drive was infectious. He was exactly the kind of friend that I had been waiting my whole life to meet. He challenged me to think bigger and not worry so much about whether people would like what we were doing or if our music was super-polished-sounding or whatever. The two of us were a perfect combination. He'd often have a fully formed lyrical idea or a melody in mind, and I’d seamlessly put in the sort of guitar lines I’d always wanted to play.

Basim Usmani
When it came to the music, and our first forays into writing with each other and stuff, like a big, big part of that was that the culture was so, so self-censored and like militarized and like about war.

[Music]

Shahjehan Khan
And he had a great band name already: The Kominas. Komina means the same thing in Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi: a scoundrel, or a person of a mean disposition. My favorite translation is rapscallion. The Kominas. The perfect name for a Desi punk band.

Basim Usmani
The Kominas was like our adolescent response. It was like a shot in the dark, out of like our garage kind of, where we maybe didn't understand what we were getting into.

Shahjehan Khan
With the start of The Kominas, my life finally meant something. For the first time maybe ever, I belonged somewhere. I was in a state of artistic and creative flow that I’d only heard about on music documentaries or read about in interviews with musicians that I admired. And the best part was that it wasn’t just another band; this one was gonna be our response to all the bullshit we saw all around us, as Brown dudes, as Muslims, and it was gonna help us define our own place in this fucked-up country. And, I was finding my voice through music, through the guitar, just like I had done when I first started playing.

I’d always thought that although my parents were proud and happy when I started to get good at the guitar, they were hoping I’d eventually just chill out, study hard, get a great job, and eventually deliver them some grandkids. Turns out there was a little more behind why I got that guitar.

Tina Khan (Amma)
That was my dream anyway, because when I was young, I always wanted to play the guitar. Do you know that?

Shahjehan Khan
No!

Tina Khan (Amma)
Oh my god. When I used to tell Daddy [inaudible]. I had this, I don’t know, since I was I think probably a teenager or maybe even before that, I had always this affection towards the guitar, but can you imagine that?

Shahjehan Khan
I was pretty speechless when Amma told me this. I didn’t even interrupt her really at all like I normally do with my guests or others during a conversation. I literally got chills for the rest of the time she talked about it.

[Music]

Tina Khan (Amma)
And then you started playing the guitar. So remember when I got you the first guitar? For some of the Desi parents it was like a shock that I would give a guitar to my kid because they think that guitar is like a crazy instrument. And Muslims or Pakistanis should just be like either going to the masjid or doing something different, not playing the guitar because it gives them the impression that it's going to be the punk rock or something or whatever. That's the kind of impression. So when you wanted to play the guitar, it was like a dream come true in myself.

Shahjehan Khan
Hearing Amma say this stuff really made me look at her in a new way. She’s the only one out of her family that came to the U.S. and started a brand new life here. She had no idea what kind of family she was gonna have, or what version of her family legacy would take shape in America. I’ve heard her say before that she was sort of shy and soft spoken when she was younger, but the idea that she always wanted to play guitar and actually encouraged me to do it in spite of what she thought others would think is like a pretty punk thing if you ask me.

Listening to Amma’s quote back also reminded me of another story. Soon after I’d come home from the hospital after my suicide attempt, I was having trouble like feeling normal. I was definitely under the close watch of my family. After a few days of kind of bumming around the house, I plugged in my electric guitar that was sitting in my childhood bedroom with me and started playing quietly, something I hadn’t done in a while.

[Music]

She knocked on the door, smiled, and said, “I’m so happy to hear you playing; don’t ever stop doing that.”

Chapter 6: THE KOMINAS

[Music]

Shahjehan Khan
By early 2005, Basim and I were madly writing and recording demos, and throwing them up on the site formerly known as Myspace.com.

[Audio]

Okay maybe it still exists, but who really uses it anymore?

Basim Usmani
When I look at the lyrics of our first album, which like we mostly wrote during that time in college together at UMass Lowell, like a lot of those lyrics I wrote in between classes or we'd write them or we'd end up at the…. There was one room at UMass Lowell dormitory that was kind of like the punk rock dorm, where like a bunch of kids in bands happened to live. And we would be like the two Brown kids at this like mostly white place.

Shahjehan Khan
Our purpose was pretty clear, at least to the two of us.

Basim Usmani
I think that those lyrics are really like, I don't know, it's like, it's kind of like a time capsule because I'm like so mad at corporations. I'm so mad at like the media. I'm so mad at like so much stuff. In a way it's very, very punk. And I think it was more like directed out at the world, like, “Fuck you!” you know what I mean? Or whatever.

[Music]

Shahjehan Khan
And, man, that fuck you attitude was what I loved about punk music, something that I had never listened to until Basim schooled me by giving me mix CDs. And it totally made sense. We would hear about crazy shit on a daily basis, talk about it with each other, and it would inevitably influence the music we were making. We’d hear outrageous stories, like when folk singer Cat Stevens got put on a no-fly list and denied entry into the U.S. in 2004. Stevens, who in the late 1970s converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam, has since done all sorts of amazing humanitarian work around the world, but yeah, I mean his last name is Islam, so, you know, I guess they couldn’t really handle that at the TSA.

