HOW AFIKRA IS REWRITING THE RULES OF ARAB CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT
On
Second
The name says everything. AFIKRA— عفكرة— is colloquial Arabic for“ come to think of it.” Casual, conversational, disarmingly unpretentious. It is the phrase you use when a second thought opens a door you didn’ t know was there. For Mikey Muhanna, the Lebanese American founder who launched the platform from a Brooklyn rooftop in 2014, the name was deliberate.“ It’ s supposed to feel casual. It’ s not supposed to be highbrow,” he explains.
Thought
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We are trying to get people to say: well, now that I think about it …
HOW AFIKRA IS REWRITING THE RULES OF ARAB CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT
Eleven years on, that second thought has grown into a global movement: 200,000 people, 30 chapters across the world, hundreds of talks, one of the region’ s largest podcast networks, an academy, and Daftar— a digital journal that made its debut in print last year. But the engine at its core has never changed: the subversive act of asking questions about the Arab world that no one told you to ask.
THE QUESTION BEFORE THE ANSWER Muhanna traces the origins of AFIKRA not to the Arab world but to a classroom in New Orleans, where he taught high school mathematics as part of Teach for America. His students— working-class kids navigating an underfunded system— were bright and capable, but something had been quietly taken from them.“ The school system told them: give me answers, don’ t give me questions. Give me answers, don’ t give me questions.” Year after year, their sense of curiosity, of self, of inquisitiveness had atrophied. He built a nonprofit to address it. Then he realized the same emergency lived inside him.
“ I am from a part of the world that was colonized in that same way,” he says.“ Our sense of self and sense of curiosity was completely replaced. Instead of questions, we were just told the answers. This is who you are. This is what it means to be from this place. This is the official history. Don’ t ask anything else.”
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