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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Prejudice against Muslims has a long and complex history. In recent decades, discrimination, violence, and human rights abuses against Muslims have taken a significant turn, with rising reports and discussions of Islamophobia across the globe. However, much of the conversation has missed the key features of this increasingly insidious phenomenon.
This original book puts race at the center of the analysis, exposing the global racialization of Muslims. With special attention paid to the United States, China, India, and the United Kingdom, the authors examine both the unique national contexts and – crucially – the shared characteristics of anti-Muslim racism. They uncover how a range of counterterrorism policies, from hyper-surveillance to racialized policing, and the ensuing representation of Islam, have taken a decisive role in shaping social life for Muslims and have worked across borders to justify and institutionalize an acceptable, state-sponsored face of racism.
Ultimately,
A Global Racial Enemy argues that anti-Muslim animus is a symptom of a global and powerful form of twenty-first-century racism.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Muslim Global Racialization: 21st-Century Racism
Introduction
Rethinking Islamophobia
Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism: Foundations for the Global Racialization of Muslims
The Racialization of Muslims
Race, Ethnicity, and Communalism in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and India
The Global Racialization of Muslims: 21st-Century Racism
Gendered Racializations: Muslim Men as Terrorists and Muslim Women as Cultural Threats in the GWOT
Outline of Book
1 Muslim Histories: Contextualizing the Global War on Terror
United Kingdom
United States
Forced migration and Islam in the United States
South Asian and Arab migration to the United States
India
Secularism and religious minorities in the new dominion of India
China
Conclusion
2 The Media and the Racialization of Muslims: Constructing a Global Threat
United States
Film and television
News
Social media
United Kingdom
Film and television
News
Cyber-attacks on Muslims
China
Film
News
Social media
India
Film
News
Social media
Conclusion
3 The Global Racialization of Muslims and the Rise in Nationalism and Populism
Nationalism and Populism: Definitions
The United States: 9/11 and Patriotism, Nationalism, and the Rise of Ethnonationalist Populism
Anti-Muslim activism: The Tea Party, the ground zero controversy, and the birther movement
The UK as a Federated Nation
How to produce a Muslim problem: Two versions of nationalist populism
Trojan Horse: The cost of not being seen as a loyal citizen
India: Populism, Nationalism, and Hindutva
Modi, the RSS, and Hindutva
Hindutva and Muslims
Cow vigilantes
Love jihad
Citizenship rules
China: Settler Colonialism and Uyghur Muslims
Gendered racialization of Uyghur Muslims and nationalism
Conclusion
4 Global Counterterrorism Policies: Racializing Muslims via Surveillance, Policing, and Detention
Muslims and Surveillance in the United States
CVE and TVTP
Reach and impact of the War on Terror in the United States
The UK and PREVENT
China and the Global War on Terror
Uyghur Muslims and camps
India and Counterterrorism Policies
India and border security in the Global War on Terror
Conclusion
Conclusion: Where Do We Go from Here? Possibilities for Resistance and Further Securitization
Advocacy and Protests: Resistance to Racialization
The Muslim Justice League: United States
The UK: Advocacy against PREVENT
Jamia Millia Islamia and Shaheen Bagh protests: India
Uyghur women: Resistance from abroad
Final Thoughts
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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A Global Racial Enemy
Muslims and 21st-Century Racism
Saher Selod, Inaash Islam, and Steve Garner
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Saher Selod, Inaash Islam, & Steve Garner 2024
The right of Saher Selod, Inaash Islam, and Steve Garner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4019-8
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Polity Press for the opportunity to publish this book. In particular, Jonathan Skerrett has been incredibly patient and encouraging, and we are incredibly grateful to have worked with him. We are indebted to him for his graciousness and understanding on the multiple occasions that we asked for deadline extensions. We would also like to thank Karina Jákupsdóttir for her guidance and support over the last few years. We are incredibly grateful to Deepa Kumar for her feedback and insights on the manuscript and for being a trailblazer through her own work on Muslims and racism.
Collaborating on this book has been an exceptionally rewarding experience. Not only have we pushed one another intellectually, we were able to support one another through the trials we have all faced dealing with a pandemic, family illnesses, and professional changes.
