Brief: Nair, Mamdani, and Culture against the Culture War (Pt 1)
Well, I seem to always be inspired by the person who is considered marginal. Firstly, their spirit of survival, their resilience, their lack of self-pity, the ability usually to laugh in the face of having nothing and to create a kind of sense of flamboyance and life at any cost, despite having you know no resources of any kind that are visible. That's what inspires me and I think in making portraits of the so-called outsiders, I'm also then allowed to question what is that society that deems us an outsider?
— Mira Nair on BBC “Masterpiece”, 11/29/04
When official America speaks of good and bad Muslims, we must not think that they are speaking of the attitude of Muslims to Islam. They are actually talking about the attitude of Muslims to the U.S. A good Muslim is simply a pro-American Muslim and a bad Muslim is simply an anti-American Muslim. This is not about Islam, it is about America.
— Mahmoud Mamdani, C-Span's Book TV series, hosted by the University of Michigan on April 15, 2005.
Want to better understand Zohran Mamdani’s intellectual and emotional heritage? Want to understand how he seems to be thrashing the culture war with, well culture?
Matthew did, and so he looked into the films of his mom Mira Nair (Part 1), and the scholarship of his dad, Mahmood (Part 2).
Show Notes
Masterpiece - Mira Nair - BBC Sounds
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim | Author Mahmood Mamdani
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim | Penguin Random House Secondary Education
Reluctant Fundamentalist, The
Ben Affleck, Sam Harris and Bill Maher Debate Radical Islam | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
Sam Harris on the Reality of Islam - Truthdig
Samuel Huntington’s Great Idea Was Totally Wrong | The New Republic
#ZeeJLF2018 | Mira Nair
A timeline of JK Rowling's anti-trans shift
Mori Araj Suno lyrics
My secret debate with Sam Harris: A revealing 4-hour dialogue on Islam, racism & free-speech hypocrisy - Salon.com
New Atheists and old prejudices - The Chronikler
The Clash of Civilizations - If Books Could Kill - Apple Podcasts
President Reagan welcomes al-Qaeda and Mujahideen leaders to the White House, May 1986
For Zohran Mamdani, Mom Mira Nair’s Films Were a Formative Influence
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If you're anything like us, the hardest part is getting started.
That's why we created the Investing for Beginners podcast.
Our goal is to help simplify money so it can work for you.
We invite guests to demystify investing.
At least try to be setting aside like the minimum 10% into the 401k.
I'll teach you the basics of the market.
Yeah, I think compound interest should be at the start of any discussion about investing.
We've had investment professionals who teach in a simple way.
A valuation-driven bear market, you know, we haven't really seen yet.
And I think everyone's thinking about it, but we haven't really seen yet.
Our QA episodes feature questions from listeners just like you.
So what do you think about the situation with DTPI, which is Activision?
I'm Dave Ehern, and I'm Andrew Sather.
And we hope you join us on the Investing for Beginners podcast.
On the Investing for Beginners podcast.
Hey, do you have trouble sleeping?
Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy Podcast.
It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep.
It was the best of times.
It was the worst of times.
It was the age of classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh.
Stories that are great for adults and kids alike.
For years now, Sleepy has helped millions of people catch some much-needed disease, start their next day off fresh, and discover old books that they didn't know they loved.
So whether you have a tough time snoozing or you just like a good bedtime story, fluff up the cool side of your pillow and tune into Sleepy.
Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy.
Find Sleepy on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
New episodes each week.
Sweet dreams.
Sweet dreams.
Well, I seem to always be inspired by the person who is considered marginal.
Firstly, their spirit of survival, their resilience, their usually their lack of self-pity, the ability usually to laugh in the face of having nothing, to create a kind of sense of flamboyance and life at any cost, despite having, you know, no resources of any kind that are visible.
That's what inspires me.
And I think in making portraits of the so-called outsiders, I'm also then allowed to question what is that society that deems us an outsider.
