#  Hope Podcast: Featuring Jordan Ahmed, MDiv Candidate 

 





October 23, 2024

 

 

 

In this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from Jordan Ahmed, a first-year MDiv student at HDS. We discuss his relationship to Islam, community organizing, and the joy of embodied practice.



 

 Harvard Divinity School · Hope Podcast: Featuring Jordan Ahmed, MDiv Candidate 

 



 

 

 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Welcome to the Hope Podcast, a podcast hosted by the Harvard Divinity School Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, where we talk to HDS students about their spiritual lives, what hope means to them, and how they work to cultivate it daily.

My name is Michael Fuhrman, and today, I sat down with first year master of divinity candidate, Jordan Ahmed. I figured we could just start today by giving you an opportunity to introduce yourself to us and our listeners and tell us maybe how you find your way here today.

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah, absolutely. So, like you said, I'm a first-year MDiv student. I just started. I have been in the area for a while. I've been in Cambridge for the last eight years or so. And before Cambridge, I've been in Massachusetts about half my life, but I'm a Midwesterner at heart. I was born and raised in Ohio. And before HDS, I had a circuitous professional past.

So I've been most recently an educator. I was working in an elementary school here in Cambridge. I have been a professional dancer, I've been in social work school, and I've also been a community organizer locally. So I'm coming from a lot of different angles that have somehow landed me in Divinity School.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Jack of all trades does seem to be a common theme at Divinity School as well, too. So I'm sure people are excited to get to learn all the great skills that you have in those different professions.

JORDAN AHMED: Hopefully.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Yeah, hopefully so. And so a huge part of why people come to Harvard Divinity School, as well as because of their own personal experience, their own personal, religious or spiritual life. And so we often like to start just by giving you the opportunity to also share more about your personal religious autobiography or spiritual autobiography, whatever you have it, as to what grounds you as a student here at the Divinity school.

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah, thank you for that question. I feel like when I think about my own path through faith and spirituality, every time I tell it, it feels like it changes a little bit. I think the base is I was raised Muslim. My father is Muslim. My mom now, would say, she's Christian, sort of vaguely. But there isn't as much of a religious presence in my mom's side of the family.

My dad immigrated from Bangladesh in the early '70s with his immediate family, and somehow everyone in my family landed in rural Ohio. So I think for most of my life, I claimed that Muslim identity.

Growing up in the Midwest, especially as 9/11 happened in my upbringing, I think that how openly expressed my faith changed and my relationship to faith and even internalized Islamophobia and my own path through various other aspects of my identity definitely influenced my experience of faith and how I express my Muslimness.

But more specifically, I was raised Shia Muslim largely by my grandmother. So my father's mother. My dad had a more, I would say that my dad operates with his faith more from a sense of obligation or duty, or to his mom, to my family. Not necessarily as frequently, at least not in how he has expressed it to me coming from personal calling to faith. It was more this is how I was raised. This is how I'm supposed to relate to faith. I have to pray. I have to fast during Ramadan.

And I think even as a young person, I picked up on some of those underlying guilt, shame feelings around faith. And at first, I'd say even my grandmother raised me in a way that was a little bit more, I guess, like sharp. I wouldn't necessarily say severe, but it was definitely I think, coming from a place of worry and wanting us as grandchildren to be on the right path.

But I always, I mean, I think immediately coming from a multiracial family, living in Ohio, separated from many of my family's sense of home in South Asia. And on my mom's side, my grandmother immigrated from Indonesia. So I have multiple immigration stories. And there's actually, this is a whole other conversation, but there actually is Muslim history on both sides of my family.

But I did feel comfortable with the idea of being Muslim. But I also definitely had a lot of questions, even at a young age of my grandmother saying that only Muslims went to heaven. And I'd be like, well, what about people who never have been introduced to Islam? That just even as a five-year-old sitting in my grandmother's prayer room didn't make sense to me. But I would say that I always felt a sense of connectedness to something, to a greater force purpose.

And yeah, that was the inception of my faith as a young person where I was very interested in the ritual of Islam. I didn't get a very normative religious education. I never really went to Islamic school. I wasn't really taught the Quran in any formal sense. My grandmother tried to teach me Arabic. She tried to talk to me in Urdu, but I was a little obstinate and stubborn. And maybe it was just her pedagogy didn't meet me where I was as this little Midwestern kid who just wanted to memorize the Pokedex and go outside and play.

I think that 9/11 was definitely like 2001, I think in my life was a really key moment of change. That's 2001 is the year I say that my parents divorced 9/11 happened. I realized that I probably was queer. And all of those things to happen at once was a lot, I think, especially around identity formation, whether it was religious or in regard to sexual orientation, or in regard to my place within a family.

