qasim ansari is an educator, student, and researcher. he studied history, theology, and religious studies within the western academic tradition and currently studies the qur’ān and traditional islamic sciences under scholars in egypt. he also co-founded voxummah with momodou taal, an independent media platform focused on islām, marxism, anti-imperialism, and global affairs. he is an avid supporter of liverpool fc, likes to discover underground artists, travelling, and reading.
1. since its inception over a year ago, voxummah has existed without a face. did anonymity feel protective, instinctive, principled or just necessary? i think it was all of them, but above all, it was about keeping voxummah centred on the community rather than letting it become a platform for celebrity culture or any one individual. that way, people fall in love with the message rather than the person or people behind it.
do you think the anonymity has added to vu’s credibility or created an impression of skepticism? i think it has done both, and that’s natural. some people will always be skeptical of a platform without a face, and with anything in life there will be aversion to what is being done, whether it is beneficial or not. but i believe anonymity has added to our credibility more than it has taken away. without a personality to follow, people have to judge us on the work itself, on whether what we publish is accurate and rooted in the truth. so our goal isn’t to chase validation or answer every worry people have about us. It is to keep doing the work with sincerity and let it speak for itself, and in shā Allāh, we ask God to keep us protected and give us the courage to keep going.
2. you reverted in your teens. before islām entered your life, what kind of person were you becoming and what kind of a future / life did you imagine for yourself? and growing up in europe, what was that transition like? before islām, my principles and ideals were shaped by conversations with family and a keen interest in culture and history. i came to realise that most of the people i looked up to were anti-capitalist, and i knew straight away that this was something i was, and had to be, part of. reading more literature made me fully aware of the condition of myself and my community. back then, i imagined a future built around that awareness, one where i would somehow be of use to my people, even if i didn’t yet know what shape that would take. i had the politics, but i was missing the anchor to ground it. growing up in europe, the transition wasn’t always easy. i was already a young black man in a society that saw me as a guest in my own home, and becoming muslim added another layer to that. but it wasn’t all hard, because islām gave me the outlook i had been searching for. over time, it came to shape my politics as well, and that is something still evolving and being refined today.
do you think it's easier to revert in your teens or say, in your formative years as opposed to reverting later in life? i don’t think there’s a right answer. hidāyah (guidance) is given by Allāh, so it is literally the Creator calling you back to the religion. the when, and the if, are Allāh’s will, but it is on you to put in the work, however young or old you are.
3. what part of reversion, initially, was hardest to surrender to: intellectually, socially or internally? initially, it was very positive. i tried to be a sponge, soaking up every kind of information i could find, but the trouble with soaking up too much is that a sponge only grows heavy. so, i became heavy with knowledge that made me ‘learned’ in the religion, yet didn’t bringing me any closer to Allāh. over time, i put more effort into working out ‘which islām was the right islām’, and i found myself caught in a strange position. i was left with heaps of random questions and answers but no personal connection with the Creator, and the more i chased the idea of being a so-called ‘perfect Muslim’, the more distant from Allāh i felt. i put a lot of unnecessary pressure on the first stages of my journey, only to learn later that there was so much more of the story still to be written. what i really needed was to slow down and take the time to learn things in a steady way. i’m not sure whether it falls under intellectual, social or internal, perhaps it's a mix of all three.
so ultimately how would you approach studying islām, if you were to start learning from scratch again? if i were starting from scratch, i would begin by studying the sīrah alongside the qur’ān.
so often we delve into large, deep questions of faith before we have built our foundations in religion. islām is built on love and mercy, and on clarity and action, and all of those grow through understanding the prophet ﷺ and how he lived and acted. one of my favourite hadiths* was narrated by anas ibn malik (ra), who served the prophet ﷺ for ten years and said that in all that time, the prophet ﷺ never once said ‘uff’ to him, nor asked him why he had done something or why he hadn’t. if you understand that from the beginning of your studies, you will find islām to be a religion of ease. it only becomes hard when you stray from the middle path or put cultural traditions before the intentions and objectives of our faith. i wish i had understood that at an earlier age on this journey, for sure.
