Afikra at 10: How the platform is using culture to reclaim Arab narratives

Founder Mikey Muhanna opens up about his drive to replace the western media's view with stories of the real Arab world – by those who live there

From left, founder Mikey Muhanna, rapper Omar Offendun, composer Mona Miari and musician Zafer Tawil at Afikra's anniversary celebrations. Photo: Afikra

Live updates: Follow the latest on Israel-Gaza

A couple of months ago, the team behind Afikra – the podcast and events platform – were in New York to celebrate their 10th anniversary. Its founder, Mikey Muhanna, and part of its Beirut team had flown in to plan a week of sold-out talks at venues such as Joe’s Pub and the Lincoln Centre.

But as the events began, Israel stepped up its bombing campaign in Lebanon and the talks went forward in the tense atmosphere of pulled attention spans. Audiences listened to eminent Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, while also monitoring their phones for news. Lebanese-American graphic designer Wael Morcos incorporated texts from his mother in Beirut into his presentation, as he had received them while he was putting it together.

“I thought – should we go on with the events?” Muhanna recalls. “But it was really special – and represented the best of what we're trying to do. Talks about Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and architecture, graphic design, Egyptology and food. All the different corners of nerdiness.”

Muhanna launched Afikra as an events and education platform, aiming to broadcast Arab culture to a wider audience. They produce near-daily interviews on Arab history, art, food, music and films – the more niche the better. Other series are motivated by current events, providing a rounded dimension to countries in the news because of conflicts, such as Sudanese cultural history or Palestine, via their This is Not a Watermelon series that started after the war began last year.

Working with a staff of 17, their reach is probably best communicated through numbers: more than 650 events worldwide, local chapters in 30 cities, almost 1,000 contributors and a listenership in the millions.

Doggedly and slowly, Muhanna is betting that if he just puts enough content about the real Arab world – as experienced by the people who live there – a truer picture of the region will emerge than the one presented by western media. Even more than that, his hope is not just that people in the Arab region will appreciate their culture more, but that they can take back control politically.

“The last year has clarified what our values mean, or what our mission is,” he says. “We say we want to reframe the histories and cultures of the Arab world and to reclaim the narrative. This conflict is a case in point of why that matters. I’ve been sheepish about saying the full extent of our ambitions out loud before. We're working at a small level, but we’re trying to shift society and build a new generation of citizens.”

The idea might seem hopelessly ambitious, but is at the core of Muhanna’s thinking. Using live events and hosting retreats, the former teacher wants to turn listeners into an active community that will be able to create more informed policy, contest erroneous readings or simply teach their children about the place where they live.

Afikra Academy, the platform’s education wing, puts these ideas into practice. Run in partnership with the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin, Afikra trains high-school teachers so they can deliver courses on Arab history and culture, and provides remote courses for those who want an MA in Arab culture but cannot access or afford a university programme.

Afikra also has a network of chapters across various cities which create spaces where people can essentially meet up and talk. This includes lectures, book launches and town hall meetings hosted by each branch.

Beirut at the Heart

Afikra’s core team and studio are in Beirut, and so is its energy – that non-stop, happily intellectual resilience the city is known for. Muhanna grew up there and left at 17 to study at Duke University in the US. He later worked at Teach for America – where his commitment to education was formed, as well as his frustrations with its infrastructure – and as a management consultant.

Now back in Lebanon, he has the appearance of someone with one foot still in corporate America – he is fluent in the language of deck – and another in Arab art and culture. He’s not unusual in this, and part of the popularity of Afikra is its non-romantic and non-essentialist version of what the Arab region is. It could be the Syrian community in Toronto, he says, as much as South Asians in Dubai. His speakers tend to be Arab, but they live everywhere, and because most of the output is online, so are its listeners.

But the West is ultimately Muhanna’s reluctant bogeyman: the older cousin whose narrative he wishes to displace, even while grumbling about having to care about what this cousin thinks. Again, this is a wider shift, and many of Afikra’s recent discussions map out the current moment when the Global South is shedding itself of the West.

Such as in an interview with Ibrahim Abusharif, a journalism professor in Qatar, about western media and its creation of narratives; a standout podcast with Tunisian professor Idriss Jebari about decolonisation; or a community discussion about how Arab music provides a lens into British colonisation – an exemplary Afikra take on the subject – with the researcher Mysa Kafil-Hussain.

The relationship with the West also structures the way that Afikra has chosen to fund itself, says Muhanna. It produces podcast series, designs courses and curates symposia for academic and cultural institutions connected to the Arab world.

A recent podcast programme, for example, with NYUAD provided a look back at its Arts Centre or with Alserkal Avenue where they produced Matbakh, a series devoted to Arab food. These partnerships also provide most of its revenue, with another third generated through crowd-sourcing and some philanthropy. But Muhanna is clear that he wants to work with multiple means of funding.

“From the very beginning, we’ve tried to break the model of solely relying on neo-colonial grants, with one major funder who dictates the parameters of what you do as an organisation,” he says. “Instead, we are exclusively getting supported by the community itself, which for me includes like-minded educational and cultural institutions. We’re trying to say, this is for us, by us. And that might mean that we have to grow slower but that is okay.”

If Muhanna and his Afikra team are proud of the past 10 years, they are also palpably more tired – weighed down by worry about Lebanon, outrage over Gaza and perhaps even the pace of Afikra’s own production.

The war has directly impacted their team. While Muhanna is in New York to oversee the anniversary, two staff members in Beirut have been displaced due to the bombing. Another is working from home while her entire extended family has moved in with her. Even Muhanna is not sure where he will go next. He travels incessantly and was already booked to be in Doha and Dubai for planned events, but his itinerary after that is unclear.

Regardless, there is also a sense that now is not the time to quit. Listenership has grown since the war in Gaza, as people seek to better understand Arab culture. And the war has redoubled their sense of urgency.

“It made us more confident that people understand why our work matters,” he says. “Our community fully understands that narratives matter now. Today more than ever, it is necessary to humanise our communities, tell our stories, protect our heritage, and preserve our cultures. That's it. It's on us to do. We don't have another choice.”