That's the voice of filmmaker Mira Nair on the BBC in 2004.
She's talking about the people and characters she loves to film, but she's also sowing the seeds of the narrative and emotional power we can see coursing through the campaign of her son, Zoran, today, 20 years later.
Survival, resilience, lack of self-pity, flamboyance, all put to the task of answering key questions in raw material terms.
Should anyone be an outsider in the place they live?
How can everyone feel at home?
Are we not all outsiders in the shadow of the powerful?
These are the questions fascists don't want you to ask.
This brief is called Nair, Mamdani, and Culture Against the Culture War, and it's part one with part two dropping on Monday on Patreon for our subscribers.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
You can follow me.
You can follow Derek and Julian as well on Blue Sky.
And the podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle.
Please support our Patreon.
At this point in our ragged timeline, the structure and impact of culture war issues is pretty clear.
Take any human social question related to sexuality, ethnicity, diet, civil behavior, education, how to protest, how to be secular, how to be religious, how to parent, whether to care about climate or not, whether guns are cool or not.
The list is endless.
And the culture war views the Differing choices and behaviors of differing communities through the lens of cultural conflict, assumed to be set in stone from time out of mind.
If the culture warrior can use identity politics to manufacture untreatable wounds between people, they go for it.
And as they do this, they make sure that they ignore or even suppress the actual political issues that are most pressing to people's lives.
If you haggle over pronouns, you can ignore universalized health care.
If you gossip about whether Zoran Mamdani checked the black box on his unsuccessful Columbia University application, you can stop counting the dead in Gaza.
There's an endless sandstorm of distractions.
But underneath that sandstorm lies a bedrock deception, formed by what Zoran's father, the Ugandan scholar Mahmoud Bandani, calls culture talk, or the casual way of discussing people in the abstract that assumes every culture has a tangible and unchanging essence that defines it,
and then explains politics as a consequence of that essence rather than the consequence of, say, capitalism or colonialism.
It's culture talk that puts people into homogenous but also amorphous groups pursuing simplistic and singular goals as if they were zombies.
Mamdani's specialized focus is on how culture talk reduced and stigmatized Muslims in the aftermath of 9-11 to the point at which the only good Muslim was the Muslim who enthusiastically endorsed American foreign policy.
And I think this is crucial for understanding Zoran Mamdani's stance on Israel.
But the senior Mamdani's general framework of culture talk also predicted the malignant rise of an influencer culture committed to hardening these abstractions in a discourse of our civilization is at war with outsiders.
This is the basic MO of Jordan Peterson, Steve Bannon, Alexander Dugan, Christopher Ruffo, and Curtis Yarvin.
So on the sandstorm level of policy skirmishes over DEI or wokeism, these guys are bad enough.
But on the bedrock level of that fundamental lie, they reduce diverse and fluid groups of people to tectonic puzzle pieces in a cartoonishly simple world they believe they can understand well enough to manipulate.
So here's Mamdani Senior himself giving a peak culture talk analogy.
Let's say you slap me.
You slap me and I decide to explain this act as a result of your culture.
It's self-serving because it allows me to put myself out of the picture completely.
It allows me to not look at the relationship between you and me, but to see this simply as an outcome of you.
I have played no role in the making of you or in your response to me.
A cultural explanation which draws attention on one party to the exclusion of the relationship between two parties is politically self-serving.
So that's Mamdani Sr.
But if you watch Mira Nair's films, which is what I'm going to mainly focus on in this first part, and as you're watching them, you fall in love with street kids like Krishna in Salaam Bombay, or you watch Mina and Demetrius kiss in the bayou in Mississippi Masala,
or Changes repatriate to Pakistan after 9-11 in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, you begin to develop an internal imaginarium of humans who defy all essentialist definition.
They live and breathe cultures that change through identities in flux on the edges of borders, generations, and eras.