*recorded in sahih al-bukhari (6038) and sahih muslim (2309)
4. what did becoming muslim clarify for you about race, dignity, narratives and power that liberal multiculturalism never could? becoming muslim taught me that dignity is not something the powerful hand out, because it comes from Allāh and no one can take it away. we have liberal politics which offers representation and tolerance, but always on the terms of empire, whereas islām turns that order upside down. i always look at the story of bilal ibn rabah (ra), a black abyssinian who had been enslaved. his master, umayyah ibn khalaf, dragged him into the desert heat and crushed him beneath a rock to make him renounce his faith, but he refused. years later, at the conquest of makkah, it was bilal, the prophet ﷺ sent onto the kā’bah to call the adhān, standing above the very elites who had once owned and mocked men like him.
rather than simple tolerance, islām came to overturn the idea of who holds honour and power. power belongs to the just, no one else. i could talk about this forever… the prophet ﷺ also refused to let prejudice live among his own companions. when abu dharr (ra) insulted a man by calling him the son of a black woman, the prophet ﷺ rebuked him and told him he still carried jahiliyyah, the ignorance of the pre-islamic age. umm ayman (ra), another black abyssinian who had nursed and raised him, he honoured as his mother after his own mother. on the topic of race, blackness and africa’s place in this story runs much deeper.
when the early muslims faced persecution, their first hijrah took them to abyssinia, ruled by a christian king, the najashi. islām’s first refuge was an african land rather than an arab one, and it also teaches us the ethics of standing alongside our christian family. that honour reached beyond blackness too. salman al-farsi (ra), a persian, came up with the plan to dig the trench that saved madīnah, and when the muhajirūn and ansār each claimed him as their own, the prophet ﷺ said salman was from ahl al-bayt (family of the prophet). at a time when persians and arabs did not have the best of relationships, he was still known as salman the persian, his origin forming part of his honour.
islām does not erase race; it honours it and puts it in its rightful place. as the prophet ﷺ said in his final sermon, no arab is superior to a non-arab, nor a white person to a black person, except by taqwa (God-consciousness). and Allāh tells us in the qur’ān that ‘He created us from male and female, and made us into nations and tribes so that we may know one another, with the most noble among us being the most God-conscious.’ race, lineage, gender and identity all carry real weight, but they sit under the banner of our faith. my identity matters but it is not what earns me paradise.
5. did being a black muslim man in england shape the way you understand empire before you had the language for anti-imperialism? yes. long before i had the theory, i understood the practice of empire, because every racialised person in britain lives it daily. ours is a strange identity. we are not truly of the island we were born on, yet we are british whether we accept it or not. we enjoy privileges our families back home do not, and may never have the chance to.
that is the bittersweet reality of being born here. you exist in a place knowing that it was built on the subjugation of your ancestral homeland. it is a deeply uncomfortable truth to carry. but i carry it as a reminder of the work ahead: what empire built must first be undone, and then something just must be built in its place.
could you, for our readers, quickly distinguish between the two identities? english and british? english is widely understood as an identity belonging to the ethnic english, the so-called anglo-saxons, and in practice that tends to mean white people. that’s why many of us born here, with ancestral heritage elsewhere, call ourselves british instead. british is the broader term that makes room for the rest of us, the unwanted bunch (laughs). that shaped the way i look at empire…too. growing up understanding, we are of the empire, but never fully part of it. we can be enslaved and exploited, made to labour and build its riches, and when we are deemed ‘good enough’, we can be paraded as its success stories. yet we will never truly belong, we will never have a legitimate voice because the system itself was built on racial prejudice and ethnic supremacy.
do you think this is why islām called to you in a way? seeing figures like malcolm x, embracing it for example? and knowing that you have a place in this religion and there's inherent dignity for every race in this religion? no. my journey to islām wasn’t based on seeing other people who looked like me become muslim. even if there were no other muslims who looked like me or came from where i’m from, i would still choose islām every time. it wasn’t about being accepted by a community or feeling validated; it was a personal decision. i first entered a mosque as a ten-year-old catholic kid, on one of a series of school trips to different places of worship. when i walked through those doors and spent time inside, i felt a peace i had never felt before, a sense of being at home.
it was only a few years later that i began to learn about the link between black revolutionaries and islām, and how many of them had also reverted. that definitely strengthened my belief and understanding, alhamdulillāh, but it wasn’t what first brought me to the religion.
