Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor at Stony Brook University whose research explores how people think about, talk about, and produce shared knowledge about race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, and other social phenomena. His new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, examines the rise and fall of wokeness among America’s elites and explores the underlying social forces at play.
Tyler and Musa explore the rise and fall of the “Great Awokening” and more, including how elite overproduction fuels social movements, why wokeness tends to fizzle out, whether future waves of wokeness will ratchet up in intensity, why neuroticism seems to be higher on the political Left, how a great awokening would manifest in a Muslim society, Black Muslims and the Nation of Islam, why Musa left Catholicism, who the greatest sociologist of Islam is, Muslim immigration and assimilation in Europe, and more.
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Recorded September 19th, 2024
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TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone; welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m happy to be chatting with Musa al-Gharbi. He is a sociologist and assistant professor at Stony Brook, already a very well-known public intellectual. October 8 is the publication day 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.
MUSA AL-GHARBI: Thank you so much for being here, and thank you so much for your kind words on the book.
COWEN: 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, COVID, and other matters? Are we out of that moment already?
AL-GHARBI: I have published an essay where I argue that the Great Awokening does seem to be winding down.
In the book, looking at a lot of different empirical measures, and in some of my other published research before the book, I argue that it seems like starting after 2011 with race, gender, and sexuality and stuff — but starting a year before that with Occupy Wall Street and things like this — but basically, starting after around 2010, there was this significant shift among knowledge economy professionals in how we talk and think about social justice issues. That does seem to have peaked around 2021.
Looking at the measures that I was looking at in the book, it seems like a lot of those are on the decline now, yes.
COWEN: 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?
AL-GHARBI: One of the things that I argue in the book, that I think is really important for contextualizing the current moment, is that this current period of rapid change in how knowledge economy professionals talk and think about social justice and the ways we engage in politics and all of this — this moment is actually a case of something. As I show in the book, looking at the same kinds of empirical measurements, we can see that actually there were three previous episodes of great awokenings. By comparing and contrasting these cases, we can get insight into questions like, Why did they come about? Why do they end? Do they influence? Do they change anything long-term? and so on.
To that question — why did they come about, why did they end — what I argue in the book is, there seems to be two elements that are important predictors for when an awokening might come about. One of them is that they tend to happen during moments of elite overproduction, when it becomes particularly acute. This is a term drawn from Jack Goldsmith and Peter Turchin, for people who are not already familiar with it, which is basically when society starts producing more people who think that they should be elites than we have capacity to actually give those people the lives they feel like they deserve.
We have growing numbers of people who did everything right: They did all the extracurriculars, they got good grades in school, they graduated from college — even from the right college in the right majors — but they’re having a hard time 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 elites and elite aspirants that find themselves in that position, then what they tend to do is grow really dissatisfied.
COWEN: That problem hasn’t gone away, right? The academic job market is still glutted. Homes cost more than they used to. And yet the Great Awokening is much weaker. That gets to my point about how do we explain the contingency.
AL-GHARBI: By some of the measures, actually, there has been improvement. The academic job market is tough and will probably continue to be tough for these deeper structural reasons related to growing emphasis on contingent labor and so on and so forth. But I argue in the book and in some of my other public work that there do seem to be some indicators that the worst part of the 2010s crunch seems to be fading out a little bit. That’s one of the things that you might expect would correlate with a great awokening tapering.
Another thing that’s really important, that ultimately leads these awokenings to fizzle out, is that at the end — so the elite overproduction creates the motive. 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 and create room for themselves and so on. So they have a motive, but they don’t always have the means. This is because, as Shamus Khan and others have argued, there’s this countercyclical nature of fortunes between elites and nonelites.
When times that are relatively good for elites — when the goods and services that they can acquire — they have a lot power over workers to get goods and services at cheap rates and things like this. Anyway, so times that are good for elites tend to be a little tougher for ordinary workers, but on the flip side, times that are tough for elites tend to be pretty decent for a lot of other people.