It's a world in which no one can be reduced to the terms that culture warriors would have us accept.
It's a world of families, communities, and nations, in which internal tensions are integral, paradoxically, to how everything somehow holds together.
And it's kind of like love that way.
And if that sounds too abstract, it's also a world in which the most important moments in life unfold around the essentials of food, money, and poetry.
In Mississippi Masala, Mina crashes into Demetrius's truck and his life on a run-down street in the town of Greenwood while hauling 25 gallons of milk in the back of her old car.
And the milk is for making Indian sweets for a wedding, but it also symbolizes the spiritual and ethnic purity that falling in love with Demetrius, who's black, will challenge.
In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is Nair's rendering of the 2007 novel by Mohsen Hamid, Pakistani-born and U.S. educated business analyst, he's a prodigy.
His name is Changez Khan, and he's sent to Istanbul to restructure and eventually shutter the region's oldest and largest publishing house for Middle Eastern literature.
And this is at a point in his life in which he's starting to realize that in the post-9-11 world, he doesn't know who he is or how he fits in as a transnational Muslim.
He's beginning to suspect that he's betraying his familial values.
He started growing out his beard to the consternation of his straight-laced co-workers.
And in his first meeting with a publisher, Nazmi Kemal, who simmers with this dignified rage because he knows this young guy has come as a corporate raider, Changes attempts to ingratiate himself by disclosing that his father is a poet.
Well, no one can put a value on what you've accomplished here.
My father's a poet.
He's well known in the Punjab.
His greatest friend is his publisher.
You are a keeper of our culture in this part of the world.
Your father is a poet.
I think you should be ashamed of yourself doing what you're doing here.
Changes spends the following days poring over the company's anemic accounts, but also visiting the Hagia Sophia and quietly observing the bustle of the souks.
And on one sunlit afternoon, Kemal invites him into his office to show him a copy of a book of Changez's father's poetry that his publishing house translated from Urdu and published in Turkish.
And so it's one of these many quiet turning points as Changez fully discovers that the borders he has traversed throughout his life are not only fictional, but they have made his life abstract and unfeeling.
Now, there's this other point in this film that comes at a Pakistani lunch counter in Manhattan where Changes has ducked in for chai.
And so in his internal monologue, he's recalling how the Muslims of New York and the years following 9-11 resorted to many strategies for avoiding Islamophobic scrutiny.
They kept their heads down.
If they were taxi drivers, they would fly American flags from the windows.
And at this lunch counter, two cabbies are discussing a rash of attacks against Muslims and South Asians.
Any beard or turban is a target, one says.
And then he turns to Changes and says, not a problem for you, AG, suited and booted.
And he's referring to his Wall Street suit and grooming.
But then the cabby tells Changes that the counter only takes cash.
And Changes doesn't have cash.
He's very modern.
Of course, he only has plastic.
And so the other cabby steps in and offers to pay for Changes' tea.
And Changes refuses initially, but then the Cabbie says in Urdu, don't embarrass me.
You are like my brother.
Now, who is that cabby in that cameo?
Well, it's Mira Nair's husband, Mahmoud Mamdani.
And he's playing an immigrant who seems to know that neither the suit nor the manners Of this young globalist tycoon, nor even his willingness to work for the American empire will protect him from bigotry.
So these men are from the same world, but different worlds, and yet the elder says, you are like my brother.
In Professor Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.
This is a book I can't recommend highly enough.
It's published the year after the release of Mississippi Masala.
And in it, he articulates his version of Mira Nayer's culture blending project.
His focus is Cold War geopolitics and the emergence of political Islam.
And he basically shows that political terrorism in the Muslim world, which is the origin point of the bad Muslim trope, is not the organic outcome of culture or religion, but rather a modern political response, more specifically, blowback from U.S.-funded mercenary movements turning against the U.S. after their role in proxy wars opposing alleged Soviet influence.
