“In this remarkable primer Deepa Kumar expertly shows how racism is central to contemporary US imperial politics in ways similar to previous imperial wars, including the one that constituted the United States over the dead bodies of indigenous 'redskins.' An antiracist and antiwar activist as well as a model scholar-teacher, Kumar has written a comprehensive and most readable guide to exposing and opposing hatred of Islam.”

Such a long view allows us to see that the image of Muslims and Islam in Europe has gone through a series of shifts and changes that corresponded to changes in the political and social realms. Thus, contrary to the idea that the East-West relationship has always been characterized by conflict or a “clash of civilizations,” I show that anti-Muslim prejudice was consciously constructed and deployed by the ruling elite at particular moments. While ordinary people in Europe did accept these ideas, for instance during the Crusades, they have also resisted them.

XREF: Challenges the 'clash of civilizations' thesis associated with Huntington, contrasting with a constructed/engineered prejudice model.

For Lewis, the relationship between the “Christian West” and “Muslim East” is primarily driven by conflict; this fundamental characteristic of the East-West encounter therefore necessarily persists into the late twentieth century. Chapter 1 sets out to debunk this conception by locating the image of Islam in Europe in its proper historical context.

In the nineteenth century, various European nations set up centers for the study of the Orient from which there emerged a huge body of Orientalist scholarship integrally tied to imperialism and colonization. In this chapter, and throughout the book generally, I focus mainly on the Middle East and North Africa, because it was these regions, due to their proximity to Europe, that largely informed the development of an elite Western vocabulary about “Islam.” After World War II, the United States took over from France and England, both literally and metaphorically. It began to exercise its hegemony in the region through the borrowed language of Orientalism, but also through the vocabulary of capitalist modernization, which was better suited to the new form of imperialism initiated by the United States.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's formative argument that scholarly knowledge production about the East was never politically neutral but directly implicated in colonial power.

Chapter 4 outlines the contradictory policy pursued by the US political elite toward the parties of political Islam. During the Cold War and up until the Iranian revolution of 1979, the United States enthusiastically supported forces that could Islamize the Middle East and serve as a counter to those that posed a challenge to its domination—secular nationalists and the left. In the period after the 1970s, policy makers forged alliances with those Islamists who were on the side of US imperialism and militated against those who refused to play this role. Even after 9/11, when Islamists in general were projected as the arch enemy of the United States, the aforementioned approach would continue.

DEFINE: Explains the distinction between 'good' Islamists (pro-US imperialism) and 'bad' ones (those who refuse that role), a key analytical framework.

Chapter 5 shows that the parties of political Islam are not the natural outgrowths of Muslim-majority societies, as some have argued. As in Christian-majority societies, the (misnamed) “Muslim world” has also seen a separation of religion and politics. Understanding this history allows us to see that political Islam is a contemporary phenomenon. Chapter 6 shows that Islamism, often called Islamic fundamentalism, is the product of particular historic conditions in the late twentieth century that also spurred on the growth of Christian, Hindu, and Jewish fundamentalisms.

XREF: Parallels the argument that modern fundamentalisms across religions share late-twentieth-century historical roots. Links to scholarship on religious resurgence as response to modernity.

Statistically, Americans are more likely to die from a bolt of lightning than from an act of "terror." The focus on "radicalized" Muslim Americans serves not to keep the American people safe, but to whip up a sense of fear and paranoia which can then be used to squash dissent and win consent for violations of civil liberties at home and wars abroad.

QUESTION: Worth chasing the precise statistics on comparative fatalities to verify this claim's sourcing.

In this chapter I argue that the right-wing Islamophobes are not a fringe minority but rather part and parcel of the structures of mainstream American society. Like Senator Joseph McCarthy before them, the new McCarthyites play a collective role in ramping up fear and hatred against Muslims, with the full consent of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Just as McCarthy was enabled by a political system that found his antics useful in the prosecution of the Cold War, the new McCarthyites of today are useful in pushing the envelope and advancing the War on Terror.

XREF: Parallels historical patterns of the Cold War McCarthy era to the War on Terror; the reader may know McCarthy-era history well enough to weigh this analogy critically.

I argue that Islamophobia is about politics rather than religion per se; it therefore needs to be fought on that terrain. There was much hope in the Muslim American community and among sections of the left that an Obama presidency would mitigate, if not eradicate, anti-Muslim racism. Yet, as this concluding chapter shows, this hope for change did not materialize: Obama wholeheartedly adopted and codified Bush-era policies.

Norman Daniel characterizes the first four hundred years of contact (between 700 and 1100 CE) as the "age of ignorance." During this period the West "knew virtually nothing of Islam as a religion. For them Islam was only one of a large number of enemies threatening Christendom from every direction, and they had no interest in distinguishing the primitive idolators of Northmen, Slav, and Magyars from the monotheism of Islam. . . . There is no sign that anyone in northern Europe had even heard the name Mahomet."

QUESTION: When and how did the West first gain accurate knowledge of Islam's actual beliefs and practices? What ended the 'age of ignorance'?

Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France) lasted for eight centuries before the Christians finally drove their Muslim rulers out in 1492. During this period, Christians and Jews were tolerated as "people of the book" and were allowed to practice their religion if they paid a fee. This sustained contact mitigated and tempered the more hostile images.

XREF: Connects to the history of convivencia and interfaith coexistence in medieval Spain, and the financial jizya tax on non-Muslims.

While the rest of Europe was enduring a period of cultural stagnation known as the Dark Ages, al-Andalus, as the Iberian Peninsula came to be known under Muslim rule, saw the growth and development of human knowledge. The works of various great societies, from the Greeks to the Persians, were translated into Arabic in the many libraries created by Muslim rulers (not only in al-Andalus but also in Baghdad under the Abbasid dynasty). One great seat of learning was Córdoba in Spain. Here, as elsewhere, tremendous advances were made in the fields of philosophy, medicine, astronomy, architecture, and even urban development. While the rest of Europe stagnated in darkness, the citizens of Córdoba enjoyed streetlights and running water.

XREF: Connects to the broader historical reassessment of the 'Dark Ages' myth and the Golden Age of Islam under the Abbasids and in al-Andalus.

The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic [sic]. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or apostles? Alas! all talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian language as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.

QUESTION: Which era and region does this refer to exactly? Likely early medieval Spain or a Muslim-ruled territory under Visigothic or Mozarabic Christianity.

María Rosa Menocal, who has studied the intersections of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thought in al-Andalus, argues that this society, particularly its intellectual and artistic realms, was characterized by convivencia, or coexistence in relative peace. And while this age was not free of conflict—as Menocal's detractors have noted—it nevertheless serves as an example of tolerance and relative harmony between peoples of various faiths.

DEFINE: Explains the term convivencia as coexistence in relative peace between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in al-Andalus.

Various Muslim empires not only initiated a period of translation of the great works of various cultures but also oversaw a period of development. For instance, Muslim scholars built on Persian and Greek scientific concepts, and their work then paved the way for the Renaissance and the development of modern science.

Translated Arabic writings on medicine, mathematics, astronomy and other sciences were for centuries used as textbooks in medieval Europe, while the writings of Muslim philosophers like Ibn Sina (980–1037, known in the West as Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (1126–98, known as Averroes), and Jewish philosophers who wrote mainly in Arabic like Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, 1135–1204), were eagerly read and discussed and influenced several generations of medieval Christian philosophers and theologians.

XREF: Connects to the broader narrative of cross-cultural intellectual exchange between the Islamic world and medieval Europe, relevant to histories of science and philosophy transmission.

By this point, however, Muslims were no longer one enemy among many; the other pagan raiders (such as the Normans and Magyars) that had relentlessly invaded Christian Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries had been converted and integrated. The only enemy that remained was the Muslims. This is not to suggest, however, that Europe was united and at peace. Rather, Islam became a convenient “other” to mobilize support for the territorial ambitions of various rulers.

This charge wasn’t simply, or even primarily, about religion. As John Esposito explains, “For the Pope, the call to the defense of the faith and Jerusalem provided an ideal opportunity to gain recognition for papal authority and its role in legitimating temporal rulers, and to reunite the Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) churches.” Religion became the screen behind which social and economic conflicts were played out. To be sure, it was not just Muslims who were killed by the crusaders: systematic pogroms were carried out against Jews in Europe, and Christians in the Byzantine Empire were also mercilessly slaughtered.

What Christians now confronted was a religion that was similar to theirs but that challenged the primacy of their belief system. The God of Christianity is the same God of Abraham worshiped in Islam, but Christianity claims that God’s revelation in Jesus marked the end of revelation and of prophecy. Islam makes a similar claim but argues that Muhammad was the last prophet who received the final and correct Word of God.

XREF: Connects to shared Abrahamic roots and the theological rivalry that shaped medieval Christian-Muslim relations.

However, Jews weren’t marching armies into Christian capitals. They were not a threat to the elites in the way the Muslim empires were. Thus, as Richard Southern suggests, it was easy for Christianity to dismiss the Jewish challenge because of the “economic and social inferiority of the Jews.” In other words, Jews did not have the social, economic, or political power to threaten Christendom.

XREF: Relates to the asymmetry between how Christendom treated the Muslim empires (as military-political rivals) versus the Jewish community (as socially inferior), echoing broader patterns of how powerlessness invites dismissal.

Norman Daniel has conducted one of the most authoritative studies on the image of Islam generated by the intellectual elite in the West from the early twelfth century to the middle of the fourteenth. His book Islam and the West shows that key among their various lines of attack was the argument that Islam’s revelations were “pseudo-prophecies,” based not only on the authority of Christian scriptures but also on the notion that Muhammad could not be a prophet. Instead, Muhammad was cast as “a low-born and pagan upstart, who schemed himself into power, who maintained it by pretended revelations, and who spread it both by violence and by permitting to others the same lascivious practices he indulged himself.” We see at this stage the association of Islam with violence, a theme that would recur over the centuries.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism thesis about Western misrepresentations of Islam persisting through centuries.

For Christians, marriage meant a union with one partner, dissoluble only by death—they thus pointed to Muhammad’s multiple wives as proof of his perversion. (Abraham’s multiple wives, however, were left out of the debate.) Islam permitted men to take four wives, allowed divorce, and even allowed divorced women to remarry. Christians viewed this with horror.

XREF: Typical example of selective comparison between religious traditions, where critics of one faith overlook similar features in their own.

Just as during the early conquests of the Muslim armies in the seventh and eighth centuries, some people in Christian states welcomed the Turks in order to escape religious persecution, this time at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. The Ottoman policy of “live and let live” stood in contrast to the intolerance that Orthodox Christians and other religious minorities faced under the Church. Balkan peasants captured this mood with the saying “Better the turban of the Turk than the tiara of the Pope.”

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of religious minorities choosing more tolerant overlords, parallel to earlier Muslim conquest welcome.

However, this time the enemy was viewed in secular terms and seen as a political rather than a religious threat (even though the term “Turk” became synonymous with Muslim).

The new Muslim enemy was now seen as part of Europe rather than as an outsider. The threat it posed to its neighbors was seen not as a religious one; rather, it was the threat represented by a powerful, arguably the most powerful, European state. Indeed, the Turks were by and large considered to be ethnically European. One theory suggested that they were, like the French and the Italians, descendants of the Trojans.

DEFINE: A theory traced Turkish origins to the Trojans, framing them as European descendants alongside French and Italians.

A French king allied himself with a Turkish sultan against the Habsburg Empire; the Pope similarly forged an alliance opposing the Habsburg emperor’s plans for a crusade against the Ottomans. Jews fleeing Europe, particularly after their expulsion from Spain in 1492, found a home in the Ottoman Empire. This was true too of Protestants and other dissident Christians seeking to escape Catholic persecution. In short, the diversity that marked al-Andalus found its reflection in the Ottoman territories; Christians and Jews not only lived in an atmosphere of tolerance but also experienced prosperity.

XREF: Connects to the book's broader comparison between al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire's treatment of religious minorities.

Europe, by contrast, was going through a bitter and violent conflict between Protestants and Catholics. The first half of the sixteenth century saw the emergence of the Reformation. This internal dissent within Christianity created a climate where Islam came to be seen as yet another schism, albeit a dangerous one. Thus, even while Martin Luther, who led the Protestant Reformation, had negative things to say about Islam, he viewed the Vatican as the greater enemy. For Luther, only after the defeat of Catholicism could Islam be beaten.

XREF: This reframes Luther's relationship with Islam — many assume he was uniformly anti-Islamic, but his agenda was primarily anti-Catholic.

The origin of this myth is based in Europe’s transformation and its subsequent rise to global dominance. Up until 1500 or so, Europe was a marginal player on the world stage relative to other great powers (such as the Ottomans, Chinese, and Indians). It overcame its backwardness thanks in no small part to the rise of capitalism. The question of the origins of capitalism is a complex and hotly debated issue, and I will not discuss it here. For our purposes, let me state that the growth of capitalism conferred various advantages—technological, military, communication, and so on—which led first to European dominance over world trade and then eventually to colonialism and imperialism.

The trend toward the exotic was fueled by the growth of Romanticism, an artistic and philosophical movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The image of an exotic Orient associated with “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, [and] intense energy” can be found in the works of musicians, painters, novelists, and philosophers from Mozart to Byron, Hugo, and Goethe. To be fair, the Romantics did not only look to the East for the exotic: they also looked to their own past, drawing from Gothic tales and stories of European barbarians.

DEFINE: Clarifies Romanticism as an 18th-19th century artistic and philosophical movement that popularized exotic imagery.

The Enlightenment saw the birth of scholarship on Islam that was both realistic and sympathetic. For instance, in contrast to the vicious medieval demonization of Muhammad, several philosophers published tracts arguing that Muhammad was not an impostor. Voltaire defended Muhammad as a great thinker and founder of a rational religion even as he (and other Enlightenment critics of organized religion) condemned Islam quite acerbically. Daniel explains Voltaire’s contradictory stances: “We must say that Voltaire first thought an attack on Islam useful for an attack on religion generally; and later saw the advantage of treating the facts less passionately, in order to recommend natural religion at the expense of Christian belief.”

QUESTION: Voltaire's contradictory treatment of Islam — first attacking it to attack religion generally, then treating facts less passionately — warrants deeper exploration of his rhetorical strategy.

This chapter outlined some of the key shifts in the European image of Islam from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries. This journey through history shows us that at first, between the eighth and eleventh centuries, Muslim incursions into Europe were viewed no differently from other pagan invasions. In fact, the Saracens were believed to be descendants of Abraham and therefore from the same “family” as Christians and Jews. Yet once other pagans integrated into Christian Europe, the powerful Muslim enemy became an “other” that had to be vanquished through holy wars. The papacy sought to unite a fractious Europe under the banner of Christianity as a way to advance its power.

SEED: A counterintuitive historical angle: the construction of religious 'otherness' was a political tool of the papacy, not a natural outcome. Could make an essay on how identity boundaries shift with power interests.

When Europe, spiritually united under the leadership of the Vatican, began to fracture along national lines, the focus shifted away from the Muslim enemy. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries therefore saw a turn away from polemic toward indifference—until the Ottoman Empire began to advance into Europe in the early sixteenth century, heralding a new threat. This time, however, the enemy was seen as a secular and political threat rather than a religious one. The Ottomans were presented as Europeans of sorts and admired for their many accomplishments; European rulers forged alliances with them against other European rivals.

XREF: Connects to early modern European diplomatic history and the shift from crusading ideology to realpolitik in interstate relations.

In short, contrary to the myth that the West and the East have always been in conflict, conflict has in fact coexisted with cooperation. Far from the notion that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” what we have seen is that the histories of the East and the West, to the extent we can even talk about a singular East and West, are deeply intertwined. At the very least we have to say that such broad geographical and religious characterizations as “Islam and the West” are extremely problematic—not least because the Christian Byzantine Empire thrived in the lands designated as “the East” up until the fifteenth century, and Muslim rule in al-Andalus lasted for about eight hundred years. Thus, the notion of a transhistoric “clash of civilizations” between a united Christian West and a Muslim East is highly flawed.

XREF: Directly challenges Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' thesis and Kipling's 'East is East' line, both of which the reader likely knows.

The history outlined in this chapter also shows that “the West” has not uniformly harbored negative images of Islam. During moments of conflict, political elites mobilized Islamophobia as a means to advance their larger agendas, whether papal supremacy over Europe or the expansionist ambitions of Christian rulers. Islam-bashing has been a useful tool in power politics for a very long time.

XREF: Connects to SAID-style analysis of how discourse serves power interests.

In 1795, the School of Living Oriental Languages was established in Paris. When Napoleon invaded Egypt a few years later, he was able to take with him Orientalists whose knowledge could be put to use for colonial purposes. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 stands out as the first instance when knowledge about the native people became central to a colonizing mission.

XREF: Connects to wider critiques of orientalism and how academic knowledge has historically served imperial power.

This is not to say that knowledge about the enemy was not essential in earlier periods. Even during medieval times, European rulers gathered accurate information about Muslim kingdoms through spies, officials, and informants in order to develop martial strategies. They did not, of course, share this knowledge with the public. Instead, they used the vitriolic rhetoric of the Holy Wars to motivate the Crusades and the Reconquista. While this general method persists even in the twenty-first century, what Napoleon's invasion inaugurated was the systematic use of scholarly knowledge to serve the needs of empire, both abroad and at home.

Other than the obvious fabrications about the French being Muslims and destroying the papacy, what is noteworthy about this manifesto is its attempt to win over Egyptians through praise for Islam. Napoleon repeatedly insisted that he was fighting for Islam. He invited sixty Muslim scholars from al-Azhar to his quarters and impressed them with his knowledge of and respect for the Koran. Everything that Napoleon said was translated for popular consumption into Koranic Arabic. This strategy worked: the people of Cairo lost their distrust of the French colonizers.

XREF: Connects to broader colonial strategies of adapting to local culture for political control.

This work resulted in the publication of Description of Egypt, a compendium in twenty-three volumes published between 1809 and 1828. Its detailed information on every aspect of Egyptian society, from monuments to facial structures, was created for use not by Egyptians but by the French. While there is much accurate and valuable information in the Description, the important point that Said makes is that such vast knowledge was amassed without the input of the native people. This account of Egypt, Said argues, served to displace Egypt's own sense of itself and its place in the world in favor of a French colonial vision of the same. It was ultimately created to help the French dominate the Egyptians.

XREF: Connects directly to Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader postcolonial critique of how Western scholarship constructed the Orient.

The French, naturally, did not see their conquest in such base terms as control and domination. Rather, as the quote from Napoleon's manifesto suggests, their goal was to restore Egypt to its glorious past of "great cities" and "wide canals." France would, they thought, save a once-great country from ruin and show the natives what they once were and could become again under French tutelage. This paternalistic logic became more developed as the European colonial mission grew; Rudyard Kipling immortalized it in his 1899 poem "The White Man's Burden." Its French variant, mission civilisatrice, was used to great success to win domestic consent for colonial conquests in a nation founded on the ideas of liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, and fraternity).

DEFINE: Explains mission civilisatrice as the French colonial justification rooted in paternalistic rescue rhetoric. XREF: Connects to Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden' and the broader pattern of colonial ideology across European empires.

Prior to the nineteenth century, European colonialism was explained primarily through the lens of Christianity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans justified their slaughter and exploitation of the “Indians” in the New World through the argument that the Indian “savages” were wild animals, idolaters whom God had ordained to be dominated by Christians. They similarly justified their enslavement of Africans through the book of Genesis, arguing that Africans were a cursed people (drawn from the myth of the curse of Ham) whose black skin color marked their curse. The “curse” conveniently meant that even African slaves who converted to Christianity could still be retained as slaves.

By the nineteenth century, however, this Enlightenment universalism was rapidly being replaced by an emphasis on differences between people and civilizations. Europe developed what Etienne Balibar calls an “imperialist superiority complex.”

XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory and the shift from Enlightenment universalism to racial/civilizational hierarchy discourse common in later thinkers like Said.

