Why We Need To *Keep* Talking About Hasan Minhaj

Mainstream Islamophobia and the Stakes of Imprecision

At the time of my beginning to draft this, the Gaza Strip had no internet. For two days, we were cut off from reports from the ground. Imagine what those who would carpet bomb an entire people in broad daylight would wait to do under cover of darkness. I kept thinking about Operation Searchlight, the stories of what happened where no one could see. How I exist because my parents survived. I keep thinking about Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Palestinian-American six-year-old stabbed to death in his Chicago home by his own landlord. What it must be like for his thirty-two-year-old mother. How Wadea is now a symbolic descendant of Alan Kurdi, the new poster child for the consequences of global political silence, far from being the only Palestinian child murdered in the past twenty-three days.

Wadea Al-Fayoume, Image via CNN

Palestinians are calling for us to keep posting, protesting, boycotting, calling Congress, and otherwise sustaining our attention to atrocity. We must show that this time, we won’t take our boots off the colonizers’ neck. The pitch of outrage, however, is hard to maintain. The grief is staggering. (My attempts to send this out on Sunday as planned kept ending in enraged, impotent tears.) When we are able to lean into sustaining practices, the call is to implement a consistent drumbeat of dissent, too loud and too deep in its vibrations to ignore. Though we can keep this up as individuals and groups on social media, at protests, fundraisers, and other gatherings, we need thought leaders with large platforms to keep us engaged and thinking in nuanced and complex ways as the situation evolves. Heavy with foreboding, I need wise, nuanced, and precise voices I can trust. People who understand my cultural and faith perspectives, who don’t struggle to see Palestinians as human beings, and who know personally the inherited violences of British colonial remapping.

So, we need to keep talking about Hasan Minhaj.

I believe that political comedians have crucial power and that their voices are extremely necessary in the collective effort to sway global public opinion enough to make the siege on Gaza politically disadvantageous and economically risky. (Sadly, it’s clear that moral weight has little effect. I have been grieving the weight of what that means about the human soul for days now. I remain without words.) Normally, Hasan Minhaj would be all over this, and likely doing incredible work disentangling historical fact from fallacy, propaganda from fact, and ethical responsibility from economic avarice. Instead, the most prominent mainstream Muslim-American political voice in the United States is untangling fact from fiction in his own work because of a New Yorker article that exposed a particular messiness that may have dented his career for a long time to come.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of Hasan Minhaj as a Muslim American public intellectual on the left and the profound harm done by his irresponsible negotiation of fact vs. embellishment. Last week, Minhaj released a 20-minute video rebuttal which many asked me to assess.

In my original take, the problems I had with Minhaj’s work had to do with the consequences of playing with audience faith and how that faith is built. In short, in order to buy into a comedian’s shtick, we need to have a baseline idea of how they are playing with information for effect, and it’s a comedian’s responsibility to teach us, like any creative work, how to read them. Ultimately, my takeaway on the majority of the accusations against Minhaj is the following: Minhaj did a poor job of structuring his storytelling to properly help us distinguish between the persona of his comedic storytelling and his political storytelling. He thought it was clear. It wasn’t. Slate’s Nadira Goffe breaks down the primary accusations and the responses to them, the details of which are a bit less my concern than what this murky stand-off means in the greater landscape of mainstream Muslim-American political critique. (I’m also very interested in hearing more about whether The Patriot Act was misogynistic in their treatment of women fact-checkers and writers, but since the issue was settled out of court and likely bandaged in a billion NDAs, I doubt we’ll hear more.)

It seems like The New Yorker may have done some irresponsible fabricating, splicing, and embellishing of their own, relying on the blind faith its readership has in the magazine’s editorial rigor. Minhaj said himself that it’s no small affair to fake racist experience and that if he had read that article as someone else, he would assume that its subject is a “psycho.” In my take, I accused him of being “gollum-like” and manically obsessed with clout and self-aggrandizement myself. Figures like Hasan Minhaj hold a special place in the quotidian practices that keep our attention on the structures and injustices we must disrupt and replace if we wish to live in what adrienne marie brown calls “right relationship” with our world and each other. While we do whatever we have to do to survive under late capitalism, we trust them to gather the stories they believe we need to hear and show us that we have some power to tilt the quantum content of the day toward greater justice and equity. Minhaj is burdened by the self-appointed responsibility of being a guiding light, which is too great a responsibility to be messy or lazy with, and he was both, though perhaps not to the same extent as Clare Malone would have us believe. What would she have us believe, however, and why?