It’s hard for elites to get anyone to care if they’re having a tough time in a lot of circumstances. But there are some moments when these trajectories get collapsed, when things have been bad and worse for ordinary people for a while, and all of a sudden, they’re bad for a nontrivial share of elites too. Then those are the moments when the awokenings tend to — because you have a large share of the public, large swaths of the public that is also frustrated and wants to see some kind of change. This creates a kind of opening for these frustrated elites.
COWEN: How does that match with the timing? Real wages for lower earners have been going up pretty well since some point from the Trump administration. Equity prices are still high; it seems pretty good for both groups. The inflection point of when real wages started going up for a broader category of Americans — that doesn’t match to either the beginning of wokeness or its recent decline.
AL-GHARBI: Yes, yes: There are other factors at play. I argue those are just two of the bigger predictors.
One of the reasons why awokenings fizzle out is, when you have this moment where these two things come together, then that creates the conditions for the awokening to take off. But one problem is that, as it rolls on, these alliances between frustrated people who want to be elites and other people, they tend to be unstable. They’re unstable in part because, at the end of the day, what a lot of the erstwhile elites want to do is they want to be elites. That’s the main thing they’re concerned about. They want to find a way to get themselves in the elite structure, practically speaking. That’s what motivates a lot of their activism.
When some of them do manage to get folded in, they tend to disengage. That’s one thing. There tend to be tensions within a lot of organizations between symbolic capitalists and what you might call normies because we tend 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 people. You start seeing these internal tensions develop within social movements.
This is also one of the reasons why they just can’t sustain themselves, is because the coalition itself is unstable in a deep way. This is one of the reasons why awokenings typically don’t result in revolutions if they go on beyond a certain period of time. They have a hard time retaining their coherence.
COWEN: 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. You produce a lot of troops who could become journalists, and they’re mostly left-leaning. 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, whatever. 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. 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?
AL-GHARBI: For one, I do think that some of the factors that you identified are important for contextualizing the current moment. For instance, a lot of the symbolic professions, like law and consulting, academia, journalism — they are being feminized. I do talk a bit in the book about how this matters for understanding the dynamics in a lot of these institutions. Not just over the last 10 years, but over the last several decades, in part because women and men tend to engage in very different forms of status-seeking and competition and things like that. So that does matter.
Things like social media obviously do change the way interactions play out. But you can see, actually, that things like social media or changes in the media landscape after 2010 — one limitation for using those kinds of explanations to explain the current moment is that it becomes hard, then, to understand how or why it was the case that . . .
There were three previous episodes like this, one in the 1920s through 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 structure of media enterprises was importantly different than it is today, and before you had Gen Z “kids these days” with their idiosyncratic attitudes, or before a lot of these professions were as feminized as they were today.
I think all of those factors you said actually do matter, and they matter in the sense — because each of these episodes, there’s so much in common, an insane amount. When you read the book and I walk through some of these — I think a lot of readers will be troubled, maybe, by how similar these episodes are. But they’re also importantly different. They don’t play out identically. They are importantly different: The role that symbolic capitalists occupy in society changed immensely over the last century. The constitution of these fields has changed immensely. There are a lot more women; there are a lot more nonwhite people in these professions than there were in the past, and so on and so forth.
All of those factors you described: I think they actually do matter, especially for understanding the ways in which this period of awokening might differ from previous episodes, but I don’t think they explain why awokenings happen at all.
COWEN: 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 might be half as strong as the one we just had. What’s your model?
AL-GHARBI: I think it’s random; that depends a little bit on . . .
What I argue in the book is that the — for instance, when we look at the last period of awokening in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was much less — that was the last time we had these struggles over what they call political correctness, or the PC culture, which we call wokeness today. As I argue in the book, it didn’t last as long, that awokening. It was shorter than most of the others, actually. Shorter than the one in the ’60s, shorter than the one after 2010. It was a little shorter, and it also wasn’t quite as dramatic.
