The past several years have afforded me with the opportunity, which I took on as an obligation, to share my research on national security policing, civil liberties, and the focus of this book, Islamophobia, on college campuses, at law schools, and in communities across and outside of the United States. While I have been closely examining these topics for some time, even before beginning my legal academic career, the 2016 presidential election brought an immediate urgency to and proliferated interest in my work.

I learned, en route from the East Los Angeles campus to my downtown hotel, that Juan was neither born to a Muslim family nor a convert. He was, rather, a man on the cusp of embracing Islam at a moment of unprecedented Islamophobia and rabid xenophobia, of imminent Muslim bans and Mexican walls.

QUESTION: What draws a Latino man to Islam precisely when anti-Muslim sentiment spikes in America?

"I have been studying Islam closely for some time now, and try to go to the mosque on some Fridays," he shared. "I am considering making my shahada," Juan continued, referencing the oath of induction whereby a new Muslim proclaims that "there is only one God, and Mohammed is his final messenger." "Everybody assumes that I am a Muslim already," he said, with a cautious laugh that revealed discomfort with his liminal status.

"As an undocumented Latino from El Salvador living in Pico Union"—a heavily concentrated Latinx community on the margins of downtown Los Angeles—"I am most fearful about the pop-up checkpoints and the immigration raids," he told me. These fears were more than imminent under the administration of President Obama, dubbed the "Deporter in Chief" by critics who opposed the accelerated mass deportations carried out during the final stages of his second term. But without question, Juan's fears have become more visceral, more palpable during the Trump administration.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of immigration policy continuity across presidential administrations, especially Obama's 'Deporter in Chief' record.

I thought about the very imminent dangers these xenophobic policies and programs posed for Juan and people in similar situations in Los Angeles and throughout the country. I knew this city well and understood that the armed and irrational fear directed at nonwhite, non-Christian people was intense in LA, descending (among other places) on the city's galaxy of dense and large Latinx neighborhoods. This armed xenophobia was aimed particularly at those communities gripped by poverty, where Spanish was spoken primarily, and was concentrated on people and families lacking legal documentation—indeed, the very intersection where Juan began and ended each day, and lived most of his hours in between.

The four words I whispered to myself on 9/11 reverberated through the mind of every Muslim American that day and every day after, forming a unifying prayer for Muslim Americans after every attack. Our fear, and the collective breath or brace for the hateful backlash that ensued, symbolize the existential tightrope that defines Muslim American identity today. It has become a definitive part of what it means to be Muslim American when an act of terror unfolds and the finger-pointing begins.

DEFINE: Defines Muslim American identity through the recurring anticipatory fear of backlash following attacks, framing it as an 'existential tightrope.'

The Muslim ban was the first policy targeting Muslims enacted by the man I formally dubbed the "Islamophobia president." … President Trump promised a more hardline domestic surveillance program, which he called Countering Islamic Violence; a registry to keep track of Muslim immigrants within the United States; legislation that would bludgeon the civic and advocacy programs of Muslim American organizations; and other measures that would threaten Muslim immigrants, citizens, and institutions.

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on executive orders, religious profiling, and civil liberties debates during the Trump administration.

Islamophobia was not merely an appeal for votes, but a resonant message that would drive policy and inform immigration and national security policing. … In exchange, he delivered on his explicit and "dog whistle" campaign messaging by generating real Islamophobic policies, programs, and action. Trump, like many candidates before him and others who will follow, traded a grand narrative of nativism and hate for votes—which registered to great success at the ballot box.

Echoing through it all is the dread of an “end of white America,” a fear that politicians on the right readily stoked and fervently fed to the masses. Much of this opposing front is fully wed to racism and xenophobia, and it backed a businessman who peddled a promise to “Make American Great Again”—a promise that was not just a campaign slogan, but was also a racial plea evoked at a time when whiteness was the formal touchstone of American citizenship and white supremacy was endorsed and enabled by law.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on racialized political appeals and the history of whiteness as a legal category in American citizenship law.

Trump dangled before the electorate studies that project that people of color will outnumber whites by 204413 and that over half (50.2 percent) of the babies born in the United States today are minorities, and he inflamed the ever-present fear that foreigners are stealing our jobs. As a cure for these supposed ills, Trump's campaign offered to a primed and ready audience a cocktail of nativism, scapegoating, and racism; his campaign met with resounding success and helped polarize the nation along the very lines that colored his stump speeches.

QUESTION: How much did these demographic projections genuinely drive nativist appeal versus being exploited as rhetorical fuel?

Now more than ever, Islamophobia was not limited to the irrational views or hateful slurs of individuals, but was an ideology that drove the president's political worldview and motivated the laws, policies, and programs he would seek to push forward. This had also been the case during the Bush and Obama administrations, but the Trump moment marked a new phase of transparency in which explicit rhetorical Islamophobia aligned, in language and spirit, with the programs the new president was poised to implement.

Builds on: "Islamophobic campaign rhetoric transformed directly into governing policy."

Los Angeles was not only ground zero for a range of xenophobic policies targeting undocumented (and documented) Latinx communities, but also a pilot city where, in 2014, the Department of Homeland Security launched its counter-radicalization program, Countering Violent Extremism, in partnership with the Los Angeles Police Department. This new counterterror program, which effectively supplanted the federal surveillance model ushered in by the USA PATRIOT Act, deputized LAPD members to function as national security officers tasked with identifying, detaining, prosecuting, and even deporting “homegrown radicals.” Suspicion was disproportionately assigned to recent Muslim converts, particularly young men like Juan, keen on expressing their newfound Muslim identity by wearing a beard, attending Friday prayers, and demonstrating fluency in Arabic—the language tied to Islam, and in line with Islamophobia, terrorism.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on securitization and the merging of domestic policing with counterterrorism, and to critiques of post-9/11 surveillance expansion. DEFINE: Explains how DHS's Countering Violent Extremism program functionally replaced the federal USA PATRIOT Act surveillance model with localized deputization.

I feared for Juan's well-being, whether Muslim or not. I knew that the dangers he dodged every day would be far greater in number and more ominous in nature if he embraced Islam. The president, from inside the White House, was marshaling Islamophobia and mobilizing xenophobia to inflict irreparable injury on Muslims, Latinx communities, and the growing population of Latinx Muslims that Juan would be part of if he walked into a mosque and declared that “there is only one God, and Mohammed is his final messenger.” He would be vulnerable to the covert counter-radicalization policing that was descending on Los Angeles mosques and Muslim student associations and simultaneously exposed to the ubiquitous threat of immigration checkpoints and deportation raids. He would also be a prime target for Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement, or VOICE, the new catch–an–“illegal-alien” hotline installed by President Trump.

Islam in America has never been simply a religion one chooses. From the gaze of the state and society, Islam was and still is an indelible marker of otherness, and in war-on-terror America, it is a political identity that instantly triggers the suspicion of acts of terror and subversion.

Voicing the words released a great weight off my shoulders. At the same time, they felt unnatural because they clashed with the spiritual aim of encouraging interest in Islam. The paradox mirrored the political confusion that gripped the nation. But the challenges and perils I lectured about in university classrooms, community centers, and mosques had to be extended to the street, and to the most vulnerable.

I often wondered what decision Juan made, and whether he made his shahada. I also feared the worst, wondering whether he was still in the country. Was he profiled on the grounds of his Latino identity and detained because he was undocumented? Did he embrace Islam and fall victim to the counter-radicalization policing unfolding in Los Angeles? Or had he become a victim of the intersecting xenophobic backlash and Islamophobic violence authorized by Trump's rhetoric and policies, inflicted by a bigot on or off campus?

XREF: Intersects with literature on intersectionality and compounding identities in policing and surveillance contexts.

I did not hear from Juan again. But his story hasn’t left me, and the intersection he occupies is at the heart of this book. I share his story when speaking at colleges and universities, as well as intimately, among friends and activists, to signal that victims of Islamophobia are not merely Arab or Middle Eastern—sometimes they are not even Muslim!—and to signal that this rising system of hate is more frequently inflicted by the state than it is by individuals. Most importantly, I share it to show that Islamophobia often converges with other forms of hate, such as racism, xenophobia, sexism, and homophobia, morphing into a form of hatred custom-made for this specific target.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on intersectionality in systems of oppression, where overlapping identity-based hatreds compound for specific targets.

Islamophobia, although a relatively new term, is anything but a new form of hate. While “Islamophobia” claimed popular purchase before the rise of Trump and gained widespread resonance during the campaign as he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” Islamophobia long preceded the man who would become the face of it. It is a system that redeploys stereotypes of Muslims deeply rooted in the collective American imagination and endorsed by formative case law, foundational policy on immigration and citizenship, and the writings and rhetoric of this nation’s founding fathers.

Failing to frame Islamophobia as a system of bigotry not only endorsed and emboldened by law, but also carried out by government actors, severely underestimates the scale of its menace and the process by which it inflicts injury and authorizes popular behavior. Failing to account for the law’s role in authorizing and executing Islamophobia overlooks the relationship state actors have to the hateful violence of individual bigots, and it ignores the reality that the state enlists private citizens to partake in the national project of identifying and punishing individuals stereotyped as presumptive terrorists.

This ongoing dialogue between the state and its polity regarding Muslims by way of law, official rhetoric, and war-on-terror policy is central to this book’s framing of Islamophobia. Beyond defining Islamophobia as merely irrational fear or hatred held by a caricatured bloc or demographic, or as deviant violence committed by individual actors, this book’s definition is complex, multidimensional, and anchored in law and government policy.

DEFINE: Redefines Islamophobia as a multidimensional phenomenon rooted in state law, official rhetoric, and war-on-terror policy rather than mere individual prejudice or deviant violence. Builds on: "Law authorizes and executes Islamophobia through state and citizen action"

Although conflated with Arab identity, the grand Muslim American narrative is actually rooted in blackness. And today, Muslim America is a richly diverse population that ranks as the most racially diverse and fastest-growing faith group in the country. African American Muslims comprise 24 percent of the Muslim American population, followed by South Asian and Arab American Muslims, at 23 and 22 percent respectively. The Latinx American Muslim community is estimated to comprise 6 percent and tally a total of 200,000, and in line with broader national demographic projections is the fastest-growing subset of the Muslim American population.

XREF: Connects to broader American religious demographics and the common misconception that Muslim identity equals Arab identity, which the highlight directly corrects.

Was Hicks’s fear and hatred of Islam irrational, or was it fueled by the stereotypes of the faith and its followers he regularly heard on the radio and watched on television, and, therefore, rational? Furthermore, was he a deviant actor whose horrific acts were the result of his own motives alone? Or was Hicks collaborating in the broader national project of policing, prosecuting, and punishing Muslims—the formal mission of the war on terror, that ambiguous and unconventional war authorized by counterterror laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, Countering Violent Extremism, and, two years after the triple murder, the Muslim ban enacted by President Trump?

QUESTION: The highlight poses the core question the book pursues: whether individual terror acts are deviant or participate in a sanctioned national project.

The media coverage following the murders at Chapel Hill profiled Hicks as an irrational actor who was not influenced by the legal structures that aimed to cast Muslims as presumptive terrorists, a characterization that aligns with the prevailing understanding of Islamophobia as a “dislike of or prejudice against Muslims” generally exhibited by individuals. However, this narrow framing not only overlooks the state’s role in authorizing and emboldening the unfathomable acts (of private Islamophobia) undertaken by individuals like Craig Hicks, but it also overlooks the mutually reinforcing relationship between the state and media institutions like Fox News.

XREF: Connects to institutional versus individual framing of racism and Islamophobia debates. DEFINE: Challenges the too-narrow definition of Islamophobia as merely individual prejudice.

There were 2,213 anti-Muslim hate incidents recorded in 2016, a 57 percent increase from the preceding year. In addition, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the number of anti-Muslim hate groups rose from 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016, becoming more common than neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and anti-LGBTQ outfits, and growing at a far faster clip.

Non-Muslims are also vulnerable to private Islamophobic animus and violence. Since Muslim identity is racialized as Arab or Middle Eastern, an embedded caricature of Muslims (closely examined in chapter 3) guides how private Islamophobes imagine and identify adherents of the faith. A wide swath of non-Muslim groups and communities, most notably non-Muslims from South Asia, the Arab world, Middle Eastern nations, and Latinx states, and particularly Sikhs, are often profiled as Muslims and victimized by private Islamophobes.

This private dimension of Islamophobia dominates popular and even scholarly understandings of the term and is the form that monopolizes mainstream media framing and coverage of Islamophobia. However, if we confine our understanding of Islamophobia to the irrational actions of hatemongers like Craig Hicks or Frank Roque, or the economic or political agendas of institutions like Fox News or the Gatestone Institute, how do we account for the laws and policies that similarly cast Muslims as unassimilable, suspicious, and potential terrorists? Are these policies part and parcel of the broader system of Islamophobia, or are they distinct and exempt from condemnation?

QUESTION: The author leaves open whether policies that cast Muslims as suspicious form part of the same Islamophobic system or deserve separate condemnation.

Structural Islamophobia, the second dimension, is the fear and suspicion of Muslims on the part of government institutions and actors. This fear and suspicion are manifested and enforced through the enactment and advancement of laws, policy, and programming built upon the presumption that Muslim identity is associated with a national security threat. These laws, policies, and programs may be explicitly discriminatory, like the first and second Muslim bans, which explicitly restricted immigrants from Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. Others may seem neutral, having been framed in generally applicable terms, when in practice they are disproportionately enforced against Muslim subjects and communities.

