Farah Mahesri and Sabiha Basrai

[00:04] SABIHA BASRAI: My name is Sabiha Basrai. I'm 40 years old. I'm recording at the University of San Francisco on April 28, 2003. I am joined by my interview partner, Farah Maheshri, who is a childhood and lifelong friend.

[00:22] FARAH MAHESHRI: Hi, my name is Farah Maheshri. I am age 40. Today is April 28, 2023, and I'm recording at the University of San Francisco. And I today I'm talking to Sabiha Basrai, who is a close childhood friend.

[00:40] SABIHA BASRAI: Farah, I had wanted to do this interview with you because you and I have kind of come in and out of each other's lives since childhood. And we grew up together in the same mosque and started our religious kind of journey together as children in Fremont, California, in Asia. Marcus. And as we've grown up, we've kind of found our political voices, we found our careers, and we found different ways to keep Islam in our lives. And so I was just really excited to kind of connect with you around that and also to thank you for being that presence, that constant presence for me.

[01:21] FARAH MAHESHRI: Thank you for inviting me. It's fun to think about how long we've known each other, especially through the different kind of phases of our life, and that it's something so magical about all of the change in the growth, thinking about all the change in the growth that I've gone through, that you've gone through, and then finding these moments where our lives just keep intersecting. And it's always just so magical to connect with someone who knew you when you were, like, tiny and awkward and, like, teenagey angsty and, like, yeah, all the things. But I love that you brought up immediately, though, like, that part of our friendship and part of our relationship is around politics and political work. And when thinking about the role that religion has played in our lives, I think we've, at least for me, and I'm curious for you, how much the religion and religious identity has influenced your political work and how much your political work has influenced your religious identity, especially because we are Muslim Americans and having grown up, like, 911 just happened at such a pivotal age for us. Right. So, yeah, I was just curious how those two identities kind of played together for you.

[02:40] SABIHA BASRAI: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. I definitely feel there was a before 911 time in my life and an after 911 time in my life. And when I think about my own sense of self and identity, what I embody and what I project has shifted so much around that kind of flashpoint and collective trauma and grief and national kind of crisis. Right. And I think as a child, the muslim identity I had was a very personal one, and it was the way I related to my family. It was the way I understood celebration and the sense of worship and grounding in community and the food and the clothes and the language that were kind of all part of me and gave me a lot of self confidence, actually, as a kid in a multiracial school with not a lot of other Muslims. But I felt like I was lucky to grow up in areas that we did where there were an international, diasporic community. But when 911 happened, I was 19. We were both 19. I was a student at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. It was my second year, and I had to suddenly claim my muslim identity as a political act. It stopped being a thing that was a private, personal practice for me and turned into something I had to project and something I had to represent to my classmates university, the city I was in the. And being one of only a couple muslim students on a campus of 17,000 was pretty scary. And I could see there was a choice to make around whether I should try and keep my head down and kind of pass as a non Muslim. And I was seeing the level of anti muslim violence that was happening, and I was remembering us history. I knew what happened to the Japanese during World War two, very aware of what was kind of possible in this moment. And so I was lucky, though, to have a community of activists around me who kind of helped me figure that out. One was a woman named Sister Mary Pat, a catholic nun at the Newman Catholic center at Cal Poly, who helped me, helped model for me what faith based activism meant. And I had a group of friends that were kind of politicized after the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, who were very aware of kind of internationalism and wanted to support this kind of movement against the war, the wars that we knew were coming, and at the same time, were aware of the kind of prospect of the Patriot act and those kinds of draconian laws that we knew we were going to be facing. And so I found a way to root myself in my identity as a Muslim in the context of being an activist. And I'm grateful for the scaffolding around me that helped me do that. But I did feel isolated as a muslim person, like, I knew how to talk about being Muslim in a political context. But there was no one with me to help me figure out what it felt like in a spirit, spiritual context at that time. How was that for you?