Mamdani shows the pattern of supporting, training, and arming radical Islamist groups, including exacerbating and encouraging their religious fundamentalism in order to achieve Cold War objectives,
followed by all of the perceived betrayals such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt aligning with the U.S., combined with blanket U.S. support for Israel, and how that directly contributed to these groups turning their focus and violent tactics learned from the CIA against the United States itself.
So I'm going to return to Mamdani's political thesis on Monday in detail, but for now, because I want to talk about the films, I'm going to note how he illustrates what he's rejecting, which is the highly influential view ascendant in the years after Reagan and still a mainstay within U.S. policy and hawkish intellectual circles,
that cultures are not only monolithic, but they are abstract, impermeable, inscrutable, and unchangeable.
You cannot change the abstract culture.
You must defeat it.
And this is a view that trickled down to a thousand dime store pundits.
Sam Harris summed it up with his slogan co-signed by Bill Maher on that famous episode with Ben Affleck that, quote, Islam is the motherload of bad ideas.
He underlined this defamation in writing countless times, as in this Truthdig article from 2006, in which he writes, quote, in Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history.
It is as if a portal in time has opened and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.
Now, Harris and the rest were not original thinkers.
This childish view of geopolitics in which continents confine blocks of homogenous people that U.S. influence should be able to move around the monopoly board echoed the theories of war hawk academics in high places like Bernard Lewis, who was a leading intellectual force behind the Iraq War.
He regularly met with Dick Cheney while claiming Iran was building a nuclear weapon back in 2006.
Does that sound familiar?
Also, people like Samuel Huntington were responsible for this discourse originally from the highest levels of academia.
He developed the class of civilizations trope.
Lewis and Huntington strolled into the culture war discourse so that a thousand right-wing to liberal Islamophobe influencer bros could run with it.
So Mamdani quotes Huntington's summation of his life's work in the first few pages of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
Quote, it is my hypothesis.
This is an article called The Class of Civilizations in 1993 in Foreign Affairs, quote, that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.
The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.
Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.
The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.
The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
So this guy and his comic book vision of history had the ears of Hubert Humphrey and Jimmy Carter.
He was the coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council.
He chaired the Democratic Party's Foreign Policy Advisory Committee in the mid-1970s, and he co-founded the journal Foreign Policy, in which he published bullshit like that.
Now, Mahmoud's answer in his scholarship rhymes with his wife's answer on the screen.
The remedy for abstracting and reifying complex groups of changing people is to realize that no large-scale culture has a defining essence.
Cultural identities and political compulsions exist in tandem, not in lockstep.
Like families, cultures are rife with ideological, domestic, and intergenerational conflict.
Individuals shape and are shaped by their groups.
And like Mira Nayer's characters, cultures do not act out of essentialist or predictable drives, but rather in dynamic relationship to one another.
Now, closer to the bone of our genocidal era, Mamdani Sr. argues that the dyad of political violence, of terrorist strikes, versus massive state retribution and that sort of dynamic that goes back and forth in a state of acceleration around his writing immediately post 9-11, it can't have a military answer that perpetuates the abstractions of aggressors, victims, and heroes.
It must be answered politically by addressing human needs and grievances.
It has to be answered in the way a novel or a film would answer things.
So how does Mira Nayer answer things?
Here I'd like to ping Amardeep Singh.
He's an English prof at Lahai University in Pennsylvania, where he's taught since 2001.
He works on post-colonial literature, global cinema, modernism, African-American literature, and the digital humanities.
And he's got this great book out there from 2018 called The Films of Mira Nayer, Diaspora Verite, which is a great title.
And he opens with a tight biosketch of Nayer's pre-big time background.
So I'm going to start there, but I'm then going to get to the term he coins, diaspora verite.
So Nayeh's background is pretty cosmopolitan.
So the family name is typically South Indian, but she was born in Orissa, which is in eastern India, in 1957 to a Punjabi family, but a Hindu Punjabi family, not Sikh as is the majority in Punjab.
