Corey Robin

Tag: Moustafa Bayoumi

From Red Scare to Socialist Wave, from 9/11 to Mamdani

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If you were to cast your gaze across the America of a hundred years ago, the America of 1925, you would have had many reasons for despair. That was the year that the Second KKK reached its all-time high in membership. The previous year, immigration to the US from all Asian countries was banned, and immigration from southern and eastern Europe (home of Italians, Jews, Poles, and other undesirables) was drastically limited. And behind all that stood the Red Scare, in which Jews, Italians, anarchists, socialists, communists were drummed out of American life in an orgy of violence, mass arrests, and deportations. Just ten years later, those same forces that had been put on their back feet in the 1920s […]

This Muslim American Life: An Interview with Moustafa Bayoumi

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Moustafa Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, where I teach political science. His book, “This Muslim American Life,” came out in September. It’s a fascinating collection of pieces—sometimes hilarious, often unsettling, always probing and provocative—about, well, Muslim life in America, past and present. There’s a mini-memoir about the time Moustafa worked as a Middle Eastern extra on “Sex and the City 2″; a Philip-Roth-like story about his discovery of a terrorist named Mustafa Bayoumi in a detective novel (that really did happen); a loving deconstruction of the Islamic undertones and overtones of John Coltrane’s music (“A Love Supreme” becomes “Allah Supreme”); a harrowing essay on how the American military uses music to terrorize and torture its victims […]