I think there are these kind of contextual factors that significantly inform how severe it is or how long it lasts, how long it’s able to sustain itself or how long it is until the frustrated elites get — enough of them get satisfied that they disengage. My guess is that it’s more of a random walk, but I’m open to persuasion.
COWEN: Why does neuroticism seem to be higher on the political Left?
AL-GHARBI: I wrote this article for American Affairs that’s called something like “How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives” or something like this. There is a lot of research, going back decades and across societies and cultures, that seems to suggest that a lot of forms of neuroticism, and also things like depression and anxiety and other things like this, do seem to be more pronounced among people who self-identify with Left ideology.
The question is, Is there some kind of similar factors that predispose people towards neuroticism and also predispose them towards leftism? Or is there some way in which progressive ideology might feed into neuroticism? For instance, by — in a lot of social-justice-oriented spaces, there’s research that white people when they engage with minorities, white progressives when they engage with minorities, they do things like competence downshifting.
Which is, when white conservatives talk to minorities and you ask them, “What’s your job? What do you do?” They answer those kinds of questions the same whether they’re talking to a black person or a white person. For progressives and liberals, when they’re talking to a white person they’ll give a more sophisticated answer about what it is they do, but then when they’re talking to a black person, even when you control class markers and stuff, they downshift. They talk in simpler language and in a way that’s kind of patronizing.
You see this in a range of studies: that white liberals tend to be more conscious of race and therefore change in a more dramatic way how they engage with nonwhites versus whites. This kind of rumination, like, “Oh, am I possibly offending someone? 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?” There’s probably a sense in which sometimes people internalizing 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 feed into . . .
It could be that the progressive ideology itself exacerbates neuroticism, or it could be that there’s something about, if you’re already neurotic, that could also just make these kinds of ideologies more attractive to you compared to ideologies where you wouldn’t worry about what is this other person — I think the relationship there is unclear. It’s interesting. Is it a common drivers thing?
One thing I will say, that I do talk about a little bit in the book, is that the symbolic professions — in virtue of gatekeeping who becomes part of them by college degrees and as a result of other factors, like the socioeconomic communities symbolic capitalists tend to grow up in, etc., etc. — it is the case that the people who get folded into the symbolic professions tend to think about the social world at all times, even when we’re not in periods of awokening.
They tend to have very idiosyncratic psychological profiles and modes of engagement in politics that are very different than most people. We tend to be more ideological in general. We tend to be more extreme. We’re more likely to hold extreme political views. In some ways, we’re more dogmatic, more conformist. We’re very conscientious, on the positive side. We tend to be more cognitively sophisticated and so on. So the professions themselves select for this unusual slice of society to begin with, and then how that relates to the views we hold, I think, is a really interesting question. I’m not completely sold on an answer yet.
COWEN: How would a great awokening look different and be different in a Muslim society?
AL-GHARBI: I didn’t get a chance to talk about this too much in the book because, you know, space. You can’t talk about everything. One thing that is interesting is that when you look internationally, there do seem to have been parallel movements worldwide in a lot of symbolic capitalist spaces and among symbolic capitalists in a lot of international contexts.
For instance, the Black Lives Matter movement had — if you go to symbolic hubs around the world, including places like Seoul, South Korea, where there’s not really a meaningful percentage of black people in South Korea, but they had Black Lives Matter protests. And the same thing with Occupy Wall Street protests or #MeToo or the March for Science. They played out in a lot of these very heterogeneous international contexts, but in all cases, almost exclusively among symbolic capitalists and in symbolic economy hubs. It seems like there are this set of commonalities in terms of our politics, in terms of our interests, in terms of social position, other things like that, that do seem to drive similar things — not identical.
How would things play out in a Muslim society specifically, and how would it maybe be different from — I suspect — and actually, I don’t need to suspect: It is just the case that in a lot of Muslim societies . . .