That's also when my father, my brothers and I moved in with my paternal grandparents after my parents' divorce. And then shortly after that was 9/11. So we shifted from being closer to Columbus to instead being in a more rural area. And suddenly I was very conscious of religious difference. So there's so much that was going on in the world in which I think there was sort of a reckoning around Islam in the United States.

And as someone who hadn't really processed how I was different religiously until 9/11, yeah, it definitely had an impact on what I felt I could share about myself in school. Being multiracial, I could often pass as whatever people wanted to assume I was. So I was sometimes racialized as other, but oftentimes people would just assume that I was some type of white and which isn't untrue, but it also isn't the full truth, especially having grown up more grounded in my father's culture and religion.

So, yeah, I basically, became really shut down around my religious self and felt ashamed of my Muslimness, ashamed that my grandmother wore saris, not wanting to be seen necessarily, or understood is being a part of something that wasn't quote-unquote, "American." My dad was being called terrorist at work, and I mean, it had a real chilling effect on my Muslimness and my relationship to my Muslimness.

So I'd say, I was a closet Muslim as much as I was in the closet about many other things in my life. And that kind of lasted with waxing and waning until I was a teenager. And then I think everything came to a head as I started to understand myself with new words for sexual orientation and gender.

And in, I think it was junior year of high school or senior year, I started wondering like, am I bisexual? Am I gay? What does this mean for my Islam? At that point, I didn't really have a real religious practice other than praying during Ramadan.

So I sent a really dramatic email to my parents saying that I was bisexual, that I was leaving Islam because I was an adult and the sin was no longer on my father. And also at the time that I was in love with a woman who I met, who I was going to college with, who now, fast forward is my very best friend. She's also a lesbian. So things didn't work out as I thought they would at that time.

And it wasn't until Trump's election that I found my way back to Islam, where I felt I bristled at the Islamophobia that was surrounding me, and I felt like I needed to reclaim and own my identity as a Muslim more publicly again. I didn't know what that meant at the time. I just knew I was like walking around at, I think it was the Women's March here in Boston with a sign that was like, Queer Muslim for Peace. I didn't know what that meant. I think, for me, yet, I hadn't really found community or a real sense of religious practice.

Yeah, so I think, I guess that was in 2016, was when I started to reckon with this past and where I would go with Islam. And I was pretty reticent for a long time, even after that. It wasn't until the last few years that I really, I went from being a lurker in the online Queer Muslims of Boston community to being an active participant during the pandemic and following, like the sort of return to some form of in-person life that we're still in.

And yeah, that is sort of where I figured out that how I experienced faith in Islam was not as uncommon as I thought. I found other people who despite being from so many different backgrounds and coming from all over the world, found community among queer and trans Muslims. And that's I think, where I rebuilt my faith and refound my faith. And also that's what led me here.

So now, I very much claim my Muslim identity. I claim my Shia identity. And I don't see those as being separate from my queer identity, or my gender queer identity, or my racial identity. So yeah, things became more synthesized. And I think I've been able to, especially over the last few years, work through a lot of the shame and internal conflict that sort of began more than 20 years ago.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing all that with us today. I love the framing of it in these different moments in your life of 2001, when identity was really on the fritz suddenly and sort of wrestling with having to come to terms with identity being something you had to have in many ways, as well to 2016 becoming curious about those different identities that maybe once you claimed or didn't feel like you fully could claim them now.

And then, now here we are in 2024, where you're a few weeks in to your start of Divinity School, where I'm sure you've been asked the same questions over and over again about how did you find yourself here? And so with those first two moments in mind, and now here we are at this year, in 2024, how do you find yourself here at Divinity School?

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question and a question that I think, even family members have, which I feel like is so common for Divinity School students. I think especially within my family, I don't think many people expected that I would be the one to pursue any sort of faith work, especially having had a pretty open, conflictual relationship with religion in my adolescence.

But when I try to see the path that led me directly here, I think there's a few different pieces. One, would just be vocationally, I couldn't figure out how to synthesize my experiences as an artist, or as an organizer, and educator in any other field or in any other space. As an artist and a performance artist, I felt like I was sharing so much of myself to largely older white audiences, which didn't feel like I was having the impact that I imagined I would have through the arts.

As an educator, I was often limited in my creativity or my ability to bring myself. That's what led to me not feeling like social work was the right path either. There was this notion that I needed to be a little bit more of a blank slate than I was willing to be. And in organizing, I really just, I wanted to speak more to that process of meaning making that we talk a lot about at Divinity School.