Things like this were happening all the time. I wondered what it might be like if one day The Kominas were on a world tour and couldn’t come back home because of some similar bullshit. I mean this was the guy who literally wrote the song “Peace Train” and he was denied entry to the U.S.

[Music]

The funny thing is, you can find Islamic influence all over American rap and hip-hop. If you listen carefully to foundational groups like Wu-Tang Clan, Brand Nubian, or even Rakim, you’ll soon learn their connections to what many consider the real and true foundations of Islam in America, the Nation of Islam.

[Music]

It’s a really important part of not just Muslim history but American history, yet another side of which we never learned about in school, or for that matter, in Sunday school, which for me was overshadowed by an Arab- and South Asian-centric Islamic experience.

Basim was kind of a social media wizard. He had a LiveJournal where he had already spent a good amount of time meeting the kinds of people he couldn’t find in high school. If you’re curious, LiveJournal was like kind of how Reddit is today, so as soon as we started throwing music up, people started to listen and spread the word.

Basim Usmani
We were reacting to the jingoism that we were seeing and if that didn't exist, maybe we would not have been pushed in that direction, for sure.

Shahjehan Khan
With song titles like “Sharia Law in the USA,” “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” and “Dishoom Bebe,” I think it’s pretty hard to imagine that people weren’t going to notice us.

Taz, who we met at the top of the show, definitely noticed us. She was a contributor to the popular Desi blogging site called Sepia Mutiny when she started following and actively supporting our music.

Taz Ahmed
Yeah, LiveJournal right? There was like live journals and like all that. And like, didn’t we have Friendster? I think I was on Friendster.

Shahjehan Khan
Okay. [Laughter]

Taz Ahmed
I don't know. I can't believe we have to remember like our, where we were in social media land. There's been so many different things.

Shahjehan Khan
I know, it's wild.

Taz Ahmed
But I do remember writing about you guys on Sepia Mutiny. That is like a very clear recollection, was that, like, no one else was writing about you. And I was like, “We have to write about these guys. We have to write about Brown music.” But there was no like American music, which to me was trying to figure out not like how do we exotify ourselves for the white audience, but how do we claim our space here in America as Brown people? And I think that’s what The Kominas really did, was that it was like a claiming of like, musically saying that like, we're not gonna play sitar over drumbeats and play this at like white spaces with, you know, white girls that wear bindi, you know. We’re making Brown music for Brown kids to get wild in mosh pits. And that was like amazing to me. Cause I'm always, I was always the one Brown girl at mosh pits and I was like so like wanting and craving that kind of energy and vibe.

Shahjehan Khan
We hadn’t even finished an album yet, but articles started cropping up about us all over the place, on internet forums, in newspapers like the Boston Globe, and we even found ourselves on MTV.

[Music]

The Kominas felt like the best version of me. It felt like I was finally able to be my true self, a self that had pieces of all parts of me in there, from all periods of my life. I felt seen. It seemed like it was okay to be a flawed person, like a work in progress, whether as a young adult struggling with mental health and drug stuff, or a Muslim, or a Pakistani, or whatever I was. And so did folks like Taz who became fans, even extended family.

Taz Ahmed
What the Kominas were able to do was like be able to like channel that fiery energy and the political like feelings for the Brown kid. And it was like music that we knew that we needed something like that, but the Kominas were able to like, actually like, make it happen.

Shahjehan Khan
And you know what, even though I was still getting high, it felt like I was almost doing it normally for a little while when we first started. It was back to the fun, innocent song-writing-while-high-type stuff that I had fallen in love with when I first started. And I mean come on, what’s music without a little fucking weed?

We started to meet all sorts of like-minded people literally all over the country and even in online spaces all over the world, and it was cool. Although they weren’t necessarily crazy about how much we were being associated with Islam in the media (and weren’t necessarily blasting our music out of their car speakers), even my parents were psyched that their friends started to read about us. It seemed like I was doing something with my life, albeit still not going to my classes much. Within two years of Basim and I reconnecting, a Canadian filmmaker reached out to us about shooting a documentary on the “scene” that we were a part of, what was being labelled Muslim punk or punk Islam. So we spent the summer of 2006 on a giant green school bus purchased off eBay, touring the country, shooting a movie, living a completely surreal life.

[Music]

I couldn’t believe it, it looked like maybe I was actually gonna be a rock star?

Shahjehan Khan
But all this attention we were getting was unexpected, and we weren’t really ready for it.
Given the strides being made in Muslim American pop culture, you might think this is the point where The Kominas sign a big record contract, get ultrafamous, and go on tour with Green Day or something.

Basim Usmani
In terms of having any foresight about how the media like portrayed us as like maybe, “Oh yeah, here’s some Muslims who are critical of Islam. Isn't that cool?” Like, I think that that was something that we didn't want to be like out there. Like, “Here's some Middle Eastern dudes that sound like Slipknot.” It’s just super, super, like, “Here's a guy with a punk jacket, who's Indonesian.” I mean, it’s very much like definitely one of the most reductive things, you know what I mean?

