Salman Khan’s March to “More Muslim”

Salman – Hello, hello. 

Rob- Hi there. How are you. 

I spoke to Salman Khan on March 4th, day 5 of the American and Israeli war on Iran.  

Salman – I’m good. How are you? 

Rob – I’m very well. Where am I finding you? 

At that time, America and Israel had just started pummeling Iran with bombs and missiles.  Iran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz and firing missiles at Israel as well as U.S. targets in several countries. Including Qatar. 

Salman – You’re finding me in Doha, Qatar. In the middle of all the 

I had no idea. I thought he was in the States. 

Rob – Oh my gosh. 

Salman – No. I mean, it’s fine… Not much we can do. It’s basically like Covid but with a couple more explosions outside. So, we’re all on lockdown. (laughs)

Rob – How’s your family? 

Salman – They’re good. They’re good. I think got a bit shook up the first few days. After that, um, I don’t know. There’s a weird sense of normalcy but everyone is, kind of, a little bit on edge. 

I mean it’s not like we’re in Iran where you’re actually being attacked directly. Over here they’re mostly targeting the American base which is around 20 minutes from my house. So, I’ve seen some rockets flying around and it’s been a bit surreal… there’s just some uncertainty on when it will all end. 

Salman assured me he was safe. So we agreed to go ahead with our talk about a podcast he launched in January. One that he felt was essential before the war started and it’s even more essential now. 

The podcast is called “More Muslim.” Salman and his team report stories about the Muslim community from around the world. Stories he says that are incredibly hard to get approved by editors in the west. 

Salman - We wanted to create a space where reporters could come in and not have to even go through those barriers of having to justify the kinds of things that they're interested in and to actually be able to produce stories that you know what, maybe a Western audience might not be interested in, but maybe your uncle and auntie might be interested in.

Theme Music - (fades in)

There’s a kind-of story I go back to again and again on this podcast: a new or emerging producer picks up a mic and wills something into existence. That’s Salman.

Salman – I went with an approach like “fake it till you make it.” 

Welllll, I respectfully disagree. There was a lot more than just “faking it” going on. It was more like a persistent march forward. 

Theme Music

This is Sound School, from PRX and Transom. I’m Rob Rosenthal. 

Before we hear the backstory to Salman’s march, let’s give you a feel for More Muslim and listen to a short clip. You won’t hear Salman. He works in the background as Executive Producer and Managing Editor. 

We’ll jump right in to a story about the tension over women praying in mosques. It focuses on a Muslim woman from Chicago named Hind Maki (hind, rhymes with pinned, MAH-key). Hind found mosques to be a welcoming place when she was very young. Mosques felt like home, she says. Until she got older. 

The first voice you’ll hear is the reporter, Taqwa Sadiq (talk-wha saw-dick) 

Taqwa Sadiq -  One year in the summer holidays, this is when Hind was about 14, she, her sister, and her dad came up with a new family tradition. 

Hind Maki  - We would pray at a different masjid every Friday. 

Taqwa Sadiq -  They called it mosque-hopping. This is in the 90s, so the way in which you find the mosques to hop is through something called the Yellow Pages. 

Hind Maki – You’re saying that with this really surprised look, but you forget that I'm quite a bit older than you, so I'm familiar with the Yellow Pages, and that's how we would do our mosque crawls as well. 

Taqwa Sadiq - Is it? 

Hind Maki – It's a thing. You go to mosque or masjid, and then you find the list of all of your local mosques, and if you're lucky, it has a phone number, and you call and you find out. Amazing. 

Taqwa Sadiq -  [00:03:20] Okay so on Friday, they picked a mosque that they'd never been to before. 

Hind Maki  [00:03:23] We drove down to the city more than an hour, and it's in a very vibrant South Asian part of the city where it's full of restaurants and fabric stores. You almost feel like you're in New Delhi when you're there. 

Taqwa Sadiq -  [00:03:38] And so they put into this address that they had. 

Hind Maki  [00:03:40] And we're thinking is this it? It doesn't look like it's a mosque. Something feels 

Taqwa Sadiq -  [00:03:48] the place looks more like an abandoned warehouse. 

Hind Maki  [00:03:50] An underground parking space. But then they see someone. South Asian uncle is in his shell archimedes and he's very rapidly walking to somewhere. 

Taqwa Sadiq -  So their dad rolls down the window and asks for directions. And Uncle G is like, no problem, follow me, let's go. But um, leave the girls. The girls don't come. And my dad said what? And Hinn's dad explains, these are his daughters. He can't just leave them there. They're excited. 

Hind Maki  - To come and pray at the mosque. And the man was adamant. He said, no, no. No, no no no, there's no place for women. Come brother, come. 

There’s a clip from “More Muslim,” an episode called “Side Entrance,” the first episode of the first season. Salman told me his favorite part of the story is what happens next with Hind. We’ll hear that in a few minutes. 

Salman was born and raised in Qatar. He considers himself Pakistani since that’s where his family is from. 