Following 9/11, law scholar Leti Volpp observed how terror attacks involving a Muslim culprit spur the immediate "redeployment of Orientalist tropes." These tropes are embedded within popular representations of Muslims, such as news coverage or depictions in film. But more saliently, they are embedded within the institutional memory of government agencies, including the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive branch—most notably, in the Department of Homeland Security and anti-terror law enforcement during the protracted war on terror. These foundational stereotypes, which portray Islam as irreconcilable with American values and society and Muslim identity as foreign, subversive, and harboring an inherent propensity for terrorism, move state agencies to enact policies that profile and closely police Muslim citizens and immigrants.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and discussions of racialized surveillance in the war on terror.

However, the Trump administration should not be viewed as a marked departure or outlier, but rather as a more transparent and brazen step in a progression that has been, in great part, enabled by the stated war-on-terror aims and programs of the previous two administrations.

XREF: Challenges the common framing of Trump as a radical break; connects to broader literature on the continuity of the security state across administrations. Builds on: "Counter-radicalization programs deputized local police as national security agents"

Both are cultures embedded within government institutions. Both have preexisting narratives and propagate stereotypes based on understanding a people in flat, damaging, and subhuman terms, stories that are then institutionalized at every level of public and private organizations, institutions, and agencies. These stories are manifested in seemingly benign decisions or routine functions that bring about a discriminatory end, and sometimes through actions whose explicit intention is to bring about a discriminatory end.

Moments of national mourning, particularly after a terror attack committed by Muslims or individuals perceived as outsiders, also spark a desire to exact revenge and perpetrate violence against anybody and everybody perceived to be Muslim, or more generally, not American. This mass anger, typically enforced through acts of vigilante violence directed at innocents, is also often endorsed and emboldened by formal policy that deems Muslims to be suspicious and to be members of a faith that ties them to the terror acts.

The state's rubber-stamping of widely held stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, through the enactment of surveillance programs, religious and racial profiling, restrictive immigration policies, and the war-on-terror campaign, is the cornerstone of dialectical Islamophobia. This exchange—by which citizens absorb the suspicion and demonization the state assigns to Muslims by way of (structural Islamophobic) law or state action—is an ongoing dialectic that links state policy to hate and violence unleashed by private citizens.

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of 'dialectical Islamophobia' as the two-way exchange between state-sanctioned suspicion and private citizens' hate and violence. Builds on: "State institutions authorize and reinforce individual Islamophobic violence."

While Craig Hicks's murder of the three Muslim students is generally framed as a deviant act committed by one deviant actor entirely divorced from the state, dialectical Islamophobia reveals an underlying thread that connects the (seemingly) deviant actions of hatemongers like Hicks with the state's repeated message that Muslim identity alone is grounds for suspicion that justifies vigilante action by private citizens. If the law is laden with damaging stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, and American citizens are expected and instructed to obey the law, the dialectic between the state and the citizen—and the hostility the state authorizes—is made clear.

DEFINE: Explains 'dialectical Islamophobia' as a framework linking state messaging to citizen actions against Muslims. Builds on: "State institutions authorize and reinforce individual Islamophobic violence."

More than two centuries before a “Muslim ban” headlined the New York Times or led to the detainment of thousands of Muslims at airports across the United States, Muslims were statutorily barred from becoming American citizens. They were deemed threatening to and unassimilable within American values and society. In line with the demonization of this entire bloc of immigrants, the courts prohibited Muslim immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens from 1790 to 1944. During this span, Muslim identity, by law, was viewed as contradictory with American citizenship.

XREF: Connects to current debates about Muslim bans and citizenship, showing historical precedent predates contemporary discourse by two centuries.

During the naturalization era, immigrants seeking citizenship were bound by the prerequisite of being found to be “free white persons” by a civil court. However, what defined whiteness was not allowed to extend beyond Christianity, and especially Protestantism, and Islam stood as its rival and thus was considered irreconcilable with whiteness. Therefore, up until 1944, Muslim identity precluded one from being deemed white by law and therefore eligible for citizenship. Furthermore, the Naturalization Act of 1790 also curbed the migration of Muslims to the United States, as they were largely aware of the opposition their religious identity would spur at ports of entry like Ellis Island.

QUESTION: Which court cases or rulings in 1944 first allowed Muslim naturalization? Worth tracing the legal history.

Orientalism informed not only how race was understood during the formative stages of American history, but also how it was constructed. Orientalism helped guide, and fluidly tweak, the parameters of whiteness. And in the same way that blackness stood as the racial antithesis of whiteness, the necessary other without which whiteness would not exist, the Orientalist construction of Islam marked the faith as the civilizational foil of the West, a contrast that was necessary for the emerging United States to envision itself as an extension of Western civilization. In order to solidify itself as part of the West, and an extension of Europe in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had to follow in the footsteps of Europe and establish itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world.

XREF: Connects to how blackness functioned as the racial antithesis of whiteness — Orientalism served a parallel role for Islam and Western identity. Builds on: "U.S. law barred Muslim naturalization from 1790 to 1944."

The fundamental baseline of Orientalism was casting the Muslim world as the mirror opposite of the West. Said opens Orientalism with this: "The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience." The process of characterizing and vilifying the Muslim world, which Orientalists dub the Orient, became the very way in which the West, as well as its principal thinkers, statesmen, and tastemakers, came to define itself. This mirrored identity was very much a fluid dialectic, whereby the shifting characterizations of the Muslim world—informed by political engagements with Muslim-majority nations, colonial interventions and projects, and most intensely, clashes—would also inform how the West saw itself.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader postcolonial theory about how colonizing powers construct their own identity through the denigrated Other.

Orientalism was a discourse first, and then the narrative and its attendant ideas gradually morphed into material objects in the form of literature, art, formal state policies, academic disciplines and departments, and most saliently, the very worldview from which state leaders and governments engaged Muslim-majority states and their inhabitants.

XREF: This directly engages Said's core thesis in Orientalism — that discourse precedes and produces material reality. Connects naturally to any reading of Foucault's discourse/power framework also.

Based on a binary that made Europe the antithesis of the "Orient" and "Orient" synonymous with the "Muslim world," Orientalism spawned the corollary view that Muslims were a monolithic racial or ethnic bloc, imagined in the narrow form of an Arab or Middle Eastern.

XREF: Connects directly to Edward Said's foundational Orientalism thesis about how Western scholarship constructed the 'Orient' as a homogenized counter-image of Europe.

These contiguous regions, also home to sizable non-Muslim and indigenous non-Arab populations, were consolidated into one region called the "Middle East," itself a product of Orientalist perspective, creation, and geographic ambiguity.

DEFINE: Defines the term 'Middle East' as an Orientalist product rather than a natural geographic designation.

Critical race theorists call this process "racialization," and contend that "races are not biologically differentiated groupings but rather social constructions." Races, and racial categories, therefore, are fluid and dynamic constructs that are shaped and reshaped in line with political, economic, and cultural interests. In line with this process of racialization, Orientalism (re)made "Muslim" into a race. This conversion of Muslim identity from a religion into a race changed a diverse population represented in every corner of the globe to the narrow form of the Arab, or as stated by Islamophobia scholar Erik Love, anybody "who looks Middle Eastern."

DEFINE: Clarifies that 'race' denotes a social construct shaped by political and cultural interests rather than biological groupings.

Orientalism was essential to Europe's colonialist, imperialist project; it was the fuel without which foreign conquest into Muslim-majority nations could not have run—and the early colonists carried it with them into what would become known as the United States. Orientalist discourses have shaped state policy since before American independence.

While the framers disagreed about and hotly debated matters ranging from the breadth (or limits) of federal power to the sovereignty of the states, anti-Muslim animus was not a wedge issue. It was a matter that unified the fiercest rivals at the Constitutional Convention and beyond.

QUESTION: What specific provisions or statements in the Constitutional Convention reflected this shared anti-Muslim animus? Worth tracing the historical record.

American Orientalism is hardly a relic of the past. It is, rather, a phenomenon that lives on today and steers how politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens think about Muslims and frame Islam. It is fluid and potent. It is the root system that gave rise to and drives Islamophobia. Justifying fear of and violence against a people requires a foundational system that actively dehumanizes that people. We cannot understand American Islamophobia without understanding its predecessor, American Orientalism.

DEFINE: Distinguishes American Orientalism as the foundational 'root system' enabling Islamophobia rather than a historical relic. XREF: Extends Edward Said's Orientalism framework to the American context and its contemporary political discourse.

Social scientists estimate that 15 to 20 percent, or, "as many as 600,000 to 1.2 million" members of the aggregate enslaved African population were Muslims. That is a staggering figure, particularly when juxtaposed with the dearth of attention given to, and public knowledge of, enslaved African Muslims in that time period of American history.

QUESTION: Why has public knowledge of enslaved African Muslims remained so sparse despite this staggering figure? SEED: A hidden-historory angle: the largely untold story of enslaved African Muslims could anchor an essay on erased cultural heritage in America.

Although these enslaved Muslims prayed, observed Ramadan, maintained pious lifestyles, and forged spiritual communities while bonded to slave code and slave master, the law preempted seeing them as bona fide Muslims. Blackness, the antithesis of whiteness, was constructed to justify and perpetuate the enslavement of African peoples, and systematically reduce them to property. But this was by design. In her landmark treatise Whiteness as Property, UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris observes, "The hyper-exploitation of Black labor was accomplished by treating Black people themselves as objects of property. Race and property were thus conflated by establishing a form of property contingent on race—only Blacks were subjugated as slaves and treated as property." The creation, construction, and consignment of blackness onto the bodies of Africans washed away, from the eyes of the law and those expected to abide by and enforce it, the spiritual identities of enslaved Africans. Enslaved African Muslims were black, the law held, and thus property. And property could not adhere to any organized religion, let alone believe in Islam.

XREF: Connects to Cheryl Harris's Whiteness as Property and the racial-property conflation framework.

Eliminating the religious identities of slaves was central to the process of bifurcating black from Muslim identity during the antebellum era. Although Africans thrust into the American slave market hailed from a diverse range of tribal, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, their heterogeneity had no relevance to the law's conversion of them into property. Legal recognition of the religious identities of Africans would amount to a concession to their humanity and undermine the project of converting them into subhuman beings whom it was ethically permissible to enslave.

Criminalizing religion was vital to the project of stripping the humanity of Africans and reducing them to "beasts of burden" pushed to inhuman limits to maximize revenue for their slave masters. Frederick Douglass observed that "elevating" a slave through better treatment gave witness to the humanizing effect of religion and the dehumanizing effect of keeping a person's religion from them. Douglass famously stated, "Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog; but feed and clothe him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort, and dreams of freedom intrude." Part of the "spiritlessness" Douglass speaks of had to do with barring slaves from feeding their spirits with the soul food of religion. Denying slaves religion kept them bound to their condition. Religion, and in this instance Islam, would inspire the enslaved to question their condition, contemplate resistance, and as illustrated by a series of slave narratives from within and beyond the United States, rebel, revolt, and seek liberation.

DEFINE: Clarifies the author's mechanism connecting the denial of religion to the maintenance of enslaved submission.

Judge George H. Hutton peered across his bench in the direction of George Shishim. Shishim, a longtime resident of California and native of the Mount Lebanon Province (modern-day Lebanon) of the Ottoman Empire, had come to Hutton's court to petition for American citizenship. After living in Los Angeles as a resident alien and serving as a policeman for the LAPD, he was poised to finally become a naturalized citizen and a formal member of the country he served and for which he felt a great affinity. … Short on rebuttals, Shishim closed with the lone argument that he hoped would resonate with Judge Hutton and save his petition. It was a Hail Mary, a final plea. He rose from his seat, stood firmly with his LAPD badge glistening from his jacket, and testified, "If I am Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land." Shishim was effectively stating that if Jesus were white, the court would also have to find him to be white, or render an admission that Jesus was not white—an admission that would undermine the construction of Jesus as a white man and of Christianity as a portal toward whiteness. Christianity was one of the primary hallmarks of whiteness in the United States in the early twentieth century, and Shishim's spirited appeal insisted that although he was from the Muslim world, he was not a Muslim but in fact a Christian, and therefore white. … Hutton, conditioned to believe that anybody who hailed from the Middle East was Muslim, struggled with this dissonance. But Shishim's brilliant appeal to Christianity managed to persuade Hutton, and Shishim became the first immigrant from the Middle East to be naturalized as an American citizen and judicially ruled white by law. "When the court finally determined Shishim to be a white person, thus allowing for his acquisition of citizenship," a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote that "it made every feature of his dark, swarthy countenance radiate with pleasure and hope."

XREF: Echoes the racial constructionist literature on how Middle Easterners and other immigrant groups were legally classified as white/non-white based on cultural markers in early 20th-century naturalization cases.

An immigrant from Canada, Hutton was elected to preside over the Los Angeles Superior Court in 1906. During the naturalization era, judges like Hutton held unfettered discretion over deciding which immigrants fit within the statutory definition of whiteness mandated by law, and therefore, authority over deciding whether petitioners like Shishim could become citizens. In 1909, when Shishim filed his petition, it was impossible to become a naturalized citizen unless you were white. From 1790 until 1952, whiteness stood as the legal dividing line between inclusion and exclusion from the range of privileges and benefits that came with formal citizenship. Whiteness and citizen were made synonymous by law, and the courts were the enforcers and the final gatekeepers.