Like, say, if you look at Turkey, they had a number of protests related to the Erdogan government and some perceived oppressive or power-grabbing moves by Erdogan and his coalition that were unrelated to the Great Awokening. They were about, like, “This guy is doing this thing right now, and we think it’s bad.” But it is the case, when you look at some of the protest movements that have happened in places like Istanbul that are more connected to the global-ish protest movements that you see in America — even in those contexts, things like pushing for feminism or gay rights, while much riskier and more controversial in a place like Istanbul than in London. You do actually see some of those elements around gender and sexuality and stuff playing out in these movements.
One thing that’s different is, the justification is sometimes less — sometimes it’s purely pretty secular people who are participating in it as well, because in a lot of societies and cultures, not just in the United States, symbolic capitalists are often less oriented towards especially traditional forms of religion.
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 ways. There is this interesting relationship between wokeness and a kind of Protestantism —
COWEN: Of course, yes. Puritanism even.
AL-GHARBI: Yes. It’s an interesting historical relationship. There’s this really interesting and profound, I think, relationship between the social gospel of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the United States and the UK and so on and a lot of what we understand to be wokeness today.
COWEN: But put aside Istanbul, which is a kind of bridge city to the West. I went to Konya, Turkey; I visited the grave of Rumi. On paper, you could even argue Rumi is fairly woke as a poet, as a thinker, but I didn’t feel much woke in Konya. What is it about Islam that insulates it from woke — or would you not agree with that conclusion?
AL-GHARBI: Again, I do think at least part of the story is that there is this relationship historically, culturally, and so on between what you might call WEIRD culture and wokeness, and also what you might think of as Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and wokeness. I do think there is this interesting set of relationships. That’s a really interesting thing to say, because actually . . .
Part of Joe Henrich’s argument in The WEIRDest People in the World is that actually what helped push for these unique ways of thinking about society and the world was actually not Protestantism; it was the Catholic Church’s marriage and family program that forbade things like cousin marriage and had all of these other — forbade [polygamy] and concubines and all this, and had all these other downstream effects. He shows that, actually, places that the Catholic Church had stronger and more pronounced rule over are actually more characteristically WEIRD.
I think that that story that 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 them.
Either way, the point is, most Islamic societies — and actually not just Islamic societies, but even societies like China and so on, have importantly different cultural-historical heritages. Maybe not as different as — I wrote a piece for a sociology journal, Socius, about social science during the Islamic Commonwealth period. One of the big arguments that I make in that 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, a lot of these trends — some of them have deep, long-standing historical roots, but some of them are actually of more contemporary vintage.
COWEN: 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?
AL-GHARBI: Well, I’m a convert to Islam, though. I was raised in the United States by non-Muslim parents in a military town, in a military community. I came to Islam later. It might be that there’s some . . . although my wife is Lebanese, and she grew up most of her life in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon and other places like that. Although she did spend a nontrivial share of her childhood in the States as well. But all to say, there might be some kind of a cultural disconnect from a lot of other . . .
But I’ll say there’s this tendency in the social sciences — especially in my field, which I don’t love — where you’ll see social theorists make an argument about how it might be that some particular set of society might have unique insight over society compared to most other Americans. It just tends to always be the specific slice of society that the theorist themselves belongs to. It ends up being a story about, Why am I smarter than everyone else? Why can I see things that everyone else can’t see?
COWEN: But I’m not a Muslim. You might see things I don’t, right?
AL-GHARBI: No, no. Here’s the thing, is I think it’s actually true that people with different kinds of life experiences and backgrounds and values and commitments do perceive and reason about the world sometimes in nontrivially different ways. This is why I’ve long been affiliated with an organization called Heterodox Academy that (1) seeks to research on that point, I’ve done some research on that point myself, but then also tries to encourage institutions to fold in and engage with a wider range of thought and perspectives and stakeholders and stuff like this.
I actually do think there’s truth to that broad point, that 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 plausible to me.
I just have an aversion to narratives that, again, are common in my field, that argue that there’s some subset of people who have especially acute understandings of the social world — rather than the point that I made and that I think you also make, which is that we all have actually partially situated knowledge. By cramming our stuff together, we get a much more complete, comprehensive, nuanced understanding of the world. That seems true to me.
