In the widely shared video from November 16, 2024, a woman attacks a Muslim Palestinian American couple at a Panera Bread outlet outside Chicago. The husband wears a hoodie with “Palestine” written across it. He tries to shield his wife, who records the attack on her phone. The attacker, later identified as Alexandra Szustakiewicz, repeatedly tries to punch the wife. At one point, as she lunges, Szustakiewicz says, presumably to the husband, “What is she doing here?”
When Szustakiewicz was charged with hate crime and disorderly conduct, the husband, later identified as Waseem Zahran, told the press he was “pleasantly surprised.” He added, “I did everything I could to not touch her, because I knew, as soon as I did anything, the roles would be reversed. It would be she’s the victim …” Which is what happened at first: the Panera Bread staff consoled Szustakiewicz.
A reason that many folks, myself included, have returned to this story is its visible, nameable testimony of the wide spectrum of racism that Muslims and Arabs experience in the West, from the physical to the verbal and more hidden. That a perpetrator of a hate crime was charged in this rare instance offers a form of catharsis during a year and a half of watching very different videos and outcomes on our phones: Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, executed with absolute impunity, funded and armed by the US and Europe. The same attitudes that propel a horrific continuum of colonial violence in the Global South propel it on a smaller scale in the Global North.
The Panera Bread assault took place near where, last year, six-year-old Palestinian-American Wadea Al-Fayoume was fatally stabbed by his family’s landlord, Joseph Czuba.
The video documents the impunity that white women share with white men, though white women are rarely racism’s mugshot. Most publicised hate crimes concern attacks by white men, like Joseph Czuba, not white women, like Alexandra Szustakiewicz. As recently as 2021, after the Capitol was stormed by Donald Trump supporters, including many women, historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers told Vox, “There has been a tendency, from the colonial period to the present, to frame and to position white women as perpetual victims, in spite of the evidence to the contrary.” It is this history that emboldened Szustakiewicz to locate herself as the “ruling class” and insert herself as a checkpoint from which to spatially segregate the Palestinian American couple through bodily harm in broad daylight. Though we now know that Szustakiewicz is a European immigrant while the couple were born in the US, she said, “It’s my land. It’s not your land.” When reminded that the woman she tried to hit was pregnant, Szustakiewicz said, “I don’t care.” It should be noted that since October 2023, pregnant Palestinian women have been forced to give birth in horrific conditions at illegal Israeli checkpoints, while the genocide is creating “a generation of orphans.”
Zahran also told the press, “I always question why is no one doing anything to stop (the genocide of Palestinians). And it’s the same reason why no one helped us.” By “no one” he meant neither the Panera Bread staff nor a single customer. Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid observes that their inaction demonstrates the difference between being “not racist” – what many who do nothing consider themselves – and being anti-racist.
Panera Bread subsequently issued a statement, but with no apology. It is also true that an apology in hindsight, while essential, isn’t enough. According to the statement, the restaurant “foster(s) a warm and welcoming environment.” How? What will be different the next time an intervention is needed, and in the moment? The Palestinian American couple had each other this time, beautifully in step: she taking the video, he buffering her. Had either been alone, even with the evidence, it might have played out the way it more often does, as Szustakiewicz tried to frame it, with herself the victim. She has since pleaded not guilty and is on pretrial release. Her next court date is set for February 4, 2025.
I want to linger for a time that parallels when no one looked up, to imagine what a customer present then would now say. Perhaps: “I didn’t know.” How to respond? Deep in the heart of “I didn’t know” rests the myth of American innocence, the building blocks of Fortress Inherent Niceness. In the face of such innocence, do we speculate that had, for instance, a brown man in a hoodie with “Palestine” written across it repeatedly tried to hit a white woman – they’d know? Or perhaps a customer would say: “I’m not racist, I just don’t like conflict.” Again, what to say? Who likes conflict? Do I share that generations of Muslims have been told to run from conflict, to “just ignore it,” “be silent,” “lie low,” be “stoic” even when humiliated, profiled and attacked? That this is part of our normalisation? The likeliest scenario, alas, is this: the customer still isn’t looking up.
Regardless, the video exists, for which I’m grateful. This time, despite all attempts to silence and remove her, a Muslim Palestinian American woman flipped the script. She let her story speak.
