The Threat of Community and The Impact of Surveillance

I’m writing this piece in the air, on the plane, after the successful execution of the Muslim Mental Health Conference which took place in early March 2024 in Palo Alto, California.

I write this piece for three reasons:

1. To reflect on the powerful experiences of learning, community, and love that occurred throughout the conference;
2. To honor the commitment of my community towards addressing the mental health needs of Muslims locally and globally; and
3. To recount the impact of surveillance and silencing that presented itself from the university staff and leadership.

This conference is the longest-running academic conference dedicated to supporting the unique needs of the diverse Muslim population in the United States and around the world. There were over 300 in-person and over 300 virtual attendees joining the conference this year. The interdisciplinary Muslim mental health professionals who attended this conference belonged to a wide range of racial/ethnic groups and were from around the world including Uganda, Pakistan, South Africa, Austria, Malaysia, and Palestine. There were first-time conference attendees and even first-time U.S. visitors!

I was surrounded by professionals who felt similar spiritual callings towards a professional life dedicated to service. The common denominator that brought us all together was our commitment to serving the mental health needs of the Muslim community, of our community. I lost count of the times someone told me “I feel like I know you!” even though we both acknowledged we never met! Being at this conference was beautiful, surreal, and healing.

While I enjoyed serving on the planning committee, my favorite contribution to the conference was moderating the Annual Legacy Panel, which occurred at the top of our program. At the Annual Legacy Panel, I had the pleasure of interviewing Muslim mental health experts who have dedicated their careers to this work. I curated questions that explored their thoughts on the internalization of white supremacist ideologies that exist in Muslim communities, ways that technology can serve as a tool to challenge ways of thinking and systems of service, and spiritual practices and avenues for deriving fulfillment in a challenging and heavy vocation as mental health professionals. I was honored to interview my mentors on topics that were important to interrogate as we moved throughout the rest of the conference weekend.

As part of the planning committee, I share my contributions with pride, gratitude, and humility as I worked with the most incredible team of professionals with whom I laughed, learned, and challenged. A lot of hands, hearts, and minds are required to organize a conference. As each team member recognized the interdependence of one another, we also appreciated our interdependence with the conference attendees. Attendees left feeling inspired by the love, resilience, and deep commitment towards a common purpose and mission.

What the conference attendees did not know was the impact of the relentless requests that came from various offices within our host university merely 36 hours before the conference to change our program, silence our voices, and infiltrate our physical and virtual conference.

Now that the conference is over, I am ready and motivated to talk about the planning committee’s graceful efforts to mitigate any barriers to executing a successful and enriching conference and to unveil the impact of suspicion and surveillance experienced at the Muslim Mental Health Conference.

To accurately share the events that unfolded, it is important to give context to what I believe was the trigger that catalyzed the intense scrutiny of our conference from university faculty and staff.

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Samah Jabr, a Palestinian psychiatrist and writer, is the head of the mental health unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Given the intense mental health impact of the events in Gaza on Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims around the world, our planning team felt that it was timely and appropriate to invite Dr. Jabr to share her expertise and reflections with the conference attendees. After our initial invitation, Dr. Jabr’s team inquired about what our planning committee hoped her presentation would cover at our conference. Given that the theme of our conference was the intersection of technology and mental health, we asked her to describe the development of mental health services and programs in the Palestinian Territories and the role of partnerships with NGOs, universities, and/or countries in support of the development of these programs. We also asked Dr. Jabr to describe the current state of mental health services in Palestinian territories and what strategies are important to consider in support of Palestinians. After reviewing our request, her team provided us with the title, “The Power of Technology to Promote Palestinian Resilience in the Midst of a Genocide” which we published in our live program.

The inclusion of her title occurred on February 21, 2024. The following is a list of eight requests that came from various staff members and offices within our host university six days later. While this list is not close to exhaustive, I provide them in the chronological order in which they occurred. After each request, I also provide our team’s response to that request. I participated directly in the execution of the first five requests listed below.

• Remove the word “Genocide” from the keynote’s presentation title.