DEFINE: Clarifies the statutory definition of whiteness that judges applied as the legal test for naturalization.

Weeks before his appearance in Los Angeles Superior Court, a naturalization and immigration agent had moved to deny Shishim's citizenship petition on the grounds that his "Arab identity," synonymous with Muslim identity, did not meet the legal mandate of whiteness. Judge Hutton seemed persuaded by the immigration examiner's position, which deemed immigrants from the region Shishim originated from as hostile to American democracy and values, unassimilable, and Muslim unless proven otherwise. However, although Shishim was an Arab, he was also a Christian. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Arabs in the United States in 1909 were Christians.

XREF: Reverses modern assumptions that Arab identity implies Muslim identity; echoes how racial and religious categories were legally constructed in early 20th-century naturalization cases.

The courts had to establish by law whether, for example, a petitioner's race was to be measured by skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry, the specialization of scientist, [or] popular opinion. Most saliently for immigrants from the Middle East, the courts could also determine whiteness on the basis of religion. American whiteness, therefore, was very much a social construction, endorsed by law and subject to revision.

Builds on: "US law required whiteness for citizenship from 1790 to 1952."

A 1913 case involving an immigrant petitioner from modern-day Lebanon, Ex parte Shahid, illustrates how Muslim identity was acutely racialized and deeply institutionalized during this time. Following George Shishim's lead, Faras Shahid, a Maronite Christian, asserted his Christian faith to rebut the presumption that he was a Muslim. Judge Henry Smith engaged in his own brand of in-court eugenics, describing Shahid to be "about [the color] of a walnut, or somewhat darker than is the usual mulatto of one-half mixed blood between the white and the negro races."

QUESTION: Shahid was a Maronite Christian who still had to prove he wasn't Muslim. Worth investigating how far this racial presumption extended and when it broke down. XREF: Connects to the George Shishim case mentioned here, suggesting a pattern of Lebanese Christians contesting Muslim racialization in naturalization proceedings.

Before denying Shahid's petition, Judge Smith drilled home the Orientalist baseline that Muslim identity was indeed a racial one. In his opinion, he wrote, "What is the race or color of the modern inhabitant of Syria it is impossible to say. No geographical area of the world has been more mixed since history began. Originally of Hittite or non-Semitic races . . . then again followed by another Semitic conquest in the shape of the Arabian Mahometan [Muslim] eruption." Smith's framing of Ottoman rule as the "Mahometan eruption" illustrates his aversion to Islam, which today would be characterized as an example of structural Islamophobia.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and contemporary scholarship on racialization of religious identities in Western law.

Anticipating Ben Carson's 2015 claim that "Islam is inconsistent with the Constitution" and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal's statement, that same year, that Muslim immigration is part of an attempt to "overtake the culture" of the West, the Hassan court's framing of Islam as threatening to American values and society carried the Muslim naturalization ban forward. Indeed, the very stereotypes instrumental to the courts' understanding of Islam have been echoed, in virtually identical terms, by today's Islamophobia-peddling politicians.

XREF: Connects historical court rulings on Muslim naturalization to modern political discourse around Islamophobia.

On one front, immigration restrictions against Muslims were eroding, but the Orientalism that fed the restrictions fluidly mutated into other forms of state policy and programming.

XREF: Connects to Said's Orientalism thesis and how colonial-era prejudice adapts rather than disappears when direct legal restrictions lift.

As historian Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, author of A History of Islam in America, writes, "Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, . . . these new Asian and African Muslim immigrants came to the United States [and] did not have to change their names or dissimulate their religion."

The Islamophobia that pervades government structures and the minds of Americans today rises from a bleak history, judicial memory, and a naturalization ban that stood for 154 years—a ban that was enforced by the courts long before Trump proposed another while campaigning for the presidency and rode the tide of Islamophobia all the way to the White House.

QUESTION: What was the specific statutory or judicial basis of this 154-year naturalization ban? Worth tracing the legal history for context. Builds on: "U.S. law barred Muslim naturalization from 1790 to 1944."

This chapter examines the period immediately before the formal emergence of modern Islamophobia on September 11, 2001. This era witnessed the rearticulation of the Orientalist binary that pitted Islam and the Middle East—imagined as one monolithic civilization—against the West, a geopolitical theory known as a "clash of civilizations." The theory became an immensely influential essay-turned-book by Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader critiques of binary civilizational framing. Builds on: "The West defined itself against a constructed Muslim mirror-image."

American identity during the Cold War (1947–1991) rested heavily on detesting the Soviet Union and the ideas, images, and icons that represented it. Performances of this hate validated one's citizenship, patriotism, and Americanness. Hollywood and television glorified the savior state (the United States), armed with the humanitarian mandate to vanquish a nemesis that threatened not only its own citizenry, but also the stability of the world at large. Freedom-loving soldiers like Rambo and fighting archetypes like Rocky battled rival communists in battleground nations, the boxing ring, or wherever the threat loomed and lingered. Being American during the Cold War rested largely on hating the Soviet Union and communism, and performing that hate through political rhetoric, associations, and opposition to anything affiliated with the Soviet Union. Our identity, as Americans, was defined by who and what we hated. And for those aspiring to become American, performance of this hate was a vital part of the process of becoming American.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the global decline of communism left a sociopolitical and existential void for the United States. After decades of saber-rattling, competition, and strife, the United States was the undisputed victor of the Cold War, inspiring celebration in Washington, D.C., and American cities and towns far from it. And now American policy needed a new geopolitical villain to facilitate its foreign policy objectives and carry forward political interests on the home front. The thrill of victory was momentary, ultimately creating a vacuum. The project of expanding the U.S. sphere of influence rested on identifying an archrival and manufacturing the state-sponsored and popular narratives that this archrival's mission was the downfall of the United States. Again, we are what we hate; lacking that existential archrival and cultural antithesis created confusion about who we, Americans, are and aspire to be.

XREF: Connects to the 'we are what we hate' theme the author states directly, echoing identity-formation theories where groups define themselves against an Other.

Stereotypes of Islam as totalitarian, backward, and hostile were deeply embedded in the American imagination, supported by news coverage that regularly showcased airplane hijackers from the Middle East, angry mobs of Arabs collecting in city squares shouting at the camera, and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini—whom the media and policy positioned as the symbol of the faith at large (although he presided over one nation and was a member of a minority sect of Islam, Twelver Shi'ism) shouting on television, "Death to America, the Great Satan." Indeed, "at the end of the Cold War, Islam became deeply entangled in America's most recent search for a national identity" and was anointed as its new rival in the formation of this new identity.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and his concept of how the West constructs the East through media and scholarship.

In 1993, Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington observed a "new phase" of American geopolitical tension and rivalry. Four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Huntington would formally declare Islam, and the billions of people it encompassed, to be the existential threat that threatened American harmony and hegemony. In a widely read essay published by Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993, Huntington wrote, "The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power."

XREF: Connects to the clash-of-civilizations thesis and post-Cold War geopolitical framing. The reader may already know Huntington's 1993 Foreign Affairs essay and how this framing shaped subsequent discourse.

Huntington's clash of civilizations theory did not narrowly pit the United States against "Islamic fundamentalism" or "Middle Eastern terrorists." Rather, the clash Huntington theorized was against the whole of Islam, a faith practiced by 1.7 billion people, millions of them in the United States. Like his Orientalist predecessors, Huntington viewed Islam as a malignant monolith, writing that "Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards." In the same way that Europeans and Americans invented the Orient, Huntington constructed an "Islamic civilization" that was based on essentialist myths, arcane stereotypes, and most absurdly, a homogenization of a supremely diverse region.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the critique of essentializing Islam as a monolith, which the author explicitly invokes.

Huntington's reductionist position enabled the attendant ideas, discourses, and propaganda that Muslims were backward, warmongering, and inclined toward terrorism. This flat characterization of Islam allowed the United States, and the broader "Western civilization" it which it belongs, to continue to uphold itself as the bastion of modernity, progress, and liberalism. Revitalizing the principal Orientalist binary of "us versus them" and "they are everything we are not," Huntington echoes, "Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are." Huntington appropriated the basic theoretical tenets of Orientalism, dressing them with new phrases like "bloody borders," "civilizational clashes," and "Islamic extremists" to explain the Middle East and the world as he saw it.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader critique of Western civilizational discourse. Builds on: "Huntington framed Islam as the West's post-Soviet existential threat."

In addition to recasting Islam—which it falsely contended was a civilizational, sectarian, and ideological monolith—as the geopolitical rival of Western civilization, Huntington's Clash of Civilizations equipped policymakers and pundits with a new lexicon for analyzing Islam and Muslims. It included, most notably, the phrase "war on terror." Huntington shaped and advanced this and other terms that would become staples of the political and popular discourse. While the Bush and Clinton administrations initially resisted the framing peddled by Huntington, its ideas, concepts, and language proved immensely resonant in Washington.

Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi reflects on the work of Lewis, who contends that he, and not Huntington, modeled the clash of civilizations theory. Dabashi observed, "As early as the 1950s he [Lewis] had envisioned the clash of civilizations, and to this day he remains incensed that the idea is credited to Samuel Huntington. Since the early 1960s, he has published books which repeatedly rattle on about the opposition of the two sides, including The Middle East and the West (1964), Islam and the West (1994), Cultures in Conflict (1996), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (2001), and What Went Wrong (2003), laying the groundwork for [Francis] Fukuyama and Huntington." So although he popularized the phrase "clash of civilizations" and gave it momentum in the public and political spheres, Huntington was not an isolated actor peddling the worldview that the United States was on a civilizational collision course with Islam. These scholars, Orientalists of the highest order, were simply dressing old Orientalist ideas and arguments in modern terms and catchy phrases.

XREF: Connects to the broader lineage of Orientalist scholarship informing post-9/11 'clash' narratives and the Huntington/Fukuyama discourse.

Huntington's theory did not gain resonance because of its intellectual rigor; he was, after all, scathingly denigrated by scholars within political science, law, and other academic disciplines. Rather, his theory gained momentum because of its political expediency on two key fronts: first, because it filled the void for a new geopolitical nemesis left by the Soviet Union; and second, because Huntington's simplified construction of a menacing Islamic civilization was deeply familiar, having already been embedded within the collective American imagination and the halls of power.

Muslim Americans and Muslim residents of the United States found themselves in the crosshairs of this new civilizational standoff. And unlike Russian citizens or immigrants during the Cold War, who could generally find safe haven on account of their whiteness and ability to blend in to mainstream society, Muslim Americans were generally more conspicuous and consequently more vulnerable to private and structural bigotry.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of how physical conspicuousness determines vulnerability to bigotry across different American eras.

As immigration and citizenship scholar Linda Bosniak argues in The Citizen and the Alien, "Formal citizenship status often fails to protect people from exclusion and violence directed at those perceived to be 'foreign' in character, habit, or appearance." And for Muslim Americans, amid the buildup toward a "clash of civilizations" and the war on terror it facilitated, their faith, again, became the very marker of foreignness and menace.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of legal citizenship versus social belonging and how formal status does not guarantee protection from discrimination.

The Muslim world presented in this American media is one contiguous and consolidated territory, gripped by endless war and irredeemable turbulence, a perfect vacuum for cultivating terrorism and terrorists. Its inhabitants are backward and static, nameless and angry, violent and irrational. They are not people to be engaged or judged in individual terms, but rather a faceless bloc that can be explained with sweeping ease and reduced to a fundamental essence.

XREF: Echoes Edward Said's Orientalism and the critique of media dehumanization in coverage of other groups.

The Iran hostage crisis, which lasted from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981, cast the new Islamic government of Iran and its charismatic bearded and turbaned leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, as the modern embodiments of Islamic evil. The overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979 gave way to the rise of a new Islamic theocracy in Iran, unseating one of the strongest U.S. allies in the region with a regime it would anoint as one of its greatest adversaries.

XREF: Connects to broader Cold War era US-Middle East relations and how regime change reshapes alliance structures.

News coverage of the hostage crisis echoed Carter's words to a captive American audience that watched the news in record numbers. Special programming such as ABC's America Held Hostage communicated the message that America at large, and Americans everywhere, were being victimized by the brown, bearded Muslim extremists in the Middle East. The fear stoked by the mainstream news also warned of a Muslim takeover stateside, corroborated in the minds of viewers by the rising Muslim population and the "significant rise in the number of mosques and Muslim associations in the 1970s and 1980s." Again, citizenship did not protect Muslim Americans from being roped into guilt and conflated with an incident that was neither representative of Islam nor unfolding domestically, but one perpetrated by a specific nation-state on the other side of the world.

XREF: Connects to recurring dynamics of citizenship failing to shield minority groups from guilt-by-association during crises — parallels other post-9/11 and war era scapegoating patterns.

The hostage crisis lasted for 444 days, and mainstream television and print media capitalized on each day to deliver story lines, images, and narratives that drove the fear of Islam and a new encroaching Muslim threat into the private confines of every American home. Although the Soviet Union still stood as the primary geopolitical threat to the United States throughout the duration of the hostage crisis, coverage of the crisis alerted Americans to the threat that would eventually supplant it. Indeed, “the Islamic revolution of Iran and the hostage crisis became emblematic of the ‘threat of Islam,’” which news coverage readily and regularly delivered to an American public that could not turn away from its television screens. As Nathan Lean tells in his compelling book The Islamophobia Industry, reporting on the hostage crisis netted considerable revenues for television news networks and newspapers, and in CNN’s case established it as a major cable news station and commodity.

