The New Religious Radicals
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Although I had planned not to eat that day my will, apparently, was weak. By 4 pm, I was hungry; it didn’t take much for me to cave and buy a discounted rice bowl at the café downstairs before it closed. I’m not particularly observant, but I thought abstaining from food might put me in the mindset for the ‘Interfaith Iftar’ I was scheduled to attend: a dinner to break the daily Ramadan fast and the yearly three-day Jewish Fast of Esther.
I’ve always been sceptical of ‘interfaith events’, particularly in a time of genocide. Events like these have often been organised by institutions like the royal family to promote ‘dialogue’ while ignoring and masking deep-seated power imbalances between different groups. This event was different. Co-hosted by the Inclusive Mosque Initiative and the Jewish anti-Zionist Doikyat Collective, it was one of an eight-part series called ‘Ramadan at Pelican House’, a social centre for radical organising in Bethnal Green. The event embraced politics head-on. It started with a disclaimer by one of the organisers about the difficulty of celebrating anything amid the escalating US and Israeli war of aggression on Iran, which had started two days prior. As the Jewish hazan (prayer leader) explained, the timing hadn’t been a coincidence: the holiday of Purim is meant to commemorate the Ancient Jews in Persia’s survival amid a plot to wipe them out. Here, he pointed out, Israel was weaponising religious ritual to justify their expansionist ambitions. Statements like these along with the political zines and Boycott Israeli Apartheid stickers strewn out on the table helped establish the political mood of the space.
On the surface, the thirty or so participants sitting shoeless in the downstairs room didn’t quite fit the conventional image of religious people. Wearing wide-cut trousers, keffiyehs and piercings, many were visibly queer, progressive and politically radical. Yet the joint service, first an iftar d’ua and then the daily Maariv prayer, was deeply traditional. We waited for a prescribed time to eat, invoked scripture and drew explicit links between the politics of resistance and religious obligation.
Following the joint prayers, we went upstairs to eat falafel wraps and saffron rice from the Palestinian restaurant Hiba, while the 1971 film Resistance – Why? played in the front of the room. The Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani’s incandescent voice resounded, his measured silences filling the room. ‘The Palestinian resistance movement is not a movement to liberate a geographical 26,000 square kilometres. It is a historical movement which aims to liberate the Jews from Zionism and the Arabs from reactionaries and to establish the socialist democratic Palestine’, he said in a calm, cutting, matter-of-fact tone. To my right was the hazan, a slender man whose kippah sank into his chestnut Jew-fro. He had just led a Sephardi-inspired Maariv service and was speaking with two women sitting across from us about their Ramadan routines. To my left was an older Unitarian minister from Virginia who had just moved to London to take up a job at a church in North London.
Kanafani, arguably the most revered Palestinian intellectual after Edward Said, didn’t speak much about religion. His magazine Al-Hadaf covered arts, politics and culture from a Marxist–Leninist perspective. That his film was playing at an interfaith dinner in Bethnal Green said something about how much the movement he inspired had changed. The secular socialism of Al-Hadaf was once fundamental to post-colonial politics worldwide; today, the call for resistance hasn’t gone away, but it is increasingly framed through a different lens.
After eating, we delved into an interfaith textual document produced by the organisers titled ‘A Shared Theological Framework for Liberation: The Obligation to Resist Empire’ – a document through which we debated the roots and constructions of monotheism, the sin of idolatry (avodah zarah/shirk) and the practices of mercy (rahamim/rahma) and justice (tsedek/adl). Much like in the Palestine Solidarity encampments, which swept through university campuses in the spring of 2024, religious rituals and textual study took on a new meaning. Radical politics here was situated (perhaps retroactively) within a longer tradition of religious ethics, grounding a politics of resistance against an exhausted secular liberalism that had run out of road.
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Talal Asad, perhaps the leading anthropological critic of secularism, came to the subject of religion and politics personally. His father was Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss), an Austrian Jew who converted to Islam after a trip to Palestine in the 1920s left him disillusioned with the Zionist project. Growing up between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UK, Talal became fascinated by how newly-independent Muslim countries were modelling themselves after secular European nation-states that claimed not to be religious but emerged from the post-Enlightenment Christian tradition. In his landmark 2003 book Formations of the Secular, he concluded that secularism was itself a product of Western Christian political history, and carries its own assumptions about what counts as rational, public and modern. The backlash against Muslims in Europe, which was (at the time of his writing) ramping up amid the War on Terror, illustrated how secularism required religious minorities to express or frame religion as a private matter. Asad writes that prejudice against Muslims isn’t just racial; rather, ‘it is their attachment to Islam that many believe commits Muslims to values that are an affront to the modern secular state’.