I don’t think it’s true, though, that Muslims, or people who are mixed race in the case of — or other, depending on what these narratives are, have some kind of special insight.
COWEN: Am I correct in thinking of you as a Black Muslim as opposed to merely a Muslim who is black?
AL-GHARBI: Yes, I think that seems right.
Well, there is this interesting indigenous culture. One thing that’s interesting: if you look at Islam in America, or you look at a lot of mosques and Muslim communities in America — are geared around immigrants and the immigrant experience, because a huge share of the Muslim portion in the United States are first-, second-, sometimes third-generation immigrants, but families that haven’t been in the United States for generations and generations as well. But there is this kind of — an exception to that general pattern is that there is . . .
Although Muslims have been in the United States since the beginning. The Founders were writing about Islam and Muslims — in fact, using Muslims as kind of a limit case for tolerism. Like, “We should be able to even tolerate those people.” [laughs]
OK. But there is something interesting about — there’s this longer indigenous heritage, more indigenous, more uniquely American heritage of Islam in the black community among American descendants of slaves, black community. Yes, and so I think that’s interesting.
COWEN: I come at this from a great distance: obviously white, not really religious. But my impression from a distance is that in the 1970s, Nation of Islam, being a Black Muslim, it was a quite significant movement. But since then it’s been dwindling. Is that wrong? Set me straight. I know you know more about this than I do.
AL-GHARBI: I think it’s dwindling in the sense that some of the leaders associated with that movement have been discredited.
Even Malcolm X himself, who was one of the key spokespeople for the politically oriented arm of Black Muslim culture, grew alienated from people like Louis Farrakhan over the course of his life and came to see people like Farrakhan as corrupt, as preaching this kind of gospel — this kind of anti-white, anti-Semitic gospel that’s out of step with Islam as he came to understand it when he went on hajj and stuff. He came back from the Middle East with a completely different, more universalistic-oriented approach to Islam and began to go to war with Farrakhan and others. And then he was killed.
So I think things like the assassination of Malcolm X and the gradual discrediting of people like Louis Farrakhan have made it such that there’s not really a Black Muslim political force, like a politically mobilized activist base of Black Islam, in the way that there was in the ’60s and ’70s. But there do continue to be a lot of Black Muslims. It’s just that they’re not tied to this weird political structure that was the case as they were in the ’60s and ’70s.
COWEN: 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. Take Islam for granted: What’s the case you would make for it? Trying to persuade someone or just to illuminate what the appeal is.
AL-GHARBI: Most Black Muslims in America are Sunni. The difference is just more cultural. Again, for most other Muslim communities in America, they’re interesting mishmashes of — in fact, a lot of them are actually more specialized. There are a lot of mosques in America where most of the people who attend them are, for instance, Indonesian, or where most of the people who attend them are from Pakistan or India, or where most of the — there is this interesting ethnic sorting.
It’s actually kind of unfortunate, to my mind, and at odds with the universalistic message of Islam, but you see the same thing in Christian churches in the United States too. You have black churches, you have white churches, you have churches with specific subsets of white people, other churches with different — so it goes. And so I think, actually, if I’m revisiting the initial question, I would sort myself as a Muslim who happens to be black rather than a Black Muslim. But the reason I answered the question the way that I did in the first case is just because there’s a deep sense in which — because I’ve been black my whole life, but I’ve been Muslim for a much shorter period of time: about 15 years now, I think. I guess of the two identities, one of them has a longer-standing association, which is probably why I answered the question I did.
But now that I understand what you were getting at a little bit better from the follow-up questions, I guess I would understand myself more as a Muslim who happens to be black in the sense that I think that there is this long-standing . . .
While I’m more culturally aligned with Black Muslims in America just because, again, there’s a more common set of history and culture in all of this, I subscribe to a more universalistic view of what we should be striving to do as Muslims: to engage with people across faith traditions, across ethnic lines, and so on and so forth, rather than having a parochial, inward-looking view at black people as somehow distinct from everyone else.
