No longer left at the door
by Dr. Ruba Zeidan
For a long time, entry came with an unspoken price. Soften the accent. Shorten the name. Leave some part of yourself at the door. Something about that bargain appears to be changing.
Arab and Muslim faces are gradually entering spaces that, a generation ago, seemed locked to people like us: Politics, Music, City halls, Mainstream culture. What feels new is not simply that they are in these spaces. It is that some of them are going in without first making themselves smaller.
Take Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. He has gone by Abdul since childhood. Yet after he won Michigan’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, his full name suddenly acquired political usefulness for his opponents. Republicans began emphasising “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed” with the sort of deliberate pronunciation that turns a name into an argument. The irony is hard to miss: the shortened name once made entry easier, and the full one can still be summoned to suggest that its owner does not quite belong.
El-Sayed won anyway, after a brutally expensive primary in which tens of millions of dollars were spent supporting his opponent, much of it through a super Public Affairs Committee (PAC) backed by the American Israel PAC. More importantly, he did not get there by carefully stepping around Gaza. His criticism of US American support for Israel was one of the most contentious issues in the race, and he faced it directly. That doesn’t mean American politics has suddenly become hospitable to Arab or Muslim candidates; the attacks on El-Sayed since his victory make clear it hasn’t. What matters is that silence was not the entrance fee to the primary.
Some two thousand miles to the west, Marwan Abdelhamid, who performs as Saint Levant, has been testing a version of the same proposition from a very different stage. At Coachella, the music festival in California, before an audience that had not necessarily come to hear about Palestine, he spoke about being born in Jerusalem and raised in Gaza. Then the music resumed.
There are legitimate questions about this kind of politics: can Palestine become an aesthetic? Can the keffiyeh, the Arabic lyrics, the flags and the collective exhilaration of a concert turn something devastatingly real into something consumable? The question deserves to be asked. Still, when thousands of young people who came to dance find themselves chanting for a free Palestine, something else is happening too. Art does not liberate land, and visibility does not alter a balance of power by itself. But culture has always had ways of entering rooms before politics catches up.
Britain offers an older version of this story. When Sadiq Khan became mayor of London in 2016, the fact that a Muslim son of Pakistani immigrants could lead one of the world’s most recognisable cities was itself treated as extraordinary. A decade later, Khan is serving his third term. He speaks of being English and European, of his Pakistani and Asian heritage, and of being Muslim, without presenting those identities as contradictions that need resolving. That distinction matters more than it might appear, because the older model of integration often contained a quiet demand: choose which part of yourself the public is allowed to see. Khan’s career has not made Islamophobia disappear; he has faced plenty of it. But it has helped make something else ordinary: the sight of a Muslim politician occupying one of Britain’s most visible offices without his faith being treated as something that must remain outside City Hall.
Then came Zohran Mamdani. He is not Arab. He was born in Kampala to Indian-Ugandan parents. Yet his rise in New York belongs in this story precisely because there is no single Arab identity here, and no single Muslim one. For decades, Arabs and Muslims in Western public life were flattened into remarkably few roles: the voiceless victim, the threatening outsider, occasionally the reassuring success story whose acceptability depended on how little discomfort he caused. The people occupying these spaces now are harder to arrange so neatly. Saint Levant can wear a keffiyeh over a body moving to raï and funk.
El-Sayed can run for the Senate while openly challenging American policy towards Israel. Mamdani can occupy City Hall as a Muslim democratic socialist. Khan can describe himself as English, European, Pakistani, Asian and Muslim without choosing which identity is the footnote. They are not politically identical, they do not speak for one community, and they should not be asked to. That plurality is part of what has changed.
Part of the answer may be generational. A generation of Arabs and Muslims grew up without waiting for an intermediary to explain them. The smartphone changed something fundamental: you could record your own street, tell your own story, watch the distance between what was being said about you and what you knew about yourself. You no longer needed a Western broadcaster to translate your reality, or an official institution to make your language sufficiently diplomatic before it travelled. That generation learned to speak before anyone handed it a microphone, which may explain why these moments are directed at two audiences at once. When Saint Levant speaks about Gaza from a festival stage, the audience is not only the Western crowd in front of him. When El-Sayed refuses to apologise for positions deemed electorally dangerous, the message travels well beyond Michigan. When Mamdani takes office in New York, young Muslims elsewhere are watching too. They are seeing something previous generations saw far less often: people entering the room without first asking which parts of themselves must remain outside.
There is a danger in becoming too enchanted by that image. Representation can become its own sedative. A familiar face reaches a festival stage, a Senate primary or City Hall, and we mistake visibility for power. It is not. A Palestinian flag at a concert does not end an occupation, and a Muslim mayor does not dismantle Islamophobia on his own. One election, however striking, does not undo decades of American policy. The stage is not the ground, and El-Sayed still has a general election ahead of him.
So perhaps the change is narrower than it first appears. The balance of power has not shifted simply because different faces now appear on the screen. The conditions of entry, however, may be shifting. For a long time, entering these spaces seemed to require a bargain: become slightly less recognisable to yourself in order to become more acceptable to everyone else. That bargain has not disappeared. Some people have simply begun refusing it and getting through anyway. Perhaps that is the real shift: a name that once had to be shortened at the door is becoming one of the things that opens it.
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