Because private citizens are unable to distinguish between Muslim countries, they equate Islam with an ambiguous region of the world. They are unable to distinguish the various nationalities and ethnicities that Muslims comprise. Scholars have shown how Islam is most commonly conflated with the Middle East (Volpp 2003; Naber 2007; Cainkar 2009; Love 2017). Thus South Asians who are identified as Muslim can also be marked as Arab when they wear the hijab, but it is important to note this was not always the case.

XREF: Connects to broader work on racialization and misrecognition of identity, such as studies on how outsider status projects homogeneous categories onto diverse groups.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 259