A widely accepted theory in the nineteenth century was that human society was divided into different and distinct civilizations which existed in isolation from each other, each driven by its own core set of values. This theory held that the West, as a unique civilization with roots in ancient Greece, had certain qualities that differentiated it from all other civilizations. These included “freedom, law, rationality, science, progress, intellectual curiosity, and the spirit of invention, adventure and enterprise.” Every other civilization was then defined in relation to this notion of a superior “West.” Predictably, the world of Islam was characterized as premodern, backward, primitive, despotic, static, undemocratic, and rigid.

It followed from this that Islam, as defined by its classical texts, was the key lens through which Muslim-majority societies could be understood. If women were oppressed it was because of the teachings of the Koran; if Muslims supposedly lacked an entrepreneurial spirit it was due to “Islamic tradition”; if modernization was rejected, again the Koran was to blame. In short, a whole host of characteristics associated with the West but allegedly absent from the “Muslim world” could be explained by recourse to religious texts and the mentalities they supposedly created. In this book, the term “Muslim world” has been put in quotation marks precisely to challenge the notion that Islam is the single most important factor in defining the people who live in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, or that there is a single undifferentiated entity called the “Muslim world.”

DEFINE: Introduces the author's challenge to the conventional framing of a monolithic 'Muslim world' defined by religious texts. XREF: Connects to broader critiques of orientalism and single-factor explanations in area studies.

Starting from this idea that Muslims are a race, Orientalists claimed to be able to explain the “Muslim mind” or the “Arab mind.” Because race-based theories assume that the members of a race are all alike, scholars within this tradition could make sweeping generalizations about how Muslims think and behave. Most of all, the “Muslim mind” was disparaged; as the British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote, “You’ll never plumb the Oriental mind. And even if you do, it won’t be worth the toil.”

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader critical race theory about how racial categories enable sweeping dismissive generalizations.

In the late nineteenth century, when Kipling wrote “The White Man’s Burden,” he was simply reinforcing an idea that was by then widespread. Kipling wrote of the inherent superiority of the West and its “burden” to civilize and tame the peoples of the East. Characterized as “half devil, half child,” the colonized were seen both as evil and barbaric and as childlike and therefore in need of protection. When the poem was originally published, Kipling used the subtitle “The United States and the Philippine Islands” as a way to urge the Americans to take on the same responsibilities as the British.

In sum, the Orientalist view of the East as it emerged in the nineteenth century was based on a racial and civilizational vilification of Muslims. This is not, however, to suggest that Orientalist scholarship existed or was used in colonial contexts without contradiction. There were Orientalists who rejected notions of racial superiority; at the same time, however, they agreed that race was a useful category of analysis. There were those who admired Islam and others who disparaged it; some actively aided the colonial mission while others saw themselves as producing objective knowledge. Orientalist ideas were used differently in various contexts. Put simply, the relationship between Orientalist thought and the project of empire-building is complex.

XREF: Recalls Edward Said's Orientalism and the debate over whether all Orientalist scholarship uniformly served empire-building.

Modern-day Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington have argued that the conflict between the United States and the Middle East is a “clash of civilizations.” According to Huntington, who has done much to popularize this notion, “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic societies.”

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's critique of Orientalism and the broader clash-of-civilizations debate; this is the thesis this author is positioned against.

Greater familiarity with the Middle East in the nineteenth century came from visitors to the Holy Land and from missionaries. Mark Twain, who went on to become a staunch anti-imperialist, wrote in 1869 about his trip to the Holy Land in a book titled The Innocents Abroad, which sold nearly a hundred thousand copies. While Twain witheringly (and hilariously) critiqued his fellow travelers for their hubris and lack of cultural sensitivity—a characteristic of American tourists that would continue into the next century and become grist for the Hollywood mill—he also had harsh words to say about Muslims. He called them “a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive [and] superstitious,” and saw the Ottomans as “a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, [and] Blood.”

XREF: Connects to broader history of orientalism and how Western impressions of the Middle East were formed long before modern geopolitics.

The government and private foundations began to sponsor and fund “area studies” programs and departments that focused on the study of not only the Near East but also more broadly Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was in this context that US universities turned toward the production of knowledge instrumental to serving the needs of empire. Two approaches guided the study of the Middle East: Orientalism, which was still dominated by philologists, and social scientific research, from which a new model known as “modernization” would be developed.

XREF: Connects to critiques of academic knowledge production as instrumental to state power, echoing discussions of institutionalized scholarship.

The United States, however, could not simply accept in toto the language of the old empires. Its own anticolonial history meant that there were voices in the political sphere that resisted the mantle of imperialism. Even though it entered the imperial arena with the Spanish-American War of 1898, the “issue of self-rule was so deeply emplaced in the national psyche,” Sidney Lens writes, that “an anti-imperialist opposition . . . began to form.” The Anti-Imperialist League, founded in November of 1898, included not only figures like Mark Twain but also prominent mainstream politicians. This trend of opposition in the mainstream was mitigated over the course of the twentieth century; nevertheless, it gave rise to an image of the United States as being a different kind of world power—different, that is, from the “old-style imperialism” of Europe.

XREF: Connects to Cold War framing where the US positioned itself against European colonialism even while exercising global power.

The Truman and Eisenhower administrations therefore claimed to support anticolonial national liberation movements; concretely, they announced their intention to aid developing nations by supporting projects that would build infrastructure and foster economic growth. But this economic aid came at a price—they demanded political allegiance. For instance, the United States first sought to bring Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt under its wing through promises of financial aid. Nasser flirted with the Soviet Union, though, and the Eisenhower administration punished him by reneging on its promise to provide funding for the construction of a dam in Aswan. Nasser promptly nationalized the Suez Canal, which led Britain, France, and Israel to launch a war on Egypt. The United States (and the USSR) then intervened on Nasser’s side, allowing Egypt to finally get rid of its former colonial master—Britain. This example reveals the carrot-and-stick approach that the American elite employed again and again during the Cold War: using monetary incentives to win allies, punishing them when they strayed, but also acting to weaken the hold of former colonizer nations when possible.

Secretary of state John Foster Dulles said of the Suez crisis that what “the British and French have done is nothing but the straight, old-fashioned variety of colonialism of the most obvious sort.” In contrast, the United States crafted a new model of imperialism on the basis of what Melani McAlister has called “benevolent supremacy.” This model was premised on the notion that an American-dominated world would ensure liberty and democracy for all through the mechanism of free-market capitalism.

XREF: Connects to the concept of American exceptionalism and the Wilsonian tradition in U.S. foreign policy.

Overall, few if any questioned the premise that research on the Middle East (and in area studies in general) should be tailored to meet the needs of the US government. This was the dominant trend until the 1970s. At that point, various factors, particularly the impact of successful national liberation struggles on the field of Middle East studies, led to a flurry of books and articles critical of both Orientalism and modernization theory.

XREF: Connects to the broader critique of area studies as a Cold War instrument, echoing Edward Said's Orientalism and postcolonial scholarship. SEED: Possible angle: how national liberation movements reshaped academic fields — the intellectual fallout of decolonization on Western knowledge production.

Since the events of 9/11, politicians and the media have not just promoted Islamophobia—they've turned the dial up to eleven. This rhetoric was not invented after September 2001; it has a long history, as we saw in the previous two chapters. This chapter will examine some images of Muslims that have persisted to the point of becoming "common sense"—ideas which are believed to be true and so obvious that they need no verification. In particular, we will look at five myths about Islam and Muslims. I use the term "myth" for both its meanings—as a traditional story of supposedly historic events that shed light on the worldview of a people, and as a false and questionable story. Myths about Islam in the twenty-first century are indeed historical, but they are based on a distorted or selective interpretation of the past.

XREF: Connects to prior chapters establishing the historical roots of anti-Muslim rhetoric; a useful thread for understanding continuity vs. escalation.

While today only those on the far right would claim that Islam is a false religion, it is often taken for granted that Islam is homogenous. This is in large part because Orientalists, like their medieval counterparts, propagated the myth that Islam is a monolith that can be fully understood through its classical texts. Only working from such an assumption can anyone make claims about a static entity called "Muslim civilization" with a core set of unchanging values, or about the "Muslim mind" (viewed, of course, in the singular, as though all Muslims shared a hive mind). It is only by denying the diversity of Islamic history and practices that one can then argue that Islam has certain inherent, unchanging characteristics that render it antidemocratic, violent, sexist, and so on. The myths discussed in this chapter emerge from this core assumption that Islam is a monolith.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader critiques of essentialist portrayals of non-Western cultures.

Even a cursory look at the practice of Islam around the world shows this myth to be patently false. One and a half billion people around the world are Muslims—85 percent are Sunni and 15 percent are Shi'a. Within these two main denominations, there are many more branches. Muslim-majority countries and regions span the globe, from Indonesia to Bangladesh to several central Asian countries, the Middle East, and North Africa. In most of these countries Islam is the dominant religion, hence the term "Muslim-majority countries." But these countries are also home to Christians, Jews, and people of other faiths, as well as atheists. India, a predominantly Hindu country, is home to more than a hundred million Muslims.

DEFINE: Explains 'Muslim-majority countries' as distinct from claiming entire populations are Muslim, since these countries also contain Christians, Jews, and atheists.

Islam looks different in each of these regions and countries, largely because as it spread, people imbued it with their own local customs and traditions. The Sufi Islam practiced in northern India is quite different from the Shi'a Islam practiced in Lebanon, which is in turn different from the Sunni Islam practiced in Pakistan. Even within a single branch of Islam there are customs and practices that vary by region and across time. Thus, the Islam of seventh-century Arabia is different from the Wahhabism that exists today in Saudi Arabia. Religious texts may be more or less fixed, but all of the world's religions, including Islam, have changed and adapted based on historical transformations.

Much of the current Islamophobic rhetoric seeks to demonize Arabs in particular. As we saw in the example at the start of this chapter, Obama was "accused" of being an Arab, which is shorthand for "Muslim" in some quarters. Let us note, therefore, a simple point: all Muslims are not Arabs, and all Arabs are not Muslims. Arabs are people who speak Arabic, share certain common cultural traditions, and claim a common Arab ethnic identity. Geographically, the Arab world has traditionally been divided into two parts: the Maghreb or the West, which includes Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, and other countries west of the Nile, and the Mashreq or the East, which includes Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and all the countries to the east of the Nile up to, but not including, Iran. Because of linguistic and cultural differences, Iranians and Turks are not considered Arabs.

DEFINE: Clarifies the conflation of Arabness with Muslim identity, distinguishing linguistic/ethnic Arab identity from religious affiliation.

Thus, if we actually look, even briefly as we have above, at the diversity of the people who follow Islam, we find not only that there is no biological or ethnic basis for homo islamicus but that the notion of a monolithic Islam immediately falls on its face. So too does the Orientalist claim that there is a transhistoric "Islamic civilization" which is based on a core set of values and from which one can explain a host of contemporary phenomena. Yet this is precisely the logic we will find at work in the following myths, which assert that Islam is inherently sexist, irrational, violent, and undemocratic. The homogenization of Islam and of Muslims is so taken for granted that it functions as the basis of all of the other myths.

DEFINE: Contrasts the empirical diversity of Muslims against the Orientalist construct of 'homo islamicus' and a transhistoric 'Islamic civilization'.

While sexually repressed Europe was fascinated and titillated by Muslim marriage customs even during medieval times, there was no systematic discussion of women and Islam until the nineteenth century. Commenting on Europe's nineteenth-century obsession with Muslim women, one scholar stated that there "is no subject connected with Islam which Europeans have thought more important than the condition of Muslim women." The dominant narrative that emerged was one that presented Muslim women as severely subjugated, oppressed, and little more than slaves. Just as the Muslim despots tyrannized their subjects, it was argued, they also tyrannized their wives and daughters. As various scholars have shown, in reality the European men who wrote about the plight of Muslim women had little access to these women to verify their assumptions. Coterminous accounts by Western women of the Muslim women they encountered reveal a more complex reality. Nevertheless, this narrative of the oppressed brown woman serviced the colonial enterprise. Western men could now ride off in their jodhpurs and pith helmets to rescue them.

XREF: Echoes Gayatri Spivak's 'white men saving brown women from brown men' thesis and postcolonial critiques of orientalism.

One pith-helmeted English gentleman who rose to the occasion was Evelyn Baring, first Earl of Cromer, more famously known as Lord Cromer. When Britain invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882, Cromer was entrusted to oversee the occupation. He wrote that "Islam as a social system has been a complete failure. . . . The degradation of women in the East is a canker that begins its destructive work early in childhood, and has eaten into the whole system of Islam." The solution was that Muslims "be persuaded or forced into imbibing the true spirit of western civilization." At home, this champion of Egyptian women's rights worked feverishly to deny British women the right to vote as a founding member and president of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage. This was not a contradiction for Cromer, who was a social conservative at home but an enlightened colonizer abroad. As a colonial overlord, he was not putting forward a statement of principle but rather simply deploying arguments useful to the colonial mission.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques of 'saving brown women from brown men' (Spivak) and how colonial rhetoric co-opts liberation discourse. QUESTION: How widely did this pattern recur across other British colonial holdings, and what rhetorical strategies parallel it today in humanitarian intervention discourse?

Despite this reality, the logic that Muslim women are oppressed and therefore need to be rescued by the West continues to hold ground. The Islamic veil has been the subject of much controversy. Seen ubiquitously as a symbol of Muslim women's oppression, the veil has been banned, scorned, or otherwise used to advance the aforementioned colonial argument. In April 2011, the French government recycled this argument when it banned women from wearing the veil in public—running roughshod over religious freedom in the process. Absent from this discourse are the voices of Muslim women themselves, who could construct an alternative narrative—one which speaks to a self-conscious choice made by autonomous individuals.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial feminist critiques of Western savior narratives and the discourse on agency within veil-wearing.

As Islam spread, it adopted the cultural practices of various empires, including those of the neighboring Persian and Byzantine empires. The Christians who populated the Middle East and the Mediterranean had more rigid customs associated with women. In the Christian Byzantine Empire, the sexes were segregated. Women were not to be seen in public, were veiled, and were given only rudimentary education. As the expanding Islamic empire incorporated these regions, it also assimilated these cultural and social practices. In other words, the particular misogynistic practices that Islam came to adopt were largely inherited from the Christian and Jewish religious customs of the neighboring societies Muslims conquered. The significant point here is that sexist attitudes toward women, far from being unique to Islam, were prevalent among Christians and Jews as well.

XREF: The idea that conquering societies adopt the cultural practices of conquered regions echoes broader theories of cultural assimilation and religious syncretism beyond this Islamic context. QUESTION: Worth probing the historical strength of this inheritance claim — how did Byzantine practices compare to pre-Islamic Arabian customs around women?

Renan made sweeping generalizations about the “narrow minds” of people who live in the East and in Africa, who because of their adherence to Islam are an intellectually barren race. What we see here are not only racist assertions about Muslims but also the idea that Islam has stunted scientific growth. When challenged to explain the flourishing of science in Islamic empires in the Middle Ages, Renan replied that the Arabs, like other “Semites,” were incapable of science. The Abbasid caliphate, he added, was essentially Greek and Persian, even if it used Arabic. Thus, it was the “Aryans” who were responsible for this flowering of science.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of 19th-century orientalism and racialized accounts of scientific progress, e.g., Said's Orientalism.

While today such blatantly racist arguments as Cromer’s are advanced only by those on the far right, it isn’t hard to see how the overall logic of irrationality pervades many discussions. Often, those who are seen as “terrorists” are presented as crazed, irrational, and fanatical: as individuals who commit untold horrors with no clear reason or motivation. Palestinian suicide bombers, for instance, are presented as rabid lunatics rather than as people driven to extreme measures under conditions of occupation. Terrorists cannot be reasoned with; rather, we are told, they are driven by irrational motivations and must therefore be put on “kill lists.”

XREF: Connects to broader literature on dehumanization and how framing adversaries as irrational licenses violence, echoing works on propaganda and the political uses of the irrationality trope. SEED: Potential essay: how labeling opponents 'irrational' preempts negotiation and legitimizes extrajudicial violence across conflicts, from terror to asylum policy.

The debate on whether Iran should be allowed to have nuclear weapons draws from these arguments. Republican candidate and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani argued that “the reality is the use of military force against Iran would be very dangerous. . . . It would be very provocative. The only thing worse would be Iran being a nuclear power. It’s the worst nightmare of the Cold War, isn’t it? The nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational person, an irrational force. Ahmadinejad is clearly irrational.” These lines of demarcation are familiar: “irrational” Iran and the “rational” West. Little discussion is devoted to why Iran, as a rational political actor, might want to acquire nuclear weapons; it is, after all, surrounded by nuclear powers such as India, Pakistan, China, Russia, and Israel, and by US bases in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan, any of which might harbor nuclear weapons.

XREF: Connects to security dilemma theory and nuclear proliferation debates, where states seek weapons for security rather than irrational aggression.

During the seventh century, while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, Islam came onto the scene and Muslim armies established a vast empire that stretched from Central Asia through parts of Europe all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. The Muslim rulers of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties (661–1258 CE) recognized the advanced development of the kingdoms and cultures they had conquered and took it upon themselves to assimilate and adopt these cultures. They established libraries and translation centers where the great works of science, medicine, and philosophy, both Eastern and Western, were collected and translated. This age of translation was followed by a period of great creativity as a new generation of Muslim thinkers and scientists built upon this knowledge and made their own contributions.

XREF: Connects to narratives of the Islamic Golden Age and the transmission of Greek texts into Europe via translation movements.

The Persian scholar Ibn Sina—known in Western histories as Avicenna—laid the basis for the study of logic, science, philosophy, politics, and medicine. Ibn Rushd systematized Aristotle’s thought so as to introduce rationalism and antimysticism to a new audience; he also went beyond Aristotle to promote rational thought as a virtue in itself. Ibn Rawandi wrote several books questioning the basic principles not only of Christianity and Judaism but of Islam as well. Ibn Rawandi belonged to the Mu’tazilite sect, which went so far as to question whether the Koran was really a collection of the revelations that Muhammad received from God. They used rationalist thinking, fragments of Greek philosophy, and their own observations to develop theories to explain the physical world. In short, science thrived in the world of the Islamic empires.

XREF: Connect to the broader historical narrative about the Islamic Golden Age and its role in preserving and transmitting Greek knowledge to medieval Europe.

It is also significant that the Pope, in denouncing Islam for lacking reason, failed to bring up the Catholic Church’s hostile opposition to the scientific revolution and to the birth of nonreligious and rational ways of understanding the world. The scientific revolution and, more broadly, the Enlightenment stood in opposition to Christian dogma and were viewed as a threat by the Church. Scientists who employed reason and rationality to explain the physical world were severely punished. Giordano Bruno, who championed the Copernican system of astronomy, was imprisoned for eight years by the Roman and Venetian Inquisitions for refusing to recant his beliefs. He was later burned at the stake. Galileo was similarly brought before the Inquisition and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

XREF: Connects to Galileo's trial and Bruno's execution, classic cases of religion vs science conflict often covered in history and science narratives.

The Pope’s speech is deeply rooted in Orientalist myths; it presents a particular vision of a rational and enlightened “West” while obscuring Christianity’s own history of violence. He quotes the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, who said, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” It is ironic that Joseph Ratzinger—who was elected Pope Benedict XVI after serving as head of the Vatican office of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Inquisition)—could denounce the spreading of religion through violence and face little or no criticism. This is in no small part due to another deeply entrenched myth: that Islam is at its core a violent religion.

XREF: Connects to Said's Orientalism and broader postcolonial critiques of how the West narrates its own history.

This myth has a long history. As we saw in chapter 1, its origins go back to the eleventh century and the start of the Crusades. One contemporary echo can be found in a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. This cartoon featured the Prophet with a bomb on his turban, implying that Islam came into being with violence at its core. Muslims around the world protested angrily, but thanks to the actions of a small number of Islamists, the protests were interpreted in the West not as legitimate offense against an ancient slur but as a dogmatic response to the publishing of an image of the Prophet. Liberal columnists endorsed this position, defending the cartoonists on the grounds of free speech, and many US newspapers carried the cartoon on the same grounds, without recognizing or acknowledging that the cartoon itself endorsed the myth of an inherently violent Islam.