6. have you ever felt simultaneously hypervisible and invisible in muslim spaces? yeah, i have. in a lot of muslim spaces i felt invisible, because my community and my culture just weren’t really represented. but then in some circles i felt the opposite, almost like a token being paraded around, and my reversion story has ended up being the topic of a lot of conversations.
has that sort of behaviour ever distanced you from islām in any way or do you just do you just chalk it up to just muslims behaving badly rather than islām being bad? it has definitely made me distance myself from some masājid and some muslims (laughs). but i have never felt bad about islām itself, only about people’s understandings of it that i see as harmful or ignorant. every community, whether religious, social or political, has its good and its bad, and you have to deal with both. may Allāh make us all better.
7. many people treat spirituality and political consciousness as separate worlds. you don’t seem to. why? the idea that you can separate politics from faith is a political position in and of itself. it is a secular way of understanding the world that came out of the post-enlightenment period, born of a european project and carried to the rest of us through empire. as someone of african descent, by way of the caribbean, i don’t accept that premise, for myself or for my people. it’s not the reality of the world i belong to. i believe spirituality is political and politics is spiritual, and both are necessary for life.
how do you view apolitical traditional muslims then? in short, i feel concerned for them. when you compartmentalise islām, you miss its all-encompassing value as a way of life that guides and offers solutions for every part of our existence. islām speaks to us politically, economically, socially and spiritually, and to truly live it, we have to understand that all of these are necessary. we have a duty to do right by others, and that includes politics. we cannot leave positions of trust to those with evil intentions, and good politics helps create the climate in which islām can be truly understood.
i point to the constitution of madīnah - which was drawn up by the prophet ﷺ and set out a legal, political and economic framework for the diverse communities of madīnah, declaring them one community and bringing order within the city. that was a deeply political act within the sirāh. how can people ignore this?
8. in an age of endless information, do you think people suffer more from ignorance or from disorientation? we suffer from both, but i would say disorientation more. most people have good intentions, but they have no idea where to go, what to do or how to help. on top of that, we are bombarded with new information all the time which can leave us all disillusioned. but this is by design.
a confused people is far easier to control than an ignorant one. so we must always strive to understand the world for what it really is and the laws that currently govern it. we must educate ourselves more…we can’t let the devil win.
9. is this why voxummah needed to exist? yeah, i believe so. momodou and myself both felt “too muslim” in leftist spaces and “too leftist” in muslim spaces. so we really wanted to create voxummah with the intention of providing a space for like-minded muslims.
What absence in muslim media specifically pushed you toward creating it? momodou taal and i felt that parts of muslim media prioritised aesthetics over credibility. yes, we had representation, but we saw a lack of platforms committed to a principled stance, and we didn’t want to contribute to an ummah that ends up serving the interests of empire. a few conversations later and we began planning… alhamdulillāh.
10. you spend a lot of time observing conflict, propaganda and global violence… given this constant exposure, how do you protect yourself from desensitisation or becoming emotionally numb? there are things that need to be seen and shown. this is real life… we can’t hide from it. we have that luxury of pondering on those words. we are protected enough, already.
you know how there's a lot of graphic imagery coming out of many places - it could be falasteen, sudan, iran or lebanon; how do we engage with that sort of content? knowing constant exposure can lead to desensitisation. i don't think there's one answer for this, if i’m being totally honest. it depends on each person and what they are capable with dealing with. whatever will allow you to remain committed and empathetic to the situations at hand. last thing i would say is we should all make a prayer that Allāh protects all the oppressed and protects our hearts from normalising this.
