Exploring American Muslim Histories with Aymann Ismail

Aymann: (We) try and retell the history of America but through a prism that does not exclude the Muslims that were there. That was the principal idea right? They’re not trying to focus on this like good immigrants narrative where we need to prove ourselves and we need to show, hey look we were here and they were very adamantly against it. They’re like no this is not that what we’re doing is we’re repairing the the history and we’re telling it the way that it should have been told without excluding, purposefully excluding, the stories of you know. Non-white non-male characters who I think all of us learned about in high school and learned about an elementary school as being the forefathers of America, so I was already intrigued. I was thinking rewrite history, that’s ‘what’ can we do that is that allowed. I thought like history was this was this thing right. It’s like you can’t remake the ancient Egyptian Pyramids. They exist, but the way he explained it, was we like history itself is a a humbling monster and that it’s constantly being changed and it’s constantly being excavated, and it blew my mind. So right the very beginning I wanted to be involved in any way that I can and they suggested that I’d be some kind of on camera Talent as a Shepherd to bring the viewer along so that they can experience the story and also simulate learning for people or watching it at home, which I believe very strongly in, you know this this idea that you could tell a story but what’s more powerful than telling the story is showing somebody, digesting learning having their mind changed and experiencing watching the series alongside you you know it’s like yeah I’m really really really really glad that they approached me to do that. I love to learn. I love to be that guy with that access so when they said, “hey we got like PBS on board,” I knew that we were going to get access to crazy stuff so right after that the very first thing we shot.  It was about a year after that, and it was at the Monticello, which was the residence of Thomas Jefferson, and I was thinking oh man I’ve been here before it’s going to be packed they had because PBS was involved they were able to get the space isolated for several hours in the morning and we got access to ‘Jefferson’s Library,  we went to the Library of Congress and the the the head archivist of the entire Library of Congress was sitting across from us and he was opening the books that physically were handled and managed and owned by Thomas Jefferson, like hundreds of years ago and he was like here you want to hold it here he flung it into the air and I had to like catch you know so it was, you know, a mind-blowing experience and yeah I hope we did the stories Justice, honestly.