XREF: Connects the historical trope (Crusades-era origins) to the contemporary Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy, showing how an old slander resurfaces in modern media.

The claim that Islam was spread through war in the initial stages after its emergence in Arabia is indeed accurate. In the two decades after the Prophet's death in 632 CE, Muslim armies defeated its two great neighbors, the Byzantine and Persian (Sassanid) Empires, conquered large segments of their land, and set up an Islamic empire. They were able to defeat these two powerful empires because constant warfare between the Byzantines and the Persians over the previous century had left the people war-weary. In other words, war was a constant fact of life at the time. In fact, some villages welcomed the Muslim armies. Once in power the Muslim invaders gave their subjects the choice of either converting to Islam or paying a tax (unlike their Orthodox Christian counterparts, who persecuted heretics and ruled through fear, intimidation, and terror).

XREF: Connects to broader counter-narratives about Islamic expansion and the myth of forced conversion by the sword.

During the First Crusade in 1099, crusaders launched a killing spree after taking control of Jerusalem, murdering almost the entire population of Muslim men, women, and children. The Jews, who fought side by side with the Muslims to defend the city, were not spared either. The crusaders set fire to a synagogue in which Jews had taken refuge and made sure that every one of them burned to death. This was not an anomaly: crusaders passing through Germany en route to Jerusalem had murdered Jews in cold blood. Christians were among the victims. When the crusaders attacked Constantinople in 1203, "for three days and nights, the Crusaders murdered, raped, looted or destroyed everyone and everything they could get their hands on. Untold thousands perished; many more were brutalized, maimed and left homeless." King Richard of England (known as Richard the Lionheart) beheaded thousands of men in full view of their armies after a battle. In contrast, after Saladin, the sultan of Egypt, successfully retook Jerusalem from the crusaders, he forbade acts of vengeance and violence against the crusaders, gave Jews state money to rebuild synagogues, and left churches untouched.

XREF: Connects to broader historical debates on crusader violence versus Muslim conduct toward conquered populations. QUESTION: The one-sided framing (crusader atrocities vs. Saladin's mercy) may warrant further scrutiny of sources and balance.

Looking at Christianity's brutal history today, one might well advance an argument that all Catholics are bloodthirsty fanatics. Indeed, this logic would be analogous to the argument that Islam is inherently violent and that Muslims have a "predisposition" toward violence. Yet such a generalization is unthinkable. To my knowledge, no mainstream newspaper or magazine has drawn a straight line between the Crusades and the Nazi Holocaust of Jews, let alone between the birth of Christ and various acts of terrorism committed by Christian fundamentalists. Furthermore, as Talal Asad argues, the same people who call the actions of suicide bombers unjustified legitimize the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands. In short, only the violence of certain groups is highlighted and coded as a product of those groups' religious affinity.

XREF: Echoes the broader critical-theory argument about asymmetric attribution of violence to Muslims versus Christians, familiar from Said's Orientalism and post-9/11 discourse critiques. SEED: Could become an essay on how selective religious attribution of violence shapes policy and public fear — the asymmetry between how Christian and Muslim violence is framed.

As we have seen, the notion of "Oriental despotism" was developed in the eighteenth century by writers like Montesquieu, who argued that the hot climate of the East made Orientals supine and submissive and thus unable to resist tyranny. The Orientalists gave this theory academic credibility by stating that despotism was one of the core values of "Islamic civilization." And modernization theory would make it even more scientific by suggesting that "traditional" societies were characterized by hierarchical systems of power. Since, these theorists argued, change would never come from within, it was the burden of the West to civilize, modernize, and democratize the East. This "white man's burden" argument has been used, in different forms and guises, by every imperial power since.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the genealogy of the white man's burden across successive imperial powers.

First of all, look at the facts of the case. Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government . . . having merits of their own. . . . You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government. All their great centuries—and they have been very great—have been passed under despotisms, under absolute governments. All their great contributions to civilization—and they have been great—have been made under that form of government. Conqueror has succeeded conqueror; one domination has followed another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen one of those nations of its own motivation establish what we, from a Western point of view, call self-government.

What then if the ungrateful native should choose self-rule over the enlightened colonial overlord? What was Balfour's Britain to make of the movements for national liberation then starting to emerge in Egypt, India, and other colonized nations? Such struggles for self-determination had to be explained away. One way this was done was to assert that the leaders of these movements were misguided agitators who could not understand what was in their own best interests. As Cromer argued, "the real future of Egypt . . . lies not in the direction of a narrow nationalism, which will only embrace native Egyptians . . . but rather in that of an enlarged cosmopolitanism." In other words, the subject people should shut up and realize that they are better off as members of the global British Empire.

Echoes of such attitudes were to be found in the United States as well. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt, who shared Balfour's and Cromer's views of Egyptians, stated that they were "a people of Moslem fellahin who have never in all time exercised any self-government whatever." A firm believer in race hierarchies and the "white man's burden," he asserted that Muslims were an inferior people: "It is impossible to expect moral, intellectual and material well-being where Mohammedism is supreme." Often these ideas were used to explain why it was that "democracy-loving" imperialists couldn't bring democracy to the countries they colonized—the people just weren't ready for it. At other times it was suggested that colonialism paved the way for self-rule and that without such Western influence democracy would not have taken root in the East.

In reality, the United States has never had an interest in bringing democracy to the people of the Middle East, or to any other people for that matter. If anything, it has a long and sordid record of wrecking democratic movements and replacing them with dictatorships.

The United States publicly supported national liberation struggles but nevertheless intervened when it saw an opportunity to weaken the hold of Britain and France; its interests did not (and do not) lie in supporting democratic movements on their own terms. In fact, secular nationalists who failed to comply with American interests were reviled.

XREF: Connects to Cold War realpolitik literature and critiques of US foreign policy as instrumental rather than principled.

John Foster Dulles, as Eisenhower's secretary of state, called Nasser and other Arab nationalists like him "pathological" for their suspicion of the West and referred to the secular nationalist Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh as "a wily Oriental." Eisenhower himself believed that secular nationalists were little more than Oriental despots. He said: "If you go and live with these Arabs, you will find that they simply cannot understand our ideas of freedom and dignity. . . . They have lived so long under dictatorships of one form or another, how can we expect them to run successfully a free government?"

DEFINE: Illuminates the racialized/colonial mindset of mid-century American foreign policy elites toward the Middle East.

In 1953, the CIA toppled Mohammed Mossadegh, who had been democratically elected to power in Iran in 1951. Mossadegh's crime was nationalizing the oil industry. He was replaced by Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, who ruled with an iron fist, murdered and tortured tens of thousands of political dissenters, and abolished all political parties but his own.

This effort continues: in 2011, another wave of mass struggle burst onto the historic stage in the Middle East and North Africa. In a matter of weeks, grassroots movements in Tunisia and Egypt swept from power two pro-Western dictators who had ruled with an iron fist for decades. Democracy and political freedom were key demands in the Arab uprisings of 2011. The United States' response was at first to stand by its dictatorial allies. When it became clear that they would be swept aside, it embraced the grassroots movements rhetorically. In reality, the United States has either tried to co-opt sections of the resistance (Libya) as a way to limit the scope of change, or supported the forces of counterrevolution, from the Egyptian army to various Gulf states (Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular are leading the counterrevolutionary efforts).

XREF: Connects to the US pattern of supporting authoritarian allies in the Middle East, and to broader critiques of US foreign policy as prioritizing stability and strategic interests over democracy promotion.

Despite the wave of movements against dictatorship, the doddering old Orientalist Bernard Lewis continued to maintain that democracy will not work for Arabs; a consultative system that comes out of traditional Islamic culture would be better. As he put it, "We, in the Western world particularly, tend to think of democracy in our own terms—that's natural and normal—to mean periodic elections in our style. But I think it's a great mistake to try and think of the Middle East in those terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as you've already seen in various places."

QUESTION: Does Islamic consultative tradition (shura) offer a viable alternative to Western elections, or is this an apologia for authoritarianism?

It is important to start by noting that Islamist groups were not always seen by the US government as enemies. As we will see in the following chapter, during the Cold War the United States supported the parties of political Islam against secular nationalist and leftist parties it believed to be in the pocket of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Iranian revolution of 1979, which deposed the US-backed Shah and brought a Shi'a Islamist government to power, meant that the United States had Islamist enemies at the same time as it had Islamist allies. In a nutshell, the foreign policy establishment's view of political Islam has been neither uniform nor consistent.

In the context of the Cold War, the United States had two objectives in the Middle East: to control the flow of oil and to keep the Soviet Union out. After an initial period when it tried to bring radical secular nationalists into the fold, it turned against them. This meant cultivating all forces that could counter radical secular nationalism and communism. At the top of this list were the Islamists.

XREF: This connects to the broader, well-documented history of US support for Islamist forces during the Cold War as a counterweight to Soviet influence and secular Arab nationalism.

Readers unfamiliar with this history might be surprised to learn that Islamists were not always seen as enemies. Instead, policymakers adopted a checkered approach driven by Cold War interests. At first, up until the 1970s, the political elite allied with Islamists. In the 1970s, though, this approach changed in response to various factors, including the Iranian revolution of 1979. After this, and up until the end of the Cold War, they had it both ways: Islamists were enemies in some cases, but not in others. The United States used the Holy Warriors in Afghanistan (the predecessors of al-Qaeda) to fight a proxy war with the Soviet Union. At the same time, particularly in the wake of the 1979 hostage crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran came to personify all things Islamic and evil. Realpolitik dictated that the United States must cut against some Islamists but ally with others against its main Cold War enemy.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of US foreign policy in the Middle East and the origins of al-Qaeda via the Afghan proxy war.

One lesser-known aspect of the Eisenhower Doctrine was the "Islam strategy." This strategy consisted of bolstering Islamist organizations against secular nationalists and trying to create an Islamic pole of attraction in King Saud of Saudi Arabia. In a letter to a confidant in the early fifties, Eisenhower said that "we wanted to explore the possibilities of building up King Saud as a counterweight to Nasser. The king was a logical choice in this regard; he at least professed anti-Communism, and he enjoyed, on religious grounds, a high standing among all Arab nations." Some administrators even began to develop the notion of Saud as a kind of "Islamic Pope." A year after Eisenhower wrote his letter about Saud, he received Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of the Muslim Brotherhood's founder Hassan al-Banna, at the White House. Even though the Brotherhood had resorted to violent actions, killing several Egyptian officials, it was to become a part of the United States' strategy in the Middle East.

XREF: Connects to broader Cold War strategy of supporting religious/counter-revolutionary forces against Soviet-aligned secular nationalists.

The Orientalists who helped shape this strategy were convinced that the secular ideologies of nationalism and communism would hold little weight in the "Muslim world." At a conference organized and sponsored by the government at Princeton University in 1953, Orientalists, policymakers, and various native informants concluded that the United States must use religion to win hearts and minds, ignoring the popularity of secular nationalist movements. US propaganda efforts at the time thus emphasized the Christian and religious roots of American culture in contrast to the godlessness of the USSR. The National Security Council reasoned in 1952 that the "three monotheistic religions in the area have in common a repugnance to the atheism of communist doctrine and this factor could become an important asset in promoting Western objectives in the area."

XREF: Connects to broader literature on Cold War religious diplomacy and US-Middle East policy history.

During the 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood was used against Nasser in Egypt, and a group of clergy against Mossadegh in Iran. If Mossadegh's nationalization policy represented the potential for what secular nationalists in power might do to Western oil interests, Nasser represented Washington's nightmare scenario in the region. Though Egypt does not possess oil, Nasserism, with its emphasis on pan-Arab unity, sought to unite the technologically advanced urban countries and their large, highly skilled working classes with the vast wealth of the oil-producing countries. The combination of Cairo and Riyadh would have severely hampered Western domination over the oil resources. Thus, in addition to hatching coup plots against Nasser and carrying out various assassination attempts on him (such as poisoning his chocolates), the CIA began to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and to rely increasingly on Saudi Arabia as a counterbalance.

This strategy, however, flew in the face of reality and was doomed to fail. Had the Orientalists actually bothered to study the facts on the ground, they would have concluded, as Walter Laqueur did in 1956, that what "is decisive is that Islam has gradually ceased to be a serious competitor of Communism in the struggle for the souls of the present and potential elites in the countries of the Middle East." If that was true of communism, it was even more so of nationalism. Shockingly, Arabs, like other people, were capable of separating religion in their private lives from politics. This is, of course, a shock only to those mired in Orientalist traditions, and in the following chapter we will see that this separation of politics and religion has a long history in the ironically misnamed "Muslim world."

Although the Iranian revolution of 1979 was the pivotal moment that shifted US attitudes against what the West labeled "Islamic fundamentalism," certain incidents prefigured this shift. These incidents persuaded the United States that Islamists could not always be trusted to act in the interests of the West. In 1973, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Nasser's successor, led a war against Israel under the banner of Islam. Whereas Nasser had mobilized pan-Arab nationalism, Sadat turned to religion. His domestic strategy involved promoting the Muslim Brotherhood as a way to weaken and isolate the secular nationalists. Islam was therefore a useful tool for him in the same ways it was for the United States. In fact, Sadat went on to become the West's darling after making peace with Israel, until the forces that he helped unleash turned against him and assassinated him in 1981.

XREF: Connects to broader pattern of governments empowering religious movements as counterweights, which often later backfire — echoes US arming of mujahideen.

Muammar Gaddafi also deployed Islamic symbols and language to legitimize his rule in Libya in the early 1970s. A vocal opponent of the West, he proclaimed that Libya was an Islamic state and that he intended to promote Islamic "radicalism" and "terrorism" around the world. The United States frowned upon Gaddafi but at the same time gave its consent to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia as he attempted to Islamize politics in the region. The logic was that the kind of top-down Islamism promoted by Saudi Arabia could be controlled from above and therefore made to work in the United States' interests, whereas Gaddafi's variant could not.

XREF: Connects to Cold War-era US strategic accommodations and the later blowback of state-sponsored Islamism. QUESTION: Worth chasing: how consistently did the US actually control Saudi top-down Islamism, versus today's narratives of blowback?

The crushing of secular nationalism in 1967 and Nasser's death a few years after created an opening for Faisal. The war of 1973 further bolstered Saudi Arabia's image in the Arab world. The Saudi-led oil embargo that followed the war elevated its prestige to such an extent that it was able to seize the initiative from secular nationalism and put its homegrown brand of Islam, Wahhabism, on the map. Wahhabism is an ultra-conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam which has functioned historically to sanction the rule of the al-Saud family.

DEFINE: Defines Wahhabism as an ultra-conservative Sunni interpretation historically sanctioning al-Saud rule. XREF: Connects to the post-1967 decline of Nasserist secular nationalism and the rise of religious political movements in the Middle East.

While the World Muslim League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference were the political means for establishing Saudi hegemony, the Islamic financial system laid the economic basis for the growth of Islamism. Under Saudi guidance, the vast amounts of money pouring into Arab oil-exporting countries in the early 1970s were directed into a network of banks that were under the control of the Islamic right and the Muslim Brotherhood. These banks then funded sympathetic politicians and parties, media companies, and the business ventures of the devout middle class. They also financed Muslim Brotherhood operations in Egypt, Kuwait, Pakistan, Turkey, and Jordan.

XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of Saudi petrodollar influence across political and religious institutions in the post-1973 era.

The West wholeheartedly supported this banking system. Not wanting to be left out of the tidal wave of petrodollars now flowing through Islamic banks, Western banks pitched in to provide expertise, training, and technological know-how. The key American players included Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Price Waterhouse, and Goldman Sachs. The rise of the Islamic banking system coincided with the development of the neoliberal model in the West. The neoliberal guru Milton Friedman and his disciples at the University of Chicago forged close ties with the Islamists.

XREF: Connects to the larger narrative of how global capital and Islamic finance intertwined, and to Friedman/Chicago School influence in the region. SEED: Potential angle: the overlooked Western corporate complicity in financing Islamist movements during the neoliberal era.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 overthrew the US-backed Shah and brought to power Ayatollah Khomeini, who denounced the United States as the "Great Satan." As mentioned above, Mossadegh, who came to power in the elections of 1951, had nationalized Iran's oil industry and dealt a blow to British petroleum interests. Initially, the political elite saw Mossadegh as a means to establish greater control over Iran's oil resources and elbow Britain out. However, when Mossadegh rejected their plan to allow American oil companies into the country, his American would-be friends turned against him. The CIA organized a coup (known as Operation Ajax), relying on the support of the Islamist clergy, particularly Khomeini's mentor Ayatollah Abolgassem Kashani, who could mobilize large numbers of people from Tehran's slums against the secular nationalist Mossadegh. Kashani received substantial sums of money from the CIA and had very close ties to it. It was this initial groundwork, laid by the CIA and Kashani, that helped position Khomeini for his role in the 1979 revolution.

XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of US Cold War interventions creating blowback in the Middle East, similar to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Iranian revolution was the product of deep discontent among workers, students, peasants, and traders (or bazaaris) against the Shah. The left played a role in the uprisings in the military as well as in the student protests. However, it failed to provide leadership for the movement as a whole for various reasons, including the part played by the United States in weakening the communists and other leftists. Iran's workers, in particular its oil workers, were the key muscle that brought the Shah down but were unable to play an independent role. This allowed Ayatollah Khomeini to maneuver between various factions over the course of two years and finally to take power for the Islamic Republican Party.

Not only was the Shah—a key pillar in US policy in the region—defeated, but fifty-two Americans were taken hostage for 444 days. This was a blow to US hegemony in the region, and soon the terms "terrorist," "fanatic," and "extremist," which earlier had been used to describe secular nationalism, were projected onto Islamism. Khomeini came to symbolize all things evil and irrational. As Fawaz Gerges writes, it "was under the impact of the Iranian revolution, then, that Islamism replaced secular nationalism as a security threat to US interests, and fear of a clash between Islam and the West crystallized in the minds of Americans."

XREF: Connects to the broader trajectory of US framing of Middle East threats, from Cold War secular nationalism to Islamism post-1979.

This did not, however, stop support and funding for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, or approval for General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq's broad program of Islamization in Pakistan. It also did not prevent the Reagan administration from arming Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, at a point when it appeared that Iraq might win the war. The covert operation that came to be known as Iran-Contra involved secretly supplying arms to Iran and using the proceeds to fund the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua against the popular Sandinista government. The logic behind this continued support for Islamists was that the main enemy was the Soviet Union: if Islamists could be used to weaken this Cold War enemy, so be it.

XREF: Connects to the broader Cold War logic of backing anti-Soviet forces regardless of ideology, a pattern seen across multiple covert operations.

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan [in] December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. . . . The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.

XREF: Connects to the widely-debated claim that the US deliberately provoked Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan to give the USSR its own Vietnam.

The CIA undertook a program of recruitment and toured people like Osama bin Laden and Sheik Azzam (the spiritual leader of the mujahedeen and one of the founders of the Palestinian group Hamas) around the region. Azzam also traveled the length and breadth of the United States, visiting twenty-six states. The men recruited through such activity were then trained at various military locations in the United States.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of US involvement in the Afghan-Soviet war and the later emergence of the mujahedeen as a host of Islamist extremism.

The Soviet Union's retreat from Afghanistan in 1989 marked a high point for the global Islamist movement and legitimized the extremist tactics of the militants in eyes of others who now looked to them as a way forward. Their job complete in Afghanistan, the holy warriors now dispersed to other regions such as Bosnia, Kashmir, and elsewhere to carry on their jihad. The former CIA asset bin Laden, in alliance with the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahari, formed al-Qaeda and turned the Afghan jihad into a global phenomenon.

XREF: Connects to the broader story of US support for mujahideen via CIA backing of bin Laden and the later blowback of that policy.