The culture talk
Alexandra Szustakiewicz’s hatred of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims aligns with the white nationalism of Donald Trump supporters. She made this visible. But conservatives and liberals are united by a history of Islamophobia, including in a refusal to name it as racism.
When in January 2017 President Trump issued an executive order banning US entry to people from seven Muslim-majority countries, Republicans and Democrats alike said the ban did not specifically target Muslims. And yet, before the executive order, it was called a “Muslim ban,” and Trump had declared that Christian refugees would be allowed entry. One of my colleagues at the time, a white Christian liberal man, argued that Islam was the great unifier, regardless of race. While presenting himself as tolerant of diversity, he was educating me on how to speak of my own experiences. Another colleague, a white Christian liberal woman, defined racism as anti-Black, anti-Latinx, antisemitic, anti-Asian, anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant. Therefore, she said, there was no context for including Islamophobia as a form of racial bias. Eight years later, there is still denial of the specific ways that Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim racism, manifests.
The exclusion and minimising of Islamophobia as an egregious form of racism enables Muslims to be acceptably silenced and removed. It allows anti-Muslim racism to be the lesser evil, if any at all.
To be clear: Islamophobia is not only a hatred or phobia of Islam as a religion, though it is this as well. More widely, Islamophobia is the construction of “Muslim” as a racialized category with narratives tropes built of fear, such as, the men are violent, the women are oppressed. And though not all Muslims are Arabs or Arabic speakers, and not all Arabs are Muslims, members of both groups experience overlapping forms of hate. Too, per the definition of the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), “while anti-Palestinian racism is certainly not synonymous with Islamophobia, Muslim and Arab identities have long been conflated, particularly by those who seek to villainize both, making anti-Muslim hate part and parcel of anti-Arab, and specifically, anti-Palestinian racism. Anti-Muslim rhetoric is used to justify anti-Palestinian racism, and anti-Palestinian racism is also weaponized against those presumed to be Palestinian, including Muslims.”
Too, every Muslim inhabits multiple intersectional identities. My gender, brownness, faith, art, the languages I shape, country of birth, immigrant status, all, are rivers in a kaleidoscopic sea. Like other forms of racialization, anti-Muslim racism, by assigning fixed identities, shrinks narrative options.
The foremost purpose of Islamophobia is this: to remove Arabs and Muslims perceived to be a threat to empire building, as Arab and Muslim-majority lands are invaded, occupied and bombed. The narrative tropes that oil the machine of empire are so normalised, unquestioned, and omnidirectional that they become, to quote Ugandan writer Mahmood Mamdani, “culture talk.”
When Waseem Zahran tried not to touch Alexandra Szustakiewicz, he knew the culture talk. When the Panera Bread staff and customers didn’t help the Palestinian American couple, they did too.
While a history of segregation and surveillance of Muslims and Arabs stretches back to the colonial period, since the end of the Cold War, the US has invaded, occupied and/or bombed an increasing number of countries. Since 9/11, under the banner of the still-ongoing “War on Terror,” these countries and territories total more than 85. Islamophobia has enabled surveillance programs like NSEERS (National Security Entry Exit Registration System), which affected 26 countries, 25 of them Muslim-majority; kept Guantanamo prison open; and contributed to a catastrophic refugee crisis, especially in Syria – the largest refugee crisis since World War II – Palestine, Afghanistan, and Sudan. The stark contrast in the reception of Ukrainian refugees versus Arabs and Muslims is yet another measure of the success of the racist culture talk.
Opening the tent
Last year recorded the highest number of anti-Muslim hate incidents in nearly 30 years (surpassing after 9/11). In the US alone, in only the first half of 2024, attacks against Muslims rose by 70%. This is not including the bigotry that is never recorded, reported, or even named as Islamophobia.
That the Biden government released a strategy to counter anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate in December 2024, a mere month before Donald Trump’s presidency , was more a commitment of status quo than of new strategy. CAIR’s Deputy Director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, called it “too little too late,” adding that it ignored government-driven Islamophobia, such as the federal watch list program, or “Terrorist Screening Database,” of mostly Muslim names. It also ignored a main reason for the current rise in Islamophobia: the US-Israel genocide of Palestinians, Biden’s legacy.