In my post, I specified that I was most interested in looking as Hasan Minhaj as a figure and a case study for Muslim Americans, as a Muslim American. His irresponsibility in differentiating one thing from the other and being accused of being a liar allows for the gas-lighting of Muslims everywhere as to the severity of the Islamophobia and racism they experience and to become more conservative in their own expression if Minhaj can come under such sharp attack. I was so busy being a shocked auntie and giving him a good scolding in writing that I didn’t think about what made The New Yorker see this particular issue as exigent, partly because Malone never explained it. Muslim America is not Clare Malone’s primary audience or point of view. What’s in this piece for The New Yorker? The only part of the article I could find that gestures toward a larger point beyond Hasan Minhaj the person, is here:

Comedians might not be comfortable calling themselves anything but comedians, but a number of them, Minhaj included, have inserted themselves pointedly into political conversation. They’ve become the oddball public intellectuals of our time, and, in informing the public, they assume a certain status as moral arbiters. When fibs are told to prove a social point rather than to elicit an easy laugh, does their moral weight change? [emphasis mine]

The average reader of The New Yorker is mostly likely middle class, well-educated, and white. Think about the stakes of declaring to this audience that the beloved Muslim American millennial public intellectual—the one who supports Black Lives Matter, critiques capitalism, and demands that the United States hold itself accountable for its capitalist rapaciousness—can’t be taken seriously. Hasan asked in his video rebuttal why Malone didn’t gather data on the ratio between fact and embellishment in comparable stand-up comedy to assess a larger question about genre and moral weight. What if Malone had teamed up with a specialist in comedy and done a deep dive into the routines of Hasan Minhaj, Hannah Gadsby, Trevor Noah, Chris Rock, John Leguizamo, and Tig Notaro to look at the implications of fact vs. embellishment in stand-up comedy in the communication of “emotional truth”? Wouldn’t we be having a different conversation? But we’re not. We’re having a conversation about how the most prominent mainstream Muslim-American voice who happens to dare to lean hard-left is a liar, a hypocrite, an overly-dramatic attention whore who will stop at nothing to aggrandize himself. I can see how, in someone’s subconscious, it logically follows that his people, the ones we’re giving our tax dollars to bomb out of existence, like the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, are all liars whose pain is grossly overstated. Biden claimed last week that he had “no confidence” in the numbers of casualties and deaths provided by Gaza’s Health Ministry, though the same Ministry’s data has been trusted by the U.S. State Dept., the United Nations, and several other governments in the past. Palestinian death, he implied in the same speech, is “the cost of waging war.” Malone played into very old traditions of discrediting dissenting Muslim voices, gas-lighting a brown man for saying his experiences had something to do with racism, and accusing him instead of being an angry incel projecting his insecurities onto an innocent white lady whom he would not stop punishing for his rejection. If the story of how American Orientalism discredits Arabs and Muslims as dramatic, stupid, rapacious, and greedy is new to you or has not been exposed to you explicitly, consider this hour-long documentary, Reel Bad Arabs, which I assign to students when they first read Edward Said:

I wrote about the soul-crushing pressure of upward mobility imposed on so many South Asian diasporans; the voice that says: We do have to work twice as hard to get half the credit. When we get too much credit, we must work ten times harder to ensure they won’t take it from us by coming for our character. No mistakes, no weaknesses, no character flaws that result in poor work product. The consequences are never just about you. Hasan Minhaj did shoddy work by not creating separate enough characters across comedic and political storytelling. The empire rebuked Hasan with a feather in the form of Clare Malone and damn near destroyed his career.

Hasan Minhaj’s mistakes are not like other comedians’ mistakes, sadly. He can’t have serious formal issues in his delivery without being used as a psychological pawn in a game of dehumanizing his whole community. That’s not his fault, but it is his lot, and I feel for him. He’s representative of us (South Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, brown immigrant folk) that way, too, and the problems that we navigate in our workplaces, board rooms, Zoom rooms, etc. We should have the right to fuck up, to be a little mediocre sometimes, but we don’t and are gaslit and harshly criticized for our ingratitude when we screw up anyway. I’m enraged that no matter how we slice it, brother’s gotta tighten it up because the stakes are different for him, for us, and that’s especially true right now. I need Hasan Minhaj’s voice, and I need it now. I need him to get off his skinny butt and jump around on his fluorescent squares, bombard me with infographics, and model ways to absolutely refuse to shut the fuck up even if he gets it wrong sometimes, even if he gets kicked for it. I need him to keep doing it even as it hurts, as the battles get harder and weirder, and the white ladies who want him to shut up come out in droves. I need him to go back to being a moral arbiter and simply be better at it. I trust that this setback will make him more thoughtful, precise, and rigorous going forward. Perhaps The New Yorker did him a favor by giving him the jolt he needed to be sharper, funnier, and more interesting as a comedian. He needed the lesson in being more discerning, and, apparently, the lesson in being harder to tear down. A horrible experience I’m sure, but child’s play compared to the bigger issues in the world now. He will recover, and he must.

He needs to be funnier, stop going for low-hanging fruit about how “chai tea” is redundant, and instead go after the insidious ubiquity of the companies that benefit from the mass murder of stateless Palestinian civilians. I need him to go after The New Yorker and its history of pandering to the fears of a black and brown planet. It’s true, South Asian diasporans and Muslims should get to be bad at things like white people get to be bad at things, and get to fuck up here and there as we go along without devastating consequences—but we don’t. Perhaps he will help us break that pattern. I hope that for him, and I’m rooting for him, but for now, I’m just angry and exhausted that The New Yorker wasted everyone’s time, especially Hasan Minhaj’s, whose credibility was discounted just in time for a global resurgence in Islamophobia, when we need him and his power the most. Excellent work, Clare Malone and The New Yorker. You get this week’s colonizer gold star.