Dexter Van Zile, managing editor of Focus on Western Islamism, recently interviewed me about how my work changed after October 7, 2023. The interview prompted me to think through some important ways that ministry and research have changed since that tragic day. We discuss my many years working with Muslims, what I saw in London on October 8, and how I now spend far more time writing about Islamism and antisemitism. You can read the full interview below, but I wanted to share my own thoughts on this journey in my own words.

Mink to the interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVHzK5wj5MQ&t=1s

I arrived in London on October 7, 2023 expecting to spend the next two weeks doing the same thing I’ve done many times before. Meeting Muslim scholars and students. Talking theology. Building friendships. Engaging in Christian-Muslim dialogue. I crossed the Atlantic having avoided most news until that point and still didn’t know the extent of Hamas’s attack against Israel. My plan was to visit dear friends and colleagues I had been building relationships with for years, many of them from within the Shiʿa Muslim community. By the time my plane landed, however, nearly everything about that trip would look different.

Demonstrations were already happening in London by October 8 and I began hearing the ideological language that would quickly dominate headlines throughout the West. “Resistance” to “apartheid” and........

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