No strategy to combat Islamophobia in the US can exist without acknowledging the long history of manufacturing it. We don’t even have to look that far. Take, for instance, former vice-president Kamala Harris’ selective racism – and, by extension, selective sensitivity to racism – at the Democratic National Convention in August. When Harris refused to “open the tent” to uncommitted delegates, she didn’t need to ask the question that Alexandra Szustakiewicz asked as she lunged for the Palestinian American woman at Panera Bread: “What is she doing here?” Without a physical slap, or a word, Harris made her, and everyone with her, wait outside. Meanwhile, inside the tent: the promise of women’s reproductive freedoms (except Palestinian women’s), of making history as the first woman, Black woman, and South Asian to be president. Most of all: the promise that the privileges of white supremacy extend to women of color who embrace the imperial project.
The promise of making history over ruined histories is foundational to this state, built from stolen Indigenous lands and stolen and enslaved African bodies. The overcoming of Jim Crow apartheid laws was repeatedly invoked at the DNC, while critique of Israel’s apartheid laws was kept outside. There were statements of land acknowledgment, while Indigenous Palestinians were being ethnically cleansed. Asian Americans celebrated overcoming the Asian Exclusion Act, and Harris’ Asian-ness, yet among those excluded were Asians. In the name of “lesser evil,” her supporters dismissed these double standards. It would not have been the lesser evil had they been the ones facing annihilation.
Championing a multicultural empire that divides racial minorities into the chosen and the damned is part of the culture talk, as former US president Barack Obama’s supporters also demonstrated.
A correct pronunciation
In 2008, the year I left Pakistan to teach in the US, I wrote an open letter to then-Senator Obama, underscoring that, before his nomination, Obama had been signalling support for war against Pakistan and Iran, and fuelling Islamophobic rhetoric. My teaching appointment was in Honolulu, Obama’s birthplace. There was jubilation when he made history as the first Black president. There were jeers directed my way when I couldn’t participate in the cheer because I feared more war was coming. Hawaii’s long history of anti-colonial struggle was supported by Obama supporters. My local and Indigenous students were willing to draw connections across anti-colonial and indigenous solidarity movements. But among my generation (and older) were those who ignored or downplayed Obama authorising more drone strikes against Afghanistan and Pakistan in his first year than President Bush in his entire administration, and cheered when Obama won the Nobel peace prize.
An Obama admirer I knew, a first-generation Asian immigrant from the mainland, said to me one day as we walked to a Hawaii solidarity panel and I worried about the civilian death toll of the war, “At least Obama can pronounce Pakistan. Bush couldn’t.” I didn’t ask whether correct pronunciation of her home as it was being bombed would offer solace. I’d learned. Whole islands and continents are settled through hobnobbing with one messenger while shooting the other.
By 2016, Obama had extended the war to seven Muslim-majority countries. I’d moved to Massachusetts by then, to teach at an institution where I was the only Muslim woman faculty. For eight years, I’d heard Democrats complain that Republicans “accused” Obama of being a Muslim. Nobody questioned why they, as much as any Republican, considered this an accusation. It was normalised racial code to distinguish acceptable racism from unacceptable, at a time when the media normalised oblique terminology to keep drone wars a “covert operation.” My grief about the war, as well as about anti-Muslim racism as both culturally encouraged and denied, were also to be kept covert. Meanwhile, three countries – Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – weren’t even considered “battlefield settings,” as the media kept praising the “exceptionally surgical and precise” strikes against “terrorists” in all seven “settings.” No evidence to the contrary appeared on our phones.
Shaking a hand
In autumn of 2016, as the world watched the rise of Donald Trump in disbelief, I arrived in Germany for a literature festival. On the last night, I had dinner at a fellow participant’s home. The conversation turned to the upcoming US elections. One guest, a white Norwegian woman, described herself as a feminist, and a fan of Hillary Clinton. I spoke of Clinton’s role as US secretary of state in the escalation of the “War on Terror.” The guest, ineligible to vote in the US, cut me off: “Then you support Donald Trump.”