Salman - I still have a Pakistani passport and I'm proudly Pakistani. Speak Urdu. And, I am a card carrying member of the Pakistani community. (laughs)

Salman traces the seeds of More Muslim back about 12 years. He was an undergrad majoring in economics in Qatar and a friend said listen to Freakanomics. 

Salman – I remember listening to that and just being like “Oh. This is really interesting.” 

That led Salman to Snap Judgment. Then This American Life, Radiolab, 99% Invisible. It’s probably safe to say the majority of Sound School listeners took a similar path. 

Then, came Serial in 2014. The true crime podcast about Adnan Syed and whether or not he was wrongfully convicted for murder. 

Salman – It was a very different experience listening to that show from here because Adnan Syed it is a Pakistani-American and his… family members sounded like people I knew. So it was a strange thing to be like, “Oh, this guy is like one of us And he's in the middle of this really harrowing situation. And then I think, yeah, I just that started the love affair with narrative…

I also just started getting obsessed with the craft of it of like, who are these people who are making this thing? And why is this so good?

In the old days, we’d say Salman had been bitten by the radio bug. I’m not sure what the podcast equivalent is but he had it. 

Right around the same time, Salman took a class on Islamic law. 

Salman - Just to paint the picture a little bit. We were studying at Georgetown University's campus in Qatar. So we were studying in Islamic law class at a Jesuit university in Qatar with a group of students from all over the world…

Like there's such a variety of people who had the kinds of experiences that you didn't have to explain yourself to people… it was this safe space to be able to discuss really nuanced issues within the Muslim community, within Islamic law, Islamic theory. 

Salman put two and two together and got “podcast.” He wondered “How can we take these insightful, broad discussions about Muslim life and turn them into a show?” 

That’s when his experiments started. He just started making something with friends after he graduated. 

Salman – Like we were just riffing around. 

Here’s Salman’s first riff from the late 20-teens. A podcast called “Ballads of Others.” 

Clip – From the episode  “Passports, Passports, Passports” - Speaker -  A lot of people criticized me when I made the decision to move from Qatar to Pakistan at this young age when I was earning a lot. (fades under)

Salman – When we started, we really wanted to do like really artsy, non-narrated documentaries in the Love + Radio style plus Snap Judgment and we’ll do those but we’ll do them from people like us. 

Speaker – (fades up) What are you out of your mind? You're a young family. You should have gone to Canada get the passport and go to Australia Get the passport the passport, the passport and that didn't bother me that much because I have seen the cost of that passport in my life. 

Salman -  This is Ballads of Others, stories of the Permanently Temporary.

Speaker - I didn't meet my grandparents and this is similar to most overseas Pakistanis.  (fades under) 

Salman shakes his head a little at his first attempt. What did Ira Glass once say – There’s a time, early on, when you’re making audio stories and your taste exceeds your skills. This is that time for Salman. 

Speaker – I often find myself pondering, at what cost? (fades out)

Salman remained in touch with his Islamic Law professor. She hosted gatherings with her former students. They’d often talk about how they felt Muslim culture is not well-represented in the West. 

It was at those gatherings that the idea for “More Muslim” took shape. 
Stories not just about Muslims but for Muslims.

Salman - It's just such a different experience listening to someone from the region report on the region, rather than having a foreign perspective of saying like, here, instead of these people, it's us and our people and what we are going through.

Problem is, Salman says there’s no narrative podcasting scene to speak of in Qatar and the Middle East. For several years, there was a show called Kerning Cultures. But that was it. So, Salman felt if he wanted to make a go of it in podcasting and turn “More Muslim” into a show with solid reporting, storytelling and production, he would need help. 

Salman - I can see my future and my future is, if I can work at WNYC, if I work at NPR, if I could work at Gimlet, I can see a path to making this my career from there.

Salman applied to the journalism program at CUNY, the City University of New York, and got in. 

Salman - I basically used up five years of my saving to be able to do that. I was working two jobs…. And also the timing wasn’t great because I went in 2021 and then the audio industry collapsed. (laughs).

Once he was in New York, Salman went into sponge mode – soaking everything up. For instance, he wrote down the names and contact information for every Muslim reporter and producer he met thinking that maybe someday such a list might come in handy. 

He petitioned the school for special permission to work on a More Muslim pilot. They said yes and he set up a one-on-one mentorship with Amanda Aronczyk, the co-host of Planet Money. 

And, his vision for the future came true. He landed an internship at The Experiment, a podcast at WNYC. Salman carefully watched how reporters and editors worked together, how the production flow was managed, how scripts were edited.  At one point an editor said to him, see if you can find us a story about the war in the Ukraine. He did. And they said: 

Salman – You know what? You’re in charge now. For this week’s episode why don't you go and take the lead and we'll follow you…. The way I think of it is someone gave you the wheels of an F-1 car. 

Do you see why I described Salman’s path to making “More Muslim” a reality as a persistent march forward?  

Salman graduated from CUNY in 2022. Now what? 

As fate would have it, his professor from Georgetown University, Dr. Sohaira Siddiqui (sew-haira se-deek-eee), reached out. Dr. Siddiqui had recently become the head of a mosque and community center for Muslim women and she asked him “How much would it cost to properly produce a season of More Muslim and would he run it?” 

