Politics & Power Quote by Feisal Abdul Rauf

Rauf’s halting repetitions are doing more work than his polished thesis. The stumbles ("are - are - are", "in - in") signal a speaker trying to thread a political needle in real time: correcting a narrative abroad without sounding like an apologist at home. The core intent is corrective PR, but not for America so much as for a transnational audience whose information about U.S. Muslims often arrives pre-filtered through war footage, surveillance stories, and sectarian media ecosystems.

The subtext is a quiet act of community defense. By framing the problem as a "misperception" in "the Muslim world", he relocates the conversation away from U.S. Islamophobia and toward a reputational gap: America’s image as a place where Islam is supposedly unlivable. That’s strategic. If he foregrounds discrimination, he risks feeding the very story he wants to disarm: that Muslims are inevitably persecuted in the West. If he overpraises America, he risks alienating listeners who know about profiling, mosque controversies, and the post-9/11 security state. So he reaches for lived ritual as evidence: fasting, praying, "we do our prayers". Not abstract rights, but embodied practice.

Context matters: this is the era when Muslim American belonging was routinely litigated on cable news, and Muslim-majority publics were simultaneously consuming images of U.S. military power. Rauf tries to compress a complicated reality into a reassuring snapshot: religious life continues; community survives; the faith is not extinguished. The awkward cadence reveals the tension underneath that reassurance.