For Taher, who grew up in the Bronx in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent wave of Islamophobia that swept the city and country, the scene felt improbable. She recalls stories she'd heard growing up about family members and friends facing racist and anti-Muslim attacks. Her father, a taxi driver, was assaulted by a passenger, who hurled racial slurs at him.
For Batoul Hamdan and her two children, seven-month-old Fatima and Jihad, three, Monday's iftar, the evening meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan, was special. For a week, they had eaten to the sounds of bombs in their home in Arab Salim. Hamdan eventually decided to leave for Al-Nimiriya, the sleepy town where she had grown up. Surrounded by her parents and siblings in the family home, she hoped they could finally enjoy the festive mood of Ramadan.
In Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood of Tel Aviv, more than 100 people, including Muslim families with young children, religious Jews from a nearby seminary and at least a dozen dogs crammed into the public shelter underneath a park. Some groups splayed out on mattresses they brought into the shelter and played cards, others shared snacks, while observant Muslims were fasting for the holy month of Ramadan.
Not a day passes without some overt expression of it in our national life. A crime committed by one Muslim becomes an indictment of all Muslims. A cultural practice is wrenched from context and weaponised to provoke anxiety. A theological concept is distorted to imply threat. And on the streets, and increasingly online, it can turn into violence, intimidation or exclusion directed at anyone who looks Muslim.
We are living through one of the most disorienting periods in recorded history. The AI race is accelerating toward ever faster, ever more sophisticated automation and optimization. Agentic AI systems are moving from research labs into workplaces, healthcare, and governance. Geopolitical tensions are restructuring alliances faster than institutions can adapt. And planetary systems are signaling, with increasing urgency, that our current trajectory is unsustainable. Amid all this, it is dangerously easy to lose sight of a foundational question: What are we actually optimizing for?
As the holy month of Ramadan begins this week, Muslims in Cairo have been adorning their homes with lights and decorations featuring arabesque patterns. Lanterns called fawanees, like the ones I saw being sold in this shop in old Cairo, have become a symbol of Ramadan and are an almost-mandatory home decoration for the month in Egypt. This street and the nearby neighborhood of al-Darb al-Ahmar bustle with shoppers getting ready for the holiday.
We were expecting to see houses and buildings dot the shore, as well as the hawkers who'd typically crowd around piers in Indonesia with food and wares to sell. There was none of that. It was just a pier next to a tiny village. After disembarking, we set off walking and within 100 metres ran out of houses, surrounded only by rice paddies and farmland. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go, and not even a tree to seek shade under.
"There's definitely been a lot of fear and a lot of discrimination. We know the stereotypes against us and they're just amplified now." - Bismah Jaffer, CAIR-SFBA Civil Rights Attorney
