Nuanced stories on faith from 'Me & My Muslim Friends'
Welcome to the 4th edition of North Carolina Religion Roundup: stories on the Muslim American experience, abortion theologies and more.
Happy Sunday! Thanks for reading the 4th edition of North Carolina Religion Roundup, a newsletter meant to highlight major religion news and trends in the Triangle and greater N.C. My name is Hannah. I’m an education and local government reporter at The Chatham News + Record in Chatham, N.C. and a M.Div. student at Duke Divinity School. (If you’re interested, you can read more about the newsletter and why I was inspired to start it here.)
This week, I’m excited to include the first Q&A of the newsletter. I sat down (virtually) with Yasmin Bendaas to discuss the podcast she created and hosts, “Me & My Muslim Friends.” We talked about her vision for the podcast, the kinds of stories it seeks to tell and how such stories aren’t always told, or told well, by broader news media. I hope you’ll read our interview and then check out some of the podcast’s excellent episodes — ranging from (most recently) politics with guests Nida Allam and Lela Ali, to Latina converts and Black Muslims and racism.
Thanks for following along. Please reach out with any thoughts or feedback!
This week:
In Story to Follow, I include my conversation with Yasmin about “Me and My Muslim Friends.”
In Deep Dive, I briefly examine religion and abortion policy in light of the Supreme Court’s arguments in the Mississippi abortion case last week.
And In a Nutshell, I include a list of N.C. religion stories to keep an eye on.
Story to Follow: “Me & My Muslim Friends” and nuanced stories on Muslim Americans
Yasmin Bendaas grew up in Winston-Salem in an Iranian-Algerian household, and is the host and creator of “Me & My Muslim Friends.” She studied anthropology at Wake Forest University and science and medical journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. Yasmin originally started “Me & My Muslim Friends” as a graduate project at UNC. Now on its second season, the podcast is produced in partnership with North Carolina Public Radio by a 13-member team. In addition to her work on the podcast, Yasmin works at ICON as a proposal writer for global clinical trials. You can follow her @yasminbendaas.
Our conversation below is edited lightly for length and clarity.
What inspired you to start this project, and what was the process of starting it like to where it's at now?
In grad school, we were required to take a seminar and the one that I ended up in was gender violence. We had to do projects for that class — I decided to interview Muslim women who wore hijab. I had the assumption they would experience gendered violence, because they would be visibly Muslim compared to Muslim men who are often not visibly Muslim, or not in the same way unless they're wearing one of the religious style hats or religious clothing, or maybe just have a beard. There's all sorts of Muslims who look all sorts of ways, so there's not like a typical look. But if a woman wears hijab it's a pretty identifying marker. So I did like a series of interviews with women about that — not just their experience with gender and Islamophobia, but also just they felt about representations in the media.
When the project was done, there used to be a program on WUNC called “The State of Things” and I pitched to them and they they ran it and interviewed me and ran a few clips from that. That's kind of when it clicked for me that there's a broader interest in these topics, because we weren't discussing them in these ways and I realized I hadn't actually heard Muslim woman voices like that — like just on the radio, their voices. A lot of times when we've covered Muslim women or Muslims in general, it unfortunately, it was around an issue of terrorism or a conflict in a country, or the U.S. engaged in war with a majority-Muslim country. And a lot of times the images that you would see were either like angry Arabesque men, or women who were wearing all black, and maybe a niqab where you can even see most of their face. It's just extremely unrepresentative of the Muslim community, and you rarely actually get to hear them speak. I didn't even realize that until I had done that project in journalism school. I realized I hadn’t really heard this, and I think we should hear more of it.
The podcast covers a wide range of topics, from mental health to politics and racism. How do you approach brainstorming ideas and what is your goal in covering so many issues?
I have a notebook where I jot down a lot of ideas, and for whatever reason I get seasons at once, where it's five to six episode ideas that I feel like really go together. This season we went with social justice. When we originally pitched this season way earlier in this year, it was following the heels of the summer of 2020, which was a big social justice summer. Also, I don't think many people realize how much social justice is a really big part of our faith. Even when I pitched, they were like, “Why are you doing social justice? How does it tie into it?” If I said that to a Muslim person, it would be an immediate understanding. But because there's not a big understanding of our faith, it wasn’t
We don't talk about our faith like that on the podcast. It's tangential and it comes in naturally. We're really more focused on experiences of identity and how other people see us and how we navigate that — that's probably why you're seeing such a diversity of topics. In the first season, I was really big on trying to showcase Latina converts or Black Muslims. Racism is an issue within our community, but also I don't feel like Black Muslims are understood for as big of a population as they are. A lot of people just have a stereotypical understanding of what a Muslim looks like, and they don't think of Black Muslims, even though it's a big historical population in the U.S. And people also don’t think of Latina converts and how diverse our community actually is. So the ideas really come from, in my head, I'm trying to show the diversity in our community — not only in terms of what we look like and how we practice, but also that we're not as homogenous as we've been brushed with.
