In November 2017 I came across the work of Naeem Mohaiemen at a New York Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 gallery while doing research with the city’s Puerto Rican Muslim population.

In "Volume Eleven (A Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism),” Mohaiemen explores his uncle Syed Mujtaba Ali’s “flawed cosmopolitanism.” On the one hand, his uncle was a Bengali author who fought against colonial interference in the affairs of India and Pakistan. On the other hand, Ali wrote words of adoration for Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.

The artist wrestles with the (im)possibility of both being true, but comes to the uncomfortable “conclusion” that in Volume 11, a collection of his renowned uncle’s essays, there is a “flaw in the algorithm of cosmopolitanism” — evidence of the swirling contradictions and inconsistencies of what it means to live as a minority in the late-modern world.

Cosmopolitanism is often presumed, or proposed, as a moral ideal or political ideology. I think cosmopolitanism is something else.

Through my ethnographic research alongside Puerto Rican Muslims — in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Puerto Rico, and online — I became convinced that cosmopolitanism is more a condition. One which we all share in a modern world that is evermore speeding up and spreading out. Like Mohaiemen’s uncle, we face some choices regarding what to do in this cosmopolitan world, but we cannot opt out.

There is no way to be non-cosmopolitan in the 21st century.