I paused. I framed a set of questions. If Germany were bombing Norway today, I asked, what would she do? Would she choose between an openly misogynistic and racist candidate and another who’d authorised the bombing of Norway? I added it was unlikely she’d be expected to choose if the “lesser evil” had approved the bombing of Europe. Even so, what would she do?
She stared at her plate, red-faced. I was startled by her rage and wondered if she was about to throw the plate at me. Had she, I still wonder what the three others there would have done. She looked up and said, “Go back to Pakistan and fight there.” The two white men at the table, both German, silently scowled. No one was telling the Norwegian to “go back.” She’d assumed, with the complicity of everyone present, the role of the checkpoint, and it hadn’t taken long, because she’d never been, or tried to be, in any other location.
I remembered all the times I’d been removed from a line at an airport or a visa office and interrogated, humiliated, as others passed by. She kept talking, loudly: I was “entitled,” presumably for equating the worth of white lives with everyone else’s. I considered offering another word, “uppity,” before mumbling something about white privilege. Predictably, now I was “bringing race into it.” Moments earlier, we’d both brought race into it, when the one thing we’d agreed on was the racism of Donald Trump. Finally, the other person of colour at the table, a German man, spoke – to change the subject. The tone of the woman softened, and the two engaged happily about other things.
I got up to leave, but not before trying to shake her hand; I was raised by parents who never allowed me to leave a gathering without acknowledging everyone. I was raised to just ignore it, even self-remove. She kept her hands by her side and shook her head.
Relaxing
Within the culture talk there exists many degrees of severity. Always present is intense peer pressure to surgically remove from language the violence of empire; the racism that enables the violence; the intersection of white feminism and imperialism; and even the word “Muslim.” Mahmood Mamdani again: “The particularly covert nature of language-based anti-Muslim racism serves to sanction discriminatory practices and policies behind a thin mask of plausible deniability.” Through a language of plausible deniability, a good Muslim participates in her own oppression. She doesn’t record it.
Since October 7, 2023, there have been reports among Muslim civil rights groups of increased FBI contact and mosque visits: a continuation of “War on Terror” practices. The more oppressive the tactics, the likelier the self-silencing. It means that some forms of intimidation, including casually administered – say, at a restaurant, or museum – go largely unreported. When an invisible population is only made visible through dangerous tropes, staying under the radar feels safer.
There’s a way that one’s guard comes down in moments meant to be joyous, where we want simply to relax. I think again of the couple at Panera Bread. Instead of an outing and a quick meal, they ended up having to fight for their right to exist. When the Palestinian American woman recorded herself and her husband as victims of violence – instead of how Szustakiewicz tried to frame it – she resisted participating in her own oppression. Though not visible in the video, she is audible. Her husband is visible, audible and later named. He received messages of support. He also received death threats and messages wishing ill upon the couple’s unborn child. This was the cost of stepping out.
A Surreal Labyrinth
The second time I watched the Panera Bread video, I recalled an incident from the month before, in October. I’d been in Paris, where I’d seen the “Surrealism” exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Structured in the shape of a labyrinth, the show was predictably crammed. In physique, I am slight; I assess space carefully for a view. About mid-way, I returned to a section that was a little less crowded than before. I stood, mesmerised, before Remedios Varo’s painting “Ciencia inútil o El alquimista (Useless Science or The Alchemist).” I gazed at the figure seated at the center of the composition, turning a spinning wheel and draped in a checkerboard cloth that merges in sari-like folds with a checkerboard floor. The work had a sublime effect on me. I lingered on the intent, monk-like expression of the face, and the subtle blending of the cloth-floor pattern with the flesh. It is a painting that invites you inside, as though to partake in a creation that is ongoing.
And I was falling inside, my guard down, when I felt a shoulder pressing into mine. “Pardon?” I said, turning to face a woman, white or white passing, dressed in a fluffy white jacket. In French, she said I should stand to the side. I was already standing to the side, while she stood, wide-girthed, legs apart, directly in front of the painting. Before I could answer, with both hands at my shoulder, she began pushing, hard. “Va-t’en,” she commanded. Go away. I froze. In broken French, I said to look around. It was crowded and she already had a great view. There was no problem! I cautioned myself: don’t make physical contact or she’ll be the victim. She kept arguing: “Oui, il y a un problème. Va-t’en!” My husband passed by, and I spoke to him, pointing, telling the room what she was doing. She backed away. The transformation was instant when she saw someone, a man, was with me.
