“Medina Is a Place of Refuge and Creativity” - Maryam Kashani on Muslim Study and Survival in the Bay Area

This is the first part of a two part conversation with Maryam Kashani on her book Medina By The Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival

It’s a cool book that weaves Maryam’s scholarly ethnographic work with her talents as a filmmaker and a DJ to examine and illuminate various strains of Islam in the San Francisco Bay Area from the Black Power Movement to the so-called war on terror and the rise of the surveillance state. She dubs her approach an “ethnocinematic.”  We discuss legacies of anti-imperialist Islam on Turtle Island as well as more assimilative ways of being. We’ll dig into this more in part 2, but we wanted to make sure to get this part out during Ramadan. 

Kashani is an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition. We’ll include a lengthier bio in the show description.

Believers Bail Out has a fundraiser to bail out Muslims during Ramadan which we will link in the show description. We really encourage folks to kick in what they can to support that initiative. 

The other thing I wanted to make sure to mention is we do talk a little bit about Imam Jamil Al-Amin in this episode. As far as I know he is still trying to get a medical reprieve or an emergency medical transfer as he battles cancer and other health issues. I’m including a couple of links to quick actions you can take to support this revolutionary elder, and veteran of SNCC and the Black Panther Party who has been incarcerated by the US as political prisoner for the last 25 years. Make sure to take a few moments and support those campaigns as well (see below for links).

And lastly, we have a Samir Amin Accumulation on a World Scale Study Group for patrons only. It will start Wednesday the 12th of March and run through June. I’ll include a link with more details in the show description, but space is limited on that so if you want to reserve a spot make sure to sign up today at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism which is also the best place to support our work on this podcast.

Links:

Purchase Medina By The Bay through Massive Bookshop, the bookstore that bails people out of jail.

Imam Jamil Al-Amin Transfer Campaign / Demand Emergency Medical Transfer also check out https://www.imamjamilactionnetwork.org/ and freeimamjamil.com

Samir Amin Accumulation on a World Scale Study Group (7:30 PM Eastern Time US on Wednesdays)

Believers Bail Out use Zakat to bail Muslims out of jail or immigrant detention

Full bio:

Maryam Kashani works from a deep commitment to the aesthetic and political possibilities of experimental filmmaking, music, and the essay form, whether as 16mm films and videos, text/sound/image installations and live performance, DJing, or written monograph. Her work explores the relationships between physical landscapes and the sociopolitical, material, and spiritual histories and forces that emerge with and against them and is concerned with narration and description, archive, and knowledge production with a particular focus on collective study and struggle in and against colonial racial capitalism across local and global geographies. She recently published Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke University Press, 2023), which is an ethnocinematic examination of how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Her films and video installations (http://www.maryamkashani.com/) have been shown at film festivals, universities, and museums internationally, including the Sharjah Biennial, MoMA, Hammer Museum, Chelsea Museum, and the Pacific Film Archive.

Kashani is an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition.