hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm happy to be chatting with Musa algardi he is a sociologist an assistant professor at Stony book already a very well-known public intellectual and October 8th is the publication date for his new and excellent book we have never been woke the cultural contradictions of a new Elite I'm very happy to have blurbed it Musa welcome thank you so much for being
here it's uh and thank you so much for your kind words on on the book I'm sure you've been thinking about this question but how much is the distribution of wokeness amongst the elites as we saw maybe three or four years ago is that something sociologically necessary or was that extremely contingent and dependent on a whole host of factors ranging from zero interest rate policy to the rise of
trump uh covid and other matters are we out of that moment already I I do think uh so I have I have uh published an essay where I argued the great awokening um does seem to be uh winding down um in the in the book I argue um looking at a lot of different empirical measures and in some of my other published research before the book but I argue that um it seems like starting after 2011 um uh
with race gender and sexuality and stuff but starting a year before that with occupy Wall Street and things like this um but but basically starting after around 2010 there was this um significant shift among knowledge economy professionals and how we talk and think about social justice issues uh but that does seem to have peaked um around uh around 2021 looking at the measures that I was looking at in the book seems like a lot
of those those are on the decline now yeah do we have a single coherent theory that explains both the rise of the great awokening and its apparent fragility I can see that it's easy to explain either of those but how do we do both yeah uh so in the in the book um one of the things that um I argue in the book that I think is really important for contextualizing the current moment is
that uh this current period of of Rapid change and how knowledge economy professionals talk and think about social justice and the ways we engage in politics and all of this um this moment is actually a case of something as I as I show in the book looking at the same kinds of empirical measurements we can see that actually um there were three previous cases of um episodes of kind of great awokening uh uh and by comparing
and contrasting these cases we can get insight into questions like why do they come about why do they end um do they influence do they change anything longterm and so on and so to that question um kind of why did they come about why did they end um it seems like from my from what I what I argue in the book is there seems to be kind of uh two elements that are important predictors um for when an awokening U
might come about um one of them is that they tend to happen during moments of uh Elite overproduction when it becomes particularly acute um which is uh this is a term drawn from uh Jack Goldsmith and Peter turchin for people who are who are not already familiar with it um which is uh basically when Society starts producing um more people who think that they should be Elites uh then we have capacity to actually make
give those people the lives they feel like they deserve so uh we have growing numbers of people who did everything right they um did all the extra curriculums they got good grades in school they graduated from college even from the right college and the right Majors but they they're having a hard time uh you know getting the kinds of six-figure jobs they expected they can't buy a house they're not being able to
get married and live the kind of standard of living their parents had and so on when you have growing numbers of elite and Elite aspirants that find themselves in that position um then what they tend to do is uh grow really dissatisfied but that problem hasn't gone away right the academic job market is still gladed homes cost more than they used to and yet the great awokening is much weaker and that gets to my point
about how do we explain the contingency yeah I mean by some by by some of the measures actually uh there there has been Improvement I mean the academic job market is uh tough and has um and will probably continue to be tough for these kind of deeper structural reasons related to um growing emphasis on contingent labor and so on and so forth but um but it does seem like the uh uh I argue in the in the
book and in some of my other uh public work that there there there do seem to be some indicators that the the kind of the worst part of the 2010's crunch um seems to uh seems to be uh fading out a little bit and so that's that's one of the things that you might expect would correlate with a great awokening um tapering but the other thing uh another thing that's really um important that that ultimately leads
these Awakenings to fizzle out is that um at the end like so the elite overproduction creates the motive right it creates the motive for a lot of these Elites to condemn the prevailing order and the people who are at the top and who were successful and to try to purge some of those people create room for themselves so on okay so they have a motive um but they don't always have the means um and this is because um as as
Sheamus Khan and others have argued uh there's this kind of counter cyclical nature of Fortunes between Elites and non- Elites so when when um times that are uh relatively good for Elites when the goods and services that they can acquire are they have a lot of um power over workers to to get goods and services at cheap uh rates and things like this um anyway so times that are good for Elites tend to be a little tougher for
ordinary workers but on the flip side um times that are tough for Elites uh tend to be pretty decent for a lot of other people um and so it's hard for Elites to get anyone to care um if they're having a tough time in a lot of circumstances uh but there are some moments when these trajectories get collapsed when things have been kind of bad and worse for ordinary people for a while and all of a
sudden they're bad for a a non-trivial share of Elites too um and those are the moments when when the awokening uh T because you have a large share of the public a large swads of the public that is also um frustrated and wants to see some kind of change and this creates a kind of opening for these frustrated Elites but but how does that match with the timing so real wages for lower earners have been going up pretty well
since some point from the Trump Administration uh Equity prices are still high it seems like pretty good for both groups and the inflection point of when real wage started going up for a broader category of Americans that doesn't match to either the beginning of wokeness or its recent decline yeah yeah so those are um there are other factors that play So I I argue those are just two of the the kind of um
uh bigger predictors one of the reasons why Awakenings um fizzle out is so um when you have these this this moment where these two things come together um then uh then that creates the conditions for the awokening to to take off but as far as like uh but one problem is that as it rolls on um there there um these alliances between frustrated people who want to be Elites and other people um they tend to be kind of unstable they're
unstable in part because at the end of the day what a lot of the uh earthw Elites want to do is they want to be Elites like that's proba that's the main thing they're concerned about they want to find a way to get themselves in the elite structure um practically speaking that's what motivated a lot of their activism and so when some of them do manage to get folded in they tend to disengage um and and uh and so that's
one one thing and then there tend to be tensions within a lot of organizations between symbolic capitalists and um uh what you might call normies uh because we tend to to talk and think about a lot of social problems in ways that are very different from other people we tend to go about politics in a different way than other people and this alienates um people um and so you start seeing these
kinds of internal tensions develop within social movements and this is also one of the reasons why they just can't sustain themselves is because the the Coalition itself is kind of uh unstable uh in in a in a deep way and this is one of the reasons why Awakenings um typically don't result in revolutions uh if they go on um Beyond a certain period of time they just uh they have a hard
time retaining their coherence let me give you an alternate theory of the great awokening and tell me what's wrong with it it's not really my view but I hear it a lot so on the left there's some long-term investment in teaching in America's top universities so you produce a lot of of troops who could become journalists and they're mostly left leaning and then 2011 2012 there's something about the interaction of
social media and say the New York Times and other major Outlets where all of a sudden they have a much bigger incentive to have a lot of articles about race gender black lives matter what ever and when those two things come together wokeness takes off based on a background in Christianity and growing feminization of society by the time you get to something like 2021 enough of mainstream media has broken down that it's simply social
media out there going crazy and that just gives us a lot of diversity of bizarre views rather than just sheer wokeness and besides Elon is owning Twitter so wokeness ends what's wrong with that account yeah um so for one I I do think that some of the factors that you identified are um important for contextualizing the current moment so for instance a lot of the symbolic professions as you like law and
Consulting Academia journalism they are being feminized and um I I I do talk a bit in the book about how um uh this matters for understanding the Dynamics in a lot of these institutions not just over the last 10 years but over the last um uh you know several decades uh in part because uh women and men uh tend to engage in very different forms of kind of status seeking and competition and things like that um and uh so that does
matter um things like social media obviously uh um do change the way interactions play out but you can see actually that um things like social media or Trend uh changes in the media landscape after 2010 um one limitation for using those kinds of uh explanations to explain the current moment is that it becomes hard then to understand um how or why it was the case that there were three previous episodes
like this uh one in the 1920s to the early 30s one in the mid 1960s to the late '70s and then one in the late 80s through early '90s in all cases where we didn't have social media where the media where the structure of media Enterprises was importantly different than it is today um and it before you had you know gen Z kids these days with their idiosyncratic attitudes or before a lot
of these professions were as feminized as they were today so I think all of those factors you said actually do matter and they're they they actually they matter in the sense um because each of these episodes you know there's so much in common like an insane amount when you read the book and and I walk through some of these like I think a lot of readers will be troubled Maybe by how similar these episodes are but they're
also importantly different um they're they they they don't play out identically they are importantly different the role that symbolic capitalists um occupy in soci Society changed immensely over the last century the constitution of these fields has changed immensely uh you know there are a lot more women there are a lot more non-white people uh in these professions than there were in the past um and so on
and so forth so all of those all of those factors you you you described I think they actually do they do um matter for especially for understanding the ways in which this period of awokening Might differ um from previous episodes but I don't think they explain why awokening happen at all so if woke recurs do you think there's a ratchet effect where it comes back bigger and stronger each time a bit like the
destructiveness of war or is it more of a random walk like the next wave of woke in 37 years you know might be half as strong as the one we just had what's your model yeah I think it's it's kind of a a random walk that that depends a little bit on so what I argue in the book is that the um like so for instance look at the LA when we look at the last period of awokening in the late 80s and
early 90s um it was much less um that was the last time we had these struggles over polit what they call political correctness then or PC culture which um which which we call wokeness today um but uh as I argue in the book it didn't last as long that that awokening it was shorter than most of the others actually um shorter than the one in the 60s shorter than the one after 2010 it was a little shorter um and it also wasn't as
quite as dramatic so I think there are these kind of uh textual factors uh that kind of that that might um that significantly inform kind of how severe it is or how long it it lasts um how long it's able to sustain itself or uh you know how long it is until the the frustrated Elites get enough of them get satisfied that they disengage um so I think it's more of a my guess is that
it's more of a random walk but I'm open to persuasion why does neuroticism seem to be higher on the political left yeah I think um so I think there are a few so I wrote this article for American Affairs um that's called something like how to understand the subjective well-being gap between liberals and conservatives or something like this there is a lot of research um going back decades and across societies and
cultures um that seems to suggest that uh a lot of forms of of neuroticism and also um things like depression and anxiety other other things like this um do seem to be more pronounced among people who uh self-identify with left ideology the question um is is it something um is there some kind of same similar factors that kind of um drive people towards uh that kind of predispose people towards um neuroticism and also
predispose them towards leftism or is there some way in which Progressive ideology might feed into neuroticism for instance by um so in a lot of uh social justice oriented spaces uh there's there's research that white people um who in who when they engage with minorities white progressives when they engage with minorities they shift a lot they do things like competence downshifting which is like when white
when white conservatives talk to minorities they talk about them and you ask them like what what's your job what do you do what do they they answered those kinds of questions to whether they're talking to a black person or a white person for for progressives and liberals um if you when they're talking to a white person they'll give a more sophisticated answer about what it is they do and what you know but then when
they're talking to a black person even someone who's who's um you know even when you kind of control class markers and stuff they they downshift they talk in simpler language and they kind of uh in a way that's kind of patronizing um and and you see this in a range of studies uh that white liberals tend to be more conscious of um of race and and therefore change uh in a more dramatic way how they
engage with non-whites versus whites and so this kind of rumination like oh am I am I possibly offending someone am I am I saying the right thing what is this person thinking of me do they think I'm racist do they think I'm a good Ally so there's there is probably a sense in which um sometimes people internalizing this uh Progressive um these Progressive commitments and really wanting to be a good Ally and wondering if they're a
good Ally and wondering if the people that they're trying to Ally with perceive them to be a good Ally and stuff like that can um can kind of uh feed into um kind of feeded so so it could be that the progressive ideology itself kind of exacerbates um uh neuroticism um or it could be that there's something about um if you're already neurotic um that could also like just make these kinds of ideologies more
attractive to you compared to ideologies where you wouldn't worry about what is this other person so I don't you know I think the relationship there is uh unclear it's interesting is it a common driver's thing is it a but one thing I will say um that I do talk about a little bit in the book is that the symbolic professions um in virtue of gatekeeping who becomes part of them by college
degrees and and as a result of other factors uh like the socioeconomic the kind of community symbolic capitalist tend to grow up and etc etc um it it it is the case that the people who get folded into the symbolic professions are very um tend to think about the social world at all times even when we're not in periods of awokening they they they tend to um have very idiosyncratic um kind of psychological profiles and
modes of Engagement in politics that are very different than most people we tend to be more ideological in general uh we tend to be more kind of extreme we're more likely to hold extreme political views um in some ways we're more dogmatic more conformist we're very conscientious uh on the on the positive side um and we tend to um be more cognitively sophisticated and and so on and so there are these kind of um so the
professions themselves select for this unusual kind of slice of society to begin with uh and then um how that relates to um the the the the views we hold I think is a really interesting question um and I'm not I'm not completely sold on an answer yet how would a great awokening look be different and be different in a Muslim Society yeah I mean one of the things that's interesting is when you when you I didn't get a chance to
talk about this too much in the book um because uh you know space you can't talk about everything but but one one thing that is interesting is that uh when you look at uh internationally um there do seem to have been a kind of parallel movements uh worldwide in a lot of symbolic capitalist spaces and in a lot of um uh symbolic capitalist among symbolic capitalists in a lot of international context so for instance the black lives
matter movement had if you go to symbolic um symbolic hubs around the world including places like so South Korea where there's not really a meaningful percentage of black people in South Korea um but they had black lives matter protests and um and the same thing with uh Occupy Wall Street protests or Meo or the March for science they played out in a lot of these um very uh heterogeneous International
context but mostly among but in all cases almost exclusively among symbolic capitalists and in symbolic economy hubs um and so it seems like um there are uh there are this set of kind of um commonalities in terms of our politics in terms of our interests in terms of our social position other things like that that um do seem to uh do seem to allow uh that do seem to drive kind of similar things how not
identical okay so how would things play out in a Muslim Society specifically um and how would it maybe be different from um so there I think you know in one in one way and I suspect and actually I don't need to suspect it is just the case that in a lot of U Muslim societies like say when you if you look at turkey and um uh they had they had a number of protests uh related to like the erdoan government
and some um perceived uh kind of oppressive or or kind of power grabbing moves by erdogan and his Coalition that were unrelated to the to the great awokening they were about like this guy is doing this thing right now and we think it's bad um but uh but it but it is the case when you look at some of the protest movements that have happened in places like Istanbul um that that that are more connected to the kind of
globish uh protest movements that you that you see in America um even in those contexts uh things like um pushing for feminism or or gay rights um while much riskier and more controversial uh in a in a in a place like Istanbul um than in you know uh London you do actually see some of those elements around gender and sexuality and stuff um playing out in these movements one thing that's different is that
justification is sometimes less um sometimes it's it's like purely you know pretty secular people who are participating in it as well um because in in a lot of societies and cultures not just in the United States um uh symbolic capitalists are often uh kind of less oriented towards especially traditional forms of religion um but uh and actually this is one thing that I think is interesting and I think this goes to the
heart of what you were asking about in some way is there is this interesting relationship um between wokeness and kind of um protestantism you can say yeah yeah puritanism even yes um it's an interesting historical relationship and it's also there's this kind of like really interesting uh and profound I I think um relationship between the Social Gospel of um uh you know kind of white Anglo sax and Protestants in in the
United States and and and uh uh the UK and so on and um and and a lot of what we understand to be um less today but put aside stanbul which is a kind of Bridge City to the way I went to cona turkey I visited the grave of roomi on paper you could even argue roomie is fairly woke as a poet as a thinker but I didn't feel much woke in cona I mean what is it about Islam that insulates it from woke or would you not
agree with that conclusion yeah I mean I think um so again I I do think like at least part of the story is that there is this relationship um historically Al and so on between what you might call weird culture and um wokeness and also what you might uh think of as kind of uh and and and kind of anglo-saxon protestantism and wokness I do think there is there is kind of um this interesting set of relationships um and
they're actually kind of that's actually that's a really interesting thing to say because like actually um so part of Joe uh Joe henrik's argument in the weirdest people of the the world is that actually what sets what sets weird Society what what kind of create um helped push for these kind of unique ways of thinking about Society in the world was actually not protestantism it was the C the Catholic Church's kind of
marriage and family program um that forbid things like cousin marriage and and uh and had all of these um other kind of uh um forbid polygyny and concubines and all this and had these kind of other Downstream effects and he shows that actually places that the Catholic Church um had had kind of stronger and more pronounced um rule over um are actually more characteristically weird um and so I
think that that story that uh um Henrich tells sits at an interesting angle with what I just said about protestantism but I think both are actually true I'm just not sure how to exactly reconcile him okay but um either way uh so so the point is um uh most Islamic societies and actually not just Islamic societies but even um socities like China and so on um have uh a lot of um have importantly different uh kind of
cultural historical heritages uh maybe not as different as I wrote a I wrote a piece for uh for a sociology Journal socius uh um about uh social science during the Islamic Commonwealth period uh and um one of the big arguments um that I make in that uh paper is that a lot of the ways that we understand a lot of the associations that people have today about Islamic culture and how it's different from the
west and why it's different from the West um a lot of these these Trends are actually um some of them have kind of deep long-standing historical Roots but some of them are actually more of more contemporary um vintage do you think that you being a Muslim makes you a more perceptive Observer of the great awokening because you're coming at it quite from the outside in some way um well I mean I'm a convert to
Islam though so I was I was raised in uh I was raised in the United States um by um by non-muslim parents uh in a military town in a military community and uh and I came to to Islam later uh it might be that there's some um although you know my wife is uh is uh Lebanese and um and so and and she grew up most of her life in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon and other places like that although she she did spend a non-trivial
share of her childhood in the states as well but but Al to say um there might be some kind of a cultural disconnect from from a lot of other but I'll say there's this tendency in the social sciences especially in my field which I uh which I don't love where um you'll see social theorists make an argument about how it might be that some particular set of society might have unique sight over Society compared to
most other Americans and it just tends to always be the specific slice of society that the theorists themselves belongs to and so it ends up being a story about like why am I smarter than everyone else why can I see things that everyone else I'm not a Muslim you might see things I don't right no no well and so here's the thing is I think it's actually true I think it's actually true that people of um with different kinds
of life experiences and backgrounds and values and commitments um do perceive uh and reason about the world in sometimes in non-trivially different ways and this is why I've long been Affiliated um with an organization called heterodox Academy that that one seeks to to kind of research on that point and I've done some research on that point myself um but then also uh tries to encourage you
know institutions to fold in a wider and engage with a wider range of of thought and perspectives and stakeholders and stuff like this I actually do think there's there's truth to that broad point that you you and I probably do perceive and reason about the world in different ways in no small part because we have very different life experiences very different commitments social ties social networks and all of that that
seems perfectly possible to me I just don't want to um I have I just have an aversion to uh narratives that implicitly or not uh uh or or directly um seem to that that again that are common in in my field um that seem to that that argue that there's some subset of people who have like especially acute understandings of the social World rather than the point that I that I made and that I I think
you also make which is that we all have actually partially ins situated knowledge and by kind of cramming our stuff together we get a really um we get a much more uh complete comprehensive um nuanced understanding of the world that seems true to me I don't think it's true though that like you know Muslims or people who are um mixed race in the case of uh or or other like depending on what these narratives are um have some kind
of like special Insight am I correct in thinking of you as a black Muslim as opposed to merely a Muslim who is Black yeah I think that seems right uh well yeah so there is this um you know there is this kind of interesting indigenous uh culture it's so one thing that's interesting if you look at Islam in America or or you look a lot of um a lot of uh mosques and and kind of Muslim communities in America are kind of
geared around immigrants and the Immigrant experience because a lot a huge share of the Muslim portion in the United States are first second um sometimes third generation immigrants but people um who haven't um haven't been in the united you know families that haven't been in the United States for as long as you know for for generations to generations and so on um but there is this kind of um an
exception to that General pattern is that there is a uh although Muslims have been in the United States since since the be I mean the the founders were were writing about Islam and Muslims um in fact using Muslims as a as kind of a limit case for tolerisation there's this kind of longer indigenous Heritage uh more more indigenous more uniquely American um Heritage of uh Islam in the in the black community
among American descendants of slaves black community um and uh yeah and so I think that's interesting now I come at this from a great distance obviously white not really religious my impression from a distance is that in the 1970s uh Nation of Islam being a black Muslim it was a quite significant significant movement but since then it's been dwindling is that wrong like set me straight like I know you know more about
this than I do I mean I don't think it's I think it's dwindling in the sense that some of the leaders associated with that movement um uh like have been discredited so even Malcolm X himself who was one of the key spokes people for the um for the kind of politically oriented arm of of um kind of uh black Muslim culture grew alienated from people like Louis farakhan over the course of his life and
came to see people like farakhan as corrupt as preaching this kind of gospel this kind of anti-white um anti-semitic gospel that's out of step with Islam as as as he came to understand it when he went on um on on ha and stuff um he he came back from the Middle East with a completely different more universalistic oriented approach to Islam um and began to kind of go to war with farakhan and
others and um and then he was killed um so I think so I think things like the assassination of Malcolm X and the gradual discrediting of people like um Lou Faron have have made it such that um like there's not really a black Muslim uh political force uh in like a politically mobilized activist base of uh of kind of black Islam in the way that there was in the 60s and' 70s um but there are a lot of but there but
there do continue to be a lot of um black Muslims it's just that they're not tied to this kind of weird political structure that was the case in the as they were in the 60s and so say you were to try to explain to me some mix of either the Theology of black Muslims or the appeal of being a black Muslim compared say to Sunni Islam so take Islam for granted what's the Cas you would make for it trying to persuade
someone or just illuminate what what the appeal is well I mean most most most Muslims in uh most black Muslims in America are are Sunni um I guess one of the things that's different um I mean the difference is just more more cultural right um so again for for for most other um kind of Muslim communities in America they're just um they're they're kind of um interesting Mish mashes of of um in
fact a lot of them are actually more specialized so uh so there are a lot of mos in America where most of the people who who attend them are are for instance um Indonesian or where most of the people who attend them are from Pakistan or India um or where most of the you know and so there are there is this kind of interesting ethnic sorting it's not um and I it's actually kind of unfortunate to my mind and uh kind of at
odds with the universalistic me Message of Islam but you see see the same thing in Christian churches in the United States too right you have black churches you have you have kind of uh you have white churches you have churches with specific subsets of white people other churches with different you know so it goes well so I think actually if I'm revisiting the initial question um I would sort myself as a
Muslim who happens to be black rather than a black Muslim but the reason I I answered the question the way that I did in the first case is just because um there's this a deep sense in which I mean I was because I've been black my whole life but I've been Muslim for for uh for a much shorter period of time uh about 15 years now I think um uh so you know I've um and so I guess of the of the two identities um one of them has a um has a
longer standing Association which is probably why the question I did but but now that I understand what you were well kind of what you were getting at a little bit better from the follow-up questions I guess I would understand myself more of a as a Muslim who happens to be black in the sense that I actually um I I think that um there is this kind of longstanding while while I'm kind of
more culturally aligned with like you know um black Muslims in America just because you know again we there's a there's a more um uh more common set of history and culture and all of this um I do uh I I subscribe to a more kind of universalistic view of of what we should be striving to do as Muslims to engage with people across Faith Traditions across ethnic traditions and so on and so forth uh I mean across ethnic lines