We changed the title of her presentation from “The Power of Technology to Promote Palestinian Resilience in the Midst of a Genocide,” to “The Power of Technology to Promote Palestinian Resilience”.

• Change the wording of specific titles of presentations and panels so that each title included a reference to mental health. For example, “Conducting Community-Based Participatory Research on American Muslims using Technology” was changed to “Conducting Community-Based Participatory Research on American Muslim Mental Health using Technology”.

We complied with most of these requests.

• Change the name of our panel dedicated to highlighting the impact of Palestinian trauma, which was appropriately titled, “Palestine”.

We changed the title to “Palestine and Trauma”.

• Provide a list of abstracts and learning objectives for each of the 68 presentations two days before the conference. It is important to note that providing this list is standard protocol when a conference offers Continuing Education (CE) credits to its attendees. However, the CE office guaranteed our conference planning committee up to 11.25 hours of Continuing Education credits for physicians, psychologists, and social workers who attended our conference without ever asking for this list from our team. It was only within 36 hours of the conference that they made the request. Although the misstep came from their office, our team was required to provide this list within a short timeframe at the cost of our attendees losing their ability to claim their Continuing Education credits required for the maintenance of their clinical licenses.

We provided all the information within 12 hours of their request.

• Provide the presentation slides from a presentation by Dr. Alice Rothchild, a Jewish physician, author, activist, and filmmaker, titled “Health and Human Rights Consequences of the War in Gaza” (the original title of this presentation was “Health and Human Rights Consequences of the War on Gaza”). No other presentation slides were requested.

We emailed Dr. Rothchild to share her presentation slides with our team, which she quickly provided. The slides were forwarded to the CE office for their review.

• Change the format of Dr. Jabr’s keynote lecture to an interview-style session and provide the list of questions that will be asked of her during this interview-style keynote session.

At this point in the story, our team recruited a civil rights lawyer from the university’s Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities Committee. To summarize the conclusion of the many parts to this particular request, the CE office recognized that there were indeed legal parameters surrounding their intrusion into the academic intellectual freedom of our conference and that they are not able to limit Dr. Jabr from freely presenting her ideas and expertise. Dr. Jabr presented her lecture.

• Include CE office staff in our conference so they may audit our conference. The office requested that two CE staff members be physically present during the entire conference and that we grant 10 individuals (provided as email addresses) access to our virtual conference through Whova, an event management platform we used to connect virtual and in-person attendees.

The request for the two staff members to join us in-person was honored. Two CE staff members were physically present during the entire conference. Several more staff members (it was unclear to me if they came from the CE office) attended the keynote presentation. We refused them access to the Whova but provided them Zoom links that gave them access to watch each session virtually. It was nearly impossible to monitor the number of individuals who joined these Zoom sessions who were not registered attendees.

• Notify all conference attendees to remove any recordings of the keynote speech and follow-up dialectic with the audience that may have been posted on social media.

Several conference leadership members visited every session room to make this announcement to all attendees. Additionally, an email was sent to all attendees given that we had a large virtual audience.

I want to express how difficult many of these decisions were for me personally. I asked myself, In what ways was I complicit in the silencing of my own community? Did I push back in ways that did my community justice? What is my personal and professional responsibility here? How do I weigh the consequences of each request that I deny? What are the consequences of softening or avoiding language such as “genocide”? While not all scholars agree that the siege on Gaza is a genocide, many do including genocide experts: do we need political consensus before we can use a term? Whose experiences and feelings about these political and scholarly debates are we privileging by making these concessions? What does it mean to choose one’s battles in this context? Would a mental health conference that featured the siege in Ukraine ever be under this kind of scrutiny at a US university? At what point will university staff and leadership find it justifiable to cancel our entire conference?

As I reflect on the events that unfolded this last week, I’m left wondering about the ways other marginalized groups are treated by different university offices and staff members. In what ways does university leadership protect students, faculty, and other folks connected to the university who encounter threats to their intellectual and physical safety? To their credit, the Office of the President created the Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities Committee, which we were able to recruit and utilize. Nevertheless, I am still left wondering: Whose responsibility is it to keep a record of the events I described above and hold accountable the unchecked suspicion, surveillance, and discrimination that ensued?