For Steve, the last section of this book project occurred during a particularly tough time, and he would like to thank people who went out of their way to help him through it: his great family of course; his fantastic wife and children, Anne, Dani, Gabriel and Morganne, and his parents, Chris and Chris. Thanks also to Lisa Jones, Christi Barrera, Marisa Winking, Emilce Santana, Kelly and Sara Davidson, Derald Young, Lori Vesperman, Heili Pals, and Warren Waren for their kindness. He would like to thank Saher Selod, David Embrick, Sin Yi Cheung, David Brunsma, and Nasim Vaseiezadeh (and her new daughter, Arta) for their faith in him. He really appreciates Wendy Moore of New Orleans, who goes the extra distance to be an epic friend. Finally, as we received proofs for this book, he got the horrible news that his former colleague, Mark Fossett had passed. He would like to include Mark for his help and hospitality when he was working at A&M.
For Inaash, first and foremost, she is indebted to her co-authors for taking a chance on her when she was still a doctoral student at Virginia Tech. She would like to thank Saher and Steve, for bringing her on to this important project. She has learned so much from them and is grateful for their guidance, mentorship, and support. She would also like to express her gratitude to David L. Brunsma for being a brilliant friend and mentor over the last few years. To her family, Izza, Haneen, Ammi, and Abbu, their constant encouragement and belief in her has meant everything. She thanks them from the bottom of her heart.
Saher would like to thank first and foremost Steve and Inaash for their dedication and commitment to this project. Thank you to Jyoti Puri and the Hazel Dick Leonard Fellowship at Simmons University for their support. Aaron Rosenthal, Jessica Parr, Laura Prieto, Sarah Leonard, Felipe Agudelo, Lena Zuckerwise, and Sumayya Ahmed provided thoughtful and critical feedback during the early stages of the book. Saher is grateful to Marilyn Rodriguez for her work as a research assistant. Saher is indebted to Sahar Aziz and John Esposito for their invitation to publish on ethnonationalism and populism and the racialization of Muslims in their forthcoming edited manuscript, which greatly helped in formulating some of the ideas presented in this book. She would also like to thank Margaret Hicken for the invitation to present on this project at the Racism Lab at the University of Michigan. Saher would like to give a huge shout out to Fatema Ahmed and the Muslim Justice League for being the true superheroes in doing the hard work on surveillance and policing of Muslims on the ground through their advocacy. Finally, to her husband and daughter, Eben and Isra English, Saher owes everything. They continue to provide the encouragement desperately needed to continue pushing forward with this work. Saher hopes this book honors the memory of her parents, Farooq and Sayeeda Selod, whose histories of forced and voluntary migration from Myanmar (formerly referred to as Burma) to Calcutta, to the newly created Pakistan, to the United States, continues to inspire her work. Their resilience in the face of discrimination and racism and their dedication to social justice is what sustains her commitment to this work.
IntroductionMuslim Global Racialization: 21st-Century Racism
Introduction
Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur activist living in the United States, has been speaking out against the crimes against Uyghur Muslims in China. She is the founder of the organization Campaigns for Uyghurs, and has spent years advocating for the human rights of Uyghur Muslims. In a podcast with Al Jazeera, she discussed how millions of Uyghurs are being placed in camps simply because they are Muslim (Al Jazeera Podcast 2022). Her husband’s family had been disappeared in China and after she started speaking out about forced sterilization, rapes, and camps for Uyghur Muslims, her own sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, was placed into a camp and sentenced to twenty years in prison for “terrorist activities” (Cadell 2021). In the podcast, Abbas noted the long and complicated history of Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan (referred to by the Chinese government as Xinjiang) with the Chinese state, one that she characterized as colonialist. But she also discussed how the Global War on Terror shifted the way the state framed Uyghur Muslims as a threat to the nation by labeling them as terrorists. Once this label of terrorist is applied, individuals are dehumanized to the point where they are no longer thought to behave with any rationality, and instead reduced to bloodthirsty, evil, and irrational actors. This marker justifies the Chinese government’s draconian and cruel policies put in place to prevent terrorism. As we show in this book, it is the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that has led to the imprisonment of a retired doctor and mother, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, for twenty years.
