Wajahat Ali

Wajahat Ali

Wajahat Ali was born in San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA. Ali attended the University of California, Berkeley where he received a B.A. in English with Honors. He also attended the University of California, Davis - School of Law.

Wajahat Ali is a Daily Beast columnist, recovering attorney, public speaker, and tired father of three adorable kids. He believes in sharing tales that are for everybody, by his people. Universal narratives told through this culturally specific lens to educate, entertain, and bridge the global divides. He knows what it feels like to be the token minority in the classroom and the darkest person in a boardroom.

A lot like Spiderman, he has often had the responsibility and power of being the cultural ambassador to a whole group of people. Those that are often silenced, marginalized, or reduced to stereotypes.

Ali frequently appears on TV and podcasts for his incisive, brilliant, and witty political commentary.

While going to school, he just knew three words of English. But wound up graduating from UC Berkeley with an English major and wound up becoming a licensed attorney.

His reporting, essays, interviews, and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, and New York Review of Books. He’s spoken at numerous organizations, from Walmart to Google to Princeton University to the Chandni-Pakistani Restaurant in Newark, California to the United Nations, and to his three kids in his own living room.

With Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American Ali tackles the dangers of Islamophobia, chocolate hummus, white supremacy, peppering personal stories with astute insights into immigration, national security, and pop culture. Ali, in a refreshingly hopeful, bold, and uproarious memoir, he offers some indispensable lessons to cultivate a more inclusive, compassionate, and delicious America.

Growing up in suburban America, young Wajahat devoured comic books (which were devoid of brown superheroes) and field some well-intentioned advice from aunties and uncles (become a doctor, they’d say). He was accident prone, had turmeric stains under his fingernails, suffered from OCD, wore Husky pants, however he was just as American as his neighbors, with roots all over the world. Then during his time studying University of California, Berkeley, 9/11 occurred. Muslims were now the new communists as the enemy #1 of America. And Ali became an accidental spokesman and ambassador of all nonthreatening and ordinary things Muslim-y.

He was told to go back where he came from. It was one of the many lovely, warm, and helpful tips that he and numerous other kids of immigrants get on a daily basis. But go back where exactly? Fremont, California, where he grew up, but is unaffordable? Or Pakistan, where his parents left a half-century ago?

Related Authors

Fans of Wajahat Ali also enjoy these authors:

1. Kristin Hannah, author of: The Nightingale.
2. Anthony Doerr, author of: All the Light We Cannot See.
3. Amor Towles, author of: A Gentleman in Moscow.
4. Delia Owens, author of: Where the Crawdads Sing.
5. Catherine Steadman, author of: Something in the Water.

Wajahat Ali: F.A.Q