“Should Muslim-Americans attend the Washington, DC Iftar?”  I asked the women across the dinner table, after digesting the heated exchanges about the White House Iftar Dinner on my social media timelines.  

“Who cares?” Responded the 51 year-old, single-parent Muslim-American from Detroit. 

The debate of the day among Muslim-American intellectuals and elites in Washington, DC did not register on the broadening spreadsheet of concerns of this immigrant from Iraq, raising three children on a pay-rate marginally above minimum wage.

“They may cut my water,” she shared, highlighting Detroit’s looming water crisis. “And a young boy was recently shot outside our mosque.”  These troubles, among others she shared during a Ramadan dinner, occupied her mind.      

For the vast majority of Muslim-Americans today, who attended or boycotted the July 14th, White House Ramadan Iftar ranks low in their hierarchy of concerns. This matter, like the growing majority of issues taken on by Muslim-American organizations in the beltway, is a matter that concerns elites, and worlds away from the checklist of issues important to the vast majority of Muslim-Americans today.

The debate encircling the White House Iftar also highlights a widening disconnect between communities and an increasingly estranged Muslim-American ‘leadership.’  This is particularly true for doubly marginalized segments of the Muslim-American population: 1) Muslim-Americans victimized by state policies and programming, and 2) demographics sidelined by Muslim-American organizations and gatekeepers. 

Who are the groups living on the intersection of both state-sponsored and Muslim-American institutional marginalization?  Immigrant Muslim-American communities. Poor, indigent Muslim-American communities. African-American Muslim communities.  Muslim-American households headed by single parents.  Unemployed and under-employed Muslim-Americans.  And the list goes on. 

The specific interests of these marginalized groups are seldom championed by the string of Muslim-American organizations in and around Washington, DC.  Their voices are virtually non-existent within the most prominent Muslim-American organizations and their pressing, everyman concerns absent from their programming.     

The growing population of marginalized Muslim-Americans – in blue-collar, rustbelt towns like Detroit, overpriced inner-city enclaves in New York City and neglected communities beyond and in between, are chiefly concerned with: adequate housing, affirmative action, government surveillance and spying, Gaza, adequate healthcare, access to water, immigration reform, extraterritorial detentions, poverty and racism.  

Instead of debating the ethical or political merits of attending the White House Iftar, these Muslim-Americans are more concerned with how to feed their families before, during and after Ramadan. 

Therefore, a Ramadan Iftar ripe with fruit bouquets and smiling photo-ops is not only symbolic of this divide, but also symptomatic of an increasing irrelevance in the very Muslim-American communities that need DC leadership the most.  

The hotly contested White House Iftar is fundamentally a Washington, DC concern, far from Muslim-American main street, which should inform how American-Muslim organizations prioritize their institutional concerns after hands are shaken and selfies taken.

That coveted seat on the government table, for almost every Muslim-American far from Washington, DC and even further away from ever receiving an Iftar invite from the White House is yet to bear fruit.  Therefore, making the debates had on the tables of DC elites ever more remote from the discussions had within the dining rooms of the rest of Muslim-America.  

— Khaled A. Beydoun is a professor of law at UCLA. Twitter: @khaledbeydoun