I’m from a military family going back generations. My maternal grandfather fought in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. My father helped coordinate NATO operations during operation Desert Storm. My mother and my stepdad were both in the army too — alongside many of my siblings and cousins. I was raised in the community surrounding the U.S. Army’s principal intelligence base.
Yet, rather than going into the family business, as I approached adulthood I aspired to be a Catholic priest and prepared for that vocation through rigorous studies of Christian theology, scriptural exegesis and “higher criticism” of the Bible.
However, following a crisis of faith, I abandoned this calling.
The next several years were spent wandering—managing enterprises in the private sector and attending community college off and on. Throughout this period, I continued to explore the questions that I had been consumed with as a theologian — albeit, without the religious underpinnings —through intensive private studies of philosophy and the classics.
At the time, I considered myself an atheist. And I zealously tried to prove my unbelief through my lifestyle. However, I struggled to truly internalize atheism: fundamentally, I was a believer. This eventual insight was the beginning of a journey which culminated with my conversion to Islam, and a renewed sense of purpose.
Shortly after converting to Islam, I finally completed my associates degree at Cochise College. Then, nearly a decade after graduating high school, I applied to 4-year universities. However, just as I was preparing to transfer from community college to a four-year university, I was informed that my twin brother, a soldier in the U.S. Army, had lost his life in Afghanistan.
In the aftermath of this tragedy I scrapped plans to study at New York University, where I had been recently admitted, and enrolled in the closest land-grant public university (which also happened to have a top-notch philosophy program) so I could help support my family through this difficult time.
Initially, I was an odd fit in the University of Arizona philosophy program: my intellectual foundations were theology and continental philosophy; towards the end of my private study period, I had developed a deep affinity with the anti-philosophies of Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. The U of A, meanwhile (like most U.S. philosophy programs), is rooted firmly in the American analytic tradition.
I felt uncomfortable in the academic realm overall: I came from a military family and a military community, I had years of private-sector experience under my belt and continued to work while attending classes. I was a good decade older than most students, I came from a community college. I’m black. I’m Muslim. I was (and continue to be) allergic to idealism, secular moralism, utopianism, and positivism. These life experiences and perspectives were alien to most in the Ivory Tower, and they were certainly not well-represented in my department.
Nonetheless, my tenure at the U of A was transformative: while I remain deeply skeptical of many of the methods and axioms of analytic philosophy, I evolved into a pragmatist, inspired by William James, Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. Then, under the tutelage of my thesis chair, I emerged from the program as an experimental philosopher.
The “ex-phi” movement is premised on the idea that many philosophical questions can be explored through empirical investigation rather than relying primarily (or exclusively) on logical arguments, counterfactuals, abstract models, or intuitions. Those theories which are testable should be tested—and at the very least, philosophical positions should be informed and constrained by empirical realities. In pursuit of this ideal, experimental philosophers establish a firm foundation in, and try to remain current on, scientific literature and social science research relevant for the questions they want to explore.
Over time, my work gradually grew more ‘political’ as well. Prior to my brother’s death, I was disdainful towards politics. I thought politics amounted to folks getting distracted by the ‘little’ things, while I was focused on the ‘big’ things like the structure and nature of reality or the meaning of life. However, as I worked to process the loss of my twin, I came to realize that politics was more important than I thought, and was important in different ways than I had initially understood. Resolving to help others avoid going through tragedies like the one my own family was struggling with, I switched my concentration to applied social epistemology, with a particular focus on national security and foreign policy questions. In order to bolster my subject-matter expertise, I simultaneously pursued a second degree in Near Eastern Studies.
While I pursued my BAs, I also helped manage an academic consortium that brought together students who were military veterans with scholars from war-affected regions to study Middle East conflict together. I simultaneously served as an outreach scholar for the University of Arizona Center for Middle East Studies. Eventually, I began teaching classes on national security policy and international organizations for the Department of Government and Public Service at the University of Arizona south campus.
And then I was cancelled by Fox News.
For most, a cataclysm like this would mark the end of their academic journey. It nearly did for me as well. However, as a result of providence and some life-changing advice and support from my mentors at the University of Arizona, I managed to ‘fail upwards’ and gain admission to a number of top-ranked PhD programs that I would have probably never even applied to were it not for the fact that virtually all other options been rendered non-viable by the Fox scandal.
As the Taoist parable goes, who knows what’s good or bad in this life?
Over the course of my previous studies I had come to recognize that the questions I was most interested in were not really ‘armchair’ problems – they required different methods, and more data, than philosophers typically draw from. My MA thesis made the case that, in order to credibly answer the kinds of questions it asks, epistemology must move in a more empirical and culturally-informed direction. Bringing my own actions into line with my expressed convictions, although I received offers from many top philosophy programs, I ultimately decided to pursue a PhD in sociology at Columbia University instead.
However, my philosophical background continues to inform my work as a social scientist: I have a deep comfort and familiarity with theory and formal models. I am also quite attentive to the (often implicit and underexamined) moral and theoretical underpinnings of methods used to collect, analyze and describe data.
Moreover, existential questions haunt virtually all of my work, namely, ‘so what?’ and ‘why does this matter?’ Grappling with these questions gives my scholarship its particular flavor: theoretically-driven, empirically-grounded, and pragmatic in its orientation. It also creates a sense of urgency that drives my productivity. And in addition to my academic publications, I’ve done hundreds of interviews, public talks, and editorials over the past several years to extend the reach of my work beyond my field and beyond the academy.
Broadly, my research explores how people talk about, think about, and produce a shared understanding of social phenomena. As detailed above, my early work was focused on national security and foreign policy issues. However, as demonstrations erupted in the United States pushing back against racial disparities in the criminal justice system, my attention increasingly turned to domestic law enforcement, social movements and extremism.
The 2016 election cycle drew me into U.S. politics per se. Early on, I could see an epistemological bubble forming with respect to Trump and his prospects. The consensus was not just that Clinton was marginally more likely to win, but that it was impossible for her to lose. Trump could never win the Republican nomination, it was asserted. After he secured the nomination, it was nonetheless proclaimed with equal confidence that he could never win the presidency. People who proposed that he had a solid path to victory were broadly mocked, denounced and dismissed (as Nate Silver was for asserting Trump had even a 30 percent chance of winning). Nevertheless, I spent most of the cycle trying to get people to take Trump’s appeal and Clinton’s vulnerabilities more seriously, largely in vain.
After the election, I grew disturbed that little seemed to have been learned from the pervasive expert failure of 2016. Journalists and scholars seemed more preoccupied with analyzing Trump and his supporters in terms of various deficits and pathologies than trying to understand where their own party went wrong, where their own analyses went awry, or the extent to which many of the trends that fed into this outcome were a long time coming.
My growing concern about the pernicious effects of ideological bias and homogeneity on our ability to produce an reliable understanding of the social world led me to work with Heterodox Academy, a non-partisan non-profit organization dedicated to understanding and addressing these very problems.
Gradually, my research expanded to studying the political economy of the knowledge professions writ large — culminating in my first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, published October 8th, 2024 by Princeton University Press.
I then leveraged my interest in public engagement, and my commitment to helping others connect with the public, into a tenure-track professorship in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University.
That’s the story up to now. Where things go from here, only God knows.