If you look up IslamAlways.com , your computer (much like mine) will likely glitch, attempt to load the website for an eternity, and prompt a grey error screen before eventually redirecting to " searchforislam.com " instead. That didn't stop Ismael Loutfi' s father, Yaser, from painting the website across the back windshield of his Pontiac Grand Prix in the early 2000s. Over time, it was joined by other phrases scrawled across the car, transforming it into a moving expression of his unapologetic Islamic identity in central Florida.
Ismael now recounts the story of the car, his father, and his childhood in a new one-man show Off-Broadway at New York's Soho Playhouse, called Heavenly Baba .
Presented by Emmy and Peabody Award-winning comedian Hasan Minhaj and directed by Greg Walloch , Ismael centres his Baba, or father, in his first long-form narrative show. He combines elements of his stand-up background, images projected on a screen behind him, and a chronology spanning more than 20 years to examine themes of parent-child relationships, religious practice, belonging, and authenticity. In a wide-ranging conversation with The New Arab , Ismael Loutfi examines what it means to be a Muslim-American comedian today, how audiences are engaging with Heavenly Baba , and how the show honours his eccentric father and upbringing. The New Arab: In the show, you immediately introduce yourself as a 'Muslim-American comedian'. What was important about establishing that so quickly? Ismael Loutfi : I lead with it because I want everyone to know what I am, right? The show is about a Muslim American comedian — those three things. And so, if I just say I'm a Muslim comedian, that could be anything, that could mean anything.
You also need the Americans to know that I'm a mainstream comedian. And I think that gets injected throughout the show. The idea that I'm a practising Muslim can be a hard thing for people to accept. So, as a practising Muslim, what's it like to talk so openly about Islam on stage? Is there a fear of what palatable Islam might look like for an American audience? It's a strange dynamic. When Muslims in the audience hear me say I'm Muslim, they immediately measure it against their own experience — wondering if I pray, if I'm more cultural, or if I'm strict in my practice.
For an American audience, though, the reaction is different. When they hear 'Muslim', they're not consciously analysing it, but subconsciously they're thinking: he's not what I expected — not a stereotypical, bearded figure — so he must be more cultural. It becomes just another identifier, like being Dominican or Puerto Rican, rather than something deeper.
And that's something you can lean into as a performer. You can position yourself as, 'I'm Muslim, but I'm also just like you.' A lot of comedians do that — I did it myself for years.
But over time, it can take a toll. You start bending your identity to meet the audience where they are, and in doing that, you're not being entirely honest — with them or with yourself. You let people believe something that isn't quite true: that you're Muslim, but not really. And that's not the truth. In the show, you discuss how Islam has often been seen as uncool over the course of your life. In New York today, though, with a Muslim mayor, a Yemeni coffee shop around the corner from the Soho Playhouse, and the Islamic Center nearby too, it almost feels like Islam is cool right now. It does, right? With that, how do you balance the feeling of being representative, or the politics of a show like this? It feels like the right moment for this show. It's about my father and me, and about him being unapologetically, even confrontationally, Muslim at a time when that felt genuinely dangerous. He lived that way from around 2004 to 2020 — nearly two decades.
Back then, America wasn't ready for that, and comedy certainly wasn't either. But now, especially in New York, it feels like audiences — at least theatre audiences — are more open to stories that don't try to soften or reshape faith into something easily digestible.
With figures like Zohran [Mamdani] in the public eye, there's a greater willingness to engage with that complexity.
The show itself centres on something as simple as my dad's car, and the things he wrote on it — all sorts of wild stuff. But what's changed is that audiences today are more able to sit with that, not jump to conclusions, and instead try to understand the layers behind it. In the show, you characterise stand-up as "relatable hyperbole," where you rely on overexagerrations of familiar events, feelings, or more to get a response from your audience. With your emphasis on authenticity here, do you ever feel like you're playing a character in this narrative performance? Does one medium, stand-up or a narrative show, lend itself better to authenticity than the other? It's a very hard question, because you're basically asking, 'In which one are you being more honest?' In a weird way, I think of stand-up as being more honest, because there's more room to play, even more room to experiment.
When I'm doing the one-man show, I'm telling a more honest story because the standup is not honest at all.
The standup is all just fabricated little anecdotes, maybe an opinion here and there that's true. But, for the most part, it's couched in things that are going to function as a joke.
So the story of Heavenly Baba is very true, but the performance is locked in. The content is authentic, but who I am, I can't be super loose.
I have to get to the next thing, I have to get to the next plot point. So it's a more authentic story-wise, but performance-wise, I'm more of an actor. Throughout Heavenly Baba , you mentioned having to talk to your mum and older siblings to research your father. What was that process like? How did it feel to learn or discover so much about someone you already know so well? Is the show living and breathing as you learn more? It's funny. I mentioned on the show that I'm the youngest of five, and I'm much younger than my siblings. So I had a very different experience. I had a very different upbringing.
My upbringing was coloured by the car and by my dad's religiosity.
My older siblings had a dad who was, for the most part, a pretty regular dad. He wasn't around that much; he was around at night. During the day, he was at the hospital and strict. He was very strict.
But by the time I was around, my dad had chilled out a lot. He had lost his [medical] licence; he had lost everything. So I was the fifth kid that he just let run around.
The reason I say that is that there was a lot of research involved in figuring out what he was like before the car. I talked to my mum a lot about it, and I learned a lot… I feel like the show is 95% set, but there's always like a 5% of playing and growing with it.
Last March, a year ago, my brother Hassan came to the show and afterwards was like, 'Yeah, I liked it, but you didn't really talk about Baba at all.' And I was like, 'That's insane. The whole show is about Baba and me.'
So he started rattling off all these funny things my dad would do that gave a clearer picture of him.
There were so many different weird little things that had to be excavated and given to me by my siblings and my mum. The show balances the humour of your eccentric, maybe even weird, upbringing with a real, earnest honour and appreciation for it. What has the balancing act of putting it together looked like? It helps that my father was a really good guy. He was a good dad. That makes it so much easier, because the thing I've always said about him was that he was just eccentric enough to be on the line of dangerous, but never crossing – just a little bit kooky.
And that line is where comedy works. So this show is helped a lot by the fact that my father was a very loving, affectionate guy.
This then made it easy to be like 'I want to laugh at his car a little bit, because it is funny,' but I don't want everyone to walk out of the show thinking 'What an idiot that guy is.' I want people to walk out thinking, 'What a complicated, lovely guy that man was.' Heavenly Baba is playing Off-Broadway at Soho Playhouse in New York City until 26 April. And yes, Ismael is considering buying the IslamAlways.com domain Suha Musa is a New York-based journalist and researcher