XREF: Connects to broader media-framing theory and how corporate news incentives shape public fear, echoing work by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. QUESTION: To what extent does current coverage of Middle East events reproduce this same dynamic?

Coverage of the Persian Gulf War bolstered the modern image of the menacing Arab, synonymous with Muslim, in the mind of the American viewer. The Iranians at the center of the hostage crisis were not Arab, and the Iranian government the United States tapped as the embodiment of Islamic fundamentalism was a Shiite-controlled state, whereas Hussein himself was a secular Sunni Muslim. But these distinctions were unimportant to most Americans, who conflated Iranian with Arab and had no clue what Sunni or Shiite meant. Saddam Hussein, whom the news media focused on by way of special reports, vignettes, and documentaries, succeeded his old foe, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in becoming the new embodiment of Muslim terror.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns in American media framing of the Middle East and the Orientalist conflation of diverse Muslim groups into a single menace.

For ABC, NBC, CBS, and the upstart CNN (the only major American network that provided twenty-four-hour news coverage), the fact that Hussein was an ardent secularist and alleged pan-Arab nationalist, again, was of no importance. He was dark, Arab, and from a region tethered to the maligned faith of Islam, so he fit the role. News outlets consistently emphasized the Iraqi dictator’s identity as Muslim, shaping the narrative in line with the “clash of civilizations” binary.

Hussein, however, was no innocent bystander. He abetted the process, launching scud missiles toward Israel, adding ʻallahu akbar (“God is greater”) to the Iraqi flag, and claiming “to be the religious warrior or mujahid who was going to unfetter Mecca from its American shackles.” While “the whole world was watching” news coverage of the Persian Gulf War, the American audience was getting to know a dictator and the strategically crafted civilizational threat he allegedly represented, a civilizational threat it would meet again after 9/11 and the formal declaration of the war on terror. Hussein and his regime survived the first U.S. incursion against it. However, news coverage of the first war in Iraq would stay in the American public’s consciousness, and in 2003, George H.W. Bush’s son, George W. Bush, would tap into that consciousness and declare a second, and much more prolonged, war on Iraq.

XREF: Connects to post-9/11 framing of civilizational threats and the 2003 Iraq War, showing continuity in how American audiences were primed to perceive threats.

The law, on its face, aimed to “deter terrorism, provide justice for victims, [and] provide for an effective death penalty” for culprits of terrorism. However, its enforcement disproportionately targeted Middle Eastern and Muslim subjects, the very same demographic Connie Chung, the media at large, and most Americans presumed to be terrorists. The vast majority of designated foreign terrorist groups were of a Muslim character or based in the Middle East. Muslim Americans who traveled back to their homelands, sent remittances to support family members, or were involved with religious or political organizations found themselves being profiled or suspected of “abetting terrorism,” while immigrants were viewed with heightened suspicion.

The United States was locked in a “clash of civilizations” with Islam, prominent academics theorized and news anchors reported, pushing the state to enact laws and policy that aligned with this binary. Never mind the racial or religious identity of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, who represented the demographic that commits the vast majority of terror attacks on U.S. soil. Stereotypes, not statistics or specifics, mattered most to Orientalists, proponents of the clash of civilizations, and Islamophobes who would beat the war-on-terror drums in the era to come. Terrorism, for the state, was not defined generally or neutrally, but focused exclusively on Islam and Muslims.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of the war on terror and Islamophobia discourse across contemporary political scholarship.

Balbir was not a Muslim. But according to his killer and scores of Islamophobes, he looked Muslim—he wore the same beard, had the same dark skin, and donned a turban similar to those the terrorists on television wore. Was he part of the Taliban, the extremist Muslim group that controlled much of Afghanistan, blew up ancient Buddhist temples, forced its women to wear burqas, and adopted the arcane form of Sunni Islam peddled by U.S. ally Saudi Arabia? Or was Balbir a member or sympathizer of Al Qaeda, the transnational terror network behind the 9/11 terror attacks? No. He was neither, nor was he Shiite or Sunni Muslim, Arab or Middle Eastern. He was Indian American, and his religion was Sikhism. … But it did not matter. Because to Frank Roque, who murdered Balbir on September 15, 2001, Balbir looked the way so many non-Muslim Americans imagined Muslims to look. To Frank Roque, and the growing ranks of Islamophobes, Balbir's skin color, beard, and dress were enough to mark him as Muslim, and being Muslim was enough to mark him as evil.

QUESTION: How widespread is post-9/11 violence against misidentified non-Muslims like Sikhs? Worth tracking data on hate crimes against South Asians generally.

President Bush's speech, which specified that America's target were terrorists who "practice[d] a fringe form of Islamic extremism," was saturated with appeals to an ideological, cultural, and civilizational war—indeed, the very standoff Huntington wrote about in The Clash of Civilizations. The speech was more than just a demonstration of resolve to the American people and the world at large; it was, most fundamentally, a declaration of war, a "war on terror," as it came to be known, against an enemy the state explicitly identified as Al Qaeda and the "Islamic extremists" who supported it. In practice, the war on terror has been against Islam as a civilization, and a war on Muslims everywhere.

XREF: Connects directly to Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations thesis, which frames the war on terror within a civilizational conflict narrative.

The cornerstone principle of American rule of law was turned on its head for the 1.7 billion Muslims across the globe and the 8 to 10 million living in the United States, now presumed to be guilty until proven innocent. “Guilty until proven innocent” forms the fundamental definition of Islamophobia. War-on-terror policies have rolled it out by law, expansive surveillance, policing programming, and outright war.

DEFINE: Defines Islamophobia as 'guilty until proven innocent,' pairing a political term with a legal principle reversal.

Twenty-four of the twenty-five countries of interest listed in the NSEERS legislation were Muslim-majority nations, which was a clear manifestation of the structural Islamophobic presumption that Muslim identity was correlative with terrorism. NSEERS was predominantly concerned with tracking the activity of Muslim immigrants, particularly while they were within the United States, as evidenced by the nations it honed in on and the arrests made after its enactment. Immediately after it went into force, 80,000 men were entered into the NSEERS registry, the vast majority of them Muslims, “2,870 of whom were detained and 13,799 placed in deportation proceedings within two years after 9/11.”

QUESTION: The specific numbers on detentions and deportation proceedings raise questions about what happened to the roughly 63,000 registrants not detained or deported.

This private Islamophobia, unfolding on screen, was triggered by the structural Islamophobia made more expansive and explicit by the Bush administration, which spurred a second wave of private Islamophobia.

XREF: Recalls theories of how state discourse legitimizes and normalizes popular prejudice, echoing ideas in research on how institutional rhetoric drives individual attitudes.

Indeed, the structural Islamophobia enacted by the Bush administration, and confirmed by media channels “redeployed [the embedded] Orientalist tropes” that Muslims were vile, violent, and bent on destroying the United States. The national security policies of the war on terror were far more than merely protective actions taken to bolster the country’s ability to preempt and prevent terrorism; they were a resounding call to action. They were a call to the broader polity to stand on guard and keep your eyes open, to participate in the national project of defeating terrorism by reporting suspicious activity, to enlist as informants, and, as demonstrated by the horrendous uptick in hate crimes and hate incidents, to take the law into your own hands if need be.

Shari‘a law is not monolithic. It is not a menacing body of uniform law ordained by a state, “or one book or a single collection of rules. Shari‘a is divine and philosophical." Interpretation of Shari‘a, or Fiqh, ranges depending on the degree of education and expertise of the individual, the individual’s method of construction, age, gender, race, and a wide range of other variables. Mirroring the diversity of the global Muslim population, interpretation of Shari‘a is heterogeneous.

DEFINE: Clarifies that Shari'a (divine/philosophical) is distinct from Fiqh (human interpretation), and that interpretation is heterogeneous rather than monolithic.

Fear of Shari‘a law proliferated again in 2011, resulting in a series of bills being introduced in states across the country. Capitalizing on the intense Islamophobia spurred by debate over a possible Muslim community center near Ground Zero, the congressional hearings on “Islamic radicalization” called by Representative Peter King, and the extended war on terror, a number of states introduced legislation that sought to ban Shari‘a law. The proposed bills were not standalone or isolated, but part of a broader movement driven by a partnership between conservative think tanks and politicians, which looked to convert the private Islamophobia saturating the country into structural policies adopted on the state level. The movement to ban Shari‘a law, debated within and carried forward by state legislatures, illustrates how structural Islamophobia also unfolds beyond the federal level and within state governments.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how social prejudice gets institutionalized through legislation and think tank-driven political movements.

Proponents of anti-Shari‘a legislation defined Shari‘a law as a “‘totalitarian ideology’ and ‘legal-political-military doctrine,’ committed to annihilating Western civilization as we known it today." Relying on principal Islamophobic baselines that frame Islam as a competing political ideology (sometimes referred to as "Islamo-fascism") as much as religious scripture, Shari‘a law abolitionists authored a model statute that “would prohibit state judges from considering foreign laws or rulings that violate constitutional rights in the United States." The model statute, titled "American Law for American Courts," was passed on to allies within state legislatures and subsequently rewritten into bill form.

“As of June, 2011, there were forty-seven bills in twenty-one states that were seeking to ban the use of Shari‘a and/or any category of international law." Spearheaded by the Louisiana and Tennessee legislatures, nearly half of the country’s states entertained the idea of banning Islamic law. One state, Wyoming, even engaged the idea of prohibiting its courts from citing other states that might permit the use of Shari‘a law. In addition to crippling the ability of judges and juries to engage the religious and cultural dimensions of Muslim subjects coming before the courts, anti-Shari‘a legislation conflicts with the Establishment Clause and, perhaps more acutely, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, thereby endangering the rights of Muslim Americans to freely practice their religion of choice.

QUESTION: Worth investigating whether any of these bills actually passed or were all defeated by constitutional challenges.

A number of states passed explicit anti-Shari‘a legislation or superficially neutral but de facto Islamophobic measures that restricted state courts from considering foreign, international, or religious law. While not explicitly including the words "Islam" or "Shari‘a," these laws are specifically aimed at the faith and the citizens who observe it. The 2016 presidential race and the induction of the Trump administration facilitates even more opportunity for states to pass anti-Shari‘a bills. Indeed, the prolific spike in private Islamophobia since Trump was inaugurated, emboldened by the structural policies enacted by him on the federal level, have furnished the anti-Shari‘a movement with momentum and support from Washington to introduce more bills, and very likely, enact more state laws.

Builds on: "Anti-Shari'a bills turned grassroot Islamophobia into state-level structural policy"

While this legislation conflicts with the First Amendment's principle of separating church and state and preventing the states from meddling in the religious affairs of their citizenry, the ferocity of Islamophobia in America today, at both the federal and state levels, reveals that there is always an Islamophobic exception: violating core constitutional principles is deemed justifiable or permissible as long as the target is Islam or Muslims.

The anti-Shari‘a movement that reached its climax in 2011 illustrates that Islamophobia was just as pervasive during the Obama administration as it was during the George W. Bush era. And while the charismatic and fresh-faced politician came into office promising an end to the war on terror, what came to pass was entirely different.

XREF: Connects to continuities between the Bush and Obama administrations' national security and counterterrorism policies.

Mirroring his own relationship with Islam and Islamophobia, defined primarily by resisting allegations that he himself was an undercover Muslim, President Obama's engagement with the faith can be best characterized as strategic accommodation and intentional distance.

Political aversion to mosques, in President Obama's case, exhibits a less conspicuous brand of Islamophobia. And under what circumstances did Obama—during the final quarter of his second term—finally enter a mosque and speak to its congregation? That his visit took place during his second term, and at the close of his administration, meant that the political stakes were far lower. The damage the visit could have done to his administration was minimal; he was setting his sights beyond his presidential post. He dodged American mosques and close association with Muslims until it was no longer politically expedient to do so, namely when he sought to advance his signature structural Islamophobic program: CVE policing.

The expansion of CVE policing in the aftermath of the San Bernardino, Paris, and Orlando attacks strongly suggests another motive: interest in enlisting Muslim Americans as strategic supporters of expanding counter-radicalization programming and CVE policing. And so the latent political Islamophobia of Obama's decision to steer clear of mosques was fused with the anti-Muslim underpinnings of his cornerstone anti-terror policy, CVE policing, which Hillary Clinton would likely have expanded if she had been elected president.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of countering violent extremism programs as surveillance infrastructure targeting Muslim communities. Builds on: "Counter-radicalization programs deputized local police as national security agents"

While "celebrat[ing] the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation" was the motive issued to the media for Obama's mosque visit, enlisting Muslim Americans as CVE policing interlocutors and informants was the likely reason for the visit. In line with this aim, Obama made "a direct appeal to America's Muslim youth. . . asking Muslim communities to be 'partners' in state and federal campaigns [CVE policing] to combat militant groups that try to recruit young followers of Islam." In a speech that probably would not have been given if not for the San Bernardino shooting, President Obama called for closer collaboration with Muslim Americans to combat and counter radicalization.