The racialization of Muslims in the 21st century is global in nature. Although the terrorist attacks that incited this war took place in the United States, this new war, one that is waged against terror as opposed to a nation-state, has allowed for counterterrorism laws and policies that rely on the construction of a Muslim as a threat to both national security and cultural values to be reproduced and cross borders. The deeper motivations for the oppression of Muslims are unique to their histories within each nation, chronicled in this book, but the current global call to weed out terrorism has triggered anti-terrorism laws resulting in unprecedented levels of state-led discrimination and human rights abuses of Muslims internationally. In this book we unpack how the Global War on Terror has led to a global enemy as a result of the global racialization of Muslims.
The way that racism via attitudes, representations, and policies crosses borders while at the same time retains its uniqueness within a particular sociopolitical context requires us to identify this process across various spaces and contexts. For example, Pakistanis in the UK have a history of racialization that is tied to the history of colonialism in India. The derogatory use of the term “Pakis” was used prior to the attacks of 9/11 reflecting the anti-South Asian sentiments that derive from a history of colonialism (Taylor and Gillan 2009). However, since 9/11, counterterrorist policies that target South Asian Muslims in new ways have been appearing in the UK. Kundnani and Hayes’ (2018) report on the history of a surveillance policy in the United States, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), exemplifies the global nature of counterterrorist policies. After 9/11, European countries began to develop theories of radicalization to understand the motivations of terrorism, which the United States later adopted. One program that Prime Minister Tony Blair put into place was called Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE), later named PREVENT. This policy aimed at surveilling a British Muslim population, by targeting mosques and individuals that the government thought was susceptible to “extremism” as a way to prevent the radicalization of Muslims and consequently violence. But PREVENT is deeply problematic because it relies on stereotypical associations of Muslim=radicalization=potential terrorist. The policy was based on these stereotypical associations.
From 2005, the analysis of extremism among UK security officials shifted away from references to formal groups and movements and towards an emphasis on attitudes, mindsets, and dispositions – similar to the shift in the Netherlands and the US at this time. Attention turned, above all, to concern about a free-floating Islamist ideology that did not spread through organisational recruitment but through a radicalisation process in which it captured the minds of the young and made them into “violent extremists” – the term had been adopted from the US by UK policy-makers in 2006. Extremism was pictured as a virus, flowing from radicalizer to radicalized, infecting, spreading, infiltrating. (Kundnani and Hayes 2018: 7)
The way people are perceived to think is tied to their religious identity, which becomes criminal via this policy. PREVENT racializes Muslims because of the construction that Islam is a violent ideology, therefore anyone who practices this religion is susceptible to radicalized ways of thinking and behaving. Kundnani and Hayes (2018) trace the lineage of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) in the United States under the Obama administration back to PREVENT. PREVENT was created in England, inspired by Dutch policies that were put into place after the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. Theo Van Gogh was known for making films that vilified Muslims as misogynists, barbaric, and violent. His killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, was twenty-six at the time and a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent. Although the Netherlands experienced few terrorist attacks, compared to other European countries, the response to this one isolated violent act was to institute a community-based surveillance program, Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE), to stop radicalization in individuals. PREVENT in the UK drew on the Dutch version, which then influenced CVE in the United States. In the first iteration of CVE in the United States, federal grants were given to organizations that aimed to weed out radicalization in their communities. Not surprisingly, mosques and Islamic community centers were some of the first recipients of these grants. Communities who received the grant were expected to monitor their population for extremists. While we revisit CVE and PREVENT in more depth in later chapters, the point that we make here is that counterterrorist policies do not exist in a vacuum but have a global domino effect. These policies rely on the racialization of a Muslim identity that transcends borders. While Muslim experiences in the UK are different to those in the United States due to their unique histories, the counterterrorist policies that have arisen in each country are similar to one another and rely on a global bogeyman, or the global racialized Muslim.
