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.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 187