But also, it seems like the family is pretty secularized.
Religion does not play a big role in her upbringing, it seems.
Singh says that many of her family members today are among the large Punjabi community in New Delhi.
Now, Nair's dad was a bureaucrat, and in one interview, she comments that watching him work within state confines actually provided a kind of indirect political fire for her lifelong quest to challenge boundaries.
And her mom was a social worker.
Nayeer's early education included attending an Irish Catholic boarding school in Simla.
This is such an Indian story.
The school was heavily influenced by British colonial values.
And this is where she first encountered William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which she said she read under the covers and found very fascinating.
And of course, she turned that into a major motion picture with Rhys Witherspoon.
And then she went on to study political theater at the University of Delhi.
In 1976, through the connections of her father's governmental contacts in part, she was able to attend Harvard University on Scholarship to study documentary filmmaking.
You won't be surprised to learn that she found it a little too stuffy.
However, she did meet future collaborators there, like screenwriter Sunit Taraporovella and cinematographer Mitch Epstein, who became her first husband.
And her early documentaries, such as So Far From India, 1983, and India Cabaret, 1985, established her focus and concentration as being on realism, on displacement, and on gender relations.
For Nayir, filmmaking has also often been wrapped up in activism and mutual aid.
So with Salaam Bombay in 1988, she invested some of her capital from the Khamerador at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination into the Salaam Balak Trust Charity, which serves slum kids in Bombay.
And Nayir put her mom Praveen in charge of the trust because she's the social worker and she had experience with that.
Now, her personal life is also mixed up with her work, as you can expect.
She met and married Mahmoud Mamdani in Uganda in 1989.
And that's a story that's tangled up with the stories of Mississippi Masala.
And in 2000, she founded the Maisha Film Lab in East Africa, which is a filmmaking school whose alumni include Lupita Ngongo, who appeared in Black Panther, 12 Years a Slave, and a bunch of other stuff, and also starred in Nayeer's 2016 Disney film, Queen of Katwe.
So let's get back to diaspora verite.
This is Singh's phrase where he's basically explaining that Nayeir uses the documentary and realist techniques that she started her career with back in the late 1970s to explore experiences of migration and displacement in the later feature films.
Diaspora Verite is at the root of her, quote, commitment to social justice, especially with respect to women and socially and economically marginalized groups.
Now, there are technical and aesthetic elements to diaspora verite as a genre, because Nayir is always emphasizing naturalistic acting over melodrama.
She's minimizing narrative or visual manipulation on screen.
The films are shot on location rather than in studio wherever possible.
She uses mobile and eye-level cameras, which often give this kind of home movie flavor.
And she also favors synchronous sound rather than overdubbing.
And, you know, alongside this, she's also always hiring amateur actors and transnational production teams.
And she workshops many scenes offset to contribute to a natural and spontaneous vibe within the cast.
And that takes a lot of work and it's extra money, but you can really feel it happen and you can feel that the casts are bonded.
And the scripts are polyglot.
The captioning AIs really struggle with monsoon wedding, for instance, because it's flipping seamlessly between Hindi, Punjabi, and English.
And also, Nayeh is using these syncretic graphics and visual motifs that express her kind of masala aesthetic.
There's always bridges, piers, boats, train stations, and shoes that represent movement and migration and the fluidity of personas and identity, and also the hollowness of static stereotypes.
And when I say stereotypes, I mean all stereotypes because, you know, she points at cultural, ethnic, religious, and gendered boxes that people are in, and she breaks them apart.
And I'll just sprinkle in some quotes from Singh here as he scans the filmography.
He says that Salaam Bombay presents a critique of the illusionist conventions of commercial Hindi cinema.
She shows poverty with realism, without sentimentality or melodrama.
And this is contrasted with Bollywood's, you know, kind of unconvincing portrayals where sometimes they take a superstar and they actually paint dirt onto her face to represent poverty, but it's obvious and it kind of fails.