What misogyny was this? And I could already hear the gaslighting, those denying it had also to do with being racialised. But I’d lived in France years ago, when I’d frequently been called, with disdain, “L’Arabe.” Now I recognised the hate on her face. Had she kept using force, I’d likely have pushed back. The museum would have joined her in telling me to leave.
Artists we will never know
For a time, I no longer enjoyed the art. The trance was gone. I recalled Toni Morrison: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
I tried to remember where in the labyrinth I stood. Where to? I moved, somnambulantly, toward Erwin Blumenfeld’s 1937 “Le Dictateur (The Dictator)”, a dark photomontage of a bull’s head on a bust. I stared at the teeth protruding from the bull’s lips, the overlapping images assembled in a snarl, at once goofy and ominous. A scarf tossed in mock stylishness across the dismembered bust seemed to mirror the snarl. Also called “The Minotaur,” it was one of a series of satirical photographs made by Blumenfeld in response to the rise of fascism.
Later, at my Airbnb, I looked through my phone. I’d taken one picture of Blumenfeld’s minotaur. In its face, I saw the woman who’d tried to remove me from a space of beauty and wonder, perhaps to a ghetto. I recalled that last year, in a banlieue, a neglected Paris suburb of mostly Muslims, Arabs and Blacks, an unarmed French teenager of Moroccan and Algerian descent, Nahel Merzouk, had been shot dead by a police officer at a traffic signal. His killing had led to riots. The face of the composite minotaur began to blur with those images, and with the riots in England this summer, following false claims that a mass stabbing had been perpetrated by a Muslim immigrant.
Through an online search, I learned that Remedios Varo, who was born in Catalonia to Catholic parents, had been living in Paris at the start of World War II. Because of her communist connections, she was placed in internment camps, though where and for how long is unknown. In 1941, she found refuge in Mexico City, later becoming a dual Spanish and Mexican citizen. Erwin Blumenfeld was born in Germany to Jewish parents. He too had been living in Paris when the war began. He was interned in several camps over a period of two years in France and French-occupied Morocco. In 1941, he found refuge in New York City, later becoming an American citizen.
I gazed, now undisturbed, at Varo’s luminous painting on my phone. I let it invite me in again. It struck me that many artists in the show who transported us somewhere between dream and reality were celebrated too for their resistance to authoritarianism. They became “undesirable foreigners” at a time when Asia and Africa were rising up against European colonialism. Freedom movements of the Global South are still being crushed. Colonial powers champion select resistance to select oppression, while expanding a living nightmare of “undesirable foreigners” – among them, people forcibly removed from their own lands. Among them, artists we’ll never know.
Civilian
In September 2024, while addressing the American Israeli Council, Donald Trump announced his intentions to reinstate the Muslim ban when he returns to office. He called it a “travel ban,” then linked it with “Islamic terrorists.” During his first term, he gradually extended the ban to include non-Muslim-majority countries. What will it be this time? We wait.
In the meantime, I search for updated year-end statistics on racially motivated crimes. The media and government reports continue to largely unname Muslims and Arabs as target groups. For instance, the Los Angeles County report lists, in its heading, “African Americans, Asians, Jewish people, Latino/as, LGBT individuals, and transgender people.” Within the report itself, in the very last bullet point specific to racially motivated attacks, is added: “Crimes in which there was specific language regarding conflict in the Middle East sharply increased …”
Where in the “Middle East”? Who lives there? What “conflict”? Who was removed? By whom? What were their names? What were their dreams? What “language”? What “crimes”? By whom?
Shrouding anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and especially anti-Palestinian racism in a veil of plausible deniability through covert language perpetuates the idea that the “Middle East” is a zone of forever “conflict” brought about by people on themselves, instead of by the violent colonial project of US, Europe and Israel, and funded by US tax dollars. It keeps US voters and tax payers from imagining the connectivity between all lives, across borders.
When the “other” is removed, the mind that has lost the ability to hold the other is also removed.