The global racialization of Muslims entails certain tropes about Muslims that are shared across nation-states even though they thrive under very different contexts. Uyghur Muslims, Indian Muslims, American Muslims, and British Muslims are all framed as misogynists, violent, irrational, and a population that should be watched, monitored, deported, or even detained. It is important to note that it is not just Muslims in these countries who have been impacted by the racialization of Muslims that has been used to justify the Global War on Terror. Every country that is a member of the United Nations was tasked with participating in the GWOT after 9/11, which resulted in human rights breaches against Muslims in these other countries as well. These policies that appear to target Muslims have a much wider net and have impacted other racialized and marginalized groups, which we touch on later in this book. Furthermore, the global racialization of Muslims is not a one-size-fits-all, but rather is a deeply gendered construct. Throughout the book, we identify the ways that Muslim women encounter forms of gendered racialization that are unique from Muslim men. Finally, we show how racism against Muslims is not owned by the “West” but is a global phenomenon that exemplifies racism in the 21st century.
Rethinking Islamophobia
Since 9/11, Islamophobia has become the go-to term to encapsulate the encounters Muslims have with racism and discrimination (Sayyid and Vakil 2010; Love 2017; Beydoun 2018). Although the original application of the term centered on a fear of Islam, several scholars have articulated the ways that race and racism are central to the concept, allowing it to capture anti-Muslim racism (Tyrer 2013; Love 2017; Kumar 2021). Making race central to the concept of Islamophobia became more widespread, particularly in the years after 9/11. Prior to 9/11, Islamophobia was used by scholars to describe anti-Muslim discrimination, without much analysis of whether it is a form of racism (Gottschalk and Greenberg 2008; Shryock 2010). While some scholars argued that Islamophobia could be used to incorporate structural racism, others have noted the limits of this term when it does not adequately address histories of race and racism for Muslim populations (Halliday 1999; Garner and Selod 2015; Husain 2021b). One of the critiques of the term is that it focuses too much on the religion, Islam, rather than on Muslim experiences (Garner and Selod 2015). Another issue with the term is that within the US context it makes invisible anti-Black racism because the concept has been rooted in the experiences of Arabs and South Asians (Husain 2021b). Indeed, to date, the majority of research on Muslims and racism, particularly since 9/11, has been mostly conducted on Arabs or South Asians (Naber 2007; Cainkar 2009; Alsultany 2012; Bayoumi 2015; Selod 2018). This argument is best reflected in the idea that Muslims are being racialized as “brown” (Zopf 2018), revealing the focus on South Asians and Arabs in the current literature. Furthermore, some of the scholarship on Islamophobia situates it in relation to whiteness (Razack 2022), making the term difficult to use in countries like Nigeria, where Muslims experience discrimination but are phenotypically similar to the dominant population (Ejiofor 2023). As a result, there has been a call to decolonize the scholarship on Islamophobia because it centers whiteness and is Eurocentric (Ejiofor 2023). We argue that racialization is a better theoretical analysis because it allows us to show how religion is racialized and interacts with other identities, such as religion, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, class, etc., in unique ways. As we show later in this chapter, racialization of a religious identity via Muslim men as terrorists and Muslim women as cultural threats justifies security practices that are deeply racialized.
Another reason we steer away from the term Islamophobia is because of the problematic ways in which it reinforces the idea that racism is an illness. The suffix “phobia” in Islamophobia participates in the continued stigmatization and vilification of mental health issues whereby racism is continuously characterized with words and phrases that denote disabilities, highlighting the problems with these negative attitudes. A Google search of the term “phobia” provides a definition as an extreme or irrational fear of something. This definition perpetuates the idea that this is an individualistic practice and one that is not rational – ignoring how it is a systemic issue and an intentional act with material consequences. Anti-Muslim racism is structured into laws and policies with concrete political, social, and material effects, something that a phobia does not capture. And while Love (2017), Beydoun (2020), Kumar (2021), and Kazi (2021) do the work of identifying how Islamophobia can also refer to structural racism, we feel the term can detract from the concept of structural racism. Finally, we view racism against Muslims as part and parcel of racism at large. In other words, although Muslims have not been theorized about enough in race scholarship currently or historically, their encounters with racism have always been there. These experiences have not been uniform, but are complicated by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and religion. African Muslims who came over to the US via slavery have very different experiences with racism because of their religion and race than do the South Asian migrants who came over as cheap labor in the 19th century (Bald 2013). Just as an indigenous population has been ignored in the construction of critical race theory (Byrd 2011), so have Muslims and other racialized religious groups. The ways that race theory has been and continues to be constructed often leaves out issues around immigration, colonialism, and settler colonialism. Settler colonialism predates slavery in the United States, and this should be built into theories about racism that often treat slavery as the starting point in critical race theories (Byrd 2011). Without dismissing the important work that current scholars and activists are doing around Islamophobia, we argue that Muslim racialization is a better way to understand and theorize a 21st-century racism that is global. Racialization allows us to build on existing theories of race and racism, bringing in intersectional and global perspectives that are rooted in the existing scholarship on race, racism, and colonialism.
Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism: Foundations for the Global Racialization of Muslims
The association of Muslim men with terrorism has a long history that predated the Global War on Terror. Arabs, and consequently Muslims, have always been portrayed as uncivilized, barbaric, and violent. Edward Said’s (1978) concept of “orientalism” provides a starting point to situate the racialization of Muslims as a global project. One of the most renowned theorists of postcolonial thought, Said showed how ideas about the Orient, which he referred to as the Arab world, were constructed through a colonizing epistemology. In Orientalism, Said convincingly writes that the construction of the Arab/Muslim via literature, aesthetics, and scholarly texts produces the “us” vs. “them” mentality that is incorporated into laws and policies that make up the governing structure of colonialism and imperialism. The epistemological construction of “the Orient” is done in such a way that the creators of knowledge need not ever step foot into the cultures and countries they represent. In his text, Said refers to paintings by European artists that depict the Arab world as static, unchanging, and inherently unmodern. Some of the paintings include harems of white women in submissive positions to the darker skinned Arab men wearing what appears to be traditional attire, like a turban. What Said discovered is that many of these artists had never been to an Arab country, thus these images were from their imagination.
The title of Zareena Grewal’s book, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (2014), further exemplifies the ways the Arab world and Islam are constructed. The first part of this title reveals how a religious identity is conflated with spatial geographies. “Americans have inherited this centuries-old discourse. When Americans refer to the ‘Muslim World,’ they reproduce, amend, and complicate Colonial Europe’s moral geography of the Orient” (pg. 5). The creation of the “West” and the “Orient” is a construct that is not based in reality. There is no Muslim world with specific boundaries and a unified national and cultural identity. The Global War on Terror is not one that is engaged with one specific nation-state, like past wars, but one that extends its reach to wherever terror may be found, making war’s scope limitless. Because the terrorist is not worthy of human rights, state-sanctioned violence against Muslims is seen as necessary. But to be clear, it is not just the United States or the mythical “West” that participates in this subjugation. It encompasses a multitude of countries that inherit and adapt the construct of the terrorist to expand their authority on their population. This imaginary geographic location, the “Orient” or the “Muslim world,” is viewed as a place where terrorists are produced.
Orientalism in the 20th century laid the groundwork for its use in the GWOT in the 21st century. Samuel Huntington’s work best exemplifies how orientalism was used to set the stage for the GWOT. Huntington, a Harvard political scientist, was influenced by Bernard Lewis (1990), a British American historian, who wrote about the “Roots of Muslim Rage,” arguing that Muslim men naturally tended toward rage and violence. In 1993, Huntington made a prediction about what the next global war would be in his article “The Clash of Civilizations.” Huntington states that clashes between distinct cultures would create the context for the next major world war. But rather than characterizing the war as between nations, he identified eight “civilizations” that make up the globe. Huntington defines civilizations as,
the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. (pg. 24)
Huntington’s thesis is what Said defines as an orientalist construction because it is an arbitrary and unrealistic division of the world into “civilizations” that are not based in reality, fact, or even geographical boundaries, but myth and fiction. In fact, Huntington and Said gave lectures critiquing each other’s ideas. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996, Edward Said gave a lecture entitled “The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations.” Here he argued that an “Islamic” civilization does not exist, but was rather created by neoconservative academics, like Huntington, to justify extraction of resources from Arab countries. Muslims globally make up distinct cultures and beliefs. They speak different languages, have various political interests, and even practice Islam or do not practice Islam in various ways. Yet, Huntington’s division of the world into spatial locations, religious beliefs, continents, and even one nation-state (Japan) was not dismissed as ridiculous or baseless, but instead appeared in the way US foreign policy was instituted after the September 11th attacks. The GWOT relied on the construction of a Muslim terrorist who comes from the Islamic world. It was not important that the terrorists who committed the violent attacks on 9/11 did not come from the two countries against which the United States engaged in a military strike, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Scholars have since built on Said’s concept of orientalism, situating it within the current