And then in India Cabaret, Nayir portrays sex workers without sentimentality or moralizing to show them as empowered and self-sufficient rather than helpless victims or fallen women.
And in that one, her camera is often taking the dancer's perspective, which minimizes the male gaze.
And then there's Kama Sutra, in which Nayeir challenges India's highly repressed sexuality culture.
And she really uses that film to argue that, in the words of Singh, quote, representing sexuality is not a Western art, but something that's deeply ingrained in Indian tradition.
Speaking of boundary blurring, she also does a lot of work on what's known as colorism.
So Mississippi Masala explores anti-black racism within the Indian immigrant community in the southern United States, as well as exposing bigotries within Indian culture that focuses on skin shades of lightness versus darkness.
Mira Nair makes her cultural interventions around the world and then shares them in art houses and at film festivals.
Now, once in a while, she hits paydays.
And at one point, after the release of Vanity Fair, you know, big budget film, Rhys Witherspoon, and so on, Warner Brothers comes to her to ask if she would like to direct Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, which is the fourth movie in the blockbuster franchise.
Now, at the time, as she told the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2018, she was deep into the writing and production of a very personal film for her called The Namesake.
I had suffered a very, my first death in my family, you know, of my mother-in-law, who was like a mother to me, and an unexpected death of medical malpractice.
And completely blew me away, and I was deep in that melancholy.
And that's what inspired me to make The Namesake, because Jumpa has written in it of this terrible melancholy of losing a parent in a foreign country, which is exactly what I was experiencing.
And so I was deep in the throes of like almost a month away from shooting The Namesake.
And they offered me Harry Potter.
And I thought I had to take these meetings because my son had learned to read from Harry Potter.
And I went several meetings and I was in the throes of it.
And then I was very troubled to be able to give up my own film.
And I asked my 14-year-old son, Doran, what should I do?
And he said to me, Mama, many good directors can make Harry Potter, but only you can make the namesake.
And it was such a liberating and clarifying statement.
And it kind of is about how I have lived my life, you know, like that, is that what can I do that is so specific and that you cannot do?
You know, how to make my distinctiveness my calling card in a sense, you know, how to trust my own instinct, because really instinct is the only thing that, you know, that is particular to each one of us and that defines me or from you or anyone else.
Now, the interesting timing here is that Nair gave this interview about a month before J.K. Rowling entered her anti-trans phase by accidentally, quote-unquote, liking a tweet from a bigot referring to trans women as men in dresses.
Now, I can't find Nair on record discussing trans rights per se, but with her son's full-throated support of trans people, in which he pledged $65 million in new services for the trans community in New York City, and that he would designate the city as a sanctuary city for LGBTQI people threatened by Trump should he become mayor.
I have a pretty good idea of how her feminism impacted his views there.
And if it's true that he really did grow up learning to read with the Harry Potter books, that he's now in the awkward position that so many leftist families, including my own, find themselves in as they realize something deeply troubling about the writer and her world, which we once loved.
You know, and I would say that even this is a boundary-bending masala story that harmonizes with the Nair filmography.
Here we have a Muslim boy born in South Africa to a Punjabi mom and a Gujarati dad who learns to read via British author J.K. Rowling, but grows up to become a very different type of wizard.
And now he's eating chicken and rice with his hands on a Manhattan park bench answering questions about his support for Palestine.
And he's driving liberals and MAGA folks to utter distraction.
With his current global visibility, Zoran Mamdani, I would say, is repping his mom's masala progressivism far beyond the art house set.
And I think what's particularly thrilling about This is that it hits back hard against the culture talk his dad has identified, and he's landing punches right on the jaws of anyone from the new atheist shaking hands with the State Department culture war side of things, especially the Islamophobic stream, which always ignored world building of thinkers like Nayir in order to keep trafficking in cartoons and abstractions.