It wasn’t so long ago that Jews also found themselves on the other side of that line. Commentators commonly point out that language that today frames Muslims as ‘invaders’ was once used against Jews. Asad himself discusses how the concept of ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’, a category that hardened after 9/11, emerged after the Zionist project, which pushed Jews in the West to narrate their religion through a secular-nationalist lens. Jewish groups who opposed Zionism on religious grounds, like Hasidic Jews, were marginalised by mainstream Jewish groups who saw them as a backward holdover from a previous age, an affront to the secular-liberal consensus. The new ‘Judeo-Christianity’ was less an act of inclusion than a redrawing of the boundary. It’s not that anti-Jewish prejudice doesn’t endure, but it’s unlikely that Douglas Murray would be invited on the BBC if he had called for ‘less Judaism’.
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Growing up in suburban Chicago, I was often told that there were two topics I should never raise with strangers: politics and religion. This was a time where secular individualism was the ultimate marker of freedom. Faith was a relic of a bygone age and completely antithetical to rationality. It was the time when coming-of-age films like Bend It Like Beckham celebrated young people subverting oppressive community expectations. The struggle for same-sex marriage was at its peak and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had just been released. Not coincidentally, the least cool thing you could be was religious. Stuffy old religious conservatives, like Evangelical Christians and Hasidic Jews, I was taught, couldn’t let go of the ‘old ways’. They needed to understand that times had changed and tradition was only holding us back.
Like many things, I largely believed this because everyone around me did. In the late 1990s and 2000s, at the peak of ‘third way’ liberalism, speaking fluent secularism was foundational to being an authority on anything. Take, for instance, Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who once called faith an ‘excuse to evade the need to think’, or commentators like Bill Maher, Ricky Gervais and George Carlin, who poked fun at ‘lunatic’ or ‘crazy’ right wingers who believed in an ‘invisible man in the sky’ – many of whom would later rebrand as condescending ‘anti-woke champions’ in the late 2010s. At the time, however, politicians who didn’t couch their views in lay language could face scrutiny. In 2000, US Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, had to repeatedly reassure atheist voters that ‘our faith is not inconsistent with their freedom’. His reassurance didn’t cut it for many Democratic voters or for the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, who warned that such language ‘risks alienating the American people’. Lieberman and Al Gore lost to George Bush and Dick Cheney later that year.
During a 2008 campaign event with a crowd of wealthy San Francisco liberals, Barack Obama was asked why working-class white voters often voted ‘against their own interests’. Obama responded that amid economic uncertainty, the disenfranchised ‘cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them’. His comment, often compared to Hillary Clinton’s famous ‘deplorables’ statement, was even more ironic given his own attempt to break with the left’s secular orthodoxy through speaking a language of faith characteristic of black Christian politicians of his party. Obama’s overtures to faith helped him break through to white religious rural voters; a black Christian quoting scripture was much less threatening than a Muslim with the middle name Hussein. Once in office, however, whatever faith he had remained a private matter.
If Lieberman faced backlash as an observant Jew, London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s position as a Muslim made him even more of a target. In his 2016 campaign, Khan had to repeatedly rebuke allegations that he gave cover to ‘religious extremists’. In an interview with The Washington Post, ahead of his campaign, Sadiq Khan warned of the dangers of the ‘Donald Trump approach’ to politics. He called on Trump to visit London so he could introduce himself ‘as a mainstream Muslim, very, very comfortable with Western liberal values’. Khan’s appeal to the politics of respectability clearly helped him get in the door. But in his ten-year tenure as mayor, he has increasingly leaned into his Muslim identity. By posting pictures of iftars at Nando’s, Khan has become a symbol of multicultural London and an outspoken voice against the peaking wave of Islamophobia over the last five years.
