Does Emgage represent the aspirations of the Muslim American community? – A conversation with Azad Essa and Samia Assed

 

Earlier this month, Middle East Eye’s New York-based reporter Azad Essa published a scathing report on Emgage, a prominent US-based Advocacy organization that claims to advocate for American Muslims. It argues that “Emgage’s rise to prominence in the 2020 US election is not a story of a group that advocates for Muslim communities, but rather of one that has served to mute their voices”. The report raises some important and difficult questions. Who gets to speak and advocate for American Muslims? In the name of having a seat at the table, do issues that matter to Muslim Americans get delegitimized by those who claim to speak on their behalf? More importantly, how these actions affect the fight against Zionist ideologies and how they have failed to acknowledge and counter the rise of right-wing Hindutva forces and their role in American elections.

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Suchitra Vijayan is the author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Melville House, New York) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press). She is an award-winning photographer and the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a New York-based magazine of dissent. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University, and is the Chairperson of the International Human Rights Committee. Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric Literature, NPR, NBC, Time, and BBC. As an attorney, she worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo for Iraqi refugees.