Islam is inherently violent, they would say, more violent than any other religion, because look at this cherry-picked quote from the Quran, I can't read in Arabic or contextualize.
That was the mode of reducing all issues to religious ideology, neglecting the impact of colonialism, Western foreign policy, and socioeconomic factors in the rise of extremism.
It's a paint-by-numbers history told by lazy thinkers who believed their brains were special, and we're living with the consequences of those abstractions today.
But you know, the thing that stands out most to me is the lack of imagination, the absence of curiosity.
I mean, maybe it's a temperament thing, an experience thing, an educational thing.
Maybe it's just outright bigotry.
But listening to the familiar abstractions about Islam and Western civilization, I never hear a single on-the-ground reflection on what it means to live in our actual world in the global village that we find ourselves in.
So beyond the venal cruelty of the content, the whole feeling of the culture war world is dissociative.
It's a wasteland.
It makes me lose all sense of time and place and hope.
It's just words on screens and day and night merge as, you know, you never feel awake, but you're never able to sleep.
And meanwhile, there's a looming fascist state clanging like a crypto convention on a Blade Runner set, where all the screens behind the bar scroll with endless bad news, punctuated by memes, glitching prophets speaking in tongues, and influencers spewing bullshit.
And trying to make sense of it, you can wander forever through the culture war morass in search of a quiet nook, a sane conversation, a single fact you could hold on to, a friendly stranger, and you'll be stymied by countless dead ends of mistrust, misinformation, and disillusionment.
And also, you can still walk through a real city, through real neighborhoods, past churches and food trucks, street cleaners and park gardeners, people with stories, bakers and buskers, and bodega workers, muscle bros and goth girls and Bangladeshi aunties and Haredi men sweating in their fur hats, people from everywhere, the world on a street.
And you can look them all in the eye and feel the decency of common folks and also wonder who they are and what they need from day to day, and then think about how to help them get it.
And that's what we saw Zoran Mamdani do on the sticky night of June 20th, because he walked his final campaign walk through Manhattan, all the way from Dykeman Park in the north to Staten Island Ferry in the south, 13 miles down the island, 13 miles of real sidewalk, coming back into focus through all of this noise.
And then he cuts a campaign ad that looks like a montage of a cast and crew party for every film Mira Nayer ever made, but it's real.
I want to finish with one scene from one of Nayer's films that I think encapsulates her refutation of culture talk.
Changes Khan in The Reluctant Fundamentalist makes his final break with Wall Street and the American Dream at about three-quarters of the way through.
He gets the news from his boss, played by Kiefer Sutherland, that the UK office of their analyst group has given them the go-ahead to close down the Turkish publishing house they came to audit and probably sell it off for scrap.
But Khan has decided he can't go through with it because the day before, he'd had lunch with Nazmi Kamal, who's the publisher.
This guy's a secular Muslim.
He's kind of depressively quaffing wine and pulling on endless cigarettes while smoldering with love for his suffering world.
But he tells Changes a story.
Have you heard of the Janasteries?
No.
There were Christian boys captured by the Ottomans to be soldiers in the mighty Muslim army.
When they came of age, they were sent to kill their former families and destroy their former homes.
How old were you when you went to America?
I was 18.
Ah.
Much older.
The Janissaries were always taken in childhood.
And when they became men, they were devoted to their new caretakers to serve their adopted empire, not devoted to the empire.
So notice here how the betrayal flows the other way, that the aggression from the trained hostages of the empire flows westward.
And Khan sleeps on this story and wakes up knowing he can't continue.
He can't be the shark who brings Kemal's business down.
And so he tells his boss calmly and resolutely in the hallway of their five-star Istanbul hotel, and he weathers Kiefer's screaming.
How dare he walk away from the money machine who made him who he was.
But no, the money machine did not make him who he is.
And that is the chance for Nayir to catapult the film into a montage of the downstream effects of Chunghiz quitting.