context. “Neo-orientalism” or 21st-century orientalism (Kerboua 2016: 8), for example, emerged after the events of 9/11, but reproduces essentialized ideas of Islam and Muslims similar to those evident in Said’s original concept of orientalism, yet specifically focusing on Islam. Using discourses of the GWOT, neo-orientalism produces a binary logic that not only defines Islam as terroristic and Muslims as terrorists or potential terrorists but conflates Islam with fundamentalism to the point that the two are rendered indistinguishable. The focus on terrorism and fundamentalism essentializes the difference of Muslims and Islam with western and non-western citizenries and nation-states who are socially, politically, and militarily concerned and engaged with the GWOT. However, rather than simply focusing on the element of western patriotism and democracy as opposed to Islamic or Arab totalitarianism, neo-orientalism focuses more on the negative dimensions of Islamic theology and Muslim lifestyles, rendering these as incompatible with nation-states’ visions and values. In the United States and the United Kingdom, freedom, equality, and democracy are perceived to be antithetical to Islam and its adherents. In non-western nations such as China and India, neo-orientalist logics pose values of secularism, ethnonationalism, and unity as being threatened by the presence of Muslim subjects and Islam within state borders. Consequently, even though it emerges from western sociopolitical discourse, neo-orientalism offers non-western nations the language, political discourse, and mass-mediated narratives that reify an orientalist binary of us vs. them that is uniquely attuned to and influenced by the politics of the GWOT. Co-opting these neo-orientalist logics facilitates the GWOT’s global racial project of racializing Muslims by attaching specific meanings of terrorism, fundamentalism, and danger to Muslims and Islam, which then shape public sentiments, conceptions, and state policies that locate Muslims as outside of each nation-state’s national imaginary.
One of the major contributions of neo-orientalism is the attention to gender. According to the neo-orientalist logics of the GWOT, Muslim men are to be perceived as terrorists or potential terrorists, national security threats, suicide bombers, and illegal immigrants, while Muslim women are to be perceived as passive victims, oppressed by Muslim men, and as cultural threats – who, by the virtue of being women and potential mothers, may inculcate within their children Islamic belief systems thought to be antithetical to each nation-state’s specific values (Mishra 2007; Cainkar 2009). It is this logic that drives forced marriages for Uyghur Muslim women to non-Muslim Han men in China and how the rhetoric of “saving” the women of Afghanistan from the Taliban was popularized when the United States invaded Afghanistan, which will be further expanded on later in this book. Thus, the terrorist justifies borders, surveillance tools and technologies, and prisons while Muslim women who need saving or are viewed as cultural threats justifies policing intimate relations. These gendered and racialized meanings are manifestly evident in the discourse used to create and validate state and federal policies in each of the countries examined in this book.
Orientalism and concepts like neo-orientalism are not without their flaws. Sexual orientation is mostly absent, with the exception of Ghassan Moussawi (2020), who broadens the concept of orientalism to incorporate sexuality in his study of LGBTQ people in Beirut. Said’s concept of orientalism has also been critiqued for being narrow in its focus of specific European countries and leaving little room for resistance in the way it was conceptualized (Lowe 1991; Kumar 2021). Furthermore, neither concept engages with the concept of race. Kumar (2021) advances orientalism by showing how institutional orientalism was a racial project that began in the 19th century that was tied to capitalist imperialism. “The ability to colonize Muslim lands and to deny rights to the colonized created the conditions for modern anti-Muslim racism . . . the necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of Muslims as a race in its modern form were present only in the nineteenth century in the era of capitalist modernity” (pg. 46). Most of the focus on orientalism, neo-orientalism, and institutional orientalism has been on the relationship of Europe or the United States to Muslim majority countries via colonialism or capitalist imperialism. We move this argument forward in new directions by showing how the construct of Muslim men as terrorists and Muslim women as in need of saving are racial constructions resulting in the erection of racialized securitization globally in both western and non-western societies. Orientalist notions of Muslims as monolithic, misogynist, and a threat have served European colonialism in the 19th century, and the United States in the 21st century in their military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but are also being used in countries like India and China to control their population via hyper-nationalism. The racialization of Muslims does not only serve white supremacy but is also serving nationalist supremacies as well.