COWEN: Your last name reflects that universalistic view, right?
AL-GHARBI: Yes. Al-gharbi, yes, yes: “Of the West,” “Westerner.” Yes.
COWEN: And Musa is “Moses.”
AL-GHARBI: Musa is “Moses,” yes.
COWEN: Why Moses?
AL-GHARBI: There’s a great book that just came out, I think it’s Mustafa Akyol who wrote it, called The Islamic Moses. Moses is a figure of great importance across Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, as this central figure who helped bring the law and guide believers down the right path.
It’s funny. So my name is Moses; my son, I named him Ezra. Because Moses was the bringer of the law; Ezra was the restorer of the law or whatever, so there’s this kind of interesting — I do agree that there is this kind of universalistic orientation even in my name.
COWEN: What is it about Catholicism that led you to grow disillusioned with it?
AL-GHARBI: That’s funny; this isn’t a thing I’ve actually talked about yet. But 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 God made flesh.
Even some of the words he used to refer to himself — like he constantly referred to himself as the Son of Man. Well, in the Torah, Ezekiel is repeatedly referred to as the 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. [laughs] So Jesus adopting that term for himself, constantly referring to himself in that way, and so on.
Anyway, in this and in many other ways, as I was reading the scriptures, I came to believe that Jesus wasn’t God. And, in principle, 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. But Catholicism didn’t go that route.
The philosopher Quine had the theory of this kind of way of talking about our beliefs. He described them as a web of these interconnected beliefs, where some of them are more central, and if you tear them out of the thing, they don’t just go by themselves. They pull a lot of other stuff with them. In the case of — as a Catholic, if you reject the idea that Jesus is God, if you reject the idea of a Trinity of one God in three persons, then that changes a lot.
It changes the meaning of sacraments like communion. It changes the meaning of just so much. And so there wasn’t really a way to reconcile Catholicism with the beliefs I came to hold about Jesus and what his message was and what his intent was. As I left Catholicism, as I became alienated from Catholicism, I gradually came to be alienated from religion writ large and became a somewhat militant atheist for a little bit.
But that’s what started me down the path, basically, is 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 religious tradition that I’d been part of, that goes back millennia, and the rituals that we participated in, that people have been doing around the world for all of this time.
COWEN: You could have just become a Jew, right? 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. Holier in kind than, say, the Bible.
AL-GHARBI: So I was an atheist for a while, but then I had this problem where I rationally convinced myself that religion was garbage and there was no God, but I couldn’t make myself feel it. This left me in a dilemma where it’s like, well, I could just say I’m spiritual but not religious, but that was intellectually unsatisfying to me 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. [laughs]
So I started looking into other faith traditions. At some point in this journey, I started reading the Quran, and I came to the conclusion that it was a prophetic work. I was like, “Well, if I think Muhammad is a prophet and I do believe in God, then maybe I’m a Muslim.” I looked into it more and eventually took the plunge.
But, while I do think the Quran is a prophetic work, I actually don’t think — and actually the Quran itself is full — over and over and over again, it stresses this point, actually, that the Torah — well, actually the Torah, the gospels: I actually do recognize those as of equal footing with the — I don’t view them as, in any way, being inferior to the Quran. And in fact I would say that my background in Catholicism in some ways enriched my understanding of the Quran. It’s a very rich text for people who have familiarity with the Bible.
I think it’s actually regrettable and unfortunate that more Muslims are less familiar with Judaism and Christianity than, to my mind, would be ideal. So I’m not a Muslim supremacist in that way. [laughs]
COWEN: Putting aside Ibn Khaldun, who do you think is the great sociologist of Islam?
AL-GHARBI: That paper I mentioned — it’s called “People of the Book: [Empire and] Social Science in the Islamic Commonwealth Period.” That one focuses on four people: al-Farabi, Ibn Khaldun, al-Razi, and someone else whose name is not coming to me right now. But, all to say, I like al-Farabi’s work a lot. Among other things, one of the contributions I think that’s really important of his, and is underappreciated, is he’s one of the social scientists, he’s one of the people who — he might have been the first person to really come forward with . . .