[06:27] FARAH MAHESHRI: I think, and similar to what you were saying, it was actually my third week of college, that 911 happened. And I think back on it now, and I don't think I would have been able to put this into words then, but the sense of that was the moment where I was going to explore who I was, find my own identity, practice or not practice a religion, not because, you know, parents were telling you to get up and pray and you had to do this, and you have to, like, fast, because I wanted to, or even that exploration. And I think there is this moment of, like, that choice being taken away. And I remember distinctly the moment my mom called and said, you have to turn on the tv. And then the next thing she said, you have to be very careful. You know, they're gonna blame Muslims. And in that moment, it was. I realized. And again, I don't think I consciously realized it then, but in retrospect, I'm like, that was the moment where I'm not sure. I no longer felt like being Muslim was my choice. It was something that was, like, put on me, and all of a sudden, I had to represent. And later that week, I was home in Fremont, which is a very racially diverse, very kind of inclusive thing. I distinctly remember walking in front, crossing a parking lot, and a guy in a big pickup truck was, like, revving his engine and, like, clearly trying to intimidate me. And I realized in that moment also that it didn't even matter if I was practicing or not, if the world perceived me as Muslim, as perceived me as other. I had to occupy this identity, and that politicized me. Right? But again, it was this, like, moment of. There was a little bit of that sense of, like, lack of choice. And I'm curious, and I wrote this down as you were talking about it, that, like, you made the active choice to become politically active because 911 happened and that you stepped into that role. And I almost feel like I didn't feel that same sense of agency. I felt like I had to. And then that combination that became inexplicably tied the religious and political identity took me internationally. So I was very curious about what it meant to understand what was happening geopolitically from the perspective of muslim majority countries. And in some ways, a lot of, like, I was like, I don't really want to be the other here. And so what will it feel like if I escape into a muslim country where I am just like everybody else? And I think that's where instead of having a political identity forced on me, I had agency and recognized and owned my political identity, because at that moment, you show up in any other country, and no country is perfect. And so I was also like, oh, I don't just fit in just because of my identity. I still have to find community. I still have to know what my values are. I still have to figure out what I believe in, what I don't believe in, how I'm going to navigate the world and so kind of all of that happening. But it is in the same way that you mentioned. I don't know that I can talk about being Muslim without 911 as this flashpoint lynch point. And I am very curious of what that means for me, but also for future generations and for others who are experienced. It's almost as weird looking at someone else's life type thing. What would it have been like to explore my religious identity without this massive political event, right.

[10:20] SABIHA BASRAI: If we weren't burdened by the reaction to that moment. What you said, though, about choice and agency was really interesting because I do remember making a choice, and I recognize that privilege of even having, getting to make a choice as a non hijab wearing Muslim with a name that doesn't immediately read Muslim to folks who don't know. I've plenty of folks in my lives who named Muhammad, who went by Mo instead in these kind of acts of self preservation, I was able to pass as a non Muslim if I wanted to really downplay that story. And I do remember when it was in the year 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the first Gulf war was starting, my parents told me, you know, don't tell your classmates that you're muslim and don't tell them that your family's name is Hussain, which is my mother's side. And I mean, we were kid, we were really little, right? I was like seven or eight. And I was just super confused about why all of a sudden I have to be afraid of my friends or rather put on some armor, right? And I can only imagine how hard that moment was for my parents parents to be wanting me to feel safe and free and also give me that armor that they knew I was going to need. And so because of that experience, I understood what it meant to put on some armor. And I don't, I wish that we never had to do that. But I learned a lot about how to move through the world because of those experiences. And I have a lot of, I think a lot about the level of privilege that I've had and the kind of violence I've been spared because I don't immediately read as, you know, as the kind of stereotype that a lot of the most anti muslim bigots would target or, like, folks in the Sikh community or, you know, whatever kind of exoticization that folks had learned to demonize. And what you said, too, about going kind of focusing your work internationally in that moment, I did kind of the opposite and focused my work domestically and locally and was looking at the impact of state surveillance, the special registry program, the NCERS program, the Patriot act. What that meant for kind of civil rights in this country was working on campaigns with, like, global exchange and the ACLU as a volunteer to support civil rights protections for our communities. And my kind of tactic for that was always to try and prove my humanity to other people in America and explain, listen, Muslims are just like you. We deserve civil rights just like you. These terrorists don't represent all Muslims. And having to explain that and being ready to explain that constantly, and that was probably the first poster that I made for the first anti war protest I organized through my campus was a sign that said, the taliban do not represent Islam. So I was called to tell that story. And later in life, I've really moved into a different orientation around that where, like, why it is exhausting to try and prove your humanity. Every time there's an election, every time there's anything going on, there's constantly this expectation that you need to prove why you deserve to live here safely and what the toll that takes on all of us. And so my orientation now is, like, actually, what is wrong with you that you do not see me as humanity and trying to really move the conversation and reframe the narrative about the way we think about our roles in a place like this?