and so on and so forth rather than having a kind of parochial inward-looking View at you know at at black people as somehow distinct from everyone else your last name reflects that universalistic view right yeah Al garby yeah yeah uh of the West the Westerner yeah yeah and Musa is Moses Musa is Moses yes why Moses um yeah I and well um you know he's actually uh there's a great book that just came out uh I think
it's Mustafa iol who wrote it uh called the Muslim Moses um uh that's um yeah about you know how across Faith Traditions actually like Moses is a figure of great importance across um uh across all of uh across Islam Christianity and Judaism um as the central figure who helped um you know uh bring the law and and and kind of guide uh guide Believers into the you know down the right path and um yeah and I think
um it's funny so uh so my name is Moses my son I named him Ezra um because in a lot of uh you know because Moses was kind of the bringer of the law Ezra was a restorer of the law or whatever so there's just kind of interesting uh but um yeah so I do agree that there is this kind of universalistic orientation even in the even in my even in my name what is it about Catholic ISM that led you to grow
disillusioned with it yeah so there um that's funny this isn't a thing I've actually talked about yet um but the the core um the core problem that I ended up having is that based on my reading of the scriptures I came to believe that Jesus was not God and did not understand himself to be God and wasn't arguing that he was godm made flesh even some of the words he used to refer to himself like this he constantly referred to
himself as the son of man well in the Torah Ezekiel is repeatedly referred to as son of man not to indicate that he's God incarnate but precisely to remind him that he is not that he is the son of man and um and uh so Jesus adopting that term for himself constantly referring to himself in that way and so on um anyway so in in this and in many other uh ways as I was reading the scriptures I came
to believe that Jes Jesus uh wasn't God and and in principle that's not a way that doesn't rule out Christianity in the early church there were a lot of Christians who didn't believe that Jesus was God who just viewed him as a prophet um uh but in Catholicism didn't go that route and you know the philosopher Quin uh had this theory of uh this kind of um way of talking about our beliefs he described them as a web of these kind of
inter interconnected beliefs where some of them are kind of more Central and where if you kind of tear them out of the thing it they don't just go by themselves they pull a lot of other stuff with them and in the case of um as a Catholic if you reject the idea um that Jesus is god um uh that there if you reject the idea of a trinity of of of one God in three persons um then that changes a a lot it changes the meaning
of sacraments like communion um it changes the meaning of just so much um and so there wasn't really a way to reconcile Catholicism um with the beliefs I came to hold about um Jesus and what his message was and what his intent was and um as I left Catholicism um as I became kind of alienated from Catholicism I gradually came to be alienated from religion for at large and became became a a uh somewhat militant
atheist for a little bit but but that's what started me down the path basically is I I came to conclude from my study of the scriptures that Jesus probably didn't understand himself to be God and that as a consequence the the kind of religious tradition that I've been part of that goes back you know Millennia and um and uh and the the kind of rituals that we participated in that people had been doing around the world
for all of this time and but you could have just become a Jew right or or some variant of that so there's something about the idea of the Quran being a book that is Holy on a very different level of all other books you know Holier and kind than say the Bible Well I think um so yeah so as I was so I was an atheist for a while but then I had this problem where I kind of rationally convinced
myself that religion was garbage and um and uh there was no God but I couldn't make myself like feel it um and so this left me in a dilemma where it's like well um I could just say I'm spiritual but not religious or I could say um but that was kind of intellectually unsatisfying to and spiritually unsatisfying or I could just deny these feelings that I had but that's terrible because then you're like
a bad faith atheist and that's really weird so I started asking myself basically um and so I started looking into other um Faith traditions and and I at some point in this journey I I started reading the Quran and I came to decide that it's a prophetic uh and I came to the conclusion that it was a a prophetic work and so I was like well if I think Muhammad is a prophet and I do believe in God then maybe I'm a Muslim
and so I looked looked into it more and eventually um took the plunge but I don't uh but I but while I do think the Quran is um prophetic work I actually don't think and and actually um the Quran itself is full like over and over and over again it stresses this point actually um that uh the um the Torah uh well actually the the talmud Writ large um I mean sorry uh the Torah yeah the Torah the gospels um I
actually do recognize those as um of equal footing with the I I don't I don't view them as in any way being inferior to um to the Quran I just um and and in fact um I would say that my background in um in Catholicism uh in some ways enriched my understanding of of of the Quran I mean it's a very rich text for people who have familiarity with the um with the Bible uh which U I think is actually
kind of regrettable and unfortunate that um more Muslims are less familiar with Judaism and Christianity um then to my mind they they would be ideal um but uh but yeah so I'm not a um I'm not a Muslim supremacist in that way putting aside ibun calun who do you think is the great sociologist of Islam yeah um so I I so so that paper I mentioned it's called people of the book uh social science and the Islamic Commonwealth
period and um and it focuses that one focuses on on four people alabi um ibun um and uh Al alari and um someone else whose name uh is not coming to me right now but also to say I actually think uh I like Al farabi's work a lot um he he um among other things uh one of the contributions I think is really that's really important of his and is underappreciated um is he's one of the social scientists um he's one of the