QUESTION: Was the CVE partnership framing widely reported as a goodwill gesture rather than a policing request?

President Obama condemned the "inexcusable rhetoric" from Republican candidates and implored that "we can't suggest that Islam is the root of the problem." And yet, in direct conflict with these words was the primary political objective of his historic address, to promote a counterterror program that suggests Islam is the root of radicalization and Muslims are the lone demographic prone to becoming radicalized. The Baltimore speech, essentially, was an exercise in masterful doublespeak—President Obama used the laudatory rhetoric about Islam that Muslims so desperately wanted to hear, while warning about the threat of Islamic radicalization to mitigate the fears of everybody else.

XREF: Connects to analysis of political doublespeak and how leaders manage contradictory constituencies.

While the Republican Party, particularly with Trump's ascent, became the party of blatant and explicit political Islamophobia, the Democratic Party under President Obama stood as the party of expanding structural Islamophobic policy and programming. The latter, mirroring Obama's masterful speech at the mosque in Baltimore, used benign and gracious language toward Muslims to enlist them as informants in programming that invites great dangers into Muslim American communities.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of 'soft' structural racism vs. explicit versions — parallels how surveillance operates through inclusive rhetoric rather than exclusion.

Above all, this strategy of engagement within Muslim American communities not only carried forward the baseline presumption that Muslim identity is correlative with terrorism, but also localized it by deputizing police officers to lead the charge in unearthing potential radicals and preventing them from taking action.

DEFINE: Describes how policing strategy operationalizes the presumption that Muslim identity correlates with terrorism, localizing it through deputized officers.

His presidency began with much optimism and concluded with the bitter realization that Obama did not put an end to the war on terror launched by his predecessor, but mutated, modernized, and marched it forward. With a fresh new face, rhetorical smoke signals, and the pacifying effect afforded by his racial identity and strategic deployment of progressive ideas and language, the war on terror was craftily pushed forward for another eight years under the Obama administration, and Islamophobia swelled right alongside of it.

QUESTION: This makes a strong, contestable claim. Worth investigating specific policy evidence — drone strikes, surveillance, executive orders — to assess how Obama's counterterrorism record compared with Bush's.

Many years later, my most politically radical college friends, who had the luxury of dedicating the time to activism that I did not have, retreated to the lives of their parents, shelving political activism for a quiet life in the suburbs and the professional upward mobility that a quiet, apolitical life enabled. Struggle, again, was a social fad that many of my classmates could opt out of as easily as they opted in, while the challenges I faced were no extracurricular activity, but the only life I knew.

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how activism functions as social performance for the privileged versus existential necessity for the struggling.

I recall reading Edward Said's memoir, Out of Place, as a college junior. His experience as a stateless Palestinian, living in the United States but always longing for the home from which he was displaced, resonated deeply with me. I was not Palestinian, but an Egyptian and Lebanese American, raised on the west side of Detroit, and unlike Said, a man I consider an intellectual hero, I grew up on welfare and without the means he had. But his story spoke to me, and his experience made sense of that incessant circumstance, feeling, or spirit of perpetually being out of place: not Muslim enough in some spaces, not Arab enough in others; not Shiite or Sunni enough, cultured or sophisticated enough, or down or radical enough. Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicana feminist and one of my favorite thinkers, articulated this feeling of perpetual flux best, writing, "Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element." These intellectuals articulated what I was, at that point, unable to, and just as importantly, they gave me community.

DEFINE: Defines the experience of hybrid identity — not belonging fully to any single community — through Said and Anzaldúa's articulation.

But as I approached my mid-twenties, the pressures of living at the intersection of multiple borders mattered less and less. I rebuffed them and ultimately learned that that feeling of being out of place was empowering, and more fundamentally, offered a portal toward full-fledged freedom and independence. As my friend and mentor Hisham Aidi would later tell me, "There's might at the margins!" Not having to appease an individual, placate a gatekeeper, or conform to a narrowly defined community marked the essence of liberty and the pathway toward the person I wanted to be.

The message from both Bush and Obama to Muslim Americans was clear: there were good Muslims and bad Muslims. The latter were not only the terrorist groups and their agents, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, but also Muslims and Muslim Americans who might be suspected of sympathizing with these groups. The former were citizens who heeded the call of the war on terror to participate in identifying terrorists and “homegrown radicals,” which not only showcased their patriotism, but also excluded them from suspicion of terror.

Although Muslim Americans are bona fide citizens, their religious identity induces scrutiny of their citizenship status, patriotism, and belonging. This scrutiny is strongest after national crises, and specifically in the direct aftermath of a terror attack committed by a Muslim culprit. As constitutional law scholar Kenneth Karst writes, “In times of trouble . . . fears tend to focus on particular groups of cultural outsiders as a source of danger.” This is particularly true for Muslim Americans, whose religious affiliation can negate any legal or material claim to Americanness and hold them out to be threatening interlopers.

Because Muslim and American identities are constructed as opposable, any performance of Americanness requires downplaying Muslim identity. Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati list some examples of Muslim American expressions of patriotism: “[A man] shaving before taking a plane trip. Or for a woman it might mean refraining from wearing a headscarf. For the family, it might mean placing an American flag outside the home. It also might mean refraining from doing the traditional Muslim prayers at work.”

In a May 2016 article for Al Jazeera English, I wrote, … For Muslim Americans, demonstrations of good citizenship are tied to terrorism. Namely, condemning any and every act that involves a Muslim culprit. Apologizing for the actions of a deviant, distant few. And routinely on deaf ears, collective statements against the savage acts of savage actors such as ISIL. . . . Muslim Americans are riddled with the assignment of collective guilt that obliges them to disavow or apologize for entirely unrelated actors, or completely unconnected actions. . . . Unfortunately, there are only two sides, and selecting the wrong side leaves one vulnerable to identification as a bad Muslim, followed by the surveillance and state violence attendant with that classification.

XREF: Connects to anti-Muslim discrimination research and the 'show me your papers' double-bind often described in critical security studies about surveillance of Muslim communities.

Journalist Nesrine Malik pinpointed how Clinton carried forward the central Islamophobic narrative that tethers Muslim identity tightly to terrorism, specifically, through the tokenization of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the gold-star parents of fallen Army captain Humayun Khan. The Khans lost their son to a suicide-bomber attack in Iraq in 2004. Like thousands of other American families, the Khans had to move forward without a child lost to war. The Clinton campaign seized on their story and sought to showcase it and the Khans during the 2016 presidential campaign. In response to this, Malik observes, “Take the Khans of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for example. They are liberal America’s final answer to the right’s toxic messaging and Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ electioneering. Rather than countering simplistic and reductionist views of Muslims, they confirmed them—something that was not lost on many, despite how desperate the situation was.”

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of 'positive stereotypes' and tokenism in liberal politics, similar to debates about 'model minority' framing.

Declan Walsh of the New York Times echoed this very point: “The manner in which Mr. Khan was lionized in the American media also aroused discomfort and debate among other American Muslims. Some say it has resurrected the specter of the ‘good Muslim’—the idea, born of the fertile post-2001 era, that Muslim American patriotism can be measured only by the yardstick of terrorism and foreign policy. That raised a question: Did Mr. Khan’s testimony, determined and powerful as it was, show that it takes the death of a son, in a disputed war in a Muslim land, to prove you are a good American?”

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of conditional acceptance of minority groups in US civic nationalism. QUESTION: How does this 'good Muslim' framing parallel model minority narratives faced by other groups?

The year 2014 marked a critical turning point for Ahmed. During the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims are obliged to abstain from food and water from sunrise to sundown, Ahmed found himself spending more time in the mosque. He would make the short walk over when he found time between classes and his work shifts, and he became a fixture at the mosque in the early morning, when brothers and sisters convened to make taraweeh, the special Ramadan prayers. Like many young people of faith, whether Christian or Jew, Hindu or Buddhist, Ahmed was drawn to Islam at the crossroads of his teenage and adult years, smitten by the beauty of the Qur’an he finally picked up to read closely, and drawn in by the tight-knit community that surrounded him. Ramadan drew him closer to Islam and closer to the community, and he found himself drawn to maintaining a more pious lifestyle beyond the Holy Month. Faith changed Ahmed from the inside, and gradually his enhanced spirituality would become more manifest on the outside. Ahmed always knew Islam and was always around the mosque, but months before his nineteenth birthday, he fully embraced it as a way of life.

Everybody around him noticed his shift for the better, particularly his family and closest friends. Apart from spiritual growth, Ahmed’s academic performance dramatically improved, his professional drive and sense of purpose sharpened, and his commitment to social justice and community philanthropy strengthened. But this personal development, which would seem benign for young men of other faiths, spelled danger for Ahmed, a Muslim and a young black man; he occupied perhaps the most dangerous intersection of identity during the American moment in which he lived, a period of radical reform on the national security policing front.

In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security named Minneapolis as one of the pilot cities where Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) policing would be implemented. CVE was a recently established program, formally implemented by the Obama administration in 2011, whereby local law enforcement (the Minneapolis Police Department) collaborated closely with federal security agents to help identify prospective “homegrown radicals” and try to prevent them from enlisting with a terrorist organization or taking part in a terror attack. CVE policing focused almost entirely on Muslims and concentrated on Muslim communities like the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis that Ahmed called home. Religious piety was considered by CVE policing policy to be one of the signals of a Muslim becoming radicalized, particularly when the shift toward religiosity was an abrupt one.

DEFINE: Clarifies what Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) policing was and how it operated, targeting Muslim communities based on religious signals.

Ahmed had no idea he was a suspect until one Saturday morning when two police officers, who had been carefully observing him and his social media for weeks, stopped over at his family’s home to question him. The officers were acting with the help of an informant, a school acquaintance who kept tabs on Ahmed in exchange for reduced probation time for a crime he had committed. Ahmed had done no wrong, he had no prior convictions, no criminal record at all, and yet he was deemed a subject of interest—a prospective radical on account of his nationality, neighborhood, and especially, his spiritual evolution from secular to devout Muslim.

QUESTION: How widespread is informant-based surveillance of citizens with no record? What legal thresholds govern this?

CVE policing, the signature structural Islamophobic program implemented and enforced by the Obama administration, shifted the focus of the war on terror from foreign terrorist organizations to “homegrown radicals,” in line with DHS’s belief that Al Qaeda, and more potently, ISIS, was inspiring “homegrown radicalization.” CVE policing extended the Islamophobic presumption that an expression of Muslim identity, whether through religious practice or observance, physical markers, or even political activity (perceived as Muslim-related), is indicative of radicalization and deserving of suspicion and investigation. This story is not Ahmed’s alone, but a common tale of Muslim youth, men, and women throughout the country.

XREF: Connects to broader critical discussions of the Obama-era countering violent extremism program and its Islamophobic framing of Muslim identity.

The primary profile of the Muslim terrorist was no longer that of the foreign actor who traveled to the United States to carry out an act of terror. The new image was the "homegrown radical," who was (likely) born and bred in the United States, by all measures American but vulnerable to recruitment and ideological conversion by ISIS on the basis of his or her Muslim identity alone. Thus any and every Muslim American (particularly Sunni Muslims, since radicalization is disproportionately linked to Sunni terror networks like ISIS) was presumed to be vulnerable to radicalization, and therefore subject to the suspicion and surveillance of the state.

XREF: This connects to broader discussions of Islamophobia, surveillance states, and post-9/11 security policies.

Yet the private Islamophobia of the media was no aberration at all in this respect, but rather an extension of the structural Islamophobia shaped and enforced by the state, which likewise built its suspicion and surveillance of Muslim Americans, like Ahmed in Minneapolis, on the slimmest pieces of evidence, overwhelmingly focusing on the religious identity and lifestyle of the actor. In the words of my younger brother Mohammed, "The more you pray, the more you're prey."

XREF: Connects to broader literature on structural racism and state surveillance of minority communities.

In August 2011, President Obama formally implemented CVE policing, which would become the primary counterterror surveillance program and the signature Islamophobic policy of his administration. CVE theory contends that through collaboration between DHS and local law enforcement, individuals suspected of becoming radicalized can be identified, persuaded from adopting a "radical" ideology, and prevented from taking terrorist action.

Builds on: "Counter-radicalization programs deputized local police as national security agents"

While "extremism" is framed in racially and religiously neutral terms, and CVE policing is theoretically focused on all culprits of extremism, it is disproportionately if not entirely focused on "ideas" and behavioral "processes" linked to Islam and expressions of Muslim identity. Radicalization, therefore, is theorized as an exclusively Muslim phenomenon, much like its precedent and related enterprise, terrorism.

According to DHS, the predictive pathway toward radicalization makes it preventable. And prevention is at the core of radicalization theory, which centers exclusively on Muslim subjects and geographies as presumptive sources of terrorism. Muslim Americans suspected of radicalization have engaged in no criminal act. And yet young Muslim men, like Ahmed in Minneapolis, are disproportionately vulnerable to the dragnet of CVE policing, which makes the Islamophobic leap that Muslim masculinity plus piety equals a desire to enlist with ISIS or another terror network.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on CVE/Countering Violent Extremism programs and their disproportionate targeting of Muslim communities post-9/11.