11. What responsibility comes with shaping political understanding for a large muslim audience? and who do you think your primary demographic is? first and foremost, the responsibility comes from Allāh (swt) to all believers. He encourages us to learn, and not only to teach people but to encourage them towards action. so it is a large responsibility, but it does not rest on me alone; it rests on every believer. as for our audience, it stretches from teenagers to the elderly, across all genders, and it includes both muslims and non-muslims who support us and the causes we cover.
i will tell you a message has stayed with me because it summed up our community. a person sent us a dm saying they loved the platform and was happy they had found a place to learn from. they said they had felt like a social outcast, and that finding like-minded muslims meant a lot to them. that word, outcast, played on my mind, because i think it describes many of us, many in our audience. those who care about the future of muslims, care about politics, palestine, sudan, care about the global south, care about justice, and often feel alone in that in wider circles. if voxummah can create a place where people feel less alone, and where that feeling turns into learning and action, then we are carrying out part of that responsibility.
does the idea of a place like dar al-arqam inspire you then? because you seem to have integrated aspects of the first school of islām into this digital space. i think that’s a beautiful way of looking at it. to be honest, i was drawing more inspiration from bayt al-hikmah, the house of wisdom in baghdad, which was akin to a university where scholars from different backgrounds and faiths would come together to discuss ideas. some remarkable conversations and learning took place there, and many of the most brilliant minds of the age were shaped within its walls. that was more my inspiration, but now i can see how dar al-arqam is something we can draw from too.
yeah, i feel like especially given the age of surveillance, voxummah is not a platform that empire wants to exist. just as dar al-arqam wasn’t something that the quraysh wanted to exist. so in terms of that i feel like is a digital space where muslims can visit and learn ideas that the enemies of humanity wouldn’t want them to learn or analyze things from a different lens that's “ummah-centric” while also remaining relevant to contemporary culture. yes, and i think you’ve drawn out something really valuable. dar al-arqam, the first school in our tradition, wasn’t just a place where you learned the qur’ān; it was where the early muslims learned how to resist tyranny and how to hold on to their faith among people who wanted to persecute them. it began as a safe, learning place for the believers, and graduated them with hearts and minds strong enough to protect and represent their faith.
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thank you for that. it’s a really good way of thinking about things, and i had never thought about voxummah in that context.
personally, it’s actually what drew me in initially. i’ve always seen voxummah as a sacred space for muslims with a revolutionary spirit and i can’t believe you didn’t draw this parallel since you built this space for us. honestly, i want to say thank you for that because now i’m drawing parallels and subhanAllāh… what an important place in our history. so yeah, that's a really nice way of understanding things. thank you.
of course. you deserve a great deal of recognition and knowing you, i know that recognition isn’t something you actively seek, but i think that’s part of what makes you even more deserving of it. at least in my eyes. i’m also not sure you fully grasp the magnitude of what you’ve done, and continue to do, with voxummah. you’re cultivating the art of critical thinking and promoting this sort of… marriage between faith and analysis, which is something i think is desperately needed. in many ways, you’re helping people see that they can strengthen one another. i also think a lot of muslims tend to focus on themselves and on getting rid of the diseases of the heart. and while that is absolutely necessary, because real change begins with purifying the heart, we also can’t become entirely inward-looking. we might work to cure the diseases within ourselves on an individual level but what about the disease currently festering out there in the world, the ones that allow things like genocide to take place? my point is that i see you as someone who’s deeply committed to tazkiyyah but also actively works towards shining that light outward and tries to create real change. that balance is rare. so thank you for that. thank you, this genuinely means a lot, because as i said before, i really want this to feel like a space for everyone. i want the work to mean something, but more than that, i want it to change something. i want people to feel they have a trusted source to turn to when they want to learn. what i value most is that the work gives me the chance to connect with new people and to connect others with one another. it has helped me learn a great deal, and i hope it has done the same for others. so the appreciation really belongs to everyone who has engaged with us and supported us.