The Racialization of Muslims
In order to understand racialization, we have first to acknowledge that race is not a static concept but shifts within nations over time and is also not recognized by every nation-state. In the United States, race has been universally understood as being about phenotype, with skin tone and pigmentation being the main characteristics that determine one’s experiences with racism. However, there are other factors, like cultural attributes, that race someone (Naber 2007; Cainkar 2009; Selod and Embrick 2013; Garner and Selod 2015; Love 2017; Aziz 2021; Kumar 2021). Cultural markers in addition to biological ones play a huge role in how someone is read as raced, resulting in their encounters with discrimination and racism. Cultural racism describes the process by which cultures mark someone as inherently inferior (Bonilla-Silva 2006). Our argument however is not that phenotypes no longer matter, as they certainly do, particularly in European countries and the United States. Biological racism never went away, as many scholars have argued, it is just no longer the only way someone is raced (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Omi and Winant 2015). The resurgence of genomics is an example of how biological and scientific racism have always been a part of our epistemologies (Roberts 2011; Benjamin 2013; Williams 2013). But Muslim encounters and experiences with racism are often dismissed across the globe because beliefs about what has to do with race and what does not have to do with race are often connected to antiquated notions of biological difference.
Currently, there are many scholars who use race theory to frame the Muslim experience since 9/11. Some have argued that Muslims are a new race (Rana 2011). Others have noted that Muslim experiences with race must be understood within the context of empire (Kumar 2020; Kazi 2021). Naber and Rana (2019) argue that anti-Muslim racism should be examined within the history of imperialism and colonialism, highlighting the global nature of racism. This global recognition of racism enables movement building against imperial racism (Naber and Rana 2019). Aziz (2021) provides various types of racial Muslims that have been created as a result of a long history of racism within the United States and particularly after 9/11. We add to this burgeoning critical race scholarship on Muslims by using the theoretical concept of racialization to explain how Muslims are encountering racism today within a global context. Racialization is not static, but constantly shifting because it reflects the structures of the era within which it is captured or studied.
Racialization is a concept that allows for an understanding of how groups of people are read and understood in racial terms. For our work, racialization enables us to think about how a religious identity acquires racial meaning without relying only on phenotypical or biological factors, like skin tone, which allows for its use in countries that do not acknowledge racial classifications. To use it, we first need to examine the definitions of this term. In their seminal book Racial Formation in the United States (2015) Omi and Winant argue that racial formations are tied to specific historic and sociopolitical contexts. For example, to understand how African Americans experience racism, we have to continuously examine the political and social context of the era within which the racism occurs. As we stated above, racial experiences shift over time. Racialization allows us to capture the fluid nature of racism. Omi and Winant define racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (Omi and Winant 2015: 111). We appreciate this definition as a starting point; however, it is limited because it still relies on phenotype, something we see in scholarship that centers on Europe and the United States. They state, “we provide a concept of racialization to emphasize how the phenomic, the corporeal dimensions of human bodies, acquires meaning in social life” (Omi and Winant 2015: 109). While phenomic and corporeal dimensions are important, they do not capture the entire scope of experiences with racism.
Weiner (2012) writes that racialization is the process of ranking groups of people on a hierarchy that can shift depending on the sociopolitical context. This definition does not rest on phenotype but includes cultural traits as well. For us, racial hierarchies as a way to think theoretically about racism (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Weiner 2012; Treitler 2013) also has limitations. Racial hierarchies can ignore the nuances of the lived experiences of racialization, especially as the hierarchies are often based on a limited number of measures, such as socioeconomic status, rather than incorporating everyday experiences with racism. For us, racialization does not necessarily mean that groups are acquiring a new racial classification or becoming a race, but that they are encountering racism and racist structures. These structures shift in response to what is going on in society. Nevertheless, Weiner (2012) provides several empirics and indicators of racialization that we find useful in this book, which include citizenship laws, state control, and criminalization.