Once in power, they applied their Deobandi philosophy—a particularly conservative approach to Sunni Islam—not only to their own community but to Afghanistan as a whole. The various mujahedeen groups that had held power had already started to Islamize Afghan society, but the Taliban took it to a new level. Women were forced to wear the veil and were not allowed to take jobs; men had to grow beards and wear certain types of clothing; television, music, and movies were strictly forbidden; and a force of religious police was set up to enforce these rules. The United States, despite its pious lip service to freedom and democracy, was more than happy to forge a relationship with the Taliban in order to establish a pipeline to oil and natural gas resources in the Caspian Sea. In short, the American government was willing to work with Islamists when it was convenient, even well into the 1990s.

SEED: The pragmatic US-Taliban relationship over energy interests offers a compelling essay angle on how geopolitical convenience shapes foreign policy choices, contrasting rhetoric with practice.

External developments, including the Iranian revolution, the birth of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the rise of Hamas, eventually forced Israel to rethink this strategy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israeli leaders—with the assistance of their neoconservative allies in the United States—sought to convince the US political leadership that it faced a larger-than-life enemy: Islamic fundamentalism. Their efforts were successful only after September 11, 2001; in the 1980s, despite the rise of Hezbollah and Hamas as threats to Israel, the United States continued to support Islamists against the USSR.

XREF: Connects to the broader narrative about how geopolitical framing of enemies shifts following major events. QUESTION: How directly did Israeli neoconservative pressure shape post-9/11 US policy toward Islamism?

The years immediately before 1991 witnessed several victories for Islamists. In addition to the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, Islamists in various countries gained momentum around that time. In the Sudan, a military coup brought the Islamist ideologue Hassan al-Turabi to power. In Algeria, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) won decisively in the first free elections in that country since independence. And in Palestine, the domination of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) over the Intifada came increasingly under threat from Hamas.

In the 1990s, like today, the Middle East was perhaps the most strategically important region, chiefly because it houses the world's largest oil reserves—oil being, of course, the lifeblood of the world economy. Virtually every US intervention in the region is related either directly or indirectly to the question of control over the flow of oil. In this context, Islamist groups and nations were cast as allies or enemies based on their degree of acquiescence to US aims.

What shifted during this period was that nonstate actors who resorted to terrorist tactics in their war against the West became a thorn in the Americans' side. Beyond al-Qaeda, many of the militants who had fought in Afghanistan either returned home or traveled to Bosnia, Kashmir, and elsewhere to carry on the holy war. Their training and war experience with the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI gave them the knowledge they needed to use violent tactics to advance their goals. This was a rather inconvenient outcome for the United States. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing attempt brought home the point that the forces the United States had enabled through the Afghan war could create blowback.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of US proxy warfare blowback, notably the mujahideen-to-terrorist pipeline discussed widely in foreign policy literature.

One consequence of the Oklahoma bombing was the 1995 Omnibus Counterterrorism Act, passed in both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Clinton. The act was billed as a means to protect Americans from terrorism and, among other things, made it legal to deport noncitizens suspected of terrorist ties, based on secret evidence which does not have to be disclosed. An “alien” could also be deported for making contributions to international charities that the US government deemed to be funders of terrorism. Thus, even though the Oklahoma bombing was carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a homegrown white Christian fundamentalist, Arabs and Muslims were targeted for blame and vigilante violence. It was only a matter of time before another attack on American soil would swing the pendulum toward the confrontationists, opening the door to the “clash of civilizations” and the USA PATRIOT Act.

XREF: Connects to post-9/11 history and USA PATRIOT Act foreshadowing; the author explicitly links the 1995 Act to later events.

The one constant underlying the various zigzags in attitudes among the US ruling class is that Islamists were pegged as allies or enemies based on US interests and political hegemony. The debate between confrontationists and accommodationists within the foreign policy establishment does not question the right of the United States to assert its power around the world. Thus, this debate is more aptly characterized as a tactical disagreement between conservative (or, more aptly, neoconservative) and liberal imperialists on how best to realize the aims of empire-building.

DEFINE: Defines the confrontationist/accommodationist split as tactical rather than fundamental, reframing the debate as between conservative and liberal imperialists.

This section sets out to demonstrate why this is an erroneous reading of the history of Islam. While Islam came into being as both a political and religious ideology, since at least the eighth century it has had a de facto separation of political and religious power. Furthermore, there is nothing unique in Islam's political potential. When the papacy sought to unite Europe under the banner of Christianity, it unleashed the Crusades in the name of God. Christianity too has been political since at least the fourth century (when Rome adopted Christianity as its official religion), if not since its founding.

However, the potential for a religion to be used for political purposes needs to be distinguished from its actual role in various societies at specific historical moments. Not unlike Christianity, Islam transformed in various ways to adapt to the needs of the societies in which it was practiced. A brief overview of the birth of Islam and the rise of revivalist movements reveals a simple point: political Islam is better understood as a contemporary phenomenon akin to the rise of Christian, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms in the recent past rather than as the natural outgrowth of Islam.

XREF: Parallels the broader framing of religious fundamentalisms (Christian, Jewish, Hindu) as modern responses to sociopolitical conditions rather than inherent doctrines.

The prophet Muhammad, a merchant who traveled widely, understood that if the tribes who populated his city were to gain greater political and economic power in the region, they would need to unite under a common banner. … Muhammad's spiritual drive was partially fueled by socio-economic passions, by the desire to strengthen the commercial standing of the Arabs and the need to impose a set of common rules. His vision encompassed a tribal confederation united by common goals and loyal to a single faith. . . . Islam became the cement utilized by Muhammad to unite the Arab tribes and, from the beginning, it regarded commerce as the only noble occupation.

The first Muslim empire, which brought together large numbers of people from various regions, sought to develop a set of laws that could be applied uniformly to all Muslim subjects. This need for a system of organization was the impetus behind the development of the Sharia—a set of rules codified into law. The ulama were entrusted with the task of formulating the Sharia. The various Sharia systems that emerged from this effort attempted to describe all human acts and activities and to classify them by permissibility: as forbidden, objectionable, recommended, and so on. These rules encompassed almost all spheres of life, from commerce and crime to marriage, divorce, property, hygiene, and interpersonal relationships.

While this was the reality of the relationship between religion and politics, leading theologians went out of their way to demonstrate the opposite as a way to uphold their credibility. They have consistently done so through history, thereby creating the impression that religion and politics were more closely intertwined than they actually were. Not surprisingly, Orientalists—whose view of the world is driven by texts—fall easily into the trap of not separating religious claims from actual reality. That said, there are examples of more practically minded theologians, such as al-Ghazali (1058–111), who openly advocated a division of labor between the caliph and the sultan.

XREF: Connects to Orientalist critique in Said's Orientalism — the textual bias that conflates religious claims with reality.

The religious class [in Islam] did not pose the sort of challenge to temporal authority that the religious hierarchy presided over by the pope did to emperors and kings in medieval and early modern Europe. The dispersal of religious authority in Islam therefore normally prevented a direct clash between temporal and religious power, as happened in medieval Christendom. . . . It also helped preclude the establishment of a single orthodoxy that, in alliance with the state, could suppress all dissenting tendencies and oppress their followers, as happened in Christian Europe during the medieval and early modern periods. Wars of religion and persecution of "heretical" sects were therefore infrequent in Islamdom in contrast to Christendom. At the same time, it promoted the creation of distinct religious and political spheres that by and large respected each other's autonomy.

XREF: Connects to comparative institutional histories of religion and state; implies divergence from the European path of church-state conflict.

These modernizing reforms gradually displaced Islam as the basis of Muslim society and put secularism in its place. Additionally, a new Western-educated, secular middle class came into being and assumed positions of importance in government, education, and law, which then eroded the ulama's traditional basis for power. It is only in this context that we can understand the "return to Islam" or the various Islamic revivalist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to which we will return shortly.

The turn toward secularization and modernization was spurred on by the spread of capitalism and the encroachment of colonialism on various Muslim empires. In fact, it was only during the era of capitalist development that Islam finally ceased to play a central role in social organization. In response to the loss of their territories to European colonial powers, the Muslim rulers of the Ottoman, Egyptian, and Persian Empires introduced programs of modernization, capitalistic reforms, and Westernization.

The first efforts at modernization were initiated from above. The monarchs who presided over Turkey, Egypt, and Iran looked to the West to find ways to develop their military in order to better defend themselves from colonial conquest.

As the historians Goldschmidt and Davidson note, "Mehmet Ali was the first non-Western ruler to grasp the significance of the Industrial Revolution. He realized that a modernized army would need textile factories to make its tents and uniforms, dockyards to build its ships, and munitions plants to turn out guns and bayonets." This realization resulted in the wholesale restructuring and modernization of Egyptian society.

XREF: Relates to industrial revolution history and modernization theory; echoes Gerschenkron's late-industrialization framework.

Turkey is significant, though: in 1923, it became the first republic in the modern Middle East. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk instituted a series of reforms, including the formal separation of religion from politics, and carried out what Marxists refer to as "bourgeois democratic tasks"—in other words, the reforms needed to mark the transition from a feudal monarchy to a capitalist democratic order. His key battle was against the old order based on Islamic law and practices. To consolidate his own authoritarian rule, he had to destroy the power and authority of the old ruling classes, which were tied to Islam. In 1924, he abolished the caliphate, closed down the madrassas (religious schools), replaced Sharia law with the Swiss civil code, and expunged the Turkish constitution of any reference to Islam as the state religion.

XREF: Connects to contemporary debates over secularism vs. Islam in Turkish politics, and the tension between modernization and authoritarianism visible in later Turkish leaders.

While at the top of society the response to colonialism was a move toward modernization and secularization, others turned to the fundamentals of Islam—the Koran, the lives of the Prophet and his followers, the example of the early Islamic community—for solutions and models of Islamic reform. These revivalists saw European colonialism and imperialism—particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when European powers started to make significant incursions into Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—as vital threats to Muslim political and religious identity. The leaders of this revivalist turn tended to be religiously minded middle-class individuals who sought to limit the ulama's control and authority over Islamic texts and who insisted on the right of individual interpretation (ijtihad) of the Koran and the Sunna.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of anti-colonial reform movements across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. DEFINE: Introduces ijtihad as individual interpretation of Islamic texts, contrasted with ulama authority.

However, even at this stage, Islamic revivalism and Salafist thought in particular had little to say about the state, beyond its role in applying Sharia. They issued no wholesale condemnation of Muslim governments and therefore no call to overthrow these governments—such a turn within Salafism occurred only later in the twentieth century.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of Islamist political thought and where the modern call to overthrow governments originates.

The Brothers argued that there was no need to look to Western models of social order. Instead they championed the slogan still used today: “The Koran is our constitution.”

The revivalist movements and groups discussed above were minor players on the political stage in the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century. The dominant trend in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia during this period was toward secularism and modernization. Thus, despite his best efforts, al-Afghani—the “father” of modern Islamist thought—failed to build a pan-Islamic alliance. Similarly, the secular nationalists in India and Egypt had the support of the vast majority of the population; Islamist currents were marginal.

XREF: Reverses common assumption that Islamism has long been the region's dominant political force; Islamism is a relatively recent surge.

During the post–World War II era, a new generation of radical anti-colonial secular nationalists took the place of their predecessors. The previous generation had failed to end colonization, and colonial conditions had become unbearable for the vast majority. Even though by 1945 many Middle Eastern and North African countries had been granted formal independence, in reality they were not free. The League of Arab States, formed in 1945, consisted of the supposedly independent countries of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Saudi Arabia, but all of these countries were in fact under the thumb of the British. … The loss of Palestine in 1948, and the failure of the Arab states to stop the formation of the state of Israel, exacerbated matters. The result was that popular discontent, combined with leftward pressure exerted by various Communist parties in the region, pushed the nationalist movements in a more radical direction.

XREF: Connects to broader decolonization and Cold War historiography; the Arab League states' nominal independence contrasts with later anti-colonial movements.

During the postwar period, radical secular nationalism was the dominant political philosophy in colonized nations from Indonesia to Algeria. Several Orientalists, ignoring this reality (as we saw in the last chapter), asserted that people in Muslim countries—whom they viewed as being deeply entrenched in their religious beliefs—would reject political ideologies like nationalism and Communism. They were wrong.

XREF: Connects to Orientalist assumptions about religiously entrenched populations being misread — echoes Saïd's broader critique of Western misrepresentation of the East.

For instance, Nasser introduced various measures in the form of political, social, and economic reforms under the banner of “Arab socialism.” One such measure was meant to quell the influence of the clergy and prevent them from interfering in matters of the state. Another imprisoned members of the Muslim Brotherhood and outlawed the organization. We see here a further separation of religion and politics. Though Nasser claimed that some of Islam’s teachings were consistent with his view of “socialism,” Nasserist ideology was secular at its core.

All in all, Islamic revivalism might have been confined to the dustbin of history had it not been for the collapse and defeat of secular nationalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is to this failure that we turn next in order to understand the conditions that have allowed political Islam to develop and grow.

In sum, what this brief history of Islam and of Islamic revivalism makes clear is that there is no direct link between seventh-century Islam and the rise of Islamist groups in the latter part of the twentieth century. I have outlined the de facto separation that took place in Islam between the religious and political spheres, and the quietist doctrines that advocated an eschewal of political power. The traditions of secularism and modernization have been dominant for at least the last two centuries in various Muslim-majority regions, beginning with modernizing reforms instituted by various Muslim monarchs, then followed by further changes implemented by secular nationalist leaderships after successful anti-colonial struggles. Thus, political Islam is better understood in light of recent political and economic developments—developments that have given rise to religious movements in other societies as well.

XREF: Parallels to common arguments that religious fundamentalism rises in response to modernization across faith traditions, not from ancient texts.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, religious fundamentalisms of various stripes began a process of ascendance. In India, for instance, Hindu extremists began to gain ground in the political vacuum created by the failures of the secular nationalist Congress Party. This political opening, coupled with the ravages of liberalization, allowed the Hindu right to come to power, and consequently to push through a program of Hindutva, the Hinduization of society. In the United States, Christian fundamentalism in the form of the New Right started to impact politics in the late 1970s. Gaining momentum as a backlash against the progressive movements of the 1960s, the fundamentalists succeeded over the course of the next few decades in shifting the terms of debate on most social issues to the right. The same is true of Jewish ultranationalist and fundamentalist organizations in Israel. In short, the entry of religion into politics is not unique to countries where Islam is the dominant religion.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarly debates about the global resurgence of religious nationalism across multiple traditions, not just Islam.

Let us look at a few examples of how Islam has been reinterpreted to serve explicit political goals. Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran adapted Shi’a Islam to serve as a means to mobilize the clergy and to lead a popular revolution against the Shah. Up to that point, Shi’a Islam had, for the most part, had a politically passive or quietist orientation. While sections of the clergy were sometimes involved in political activity, there was a consensus for some eleven centuries that the clergy should not control the state. Rather, as Ervand Abrahamian notes, most “viewed the clergy’s main responsibilities, which they referred to as the velayat-e faqih (jurist’s guardianship), as being predominantly apolitical.” Khomeini broke radically with this quietist Shi’ite stance in the context of the social upheavals of the late 1960s and ’70s; he called for Muslims to overthrow the Shah in the name of Islam and to establish an Islamic state based on Sharia law.

DEFINE: Introduces velayat-e faqih as the jurist's guardianship, explaining its quietist origin before Khomeini's radical reinterpretation.

In the Sunni tradition, we can take the example of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Palestine. From about 1967 they shied away from openly organizing against or confronting the state of Israel, which is why they were favored by the occupation authorities. Historically, this trend has been justified by muslim religious scholars (ulama) using two arguments: first, that it is better to have tyranny than anarchy, because the latter would lead to the dissolution of the ummah, the community of believers; second, that a Muslim ruler, even a corrupt and unjust one, is necessary in order to defend the land of Islam against infidels. This reasoning has been used time and again through history to justify the reign of corrupt and cruel rulers.

In Palestine, even though the rulers were Zionists, the MB nevertheless shied away from open confrontation after 1967 and sought to "prepare the generations" for an Islamic state. As Khaled Hroub notes, the Palestinian MB used this rationale to justify its policy of nonconfrontation with Israel until 1987 and despite "mounting accusations by other Palestinian nationalist and leftist organizations of cowardice or even of being indirectly in the service of the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Islamists clung to their strategy of 'preparing the generations' for a long time." However, sections of the MB broke with this quietist line and sought to reinterpret Islam to serve the goals of national liberation. They viewed the struggle to liberate Palestine as a religious struggle (jihad), which was obligatory for Muslims to fight because it took place under defensive conditions (occupation, dispossession, colonialism). Furthermore, they saw it as essential for Muslims to fight for the homeland, which they viewed as waqf, an inalienable religious endowment.

XREF: Connects to the wider Muslim Brotherhood's gradualist 'preparing the generations' strategy and its tensions with revolutionary Islamist currents like those that formed Hamas.

In 1987, in the context of the first Intifada, the debate between the quietists and the confrontationists broke out into the open and led to the formation of Hamas, a group dedicated to the liberation of Palestine. Here is how one Islamist put it: "Why should Islam be viewed as a separate entity to what is going on in the region, confined to mosques and cut off from social and political life? This question lies in the minds of hundreds of Palestinian youths in the Gaza Strip, youths who are dedicated to Islam and have also participated in resistance to the Israeli occupation. Their answer: let us engage in active resistance to the occupation because the occupation not only affects the land; it also aims to uproot Islam."

XREF: Connects to broader histories of Islamist political movements emerging from colonial/occupation contexts.

Broadly speaking, a confluence of three factors helped pave the way for the rise of Islamism: the failure of secular nationalism, the weakness of the left, and the onslaught of economic crises. In what follows, I examine each of these in greater detail. While these are the overarching conditions that enable Islamists to vie for hegemony, there are specific local and regional factors that play a role. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to speak to these local conditions.

"Arab socialism" was in practice state capitalism; it involved state planning combined with authoritarian control and the use of repression to quell opposition. Politically, Nasserism sought to unify and regroup Arab territories into one nation and overturn the arbitrary divisions imposed by the Allied powers after the First World War. The principal enemy was imperialism, particularly the imperialism of the United States, which emerged as the dominant power in the Middle East after the war.

DEFINE: Clarifies that 'Arab socialism' was effectively state capitalism combining planning, authoritarian control, and repression.

However, postwar secular nationalism, despite its radical promises, was ultimately a middle-class ideology that served the interests of its class. State capitalist measures, while moderately successful for a period, were unable to seriously address class inequalities and produce real economic change. Furthermore, in the 1970s many of these countries experienced crises that state capitalist methods were unable to resolve. The result was increased unemployment and growing class inequality—conditions that were only exacerbated with the introduction of neoliberal reforms.

On the political front, the Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel defeated neighboring countries and annexed their territories in a matter of six days, dealt a deathblow to the political legitimacy of Arab nationalism.

Both Nasserism and Ba'athism failed to achieve Arab unity and to resolve the problem of Israel and the Palestinians. Nowhere was economic performance brilliant, and Nasser's Egypt in particular sank into destitution and cultural decline. The new classes in power were often painfully reminiscent of the old. The June 1967 fiasco raised the question of the adequacy of old ideas for solving the pressing problems of the day. Every major problem, every failure, every crisis that arose . . . led to feelings that something was lacking in nationalist ideology, that other important ideologies should be looked to as sources of fresh ideas.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial decline of Arab nationalism and the ideological vacuum that opened space for Islamism in the 1970s.

The regime of Anwar Sadat helped nurture and support the development of these groups in an attempt to turn sharply away from the secularist and statist policies of the previous period. These associations recruited students who were growing increasingly disillusioned with left politics and trained them in the "pure Islamic life" at summer camps.

