Abduallah Bin Hamid Ali's Lord of the Flies Dawa Won't Work

Islamic scholar does extremely American politics

Why are Muslims so completely without political influence in the United States? And if they ever did gain that influence, what should they do with it? One person who has written about how Muslims should do politics is Dr. Abdullah Bin Hamid Ali, an Associate Professor at Zaytuna College teaching Islamic law, aqidah and ethics. He is also the founder and face of the Lamppost Education Initiative. Over the last several years, Ali has been active as a politically conservative voice in the Muslim community.

This, however, is not a newsletter about political ideas. At its best, this newsletter is about understanding what excellence (iḥsān) means for Muslim nonprofits and leaders. So, while I discuss politics, law, and history here, I do this only in service of addressing a completely different problem:

How is it that in the US Muslim community, and in the San Francisco Bay Area in particular, someone like Ali can be regarded as a serious scholar or teacher, and have a position at an institution like Zaytuna College?

Muslims as a Fifth Column and Menace

The principal problem for Muslims in the United States, according to Ali, is that Muslims in the United States are perceived as a “menace” and “fifth column.” He claims this is a common problem for people who have “family roots in the Muslim world” and see themselves as “visitors in a foreign land.”

How, then, should Muslims demonstrate that they are ‘real’ Americans without bridged identities linked to other places on the world map? Exit WhatsApp groups with their cousins in Egypt? Burn their books of Iqbal poetry? Ali does not say. However based on evidence proffered by Ali, such identities (or even as I explain below pledged loyalty to a foreign nation) don’t seem to disqualify anyone from being considered a true American, so long as they are Trump supporters. For Ali, nationalism is vital (which I will get to) but being a real American is mostly about Trump fandom.

For example, the Muslims that Ali recognizes as success stories are those that Trump has honored with appointments. These “good Muslims” include people like Mayor Amer Ghalib, Bill Bazzi, and TV doctor Mehmet Oz. Ghalib and Bazzi are immigrants (Yemeni and Lebanese), and Oz is a dual US-Turkish citizen who completed mandatory service for the Turkish military. These otherwise problematic transnational backgrounds are cured by fealty to Trump.

It seems far easier to be authentically American by MAGA standards than by the model previously advanced by Democrats. Here, your son doesn’t need to die fighting on behalf of the US military. You only need to appreciate the work of the Department of Government Efficiency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Indeed, for Ali, the apparent malady of unAmerican sentiments in the Muslim community extends not only to first and second generation “immigrants” (an ailment easily cured by supporting Trump), but also to the majority of Black Americans who he claims “continue to uncritically support the Democrat party.” Ali does not identify any Black Americans whom Trump regards as acceptable Muslims.

A major problem though for Muslims supporting Trump (among others) is that the President has expressed nothing but contempt for Palestine and Palestinians.

What About Palestine?

None of you (truly) believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.

-Hadith of Muhammad ﷺ

For Ali, Islamic brotherhood appears to have a hard limit. It seems to come secondary to the imperatives of nationalism. Part of Ali’s nationalism is that you cannot care much about people overseas.

Ali’s “support” for Palestine is limited and conditional:

Do I support the Palestinians? Yes, I do. I support all people who prefer life over death. In all civil conflicts there are not only two sides. It is not only the rebels, or the regime involved. There is also the majority who typically flee from the violence attempting to salvage what they can even if it means relocating until the conflict has ended. I have always supported this majority.

Ali never explains how he has supported this majority. Unfortunately those who do not follow evacuation orders, because they are infirm, unable, or unwilling to follow their occupier’s orders, do not appear to have Ali’s moral approval: a circumstance they may well live or die with.

For Ali, Muslims in the US face a binary choice. He writes, “Is our mission merely to liberate Palestine? Or is it to embody and deliver God’s message to humanity?” Here, embodying God’s message to humanity is limited by a Lord of the Flies moral framework, in which Americans form one tribe and non-Americans form another, and violence against the outgroup becomes justified in service of the in-group’s interests. Ali clarifies, “My family is more important than yours. My children are more important than yours. So why should the security of yourhomeland (sic) be more important than mine?”