12. as someone who works in education as well as media, do teaching and political commentary require different forms of accountability / responsibility before Allāh? both sit under the same umbrella of responsibility, but they touch it differently. political commentary is about reporting events truthfully and free from imperial bias. standing by the truth is an obligation on every muslim, so whatever we report on, our responsibility is to report it honestly
teaching carries a greater weight, i would argue. when you teach, you are not only giving someone information; you are shaping how they think. you give them a framework for understanding not just what exists, but why and how it exists. that framework stays with them long after any single piece of news, so i would say, the accountability for it weighs heavier.
and do you think there’s an intersection? like has being a teacher translated into you being a good political commentator? teaching has made me focus on explaining why things happen, not just what happened, and i carry that into how i cover the news. in anything, there is never one perfect approach, so we need a range of methods. we see this even with the early muslim leaders, the sahābah and the ahl al-bayt. they had very different personalities, but they were all shaped by the same understanding: that Allāh is God and that the prophet Muhammad ﷺ is His messenger.
so as long as we find what works for us in a way that pleases Allāh, that is the best way. i hope before being good, i work hard and in doing so, keep giving visibility to those who deserve it and put the real work in. we have many great teachers, writers, journalists who have shaped this platform.
13. what’s something anti-imperialist or communist spaces misunderstand about religion? or where does the problem of islamophobia come from within organising spaces? i think it comes from a misunderstanding of how societies form. many in these spaces take a snapshot of muslim history, pick out the moments of conquest and conclude that islām itself is imperial. but you can do that with any people and any period, finding flaws or virtues also depends on what you go looking for. we must not ignore the wider ‘how’ which answers how faith, power and society shape one another. we have to be honest, we have to acknowledge…‘islām’ (i say in quotes) has at times been tied to imperial conquest, and many muslims have taken part in those awful conquests. but that is the story of people using a faith for power, not the faith itself. religion has always been an easy vehicle for those who want to rule, and islām is no exception. however, it also carries the tools to challenge that very abuse. an islām centred on justice exists, and it always has. from its inception to the modern day, our tradition is full of muslims who stood up against oppression. in the modern era alone… alhamdulillāh, we have names like shaykh ahmadou bamba, shaykh ibrahim niasse, shaykh omar mukhtar, shaykh izz ad-din al-qassam… may Allāh have mercy on them all. that’s just a few but we have so many more.
and today, we have numerous groups across the muslim world who feel the weight of empire first-hand every day, yet most honourably challenge it. anybody who denies the importance of islām in resisting the empire today… is simply put, a 10/10 hater… an islamophobic one.
14. has this work changed your relationship with worship, silence, power or attention? the work has changed my life completely, above all by making me more conscious of what i consume and more aware of the sanctity of time. i don’t know when Allāh will call me home, so i try to make the most of the time i have. for me, worship extends to how i spend my evenings, what i read, watch and whom i connect with. this shapes what i give my attention: what really benefits the ummah.
as for silence, i have always loved it, because it is where i gain clarity. we see this occurring in the event of the prophet ﷺ first receiving revelation the cave of hira. he ﷺ was alone, pondering. so i try to bring this type of silence into my daily life.
so what i understand, from what you’re saying is that silence for you is less about boredom and more about reflection. yes, and over time i have grown to appreciate it more deeply and to understand why it is necessary. in times of stress, chaos or confusion, i try to sit in silence, either pondering on my own thoughts or reflecting on the words of Allāh.
15. how do you recognise when media is cultivating clarity versus simply feeding outrage? if i’m being totally honest, i don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. sometimes you have to feel outrage before you reach the kind of clarity that brings change, so it works more like stages of feeling. stirring outrage, or any strong emotion, is not a bad thing if it moves people to want a better world. for some, that happens through tears; for others, through anger or even disgust. it depends on the person, their relationship with God and how they respond to what they see.
what matters is how you frame it. as editors and contributors at voxummah, our job is to make sure we are never being deliberately provocative or chasing the virality of social media. we want our work to be respected. we don't want to chase virality. if we have ever fallen into that, i ask Allāh to forgive us and purify our intentions, because it has never been our aim. our aim is to educate, and to offer the kind of education that deepens people’s commitment to change.
16. when all of this is over, what do you hope Allāh accepts from your life? my actions being sincere. and to leave as a…true believer to the will of Allāh, a real husband, a great father and teacher. in shā Allāh, bi idnillāh.
final question:
what made you decide that you want to share your identity with the world? and why now? i think with life in sujūd, it's a platform that i really like and respect because it is a sadaqah jāriyah and a platform with a deeper purpose - helping educate readers about their faith. simple, but very necessary. so it was more of the right platform at the right time.
(…)
and also being pestered by the right person (laughs) you can put that in there.
