For Arab museums asking how to genuinely engage youth, Muhanna’ s prescription is equally blunt: stop designing programs as one-off encounters and commit to continuous, layered public programming. Offer entry points for beginners. Create pathways toward deeper engagement. And be willing to offer accessible content that the sophisticated crowd might roll their eyes at— because that content isn’ t for them.
Mikey Muhanna
The turning point came from one of his students— a young man named Melvin— who responded to Muhanna’ s enthusiasm for 1920s New York with a simple, devastating question: How much do you know about 1920s Beirut? Muhanna paused. He knew little. He knew New York’ s music, fashion, politics, and criminal history. He knew it from films, from culture, from a thousand hours of absorbed media. His own city was a blank.“ It’ s not that we don’ t have the history,” he reflects.“ We have the history here— it just isn’ t given the same stage.”
That asymmetry— the invisibility of Arab history not from its absence but from the absence of platforms to carry it— became AFIKRA’ s founding problem to solve.
FLIPPING THE MODEL Where most cultural institutions position the institution as the authority and the audience as the recipient, AFIKRA inverted the equation. Community members research topics, present findings, lead discussions. Knowledge flows laterally, from peer to peer, shaped by curiosity rather than curriculum.
“ The problem is not that we don’ t have scholarship about the region,” Muhanna insists.“ There’ s a million postdocs, professors, writers, historians— the information is there. The problem is that the broader masses are not invited to engage critically with it.”
This participatory model is not without friction.“ It’ s really hard,” Muhanna says plainly. Building genuine community takes time, repetition, and what he calls nafas— stamina. He invokes dance subcultures— swing, salsa, tango— as models of how inclusive participatory communities’ work: same place, every week, open to beginners and experts alike, with levels of engagement that deepen over time.“ You can’ t just show up and sit there. The whole point is to actually join.” His message to cultural institutions is just as unsparing:“ One event builds nothing. You should be doing 24 events. You might not attract the right crowd at first, but after a while the right people emerge... It is like a garden. You plant, you prune. It takes a long time.”
BELONGING IS NOT A BIRTHPLACE Perhaps the most challenging idea Muhanna brings to the table is his reframing of identity itself. In a cultural landscape saturated with discourse about Arab identity— who belongs, what it means, how to preserve it— he proposes a quieter revolution: prioritize interests over identity.
“ Identity, as it’ s used today, usually means what passport you have and where you were born,” he explains.
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Identity tied to those borders is, he argues, essentially arbitrary— a product of where your grandparents happened to be standing when nations’ lines were drawn by colonial powers. What matters more is investment: what you care about, what you have put your hands into, what ground you are actively gardening.
It is a reorientation toward lived, active cultural engagement rather than inherited, static labels. For diaspora youth navigating layered identities across multiple countries, languages, and generations, it offers a different kind of belonging: one earned through curiosity and participation, not determined by birthplace.
“ We live in the slums of our own imagination,” he says, reaching for an image that is both stark and generous.“ We don’ t even allow ourselves to think outside of those slums.” AFIKRA, at its core, is an attempt to expand those limits— to give people not an identity to accept but a set of questions to live inside.
WHAT MUSEUMS CAN LEARN The issue of Arab museums and their relationship to community is where Muhanna becomes most direct. He is not unsympathetic to institutions— he loves museums, works with them, and names Sharjah Art Museum, Mathaf in Qatar, and the more
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