Today, CVE policing ranks among the most destructive forms of structural Islamophobia. Its strategy and enforcement, while framed in a facially neutral fashion, is “cloaked in expertise about the process by which Muslims become terrorists.” Individuals who maximize their Muslim identity, or “Muslimness,” by freely expressing their faith and exercising their First Amendment rights, expose themselves to being profiled by the state as refusing to assimilate, as religiously conservative, as extreme or subversive, to name just some of the “bad Muslim” tropes that open the door to CVE suspicion. In short, the more Muslim one is, the more likely one will be pegged as a subject of CVE interest.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racialized surveillance and the paradox where protected rights themselves ground suspicion.

CVE policing is driven by the same fears that fuel private Islamophobes to vandalize and burn down mosques, isolate and attack Muslim men with beards or women with headscarves, and rally in front of religious centers and advocacy organizations. But instead of enforcing Islamophobia by way of vigilante violence, CVE policing plants informants in mosques and other spaces where Muslims congregate, and mobilizes local law enforcement to keep a watchful eye on Muslim communities. It also turns Muslim Americans against one another, and intentionally (or at minimum, consequently) divides Muslim communities.

Builds on: "Government policy amplifies private prejudice into widespread public bigotry."

Olivier Roy, a prominent French intellectual and critic of counter-radicalization theory and programs as they stand today, argues that “radicalization seems more linked to individual trajectories” than collective religious behavior. Roy recommends that CVE strategy focus more on individual subjects and the societal conditions that give rise to radicalization, rather than on religious doctrine or religious groups at large. Societal symptoms include systemic poverty, declining education, disaffection, and hostility toward Muslims in the form of structural and private Islamophobia that isolates Muslim Americans and feeds into the propaganda of terror networks like ISIS.

XREF: Connects to debates about whether ideology or socio-economic grievance drives terrorism — parallels with research on lone-wolf attackers and models of grievance radicalization.

Statistics show that Muslim Americans as a standalone faith group are comparatively poorer than the broader American polity, and according to a number of studies, poorer than any other faith group. This doesn’t just challenge the myth that Muslim Americans are overwhelmingly wealthy and upwardly mobile; it shatters it to pieces. And poverty for Muslim Americans comes with a range of other concerns and dangers, including those linked to how poverty enhances vulnerability to private backlash and state surveillance. The reality of pervasive poverty among Muslim Americans, particularly in immigrant-heavy communities, leads to their disproportionate targeting and victimization by war-on-terror policies, and, most frequently and furiously, CVE policing. It is trying to be poor in the United States, but exponentially more trying to be poor and victimized by the war on terror.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how poverty compounds surveillance and policing vulnerability for marginalized communities.

In addition, the metropolitan Detroit area is home to a sizable Lebanese American population, which, like the Iraqi community, is overwhelmingly Shiite. The sectarian demographics of the city have equipped DHS, and local law enforcement, with the added ability to turn Muslim American communities against one another—to mobilize Shiite Muslim Americans as informants or full-fledged partners against their Sunni Muslim American counterparts. In effect, this imports the sectarian divides of the Arab world into structural Islamophobic counterterror programming at home, in an effort to uncover the homegrown radical—who is far less real than imagined.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques that the homegrown-radical threat is exaggerated while surveillance is expanded through communal divisions.

By pegging specific Muslim traditions, practices, and cultures, most notably Sunni Muslim populations, as prone to radicalization, the state is drawing clear economic, political, and sectarian divisions within the broader Muslim American population. Driven by clear articulations of the good and bad Muslim, CVE policing creates a landscape in which those who endorse CVE policing and partake in its programming as informants and collaborators are deemed good Muslims and good Americans, while those critical of it, and critical of structural Islamophobia at large, are not only perceived as bad Muslims, but more dangerously, are subjected to possible CVE policing.

XREF: Connects to broader security-counterterrorism scholarship on how state surveillance categorizes populations and produces citizenship hierarchies. Builds on: "Counterterror programs exploit sectarian divides among American Muslims."

Almost overnight, LAHC went from being a local cultural organization to a de facto policing outfit, making structural changes in order to carry out the groundwork for CVE policing in Dearborn-area schools, community centers, and meeting places. The makeover would create a slew of new jobs for LAHC staff, higher salaries, and direct reach into Washington, D.C.

QUESTION: What specific structural changes and CVE programs were involved, and how did the shift affect the community LAHC originally served?

Mahfouz stated, "The funding will be specifically used to sustain existing programming . . . [including] youth development, nurturing parenting, substance abuse prevention." But these seemingly benign programs were given greater clarity by the DHS secretary, who released a statement the week before the LAHC announcement, declaring that "in this age of self-radicalization and terrorist-inspired acts of violence, domestic-based efforts to counter violent extremism have become a homeland security imperative. . . . The funding will go for activities that include intervention, developing resilience, challenging the narrative, and building capacity."

XREF: Connects to broader security studies literature on the securitization of social programs and how homeland security objectives embed themselves in ostensibly benign community services.

These ambiguous aims, which sound innocuous and even well intentioned, are code-speak for programming that would educate students about the threat of radicalization, develop a “see something, say something” culture in schools, and, ultimately, deputize school administrators and students to be watchdogs on the lookout for homegrown radicals—radicals, absurdly, that were as young as eleven years old and profiled because of their religious identity.

QUESTION: How widely has this sort of school-based counterterrorism programming actually been implemented, and what have the documented consequences been for students?

CVE policing in a setting like Dearborn, with its sectarian diversity, would have capitalized on already profuse tensions among Shiites and Sunnis to advance its strategy. For example, Lebanese or Iraqi Shiites would have been sought as informants against Yemeni or Palestinian Sunnis, since radicalization is generally understood and enforced as a Sunni phenomenon.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of counterterrorism strategy leveraging communal fault lines to produce informants, echoing similar dynamics in colonial intelligence and other surveilled minority communities.

Pressured by social media shaming, op-eds, and behind-the-scenes phone calls, LAHC declined its CVE grant nine days later. It was a major victory against CVE policing in Detroit, but a slew of other organizations, in "locations across the country such as Boston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles"—cities with already established hardline CVE policing programs—as well as other locations tapped for similar programs, accepted the funding. MPAC kept the reported $400,000 it received and still collaborates with DHS in carrying forward CVE policing within and beyond Los Angeles, where a hardline CVE policing program has existed since 2014. Even universities cashed in on CVE funding—the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill was the biggest recipient.

Divide and conquer is a stated objective of American foreign policy in the Arab world, and with CVE policing, it is an evolving counterterror strategy. This is evidenced by the exploitation of the tense and divided sectarian landscape in the metropolitan Detroit area, the leveraging of ethnocentric and class-based paternalism that drives groups like MPAC to advance CVE policing in places like Los Angeles, and the economic vulnerability of recent immigrant communities like the Somali population in Minneapolis, where, as Asha Noor shares, "CVE and surveillance of the Somali community has created a rift and a sense of mistrust. Individuals who were once friends are no longer on talking terms because of the choices they made: to accept grants that meant framing your community as inherently violent or to not."

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of CVE as a strategy of social control and community fragmentation, consistent with surveillance studies and counterterror literature. QUESTION: How does CVE grant acceptance itself function as a dividuating mechanism within communities based on perceived suspicion and loyalty?

Turning Muslim Americans against one another, as native informants or community informants, watchdogs-for-hire or sectarian rivals, is a vital cog in the war-on-terror machine, and as exhibited by CVE policing, an evolving dimension of structural Islamophobia. While foreign policy tactics in the Middle East have long capitalized on intensifying sectarianism as a strategy for intensifying tumult, division, and conquest, DHS has wielded this very strategy at home, in the heart of Muslim American communities, to bring about the same end.

XREF: Connects Middle East foreign policy tactics of cultivating sectarianism to domestic countering-violent-extremism policing within U.S. borders.

“We need to wake up and say, ‘You know what? Enough is enough,’” stated Hibaaq Osman, whose family owns a small café in a Somali shopping mall in Minneapolis. “We are citizens, we are taxpayers, we own businesses, we need people to understand that we also are part of this country just the way anybody else is.” While Muslims are asleep, DHS and local law enforcement are pushing CVE policing, planting informants, and paying collaborators to be part of this new war-on-terror witch hunt—a persecution against which citizenship, sadly, offers little protection.

The death of Ali, a black Muslim giant who symbolized so much to so many, manifested that even the transcendence of this beloved figure did not deliver the empowerment of the very people he represented, gave voice to, and fought for. Too often, the harmonized identity that inspired his commitment to racial justice was vilified, obfuscated, and dismembered. People took what they wanted from Ali, not the entirety of the man, appropriating his image or a quote, his blackness or his Muslim identity, without championing the whole of who he was: a black Muslim committed to radical structural reform.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions about commodification and selective appropriation of historical figures' legacies (e.g., MLK, Malcolm X). SEED: Angle: how selective memorialization of activists neutralizes their radical politics while preserving their imagery.

Allegations of Ali's funeral being “whitewashed” were widespread, and many of the black figures who brought Ali into Islam were excluded from the fallen champion's funeral. Ironically, the funeral of the most famous Muslim American in history, a black man equally remembered for his fierce and unrelenting assault on racism and his in-ring feats, replicated the erasure that has loomed over black Muslims since the earliest stages of this country's history.

SEED: An essay on how commemorations of iconic figures—even of those defined by their fight against erasure—can replicate the very erasure they opposed, and what exclusionary funeral/legacy practices reveal about whose narratives get centered.

Islamophobia and anti-black racism were not unfolding on separate tracks, or inflicted on distinct populations; they were, and are, entwined by a kindred source and common targets.

Muslims have always been, and still remain, black. The claim that “Muslims are the new blacks” ignores the extensive history of black Muslims in the United States, and ignores the very existence of black Muslim communities, indigenous and immigrant, today.

DEFINE: Clarifies that the trope 'Muslims are the new blacks' erases actual black Muslim history and presence — both indigenous and immigrant.

Despite constant and conspiring efforts to erase their existence, black Muslims do exist, and they occupy the intersection where mounting anti-black racism and Islamophobia collide. Too often, non-black Muslim Americans only acknowledge the existence of black Muslims when celebrating their excellence, which, ironically, is often done in terms that entirely eclipse their blackness with their Muslimness.

Two of those bullets lodged in Brown's head. Brown, whose name and face the whole world would come to know, was left for dead, face-first on the hot summer pavement in Ferguson, Missouri.

Three black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, coined Black Lives Matter, “as a call to action for black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was posthumously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed."

The election of President Obama in 2008 signaled for millions that the United States was approaching, or had reached, a new era where racism was a relic of the past. Advocates of this mythic worldview, and the attendant ideology of colorblindness, resisted the salience of race and opposed the need for affirmative action to rehabilitate past and present inequity, arguing that any assertions of race or racism were moot. The murder of Trayvon Martin, and the string of deaths of unarmed black men and women killed in the months and years after Martin's death, vanquished the fiction that the United States was postracial.

XREF: Connects to the postracial/colorblind ideology debates and the Black Lives Matter movement context. QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the postracial narrative shift specifically between 2008 and the Trayvon Martin case?

In her timely book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, "The killing of Mike Brown, along with an ever-growing list of other unarmed black people, drove holes in the logic that black people simply doing the "right things,' whatever those things might be, could overcome the perennial crises within Black America. After all, Mike Brown was only walking down the street. Eric Garner was standing on the corner. Rekia Boyd was in a park with friends. Trayvon Martin was walking with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea." Black men, women, and youth were vulnerable when engaged in the most benign acts, which illustrated that any and every black person in America could be similarly targeted. Being an exemplary citizen offered no safeguard from the prospect of police violence. Respectability, and the politics that sang its praises, offered no protection.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of respectability politics and their limits in addressing systemic racism.

The protests that proliferated on the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, and everywhere the BLM movement inspired activists reminded me of the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt several years earlier. As an Egyptian American with family members and friends who put their lives on the line during that nation's historic 2011 revolution, I heard in the demands made by BLM protestors an echo of those that rang out in Tahrir Square in Cairo. In an article that appeared in Ebony days after the killing of Freddy Gray in Baltimore, Loyola Law School professor Priscilla Ocen and I wrote, "Poverty and the police state prevailed in Ferguson and Cairo, Baltimore and Benghazi. Soldiers and patrol cars closely monitored city blocks—where unemployed youth roamed with little purpose and even shallower prospects for the future. Emaciated communities, rich in only nihilism and hopelessness, kept their residents trapped." Many of the symptoms that gave rise to the Arab Spring were similar to those that ignited the Movement for Black Lives. Understanding these parallels helped mobilize non-black Muslim Americans to stand in solidarity and be active participants with the Movement for Black Lives. These precedents primed many Arab and Muslim American youth to stand alongside their black allies as the Movement for Black Lives emerged and pushed forward.

XREF: Connects the Arab Spring (2011) and the Movement for Black Lives, showing how shared symptoms of poverty and police state conditions produced parallel uprisings. QUESTION: Could explore how these transnationally shared experiences of marginalization actually mobilized solidarity across racial lines.