For instance, students had to deal on a daily basis with an inefficient and overcrowded transportation system. For women, this was particularly difficult, as they were often harassed on crowded buses. The "Islamic" solution was to transport women in minibuses brought explicitly for this purpose. Once this alternative mode of transport became popular, however, the Islamists restricted this service to only those women who wore the veil. The privatization of transport was thus a way of responding "Islamically" to a social problem, and of placing women students in a situation where they had few choices but to adopt the veil.

It was only in the late 1980s and the 1990s that Hamas was able to successfully challenge the dominance of the PLO in Palestine. Yet it was not a foregone conclusion that Islamists would occupy the vacuum created by the collapse of secular nationalism. If there was a political alternative to the left capable of leading working-class struggles, it was the various Communist Parties (CPs) in the region.

XREF: Connects to broader questions about why leftist/communist movements declined relative to Islamist movements across the Middle East in the post-Cold War period.

Despite these successes, the CPs were severely hampered by their adherence to Stalinist politics. They vacillated on important questions. When the Soviet Union declared support for the United Nations' partition plan for Palestine, despite massive popular opposition to this plan in the Arab world, the CPs went along with it. Later, when the Soviet Union changed its position and turned against Israel, the CPs simply followed suit. They also shifted between support for and opposition to nationalist parties as Soviet policies changed.

In the 1960s, the CPs once again switched position to accommodate Soviet directives. The CPs of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan issued a joint statement in 1964 calling for "closer unity and cooperation between all the patriotic and democratic trends and . . . all the national forces of the Arab liberation movement." In practice, this meant that the Syrian CP declared the Ba'ath Party one of the "basic revolutionary forces." The Syrian Communists then entered the regime and gave up all political independence. Similarly, the Iraqi Communist Party aligned itself with the Ba'ath Party and, by association, the war against the Kurds and the repression of Shi'a Muslims. All of these disastrous shifts delegitimized the CPs in the eyes of people who had once turned to them for leadership. Additionally, the parties' uncritical support for various "revolutionary" nationalist parties and regimes meant that when radical nationalism went into decline, the CPs too suffered a loss of credibility.

XREF: Pattern mirrors Soviet-aligned parties globally abandoning independent positions in the Cold War era.

As a result of structural adjustment, state capacity to co-opt oppositional movements declined and services were increasingly restricted to urban middle class and elite areas. Income distributions polarized. Structural adjustment meant that states were unable to provide previously established levels of services or to ensure adequate supplies of commodities. . . . The political and moral vacuum opened up great opportunities that were seized by Islamists, who established a social base by offering services that the various states have failed to provide.

SEED: Potential article angle on how state retrenchment creates vacuums opportunistically filled by ideology-driven service providers.

The main recruits to Islamism in the early 1970s were educated urban youth. Between 1955 and 1970, population growth in Muslim-majority countries approached 50 percent.

XREF: The demographic surge plausibly connects to youth-bulge theories linking population growth to radicalization and political upheaval.

By 1975, with urbanization and literacy growing steadily, 60 percent of the population was under the age of twenty-four. While these youth, who hailed mostly from families that had recently moved to the cities, had access to education thanks to the reforms instituted by the secular nationalists, they had few opportunities for economic advancement. In some cases, states offered jobs to new graduates and were able to absorb a number of them into roles as state bureaucrats. Yet even this avenue became tenuous as IMF policies of liberalization and government cuts instituted in countries like Egypt and Algeria lowered salaries for intellectual bureaucrats, who then had to find second jobs as taxi drivers or night watchmen to survive.

XREF: Connects to IMF liberalization policies as a driver of youth underemployment across Egypt and Algeria.

The typical Islamist of this era was an engineer born sometime in the 1950s whose parents were from the countryside. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of an ultraconservative faction of the Afghan mujahedeen, was trained as an engineer; Hacene Hashani, the spokesperson for the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) in 1991, was an oil engineer; Ayman al-Zawahari of al-Qaeda was trained as a medical doctor.

As such, this intellectual leadership held a modern, urban worldview. Thus, the rise of contemporary political Islam is not the reemergence of a medieval clergy crusading against modernity but rather a modern urban phenomenon born of the crises created by capitalism. As Chris Harman puts it, "Islamism has arisen in societies traumatized by the impact of capitalism—first in the form of external conquest by imperialism and then, increasingly, by the transformation of internal social relations accompanying the rise of a local capitalist class and the formation of an independent state."

XREF: Challenges the popular framing of Islamism as backward-looking medievalism often seen in Western commentary.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Islamists made headway among yet another class—the very poor. This category includes declassed refugees and urban slum-dwellers, as well as those historically oppressed and exploited due to their religion. For instance, Hamas has recruited heavily from the refugee camps created by Israel, and while it has the support of businesspeople, the middle class, merchants, and the wealthy, its leadership and cadre are largely drawn from the refugee camps. This is true too of Hezbollah, whose mainstay is the Shi'a poor in the outskirts of big cities like Beirut, in what is known as the "belt of misery." Similarly, the Sadrists in Iraq, both in the 1990s and today, draw much of their support and muscle from the slums of Sadr City.

The devout middle class, which sometimes has the backing of other segments of society, typically tends to be more conservative in its orientation and constitutes the "moderate" Islamist wing. While members of this class share the vision of creating an Islamic state, they prefer to do so under conditions of social stability that advance their economic interests. Urban youth displaced from the middle class due to a lack of opportunity, on the other hand, tend to be open to more confrontational and violent tactics; they constitute the "radical" wing of the Islamist movement. At times these two groups have cooperated with each other; at other times they have gone their separate ways.

DEFINE: Clarifies the socioeconomic cleavage that distinguishes the 'moderate' vs 'radical' wings of Islamist movements.

These vacillations are typical of movements led by the petty bourgeoisie because, as a class, it lacks the social weight to bring about effective political and economic changes. Placed in a context of economic crisis, the Islamists often make vague anticapitalist appeals against poverty and greed and combine them with attacks on "Western values" and imperialism. In reality, however, this is not anticapitalist ideology. With few exceptions, Islamists are in practice strong advocates of capitalism and neoliberalism and therefore cannot offer real solutions to the people who turn to them as a political alternative.

Islamism, then, both mobilizes popular bitterness and paralyzes it; both builds up people's feelings that something must be done and directs those feelings into blind alleys; both destabilizes the state and limits the real struggle against the state. The contradictory character of Islamism follows from the class base of its core cadres. The petty bourgeoisie as a class cannot follow a consistent, independent policy of its own. This has always been true of the traditional petty bourgeoisie—the small shopkeepers, traders and self-employed professionals. They have always been caught between a conservative hankering for security that looks to the past and a hope that they individually will gain from radical change.

XREF: Connects to classic Marxist class analysis and to ongoing debates about the social base of religious-political movements.

The 2011 uprisings and mass mobilizations that swept the Middle East and North Africa strengthened the existing left and opened up a space from which such a viable new left can be born. These struggles struck a blow to the radical Islamist argument that acts of terror by individuals and small cells are necessary to rid Muslim societies of pro-imperial leaders, and instead put on the map a different model for social change. Egypt and Tunisia showed that nonsectarian mass rallies and demonstrations can succeed in toppling dictators.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on nonviolent resistance and civil resistance movements, particularly Sharp's work on the efficacy of nonviolent struggle.

Hamas's struggle against Zionism is worthy of support, especially when it has the backing of the Palestinian people. This flows from an understanding that the resistance of a colonized people, no matter what form it takes, should be supported, particularly when left alternatives have discredited themselves. (Popular support for Hamas rose only in conjunction with the betrayals of the secular left.) Furthermore, the Hamas of today is not the same organization as the Hamas of 1987. It has gone through many shifts in response to the day-to-day challenges of fighting Zionism and imperialism. One of these shifts is the downplaying of its Islamist ambitions and a corresponding emphasis on its nationalist politics.

DEFINE: Defines a political principle: the author's stance that resistance by colonized people should be supported unconditionally, regardless of its form.

Additionally, the left should uphold basic democratic rights and support Hamas's right to take political power after having been elected by the Palestinian people in free and fair elections. Consequently, we should stand opposed to US and Israeli efforts to isolate Hamas and to collectively punish the people of Gaza. Part of the equation is also the consideration that allowing Hamas to rule unhindered would show that it, like other Islamist parties in power, does not really have a solution to the problems faced by the Palestinian people. This vacuum could then potentially be filled by a secular left committed to more effective strategies for liberation that could link the Palestinian struggle with those of Arab workers and the oppressed throughout the region, regardless of religious affiliation.

QUESTION: This is a speculative strategic bet that Hamas's governance failures would create openings for a secular left. The assumption that failure in power produces political space for rivals is contestable and worth checking against historical cases. XREF: Connects to the broader left debate about whether empowering Islamist parties is a viable strategy for advancing secular/progressive aims, echoing arguments made in other regions about Islamist movements. SEED: Could angle an essay on whether 'unhindered rule leads to political displacement' actually holds, testing the claim against cases like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The same is true of Afghanistan. Leftists must support the right of the Afghan people to self-determination and consequently stand opposed to the US occupation. However, the Taliban, who are leading the struggle against the US/NATO occupation, are neither a genuine national liberation movement nor an anti-imperialist force. Based among the Pashtuns, who constitute about 40 percent of Afghanistan's population, the Taliban is a highly sectarian organization that has little appeal beyond this ethnic group. Its narrow and rigid interpretation of Islam, which favors Pashtun cultural practices, has little to offer the Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and other ethnic minorities. In fact, non-Pashtuns seem to prefer the United States to the Taliban.

QUESTION: Worth verifying current ethnic dynamics and whether non-Pashtun groups' preferences persist today.

The Taliban is also not a principled anti-imperialist force. In addition to its willingness to negotiate with the United States in the 1990s, the Taliban has close ties to Pakistan and at times acts as a conduit of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. As discussed earlier, Pakistan nurtured and cultivated the Taliban and, even today Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), maintains strong ties with the Afghan Taliban. In a region destroyed by three decades of war, with an economy dominated by opium production and sales and lacking in industry, the political forces that come into being must inevitably enact the agendas of greater powers.

At the same time, however, we also find instances of collaboration and cooperation with colonial powers. In the 1950s, Khomeini, who famously denounced the United States as the "great Satan," took part in CIA-orchestrated demonstrations against Mohammed Mossadegh; his mentor developed close relations with and took large sums of money from the CIA. When the United States sent troops to Lebanon in 1958, and Britain to Jordan, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood joined in on the US/British side to help crush the nationalist uprising in both countries. In short, Islamist groups are often self-serving entities rather than principled anti-imperialists.

XREF: Challenges the common assumption that Islamist movements are uniformly and principledly anti-imperialist, complicating the narrative of these groups as consistent resistance forces.

In this chapter I have laid out the conditions that have allowed the parties of political Islam to succeed. What we saw is that in contrast to the caricature of Islamists as a medieval-minded clergy railing against the modern world, political Islam is the product of specific historic conditions. These conditions include the failure of secular nationalist movements due to their own internal weaknesses; the inability of Stalinist parties to offer an effective alternative; and economic crises in various countries that could not be resolved through state capitalist methods and that neoliberalism exacerbated. However, it must be emphasized again that imperialist nations, particularly the United States, played a key role in bolstering the parties of political Islam and consequently weakening secular nationalists and the left (as discussed in chapter 4).

Today, the ravages of imperialism and neoliberalism are plain to see. While tens of thousands have lost their lives in the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, millions more suffer under the daily depredations of the free market. But there is a major reconfiguration of forces taking place in the region. Secular nationalism, with its considerable mass appeal, was the main driving force of change in the area in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, the Arab regimes made a concerted effort to stabilize the region, including supporting "Islamist" forces against secular nationalists and the left.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of states using religious movements as counterweights to secular opposition elsewhere, e.g. Cold War alliances.

The Arab uprisings of 2011 seems to indicate a break with the status quo of the last two or three decades. The mass movements that have developed across the region are aimed against the dictators who rule with impunity. They also are rebellions against the political and economic system known as neoliberalism. These revolts have raised fundamental questions about the character of the distribution of wealth—that is, who rules and in whose interest. A genuine solution that combines the struggles against the ravages of both capitalism and imperialism in the Middle East and elsewhere only can be forged by rebuilding the left.

In September 2000, the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century released a document outlining its foreign policy vision. It called for the United States to use overwhelming military force to take control of the Persian Gulf region and for “maintaining global US preeminence . . . and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” This goal, the report went on to add, was going to take some time to be realized “absent some catastrophic event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” On September 11, 2001, such an event did occur—at a time when the neoconservative wing of the foreign policy establishment held powerful positions in the George W. Bush presidency.

XREF: Connects to the broader narrative of the Project for a New American Century anticipating a Pearl Harbor-like event that materialized as 9/11.

September 11, however, precipitated unanimous agreement in the foreign policy establishment that the War on Terror would henceforth frame US foreign policy. Barely had the ashes settled from the Twin Towers when loud proclamations that “Islamic terrorists” represented existential threats to the United States began to echo in the public sphere. From then on, US policy was geared toward “keeping Americans safe” from Muslim “evildoers.” These claims fly in the face of reality, as the previous chapter outlined, since Islamist organizations typically emerge from local conditions and are focused on those conditions. What then lies behind this Islamophobic rhetoric? The agenda behind this focus on the “Islamic threat” is the subject of this chapter.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of security-state agendas and manufactured consent in US foreign policy.

The term “neoconservative” was coined in the early 1970s by Michael Harrington, who is associated with the democratic socialist tradition in the United States, as a way to distance former allies (some liberals, others socialists) who had started to gravitate to the right. These turncoats included figures such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Most of the first generation of neocons supported the United States’ war with Vietnam and resented the antiwar movement. They saw themselves as liberals who believed in the idea that America was a force for good in the world and that it should maintain global stability and intervene militarily when needed. They stood against the “bad liberals” who championed George McGovern’s bid for the presidency in 1972, viewing them as operating with a politics of “appeasement” and liberal guilt. Many opposed Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” program of domestic reform as well.

DEFINE: Clarifies the origin and original intent of the term 'neoconservative', which was coined as a distancing label by a democratic socialist rather than an in-group label.

The neocons’ vision of imperialism is premised on the notion of American exceptionalism: “a pervasive faith in the uniqueness, immutability, and superiority of the country’s founding liberal principles, accompanied by a conviction that the United States has a special destiny among nations.” This vision of the United States as a unique “beacon for other nations” because of its liberal values is taken for granted within the policy establishment as a whole. However, what is different about the neocons is their singular commitment to unipolarism and militarism. As Danny Cooper writes, the neocons “have been nothing if not consistent in their belief that only overwhelming American military preponderance can prevent the outbreak of great power war . . . [and] that multipolar international orders lead to great power war.” In short, what defines the neoconservatives is the notion of a unipolar world dominated by the United States, which they believe is in the interests of all; “American military preponderance is good for America, and good for the world.”

DEFINE: Distinguishes neoconservatism from broader American exceptionalism by its specific doctrine of unipolarism and military preponderance.

When the Soviet Union did eventually collapse, the next generation of neocons developed a vision for the post–Cold War world that was premised on the notion of American dominance in a unipolar world. Charles Krauthammer, a nationally syndicated journalist best known for his writing in the Washington Post, articulated this position in a 1990 piece titled “The Unipolar Moment” published in the preeminent foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs. Krauthammer argued that the end of the Cold War had created a “single pole of world power.” This single superpower, the United States, could therefore intervene anywhere it wanted around the world and set the terms of world politics. In order to realize this vision, Krauthammer continued, it was necessary to marginalize the arguments of the realists and the isolationists in the policy establishment, who did not realize how important it was for one hegemonic power to rule in order for there to be global stability.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of American foreign policy and neoconservatism, particularly how unipolarity shaped subsequent interventions.

This article was followed by a report prepared for the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz (at the request of Dick Cheney) with the help of Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, and others. The “Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG) report was not intended for public consumption but was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post. The document stated that the United States’ first objective should be to “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” It went on to assert that it must “establish and protect a new order” and that potential competitors should be convinced that “they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.” In short, a pax Americana should be established on the military, political, and economic fronts. Even advanced industrialized nations would be discouraged from seeking to “overturn the [United States’] established political and economic order.” It followed from this that the United States would act alone if it needed to, in a unilateral manner, with no questions asked. This, the report stated, would guarantee world stability in a way that neither the United Nations nor any other multilateral coalitions could.

XREF: Connects to broader history of neoconservative foreign policy and the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War through key figures like Wolfowitz, Perle, Libby, and Khalilzad.

In order to maintain world stability, the report continued, the United States was right to wage preemptive war on any aggressor. It named a number of state actors as aggressors, from Iraq and North Korea to India and Japan. Post-Soviet Russia was also viewed as a potentially destabilizing force. Additionally, preemptive strikes were warranted against any threat to US interests. At the time, these ideas were critiqued harshly by the policy establishment; the report was a political embarrassment for the elder Bush. The backlash was so strong that Wolfowitz believed his political career to be over. The document was revised, and a softer version replaced the original. It was not yet the neocons’ time—as we will see shortly, the 1990s were to be the era of “humanitarian imperialism,” led by Clinton and the liberal imperialists.

XREF: Connects to the later Bush Doctrine after 9/11 and neoconservative influence in the Iraq War.

What is noteworthy about the document, though, is that the enemies it named were diverse and the list of national interests was broad; these included “access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to US citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to US society from narcotics trafficking.” Thus, “terrorism” was named as one among several threats faced by the United States. In fact, Krauthammer’s article didn’t even mention terrorism, an omission for which he would later atone in an article where he stated that the “new threat [Islamism] is as evil as the old Evil Empire.”

In a Wall Street Journal piece titled “What the Heck Is a ‘Neocon’?,” leading neocon Max Boot stated unequivocally that “support for Israel” has been and remains a “key tenet of neoconservatism.”

Many of the first generation of neocons were Jewish and found themselves alienated by the New Left’s sympathy for the Palestinian struggle and for Third World causes more broadly. Yet the Jewish experience does not automatically translate into a hard-right Likud-style politics. As Richard Seymour observes, “It is clearly the case that, for many Jewish neoconservatives, their Jewish identity mattered; but there are surely a variety of ways of experiencing life as a Jewish immigrant in the United States, and many more ways of relating to that experience.”

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how identity shapes but does not determine political alignment, relevant to discussions of Jewish politics and the New Left/neoconservative split.

Thus, the roots of neocon hard-line Zionism lie less in its Jewish adherents’ ethnic identity and more in their politics and in a particular worldview that sees Israel as instrumental in advancing American power. If the United States was going to maintain its dominance in the Middle East, it followed that Israel, the most pro-American country in the region, had to be its key ally. As Dorien notes, most “unipolarist leaders were Jewish neoconservatives who took for granted that a militantly pro-Israel policy was in America’s interest. Wolfowitz, Perle, Podhoretz, Krauthammer, [Ben] Wattenberg, [Joshua] Muravchik, both Kristols, Kagan, Boot, and Kaplan fit that description.” Yet this position was also held by prominent non-Jews such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Woolsey, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Linda Chavez, and others.

XREF: Challenges the common assumption that neocon support for Israel stems from Jewish identity; connects to debates about the ethno-religious versus ideological basis of foreign policy.

Concretely speaking, neocon positions on Israel are in line with right-wing Zionist or Likud-style politics, combined with an abhorrence of any negotiations that show compromise and weakness. It follows, therefore, that the neocons were strongly opposed to the Oslo Accords, which were based on the principle of mutual recognition through a process of “land for peace.” When Yasser Arafat signed the agreement on the White House lawn in 1993, President Clinton told him that he could proclaim a “state” in the Occupied Territories and become its president. In exchange for US and Israeli recognition of this “state,” Arafat was asked to sign away long-standing—and historically just—Palestinian claims on three major issues: the status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and the right of return, and sovereignty over their land.

QUESTION: The claim that Arafat signed away historically just Palestinian claims on Jerusalem, refugees, and sovereignty is debatable — worth checking the actual Oslo terms and what was deferred versus signed away.