We use instead Selod’s (2018) definition of racialization: “the process by which bodies become racial in their lived realities because of biological and/or cultural traits as a result of the intersection and cooperation between ideologies, policies, laws, and social interactions, resulting in the denial of equal treatment in society” (pg. 23). In the twenty years since the GWOT began, the institutionalization of counterterrorism policies has expanded and grown globally. For this to occur, Muslims have been continuously racialized as a threat. But this construction shifts over time and space; thus, we must constantly examine and re-examine what these constructions are and how they operate. As we have moved further away from 9/11, we are able to see how the racialization of Muslims has actually become more widespread because policies imbued with racial stereotypes of Muslims have been embedded into our society. It is how we allow horrific human rights abuses to occur in the name of national security – because that threat is seen as so evil and dangerous that any means necessary are supported to thwart terrorism.
The process of racialization allows for an understanding of how other identities such as sexuality, gender, language, and religion intersect and can also be understood racially (Garner and Selod 2015). For example, in India Muslim men’s sexuality has been racialized as hypersexual and therefore viewed as in need of policing and surveillance (Puar 2009; Puri 2016). Racializing Muslim men as hypersexual justifies policing and surveillance of them because they are seen as a threat to women – because of their gender and racialized religious identity (Puar 2009; Puri 2016). Another example of how racialization captures intersections like gender, race, and religion is in airport experiences. Because airplanes were used in the September 11th terrorist attacks, security practices in airports have greatly shifted. The Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) was created in the United States to deal with security at the borders. But airport security and the TSA have been accused of racially profiling passengers, specifically Muslims (Selod 2018). Since 9/11, Muslim men and women, particularly those that visibly appear Muslim because of their religious attire, like the hijab, or men who don beards, have been removed from flights because of their religious identity. For example, Eaman Shebley, who wears the hijab, and her family were removed from a United Airlines flight in 2016 simply because she asked for a child harness for her toddler (Mohammad 2016). Muslims did not encounter these experiences on airplanes before 9/11 like they have since. Racialization allows us to see how Muslim women who wear the hijab are viewed as a threat in airports and on airplanes and are thus subjected to profiling due to the institutionalization of security practices in airports.
Race, Ethnicity, and Communalism in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and India
In order to apply racialization to the four different contexts we examine in this book, we first turn to the ways that each country thinks about race. In the United States, race is not a fixed category, but one that has shifted and changed over time. The creation and erasure of racial categories has been documented by the Pew Research Center. An interactive chart shows how racial classifications changed over time on the US Census (Brown 2020). The 1790 Census lists “free white males/free white females,” “all other free persons,” and “slave” as the three racial classifications. On the 1860 Census “Mulatto” and “Indian” are listed as racial classifications. Between 1920 and 1940, “Hindu” is listed as a racial classification on the US Census, which was used to capture Asian Indians. One might wonder why a religious classification was used to denote a racial classification. Ian Haney Lopez answers this question in his book White by Law (2006), where he shows how the courts used a religious identity for South Asians and Arabs as the justification for denying them access to citizenship. At this time, one had to be white in order to become a naturalized citizen. The courts determined that one could not reasonably be white if one were Hindu, because the cultural values associated with this religion were too distinct from those of a European Christian identity, which defined whiteness. In the early to mid-20th century several Asian Indian men attempted to gain citizenship by challenging the notion that they were not white in the courts. The courts ruled their religion situated them as not white, thus the failure to attain citizenship and the racialization of religion is reflected in the racial classification of Hindu on the census. Currently, Arabs are racially classified as white in the US Census, something that is being contested by Arab advocacy groups because many have argued they do not experience the privileges of whiteness due to skin tone and/or religious identity, like being Muslim (Maghbouleh 2020). Although whiteness is a racial classification that has been constant on the US Census, who has been included and excluded has changed over time.