Do you have a favorite episode? What is it?
That's really hard! I like all of them, I wouldn't put an episode I didn't like, I will say that.
I really liked the MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) one that we just did. A lot of our episodes tend to be more serious and that one wasn't. I'm not always a really serious person, and so I really liked that my friends made that one funny. I tend to also have favorite like parts of episodes, like even when I was listening back to “The Muslim Women in Politics” [featuring Durham Commissioner Nida Allam, the first Muslim woman elected to office in North Carolina who recently announced her bid for Congress, and Lela Ali, policy and program director at Muslim Women For]. There's just certain lines, when I hear Nida or Lela say it, I'm like, wow, I hope people pay attention to that because it's a Muslim woman really standing in who she is. That's probably the most fulfilling part is when I can get the soundbite where I'm like, this is the point of the show.
What has the reception to the podcast been, from Muslims and non-Muslims?
I've loved the feedback that I've gotten, because a lot of times I've heard from Muslims that this isn't like a typical Muslim podcast and I think that's really true. There are a lot of like faith-based podcasts, but again, we touch on it tangentially —where obviously, you're bringing your faith to the table, but we're not talking about how you pray or having a Quran study. Those things are great, and they have a place, but our podcast focus is a little different.
Our primary audience before WUNC, I think NPR has made our audience a little bit older, but when we were releasing independently, it was 18 to 24 really heavily. So college was our base, and I think that's a time when people are really trying to figure out who they are and where they stand. And I would receive comments like, “If I had if I had Muslim friends that I felt like were like this, I would have been closer to my Muslim community when I was in college.” Everyone's trying to figure themselves out, even within the religion, and I think that it was nice for me to hear that even through a podcast, people became more connected to their faith, even though we're not directly talking about it.
From non-Muslims, even though it's not our primary audience, our slogan is, “Whether or not you have a Muslim friend, you'll find one here.” The idea for that was originally — there are all these misconceptions about us because no one had just one Muslim friend. Because if you had a Muslim friend you would know. If you had a Muslim friend, you would understand our community is not what it has been stereotyped as. A lot of times, all I get from interfaith is I learned a lot, and other minorities can sometimes relate to some of the things we talked about or navigating identity. It's always interesting to me what people take from it, and I love getting comments and emails. I wish more people did it.
One of my goals in creating N.C. Religion Roundup is to bring attention to religious news across the state that I feel often goes underreported or else covered without much context. I can imagine you feel that even more starkly particularly with the coverage of Muslim Americans in N.C. How do you see North Carolina's Muslim communities shaping the state? What do you wish received wider attention or else was covered in a different way?
Yeah, I mean, I see this stuff all the time and I like to take screenshots of it on my phone. Even recently, when there was the pull out of Afghanistan, and how some of that was covered, the lead photograph would still be like, the angry men with weapons. I was like, there are other lead photos you could have picked. I don't know how to fix that. I'm trying to do it now through radio just so people can actually hear us, and again, I'm not the only one doing this, there are so many Muslim podcasts. Anisa (Khalifa) is a new hire at WUNC, she's on a production team and has her own podcast called, “Muslim in Plain Sight.” I'm not trying to like build a place just for my voice, I'm trying to break through a little bit so that people can hear all of these other voices.
In terms of like North Carolina, when I think of the population of Muslims here, we’re really highly educated. You are more likely to meet a Muslim here who is your doctor who is trying to help you than to hurt you. And I think that's really true. I don't necessarily see Muslims covered. I see coverage in two ways — kind of like the Afghanistan situation where it's like people who are abroad in not great places to live where we have to go in and save them, or the other way, which is extremely tokenized and like, “Look, they're normal.” When I did the 911 episodes, one of the guests shared with me that their family had been interviewed for the local newspaper, but they basically came to their house and took pictures of their family around the dinner table, like, “This is a typical Muslim family sitting down for dinner.”
There's not a good middle ground that feels authentic. That's what I've been trying to do with the podcast is really just pulling in Muslim voices, because I know when it's authentic — because I am Muslim, and I know what my friends are talking about, I know what we do. People are trying but it's not authentic enough. There's not enough context. I think it's because there's so many misunderstandings of the faith, people are still reducing as to a sound bite or a photo, and not really taking time to get to know the Muslim community. And there's a lot of people like Lela and Nida who I interviewed on the most recent episode who are doing really groundbreaking work in North Carolina politically, there are a lot of Islamic charity groups. Those stories are not normal news stories that we hear. Having gone through journalism school and worked in a newsroom, I can understand the level of there's just not a religion reporter sometimes. Like it's a person's like side beat, and it shows. Even from the newsroom structure, I understand why that happens.
What have you learned over the course of making and hosting this podcast?
