There is perhaps nothing more quintessentially American than the cross-country summer road trip. Growing up, I made indelible memories on road trips with my family through much of the Midwest, South, and the East Coast, encountering people and places across the great highways of the nation.

In The Great Muslim American Road Trip, Muslim American couple Mona Haydar and Sebastian Robins invite us to join them as they hit the road along the famed Route 66. The three-part documentary, a film by Unity Film Productions’s Alex Kronemer and Michael Wolfe, begins in Chicago and ends in Los Angeles. The couple takes a few detours along the way as they meet Muslims in unexpected places, examine their own relationship, and shine a light on untold stories of Muslims in America.

Many readers will be familiar with Mona, a Syrian-American lyricist and rapper. Sebastian, the Muslim convert son of a Jewish father and Christian mother is an educator who describes himself as a seeker. Over the years, Mona and Sebastian have made a name for themselves as a Millennial Muslim couple dedicated to building bridges of interfaith understanding. This commitment is woven throughout the series, which unmistakably aims to educate non-Muslim viewers about the values Muslims share with other Americans, the community’s commitment to serve and give back to the country, and famous Muslim Americans.

As music, poetry and literature are important to Mona and Sebastian, we hear them read passages from famed American authors like Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, Maya Angelou and others throughout the series. The documentary is scored with a country, rock’n’roll and a jazz soundtrack, sprinkled with interludes of Mona’s own rap videos.

A scene from The Great American Muslim Road Trip; image source: PBS

The soundscape is appropriate to the Route 66 geography, though I would have loved to have heard country singer Kareem Salama on the soundtrack. (That would’ve been a beautiful example of how Muslim American artistry is woven into the American landscape)

All along Route 66 we meet an array of diverse Muslim Americans and experts of local Muslim history. We meet a civil rights lawyer and a daughter of Muhammad Ali in Chicago, an Arab American Christian academic of the history of Muslims in the U.S. heartland and successful Bosnian restaurant owners in St. Louis. We have a brief history lesson from a jazz musician in Tulsa and meet Afghan and Rohingya refugees in Amarillo, TX.

In New Mexico we are introduced to members of a teenage robotics team and a Zuni Pueblo Native American historian. In Las Vegas we spend an afternoon with members of a mosque who run a free farmers’ market and end the evening with a retired Cirque du Soleil performer break dancing along the strip like an up-side-down whirling dervish. And in California we meet a Muslim theater actor, a date farm owner, and young children at a Muslim camp who share their dreams for the future.

Islamophobia and the shadow of 9/11 lurk in the background. Not in the sense that Mona and Sebastian face any bigotry during their trip across the eight states along Route 66 (if they did, it’s not portrayed in the series), but in that they and the Muslims they meet along the way are acutely aware of the national security framework into which U.S. Muslims are often placed by media and policymakers alike.

From elders raised in the Jim Crow era, to refugees escaping genocide and military veterans, to medical professionals and interfaith educators, to children born after the terrorist attacks, all the Muslims Mona and Sebastian meet seem almost painfully eager to share stories that humanize themselves as individuals and show that the American Muslim community is a value added to the country.

This makes for good storytelling for audiences who remain unfamiliar with Muslim Americans and likely only encounter us from media representation, which is often highly negative and dehumanizing. But for many Muslim Americans, it can feel a bit like trying too hard to prove that we are humans too. That is also a sort of apropos comment on where we still stand sometimes as Muslims in this country in the eyes of many non-Muslim White Americans.

A scene from The Great American Muslim Road Trip; image source: PBS

Mona and Sebastian also take the opportunity of the road trip to examine their own relationships; we join them for a detour to Lama Foundation Mountain Retreat where they first met. Spending an intense three-week trip together leads them to confront their personality differences and name the shared values that led each partner to the other. Although the story of minimalist seeker Sebastian and maximalist Mona is unique to themselves, viewers will connect with the warmth, vulnerability and honesty between the spouses.

Mona and Sebastian continuously underscore the importance of Black Muslims to their own understanding of Islam and in their work. As such, the Black American Muslim story is one of the strongest threads woven throughout the series. Viewers hear first-hand accounts of Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre, and are taken through the history of why so many millions of African Americans accepted Islam as a font of spiritual, political and psychological liberation.

One of the most interesting and unique stories told in the series is that of Hi Jolly (Haj Ali). A Civil War era Ottoman subject of Arab and Greek background who converted to Islam, Haj Ali was recruited by Jefferson Davis, of all people, to be a handler for the U.S. Camel Cavalry Corps. The Corps was meant to train camels in the Southwest, which shared a similar climate to parts of the Middle East. Later, Hi Jolly was sent by the U.S. government to find the best road to California. Upon his death in 1902, the crew members who worked under him built a monument to their camel-driving leader at the site of his grave in Quartzsite, AZ.

The road that Hi Jolly and his crew were mapping? That ended up becoming today’s Route 66.

While we meet a great diversity of Muslims during the road trip – immigrants, African Americans, newly arrived refugees, doctors, community organizers, military veterans, business owners, women and men, people of all ages – we don’t spend very much time in each location.

The series would have been strengthened by spending a longer time with some of the characters; the main takeaways viewers will walk away with is that the U.S. Muslim community is racially and ethnically diverse, has a surprisingly long history in America, is eager to serve its neighbors (and prove themselves, which can feel frustrating at times), and still feels circumscribed by the post-9/11 Islamophobia.

Many Muslim viewers might be familiar with – and perhaps a bit weary of – the patently obvious framing of Muslims as a value added, not a threat, to the United States in the series. But if you’re looking for a show that introduces America to a plethora of good-hearted Muslims in communities across the Midwest and West eager to share a song, a poem, or a dream and build bridges of understanding with a through line of the contributions of African American Muslims and a bopping soundtrack, then this is the show for you.

The first episode of The Great Muslim American Road Trip, premieres on PBS on July 5th, 2022. The second episode airs July 12 and the third airs on July 19.