[14:42] FARAH MAHESHRI: No. Annette, thank you for also bringing up, though, that 911 wasn't like, everything was rosy before, and then 911 happened because we were prepped and trained to already have kind of a complicated relationship with our identity. And this notion that sometimes you hide a. You have to be careful. I'm curious. As you navigated this political journey and your activism journey, how did your spiritual journey, like, how did you walk that spiritual journey alongside that? And, yeah, how did you develop a relationship with Islam and being Muslim, that exist? Does it exist outside of this other activism, identity and political identity? Yeah. How do you navigate that, especially now that we're like, we have this. We're 40, we have this weird opportunity to look back and at the same time be able to look forward. Right? Like, there's still so much life to lead, and we get to decide what comes next.

[15:49] SABIHA BASRAI: I love that. I love that we get to grow up together. Farah that's a really important question, how my kind of relationship with my sense of faith has changed over time. When I was younger, I think in the both, 911 was not only this political flashpoint, but it was also when we both left home, really. Right. So the kind of before 911 years where my religion was about the way that I interacted with my family and the way I celebrated holidays and the times that I would see your family and we would do the rituals that our ancestors did. And the idea of being in diaspora was something. It was a place to feel rooted. So when I left home, I had to, as you did, figure out, what of those things am I hanging onto, and what of those things am I letting go of? And I definitely struggled to find a place for a consistent practice of my Islam in my twenties as I was a college student, as I got my first job in Philadelphia, I was just not anchored to a muslim community. And so it all had to be self motivated, and I struggled to. My parents really supported me in doing that. My mom would transliterate surats for me if I didn't know them by heart. So I knew what I need to say at different times. It was very. She put in so much effort, and I love her for that. So I still had it in my DNA, but my practice was inconsistent. I think what really helped me reconnect with my sense of spiritual practice, and I think this is also, you know, we've talked about times when our faith is, like, tested. Right. I had the opportunity to go for the Hajj pilgrimage in 2011 with my parents. And primarily we went because it was, you know, my mom's lifelong wish to go. And it was really important that, you know, my dad and I also went to support her. And, like, she helped us find that motivation that, like, this is something all Muslims are called to do. And she really helped lead us to plan that and prioritize that in our lives. But when I went, while I was there, while I was in Makkah, circling the Kaaba, running back and forth between these two hills, sleeping in the grounds in Mosdalafah, I was kept asking myself, like, do I belong here? Like, is this. Should I be here? And because I felt my faith was complex and I was surrounded by people for whom this was their lifelong goal. And I was feeling almost, yeah, just uneasy about being there. And then I was in the process of these rituals, though. I found a way to connect with them that felt really profound, and it wasn't what I had expected. I was also participating in these rituals in the backdrop of the Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria. And I was there as an american meeting people from muslim majority nations from all over the world and others in diaspora. And I think the experience pushed me to find meaning in these rituals and discover a deep love for being Muslim. And there was something very magical about being together with three and a half million people who were all deeply connected around this sense of worship, but also generosity and care for one another. And so if for any of us, our clarity of connection to God, Washington wavering, like, there was a way to see the beauty in humanity and have that kind of faith grounded there. And it really moved. It was a profound spiritual experience that I could not have predicted. And I don't know if it was the experience that was prescribed, but it was the one I had. And despite everything, I came back and realized I did get to walk in the footsteps of my ancestors. And the stories of the prophets that I've been told since I was little took on a kind of visceral quality. And I come back to that experience all the time. Are there times when you felt like you were really kind of testing your connection to your faith?