I didn't do a radio track in journalism school. My advisor had a heavy broadcast journalism background so I did like Carolina Week and TV stuff, but TV scripts are very different. And I've just really learned a ton about podcasting.
What's next?
We've only done like two full episodes of WUNC right now, and our listenership has gone up significantly since we started tracking. So I'm really interested in who those listeners are and how they're going to engage with it. I'm just really interested in who else is going to find meaning in these stories, because that's really the point of them. I hope that people can connect with them in some way, you know, connect their identity, or the identity of one of their friends or just their curiosity with it. I’m working with WUNC on maybe doing some live events, whether it's at local universities where we can share the podcast and have more local community discussions around them — I'm really excited for that.
And I’m really, genuinely curious what people are getting out of it. It comes from a very authentic place, and a lot of work outside of my job, so I want it to be good, and I want people to get something out of it. I hope that it kind of like humanizes us a little bit. Because growing up, obviously, post-911, we were very silenced in many ways, whether that was through not being covered in the news very well to like, any media you consumed. I think that really harms a community when they see themselves depicted in that way for so long, especially when you're young and you see so many misconceptions about you in very prominent places very regularly. I just hope that the podcast is a place that both challenges that and is a space for honest and open discussions about who we are and how we live out our faith.
Deep Dive: ‘Dueling Theologies’ on Abortion
Due to the lengthy Q&A above, this section will be a bit shorter than usual. I encourage checking out the included links for more context on this subject.
During last week’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, religious supporters and opponents of abortion rights alike demonstrated outside the building. The highly anticipated case could have drastic impacts on national abortion policy, though some states already do have restrictive abortion policies in place.
Religion News Service reporter Jack Jenkins covered the “dueling theologies” present that morning. Religion is often used as a reason to oppose abortion, particularly from evangelicals, but not all religious people are against abortions or for policies that restrict abortion.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor made this distinction last Wednesday, speaking to a lawyer during oral arguments over the Mississippi abortion case: “How is your interest anything but a religious view? The issue of when life begins has been hotly debated by philosophers since the beginning of time — it’s still debated in religions,” she said. “So when you say this is the only right that takes away a life, that’s a religious view, isn’t it?”
Here’s Jenkin’s dispatch from Wednesday, which reports that "demonstrations began earlier that morning at Washington’s Lutheran Church of the Reformation, where the National Council of Jewish Women, Catholics for Choice and other religious groups hosted an interfaith service featuring speeches from faith leaders and lawmakers in support of abortion rights.” Also from that report:
“They represent a spectrum of support for abortion that varies per faith tradition. A 2014 Pew Research study found Jewish Americans to be among the most supportive, with 83% saying they believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Another Pew survey, conducted this year, also reported smaller majorities of Black Protestants (64%), white nonevangelical Protestants (63%) and Catholics (55%) saying the same.
The reverse was true among white evangelicals, however, with 77% saying abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. And while Catholic lay people may slightly favor abortion rights, the church itself is still adamantly against it — including many U.S. bishops, who have recently been embroiled in a debate over whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be denied the Eucharist.”
Here’s a quick snapshot of where a few North Carolina religious leaders/scholars and groups stand on the issue:
Rabbi Eric Solomon, a congregational rabbi in Raleigh, for The News & Observer last May: “NC bills would intrude on personal choices about about health and abortion”
Durham Mennonite Pastor Melissa Florer-Bixler for Sojourners: “As a Pastor, I Can’t Define Life’s Edges. Neither Can Lawmakers”
Karen Swallow Prior, a research professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, in support of abortion laws in The New York Times in September
From WRAL in October: “Hundreds march for women's reproductive rights in downtown Raleigh” including Muslim Women For among other advocates for abortion access
Rev. William J. Barber II, pastor from Goldsboro N.C, on the “immoral hypocrisy” of Alabama legislatures pushing abortion ban in 2019
The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Copeland, executive director of the North Carolina Council of Churches, in favor of abortion rights in a 2020 NC Policy Watch column
In a Nutshell:
Ahead of the last day of Hanukkah from the N&O: Hanukkah starts early this year. Find local celebrations and info on traditions
From NC Health News: Religious burial rituals slowly resuming after shift forced by pandemic
WRAL Fact check: Are atheists 'prohibited from holding office' in North Carolina and 7 other states? (Half True, the post says)
Worshipers found religious homes near and far thanks to virtual services from WUNC
WSJ’s “Churches Changed During the Pandemic and Many Aren’t Going Back,” featuring The Summit Church
Charlotte man claims years of sex abuse by priest in lawsuit by the Charlotte Observer (Subscriber exclusive, but if you google the headline, other paper’s have posted without a paywall)
That's it for this week's edition of North Carolina Religion Roundup. Thanks for reading. Until next time. And in the meantime, I gladly welcome any tips, feedback or news you think I haven’t included but should in future editions. — Hannah
Post photo credit: Me & Muslim Friends