Despite everything done to mitigate the harm and unprofessional behavior coming from various university staff and offices, I stand with an immense amount of pride in the way the conference planning committee mobilized to address all concerns before, during, and after the conference. We were respectful and gracious. We checked in with one another. We attended to the feelings of unrest and perceived disruption to safety that impacted everyone, from attendees to volunteers. We processed and debriefed with all volunteers and team members after the conference. The irony of the surveillance and silencing during this particular conference was that we were mostly all trained mental health professionals!

I will never forget the steadfast and active resilience our planning team embodied in their words and actions of solidarity with one another and with our Palestinian keynote speaker who had flown in from Ramallah.

For American Muslims, the experience of surveillance and silencing is not new. I remember the first time government agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed up at my family’s home to inquire about a donation my parents made to family members in Yemen. I was 12. If you’re Muslim, you already know that our affiliations, relationships, and behaviors are being tracked. If you’re not familiar, you can read this piece from the Brennan Center for Justice for more information about the cost of surveillance on communities of color.

Anyone committed to academic free speech will be outraged by what we endured. Allies may ask: “What now? How can I contribute in a meaningful way when I’m not Muslim and have no proximity to the conference, especially since it’s over now?”

I believe that regardless of identity, every single one of us has a duty towards becoming a more critically conscious member of society. Critical consciousness asks us to:

1. Critically examine the systems we are in (pay attention, read, question, interrogate yourself and those around you);
2. Understand that the work started a long time ago, every single person has a unique role in creating change, and it is our responsibility to find unique ways to contribute; and
3. Transfer the energy of our frustration, disappointment, and love towards concrete actions in the pursuit of the liberation and solidarity of the marginalized.

Witness. Challenge. Advocate. Act according to your capacity and the power you hold. That’s what you can do. It makes a difference.

After everything, and as my flight lands, my sentiment is perfectly encapsulated by a message written by one of our volunteers. He composed and sent this message within 24 hours of the conclusion of the conference and gave me permission to share it here with you all.

“I want to say thank you to all of you for enduring these past couple months of setting up this conference. This was, from my experience, one of the most difficult conferences yet and in times of great stress or struggle, they say one’s character is truly revealed. What I saw in each of you during this period is your true character: persistence, determination, unwavering, and joyfulness (as well as being quite hilarious lol). The Quran itself mentions your actions in detail: “O you who have believed, persevere and endure and remain stationed and fear Allah, that you may be successful.” (3:200) You are the backbone of this conference, and you made it a success when weeks prior, there was concern this conference may not go ahead at all. But they say, Allah is the best planner of all. I [have] never seen a greater assortment of talent of this magnitude in my experience — ranging from business and law to healthcare and activism. You represent the best of your community and of the Islamic faith and your story has only just begun. In my last comments, I stated that this has been a difficult year for me as I’m in residency first year and at times, I have indeed felt alone via being a Muslim and dealing in the mental health field. But you all reminded me of why I love this conference, that I am not alone and that there are people like me who acknowledge the connection of one’s faith and mental health. That the Ummah is there and that you’ll never walk alone no matter how hard you try. If I could buy all the Kleenex in SF, I would, because your dedication and supportive messages to me and your own colleagues are the reason why I couldn’t sleep on the plane due to the water in my eyes that couldn’t stop. This conference’s potential has no limit and I want you to know that whatever you are going through in your own life, let it be known that you are appreciated here, always welcome to speak your mind, and are perfect in your own way because Allah does not make mistakes, therefore you are not one of them. Inshallah, I will be with you all back home in NYC for #17 and we will do our best to make it one of the best in conference history and I can’t wait to see you all again with both updates in your life and your pursuit of chasing your dreams. So JazakAllahu Kairan* for these past months, JazakAllahu Kairan* for your incredible efforts at the conference, and JazakAllahu Kairan* for your future efforts in your life. May Allah bless you a thousand times over and even then, it still wouldn’t be enough.”

• A common Muslim colloquial used to express gratitude. Translates to May God grant you Goodness.