So then I was like, OK, maybe faith work? Question mark. But I think the single most important factor was finding community among queer and trans Muslims here in Boston. So there's a group called Queer Muslims of Boston. It's not a 501(c)(3). It bridges this line between formal and informal, where really it's whatever the community wants and needs it to be.

And it's been around for more than 10 years. It actually was founded by Magda Mohammed and Nabil Khan among others, I believe. But both of them graduated with MDiv from Harvard Divinity School.

And there's this history of relationship between HDS and QMOB, and many of my peers in Queer Muslims of Boston, especially peers who I was able to deepen relationship with through a Halakhah, that was sort of, it's like a circle within QMOB. There's a group of us who meet weekly and talk about faith. And it can be that we're just gabbing and gossiping, and then maybe doing vicar, like, recitation together. Or we're like, considering some aspect of Islam or some aspect of queerness in relationship to each other.

And realizing that what I had to say was respected by my queer and trans peers, and that some of them went to HDS, and I was like, OK, this seems like a place where I might be able to explore these various threads together and see them as closer to being one thing rather than, previously I'd so frequently compartmentalized myself as artist Jordan, educator Jordan, organizer Jordan, Muslim Jordan, queer Jordan, and I no longer. As I've gotten older, it's harder and harder to keep the compartments separate. And I don't really want to.

And I found, partially, through some of my organizing work, and just in how I started to carry myself in my personal life, that there's a real power in owning aspects of my identity together. And I found that within my community that I was learning a lot from other people about how they negotiated the relationship between different aspects of themselves, especially their queerness and their faith and in Islam.

And I also realized that I really like to talk to people about that. And I think that coming from a non-normative American-Muslim background from the Midwest, I was more willing to own what I didn't know, I think, than is necessarily typical of Muslims in any sort of leadership or teaching or mentorship role. And I started really enjoying and finding a lot of meaning in conversations I was having particularly with young queer and trans Muslims as I suddenly had shifted from adolescent to like, uncle, auntie Jordan, especially among the queer and trans Muslim community here. Me being in my early 30s, sometimes does feel like I am the uncle.

And yeah, I feel like HDS is the place where I want to. And I feel like I already, even in the first weeks being here, have been able to start laying the groundwork for what a life of faith work might look like moving forward. And yeah, figuring out what my role is in supporting not only queer and trans Muslims or Muslims, but just people in their process of making meaning and different ways I can share myself in that process, whether it's through chaplaincy or through some form of performance art, and storytelling, and writing, or some unknown, so many unknown paths that may present themselves.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Absolutely. And I find when you speak on that bridging the line between formal and informal as well, too, is something that I also think is a common theme at Divinity School but something that might also really inspire the work that you're doing and thinking about things not in these compartments, but as they come and bleed together, which I think is really inspiring and something that a lot of people would find to be a really freeing framework for the way that they think about themselves.

JORDAN AHMED: I mean, even in coursework I've already had from various different lenses, I feel like there's been this conversation about selfhood, and the closer we get to the truest sense of ourselves, the closer we are to the divine, or God, or meaning.

And I really feel like that's been reflected in my lived experience, and also how I've made meaning of really large challenges in my life to get to this point where I just want to be as much Jordan as possible in whichever ways allow me to move through community and relationship with integrity, and authenticity, and a desire to really meet people where they are.

And I want to experience people in their Michaelness, or in whatever they're most, in the truest form of themselves. And I feel the best way I can do that is trying to be as Jordan as I can if that makes sense.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: I think it certainly does. Yeah, I certainly appreciate it as well too. And the container of this podcast is thinking about that word "hope" as it maybe pertains to some of the things that you were just talking about, about selfhood, maybe it's authenticity, maybe it's sort of coming into identity. And we're curious here what maybe that word "hope" might mean to you in the context of what we've been talking about, and maybe ways in your life that you come to cultivate a sense of what that word "hope" might mean to you.

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah, I'm trying to think of a way in because I feel like, I don't know how much time I've spent thinking about that specific word "hope." I think it really, for me, it often comes back to community and relationship. I think when I was organizing around abolition and against the surveillance state, essentially, and talking to young people about their rights and some of the real dark challenges we face, especially here in the United States.

And with a pretty, there's a reckoning happening in our culture with this tortured history of what it means to be the United States. And a lot of young people would ask me after I gave this workshop about policing and surveillance. They'd be like, well, things sound really bad. What do we do?

And I think I used to be more solutions oriented, where I'd try to think about that question from kind of a structural sense or like what within the systems can we change? But then I started leaning instead on what actually felt true to me is we have the ability to make meaning with the people in our lives who are in our immediate surrounding especially, and when things feel scary and overwhelming and impossible, especially sometimes what feels like the impossibility of liberation or the impossibility of justice, that it can only ever be a striving. It feels like it's hard to find that to achieve those things.