Zohran Mamdani, who became the first New York City mayor to swear the oath of office on a Quran, skipped the first phase altogether. From the get-go, Mamdani made his Muslim identity central to his appeal to New Yorkers. He made faith feel fun, for instance when he joined content creator Kareem Rahma and a Côte d’Ivoirian cab driver for iftar in the Bronx, or when he controversially broke the Ramadan fast with a burrito on the train (eating is taboo on the NYC subway). Since becoming mayor, Mamdani has hosted multiple iftars at Gracie Mansion with figures like pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil and his wife Noor. Zohran was elected for two principal reasons: his focus on the cost of living, and his principled opposition to the genocide in Gaza. In both of these appeals, Mamdani’s unapologetic identity made him appear genuine and grounded. It also allowed him to appeal to other religious communities in the city, namely Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, whose leadership publicly refuted allegations of anti-Judaism levelled against him.
Mamdani found an unlikely ally in Brad Lander, a middle-aged Jewish progressive who is now running for Congress. Flying in the face of several mainstream Jewish organisations, Lander cross-endorsed Mamdani in the Democratic primary and repeatedly spoke about the need for solidarity between Muslim and Jewish New Yorkers. Lander may lack Mamdani’s subway-burrito charisma, but he’s also made religious identity central to his messaging – for instance, in cursing rival Andrew Cuomo in Yiddish or, more impactfully, giving an impassioned pulpit speech on Yom Kippur calling for Jewish collective repentance over the crime of genocide.
Mamdani’s religious populism is finding echoes in Britain. In the February 2026 by-election in Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer, a local plumber, visited multiple local mosques and even fasted for a day of Ramadan as an act of solidarity. She took her victory speech as an opportunity to call out her rivals for scapegoating the local Muslim community and being silent as their brothers and sisters were being killed in Gaza. While the Green Party have made overtures of solidarity, the most consequential shift has come from within British-Muslim communities themselves. In response to a feeling that Labour was taking the community for granted, many Muslim communities have split from the party. Since 2023, organisations like The Muslim Vote have been supporting pro-Palestine independent candidates like Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North as well as other similarly aligned independents throughout the country. The most prominent new political voices in Britain are Muslims who didn’t wait for an established party to platform them.
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Only ten years ago liberal assumptions like free trade and universal human rights seemed like unquestionable foundations of a ‘just political order’. Today, it is harder to pretend these principles were ever neutral. In January 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, himself an establishment liberal, stood before the assembled elites of Davos and said what few in that room had been willing to say out loud: that the rules-based international order had always been ‘partially false’, that the West had been ‘living within a lie’. It was, he said, ‘a rupture, not a transition’.
His message may have referred to the international system, but it reflects what politicians like Mamdani and Spencer have been saying at the grassroots: that the unbridled worship of progress has led us into a world of plutocratic control, spiralling wealth inequality and geopolitical chaos. Politicians are left with a choice: adapt to the new order or try to play the new game by old rules.
If liberalism is dead, then what’s filling the void? The answer can be found in the anti-establishment political movements of both the right and left.
In the spring of 2024, as encampments sprang up across American and British universities, the Palestine Solidarity movement was beginning to go mainstream. The encampments were disruptive – they protested universities’ complicity – and institutional crackdowns exposed a gap between administrations and their students. Unlike previous protest movements, however, the encampments didn’t shy away from religion: they hosted ‘Liberation Seders’, Jum’ah prayers and meditiations guided by Buddhist monks; signs read ‘this protest is a ritual’.
The secular left of the sixties, seventies and eighties spoke of equality, civil rights and decolonisation, but it didn’t draw on ritual. To an extent, this generational religious gap in the organising world persists today: when the anti-Zionist magazine Jewish Currents began to publish weekly religious commentaries, many long-time subscribers sent furious letters to the editor accusing the magazine of straying from real socialism. For the magazine’s younger readership, however, reading about the weekly Torah portion was a way of engaging with a Jewish tradition beyond the secular Zionism that many were raised within.
At King’s College London, where I work and study, a similar trend played out. The sixty-eight-day encampment in the spring of 2024 brought together Muslims of all leanings, alongside leftists, communists and LGBT activists, all united to hold the university accountable. Notably, the encampment was a deeply religious space, with regular Quran circles, scheduled prayer times for those who wanted to participate and halal food served for meals throughout the day. The guest speakers, many of them Muslim and Jewish, frequently spoke from a position of religious ethics, specifically the obligation to seek justice. When I asked Luqmaan Waqar, a key organiser of the encampments, about those months, he said that while the Muslim ethics of justice were foundational to the movement, it was open to people of multiple faiths and ideologies and drew from a range of tactics and methods from across the political spectrum. In this context, Third-worldist writers, like Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon, were often paired with religious teachings. Multiple participants, having seen what Muslim communal life can look like, chose to convert to the faith themselves.
