Meet a Muslim Community Organizer Challenging Islamophobia

Abdelhamid’s father hanging up a poster in NY.

Rana Abdelhamid was only nine years old when she watched her congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), argue for the invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. On the House floor, the representative stood dressed in a blue burqa, arguing that “the restrictions on women's freedoms in Afghanistan are unfathomable to most Americans.”

Twenty years later, Abdelhamid, a community organizer, is challenging Maloney for her seat in New York’s 12th Congressional District. Amid the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last month, Abdelhamid shared the clip of Maloney’s speech in the burqa, tweeting, “For the rest of my life, I knew that as a Muslim woman my identity would be weaponized to justify American wars.” Maloney has since defended her actions.

AJ+ senior producer Raji Ramanathan interviewed Abdelhamid about why she’s running for Congress, how speeches like Maloney’s led to the surveillance of her community and the accountability she’s seeking for two decades of violence and Islamophobia against Muslim New Yorkers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to run for Congress?

Over the past over a decade now, I have been organizing in my neighborhood, in a community that's predominantly made up of North African working-class immigrants, that is Muslim-majority. … I came to organizing within a post-9/11 context, after I saw my own community being surveilled by the police. Stop and frisk was rampant. A lot of people who are undocumented or even green card holders were deported under this guise of the global “war on terror.” And I saw my own representative, Carolyn Maloney, be someone who championed and pushed forward some of those policies.

Do you think that your identity and your childhood experience have been shaped by Islamophobia and unfolded after 9/11?

I kind of laughed at that question because sometimes I do think about that. Like, what would my life have been? 9/11 in itself changed my life because I'm a New Yorker. I love this city and anything that happens to this city is devastating for me and my family, my community. But as a Muslim New Yorker, 9/11 was devastating because it criminalized my neighborhood, and it forced me to grow up so quickly, disrupted my childhood completely. It forced me to internalize deep levels of shame around my identity.

Overnight my identity, spiritual practice and religious identity were politicized. We were demonized overnight, and it's traumatizing, it's hurtful and it's really hard.

What were you feeling when you saw Maloney on the congressional floor?

Obviously as a child, I didn't understand the extent of that. … My mom was a hijab-wearing Muslim woman. ... [Seeing her] looking really horrified and disgusted at the rhetoric that was being used. And seeing Maloney, wearing something that is sacred … as a part of our religion and cultural practice, and using it to justify war and violence. I remember and understand now how that really created a lot of harm to my own community, especially as a hijab-wearing Muslim woman.

What should have happened in the aftermath of Maloney doing that on the congressional floor?

It is so frustrating that we're 20 years out and there still isn’t a real reckoning with the amount of harm, and the lack of accountability [on the part of] political leaders.

So as these people both weaponized and leveraged the narratives of Afghan women and their experiences with violence to justify more violence and to justify war, where is the reaction now that also holds America accountable, and demands that the United States take in Afghan women refugees? Take in Afghan people as refugees within the context of the current political climate and this humanitarian crisis?

For the U.S. to have had such a large impact in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, what do you hope happens now as refugees start coming in?

The United States over the past 20 years has taken in less Afghan refugees than Canada has committed to taking in over the past week. We have such a long way to go, and we've done this before. After the Vietnamese war, we were able to take in over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees and we were able to expedite the processing, their visas, and integrate these communities into the United States. And right now we have that obligation.

What does it feel like now to actually run against Maloney?

Online someone was commenting on the image [of Maloney in the hijab] even before it went viral, because a lot of people who live in this district remember what she did. Someone wrote this feels like poetic justice. And I feel like this feels like poetic justice.

Watch the video of Ramanathan’s interview with Abdelhamid here.