The neocons viewed this as a mistake. Even though Israel had no intention of upholding any of its pledges and the United States had no intention of forcing Israel to comply, the neocons vociferously opposed the Oslo Accords, seeing the deal as an Israeli, and by extension American, retreat. Consistent with their opposition to the deals Reagan struck with the Soviet Union, the neocons argued that Oslo would lead to the dissolution of Israeli power. Frank Gaffney and the CSP stated that the “land for peace” formula was nothing more than a series of “retreats by Israel—unilateral, headlong surrenders of strategically vital real estate” to the Arabs who were “committed to its destruction” (emphasis in original).

In 1996, the neocons advised Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom they continue to have close ties, that what Israel needed to do to secure itself was to destabilize and overthrow Arab governments. They published a document titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” arguing that Israel should attack Syrian military targets in Lebanon and even Syria if necessary. At the time, conventional wisdom saw Iraq as a major threat to Israel, and the neocons urged Netanyahu to support the Jordanian Hashemites’ challenge to Iraq’s borders.

This argument was similar to a position developed in the 1980s by the right-wing Likud party in Israel. The argument went that Israel should fragment, dissolve, or otherwise weaken the neighboring Arab states as a way to shore up its own safety.

XREF: Connects to the earlier argument being compared — likely about how weakening neighbors can backfire or is a geopolitical strategy. QUESTION: Worth probing whether this strategy actually achieved its aims, given the later trajectories of these neighboring states.

The conference, held in Jerusalem, was organized by the Jonathan Institute, then headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu founded the institute in 1977 and named it after his younger brother Jonathan, who in Netanyahu's words “fell in the battle against terrorism.” In his opening remarks at the conference, Netanyahu's father Benzion sought to project Israel's enemies—Palestinians who had taken up armed struggle for self-determination—as “terrorists” and to rally the rest of the world around the struggle against “terrorism.” The terrorist, Benzion continued, “speaks of 'humanitarian' and national causes, he pretends to fight for 'freedom' against oppression, he keeps speaking of 'legitimate rights.'” To counter this, he argued that this terrorist actually has “no moral restraints” and “respects no code of law.” Instead, he belongs in the same camp as Nazis; “in his genocidal attitude he takes toward the societies he assails, whether it is Ireland, Lebanon, or Israel, he is an offshoot of Nazi philosophy.”

XREF: Connects to the rhetorical tactic of equating political opponents with Nazism, familiar from Cold War propaganda and subsequent counterterrorism discourse.

This changed at the second International Conference on Terrorism (ICT), held in 1984 in Washington, DC. During his opening remarks, Netanyahu stated that “modern terrorism has its roots in two movements that have assumed international prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, communist totalitarianism and Islamic (and Arab) radicalism.” By this stage, Iran had come to be a thorn in Israel's side with its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Arab radicalism was bracketed while Islamism took center stage.

XREF: Connects to the historical shift in framing terrorism from communist to Islamist threats in the 1980s, relevant to contemporary discourse on political rhetoric.

Lewis argued at the conference that the term “Islamic terrorism” was apt because “Islam is a political religion” and Muhammad, in contrast to other religious leaders, had “founded a state and governed it.” In other words, although terrorism carried out by Christians or Jews is not typically referred to as “Christian terrorism” or “Jewish terrorism,” linking Islam to the violence of Muslims was deemed appropriate.

XREF: Relates to debates over asymmetric labeling of political violence and how power structures shape terminology.

These parties were responsible for raising the level of hateful rhetoric against non-Jews. One rabbi stated that the “Arabs are a cancer, cancer, cancer in the midst of us. . . . There is only one solution, no other, no partial solution: the Arabs out! Out! . . . Let me become defense minister for two months and you will not have a single cockroach around here.” As Fred Halliday notes, it was in this context that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric came together to a much greater extent, especially among the settler community as well as the nationalist and religious parties. However, these sentiments did not prevent the Likud party from using the precursor organization to Hamas, the Mujamma, for its own purposes. When the Israeli state recognized and formally licensed the Mujamma in 1978, the logic was simple—the Islamists' hostility to the secular left made them useful.

XREF: This connects to the broader pattern of states funding radical religious groups against secular rivals — echoes of US support for mujahideen in Afghanistan.

WINEP, for instance, has a “mix of neoconservative and Clintonite views,” according to Maria Ryan. WINEP was founded by Martin Indyk, who formerly served as the research director of the pro-Israel lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). James Woolsey, Perle, and Wolfowitz served on its board, and Muravchik and Pipes were adjunct scholars. During the 1990s, though, WINEP was largely supportive of Clinton's policies and many of its leading lights, including Indyk, joined the Clinton administration. Unqualified support for Zionism is a bipartisan requirement in the US policy establishment.

XREF: Reinforces the Israel lobby dynamic documented by Mearsheimer and Walt in 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.'

Jean Bricmont argues in his book Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell Wars that the “ideology of our times, at least when it comes to legitimizing war, is no longer Christianity, nor Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden’ or the ‘civilizing mission’ of the French Republic, but is a certain discourse on human rights and democracy, mixed in with a particular representation of the Second World War. This discourse justifies Western interventions in the Third World in the name of the defense of democracy and human rights or against the ‘new Hitlers.’” While Bricmont may be too hasty in dismissing the uses of the “white man’s burden” logic, given the revival of Orientalism in the post-9/11 era (as discussed in chapter 3), he is correct to point to democracy and human rights as the key rationales for war. These liberal arguments, however, aren’t only the tools of liberal imperialists—they are part of the neocons’ arsenal as well. After all, the Bush administration used women’s rights as justification for the 2001 war on Afghanistan and named “democracy-building” a goal in Iraq.

XREF: Connects to prior discussion of Orientalism's revival post-9/11 referenced in the highlight's chapter 3.

The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that U.S. power—and especially its military power—can be a highly effective tool of statecraft. Both groups are deeply alarmed at the prospect that WMD might be in the hands of anybody but the United States and its closest allies, and both groups think it is America’s right and responsibility to fix lots of problems all over the world. Both groups consistently over-estimate how easy it will be to do this, however, which is why each has a propensity to get us involved in conflicts where our vital interests are not engaged and that end up costing a lot more than they initially expect.

Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor, argued that during the era of “the Cold War we contained a global threat to market democracies.” Now, after the collapse of the Soviet threat, it was possible to “consolidate the victory of democracy and open markets.” Consequently, the Clinton vision was about promoting democracy through neoliberal reforms. The world needed to be made safe for neoliberal capitalism—and Clinton took it upon himself to penetrate areas of the world previously under Soviet control.

XREF: Connects to post-Cold War foreign policy literature and critiques of neoliberal globalization in the 1990s.

It should therefore come as no surprise that these individuals talk to one another and vie for influence within the broader political arena. When they disagree it is typically around strategy or rhetoric, not the overall aim of maintaining US hegemony. For instance, back in the 1950s when the Orientalists were arguing that Islam and communism were incompatible (as discussed in chapter 4), the newly formed CFR (founded in 1954) took a position against this thesis. Its Middle East strategist at the time wrote that “Islam cannot be counted on to serve as such a barrier [to the USSR]. The theory that communism and Soviet influence could never make inroads in the Moslem world because they are materialistic and atheistic has not been borne out. Religion does have a significant place in Middle Eastern society. It colors both popular and official attitudes. But it does not establish absolute immunity to a political virus such as fascism or communism.”

The first “humanitarian” mission of the 1990s was Clinton’s continuation of George H.W. Bush’s Operation Restore Hope in Somalia in 1993. UN troops, under the leadership of the United States, were sent to address the food crisis and feed the hungry—yet the troops arrived months after those most threatened by hunger had already died of starvation. While the United States and United Nations justified the invasion on humanitarian grounds, US interests in Somalia’s geostrategic location and oil resources played a more significant role in the Americans’ decision to intervene. When eighteen US soldiers were killed in the now-famous Black Hawk Down incident, US troops departed and left the East African nation worse off than when they arrived. This intervention prefigured what was to come.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of humanitarian intervention and the tension between stated humanitarian aims and underlying strategic motives in US foreign policy.

In Iraq the United States (via the UN) imposed a draconian sanctions regime that kept Iraq’s economy close to the preindustrial state in which allied bombing had left it in 1991. The Clinton administration repeatedly stated that sanctions were meant to target Saddam Hussein’s regime and not the Iraqi people. The reality, however, was that ordinary Iraqis suffered most. More than a million died. When Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 1996 about half a million dead Iraqi children, she replied, “We think the price is worth it.” Thus, the humanitarians were quite content to carry out their foreign policy agenda on the dead bodies of children.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of humanitarian intervention and sanctions-as-policy, echoing arguments about civilian casualties in economic warfare.

The US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were designed to accomplish both of the aforementioned aims: to put down potential threats and dissuade potential adversaries. The Bush regime had hoped that after Iraq, it would go on to carry out regime change in Iran and Syria. With the region under its control, the United States could then dictate terms to the other powers that rely on Middle East oil, particularly China.

XREF: Connects to geopolitical analyses of US foreign policy as resource-driven rather than security-driven, echoing realist international relations theory and critiques of American empire.

The key element of the Bush Doctrine was that it proclaimed the United States' unilateral right to wage preventive war—to attack another sovereign nation not because it directly threatened the United States but because it could potentially pose a threat. It gave the president discretion to determine what constituted a threat. Thus, if a nation "harbored terrorists," developed weapons of mass destruction, or otherwise acted in ways that went against the United States' interests, it would be subject to attack and invasion. Another key aspect of the Bush Doctrine was the imperative to put down the rise of any rival that might challenge US hegemony.

DEFINE: Defines the Bush Doctrine's core principles: unilateral preventive war, presidential threat discretion, and thwarting rival hegemony.

Sheehi points to the different approaches Lewis and Zakaria take. He writes that if "Lewis locates the failures of Islam within the barbarism of the 'Arab mind,' then Zakaria locates the hate for the West in the failure of Arab political culture and economic organization." Zakaria, a student of Samuel Huntington, has argued that the United States should promote free markets and democracy in the Middle East, channeling his mentor's modernization proclivities. He states that Arabs have seen the "reverse of the historical process in the Western world, where liberalism produced democracy and democracy fuels liberalism. The Arab path has produced dictatorship, which has bred terrorism." In this view, the United States therefore had to intervene to carry the "white man's burden" and bring democracy and neoliberalism.

The "clash of civilizations" rhetoric therefore became dominant in the aftermath of 9/11 and was the ideological basis for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well domestic attacks on Muslims and Arabs. For a while it appeared that the neocons were unstoppable—but they overplayed their hand. During its first term, the Bush administration built a "coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq, rejecting criticisms from allies it derogatorily labeled "old Europe." The war on Iraq, however, did not go the way the neocons wanted it to. Instead of greeting US forces as liberators, the Iraqi people resisted and rejected US hegemony.

A counterinsurgency campaign is, as described in this manual, a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations conducted along multiple lines of operations. It requires Soldiers and Marines to employ a mix of familiar combat tasks and skills more often associated with nonmilitary agencies. The balance between them depends on the local situation. Achieving this balance is not easy. It requires leaders at all levels to adjust their approach constantly. They must ensure that their Soldiers and Marines are ready to be greeted with either a handshake or a hand grenade. . . . Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors. They must be prepared to help reestablish institutions and local security forces and assist in rebuilding infrastructure and basic services. They must be able to facilitate establishing local governance and the rule of law. The list of such tasks is long; performing them involves extensive coordination and cooperation with many intergovernmental, host-nation, and international agencies. [emphasis added]

XREF: Connects to broader counterinsurgency doctrine discussions from the Vietnam and Iraq eras; echoes the 'graduate-level war' concept often attributed to COIN theorists.

In short, it wasn’t enough simply to kill and militarily defeat the enemy; soldiers needed to take part in building infrastructure, providing basic services, and being both “nation builders and warriors.” To aid this effort, the following year the Pentagon recruited anthropologists through a forty-million-dollar program called the "Human Terrain System." It sent these anthropologists to Iraq and Afghanistan to gather cultural information in order to better prosecute the War on Terror. They stated their goal clearly: "Empathy will become a weapon." Thus, the United States was following in the footsteps long ago blazed by Napoleon in trying to accumulate knowledge to use in controlling colonized populations ideologically.

XREF: Echoes the author's comparison to Napoleon's colonial knowledge-gathering, and connects to broader histories of anthropology's entanglement with empire. SEED: Could develop an essay on the ethical history of 'empathy as weapon' in modern counterinsurgency versus colonial predecessors.

The Obama era therefore came to be characterized by a shift to liberal imperialism and liberal Islamophobia. The key characteristics of liberal Islamophobia are the rejection of the "clash of civilizations" thesis, the recognition that there are "good Muslims" with whom diplomatic relations can be forged, and a concomitant willingness to work with moderate Islamists. Liberal Islamophobia may be rhetorically gentler than conservative Islamophobia and (as we will see in chapter 10) the language of the "Islamophobic warriors," but it is nonetheless racist and imperialist in that it takes for granted the "white man's burden." It doesn't occur to the likes of Nye, Albright, and Haass that it is for ordinary people in the Middle East to make decisions about their societies. Self-determination does not enter their framework—and "benevolent supremacy" remains unquestioned.

Since taking office, as of this writing, he has deployed thirty thousand more troops to Afghanistan, expanded the war into Pakistan (via the "Af-Pak" strategy), tried to bully Iraq into granting an extension of the US occupation (which failed), carried out drone attacks and "black ops" in Yemen and Somalia, and participated in the NATO war on a former ally in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi. This should not come as a surprise, since his inaugural staff included Bush personnel like defense secretary Bob Gates and General David Petraeus, as well as Democratic Party hawks like Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden.

XREF: Contradicts the common narrative of Obama as a peace candidate succeeding a warmonger; connects to broader critiques of presidential continuity in foreign policy.

In practice, this didn’t go very smoothly. The NATO intervention in Afghanistan began to lose its multilateral character, as various European nations started pulling out their forces in response to domestic opposition. By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the "hearts and minds" approach and the counterinsurgency strategy had more or less failed. Obama therefore had to return to counterterrorism and say "good-bye to nation building and counter-insurgency operations." The failure of the Bush policies he was pursuing ushered in a new phase in Obama’s imperial strategy.

DEFINE: Distinguishes counterinsurgency/hearts-and-minds strategy from counterterrorism as distinct imperial phases.

In 2012, Obama's Defense Strategic Guidance document, titled "Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense," refocused US foreign policy and its military structure. It made clear that the United States will continue to fight against "violent extremists," even though the assassination of bin Laden has diminished al-Qaeda. As the report states, "its affiliates remain active in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere"; the US military will "monitor" these groups and strike "the most dangerous groups and individuals when necessary." In short, Obama would continue the War on Terror on nonstate actors through surveillance, but also through drone attacks and the use of Special Operations Forces.

The guidance document, however, refocuses attention on the Asia-Pacific area and names China and Iran as state actors that need to be contained. To deter and contain China, the United States will work with its "network of allies and partners." Bypassing its long-term ally Pakistan, the document names India as furthering US aims in Asia. In a similar vein, the document also turns to allies in the Middle East, particularly the Gulf Cooperation Council nations, to "prevent Iran's development of a nuclear weapon capability and counter its destabilizing policies."

XREF: Connects to the broader geopolitical literature on Washington's Asia-Pacific rebalancing strategy and the shifting role of allies over bilateral partnerships.

Correspondingly, conservative Islamophobia gave way to liberal Islamophobia. This did not, however, change the realities of people's lives in the "Muslim world," which in some ways got worse under Obama. This is true, too, of the domestic environment for Muslims in the United States, a topic I turn to in the next chapter.

While racism against Arabs and Muslims has a long history in the United States, legalized persecution against them took institutional form in the early 1970s.

The overarching context was the Arab-Israeli conflict, the growth of the PLO, and the use of armed struggle in the pursuit of national liberation. As we saw in previous chapters, the association of the enemies of Israel with “terrorism” began around this time. One of the first legal manifestations of this logic in the United States occurred after an infamous incident at the 1972 Munich Olympics in which a group of Palestinians took Israeli athletes hostage and murdered them. In response, the Nixon administration launched “Operation Boulder,” giving law enforcement agencies “carte blanche authorization to investigate individuals of Arabic-speaking origin, whether citizen or not, allegedly to determine their possible and/or potential relationship with ‘terrorist’ activities related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Thus, a violent act committed in Munich by a handful of Palestinians became the basis on which all Arabs were designated as suspicious and therefore worthy of investigation.

XREF: Connects to histories of racial profiling, surveillance of Arab Americans post-9/11, and how single events reshape whole populations' legal treatment.

Elaine Hagopian writes that Zionist intelligence sources were associated with the operation. So it is not surprising that Arabs were targeted, despite the fact that it was the Jewish Defense League (JDL) that had committed known and verified acts of terrorism in the United States. In fact, according to a Rand Corporation study, JDL was one of the most active terrorist groups (as classified by the FBI) for more than a decade. Yet it was Arabs who were automatically suspected of “terrorist” activities.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of profiling and how threat perception shapes law enforcement, paralleling discussions of bias in counterterrorism policy.

Another program initiated in 2002, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which had its origins in the 1996 AEDPA terrorism bill and was amended by the USA PATRIOT Act, required male immigrants sixteen and older from twenty-five countries to report to INS offices in order to be “fingerprinted, photographed, interviewed, and have their financial information copied, or to register when they enter the country, then re-register after thirty days,” as legal scholar Nancy Murray writes. (The countries were named this time, and included Muslimmajority and Middle Eastern countries as well as North Korea.) By fall 2003, more than eighty-three thousand immigrant residents had registered under the program. As their reward for coming forward, 13,799 found themselves facing deportation proceedings. As for whether “terrorists” were apprehended by this program, eleven people were found to have “links” to terrorism. The program yielded not a single terrorism conviction.

QUESTION: This remarkable inefficiency — 83,000 registrants, 13,799 deportation proceedings, one alleged conviction — warrants deeper investigation into the program's stated versus actual purpose.

In 2003, another thousand people were arrested as part of a program to catch “absconders” from Middle Eastern nations who had overstayed their visas and who might have knowledge of “terrorist activity.” Many of these people were put “on planes to destinations where they knew no one. They left behind jobs, homes, and families, including American-born children.” Such actions are nothing if not the wholesale demonization of Muslims, who are now “guilty until proven innocent.” Their consequences reach far beyond the Arab and South Asian Muslim communities. Non-Muslim peace activists and antiwar organizers soon became targets of surveillance and interrogation as well.

XREF: Connects to surveillance-state critiques and civil liberties discourse post-9/11.

A 2011 report appropriately titled Under the Radar: Muslims Deported, Detained, and Denied on Unsubstantiated Terrorism Allegations, released by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University Law School, documents the ways in which the law has been used to “cast Muslims as dangerous threats to national security.” The report argues that “religious, cultural, and political affiliations and lawful activities of Muslims are being construed as dangerous terrorism-related factors to justify detention, deportation, and denial of immigration benefits.” One way in which this has happened is that Muslims have been presented as terrorists in cases that are actually about immigration violations. Charges brought against Muslim immigrants “are almost always ordinary immigration violations,” the report states, yet the government has routinely insinuated connections to terrorism without providing any proof of these allegations.

XREF: Relates to broader discussion of post-9/11 national security law and how immigration enforcement is weaponized against religious minorities.

The logic underlying these cases is that Muslims are naturally “predisposed” to commit violent acts and should therefore be put away. Downs explains that “to prove predisposition, the government claims that routine, normal behavior of the defendants––dress, religious observances, Islamic financial transactions, literature, etc.––indicates a 'predisposition' to commit terrorism, based on the false stereotype that all Muslims are predisposed to commit terrorism. If they are sufficiently 'Muslim,' they are sufficiently 'predisposed.'”

DEFINE: Discloses how 'predisposition' functions as a legal standard in these cases, where ordinary religious practice becomes criminalized evidence.

Charity is one of the five pillars of Islam, a religious obligation for all Muslims, yet after 9/11 the Bush administration shut down virtually all Muslim charitable organizations operating in the United States and froze their assets, allegedly to prevent the flow of money to “terrorists.” In doing so, it equated this fundamental aspect of the Islamic faith with aiding the “enemies” of the United States.

