From Kensington to Chittagong: A young activist on the rise

Written by Eliza Relman

 

 

Shahana Hanif was cheering on a phuchhka eating contest at a South Asian festival in Jackson Heights the day Bangladeshi-born Imam Alauddin Akonjee and Thara Miah were executed leaving their mosque across the borough in Ozone Park.   

A week later, Hanif stepped onto a makeshift stage at Avenue C Plaza in Kensington, Brooklyn to address a crowd of neighbors, public officials, mosque members, and rabbis from the neighboring Orthodox Jewish community. The large, somber, predominantly male crowd held signs reading, “Americans come in all colors, races, and religions,” and “Terrorists are the enemies of Islam.”

“We demand safety for our diverse Muslim communities and their mosques in New York City,” Hanif called out. “We acknowledge that Islamophobic rhetoric impacts Muslims across the gender spectrum — our sisters’ voices and presence in this fight for systemic change are as important.”

Hanif’s words proved disturbingly prophetic: almost exactly two weeks after the Ozone Park killings, a 60-year-old Bangladeshi-Muslim woman, Nazma Khanam, was stabbed to death while walking home from work in Jamaica, Queens.  

 

What got her here

At 25, Hanif has spent years in diverse advocacy roles. Recently, she has emerged as one of the most prominent young activists in the Bangladeshi community in New York — leading efforts to build public space, engage voters, and raise awareness of injustice in Bangladesh. She is a leader of the Muslim Writers Collective’s New York chapter, where she coordinates open mics and performs her own creative non-fiction. Additionally, since being diagnosed with Lupus eight years ago, she has written and spoken extensively about disability justice and her experiences living with a chronic illness.  

Hanif’s world centers around Kensington — the diverse central Brooklyn neighborhood known by some as Banglatown — where she and her two younger sisters were raised by their Bangladeshi parents.

Hanif’s father, Muhammed, was 22 when he arrived in New York on a commercial export ship in 1980. When the ship docked, Muhammed settled in Crown Heights and found work in restaurants and construction sites, sending money back to Bangladesh to support his parents and five younger siblings. He returned to his family’s rural village in Chittagong to marry Hanif’s mother, Rehana, in an arranged marriage in 1989. When Rehana arrived in the US in 1990, she insisted on attending all of the Bangladeshi community association meetings her husband frequented as a way of connecting with the budding Bangladeshi community. Later, she brought Hanif and her sisters along in strollers.

Growing up, Hanif spent most of her free time at Baitul Jannah Jame Masjid, a local mosque and community center, where she studied the Qur’an, learned Arabic, and built a tight network of young Bangladeshi-Muslim friends. When she was diagnosed with Lupus at seventeen, her world was destabilized. As her daily life changed — she was homeschooled for several months and eventually had to have both of her hips replaced — her understanding of injustice deepened. However, it was as a Women’s and Gender Studies major at Brooklyn College that Hanif grew into the intersectional thinker she is today.

“[My education] gave me space to really understand my body, disability justice work, South Asian history, queer theory, feminism — it was really what I needed at the time,” Hanif says.

Hanif graduated from college with a desire to “help fill what’s missing” in Kensington and other immigrant neighborhoods. She joined CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, a nonprofit organizing poor and working class Asian immigrant communities across the city. As a public housing organizer with CAAAV, Hanif helped Bangladeshi, Korean, and Chinese residents of the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City — the largest public housing development in the country — develop better language access services across the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) system, improve tenant leadership, and strengthen relations with other minority communities in Queensbridge.

In 2015, CAAAV and the Urban Justice Center released a report finding that the majority of Asian NYCHA tenants who spoke little or no English were not provided with translation or interpretation services. Hanif watched as immigrants — particularly the elderly — were routinely locked out of government services, including social security, disability, and food stamps.

“That has everything to do with not knowing English,” Hanif says. Fighting for language justice and erasing the notion that English is a prerequisite for survival quickly became the cornerstone of Hanif’s advocacy work.

“Just because folks don’t speak the main language of a country doesn’t mean they don’t deserve equal resources,” says Wai Yee Poon, CAAAV’s former Chinatown tenants union organizer. “The whole bureaucracy needs to be multilingual.”

Language barriers are particularly significant in the Bangladeshi community. Citywide, more than half of adult Bangladeshis — and almost ninety percent of the elderly — speak limited English. Language access is also an acute problem for first-generation Bangladeshi children. In 2015, there were more than 6,500 Bangladeshi students in New York City public schools, but only three schools offered Bangla-bilingual programs.

“Asians are not understood as people who are in poverty,” says Hanif.

The reality of thousands of New York City’s Bangladeshis living in poor, overcrowded homes or in public housing continues to be largely unrecognized, Shahana says. Instead, Bangladeshis often fall prey to the “model minority myth,” a stereotype that Asian-Americans are more socio-economically successful than other minority groups. The terms “Asian” and “Asian-American” — used to refer to peoples from dozens of diverse countries — are inherently generalizing. And many organizations, such as NYCHA, fail to distinguish between different Asian nationalities when using demographic data, grouping them all together as “Asian.”

Bangladeshi immigrants and Bangladeshi-Americans are forgotten in part because they are underrepresented in the political and cultural mainstream. “Asian means East Asian and South Asian means Indian” says Hanif.