What Ali is describing is raw ethical egoism. The notion here is that it’s better that you get mugged than me, better your family in some other country be bombed than mine. Given that he is an Islamic scholar, one wonders if Ali has some sort of source from the Islamic corpus that explains to us why his values appear so shockingly degenerate. He claims to.

Patriotism is Prophetic

To bolster his nationalist rant, Ali cites a hadith about Makkah:

By Allah! I know that you are the best of Allah’s earth and the most beloved of Allah’s earth to Allah. And had it not been for the fact that I have been cast out from you, I would not have left you.

-Hadith of Muhammad ﷺ

While Ali is purportedly a scholar of Islam, this hadith does not support the idea that patriotism is prophetic. There is, however, ample evidence that Islam is not a religion of ethical egoism. For example, Muhammad ﷺ was from Makkah and loved the city, but he also clearly loved Madinah and had great affection for places like Yemen and Greater Syria.

While I am not a hadith scholar, it is hard to understand how he got from “you are the best of Allah’s earth” to asserting his homeland’s security is more important than other Muslim’s homelands.

Nationalism is a False Religion

Ali’s framework for in-group and out-group politics is rooted in nationalism—albeit a distinctly Trumpian version—that casts many Muslims as outsiders. This seems not just immoral, but nonsensical. While based in Berkeley, California, Ali was born in Philadelphia, which is 2,865 miles away. The distance between Makkah and Medina is 270 miles, which is less than a tenth of that distance. California would hardly be Ali’s homeland unless he relies on nationalism as the barometer for whose lives are more valuable.

Californians have many familial, commercial, historical and cultural ties to a variety of places, especially Mexico and the Asia-Pacific region, in numbers that easily dwarf California’s similar connections to Ali’s native commonwealth. For example, the number of Californians born in Mexico outnumber the Californians born in Pennsylvania by more than 14 to 1. Clearly, Ali’s nationalism is socially constructed, based on ever shifting goalposts for who is “good” and “bad,” what is “us” and what is “them.”

Ali demands of Muslims, for their own respectability in the United States, that they hate “illegal immigrants,” revere confederate monuments for some reason, and devalue the lives of other people’s children. People in Pennsylvania and California count for more because they are in the United States. People in other places, even one you can walk to from San Diego, are worth less.

The “Islamic Scholar” Meets the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Ali maintains his status as an Islamic scholar in the Muslim community despite his habit of spouting nonsense on a near-industrial scale. This is an impressive achievement. His false knowledge is often in service of supporting authoritarian views.

The term “Dunning-Kruger effect” comes from a study initiated after two bank robbers in 1995 decided to cover their faces with lemon juice, under the belief that this would make their faces invisible to security cameras (true story). Ali appears to earnestly believe that the United States has a significantly more authoritarian and intolerant system of government than it actually does (something he plainly likes, though admittedly the US is plenty authoritarian). The only exception to this is where he wrongly states that police have too much accountability for misconduct, and that he wants them to have less.

It’s not that he makes a mistake here or there—one struggles to find places where says things that are true. Here is a partial inventory:

1. Calling for the Fall of the United States

In his article, Ali claims Muslims may be prosecuted for calling for the fall of the United States.

Ali should similarly condemn Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. The United States Declaration of Independence says you can call for the fall of the government. In his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln said Americans have the “revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow” the government of the United States.

2. Burning Flags

Ali claims in his article that people can be prosecuted for burning flags. A fact he seems to relish.

The Supreme Court has been clear on this for decades. You 100% can burn US flags.

3. Qualified Immunity Needs to Be Restored

A bit of explanation here. The Courts created a doctrine known as qualified immunity that makes it harder for victims of government misconduct to sue government officials in civil court. Ali wants to “restore” this, even though it never went anywhere.

Qualified immunity is still the law in the United States. Ali can rest easy.

Ali continually sees more factual phantasms, but you get the point. Even for those of us who are not Islamic scholars, it’s hard to find his views trustworthy when he seems to have such a fleeting hold on reality.