Oh, al-Biruni was the other one, which is wild for me to forget him, because he’s actually really important. But al-Farabi actually is important because he advanced what I think is one of the first robust social construction theories of religion. He tells this really rich story to explain why it is that religions have so much commonality but also why they’re importantly different.
The story he tells — he’s pretty militant in his work, or pretty committed in his work, to not basing it on scripture; to make arguments from reason and making observations of the world around him. The story he ends up telling, the social construction narrative he ends up telling about religion, is actually very robustly reinforced in the Quran itself, which is another thing that I think a lot of Muslims don’t fully appreciate: is that al-Farabi’s argument is that religions — they’re divinely inspired but socially constructed.
They have this origin in deep universal truths, but they also are products of particular times and places that importantly shape how people understand and pursue and relate to those truths in ways that can be, in some cases, even distorting and limiting. He didn’t exclude his own society and culture or his own religious faith tradition from this point as he was making it. So al-Farabi I think is important.
Al-Biruni is actually really great. He pioneered a lot of what we would call today anthropology, doing these deep ethnographic-oriented studies of a lot of different societies and cultures, pioneering a lot of empirical methods that we use to study society today. Also really important for integrating mathematics into social science, because in Greco-Roman culture, and even in a lot of other contexts, other than traders, math wasn’t used for practical purposes so much. In fact, a lot of people pooh-poohed the idea of trying to — and so Biruni was actually really important.
A lot of his work, like comparing chronologies across cultures and across geographic locations and things like this, was really pioneering in integrating mathematics into the social sciences in a way that wasn’t commonly done before. And so he’s also really important.
COWEN: What do you think of the claim — you find this amongst people such as Olivier 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?
AL-GHARBI: Yes. I think he’s absolutely right about that. I alluded to that, I guess, briefly earlier in the conversation, where I said a lot of the narratives and assumptions people make when they perceive the differences between Islam and the West today are actually of much more recent historical vintage than a lot of people might assume or take for granted.
In fact, prior to that period, there was a lot of rich interplay — there were tensions between Muslim and Christian societies going back centuries, but there was also a lot of very rich cultural transmission, interplay, and so on and so forth as well. There were these kinds of shifts starting in the late 19th, early 20th century, especially to things like the broad global economic order and seeing the development of capitalism, seeing colonial expansion and also the discovery of things like oil transform . . .
When you think about Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism was an offshoot that was prominent among a small sect of a very poor society — a poor, pretty remote society in Saudi Arabia. Discovery of things like oil and the transformation of Saudi Arabia from a rural, poor place into a rich petro state that’s tied to an austere Salafist understanding of religion was a very geopolitically consequential development, and completely transformed in very profound ways that are not fully appreciated, I think, in a lot of these conversations the nature of the geopolitical orientation of Islam in the world.
COWEN: 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? What is your take on that?
AL-GHARBI: No matter where the migrants are coming from, if you have large numbers of people that are entering a different society and culture, and especially if they’re clustering in particular places and forming ethnic enclaves and stuff, there will be tensions between the long-standing population and the new arrivals. We’re seeing this right now in Springfield and Haiti being fanned on by the current Republican presidential nominees.
Even before JD Vance and Donald Trump started talking about this and making it a national issue, there were tensions within Springfield between the Haitians and the long-standing — and people in Haiti are not Muslim. But that’s a thing that you would expect.
COWEN: 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: What should we think will happen there?
AL-GHARBI: I think that it’s generally the case that a lot of times — and I think this is true across ethnic and religious lines — that a lot of times second-, third-generation people do integrate a lot more with the mainstream culture, in part because they have strong incentives to do that. If they want a wider friend network, if they want to succeed in the professional sphere, the schools that they’re going to, and so on and so forth, there are all sorts of pressures and incentives that incline people to . . .