The 2017 "Muslim Survey Poll" published by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that "Muslims [were] the most likely faith group to support the Black Lives Matter Movement." Muslim Americans supported the movement at a clip of 66 percent, compared to 57 percent for Jewish, 39 percent for Catholic, and 55 percent for non-religiously-affiliated Americans. The general public only supported BLM at 45 percent. Without question, the size of the black Muslim population contributed heavily to the high rate for Muslim Americans. But broad and emphatic Muslim American support may also be attributed to a generational shift in which younger people are openly challenging anti-black racism within their households, communities, and mosques—an indirect but very real consequence of the Arab Spring revolutions, and an indelible effect of the Movement for Black Lives on the scores of non-black Muslim Americans who marched and protested alongside their black brothers and sisters of faith. Dalia Mogahed, one of the authors of the survey and a Muslim American community leader, adds, "Non-black Muslims, especially young Muslims, are as likely as black Muslims to support BLM. I think today they find common cause with other marginalized communities because they've experienced institutionalized racism first hand, especially at the hands of law enforcement."

DEFINE: The highlight presents specific survey data: 66% of Muslims support BLM versus 57% Jewish, 39% Catholic, 55% non-religious, 45% general public.

These figures and developments signal some progress. It is perhaps incremental or isolated progress, but these are shifts that are needed to confront the anti-black racism thriving in the country today. Layla Abdullah-Poulos, a black Muslim scholar and author of a popular blog committed to addressing racism within the Muslim American community, rebuts that far more has to be done: "Muslims need to decolonize their minds, engage in active anti-racism to purge our communities of toxic anti-Blackness." Her call resounds as the intersection of being black and Muslim in the United States becomes more dangerous by the day. This intersection is seldom addressed within the convening halls of Muslim American power.

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on intra-community racism and intersectionality in American minority politics.

African American Muslims are simultaneously celebrated, demonized, and perhaps most potently, delegitimized as authentic Muslims. These processes seem conflicting; what ties them together is the way in which institutions and individuals readily exploit black American Muslims. This tradition began with the historical erasure of the enslaved African Muslim population, examined in chapter 2. Erasure gave way to demonization and delegitimization in the 1930s, and garnered national attention in the 1950s with the rise of the Nation of Islam. Led by Elijah Muhammad and the charismatic Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam's membership swelled in the late 1950s. Its message of black nationalism, empowerment, and self-sustaining community resonated deeply with a population ravaged by poverty, Jim Crow, and the residual effects of slavery.

The Nation of Islam's reclamation of black dignity by way of emphasizing the importance of family, racial pride, and community empowerment threatened the state. Yet the state, latching on to the narrow view that Muslims were an immigrant bloc from the Middle East, largely viewed the Nation of Islam and its leaders as religious charlatans. Thus, attacks on the Nation of Islam were largely racial and political; when it was attacked on religious grounds, it was attacked more as a cult than as Islam.

XREF: Connects to patterns of how states misclassify religious movements they find threatening, reducing them to illegitimate categories like 'cult'.

In an ironic twist of fate—or more factually, in an act of political tokenism—the very people American courts deemed unfit for naturalized citizenship were used by the state to delegitimize the religious bona fides of the Nation of Islam and its leadership.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of state co-optation of marginalized groups to police other marginalized communities, echoing themes in surveillance and civil rights history.

Immigrant Muslims and their leaders often delegitimized the Nation of Islam as "non-Muslim" and even "anti-Muslim." In an ironic twist of fate—or more factually, in an act of political tokenism—the very people American courts deemed unfit for naturalized citizenship were used by the state to delegitimize the religious bona fides of the Nation of Islam and its leadership.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of the state pitting immigrant communities against indigenous Black American religious groups, and the politics of religious 'authenticity' delegated to citizenship status.

In "Islamism and Its African American Muslim Critics," historian Edward E. Curtis reflects on this critical impasse, when immigration quotas were dissolved and immigrant Muslims came to the United States in large numbers: "As negative portrayals in the mainstream press and criticism from black leaders increased, more and more Muslims in the United States joined to condemn, dispute, and reject the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the NOI. Their criticism of the NOI was a public performance of Muslim identity that expressed the growing cultural power of foreign and immigrant Muslims." … Although the Nation of Islam played a key role in fighting for legislation dissolving restrictive immigration quotas, thereby enabling non-black Muslims to come to the United States, immigrant Muslims swiftly turned their back on black Muslims in favor of placating the state that had restricted their entry for nearly two centuries.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of intra-community racial politics and how marginalized groups distance themselves from other marginalized groups for state acceptance.

Non-black Muslim Americans, who tend to be the gatekeepers in prominent Muslim advocacy, political, and religious institutions, are largely wed to community models bound to Arab or South Asian ethnocentrism and model minority status, and to an aspirational whiteness that too often is expressed in racism toward African Americans, including African American Muslims. Emulating and becoming more proximate to whiteness mandates expression of one of whiteness's cornerstone traits, anti-black racism, which non-black Muslims have actively performed in order to claim, or attempt to claim, the coveted privileges of whiteness.

XREF: Connects to anti-blackness discourse from scholars like Toni Morrison and Afropessimism literature, as well as patterns of immigrant racial positioning.

The events in Toronto, which spurred a firestorm of criticism and debate within the Muslim American community, were foreshadowed by another instance of black Muslim erasure at the 2016 Islamic Society of North America conference in Chicago, an annual gathering of approximately 50,000 Muslim Americans featuring panels on culture, faith, politics, and advocacy. After speaking on a panel addressing poverty, racism, and surveillance within the Muslim American community, a prominent Egyptian American Muslim activist told me about "a secret meeting for Muslim American leaders" to be held in the hotel that Saturday evening. Unsure who would be attending and uncertain about the meaning of "Muslim American leader," I asked him about the roster of invitees. He reeled off a series of names; I was familiar with some and did not recognize others. I did realize, however, that none of the African American Muslim individuals I knew and routinely worked with were on the list of invitees. I made some phone calls and sent some texts; ultimately it was revealed that none of the African American Muslim activists and leaders I knew were invited to this secret meeting of "Muslim American leaders" at one of the most important Muslim American gatherings of the year.

XREF: Connects to broader themes of intra-community racial exclusion and Black erasure within predominantly immigrant Muslim American institutions. QUESTION: What enabled the secret meeting's criteria for 'Muslim American leader,' and who ultimately defined that category?

The presence of my four African American Muslim friends was in and of itself an act of protest against the ongoing and incessant erasure of black Muslim bodies from high-stakes conversations, institutions of power, and very simply, demonstrations of existence. After the meeting, Asha Noor asked one of the organizers of the event, "Why were no black Muslims, who make up one-fourth of the Muslim population, included in this event?" Her question was met with a blank stare and promises to do better in the future.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of representation and erasure of marginalized subgroups within already-marginalized communities.

Muhammad Ali, whom American presidents and statesmen, non-black Muslim American clergy and leaders rushed to eulogize and honor on June 3, 2016, was one of the most visible faces of the Nation of Islam in the 1960s. Ali and Malcolm X remain the two most beloved and widely known Muslim Americans, so why is the specific demographic they represent, African American Muslims, still pushed to the fringe? And why, given that African American Muslims are the biggest plurality of the Muslim American population today, are discussions of Islamophobia divorced from assessments of anti-black racism?

QUESTION: The author poses an open question about why Islamophobia discussions separate from anti-black racism—worth investigating the systemic causes and history behind this separation. SEED: An essay angle: the erasure of Black Islam from mainstream Islamophobia discourse despite demographic majority. Could explore how media representation skews toward immigrant Muslim voices.

Donna Auston of Rutgers University, one of the most trenchant voices examining the intersection of Islamophobia and anti-black racism, characterizes the weaponized anti-black racism unfolding on the streets, and the Islamophobia proliferating privately and structurally, as “intimate bedfellows.” In “Mapping the Intersections of Islamophobia and #BlackLivesMatter,” Auston argues, “Dominant narratives . . . in both media and scholarly literature tend to doubly efface the existence and voices of black American Muslims—even in this moment when black bodies are at the very center of the unrest.

DEFINE: The 'intimate bedfellows' metaphor frames two oppressions as intertwined, while 'double effacement' names how media and scholarship erase black American Muslims from both narratives. Builds on: "African American Muslims are marginalized despite being the largest Muslim American plurality"

Scholars and activists like Auston, who are rising to the fore of pressing Muslim American discourses today, consistently remind us that anti-black racism and Islamophobia are hardly operating on separate tracks. They are intimately fused, which intensifies the policing and punishment of black Muslim communities during the war on terror and the war on drugs, a similarly amorphous and unconventional campaign that, like the Islamophobic baseline linking Muslim identity to terrorism, conflates blackness with criminality.

XREF: Connects to intersecting-oppression frameworks from intersectionality theory and scholarship on how the war on drugs racializes criminality similar to the war on terror's racialization of Muslims.

Three out of the seven Muslim-majority states listed in the (first) Muslim ban are in Africa. Two of them—Somalia and Sudan—are home to black Muslims. In the same way that Islamophobia intersects with anti-black racism to intensify the targeting of black Muslims living in the United States, the convergence of these two forms of animus was experienced by Somali and Sudanese immigrants impacted by the Muslim ban.

XREF: Connects to intersectionality theory and how overlapping forms of discrimination compound for specific groups.

For the brief moment I was handcuffed, I couldn’t control myself and I just started crying,” Elamin said as she reflected on the reality that non-black Muslims from the restricted states were not handcuffed. Her religious identity as a Muslim led to her detainment, while her racial status as a black woman spurred the decision of Customs and Border Control to handcuff her, and treat her like a criminal. She stood at the dangerous crossroads of anti-black racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, which prompted a more violent brand of treatment from immigration officers.

XREF: Connects to Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality framework — overlapping identities produce distinct, compounded forms of oppression.

Elamin’s story and those of other black Muslims were perpetually eclipsed by coverage of Arab and Iranian Muslims. Even the media’s well-intentioned and spirited efforts to bring to light Muslim victimhood perpetuated the private Islamophobic tenet that conflates Muslim identity with Arab or South Asian identity, evidencing just how entrenched and pervasive this tenet is. As we have seen, this erasure is rooted in American law, starting with enslaved African Muslims who worshipped while in bondage and continuing with the ignored and overlooked experiences of black Muslims detained and handcuffed.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of how media homogenizes minority groups and erases internal diversity, similar to conflation of Asian American sub-ethnicities.

While popular concern about and advocacy for the 11.3 million undocumented individuals in the United States centers almost exclusively on Latinx communities, the Center for American Progress reported that in 2012, there were approximately 400,000 undocumented black immigrants without legal status. A sizable portion of this population is Muslim, coming from Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and other African countries. Immediately upon entry into the United States, they become subject to the converging animus of anti-black racism and xenophobia, and the perpetual threat of arrest and deportation.

XREF: Counteracts the near-exclusive focus on Latinx undocumented communities, an angle worth noting for migration-justice coverage.

Of course the ban did not impact undocumented or immigrant black Muslims alone. As demonstrated by the detainment of Muhammad Ali, Jr., in the immediate aftermath of the ban, black Muslims indigenous to the United States, with fathers who just five months earlier were being remembered by American presidents and honored by the state, were also vulnerable to the Muslim ban—and vulnerable to the many policing and profiling tentacles of structural Islamophobia. While being black in America today is challenging, being black and Muslim in a nation where anti-black racism and Islamophobia converge is even more daunting.

The Muslim ban passed by Trump on Friday, January 27, 2017, impacted scores of Muslim immigrants and their family members. But it was more than just a stand-alone policy that wrought mayhem in American airports, broke up families, and formally ushered in a heightened form of structural Islamophobia. It also foreshadowed what was to come with this new administration—a form of Islamophobia that would be common and continuous, enforced in new laws and policies. The ban was part and parcel of a broader, stark Islamophobic vision that tied Muslim identity directly to terror suspicion.

XREF: Links to broader discussions of institutionalized racism and how single policies sit within larger structural systems.

The fights against the first Muslim ban and the one that followed on March 16, 2017, were in and of themselves daunting. But they foreshadowed more, and perhaps even more ominous, challenges ahead. The fights unfolding at airports, within communities, and in courtrooms witnessed unprecedented coalitions—grassroots unions spanning racial and religious lines—coalitions needed to meet the challenge of today’s Islamophobia, and even more importantly, to meet the “the fire next time.”

These words were very painful, but they were indisputable. Like the old saying goes, nothing hurts more than the truth. The broader Muslim American population, with the exception of the black Muslim community and other discrete groups, was not part of the progressive movement until it was targeted. But a sea change began within Muslim America, particularly among the generation that endured the rampant Islamophobia that arose after 9/11. Many Muslim individuals in Arab and South Asian American communities became more visible, involved, and integral in progressive circles and causes for racial justice.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of how targeting and marginalization galvanize political consciousness and organizing, similar to other civil rights movements.

In addition to mobilizing action and solidarity, the BLM movement was fiercely educational. It inculcated Muslim Americans with the language of racial justice, and words that were once confined to sociology, anthropology, or law school classes, like "intersectional feminism," "structural racism," and "white privilege," became routine terms for non-black Muslim American teens, college students, and organizers, who began to speak in terms of collective liberation instead of discrete community interest.

XREF: Connects to the diffusion of academic concepts (intersectionality, structural racism, white privilege) into grassroots movement language.

These are stereotypes, but it is true that the wounding words of homophobes have drowned out the far-too-scarce declarations of support and solidarity within the Muslim American community and, at their extreme, have intimidated supporters into silence.