people who who he might have been the first person to really come forward with a oh elbon was the other which is wild for me to forget him because he's actually really important but alarabi um actually is important because he Advanced what I think is one of the first um robust social construction theories of religion um and so he tells this uh really kind of um Rich story to explain why it is that religions have so
much commonality but also like why they're importantly different and the story he tells like he's pretty militant in his work or pretty committed in his work to not basing it on scripture um uh to to kind of go from um to make arguments from reason and from kind of looking at the you know making observations of the world around him um but the the story he ends up telling the kind of social
construction narrative he ends up telling about religion is actually very robustly you know reinforced in the Quran itself um which is another thing that I think a lot of Muslims don't fully appreciate is that um the argument that like Al farabi's argument is that religions are are kind of um they're divinely inspired but socially constructed and they're not um and they're kind of um have this origin
and in kind of deep Universal truths but they also are products of particular times and places um that importantly shape how people understand and pursue um and kind of relate to those truths um in ways that can be um in some cases even distorting and limiting and he didn't exclude his own society and culture or his own religious Faith tradition from from that uh from this point as he was making it um yeah so
alfarabi I think is important alberon is actually really great um so he he pioneered um a lot of what we would call today anthropology doing these deep um ethnographic oriented studies of a lot of different societies and cultures um pioneering a lot of imper iCal methods that we use to um that we use to study society today um and also like really important for integrating math into uh for integrating mathematics into social
science because prior to Al like in in Greco Roman culture and even before and even in a lot of other contexts like math other than like traitors you know uh math wasn't used for like practical purposes um so much in fact um a lot of people pooed the idea of using them of trying to and and so um Bron was actually really important in part like a lot of his his work on like comparing chronologies across time I
mean across cultures and across Geographic locations and things like this was really pioneering and integrating mathematics into the social sciences in a way that wasn't commonly done before and so he's he's also really important what do you think of the claim you find this amongst people such as VA Roy that extreme political Islam Today is not a throwback to something fundamentalist but that it's a quite
modern product requiring modern technology and it's this strange creation of the Contemporary world as we know it yeah I think he's absolutely right about that that I I alluded to that I guess um briefly earlier in the conversation where I said a lot of the um narratives and assumptions people make when they when they perceive the differences between like Islam and the West today are actually um of of much
more recent historical vintage than a lot of people um uh might might assume or take for granted um and in fact uh prior to uh prior to that period there was a lot of like Rich interplay between there were tensions between um uh Muslim and Christian societies you know going back centuries um but there was also a lot of Rich very rich um cultural transmission interplay um and and so on and so forth
as well um and uh yeah so I mean there were there were these kinds of shifts um starting in the uh late 19th earliest early 20th century especially um to things like the kind of um uh to the broad global economic order and seeing the development of uh cap ISM seeing you know kind of colonial expansion of um and also the discovery of things like um oil like transformed like when you think about Saudi Arabia
like wahabism was was a kind of was a an offshoot that was prominent among a a you know a small sect of a very poor Society in a poor pretty remote Society in Saudi Arabia and the discovery of things like oil and the transformation of Saudi Arabia from a rural poor Place into a rich P State um that's tied to this kind of aore sfist understanding of religion um was a very geopolitically consequential um development and
completely transformed in a in a very profound ways that are not fully appreciated I think in a lot of these conversations um kind of the nature of the kind of polit geopolitical orientation of Islam in world if we think about European I would call it disillusionment with the assimilation of their Muslim immigrants is your view that they exaggerate the problem or that there's some fundamental difference
between the Muslim and Christian perspectives that just won't be overcome or what what is your take on that I mean I think that there is um I think there are you know no matter what kind of no matter where the migrants are coming from if you have large numbers of people that are um entering a a a different society and culture especially if they're clustering in particular places and kind of forming
um ethnic enclaves and stuff there will be tensions between the long-standing population and the new arrivals and we're seeing this right now in Springfield and Haiti uh being fanned on by the current uh Republican um presidential uh nominees but even before JD Vans and Donald Trump started talking about this um and making it a national issue there were tensions within Springfield between the Haitians and the
and the longstanding and people in Haiti are not Muslim um but that's the um uh that's you know that's a thing that you would expect but don't we know the second generation of Haitians more or less assimilate into being American blacks whether one thinks that's good or not there's a lot of evidence that happens the next generation of Muslims say algerians in France I mean what what should we think will happen there I
think I think that it's it's generally the case that a lot of um times um and and I think this is true across ethnic and religious lines it's that a lot of times um second third generation uh uh people do integrate um a lot more with the mainstream culture in part because um they have strong uh kind of um incentives to do that like if they want a wider friend network if they want to succeed in the professional sphere the