 

 

Resisting gender roles

Feminism is central to Hanif’s activism. “From a really young age, she would go to Bangladeshi community events and notice there weren’t many women present,” says Hanif’s youngest sister, Sazia. “As she grew older, that’s what she wanted to fix.”

After speaking at a rally for the murdered mosque leaders in August, Hanif tweeted: “Organizing my home community ain’t easy as a young woman in the crowd of all men.”

Mamnunal Haq, a longtime leader in New York’s Bangladeshi community and founder of the New York City Taxi Workers’ Alliance, agrees there is a need for more civically engaged women. Haq, who also lives in Kensington, says the vast majority of Bangladeshis he works with on community issues are older, first generation men.

“The majority of the men you see hanging out on Church Ave, their wives are at home, cooking and taking care of the kids,” he says, adding that engagement among younger generations is key.

Hanif has long been critical of the gendered segregation in her masjid and the fact that the Bangladeshi community associations are made up almost entirely of men.

“Because of the cultural and religious implications, women don’t want to deal with men, so these become spaces for men by men,” Hanif says.

“I appreciate the associations, I appreciate the local effort the community has put together, but it seems like, over and over, there’s buy-in for men only.”

Hanif sees herself and other second-generation Bangladeshi women activists as key in the effort to making the community more progressive and inclusive. She is a part of Naree Shongothok, a Bangladeshi women’s collective made up of activists who she considers her closest allies.

Everything about Hanif — from her strong presence on social media to her intersectional understanding of social justice — is distinctly millennial. But what sets her activism apart from many of her peers is her active engagement offline — on the streets, in community meetings, and on stage. Hanif is able to be a vulnerable and comedic performer, command a crowd as a public speaker, and build trusting relationships with the people for whom she advocates.

“She has a big personality that opens people up and draws them in,” says former CAAAV volunteer, Kevin Park. “Shahana’s very good at knowing how to care for folks. She would follow up with tenants about health issues, which was not something CAAAV could directly address.” In return, Hanif was often invited to family dinners and holidays and some tenants came to think of her like a daughter.  

Because of her fluency in spoken Bangla, Hanif did most of her direct organizing in Queensbridge with Bangladeshi tenants. She held monthly leadership meetings, during which she led discussions about Islamophobia, racism, and gender inequality, and was able to develop close relationships with the women she worked with.

Bangladeshi women face a litany of challenges, including limited access to reproductive health care and mental health services, and fewer job opportunities. Depression is widespread among Bangladeshi women, who often live more isolated, homebound lives than their male counterparts.

Hanif says counseling and mental health services are often stigmatized — “the concept of self care is an American thing,” — and there is a lack of Bangla-speaking providers.

To help lessen this disparity, Hanif advocates for the creation of health care centers and professional training services by and for women.

 

Writing as resistance

As a co-director of the Muslim Writers’ Collective, which was founded in New York City in 2014 and now has chapters across the country, Hanif coordinates, “femme-c’s”, and performs at monthly events. The Collective brings young American Muslims together for performances and workshops to celebrate what Hanif calls “the Muslim narrative.”

“We’re telling and sharing our own stories. We acknowledge that Muslims are diverse, not only in ethnicity or nationality, but also in terms of faith practice,” says Hanif.

Indeed, the Collective aims to celebrate that diversity, emphasizing that no singular voice represents all Muslims. The group recently partnered with the Huffington Post to publish ten essays by young Muslim Americans on a range of topics.

The Collective’s monthly open mics feature an array of spoken word, fiction, and personal reflections. Hanif likes to open the events with her own story, often a Lupus-related anecdote, “Like how difficult it was to poop when I was on so many meds and undergoing surgeries,” Hanif says.

In September 2016, the Collective held an open mic titled “Shifting Skylines,” which focused on post-9/11 life in America. Some of the 15 performers and 180 attendees were too young to remember 2001, but, Hanif noted, “You don’t have to remember [9/11] to know what it means as a Black, Brown, Arab, or Muslim person — everyone being raised now in America is in a post-9/11 world.”

This open mic was held just weeks after the killings of Imam Akonjee, Mr. Miah, and Ms. Khanam. All three crimes were initially investigated by the NYPD as robberies, but the Bangladeshi community is united in regarding them as hate crimes.

“It was a hate crime, it’s Islamo-racist in nature,” Hanif says. “It makes me fear for my community.”

According to a recent Georgetown study, more hate crimes were perpetrated against Muslims in 2015 than in any other year since 9/11. Many associate the uptick in violence to Donald Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric.

“My 12-year-old son, who was born in this country, says ‘I don’t want to go to Bangladesh because Trump says Muslims and Mexicans will be sent back to their country,” Mamnunal says.

But Islamophobia is not new to this community: “Things have been like this for a long time,” says Hanif. “Our mosques are our safe houses and people will continue to go.”

 

Looking forward

In October, Hanif is moving to Bangladesh where she plans to spend six months with family and friends in Dhaka and Chittagong. While in Bangladesh, Hanif plans to travel, connect with local women’s advocacy groups, and — most importantly — learn to read and write in Bangla so she can use the language more effectively in her advocacy work.

“I want to say something radical and critical,” she said, “and I don’t want a middleman to do that for me, I want to do it myself.”