On top of that, frankly, it’s often the case that people come to different countries for a reason, because there was also often something that was very unsatisfying about the milieu that they were living in, that was unsustainable or intolerable, and so they come to other countries in search of a different life. This is also a thing that helps push people towards actually pursuing that different life rather than trying to simply reproduce Sudan in France.
Now, that said, there are elements of their own society and culture, 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?” Again, these are negotiations that happen across the board when you have large numbers of migrants. I think a lot of these tensions will persist so long as there are continued waves of migration, but will ultimately — I’m optimistic that there will be some equilibrium. They’ll work themselves out.
One source of tension in France, I think, in particular is that France has a — and this is why I think it’s sometimes easier for immigrants to integrate in countries like America, frankly — is France does have this really aggressive, hostile approach to secularism, a really militant approach to secularism. Where, for instance, in some schools, they try to push pork on kids. They eliminate non-pork options. They say, “Your kid is either going to eat the same things as other French kids, or they’re going to go hungry.” That’s the choice they have.
Or they outlaw things like head coverings, even though nuns, people from Eastern Europe, a lot of people wear 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 for nuns, which is interesting, and things like no one can wear crosses or other forms of religious ornaments in a prominent way.
This kind of militant — rather than America’s more pluralistic approach, France has this really militant, confrontational approach to dealing with religious minorities that I think drives a lot of the tensions in France. It’s because they do have this really hostile approach towards religion in general, especially public-oriented religion and religious minorities, that I think is unfortunate.
So I think some of the problems that you see in France are a product of France, but I think in other cultural contexts where there’s less of that militant, government-oriented hostility towards religion, a lot of these things are easier to resolve.
COWEN: What’s your favorite novel?
AL-GHARBI: My favorite novel, huh. That’s an interesting question. It’s been a minute. I mean, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky I really love. When I started writing this book, and actually probably when I started my PhD program . . .
I used to read a lot of fiction. I realized as I was writing my book that it had been probably a decade since I had read something that was purposely fiction. [laughs] So I picked up some books by — I had a couple of books by Umberto Eco that I had wanted to read for a long time: Foucault’s Pendulum, The Name of the Rose. So I dove into those; I really enjoyed them. So I’m trying to get back into reading fiction now, but it had been a long time, I realized.
COWEN: What’s your favorite movie?
AL-GHARBI: My favorite movie. I like a lot of the Charlie Kaufman movies. He has this one, Synecdoche, New York, that I think is really fascinating and a lot of fun. I like Charlie Kaufman’s movies pretty consistently.
Woody Allen, a lot of his movies are great. He’s been on a big journey in terms of his filmmaking over the years, from this kind of slapstick, funny stuff to these kinds of — but I think it’s all really interesting and good. I love Woody Allen’s movies.
COWEN: Last question: Fiction aside, what do you want to learn about next?
AL-GHARBI: Yes. In the short term, I have a second book project, a kind of follow-up to this one.
This book was focused a lot on knowledge economy professionals, on the winners in the knowledge economy, on institutions of knowledge production, and so on and so forth. The initial plan for this book, when I pitched it to Princeton, was that I was going to do — part of the book focused on us, on symbolic capitalists, knowledge economy professionals. Then, towards the latter end of the book, I was going to 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 provide physical goods and services to people, who live in smaller towns, more rural areas, and so on and so forth.
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 still took a little bit of cutting and polishing to get it into the state it’s in today. So the second book, what I’ll be thinking about for the next couple of years, are going to be people who are more sociologically distant from knowledge economy professionals, and trying to look at the struggle between us and them and to understand it in a deeper way.
I’ve done some provisional work, and I do have a lot of pretty tight content for the second book. I’ll be shopping it out to publishers after we see how well this one does or not. But I’m going to be doing, of course, a lot of research and thinking about these tensions in the near future, and that will be occupying my brain space.
COWEN: Again, I’m a fan of Musa’s new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Musa al-Gharbi, thank you very much.
AL-GHARBI: Thank you for having me. It was a real fun conversation.