“ … with a Muslim, too”

In the fall of 2005, I sat in one of Samuel Huntington’s final classes at Harvard. I participated in the class as a woman in hijab, noticing a level of skepticism from him each time I raised my hand. One day, after the class’s fevered debates over the American war in Iraq, I turned to a friend and asked, half in jest: do you think he’d sit for an interview with a global Muslim publication? Despite my doubts, I approached him directly after class. “Professor Huntington, would you give me an interview? I want to understand where your ideas about a clash between Muslims and the West truly come from, even if I don’t fully agree with them.”

The same skeptical look crossed his face that afternoon. Still, he was gracious, and after months of correspondence he agreed to meet in his quaint, historic home in downtown Boston. He was kind enough to lay out some snacks and lemonade as we spent over two hours just talking. At the end of the conversation, he told me how much he appreciated our conversation: “with a Muslim, too.”

I later learned it was his last interview before he experienced a stroke that would eventually take his life. From what I understand, it was the only interview he ever gave to a Muslim, for a predominantly Muslim audience. That interview ran in Islamica Magazine in 2007, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers globally, and is now part of history, cited again and again in scholarly publications, books, and media stories. When he received his copy, he sent a note admiring the magazine as a whole.

Since then, similar conversations have filled Islamica’s pages, and those of the sister publication, The Islamic Monthly, that rose to fill the silence after Islamica’s sudden shuttering in 2009—controversial and influential leaders alike, speaking on issues Muslims care about, in ways no one else thought to ask. What I’ve learned across all these years is simple: sitting with someone, asking them to explain themselves, giving them room to speak on what matters to Muslims, is not a small thing. It is everything.

It matters most when the space we’re sitting in begins and ends with us. When it is curated by Muslims, for Muslims, about Muslims, nothing gets lost in translation, nothing softened for someone else’s comfort. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu sat for an interview for our publication, it was because he understood the position of the Muslim community in the global struggle for peace. When a young Saudi Muslim student was wrongfully labeled a perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombing simply for how he looked, the only place he felt safe speaking was a Muslim publication, to a Muslim interviewer. When Paulo Coelho answered questions for us on the 25th anniversary of The Alchemist, it was because he understood how the book’s Islamic themes resonate with Muslim audiences.

Once, in Órgiva, Spain, I interviewed a group of converts to Islam. One told me that while traveling in a Muslim country before his conversion in the early 1970s, he had slipped away from a party to climb a mountain alone, and got lost. A shepherd passed by, and he asked him in his very basic Arabic where he was going. The shepherd, without missing a beat, simply answered, inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un, to God we belong, and to Him we return. That mindset, I’ve come to believe, is the point of everything we do in this life, and everything we hope to do in these pages, and in this initiative’s future.

I am honored beyond words to do this work under the leadership of Sohail Nakhooda. His vision and that of the entire Islamica team over the past many decades to build a global Muslim magazine is the stuff of long-term thinking, similar to the way Mimar Sinan’s skylines continue to define the city of Istanbul, the way Malcolm X’s voice remains relevant across so much social media in our times, the way Edward Said still shapes the narrative about colonization and the oppressed, the way Hasan Çelebi’s calligraphy still carries a civilization’s script long after the hand that drew it. Islamica 2.0 is on to great new ventures. InshaAllah. Bi’t-tawfiq.
Al-Fatiha.

July 2026, Istanbul