Salman said yes. 

Clip - Taqwa Sadiq - This is the first time this has ever happened, and Hind says it's a real shock to the system. It takes them a minute to process what is going on. And so the dad, he's literally in between a rock and a hard place, and he says, look, I'm just going to go pray really quickly, and I'll be back as soon as I can. And the girls are left by themselves in the car. 

Hind Maki  - You can kind of hear echoes of the men praying in Jama'a. And we just sat there in this dark garage, just sitting there and not praying. Mystified. Absolutely mystified and feeling even a little bit hot, because I was kind of angry once the shock of it wore off. I remember just thinking like, what do these people think that we are? Do they think that we're kofar? We also need to pray. So why isn't the mosque the place for women. To offer prayers, and when you... 

Taqwa Sadiq - Dad got back in the car, did you guys have a conversation about it? 

Hind Maki  - We did. My father said, no, this man is wrong. These are people who think this way, but they don't know. And, you know, moving on. My parents were so concerned with their children born and raised in the U.S. to remain connected, to hold fast to the rope of Allah. And for my dad, I think he didn't want us to dwell on the moment because he didn't want us to think there's a reason to leave, you know, the faith. 

Taqwa Sadiq -  Because to be rejected from the masjid, the house of Allah, it's not that big of a jump to then feel rejected from Islam entirely. 

Sohaira Siddiqui -  There are now over one billion Muslim women in the world. We take up space in every sense. Intellectually, socially, spiritually. So what does it mean when our presence in one of the most central spaces of Muslim life becomes debated? This week on the show, reporter Taqwa Sadiq with a story that gets to the root of this conversation. How Muslim women's presence in the mosque has been formed and transformed through the centuries. I'm Sohaira Siddiqui. A professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University, and the director of Al Mujaddila, a women's center in Qatar. This is More Muslim, a show about the Muslim experience, with all its messiness.

The story really takes off from here. Hind launches a social media campaign that sparks a movement. It’s worth a listen. Especially the history and analysis they provide in the second half of the show. 

Clip - Taqwa Sadiq - Can I ask, like, if you take off your professor hat and you put on your Muslim woman hat, how do you feel about all of this? 

Sohaira Siddiqui -  [00:28:56] Yeah, I mean I personally believe, and this is I think a real problem, is on the one hand we want to say you know women should be these pillars of like righteousness and piety and morality in society and they should wear hijab and they should remind people of the faith and they should raise faithful children. But then we're not providing them with the majlis as the place to nourish them. And so for me I feel like there's a big gulf between our expectations of Muslim women's piety. And what we're actually giving Muslim women. Yeah, 100%. And so I think if we really want Muslim women to have that connection to their faith, then we fundamentally have to start looking really closely at these masjids that have ignored those needs so far, and designed them to be a home for Muslim women in a way that historically was the case and is no longer the case in many places. 

That’s Dr. Saddiqui, right there. Salman’s Islamic professor. She hosts the show.

Salman’s the only full time staffer at More Muslim. He put together a team that includes reporters and producers from all over. Pakistan, Egypt, and Indonesia plus reporters in the west with backgrounds from Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan. 

As of this writing, More Muslim has produced six episodes. Stories about Muslim marriage, an historic Muslim neighborhood in Cape Town South Africa that is under threat from gentrification, and the secret history of an English translation of the Qur’an. Salman says there are at least three more on the way.

And, I should let you know that I reached out to Salman asking how he’s doing. On April 17th, he sent the following voice note. 

Salman - Hey Rob, I guess since we last spoke, the major development was the night of Trump's deadline when he tweeted out that he was promising to wipe out a whole civilization in Iran. I think that was a moment where none of us knew what was about to happen next. I think there was some bombing that had started over again that night, so we just I didn't know what was going to happen, but... Thankfully, the ceasefire went into effect. And since then in Doha, at least, it's been relatively calm. I know that there's been a lot of bombing happening still in Lebanon, but it seems to be the case that there is a ceasefire happening there as well. So hopefully things are on their way to being resolved. But yeah, thanks for checking in. 

Theme music 

My conversation with Salman continues at Transom dot org where Salman lays out what he brought from his experience at WNYC to “More Muslim.”  

Salman – You keep on going through different phases of production, always listening, listening to tape. 

I think there’s going to be a LOT of listening to tape at the Transom Festival. A big ole gathering to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Transom. Think of it as a radio, podcasting, audio storytelling party in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. On Cape Cod.

The Transom Festival is happening this September. The 17th – 19th to be exact. What happens at a Transom Festival? Other than Bjork DJing a rave at the beach? I’m joking about that, unfortunately. There will be listening sessions, masterclass workshops, performances, and hopefully a swim or two or three in the ocean. 

Keep an eye peeled on Transom dot org for a list of top-notch presenters as well as ticket and lodging information. Of course, I’ll keep you updated, too.

Sound School is a production of PRX and Transom. My radio fellow travelers are Genevieve Sponsler, Jay Allison, and Jennifer Jerrett. 

I’m Rob Rosenthal. Thanks for listening.    

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