Shahjehan Khan
It’s not that we didn’t write punk songs about Islam, but we also wrote about capitalism, Bollywood-style train robberies, and just straightforward love songs, too.

[Music]

We became this caricature media story, where we were positioned by mostly white journalists as some sort of Muslim punk antidote to the otherwise backwards Muslim world, and that we could only have been created in the so-called West, a kind of Orientalist way of thinking. We also had non-Muslim members of the band, who rightfully felt super alienated and left out of a lot of the conversation. I guess it’s kind of one of those catch-22’s where, like it or not, we were making waves in the post-9/11 era.

Maybe we weren’t like commercially successful or whatever, but we had some dedicated and loyal supporters that gave us—gave me—more than I could have ever asked for. And I kind of expected that sense of accomplishment and fulfillment to just be it, be the end of everything I ever thought I lacked as a young weird kid growing up in suburban Massachusetts. Being in a band is one of the coolest ways you can spend your young adulthood, especially when you are lucky enough to have even a moderate amount of success, and being in The Kominas filled whatever hole I had within me for a little while.

[Music]

But if you’ve been listening to the rest of this series, you’ll know that I wasn’t exactly the most stable person before all of this started happening, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that trouble started creeping in.

Chapter 7: CONCLUSION

Basim Usmani
One thing that was really weird was that we got so much attention when we were 21, 22. I think that, that you had like a lot of personal demons, right? And issues. So like, you were kind of, you were kind of like in and out of the picture, or sporadically like in and out, because you were like having benders or you’re having issues. I mean, like, have you ever watched The O.C.?

[Audio]

Man, you have to watch it. So there's like a character in it named like Seth Cohen. Seth Cohen is kind of like, has a hard time in the show with like, with like some with just like confidence, I think, you know what I mean? And like just depression and anxiety, I guess. And I think that as soon as he finds weed, like one of the, one of the storylines is he finds weed and like the first day he smokes weed, he blows off his college interviews. Like his whole day worth of college interviews, he just blows them all off. And then like, you know, he runs away from his family, you know, like in the middle of it. He just kind of like goes off on like a boat and sails up the Pacific Ocean.

Shahjehan Khan
I haven’t watched the OC yet (sorry Basim, I swear I will), but this certainly sounds like me at that time. This disappearing stuff is something I used to do all the time. Like I would just turn off my phone, ask my folks not to tell people if I was home, and literally just sit in my room alone in like a dark, mental prison that it seemed I had created where I just wouldn’t want to see anyone or talk about anything. It’s hard to describe to someone that hasn’t been through that kind of depression; you just physically can’t do anything.

Basim Usmani
Like I think that there is like a substance issue there, but I think at, deep down there's like a sense of like alienation and anxiety, you know what I mean? That was like deeply driving, like the moments where like you would drop the ball or go missing or disappear, you know, like I think that that was like a part of it. And I thought that you were kind of like an island at that time, you know?

Shahjehan Khan
He’s totally right here, and that’s why he still knows me a lot better than most people on this planet. Although we wrote a lot of songs while getting high, the getting high part ultimately became more important. As things were getting more and more exciting and serious for us, I was withdrawing and becoming pretty unreliable. All the momentum we had built, it seemed, was being derailed. So Basim decided he was gonna move to Lahore, Pakistan (where both of our families are from) and pursue his other passion, journalism.

[Music]

By late 2007, although I was 25, I felt just as fucked as I did when I was 17. I was doing more serious drugs, and wondering if the whole Kominas thing was just a distraction from the piece of shit I always knew myself to be. I was back to wandering the UMASS Lowell campus in a daze, except this time, no one really knew that I wasn’t even a student. I just showed up to the same parties, and stayed up after everyone else passed out, drinking their leftover beers, smoking their leftover joints, and waiting for something outside of me to fix me.

[Music]

By the end of that year though, Basim sent me an email where he basically told me that he missed having me around, and maybe I’d like to join him in Lahore? In Pakistan? He had a sweet apartment where the two of us could live on our own, away from our families. He could even get me a job at the newspaper he was working at, and most importantly, there was [sic] a bunch of people that he’d been showing our music to that really wanted to meet me.

Basim Usmani
And I was like, “Dude, get your guitar, get on a plane, and just fucking come to Pakistan.”

Shahjehan Khan
So that’s what I did.

[Music]

Next time, on King of the World:
God knows how many millions the NYPD has wasted on spying on everyday Muslim life. It’s maddening.

[Theme]

Thanks for listening to today’s episode. We’d love to know what you think and hear about your experiences post-9/11. We’re using a tool called PodInbox, which allows us to hear directly from you. Visit podinbox.com/kingoftheworld to send us an audio message directly, some of which we’ll play on future episodes. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

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 Taz Ahmed, Dominic Rains, and Basim Usmani. We’ll have links in the show notes to learn more about each of them. Thanks again for listening. I’m Shahjehan Khan.

[Commercial]