But international solidarity was the stated purpose of the Geneva Conventions, the international humanitarian laws established after the Second World War. Among their key purposes: to safeguard civilians, through their legal status as “protected persons.” Where were the laws protecting civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the wars waged by the US and Europe in countries linked earlier in this essay? Where are the laws now, when we’ve been watching on our phones, forn sixteen months, Palestinians recording their own extermination? Who are the “protected persons,” if not the Palestinian babies being bombed, starved, orphaned and frozen, the men and women tortured in detention camps, the journalists, doctors, teachers, cooks, farmers, painters, poets being arrested? Regardless of whether the present ceasefire holds, we can never stop asking: Where was the intervention? No one can ever say again that we didn’t know.
“In the development of the laws of war,” says Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat in Jadaliyya magazine, “brown and black peoples are considered the savage other. They were evacuated from the category of the civilian to begin with.”
To begin with. It begins in casual encounters, in our quotidian lives, where the social hierarchies of civic society are enacted to secure the freedoms, needs, and safety of white Europeans and Americans of white European descent – with the complicity of POCs hoping for a seat at the table – the folks who try to frame themselves as the victims, while those who ought to be the “protected persons” are framed as aggressors and terrorists.
A disruption
The anti-genocide student protests that grew around the world in Spring 2024 disrupted this script. Prior to October 2023, those speaking out against Israel’s racial apartheid laws and 76-year-long occupation of Palestine were mostly an isolated group of people from the Global South. The student protesters were from across socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. They made visible US complicity in funding, arming and morally enabling the apartheid laws, occupation and genocide. They made visible, too, that the occupation is an extension of European colonialism and settler colonialism, and that it is maintained by the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim culture talk of the corporate media, both liberal and conservative, and by educational and cultural institutions.
The brutal crackdown on the student protests only proved their effectiveness in stirring an international consciousness. The police force that used violent counterterrorism tactics on the students – including on white, wealthy American citizens – receives training from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The crackdown exposed the face of fascism as here, on US soil, not there, in history books. In the words of Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, what the students achieved is “historical.” Khalidi was speaking at the launch of the posthumously published If I Must Die by poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in 2023. Interest in Alareer’s lifelong struggle against the occupation, and in Khalidi’s own book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, as well as the works of more Palestinian writers than before, is another measure of a shift in narrative.
Narrative – that emotional and ethical ground – awakens connectivity. It is why so many Palestinian journalists have been, and are continuing to be, eliminated. Recall again the popularity of the Panera Bread video, the many messages of support for the Muslim Palestinian American couple, and the push back, the messages of hate. Love is an act of solidarity. Those messages of love for the couple were not only about this instance of oppression, but against the systems and structures that select which racisms are egregious, and which should continue unspoken.
There have been other acts of love, solidarity and resistance helping to shift the narrative, including the number of authors who pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions, and those who withdrew from the PEN festival in Spring 2024, in protest of PEN leadership’s silence over the genocide, and its hedging through the tired trope, “It’s complicated.” PEN CEO stepped down in the fall. As to “it’s complicated”—an evasion normalized by many who wish not to “get involved” while also appearing “not racist”—perhaps no American writer challenged it with more visibility last year than Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argued that there’s nothing “complicated” about a system of racial apartheid, in which half the population is segregated and ruled by laws that don’t apply to the other half.
The rise in hate crimes is a warning for everyone. When the systems and structures of empire are shaken internally by collective actions demanding justice, dignity and freedom for all, wars and genocide converge more visibly with domestic oppression. What is true for Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti – and other countries where lands, lives and resources are stolen for the benefit of the empire – also plays out, on a smaller scale, for now, in the core of empire. The white supremacist ruling class that profits from war is not as inclusive of all whiteness and select minorities as it may seem. White and white adjacent bodies may be buffered by the Muslim, Arab, Black, brown and Indigenous bodies that they push to the frontlines of hate, war, and genocide. But what happens when the buffer is gone? Who will be left?
Uzma Aslam Khan is the author of five novels published worldwide, most recently of The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, a New York Times’ “Best Historical Fiction 2022” and winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction 2023. Born and raised primarily in Pakistan, Khan has also lived in the Philippines, Japan, England, France, Morocco, Oceania, and the United States.
