Moustafa Bayoumi to speak on “Exiled from Democracy”

Award-winning author, journalist and professor Moustafa Bayoumi will speak at Mount Holyoke College on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024, at 7 pm ET at the Gamble Auditorium, on “Exiled from Democracy? Arabs, Muslims and the 2024 U.S. Election.”

Bayoumi is the author of the critically acclaimed “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America,” which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. He also authored “This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror,” which was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by The Progressive magazine and awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. He is also the co-editor, with Andrew Rubin, of “The Selected Works of Edward Said: 1996-2006.” The talk is sponsored by the Weissman Center for Leadership.

Before his talk on campus, Bayoumi spoke with Mount Holyoke.

The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you share a preview of what you’re going to discuss?

What’s become interesting is that maybe not just Arabs and Muslims will be potentially exiled from democracy post-election. A lot of the discourse around the election and the reasons why the Democratic Party lost has revolved around a multitude of issues. But one of those issues is that Arabs and Muslims didn’t come out to vote for Harris, and some of them, in fact, voted for Trump.

Instead of seeing that as a failure of Arabs and Muslims, I see that as a failure of the Democratic Party. [It] did not come and represent its constituents; it did not come and forcefully articulate a change in American foreign policy, in particular, with something that many of the world’s leading experts are now characterizing as genocide. And, of course, I’m talking about Israel’s war in Gaza. I think that that actually demotivated a lot of people to vote for the Democratic Party, and I’m not the only person to think so — there are plenty of others.

Instead, the Democratic Party explicitly sidelined Arab and Muslim communities around the country in really troubling ways, even at the Democratic National Convention. That’s perhaps the most well-known example. [There was a] request to have a Palestinian American be on stage to endorse Kamala Harris, and that request was denied.

I think it’s also very, very important to understand that the war in Gaza is troubling for many voters — not just Arab and Muslim voters. If you look at the polling data, it’s very troubling for a lot of young voters. It’s very troubling for a lot of African American voters. It’s very troubling for a lot of Jewish voters, and it’s very troubling for a lot of people who want to vote [with] their conscience. And, actually, the margins, by which Trump won were quite slim.

Of course, Monday-morning quarterbacking is easy, but I think if the Democratic Party had articulated a moral change in their policy, then we would not be in the situation we are in now. In fact, I think that that illustrates a kind of exiling from democracy, for Arab Muslim voters in particular.

Turning to your other writing for a second, you wrote “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America,” and it’s been reissued in an anniversary edition with a new afterword. Can you talk a little bit about what has changed and what has stayed the same?

That book was [originally] published in 2008, in fact. It was really a book about the Bush administration in a lot of ways: the early years of the War on Terror and the ways in which post-9/11 life in New York City was having a great impact on the lives of young Arab Americans in Brooklyn in particular. I wrote that book presuming, a bit naively, that I would be writing a book about current affairs for maybe six months or something, and then it would become shelved in the history section of bookstores.

It hasn’t, really. Each successive administration has in many ways made life equal or sometimes worse for Arab Americans, particularly young Arab Americans, and for Muslim Americans as well. During the Obama administration, we had this whole thing called “countering violent extremism.” Spies and informants still continue to infiltrate themselves into these communities, and that is very corrosive to community life. And then with the Trump administration, we had the whole Muslim ban. In the beginning of the Biden years, actually, things did seem to be getting a little bit better. But Biden seemed to enter the stage from stage left, and he’s exiting on stage right.

We’re now seeing that there are high levels of Islamophobia and antisemitism in the country, and that’s a grave threat to many people who are of Arab and Muslim backgrounds. [“How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?”] is a book that unfortunately still remains relevant, and I am longing for the day when that book is just something that doesn’t matter anymore.