schools that they're going to the the the and so on and so forth all of the there are all sorts of pressures and incentives that incline people to um and on top of that you know frankly uh it's often the case that you know people come to these uh to different countries for a reason because there was Al often something that was um very unsatisfying uh about the the millu that they were living in that was unsustainable or
intolerable and so they come to other countries in search of a different life and and this is also a thing that helps put push people towards actually pursuing um that different life rather than trying to Simply reproduce um you know uh Sudan and France that said there are other there there are elements of their own society and culture um that people do uh from of the society and culture they came from that they think
are actually good and worth preserving or that they think are like I actually think this is a better way of doing things why don't we do it this way here why do we you know um and again these are negotiations that that happen you know um kind of across the board when you have large numbers of of migrants um and so you know I think a lot of these these um tensions will persist so long as
there are continued waves of migration um but will ultimately I'm optimistic that there will be some some equilibrium they'll work themselves out um I think the um the kind of I think one one source of attention in in um in France I think in particular is that France has a and this is why I think um integ um it's sometimes easier for immigrants to integrate in countries like America frankly is France does have this really
aggressive hostile um kind of approach to secularism uh really militant approach to secularism where for instance in some schools they try to push pork on kids um um they they kind of eliminate nonp pork options they say you know uh your kid is either going to eat the the same things as other French kids or they're going to go hungry that's the choice they have or they kind of Outlaw things like um head coverings
even though nuns uh people from Eastern Europe a lot of people were head coverings other than Muslims but in order to prevent Muslims from following their own cultural Traditions they make it so that no one can wear head coverings actually they have partial exemptions to nuns which is interesting and things like no one can wear uh crosses or other forms of religious um uh ornaments in a prominent way so
this kind of militant rather than kind of America's more pluralistic approach um uh you know France has this really militant confrontational approach to dealing with religious minorities that I think drives a lot of the tensions and friends um this because they they do have this really hostile approach towards religion in general especially you know public oriented religion and religious minorities
um that I think is unfortunate um and so I think some of the problems that you see in France are a product of France but I think in other in other cultural context where there's less of that um kind of militant government oriented hostility towards religion um a lot of these things are easier to resolve what's your favorite novel my favorite novel huh you know um that's an interesting question it's been a minute I mean uh
the brothers by dski uh I really love I when I started writing this book and actually really starting when I when I started uh probably when I started my my PhD program I used to read a lot of um fiction um and it's it it had been a while uh I realized as I was writing my book that it had been probably a decade since I had read something that was like purposely fiction I read a lot of and um and so I started and so I picked up
some books by um I had um a couple of books by Umberto EO that I have wanted to read for a long time uh fuos pendulum the name of the Rose um and so I I dove into those I really enjoyed them and so I'm trying to get back into reading uh fiction now but it's um it had been a long time I realized uh what's your favorite movie my favorite movie uh I like a lot of the Charlie Kaufman movies um like um he has
this one uh sity New York that I think is really uh fascinating and and um a lot of fun uh I like Charlie Kaufman Charlie koffman's movies pretty consistently Woody Allen a lot of his movies are great um he you know he's been on a big journey in terms of his film making over the years from this kind of slapstick funny stuff to these kinds of but I think it's all really interesting and and good I love Woody
Allen's movies um yeah last question fiction aside what do you want to learn about next yeah um in the short term um I have a a second book project uh a kind of followup to this one so this book was kind of focused a lot on um knowledge economy professionals on the kind of winners in the knowledge economy on institutions of knowledge production and so on and so forth um and the initial plan for this book when I
pitched it to Princeton was that I was going to do like uh part of the book focused on on us on symbolic capitalists the knowledge economy professionals and then towards the latter end of the book I was going to kind of turn the analytic lens from the winners in the knowledge economy to people who perceive themselves to be the losers people who are more sociologically distant from us
who work who provide physical goods and services to people who um live in smaller towns more rural areas and so on and so forth um and uh it proved untenable to do that in the space of one book in fact even this book even when we split it into two books it was um it still took a little bit of uh um cutting and polishing to get it into the state it's in today um and so the second book what I'll be thinking about for the ne
for the next uh couple of years um are are going to be people who are more more sociologically distant from knowledge economy professionals and trying to look at the struggle between us and them and to understand it in a in a deeper way I mean I've done some provisional work and I do have a lot of um you know pretty tight content um for the second book and I'll be shopping it out to Publishers
after we see how well this one does or not but um but I'm going to be doing of course a lot of research and thinking about um about these tensions in the in the near future and that'll be kind of occupying my brain space I think again I'm a fan of musa's new book we have never been woke the cultural contradictions of a new Elite Musa algari thank you very much thank you for for having me it was a real fun conversation