QUESTION: How many organizations were shut down, and were any actually linked to terrorism financing?

Fahad was allowed no contact with anyone outside his lawyer and, in very limited fashion, his parents—no calls, letters, or talking through the walls, because his cell was electronically monitored. He had to shower and relieve himself within view of the camera. He was allowed to write only one letter a week to a single member of his family, using no more than three pieces of paper. One parent was allowed to visit every two weeks, but often would be turned away at the door for bureaucratic reasons. Fahad was forbidden any contact—directly or through his lawyers—with the news media. He could read only portions of newspapers approved by his jailers—and not until 30 days after publication. Allowed only one hour out of his cell a day, he had no access to fresh air but was forced to exercise in a solitary cage.

Since 9/11, informants in mosques and in Muslim communities have led to the prosecution of more than two hundred people. The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice report Targeted and Entrapped outlines various problems with the use of such informers, not the least of which is that they are recruited through threats, as mentioned above, as well as bribes—such as reduced criminal charges or a change in immigration status, creating what the report calls “a dangerous incentive structure.” Its authors found that in the cases they studied, the “government’s informants introduced and aggressively pushed ideas about violent jihad and moreover, actually encouraged the defendants to believe that it was their duty to take action against the United States.” The informants also goaded the defendants to acquire violent videos and weapons which were later used to convict them, and even went so far as to pick the locations that were to be attacked. In short, without the active leadership of the agents provocateurs, the “foiled terror plots” would never have existed.

QUESTION: How prevalent is entrapment by informants across other counterterrorism contexts, and what safeguards exist against it?

The drama often begins when the FBI sends dozens of agents to arrest the defendants, search the mosque, and interview hundreds of frightened friends and neighbors in a manner designed to intimidate the community. . . . At the trial, the government often makes an absurd display of security in order to intimidate the jury and media into believing the defendants are really dangerous. A massive police presence surrounds the court, with snipers posted on rooftops. (Whom are they supposed to shoot?) The government often requests anonymous juries and witnesses, and it calls phony experts, who are essentially government mouthpieces, to testify about a fantasy “terrorist network” that might involve the defendant. The government feeds “secret” evidence, obtained from illegal electronic surveillance, to the judge in order to affect the court’s rulings and to prevent the defense from seeing or objecting to the material, and uses material obtained from these secret sources to assault the defendant’s character, even when the material is irrelevant to the charges. In this way, the government creates an atmosphere of hysteria and confusion to cover the lack of any substantive evidence that a real crime was committed.

Seen in perspective, the domestic War on Terror is not really about keeping Americans safe as much as it is about creating a spectacle of fear. During the Cold War, schools routinely conducted “duck and cover” drills in which students and teachers hid under tables, supposedly to protect them from a blast in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Whatever the marginal benefits of ducking under a table, the ability to survive a nuclear bomb depends on one’s distance from the blast, not on the furniture. The real goal of such activities was to keep the threat of attack alive and to foster fear and paranoia. In the War on Terror era, color-coded “terror threat levels” (ultimately phased out in 2011) and “if you see something, say something” signs in airports and subway stations have served a similar purpose by generating the spectacle of terrorism. And mainstream media coverage of “foiled terror plots” orchestrated by the law enforcement community only serves to reinforce this atmosphere.

XREF: Parallels the duck-and-cover critique and broader claims that security theater serves political ends rather than protection.

In 2007, the NYPD produced a document titled Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, in which it argues that there are four stages of radicalization: pre-radicalization, self-identification, indoctrination, and jihadization. According to this model, all young Muslim males from middle-class and immigrant families fall into the pre-radicalization stage. In short, simply being a member of this group places one on a conveyor belt aimed toward “radicalization.” Now if, by some chance, a member of this group should give up smoking, drinking, and gambling and start to grow a beard and wear traditional Islamic clothing, he is on the fast track toward acquiring “Jihadi-Salafist ideology,” which puts him squarely in the next stage: “self-identification.” Another characteristic of “self-identification” is political awareness and community activism. By the third stage, “indoctrination,” the NYPD tells us, the person has withdrawn from the mosque and has become politicized around a set of new beliefs leading to the fourth stage, “jihadization,” which is when he becomes ready to plan a terrorist attack. Signs of reaching this fourth stage include conducting research on the Internet, performing reconnaissance activity, and acquiring materials. While the report states that there is no profile for a potential terrorist, the thrust of its analysis is precisely about creating such a profile and predicting the activity of potential terrorists. Based on data from a grand total of ten cases, the report states that there is “remarkable consistency in the behaviors and trajectory of each of the plots across the stages” and that “this consistency provides a tool for predictability.”

QUESTION: How widely was this NYPD model applied in surveillance and policing practice, and what concrete harms resulted? SEED: Could be a strong angle for an essay on how 'predictive' security frameworks blend profiling with criminological narrative.

One does not need a Ph.D. in sociology or psychology to see that this is an inherently racist behavioral model fraught with double standards. For instance, the same kind of surveillance does not take place in white Christian communities, even though white supremacist terrorist organizations have long existed in the United States. A DHS report released in 2009 cautioned against violence by white supremacist groups: “The threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years. In addition, the historical election of an African American president and the prospect of policy changes are proving to be a driving force for rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalization.” The report also names the recession and economic insecurity as factors that spur the growth of domestic terrorism. One of the key differences between the DHS report and the aforementioned NYPD report is that race, gender, and religion are incidental to the DHS’s analysis. While it speaks about the anti-black, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and pro-gun politics of white supremacist groups, it fails to make the leap to the conclusion that there is a four-step process of radicalization that begins with a person simply being a white Christian male. Naturally, there is no program to infiltrate white Christian communities to see how these dangerous men eat, worship, play, or shop.

QUESTION: The DHS 2009 report on white supremacist terrorism offers a sharp counterexample to the NYPD's racialized radicalization framework worth examining further.

But even beyond declining to profile all white Christian men, the civil liberties of far-right-wing groups are respected by the law enforcement community. There is no preemptive prosecution of these groups, which span a wide ideological range that includes white supremacists, anti-government fanatics, and various Christian fundamentalist tendencies, even though many such groups form “militias” and hold regular paramilitary training camps. As Downs notes, “Nobody bothers them because indoctrination and weapons training is constitutionally protected free speech and exercise of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. The criminal line is crossed only when such groups conspire to commit a specific crime. However, preemptive prosecution makes an exception for Muslims.” In short, while white supremacists are allowed to train with guns at sites all over the United States, if a regular Muslim American so much as acquires a weapon, he or she is deemed suspicious.

The NYPD (as well other local law enforcement agencies) and the FBI advocate stage-based models for radicalization which put Islam at the “front and center of their analysis.” On the other hand, the DHS and NCTC have shied away from this stagist approach, emphasizing the complexity of the process. They have also suggested that while Islam can be used to justify acts of terrorism, radicalization is not caused by Islam. While all sides within the national security establishment agree with the theory of radicalization and the need to apprehend “Muslim terrorists,” they disagree about practical implementation. Here we see a similar dichotomy between the conservative wing of the law enforcement apparatus and what we might call a “realist” wing, similar to that which exists in the foreign policy establishment.

XREF: Parallels the conservative/realist split in foreign policy establishment that the source itself notes.

The end goal is to win consent for an imperial agenda through a process that orchestrates fear of the enemy within and preempts criticisms of empire-building.

During the NATO intervention into Libya in 2011, the FBI drew up lists of Libyan residents in the United States to be interviewed—demonstrating again the links between domestic counterterrorism in the United States and military interventions abroad. When the United States goes to war against a foreign enemy, it inevitably makes war on the perceived enemy within, which includes not only members of particular ethnic or national groups but also dissenters of all races.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on counterterrorism impacting civil liberties, and historical patterns like FBI surveillance during the Vietnam era.

This dimension of Islamophobia blossomed in the United States only at the end of the decade, when mosques and Islamic community centers came under attack from California to New York. A network of right-wing Islamophobes had been attempting to unleash anti-Muslim racism almost since 9/11 through a series of campaigns against Arab professors, Muslim community centers, and schools, but their breakthrough into the public sphere happened only after liberal Islamophobes cleared the way. Building on the media furor around "homegrown terrorism," President Obama unveiled his "Af-Pak strategy" and announced plans to send more troops to Afghanistan and increase drone strikes on Pakistan. Liberal imperialists and the mainstream media raised the alarm about "terrorists in our midst," providing the far-right "Islamophobic warriors" with the opening they had been waiting for.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how mainstream framing legitimizes far-right positions. QUESTION: Worth investigating the specific mechanisms by which Obama's Af-Pak framing enabled Islamophobic rhetoric.

In 2009, several US citizens or legal residents were arrested for alleged connections to "terrorist" activity. In the latter part of the year these became high-profile cases that drew sustained media attention. Following hard upon this media frenzy, in December 2009 the Obama administration announced plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending in more troops and by stepping up drone attacks on Pakistan, in what came to be known as the "Af-Pak strategy." Almost a full year into his presidency, the "peace president" had failed to fulfill his campaign promises to shut down Guantanamo Bay and undo the violations of civil liberties unleashed by Bush. The "homegrown terrorist" threat being whipped up by the media served well to continue the status quo.

SEED: Angle on how manufactured threat narratives license abandonment of civil liberties promises — parallels the security-agenda dynamics in many contemporary administrations.

Though none of the "homegrown terrorism" cases mentioned above lacked for sensational media treatment, the case of "Jihad Jane" caused the biggest uproar. While the Virginia case prompted speculation in the press about why five "normal" young men might be moved to fight with the Taliban, it was accepted that this was a possibility for young Muslim men. LaRose's gender, ethnicity, and "Main Street" Pennsylvania background meant that anyone could be a terrorist. Like the McCarthy-era red scare that imagined Communist spies lurking in every neighborhood, school, and workplace, the "green scare" encouraged Americans to view not only Muslims but anyone who converted to Islam as a threat.

XREF: Parallels the McCarthy-era red scare framing; the 'green scare' converts the war on terror into a suspicious-of-everyone panic. SEED: Potential article comparing McCarthy-era red scare dynamics to post-9/11 'green scare' treatment of converts to Islam.

The most virulent expression of this green scare was articulated by NYU professor Tunku Varadarajan. In a November 2009 Forbes article titled "Going Muslim," Varadarajan argued that what precipitated the tragedy at Fort Hood was not the racist harassment that Hasan faced in the army or the emotionally debilitating pressure of his job as an overworked army psychiatrist, but rather a condition that he suggests is inherent to all Muslims: the tendency toward violence. He argued that Hasan didn't "go postal"—that is, break down and become violent (the term became popular after a 1986 shooting by a postal worker). Rather, Varadarajan argued, Hasan was simply enacting, in a cold and calculated manner, the teachings of Islam. He was "going Muslim."

XREF: Connects to the broader 'green scare' phenomenon and Islamophobic discourse framing. QUESTION: Worth examining counter-narratives that refuted Varadarajan's framing of Fort Hood.

The reality, however, flies in the face of this rhetoric, as the last chapter showed. Interestingly, even the Rand Corporation, a right-wing institution, admitted that the danger posed to Americans by “terrorism” is limited. In the Los Angeles Times, Gregory Treverton noted that in “the five years after 2001, the number of Americans killed per year in terrorist attacks worldwide was never more than a hundred, and the toll some years was barely in double figures. Compare that with an average of 63 by tornadoes, 692 in bicycle accidents and 41,616 in motor-vehicle-related accidents.” Indeed.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about threat inflation and risk perception versus actual statistical dangers.

In 2009, the State Department reported that the number of Americans killed that year around the world due to terrorism was a grand total of nine. Fourteen people were injured, and four were kidnapped. To put those numbers in perspective, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 4,340 deaths due to workplace events or exposure in 2009.14 Deaths from car accidents numbered 30,797.15 Yet no one declared war on corporations or auto manufacturers. What’s more, a State Department terrorism report released in April 2009 states that “al-Qaeda . . . and associated networks continued to lose ground, both structurally and in the court of world public opinion.” Nevertheless, the report asserted that these organizations “remained the greatest terrorist threat to the United States and its partners.” All this reveals not only the disconnect between rhetoric and reality but also the mechanics involved in mobilizing a politics of fear. It is worth emphasizing that the threat from terrorism is a manufactured crisis, one that is useful to justify war and continued violations of civil liberties domestically. The green scare is just as useful today as the red scare was during the Cold War.

QUESTION: Would be worth verifying more recent comparable data on terrorism deaths versus workplace and car deaths to see if the disparity persists.

The essentialism involved in painting all Muslims with the brush of violent jihad fits neatly into the Orientalist “clash of civilizations” rhetoric. This presented something of a problem for the Obama administration, which at the time was making a concerted effort to eschew that argument in favor of a “counterinsurgency” strategy, as discussed in chapter 7. The realist think tank CSIS released a report outlining Zazi’s and Headley’s cases and argued that while the United States needs to clamp down on “Internet radicalization,” it must balance this with efforts to “puncture” the “clash of civilizations” narrative—not because it is inherently objectionable but because al-Qaeda uses the same argument in its recruitment efforts!

The immediate consequence of the “homegrown terrorist” hysteria was that the far-right-wing Islamophobes (more on them in the following chapter) who had long hoped to capture the national debate were able to do so. They took center stage in the wake of a controversy they generated around the construction of an Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of how moral panics and media amplification shift political discourse to fringe positions.

On May 6, 2010, the New York City Community Board voted unanimously to approve the project. As Salon reporter Justin Elliott has documented, the Cordoba House project did not become controversial until May 2010.21 In response to the community board’s decision, Pamela Geller, a right-wing blogger, posted an entry titled “Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction.” In it, she wrote, “This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” The next day, her group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) launched “Campaign Offensive: Stop the 911 Mosque!” While this wasn’t the first time the organized Islamophobes had blogged about the community center, their moment had finally arrived in the aftermath of the “homegrown terrorism” hysteria, which created space for the hard right to fan the flames of racism.

Stop Islamization of America, whose name is based on the notion that Muslims are conspiring to take over the United States, called a protest for May 29 against what Geller called the “911 Monster Mosque.” Geller is a fan of far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders (the feeling is mutual, given his glowing blurb for the book she coauthored on the Obama presidency) and an admirer of open fascists and street gangs such as the English Defense League that routinely attack Muslims and immigrants. She once claimed that Black South Africans are launching a “genocide” against whites. A staunch Zionist, she wrote a column in an Israeli newspaper in which she referred to the term “Palestinian” as “fallacious” and exhorted Israelis to “stand loud and proud. Give up nothing. Turn over not a pebble. For every rocket fired, drop a MOAB. Take back Gaza. Secure Judea and Samaria.”

XREF: Connects to the broader phenomenon of far-right figures synthesizing anti-Muslim, anti-Black, and anti-Palestinian positions into a single worldview.

The far right's effort to brand the center as the "victory mosque" was successful because it built on the media hysteria whipped up in the previous months by the Obama administration. The frenzy around "homegrown terrorism" opened the door, and it was just a matter of time before the far right came waltzing (or perhaps goose-stepping) in. These forces, along with sectors of the Republican Party, were so successful in setting the terms of the debate that anywhere between 54 and 68 percent of Americans expressed opposition to the project at its proposed location.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of manufactured outrage and how prior framing lowers the cost of subsequent attacks.

As this lopsided debate unfolded, President Obama qualified his earlier statements in support of the project by saying that while he affirms the religious rights of all people, he was not in saying this commenting "on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there." Obama was quickly adapting to right-wing pressure; when Gainesville, Florida, minister Terry Jones announced his plan to burn the Koran on September 11, Obama did not argue that such an act was offensive, that it constituted an attack on religious freedom, or that it was reminiscent of Ku Klux Klan cross burnings in the South, but that it threatened "national security" and would put US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan "in harm's way": "This could increase the recruitment of individuals who'd be willing to blow themselves up in American cities or European cities." Obama's summoning the specter of suicide bombers in America's cities only further stirred the pot of Islamophobic hatred.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on securitization theory — how political actors elevate issues to security matters to justify exceptional measures.

Polls in mid-2010 showed that close to 20 percent of Americans believed that Obama was a "secret Muslim" and that this made him an unfit president. Rather than challenge the racist assumptions of his accusers, Obama chose instead to emphasize his Christian credentials. This posture only gave credence to the notion that there is something wrong with being Muslim. In short, with a few exceptions (such as Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to be elected to Congress), the liberal imperialists in the Democratic Party pandered to the far right on this question. It is therefore not surprising that the right was able to set the terms of the discussion.

XREF: Connects to race-baiting dynamics in contemporary political discourse and how defensive positioning by marginalized figures can cede framing power to opponents. SEED: Could be an essay angle on how leaders' rhetorical choices about identity shape which assumptions become acceptable in public discussion.

As Max Blumenthal notes, the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy is "the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era." He explains that the efforts began in the early 2000s, when a coalition of Jewish groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) to AIPAC came together to address what they saw as a sudden increase in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses. The key targets on campuses were Middle East scholars whose work challenged the right-wing narrative of Middle East politics generally and of the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular.

XREF: Connection to ongoing discourse about campus politics, academic freedom, and organized right-wing campaigns against scholars, echoing similarly organized efforts in other fields.

Kramer, who studied under Bernard Lewis, produced a book that fueled an effort to target and stifle critical thought. As Joel Beinin notes, "Kramer and his ilk were emboldened by their links to officials in the upper-mid levels of the Bush administration," and particularly to the neocons who shared their worldview. He adds that the "neo-cons have much more powerful political connections than those that the AJC, the ADL and AIPAC were able to mobilize." But this unity was not coincidental. Rather, if Lewis, Zakaria, and others were the intellectual core brought together to formulate the propaganda war after 9/11 (as discussed in chapter 7), Kramer, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, and others served as the activists out in the world policing critical thought. Their job was to ensure that the War on Terror brand remained uncontested and that their propaganda was not punctured by scholars with the knowledge and ability to expose the lies. Bush even nominated Pipes to a seat on the board of directors of the federally funded United States Institute of Peace, which was supposed to produce knowledge to aid in conflict resolution. Pipes's nomination was scuttled, but this move represents the neocons' penchant for thought control.

XREF: Connects to the broader 9/11 propaganda apparatus described elsewhere in the book (chapter 7's network of Lewis, Zakaria, et al.). QUESTION: How effective were these pressure campaigns at actually policing academic criticism, and what specific cases went beyond Kramer's book?

In the end, however, Columbia students and faculty launched a campaign in defense of Massad that defeated the Islamophobes. Massad not only earned tenure but won the prestigious Lionel Trilling Award for excellence in scholarship.

SEED: Potential essay angle: the mechanics of successful academic defense campaigns and what makes them work against organized smear efforts.

Pipes went on to found the website Campus Watch, which asserts that Middle East scholars are un-American. In terms that barely disguise its racism, the website explains why this might be so; one page, since removed, stated that “Middle East studies in the United States has become the preserve of Middle East Arabs” who “have brought their views with them.” The next logical step was to target Arabs. Indeed, Campus Watch’s first prominent attack occurred against Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of academic surveillance and McCarthyism-style campaigns against Middle East studies.

However, as Blumenthal notes, the “local crusade established an effective blueprint for generating hysteria against the establishment of Islamic centers and mosques across the country, while galvanizing a cast of characters who would form an anti-Muslim network which would gain attention and success in the years to come.”

If that was not enough, she went on to accuse Almontaser of “whitewash[ing] the genocide against the Jews.” Daniel Pipes, who also took part in the campaigns against Massad and the Boston Islamic center, claimed the school should be stopped because “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with Pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage.” The campaign reached fever pitch when the Islamophobes found a picture of a T-shirt with the slogan “Intifada NYC” produced by the group Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media (AWAAM), a local Arab feminist organization. The weak connection between AWAAM and Almontaser is that they share an office with the Yemeni-American association on whose board Almontaser sits. This was all the Islamophobes needed to brand Almontaser as a jihadist.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of Islamophobic smear campaigns and guilt-by-association tactics in public discourse.