[21:06] FARAH MAHESHRI: Yeah, absolutely. I want to say I'm also particularly moved by your kind of your thought process and your experience with community and that role community has played. And partly why I'm so excited to be having this conversation with you is because I think, again, through multiple points in our lives, we have been community for each other, and how you have definitely pushed me to remain politically active and spiritually curious and, like, again, that role is like, I think some of the stuff none of us can walk on our own, and that we understand and relate both to religion, spirituality and politics and activism through being in relation with others. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like so much of my twenties was nothing but having questions about faith and largely about being Muslim. So I studied, lived, worked in, in Egypt, in Palestine, in Kashmir, in Pakistan, in Lebanon, in Jordan. I like, was like, I will go live in muslim majority countries. And kept walking around wanting to have an epiphany moment that made everything make sense, that proved beyond doubt that the american narrative of bad Muslims was just false. And that sense of wanting to know that my people were great and constantly understanding through this process that people are just people. Like, there is just. There's nowhere in the world that is perfect. I don't know, maybe we'll find it one day. But up until this point, I haven't found it. And having some very real experiences, like narrowly surviving terrorist attacks and just getting into some tricky situations, as one does when they're young and fearless and will be like, oh, that looks interesting. Let me go there. In retrospect, don't go there. And then being like, okay, so if I'm not finding this deep seated need for understanding of who I am in the world today, can I find it in the world of my ancestors in walking these paths that we have walked for so long and that, I think, in particular, brought me back to the Shia roots of my muslim faith. And Shia ism has a central narrative that's rooted in history, of mythology, around the battle of Karbala, which is the grandson or the prophet, peace be upon him, is engaged in this battle. And I just found myself coming back over time to this narrative, which to us, growing up was a little bit like, again, the thing that your mom took you to and would say, sit, listen, be silent for many hours, and your mind would wander because you're seven. What else are you going to do? And finding myself and having this incredible privilege of, like, getting now to hear this narrative in Egypt, in Pakistan, in Syria, it was amazing. Walking the footsteps, going to Iraq, actually being in Karbala, I think similar to your experience, actually being in Mecca and Medina, connecting to these places and starting to understand that the root of this narrative is about justice, is about humans navigating the fact that identities are complex. And part of me for what really hit me for the narrative of Karabala was that it was Muslims versus Muslims. And all of a sudden, so much of what has happened in this world post 911 started to make sense that, again, it's not. There are no perfect communities, there are no perfect people. It's a bunch of people who are trying to make good decisions, and that it's the forces of good, it's the forces of justice, and that those decisions are hard. But if you, again, you look at these narratives in the history of mythology, and it comes down to the stories are very kind of specific. And there's always the. There were young people and old people who fought. There were men and women who fought. There were people of different races who fought. And all of this is emphasized over and over again. That made me really think about, what does diversity mean? Why do we need to live in multiracial environments? Again, the role of women in this story really helped me to understand that I do have a voice and that I need to have a voice. And that also led me to, like, read Shia philosophers who talked about how the story, these stories of justice relate to politics and helped me to identify then. And then again, to me, it's interesting, the circles that come, right? It's like, went from this political event to this, like, spiritual crisis to this, like, spiritual journey, which brought me back to my politics to say, like, well, my faith also says that these are not conversations that you have theoretically. These are fights that you have to be in. We have to stand up for each other, and that there is this literal story of how to engage, how to show up for each other. And so much of it is about community. And really, again, show, it's a showing up for people, for your people, for each other.

[27:12] SABIHA BASRAI: Thank you for reminding me about how our Shia roots are a motivation for doing social justice work. And I think so much of my early part of my life, I compartmentalized my muslim practice from my political work, from my feminist values and whatnot. And you've helped me reground myself in these stories and these lessons from our history. And so I now can actually understand my practice of being a Shia Muslim is, like, I express that practice, yes, in doing these rituals that we have done our whole lives, but also showing up for social justice movements today. Right. So, like, what does it mean to show up in Oakland to support, you know, police abolition in the wake of police shootings? What does it mean to participate in solidarity actions in lifting up justice in Palestine or supporting yemeni activists who are calling for an end to the bombing and the saudi led war? Like, what are. What does it mean in practice? And can, when we commemorate Karbala during the days of Muharram and Ashura, bring our grief and memory of the prophet's family to today? And what you said earlier, too, about experiencing life in the quote unquote muslim world, where I've really only experienced, substantively experienced life in diaspora in California, being, at least for the month I was in Saudi Arabia for Hajj, I was recognizing that there were just so many different ways to be Muslim. And when we talk about conflict and terrorism and fundamentalism, it is actually between Muslims, like, struggling with each other on who's going to get to write that next chapter of what our faith looks like on a global scale and on a more intimate scale. And the idea, the dominant narrative that continues to kind of play out in the United States of it's the west versus the muslim world, or it's kind of progressive values versus these backward fundamentalist values, is just false. That's not what's happening at all. And if anything, what we're doing as kind of feminist Shia women doing the work that we do in the kind of organizing left spaces in the Bay Area are the primary targets for anybody who's kind of in a fundamentalist agenda. So I love that we get to be subversive together and dangerous in that way to the patriarchy, and can find ways to talk about those dynamics without lending fuel to the fire of Islamophobia in the United States, which has often been a big fear of mine when we kind of really get into the conversations like this about our personal relationships within our religious practice.

[30:37] FARAH MAHESHRI: Yeah. And I mean, it is, again, it's that I feel the freshman Farah even now, being like, don't say anything bad about Muslims, ever. In public, you're feeding into this narrative.

