University Chaplains’ Perspective On Campus Protests [Part II] – The Moment Of Speaking Truth To Power

By Ibrahim Moiz for Muslim Matters

Previous Parts: Part 1

Harvard Was The Dumpster Fire And Columbia Was The Villain

After the tumultuous 2023-24 school year, where American students protesting against the Israeli genocide in Gaza were vilified and repressed across the country, MuslimMatters interviewed chaplains Omer Bajwa of Yale University and Abdul-Muhaymin Priester of Grinnell College for their thoughts on these momentous events. In this second part of a five-part interview, the imams relate their personal experiences of institutional responses to the student protests and Zionist counterprotests.

Ibrahim Moiz: You mentioned that Yale has generally not been like Columbia with the crackdown. How has your overall experience been with the administration, for example? Have they tried to suppress anything or try to put pressure on you to say this or do that, anything like that?

Omer Bajwa: I think that many people understandably lump the Ivies together, and the Ivies are a preexisting cohort and consortium… But having said that, the Ivies are also quite different, in that Columbia is nothing like Yale, which is nothing like Harvard. I think the point is that they’re definitely watching each other’s moves, right, so…they’re definitely comparing notes, like what’s going on down the road, what’s going on at this school, on that campus, etc. And what they want to do is they want to learn from each other’s mistakes, right?

So in that way, Harvard was the dumpster fire of the fall, when Harvard made all these horrible mistakes. And Harvard became a huge target because they have these real, you know, shaitanis like Bill Ackman on their board…and then Columbia became the villain of the story in the spring because they have, you know [Minouche] Shafik the president there, got called before Congress…So all that’s to say, Yale was kind of, “Yo, don’t be Harvard in the fall, don’t be Columbia in the spring”. This, I can tell you from behind the scenes, is definitely the chatter up at the top.

I Can Talk To The Top

(Omer Bajwa continues…) Now to answer your question directly. Alhamdulillah, after sixteen years of investing in relationships…you know, people take your word seriously, they want to know what you have to say, they know that you have that vertical [relationship] like I can talk to the top. I mean, Alhamdulillah, for what it’s worth, I had very direct blunt conversations with the senior administration, like literally the three most important people – the president, the vice president, the provost. They know where I stand, they know where my community stands.

I don’t know if Imam Ebad [Ebadur-Rahman, the Columbia Muslim chaplain] is able to have that at Columbia, I don’t know if my colleagues at other schools are able to have that. That’s just – each school is structured differently, but I think it’s also because of the relationships that you build over time…“You have the mike now, tell us what you want to say.” You have to be honest, right? This is the moment of speaking truth to power.

The second part of your question is, do they always listen? No, I give recommendations, I say, “Look, what you’re doing is XYZ wrong for these reasons, don’t do this.” Then the committee goes and they talk about it, and then they take some of what we say, theoretically, and then they also make other missteps. But I can keep going back and be like, “Didn’t I tell you? We talked two weeks ago, I told you not to do this, now look at the consequences.”

Now, the difference is that the president doesn’t answer to me, and the vice president doesn’t answer to me, they answer to the board of trustees. And that’s ultimately the problem…the way these modern institutions work – it’s about donors, it’s about influential trustees who can twist the arm, etc.

But they have not censored me, to answer your question, personally at Yale. I mean…the vice president’s come to my Jummah, right, I’m going to say, “This did not start on 10-7, this is seventy-six years of occupation, right? This is a settler colonial apartheid system that we’re seeing.” I can say that, Alhamdulillah. Does that infuriate the Hillel and some of the rabbis and Zionist students? Of course it does! And God knows what they’re saying about me on their channels. But, for what it’s worth, I’m able to say that and the administration isn’t going to stop me from censoring it.

Strategically There’s A Better Way

(Omer Bajwa continues…) I think one thing that I will add to it, and I hope this comes off the right way and not the wrong way, is that – you know…I was a grad student when 9-11 [11 September 2001 attacks on the United States] happened. We all marched in grad school against the Iraq invasion in ‘03, right? You learn, life experience teaches you, there’s a strategic way of reading the Sunnah and of implementing this, that the jazba, the twenty-one-year-old today, who’s screaming at the rally – you’re just like, “Strategically, there’s a better way to do this, right?”

Princeton pro-Palestine protesters

But now they’re going to be like, “Listen boomer, we appreciate your khutbah calling out genocide and murder and all that, but, like, we’re going to do what we’re going to do.” And I’m like, “It’s all good, man.” You know, like, “you do you”…Because you’re the student, and you know you have a positionality, and …I’m a staff member of the university, I’m on the level of [talking to the] dean and director…we’re all adults, and you know we understand what Allah Taala gives us through, just, life experience over time.

Many of them have this conception that if you’re not making noise all the time in the most in-your-face, aggressive way possible, then that means, “We question your loyalty to the cause.”

And so what happens then is they cast aspersions, not just at Yale but other schools as well, they’ve cast aspersions against faculty and staff and administrators – Muslims, presumably allies – that are quiet. And what we gently, gently, lovingly, tenderly try to bring them to the awareness [of] is – just because they’re not making noise on the picket lines or the protest lines doesn’t mean that they’re not working very effectively and secretly behind closed doors. Some of the most powerful people are doing their work behind closed doors, pulling levers of power, and consequential conversations that are not going to be on the picket line.

And that’s what I think faculty can do is you have a tenured faculty member that has a lot of respect, hard-earned respect. The administration takes what he or she says very seriously. And they can literally pick up the phone and scream – and I’ve seen this – scream at the president, and be like, “You’ve completely screwed up how you’ve handled this situation.” Now students don’t know that, but I know that, because I’m privy to a whole series of behind-the-scenes movements. So that’s, I think, a nuance that is worth noting.

Abdul-Muhaymin Priester: I think one of the things that made the larger schools as amplified as they were – outside of the fact that they were larger schools, Ivy League schools, top-league schools – is the fact that there’s a lot more money going into these institutions.

The voices that can threaten their independence, if you will, are much louder than what we come to at Grinnell. Somebody’s giving you as many millions of dollars a year and you have an endowment that’s probably tied into their hedge fund or something like that, they can be like, “Hey, we’re not going to have any of your business no more.”

So it makes it much more difficult for them. They can have a much more positive response [to pressure].

[Next in Part III: Why Zionists Were Given the Land Of Filastin]

Related:

American Muslims, Gaza, and the White House Iftar: Do Protests Matter

Podcast [Man2Man]: From The Frontlines Of Gaza | Dr. Jawad Khan And Omar Sabha