Abstract
In American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, legal scholar Khaled Beydoun presents a reading into American political history through the lens of Islamophobia, centering the racialization, fear mongering, and policies against Islam and Muslims. Rather than presenting Islamophobia as a new form of bigotry, Beydoun argues that today’s Islamophobia is an extension of Said’s Orientalism, a system of ideology and practices that constructs the racialized political and national identity of the “West” by distancing, othering, and negating the unassimilable, oriental Others. Islamophobia implies a set of beliefs and ideas that racializes certain religious and national others, demonizes them, and socially excludes them based on these beliefs. Underlying the fear and anxiety against Muslim and Islam is an exclusive and racialized worldview with a religious undertone that defines what is American and what is not. Muslims, a religious other, is therefore casted as a fundamentally different, threatening, and un-American race. Islamophobia, in this sense, is an intersectional phenomenon grounded on the dynamic between racism, religious identity, and nationhood. This work is a part of the ongoing critical dialogue that highlights the structural, institutional, and state power behind the structural discrimination faced widely diverse but racialized religious groups in the United States.
As a racializing and epistemic force, Orientalism separates the world based on a presumed racialized hierarchy that centers whiteness and casts the distant Orients as the Oriental “others.” Orientalism further proceeds and mothered Islamophobia: just as an Anglocentric, racialized worldview and social order deemed “the Orientals” a racial other, this racialized understanding of the world turned “Muslim” into a race. Today’s Islamophobia echoes the construction of Western citizenry that centers the Western “us” and the Oriental “other” and construes Muslims as suspicious, perceived racial others that are inherently violent, alien, and unassimilable. This construction of the fictive Muslim or Islamic other correlates with stereotypes about their propensity for terrorism and a Eurocentric worldview that cast Islam as the civilizational antithesis of the West. The conflation of the Islamic religious identity into a racial one reflects how the American national identity is contingent to whiteness. And, moreover, white supremacy has been a racializing force throughout history, creating new iterations of “racial others” while reproducing and maintaining older ones.
In chapter 1, Beydoun outlines his central argument. He highlights how the epistemological, legal, and political structure of the American citizenry is centered around whiteness and the construction of some racialized figures of fundamentally as un-American others. It consists of three dimensions: private Islamophobia, structural Islamophobia, and dialectical Islamophobia. According to Beydoun, in the private dimension, Muslims are targets of fear, suspicion, and violence by private actors. On the structural level, the fear and suspicion of Muslims are exerted by institutional and state actors through policies and other institutional practices. Dialectically, structural Islamophobia shapes, reshapes, and endorses private views or attitudes about Islam and Muslim subjects inside and outside of the US border. Through the enactment of surveillance programs, religious and racial profiling, and restrictive immigration policies, the state sends the implicit message that the Muslim identity is sufficient ground for suspicion. In this conception, the American Muslims are branded as fundamentally at odds with American values, society and citizenship: Muslims is an enemy race. This message, in turn, influences individual actions and justifies violence against Muslims.
Beydoun’s central argument is supplemented by an analysis of Islamophobia in US history. In chapters 2 and 3, Beydoun outlines how early colonists carried this form of colonialism into the United States, and the framers of the constitution view the imagined Islam as the antithesis to liberty, progress, and democracy. While Muslims were an integral segment of the kidnapped and enslaved African population in the antebellum South, their religiosity was ignored because property cannot adhere to any organized religion, and their heterogeneity had no relevance to the conversion of black bodies into properties.
From 1790 to 1952, whiteness and citizenship were made synonymous by law, and the courts therefore were the enforcers of that law. During the naturalization era, courts were forced into a case-by-case struggle to define whiteness by various standards established in prior cases. Religion was conflated with racial meanings as Christianity was associated with whiteness while Islam to otherness.
In the Cold War era, policies and the real and fictive narrative it inspired view the world as two halves: the free world and the communist world, the good and the evil. American identity is associated with who people hate and the performance of hatred through political rhetoric. In other words, the American national identity is constructed upon the distancing and negation of the un-American, communist others. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the Islam arose and replaced its role as America’s quintessential rival, negatively constructing the U.S. national identity.
In later chapters, Beydoun illustrates how the “new” Islamophobia of today follows a familiar formula: The simple construction of a menacing, racialized other continues to be the basis upon which Muslims were understood in the American public imagination. This public imagination is heightened by the War on Terror in the Bush administration. The target of this war is not actually a state or an empire, but an amorphous concept of terrorism, which is conflated to represent Islam and persons of Islamic faith. Through policies and policing, Muslim and Islam became the default category of a menacing other. Guilty until proven innocent forms the fundamental definition of Islamophobia. For example, the Obama administration established a new counterterror paradigm in 2008 with the implementation of the countering violent extremism (CVE) program. CVE policing is disproportionately, if not entirely, focused on ideas and behavioral processes linked to Islam and the expression of Muslim identity. It suggest that the path from Muslim to terrorist is a predictable one—that radicalization and the specific religious and political culture within the Muslim communities are intimately correlated. This form of religious profiling leads to those who collaborate with CVE policing to be deemed good Muslims and good Americans, and vice versa.
Contemporary Islamophobia also manifested in Trump’s Muslim ban in 2011, which, according to Beydoun, is rather consistent with the history of American polity. As the Muslim identity continues to be conflated with race, however, race also complicates the experiences within the Muslim community. Muslim institutions are bound to Arab or South Asian ethnocentrism and the aspirational whiteness that is often expressed in racism toward African Americans. As such, the Muslim community is also affected by the orientalist caricature of Arab and South Asian Muslim—an image built upon essentialized, exclusive understanding of who is Muslim, and who is not. Anti-black racism and Islamophobia therefore converge and make black Muslim within this community even less visible and more vulnerable, doubly oppressed within the religious community and from anti-blackness.
Beydoun’s American Islamophobia highlights that racialization and racism is not a unidimensional phenomenon in a postcolonial era. The American nationhood is intimately tied to the construction of racialized conception of—religious or otherwise—others. Muslims’ social location in the context of world and US political history profoundly shaped the construction and racialization of “Islam and Muslim” in the American public discourse. Different groups within the Muslim communities were also treated differently based on the stereotypical image of “Muslim terrorists” in the American public imagination. For example, Arab Americans, in practice, were often targeted by anti-terrorism programs. The neglect of America’s first Muslim community—enslaved Black Muslims—in the discourse within and outside the Muslim community also illustrates how strands of racializing systems of meaning can converge and create particularly vulnerable subject positions.
American Islamophobia is a timely, accessibly written, and politically important work that examines the critical issue of Islamophobia in American political history. It underlines the importance of treating nationhood as an analytical category in a globalizing world order. Behind the imagined image of a menacing, violent, and unassimilable Muslim “race” lies the racialized construct of American identity: to be an American is to be different from, or, in this case, unanimous to the un-American, Muslim other. However, one limitation to Beydoun’s work, is perhaps the scant mention of gender at the heart of his analysis of Islamophobia. Are Muslim women, for example, because of their their pronounced religious marker such as the hijab, subjected to more surveillance? Is the racializing image of the menacing Muslim other itself a gendered one? Do some of the policies and practices outlined by Beydoun also gendered? Future scholars who are interested in Islamophobia should consider how gender could potentially intersect with Islamophobia. Nevertheless, American Islamophobia presents an important intersectional contribution in critical race theory, racial history, and postcolonial theory.