This unique decolonial politics is emerging in spaces that don’t fit neatly into left or right. One example is The Thinking Muslim, a podcast that has built a substantial following by speaking from a decolonial Western Muslim point of view while engaging with everyone from progressive academics to MAGA conservatives. In one recent episode, guest host Imam Tom Facchine sat down with Christian conservative Curt Mills: the kind of conversation that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Facchine asked where morality was in American foreign policy: ‘I’m concerned that we’ve become so secularised in how we talk about politics and foreign policy. It’s almost like a language that we’ve lost. Would God approve of what we’re doing?’
Mills’s appearance is one sign of a broader shift on the American right. While the MAGA right was once wholly unified behind the pro-Israel cause, right-wing commentators and politicians like Tucker Carlson, Carrine Prejean Boller and Marjorie Taylor Greene have discussed how their faith has moved them to oppose expansionist foreign policy. Unlike the left’s rights-based language, many right-wing commentators take a more chauvinist posture – one that sometimes bleeds into Christian or White Nationalism. Yet the religious conviction isn’t always cynical. This was on display most clearly in Carlson’s response to Donald Trump’s barrage of Truth Social posts regarding the Iran war, one of which threatened that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’. Carlson zeroed in on one post threatening to detonate Iran’s key infrastructure, which ended with ‘praise be to Allah’. ‘How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country?’ Carlson pushed back furiously. Calling the message a mockery of Islam and Christianity, Carlson declared that ‘…the message of faith … is you are not God. And only if you are God do you speak that way.’ Whatever Carlson’s politics, the language of faith is pulling him somewhere that few conservatives have dared to go.
These alliances aren’t just about politics; people of faith often have aligned priorities. A few years ago, I asked a Hasidic Jewish builder from Stamford Hill if he would rather do a job for a Muslim or someone who isn’t religious. Without hesitating, he responded that ‘[i]f they’re Muslim, at least I know they believe in something’. If someone is completely secular, he added, ‘I don’t know what they believe’. This isn’t to say that there’s no latent Islamophobia in the Hasidic community, but in day-to day life people of faith have common cause: a mutual understanding of self-abnegation, community and thinking beyond the here and now.
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I left the Interfaith Iftar that Monday night around ten, just before the reading of the Purim Megillah. For all my talk about religion and tradition, I had failed to maintain my fast, disregarding the only religious obligation required of me that day. I felt a bit guilty as I recalled the conversation between the hazan and the woman across from us: ‘I love Ramadan,’ she explained, ‘it helps reset your habits and think about what’s important.’ I remembered being taught the same thing about the Jewish Yom Kippur fast; at the height of the secular age (and as a twelve-year-old), it made no sense to me – wouldn’t abstaining from food make you think about it more? I now saw what she meant: fasting slows the body and reorganises time around collective obligation. It allows you to think beyond immediate wants. I had never done the Fast of Esther (it’s a minor fast in Judaism); maybe that night could have been a good time to start.
A few weeks later, I went to meet Luqmaan at the Aziziye restaurant and mosque in Stoke Newington. I didn’t eat before 6.04 pm this time. The dates and water were so refreshing as I accompanied him to pray alongside the twenty or so men prostrating themselves in a single saff. As we returned downstairs and ate our pide, lahmacun and iskender, we discussed everything from the Iran War to Hasidic anti-Zionism to Muhammad Asad. I asked him if he’d always been so pious; he smiled and shrugged, ‘we’ve all had a Nietzsche phase’.
Strangely, compared to my annual Yom Kippur fast, this one was easy; I was glad to participate in a ritual even if just for a day. I don’t think it was about Islam or Judaism per se. Maybe I just liked feeling part of something.
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Martín Francisco Saps is a writer and urbanist based in London whose work explores religion, identity and urban politics. His writing has appeared in Vittles, Vashti and ARC Magazine, among other places.
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