And the montage starts with him on the deck of a ferry in the Bosphorus Strait, watching the European side get farther away.
Now, I've been on that ferry between the two continents, contemplating the watery boundary between erstwhile civilizations.
I was on my way to Prince's Island for a day's hike.
So what really lies between Europe and Asia?
No great mystery.
Water and Prince's Island, which is home to fishermen who grill their catch on the docks, and there are countless feral cats.
Countless feral cats exist on an island between Asia and Europe.
So then Chunges is packing up his office in Manhattan, saying goodbye to the one friend he had at work.
Then he's boxing up his apartment.
But what takes my head off in the sequence is the voice of Pakistani superstar, Atif Aslam.
*Music*
What is he singing?
It is a poem in Urdu called Mori Arajasuno.
And here's the best translation I can find.
O my Lord, pay heed to my appeal.
I am a faithful follower of my creator.
My true Lord, you had said, Go, man, you are master of the world.
My bounties on earth are your treasure.
You are the viceroy of your creator.
And after baiting me with these promises, countless years have passed by, my lord.
And did you ever inquire what transpired with your man?
What your man has suffered in this world?
Somewhere, those in power and with the means intimidate, harass, and terrorize.
But elsewhere, draft and bribery are rampant, and my soul is shaken down to my bone, just like a bird flutters when caught in a trap.
You made a fine king indeed, my sweet lord.
All I have gotten are endless beatings.
But I don't want kingship, my lord.
All I need is a morsel of respect.
I have no desire to live in palaces.
I just want a small nook to live my life.
If you agree with me, I will agree with you.
I won't decline anything, no matter how unreasonable.
But if you don't look out for me, God, then I should go and seek for myself another God.
With this grimace, pleading, sharing the pain, rowing the boat, asking for his blessings, waiting expectantly, countless centuries have passed by.
And only now has it been revealed the one you had appealed to, the one who held your hand and guided you, where your boat had docked, from whom you had asked for a panacea for your pain, the one who did not visit your temple.
It was you only.
It was you only.
Okay, so who wrote this poem, which Nayer drops into this movie like an Easter egg, as if to heal the images of the crumbling twin towers?
Pakistani poet laureate Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
And who is he?
A theologian?
No.
A Sufi mystic?
No.
Faiz was born in 1911 and died in 1984, and was a journalist and intellectual who was shaped by Marxism, anti-colonialism, and a lifelong commitment to social justice.
In the 1930s, he was a leading figure in the progressive writers movement, advocating for literature as a tool for social change and aligning himself with leftist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist ideals.
By the end of his life, he was committed to Islamic socialism.
That's a thing, which turns to the Quran for inspiration in building an equal society.
And as a spiritualist committed to Rumi, some said he was a bad leftist, but as a devotee of an atheist path, some said he was a bad Muslim.
And that makes him sound like a mira Nayir character to me.
Or maybe any old, complicated person.
Nayir put Faiz's thumbprint on Chengez's journey away from the empire, away from walking his own tightrope of good Muslim versus bad Muslim.
Is it a hymn?
A bitter complaint and diatribe against God?
An ecstasy of sorrow?
In the lyrics, we hear more tensions between good and bad Muslim, but from a perspective opposed to that of Samuel Huntington and the State Department.
There are verses from the good Muslim who supplicates the bad Muslim teetering in his faith.
But there's also the baffled Muslim, Chengez, who misunderstood God's promises in life, who thought he was a prince destined to become a king over the riches of the world, but who was brought low by the beatings of the powerful and the state.
And then finally, we hear from the wise Muslim, who realizes that going home after centuries have gone by means reconciling at last with one's ordinary humanness.
You could watch 10,000 hours of culture talk on MSNBC or listen to Sam Harris until his hair turned white along with yours, and you would never come close to a moment of understanding and empathy like this.
I'm going to leave it there and come back on Monday with more on the work of Zoran's father, Mahmoud.
