Hisham Aidi is a lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is author most recently of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture, winner of the 2015 American Book Award.
Like thousands of others, Omar Alshogre was repeatedly tortured in Bashar al-Assad’s prisons—but unlike so many, he got out. Now he’s telling the world about the regime’s industrial-scale brutality.
For Muslim youth, interest in the black freedom movement is part of a larger turn toward an American conception of race—it fills a political void and offers a sense of belonging. But at what cost?