And I think if we ever think that we've achieved justice or liberation, then we probably haven't. So what can I share with these young people who are asking what to do, or anybody who's asking what to do? Even within my family, I end up filling a chaplain role for many generations. I think they often look to me to tell them, what do we do?

And yeah, I really emphasize that all we can do is care about each other, which feels so trite in some ways. But in my life, facing the challenges I faced every time that I've been able to come out of a dark night of the soul or a period of real catastrophe, it has been other people who bring me out and who bring me back to myself. I think, most importantly, to bring it back to that conversation of the self.

So thinking about, who are you surrounding yourself with? How are you taking care of them? How are you showing up for them? How are you witnessing them? I think a lot about that idea of witness. So both being witnessed, how am I allowing myself to be vulnerable with other people and allow them to see me in my fullness? And how am I taking steps back and coming from a position of humility in order to witness them? How are they feeling seen?

So I guess I would say that, for me, there is hope in relationship and in community. And I think that can be as micro scale, as relationship to the self, relationship to a partner, or one other person or a group of friends, relationship to a broader community, relationship to society, to the world, to the cosmos. It kind of can keep going up and up in scale, but ultimately, I think it's always about other people.

And when I lose hope, there are other people in my life who have hope. So I can lean on them. And it doesn't always come through these really direct spiritual conversations. A lot of my professional life has been working with young autistic children who communicate in ways that are really not normative or might not incorporate language in the ways that we think about language more broadly. And I can definitely say that I've learned as much or more about hope from them than anyone else.

And sometimes, that comes from just like holding hands or showing someone a YouTube video that you really care about. And I think it's important, at least I found it's important in my life not to underestimate those small moments of relationship. And I think that any day in which we interact with other people, there is an opportunity to find hope in relationship, whether it's going to a coffee shop and you're interacting with a barista or holding the door for someone.

These things sound really small, but I think there is a way to move through life. Or I found that the way I find meaning is by moving through my life with a level of intention that attends to relationship. And not to say that I'm always successful, or that the quote-unquote, "real world" doesn't take me out of that headspace of connection, because it does.

And I think many of the structures that we're living within don't support connection, and especially embodied connection. I think there's so much, so much of connection has kind of been disembodied via screens. And yeah, so that's what I'd say. I don't know, I feel like I kind of got to the point where I was spinning a little bit. So I don't know if I answered your original question.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: I think you absolutely did. And I think what I appreciate about what you add to the container that is this question of hope is how important care is in the idea of hope. And like you say, though, sometimes it might feel minuscule, those acts of holding the door, engaging with service workers in a kind way, they might feel small, they do take effort, and they do take intention, as you said.

And so I would admit myself as well to I don't always hit the mark that I want to hit. But I would be curious to ask you to part with anybody who may be listening in today. When you find those efforts might be low, or that care may not be on the top of mind, is there any act thing, something you listen to, something you care about that helps you remember how important that care can be in developing that sense of relation with others?

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah. I mean, I think that there are many practices that I've accumulated that even when I'm not able to necessarily practice all of them, even if I get to some of them, I'm able to get closer to that space of care and connection.

So one is just being around other people intentionally. So I try every Thursday night to make it to my helica. And I know that even if I'm in a space of feeling ungrounded, that just sitting around other people who I know are Muslim and who might be wrestling with similar things is helpful.

So being in community, especially, I think, for me, lately faith community. I call family members. I write a lot. I have a regular journal practice. I try to do the classic the artist way morning pages when I can. I definitely have been journaling, even more since arriving at HDS.

But also, I think I have a lot of embodied practices that are really important to me. Like, I feel like sometimes I talk about this so much that it almost becomes a trope. But I regularly go dancing and go clubbing.

So sometimes, I need to be surrounded by people and not necessarily have to interact with them in words, but to have an embodied experience and to remember the boundaries of myself physically, which there are ways that also feels connected to spirit and other forms of practice.

I'm trying to think. I go on a lot of walks. I guess, for me, it's like two different modes. There's ways of getting in my body, OK, three different modes-- ways of getting in my body, ways of reflecting, and ways of relating. So if I can do some of each of those three, or maybe one takes focus more than the others for a while. If I'm doing something within those, then it's easier to find a space of care and intentionality.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I agree with so many of those things being great practices. Well, with that, I just want to thank you so much for coming in and having a conversation today.

JORDAN AHMED: Absolutely.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: We always appreciate the insight. And so look forward to seeing you around campus more.

JORDAN AHMED: Thanks, Michael. Likewise.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: And it's so funny that it just is like and now we--

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