In an article written in the immediate wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, Sarsour and I, two Arab American Muslims, stated, “Institutional and structural racism is still robust in the US. This is evidenced by the disparate incarceration rates of brown and Black Americans, the decimation of affirmative action and race-conscious legislation in the US, and the crumbling public education systems in minority-populated communities with the all too common cold blooded murders of people of color.” The killing of Martin, we wrote, was not an aberrational or unexpected act, but a vile emanation from a deeply institutionalized racism

Her ascent, in great part, symbolizes the arrival of Islamophobia as a mainstream civil rights issue mentioned in the same breath as racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Sarsour has risen along with other Muslim American grassroots political and legal leaders who helped forge vital coalitions before the ascent of Trump—women like black Muslim activist Donna Auston and Somali American Asha Noor, who come from communities at the very intersection of racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia and speak about the perils posed by Islamophobia in ways that reach broader audiences. This broadening of leadership and audience, and a growing legion of allies, has been absolutely vital in the short term to confront the structural Islamophobia the Trump administration has been poised to expand. It is even more important in addressing the blueprint of political Islamophobia that will be followed by politicians waiting in the wings, and the private Islamophobia it will embolden.

Islamophobia is no longer a term uttered exclusively by academics in ivory towers, or a word that only comes out the mouths of Muslim American activists and advocates. It has been featured on the Twitter timelines of Jewish and Christian college students, discussed by young politicians rising in response to the hate coming from Trump and those following in his footsteps, and the frequent topic of news headlines and opinion pieces featured in the Washington Post and the New York Times. Islamophobia has fully arrived, as has the consciousness around it and the will to combat it, marshaled on street corners, social media platforms, college and university campuses, in airports, and in public and private spaces in between and beyond. A new crop of Muslim American leaders, the majority of them women, is taking charge of the broader campaign to counter Islamophobia.

DEFINE: Traces how the term 'Islamophobia' moved from academic/activist circles into mainstream news and politics, clarifying its contemporary currency.

Only days after he introduced the proposal for a Muslim ban, a December 9, 2015, Bloomberg poll found that over two-thirds of likely Republican voters supported the idea. Over half of likely Republican voters said they “strongly support[ed]” the ban, with 14 percent expressing “not so strong favor” for the measure. On the other side, 25 percent of likely Democratic voters either supported the ban or were unsure, illustrating that Trump’s explicit Islamophobic appeals resonated not only with a large majority of Republican voters, but with a sizable segment of Democratic voters as well. These figures again illustrate that Islamophobia is not exclusive to the right and the swelling segment of new-wave conservative hatemongers dubbed the “alt right,” but, as examined in chapter 1, is also a rising form of animus on the left.

QUESTION: What explains the Democratic minority's support for the Muslim ban? Worth probing drivers beyond partisanship.

The Trump campaign and administration highlight that the deployment of explicit Islamophobia is a tried, true, and proven political strategy. The rhetoric Trump used on the campaign trail appealed to sizable segments of the American electorate, providing national and local politicians with a blueprint to follow. “Trumpism,” and the politics of hate on which it capitalized, evolved into a political strategy for both upstart and established politicians. Incoming and incumbent candidates at all levels of politics, seeking to win in jurisdictions where the rhetoric of explicit Islamophobia finds fertile ground, will certainly look to Trump as a guide.

QUESTION: What evidence would distinguish genuinely effective Islamophobic rhetoric from rhetoric that works despite or independent of it? Worth probing the causal claim's basis.

The “Trump effect,” or Trumpism, may very well prove to be more destructive and lasting than the polarizing president it is named after. And yet, the effect and the movement represented by Trump are not entirely new. They have roots “as far back as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot’s third-insurgencies in the 1990s” and, as this book highlights, far beyond. Given these deep roots, Islamophobia will remain a fixture in the rhetoric of politicians and a staple of political discourse in the United States for a long time to come—a situation that will become even more violent and intense if the country experiences another terror attack committed by a Muslim actor. This leaves Muslim Americans perpetually one attack away from an explosive rise in private and structural Islamophobia, a fear that all Muslim Americans carry with them and can never fully evade.

XREF: Connects to the pre-Trump roots of Islamophobic rhetoric (Buchanan, Perot) and the argument that Trumpism is not novel.

Police swiftly ruled that Nabra’s murder was no hate crime, but the result of road rage, implying that the two cannot coexist. I attended Nabra’s vigil in Reston, Virginia, on June 21, 2017, alongside my close friends Abed Ayoub and Mohammed Maraqa and thousands who came together only blocks away from her home. Her friends were there, as were her parents. Her father echoed what he told investigators and police immediately after he learned about his daughter’s murder: “He killed my daughter because she is Muslim. That’s what I believe.” Every Muslim American at the vigil that day agreed with Nabra’s father, as did millions more who followed her story and mourned her death from afar.

QUESTION: The police ruling treated road rage and hate crime as mutually exclusive — worth examining how such classification choices shape public narratives about bias-motivated violence.

If Muslim Americans are not already interned within the walls of their homes, mosques, or community centers, could another large-scale attack bring about en masse Muslim-American internment? Although it seems a remote possibility, the sum of pernicious legislation, still-rising Islamophobia, and the precedent of Japanese internment place that possibility firmly at the center of the collective Muslim American psyche.

I never understood why my father made the choices he made, but learning about the earliest phases of his life, on the streets of Beirut, as a child from a poor Shiite Muslim family from southern Lebanon, provided some answers. He spent his whole life running toward something and away from something else, whether it was the family he was born to or the one he spawned and continuously spurned. Poverty, war, and the quest to make something of himself molded him, and at the same time, pulled him far from his loved ones. He was always gone, but this time, gone for good.

XREF: Connects to the reader's interest in how formative environments determine adult behavior patterns.

Today, he lies buried only a few miles from the cafés he frequented, the friends he made, the streets and corners that perpetually remind me of him, where his long-estranged son returned and made a home. My father, a man who was a shadow for much of my life became real, present, and finally, a father, in his last days. Since his death, his shadow is ubiquitous in the city he brought us to in 1982, a city that would become the most concentrated, celebrated, and scrutinized Muslim American community in the country. I see him more today than I ever did before, and I listen closely to the vision he had for me and the pride that would beam from him when he read about my work.

His burial site is full of names like Mohammed, Hassan, Zeinab, Kareem, Marwa, and Fawzia, old and young Muslim Americans, who, like my father, migrated to, lived, and believed in the dream America offered. Like mine did on that day, their families congregated atop a patch of dirt—American dirt—to bid farewell and permanently lay loved ones to rest. Those same families continued to pursue dreams on behalf of the departed, and to give birth to new dreams by forming families and having children, building businesses and institutions, achieving professional and academic success. Muslim Americans of all ages, ethnicities, and generations are buried here, alongside my father, joined by millions of other Muslims buried elsewhere in the United States, who helped construct the very backbone of this nation, made immeasurable and irreplaceable contributions to it, and traveled from long distances and ravaged lands to enrich it—and despite what Islamophobia and its predecessor systems propagate by popular view and law, made this country what it is today.

XREF: Counters dominant narratives that frame Muslim Americans as outsiders or threats, echoing the broader Americal immigrant-contribution discourse.

My Detroit homecoming was met with immense difficulty, mourning, and heartbreak. I had been lured by an ailing father who lived long enough to see me on a consistent basis. My new office was a short drive from his hospital bed, and after his departure, a short drive to his final resting place. But in the coming months, my summoning back to Detroit would make even more sense. Roughly a month after my father's passing, Donald Trump was elected to office, and the unhinged Islamophobia his presidency formally inaugurated would be acutely felt in metropolitan Detroit, the symbolic seat of Muslim America and the city I called home once again.

QUESTION: What specific forms did the unhinged Islamophobia take in Detroit after the 2016 election?

I watched the election returns alongside hundreds of Muslim American students and activists, mothers and fathers, on November 9, 2016, at the Arab American Museum Annex in Dearborn, Michigan. The crowd that came together that night overwhelmingly believed that Hillary Clinton would claim victory, as the political pundits and experts had forecast, and by doing so would put an end to the brazen Islamophobia unleashed by Donald Trump. Well, they and we were wrong, and Trump claimed Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, and one battleground state after another to win the presidency. The unexpected result of the 2016 presidential election, and the Islamophobia it endorsed, would usher in a different kind of mourning.

XREF: Connects to the broader literature on the 2016 election's psychological impact on minority communities and the rise of Islamophobia.

Being Muslim in America has always been wrought with scrutiny and suspicion. But the entrance of Trump spelled emboldened Islamophobia, and for conspicuous Muslims like Nora, a far higher likelihood of harm.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on how political rhetoric from the White House legitimizes or intensifies prejudice toward visible minorities.

Muslim Americans like Nora, driven by fear to conform, cover, or conceal their Muslim identity, may diminish the prospect of suspicion from the state or backlash from bigots, but in doing so they are complicit in supporting the very mission Islamophobia aims to advance—eroding and eliminating every manifestation of Islam, until it is gone from America altogether.

DEFINE: The passage reframes concealment of identity not as protective but as participation in the very erasure the prejudice seeks.

“Acting Muslim” today in the United States invites suspicion from the state and maximizes the prospect of backlash from hatemongers. For Muslim Americans who confirm their religious identity by wearing headscarves or Islamic dress, fasting on Ramadan and regularly attending the mosque, merely practicing their First Amendment rights is perilous. Muslim Americans like Nora, driven by fear to conform, cover, or conceal their Muslim identity, may diminish the prospect of suspicion from the state or backlash from bigots, but in doing so they are complicit in supporting the very mission Islamophobia aims to advance—eroding and eliminating every manifestation of Islam, until it is gone from America altogether.

Enslaved Muslims resisted the slave code and rebelled against slave masters before the United States was a sovereign nation. They built roads and railroads, cities and state buildings, without compensation. “After two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal,” they are still denied reparations.

QUESTION: What specific slave rebellions by enslaved Muslims predate the founding of the United States? Worth chasing down for historical detail.

The term "intersectionality" was coined by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw in her landmark law review article, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," Stanford Law Review 43 (1993): 1241, 1244. Crenshaw defines intersectionality as the various ways in which multiple social categories shape the complexity, and determine the vulnerability, of lived experiences.

DEFINE: Intersectionality is defined as the ways multiple social categories shape complexity and determine vulnerability in lived experience. XREF: Connects to broader identity politics scholarship and critical race theory frameworks.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 55. Omi and Winant describe race as "an unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle," and they describe racialization as the use of race as a basis for distinguishing among human groups.

DEFINE: Defines race as a decentered complex of social meanings, not a stable biological category.

Muslim-led rebellions were common in the New World. Wolof and Fulani Muslims spearheaded the first slave revolt in the history of the Americas in Hispaniola in 1522, with subsequent insurrections in present-day Puerto Rico, Panama, and Colombia from 1533 to 1580. These insurrections illustrated the distinct brand of insubordination that emanated from Islamic belief. Since many of the slave codes in the antebellum South were specifically concerned with preempting insurrections, rebellions in the United States were comparatively fewer than in Latin America. However, Muslim slaves did play key roles in the insurrections that took place, including Florida's "Seminole Slave Rebellions" in 1835–1838.

XREF: Connects to broader history of enslaved Muslim Africans in the diaspora, and the distinct religious identity shaping resistance.

Five central responsibilities are required of each Muslim. These "five pillars" include five daily prayers, abstinence from food or drink during the holy month of Ramadan, pilgrimage to the holy sites in Mecca, almsgiving to the poor, and the declaration that there is "only one God, and the Prophet Mohammed is his messenger."

DEFINE: Clearly defines the five pillars of Islam and their constituent practices.

"Many Syrian Muslims sought to pass as Christian in order to be more easily accepted into the United States and to circumvent Ottoman regulations which forbade the emigration of Muslims."

A case involving a Muslim petitioner from Saudi Arabia, Mohamed Mohriez (Ex Parte Mohriez, 54 F. Supp. 941), argued within the District Court of Massachusetts, ended the longstanding Muslim naturalization ban in 1944.

QUESTION: Why did the ban persist so long, and via what legal reasoning did Ex Parte Mohriez finally overturn it?

"From 1948 to 1965, the number of students from Muslim-majority countries in the United States increased more than five-fold from 2,708 to 13,664. The Muslim-majority country that sent the most students to the United States was Iran [then a staunch ally of the United States], followed by Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey. A sizable number of students also came from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia." GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam, p. 264.

"Under these quotas, only 100 immigrants from most Muslim-majority countries were allowed entry into the United States. The quotas did not apply to visitors, foreign students, immediate family members of U.S. citizens, and members of certain professions, such as professors and religious workers." Ibid., p. 292.

"Certain groups may now enjoy nominal citizenship status, but their members are, in fact, afforded less in the way of substantive citizenship than others in society." Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 30.

DEFINE: Distinguishes nominal (formal/legal) citizenship from substantive citizenship (actual rights and treatment), a key conceptual framework drawn from Bosniak.

See Jack G. Shaheen, The TV Arab (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1984), for an analysis of damaging representations of Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners on television and film through 1984. For a more recent study by Shaheen, see Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2014).

XREF: Relates to studies of media representation and orientalism in popular culture.

Principal among "good Muslim" expressions are "denouncing terrorism, supporting the war on terror, and waving the American flag." See also Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Harmony, 2004), for an anthropological examination of the genesis of the good versus bad Muslim binary and its global application.

XREF: Rooted in Mamdani's anthropological framework of the Cold War-era good/bad Muslim binary; connects to broader discourse on how states categorize loyal citizenship through symbolic acts.