Self-Deception on Islamophobia

Nowhere is Ali more confused than in “Islamophobia.” He addresses this in a couple of different places, for example Ali says:

Muslims cannot be in favor of free speech when it suits us and demand the punishment of others when they are critical of Islam and Muslims. If it is wrong to punish people for false accusations of antisemitism, it is also wrong to punish them for perceived Islamophobia.

Here he claims that it is also wrong to punish people for “perceived Islamophobia”—replacing the “false” (as with antisemitism) with “perceived”—suggesting with a clear framing bias that Islamophobia may not be real.

Islamophobia and antisemitism can be similar in the sense that they may appear as “hurt feelings”—a barista who is rude to a hijabi customer, or a Jewish student feeling “unsafe” when hearing a protest slogan (though the later is typically in service of censorship to protect foreign policy). The “Islamophobia” and “antisemitism” of hurt feelings is where the similarity ends.

Islamophobia differs from antisemitism in that it is institutional and permeates the federal criminal justice system and US foreign policy. There is no record of the FBI sending informants to Jewish places of worship because the agency views Judaism as a “threat to national security.” That happens to Muslims. American Jews don’t worry much about deportation because they say or write things the US government does not like. Some Muslims are dealing with that right now.

Who Would be Responsible For the Victimization of Abdullah Bin Hamid Ali?

Ali seems confident in his prescription: safety through patriotic alignment with Trump and his chosen nationalist in-group. But this positioning—where other Muslims are cast into the out-group, either for not being “American enough” or for maintaining a sense of dignity tied to the umma of Muhammad ﷺ—is ultimately an illusion of his own making.

He points out that the term “radical Islam” does not bother him because the term does not apply to him, just like he has no uneasiness “hearing that a murderer or rapist should be punished.”

But then, there is plainly some uneasiness. According to Ali:

[A] tolerant apolitical practicing Muslim may be seen as a radical as well. But as long as some Muslims act belligerently and imprudently, I have little cause to be offended by the use of the term. I put my trust in God that He will protect me from the beguiles of the treacherous. And even if I am victimized, I will turn to Him seeking his forgiveness and wisdom to endure such a trial as so many before me have done.

Ali may be victimized not because of the injustice perpetrated by Islamophobia, but because some Muslims act “belligerently and imprudently,” evidently justifying the collective punishment that he imagines may victimize him. He knows the term “radical Islam” applies to him even as he says the opposite. This is true no matter how much he aids and abets in the construction of the notion that to be a good Muslim you must be “tolerant” and “apolitical” since he may have no choice in the matter. Servility has its limits.

Ali starts off by figuring it is Muslims (including himself) who are perceived as a “menace” and “fifth column” because immigrants and their children commonly, in his unsupported view, feel like they do not truly belong. But he cannot seem to shake the notion that he is not truly protected by his MAGA in-group of real Americans. I think we should all be inclined to agree with that. We might get used to being strangers.

“Islam began as something strange and will go back to being strange, so glad tidings to the strangers.’”

Hadith of Muhammad ﷺ

Brotherhood, Accuracy and National Idolatry

Ali’s habit is to repeatedly hallucinate facts from a cavernous well of false knowledge or decontextualize to conclude that the MAGA tribe is the solution for American Muslims, while other Muslims outside the United States have expendable lives.

Instead of brotherhood and rigorous scholarship, we have Lord of the Flies.

It is perfectly fine and even beneficial for Muslims to disagree, both on the nature and scope of problems affecting society and what the solutions for those problems might be. However I hope there are three things Muslims can agree on (aside from various aqidah issues I am not writing about):

• Human life is equally precious, regardless of if that life is stateless, in an occupied territory, or in a nation state with borders.

• Muslims don’t venerate statues.

• Our Islamic scholars (or really any Muslim) should not mislead people with false knowledge.

What Ali demonstrates is that an “Islamic scholar” can be divorced from any such standards, and some masjid leaders, parents who pay good money to send their children to Zaytuna College, and even Islamic scholars might take him seriously anyway. Until they all start to demand excellence from teachers and institutions like Zaytuna, expect this to only get worse.