The New York Post carried a story that stated that the T-shirt was “apparently a call for a Gaza-style uprising in the Big Apple.” Almontaser’s efforts to explain the meaning and significance of the term intifada were countered with an ADL spokesperson who called AWAAM “an active supporter of the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas.” The usual suspects all chimed in and the pressure mounted. After enduring an intense campaign of personal harassment and intimidation, Almontaser was forced to resign when her former supporter Mayor Bloomberg caved.

This chapter sets out to situate the right-wing fanatics within the broader context in which they operate. Following David Caute, I will argue that the extremists function to create a climate of fear that bolsters the aims of empire. In his book The Great Fear, Caute showed that McCarthyism wasn’t simply about one out-of-control senator, but a political system (including both Democrats and Republicans) that allowed a figure like Joseph McCarthy to set the political agenda. McCarthy was a useful tool in prosecuting the Cold War—particularly in creating a climate of fear where dissent could be punished and neutralized. The right-wing Islamophobic warriors play a similar role during the era of the War on Terror. They are not “alien outsiders” but emerge from within the political establishment, the security apparatus, the academy, the think tank milieu, and the mainstream media. Thus, far from “infiltrating” an otherwise good system, the new McCarthyites are a product of, and fit comfortably within, the structures of American empire; their role is to push the envelope.

There are four interconnected groups of people who have come together to project the image of a vicious and menacing “Muslim enemy” and to generate fear and hatred. They include members of the neocon camp who have devoted themselves to ferreting out the “Islamic terrorist”; Zionists whose goal of policing criticism of Israel dovetails neatly with the logic of Islamophobia; the Christian Right, which has joined the ranks of the Islamophobic warriors; and a group of former Muslims (and Christians) from the Middle East and South Asia who have profited from Islam-bashing.

As the AVOT statement makes clear, it is not simply the violent section of the Islamist movement that they wish to “research,” but “Islam and Islamism” as a whole. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that simply being a Muslim makes you worthy of suspicion, according to this logic. Drawing a page from the McCarthyist playbook, Gaffney was one of many who claimed that Obama might be a “secret Muslim.” The implication, of course, is that being a Muslim is sufficient cause for not trusting him.

XREF: Parallels McCarthy-era guilt-by-association tactics against suspected communists, drawing a direct historical analogy.

As its website proudly declares, AVOT has a “steadfast commitment to attacking those who would blame America first.” This is an open declaration of war on Muslims and the left. Its targets are people in Muslim-majority countries, particularly Arabs, and the left in the West, particularly the American left. Neocons have vigorously argued that the United States has been a force for good in the Middle East and that people in that region therefore have only themselves to blame for the state of their countries. This argument is peddled not just by the likes of Pipes and Lewis but also by mainstream figures like Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a close associate of the neocons, gives legitimacy to this argument through her status as a “native informer.”

After all, the Smith Act, which was used to persecute the left during the Cold War, was passed under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

SEED: A useful corrective to the assumption that political repression is a Republican phenomenon — could anchor a piece on bipartisan history of restrictions on civil liberties.

Seven foundations contributed close to forty-three million dollars to these new McCarthyites between 2001 and 2009. The main funders are the Donors Capital Fund, the Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Newton D. and Rochelle F. Becker Foundations and Charitable Trust, the Russell Berrie Foundation, the Anchorage Charitable Fund, the William Rosenwald Family Fund, and the Fairbrook Foundation.

An August 2011 Gallup poll asked respondents in various religious groups if they thought that American Muslims are sympathetic to al-Qaeda. Seventy percent of Jewish Americans said no; the only groups with higher "no" percentages were Muslims and atheists. Clearly this is about politics, not religion.

Two of these foundations (Becker and Berrie) are explicitly committed to promoting what they see as the interests of the Jewish community (specifically Zionism), and a third, the Fairbrook Foundation, is even more extreme in its Zionist orientation. Run by Aubrey and Joyce Chernick, it "has provided funding to groups ranging from the ADL and CAMERA, a right-wing, pro-Israel, media-watchdog outfit, to violent Israeli settlers living on Palestinian lands and figures like the pseudo-academic author Robert Spencer," according to Max Blumenthal's investigative journalism.

Graham has called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion.” For Graham, “true Islam” advocates the beating of wives and the murder of adulterous children and therefore “cannot be practiced” in the United States.

In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the Tea Party bigots and the religious right ganged up to stop the construction of an Islamic center, even going so far as to set a fire at the construction site. They were assisted by groups like ACT! for America, founded by Brigitte Gabriel (a Lebanese Christian), whose members have been involved in rallies not only in Tennessee but also in Florida and other states.

Shoebat similarly tells his audiences that CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America are “the terrorist arms of the lawmaker: Sharia, Koran and Hadith.” Shoebat is even more extreme than his fellow ex-Muslims. His newfound Christian beliefs hold that during the “end times” of biblical prophecy, Muslims will fight alongside Satan on earth. Despite these outlandish claims (or perhaps because of them), he is enthusiastically promoted by his colleagues in the Islamophobic network.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on echo chambers, credibility signaling, and how extreme claims gain traction in ideological networks.

Shoebat is even more extreme than his fellow ex-Muslims. His newfound Christian beliefs hold that during the “end times” of biblical prophecy, Muslims will fight alongside Satan on earth. Despite these outlandish claims (or perhaps because of them), he is enthusiastically promoted by his colleagues in the Islamophobic network. Gaffney gushed, “In the twenty-five years I have been in Washington I have never heard anything so extraordinary and the truth told so eloquently by someone like this.” In 2011, he was paid five thousand dollars by the Department of Homeland Security to spout his nonsense at a South Dakota law enforcement conference.

QUESTION: Does shock value or extremity of claims actually increase perceived credibility in Islamophobic networks, or are these figures promoted for other strategic reasons?

The upshot of this propaganda is that few in the media challenged the King hearings, giving credence to the notion that Muslims are in fact being “radicalized” and need to be questioned and monitored in ways similar to the “reds” in the Cold War era.

XREF: Parallels the historical red scare framework of McCarthyism being mapped onto post-9/11 surveillance politics.

One example illustrates how Islamophobic propaganda is amplified in the mainstream media. The new McCarthyites have long claimed that 80 percent of mosques are controlled by jihadists. In 2004, Republican congressman Peter King stated on the Fox News network's Sean Hannity Show that “eighty to eighty-five percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.” He backed up his claim by citing the research of Emerson and Pipes. This nonsense was repeated again and again by the Islamophobes, even in the mainstream media. In 2010, Pamela Geller stated that “four out of five mosques preach hate” on CNN. In March 2011, King held his “green scare” hearings on the supposed radicalization in American Muslim communities.

XREF: Connects to literature on propaganda amplification and media studies on how weak evidence gains credibility through repeated mainstream citation. QUESTION: How did Emerson and Pipes' underlying research support (or fail to support) the 80% figure?

As Kundnani notes, Hitchens shared with Berman the view that “as soon as the West had won its historic battle against communism, a new totalitarianism—Islamism—emerged as a political force. The West, it is argued, is morally obliged to expunge this totalitarian threat both in the Islamic world and among its own Muslim communities.” Thus, although the liberal imperialists use more subtle language, they ultimately end up making a similar argument to the neocons (see, for instance, Podhoretz’s World War 4: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism) and the Islamophobic warriors. Daniel Pipes has similarly argued that “what Nazism or fascism was to World War II and Marxist/Leninism was to the Cold War, militant Islam is to this war [the War on Terror].”

XREF: Connects Hitchens, Berman, Podhoretz, and Pipes as part of a single intellectual camp framing the War on Terror as a continuation of the Cold War struggle.

A wide range of people and groups have participated in constructing a diabolical “Islamic threat.” What we have seen in this chapter is that the new McCarthyites aren’t aberrations in an otherwise fair and neutral system, despite their rabidly racist views; their role is to push the envelope. To recap, the first group of new McCarthyites discussed in this chapter was a segment of neocons who have devoted themselves to anti-Muslim advocacy through various groups and organizations. However, given that they are part of the foreign policy establishment or from the military, the CIA, the Department of Defense, or other branches of the security apparatus, their ideology is echoed and endorsed by others who share their views but may not explicitly identify as neocons. Other Islamophobic warriors include right-wingers of various stripes—Zionists, Christian fundamentalists, and right-wing ex-Muslims and Christians from the Middle East and South Asia. Their arguments are made more palatable by the liberal Islamophobes who populate the academy, the mainstream media, and various think tanks.

XREF: Connects to historical McCarthyism as a parallel for how ideological networks mainstream fringe views across political institutions.

The chart below attempts to capture these sources of Islamophobia and their impact on public discourse. The reader will notice that there is no separate box for the Islamophobes. This is because, as was shown above, they are part of the establishment and exist within foreign policy think tanks, universities and colleges, the political class, and the security apparatus (defined as the branches of government that prosecute the War on Terror abroad and as well as at home).

Wired’s investigative reporting found that the “U.S. military taught its future leaders that a ‘total war’ against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists.” Among the various options put forward were to wipe out whole cities (as was done with Hiroshima) and to target the “civilian population wherever necessary.” While the Pentagon has since suspended such training, the officer responsible for giving these lectures maintains his position within the military: the “commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels” who took his course and listened to his rants have since been promoted to higher-level assignments.

QUESTION: How many of the officers who received this training now hold senior leadership positions, and what policy influence does this legacy carry?

From this analysis it can be discerned that the McCarthyism of the twenty-first century isn’t the product of just one individual: it is the collective effort of right-wingers in the academy, the think-tank milieu, the political sphere, and the security establishment. But the green scare, just like its twentieth-century counterpart, is supported and endorsed by liberals in every sphere who share with conservatives a common commitment to US imperialism. It is, however, worth noting that Islamophobia is less potent as an agent of fear than its red counterpart. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was indisputably a powerful nuclear armed threat to the United States. The same cannot be said of radical Islamist groups, as even members of the security establishment freely admit. The “green scare” can be effective only up to a point; it must constantly be rehashed in public memory through media spectacles in order to keep the fear alive. Both conservatives and liberals participate in these efforts.

XREF: Connects to historical red scare literature on Cold War domestic politics and how manufactured fear operates.

For instance, when Florida pastor Terry Jones threatened to burn the Koran on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Obama administration had to rein him in. This had less to do with Obama’s commitment to fighting Islamophobia and more to do with his administration’s emphasis on winning hearts and minds in the “Muslim world.” After reinforcing the notion that the United States was a nation built on religious tolerance, Obama said of Jones, in a television interview, that “I just want him to understand that this stunt that he is pulling could greatly endanger our young men and women in uniform who are in Iraq, who are in Afghanistan.” The turn to counterinsurgency meant that obvious provocations of this kind had to be managed even while the logic of empire was reinforced.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of counterinsurgency doctrine and the tension between 'hearts and minds' rhetoric and imperial aims.

In this book we have journeyed from the seventh century to the twenty-first and found that the relationship between the “East” and “West” has not been characterized by a transhistoric “clash of civilizations.” We also saw that the image of the menacing “Muslim threat” has been mobilized largely by ruling elites to serve a political agenda, whether the domination of Europe by the papacy in the eleventh century or US expansionism today. An external enemy is usually paired with an internal one against whom palpable fear and hatred are generated. It follows that Islamophobia is about politics and not religion; it is therefore in the realm of politics that Islamophobia must be fought.

The Democratic Party is not an ally in this fight. Some on the left, and many Muslims, believed that the Obama presidency would mitigate and undo the virulent Islamophobia unleashed during the Bush years. Not only had tens of thousands of Muslim Americans been detained or deported in the years following 9/11, but hundreds of thousands were “interviewed” and thereby deemed suspicious by the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. There was much hope during the 2008 elections that all of this would change with a new Democratic president. A poll conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that 89 percent of Muslim Americans voted for Obama; only 2 percent voted for the Republican, John McCain. More than two-thirds declared themselves to be Democrats, 29 percent said they were independents, and only 4 percent identified as Republican. But their hopes would be dashed.

After Obama won the election, he continued Bush’s second-term foreign policy agenda. While he retreated rhetorically from the use of harsh Islamophobic language, in practice he sent thirty thousand more troops to Afghanistan, expanded the war to Pakistan, and tried to alter the Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq so as to not only extend the US occupation but also grant immunity to US troops from Iraqi prosecution. Not only did he carry out far more drone attacks on Afghanistan and Pakistan than his predecessor, he also integrated them into his strategies for Yemen and Somalia. He made a show of demonstrating his loyalty to Israel and failed, like every previous president, to prevent Israeli attacks on Palestinians.

XREF: Relates to broader scholarship on the continuity between Bush and Obama counterterrorism/drone policy, such as work by Micah Zenko and others.

In the context of the Arab uprisings of 2011, the Obama administration at first supported its dictatorial allies (such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a personal friend of the Clinton family). When it became clear that they were going to be swept from power, Obama embraced the Arab Spring, at least in public, while at the same time supporting counterrevolutionary forces around the region. The United States continued to fund the Egyptian military, the key source of counterrevolution in that country. Elsewhere the Obama White House stayed silent—such as when Saudi Arabia not only repressed its Shi’a rebellion but also sent troops to Bahrain to crush the uprising in that country. Had Obama wanted to intervene on the side of the prodemocracy demonstrators in Bahrain, he could have used the Fifth Fleet, which is stationed there. Instead, he opted to support pro-Western forces in Libya and Syria as a means of replacing inconsistent allies and deflating movements demanding real democracy and social change.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of US policy backing authoritarian regimes for strategic geopolitical advantage through the Arab Spring era.

Domestically, Obama has attacked Muslims and Arabs by continuing Bush’s policies of torture, extraordinary rendition, and preemptive prosecution. American Muslims continue to be harassed and persecuted by the state. The drama of “homegrown terrorism” was only heightened under Obama in 2009, paving the way for the far-right-wing Islamophobic warriors. Obama has even gone further than Bush in several ways. He has secured for the president the power to execute US citizens suspected of ties to terrorism without so much as a trial or the apparently unnecessary burden of proof; the cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was summarily executed in 2011. He also signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which, among other things, allows the military to detain “terror suspects” who are US citizens indefinitely without charge. Although this is both unconstitutional and illegal, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, and even though this process has torn Muslim families apart, Obama adopted Bush’s policies and codified them into law.

XREF: Connects to broader narratives about the continuity between Bush and Obama administrations on civil liberties and surveillance, relevant to any discussion of executive power and the war on terror. QUESTION: Worth verifying the specific legal claims here — the NDAA indefinite detention provision and the constitutionality of the al-Awlaki killing — given the strongly partisan framing of this source.

Instead of pushing back against preemptive prosecution and the racist practice of targeting Muslims before they actually do anything, Obama strengthened it. Giving credence to existing radicalization programs in the law enforcement community, he unveiled his “counter-radicalization” strategy in 2011. In the opening statement of his strategy document, Obama argued that “most recently, al-Qa’ida and its affiliates have attempted to recruit and radicalize people here in the United States, as we have seen in several plots and attacks, including the deadly attack two years ago on our service members at Fort Hood.” After spending much time in 2009 emphasizing the threat of terrorists inside US borders, as discussed in chapter 9, Obama put forward a plan to police “homegrown terrorism” by eliciting the help of the Muslim community. Yet liberal Islamophobia does not target all Muslims. It acknowledges that there are “good Muslims”—those who cooperate with the goals of empire. Thus, Obama stated that Muslims are “best positioned to take the lead because they know their communities best.” Heaping praise on Muslim Americans who have worked with the law enforcement community, he called for more such work. The document solicits the support of teachers, coaches, and community members, who are to be turned into a McCarthy-type informant system.

XREF: Connects to the book's earlier argument about liberal Islamophobia and the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' Muslims cooperating with empire.

Adhering to the precepts of liberal Islamophobia, the report goes on to state that “we must counter al-Qa’ida’s propaganda that the United States is somehow at war with Islam” and instead affirm that “Islam is part of America, a country that cherishes the active participation of all its citizens, regardless of background and belief. We live what al-Qa’ida violently rejects—religious freedom and pluralism.” Obama added that “our rich diversity of backgrounds and faiths makes us stronger.” This is the modus operandi of liberal Islamophobia: to roundly reject Islam-bashing—and then proceed to institute proposals that target Muslims. When representative Peter King held his McCarthy-style hearings in March 2011 to determine the extent of Muslim radicalization in the United States, he was rightly criticized by liberals. However, that August, when Obama institutionalized this process through his “counter-radicalization” strategy, there was nary a peep of protest.

DEFINE: Defines 'liberal Islamophobia' as rejecting Islam-bashing while instituting proposals targeting Muslims.

In reality, al-Qaeda is an insignificant force, and its ability to recruit in the United States is highly limited. Even members of the security apparatus admit as much. A month before the release of the “counter-radicalization” document, the Washington Post reported that it was widely believed in the CIA, as well by counterterrorism officials, that al-Qaeda was all but finished. A Foreign Affairs article by John Mueller titled “The Truth about al-Qaeda” arrived at the same conclusion. Yet, despite the lack of any credible evidence to suggest that al-Qaeda remained a threat to national security, the Obama administration launched a plan to increase racial profiling of Muslim Americans. Why? There are a number of reasons, but one is certainly that the “counterinsurgency” strategy—that is, the attempt to “win hearts and minds”—was largely failing abroad. Obama therefore had to turn back to counterterrorism and resuscitate the “Islamic terrorist” enemy, albeit in liberal guise.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of security theater and manufactured threats (e.g., Michael Hayden's admissions, or the 'blowback' literature on counterterrorism failures driving domestic surveillance).

Reda Shata learned firsthand why it doesn't pay to associate with the law enforcement establishment. He worked with the FBI and the police, inviting officers to his mosque for breakfast and even dining with Mayor Bloomberg. He personified everything that American imperialism has defined as a “good Muslim.” Yet an undercover police officer and an informant were assigned to spy on him and to keep tabs on his mosque.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on counterterrorism overreach and the NYPD surveillance program exposed by the Associated Press, and critiques of 'good Muslim' framing in post-9/11 security discourse.

In Florida, when the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, declined an invitation to attend an event hosted by a Muslim organization, she was called out. Lambasting both the Republicans and Democrats, activist Muhammad Malik said, “I don't think it's an issue of a few bad apples—as long as Islamophobia is cozy within our political and social institutions, threats to full participation, dignity, and civil rights will remain alive and well.” Poll numbers showed declining confidence in Obama; in 2011, seven out of ten Muslim Americans viewed Obama favorably, compared with nine out of ten in 2008.

The zealots, who were largely bused in from outside the city, retreated. Park51 opened in 2012. Such efforts have been reproduced around the United States, sometimes resulting in victories, other times in defeats.

As an aside, let us note that not all Wahhabis are radicals. While Saudi Arabia is a Wahhabi nation, only a small subset of Saudis are jihadi extremists. The Wahhabi-Salafi jihadis based in the tribal areas of Pakistan offer a literal and even stricter interpretation of Wahhabi-Salafi doctrine.

DEFINE: Clarifies that Wahhabism and jihadi extremism are not monolithic or identical categories.

In India, for instance, after the last Muslim ruler was deposed by the British in 1857, Muslims found themselves in the minority in a country dominated by Hindus. The Deobandi Islamic movement came into being shortly afterward, in 1867, as a response to this situation. It was founded as a means to provide Muslims in the Indian subcontinent with a set of rules to live by, in order to preserve Islam in a country where Muslims were a minority. Toward this end, the Deobandis trained a core of ulama to issue fatwas, or legal opinions, to make sure that Muslims in India conformed to their very rigorous and conservative interpretation of Islam (Kepel, Jihad, 223). In this, the Deobandis became very similar to the Wahhabis and in the later part of the twentieth century established close ties with them in the context of US-sponsored activities in Pakistan (57–58).

XREF: Parallels the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia, also a conservative reformist response to perceived Islamic decline.