[30:51] SABIHA BASRAI: We're ambassadors for the entire faith, every.

[30:54] FARAH MAHESHRI: Muslim everywhere in the world. But I think, again, to me, it comes back to over and over again, it is the forces of justice versus the forces of injustice. And I think one of the things I realized right after Trump's election, actually during the, like, inauguration and women's march protests, was even in the orthopraxy, the, like, rituals that we do, how much overlap there is between majaluses or, you know, commemorative, like, moments where there are hymns or chants that everyone does. Like, there are practices that I'm like, they're not that different from street protest. Right?

[31:37] SABIHA BASRAI: That is such a beautiful metaphor, because when I was just, when you said Trump, I just, my mind went to the San Francisco airport protest, and we were all there shouting, no ban, no wall, sanctuary for all. And there was no amplification there. So we had to repeat each other's words so it could kind of resonate throughout the airport. And there was a part of me that felt like a muscle memory around.

[32:06] FARAH MAHESHRI: We learned how to do this as kids at Masjid, at mosque, right? This is navigating towards street spaces and being able to build community organically. This is what religion taught us from a very early age. And the power in ritual and that power of showing up over and over again, even on the days when you're really tired, even on the days when you'd rather not, and how powerful that is. And I think about especially the role you play in the Bay Area left. So much of it has been marked by the fact that you do show up. Everyone knows that you will be there. Right. And I can only imagine the number of times that you've been like, oh, I don't want to. But these are the things that we have been taught as children, is that sometimes you just. You show up because, you know, the community needs you.

[33:01] SABIHA BASRAI: Yeah, we're part of these movements that are bigger than ourselves. We're accountable to them and we love them. And there's life lessons that we got from our childhood and that mark us together that continue to inform the way we grow into our adulthood.

[33:20] FARAH MAHESHRI: And I think for me, and again, you mentioned community a couple of times. For me, community is also about accountability. Right. Community is not just about supporting each other unconditionally. Community is about pushing and saying, where is your analysis? Not deep enough. I know you helped me in my abolitionist analysis so much of helping me get to a place to stand up for abolition. And that is the number of times that I think it's easy to think about walking away from a relationship, a friendship, and choosing to stay in it, choosing to believe that we can be there for each other and holding each other accountable in these not, like, punitive ways, but come from places of love and joy and support and friendship that is also really powerful that I'm very thankful that, again, we grew up in these practices that helped us build the muscle memory to be able to do that.

[34:24] SABIHA BASRAI: Oh, yes, so true. And that's. You have also taught me so much at times when I felt confused and frustrated. And you've helped remind me of, where do these practices come from? And your deep knowledge of history and your lived experience of being in places that I have never gotten to live in has helped pull me back into the best version of myself as a Muslim. And I'm also really glad that our, you know, our parents have, you know, had deep friendships, and we've known each other's families, and we've kind of seen the way that. That our relationship, like, ripples out and is informed by the relationships of our kind of blood and chosen family in the container that still exists. That is like, that original Marcus from the 1980s in Fremont.

[35:25] FARAH MAHESHRI: Yeah. And it is fun that our parents were our friends, our grandparents knew each other. Even though your family remained in India. My family moved to Pakistan. And I think that, for me, is part of it is the religious identity and the spiritual practice grounds me with my ancestors in a way. That part of aging, I think, increasingly feels more profound and more valuable. And this notion of knowing that we, as bad as things are now, like, we are not alone in this fight or this journey and that. Yeah, I think that there's just something so beautiful about it that I am. I now feel like I've gone from that place of, like, being like, oh, I must be a representative for Muslims to being like, I am so proud and so privileged to be able to speak about my religious identity in political and non political spaces. And I've like, yeah, it's been a privilege to be on a journey, just in general.

[36:36] SABIHA BASRAI: Well, thanks for being on that journey with me. I'm looking forward to all the continued learning and growth we get to do with each other. And I'm so grateful to be your friend.

[36:48] FARAH MAHESHRI: Likewise. And I do think, again, it's like, it's fun now to think about what comes next.

[36:53] SABIHA BASRAI: Right?

[36:54] FARAH MAHESHRI: Like, what do the next 2040 years look like? And some of it, as you said, already is continuing the internationalism and, like, being able to weave these narratives of how our struggles are connected and hopefully a lot of food and fun as well, because, really, what's community without food?

[37:17] SABIHA BASRAI: Yes, always. Yeah, we always. We'll make another cup of chai now.

[37:21] FARAH MAHESHRI: Yeah, it.