Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg treat it as a largely unwarranted social anxiety about Islam and Muslims, although they focus on the element of fear of Islam rather than other stereotypes. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri considers it to be a prejudice against Islam that is particularly associated with violence in media representations, although he emphasizes the similarity of Islamophobia to prejudice against other minority “out-groups” like Catholics, Jews, and blacks. Edward Curtis highlights the element of racism in Islamophobia, which he links to state repression of political dissent. Juliane Hammer draws attention to the importance of gender in images of terrorists and the construction of Islamophobia, although she cautions that particular examples of Islamophobia must be analyzed in terms of the particular political and intellectual currents that drive them. Andrew Shryock focuses on Islamophobia as an ideology related to nationalism and the problems of minority identity; he contrasts Islamophobic identification of “the Muslim as enemy” with the equally simplistic concept of “the Muslim as friend,” as found in Islamophilia.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarly debates on prejudice and critical race theory; the noted theorists each locate Islamophobia in different structures (media, state, gender, nationalism).

This book does not aim to defend Islam or present an idealized portrait of “good Muslims.” Nor does it intend to deconstruct all of the fantastic and exaggerated conspiracy theories, alleging that Muslims are intrinsically violent because of their religion, and also inevitably hostile to the United States—a proposition that is sociologically inconceivable and unsupported by facts.

Instead, this book offers important insights into Islamophobia as a conflict over American identity, which draws upon a deep well of bitterness toward racial and religious minorities.

DEFINE: Frames Islamophobia not as mere prejudice but as a contest over what it means to be American, drawing on longstanding hostility toward minorities.

The term “Islamophobia” was popularized in a 1997 report by a British think tank, the Runnymede Trust, drawing attention to this form of prejudice as a serious social problem.

DEFINE: Traces the origin of the term 'Islamophobia' as a concept, clarifying its historical introduction into public discourse.

Before 2001, survey data on American opinions regarding Islam revealed a fairly even split between positive and negative impressions of Islam, although the majority of Americans registered no opinion at all because of lack of any knowledge. But that balance has shifted over the past decade, as negative perceptions of Islam have become more widespread. Focusing more precisely on the association between Islam and violence, ten years ago, only 25% of Americans believed that Islam encourages violence, while 51 percent disagreed with that position; as of 2011, 40 percent say that Islam encourages violence, while 42 percent do not.

One unlikely site for such a protest was Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where the local Muslim community had been holding prayer services for years without attracting any notice. When the construction of a new Islamic Center was approved in 2010, organized resistance by mosque opponents took the form of arguing that Islam was not a religion protected by First Amendment guarantees, but a political movement aiming at the imposition of sharia law in America. The US Department of Justice disagreed and filed a brief maintaining that Islam has been recognized as a religion since the time of Thomas Jefferson (this action contrasts with the 1964 case in which the Department of Justice unsuccessfully argued against the religious status of the Nation of Islam, as discussed below by Edward Curtis).

XREF: Contrasts with the 1964 Nation of Islam case cited in the highlight itself, where DOJ took the opposite position.

Another report, by the Center for American Progress, draws attention to seven right-wing foundations that have provided over US$40 million to support Islamophobia between 2001 and 2009, particularly through five dedicated anti-Islamic think tanks headed by Frank Gaffney, David Yerushalmi, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Steven Emerson.

QUESTION: Worth verifying the Center for American Progress report and its methodology; the $40M figure spans 2001-2009 and a specific set of named individuals. Builds on: "Islamophobia stems from a conflict over American identity."

Millions of dollars, funneled through shadowy front organizations, have also supported the distribution of anti-Islamic propaganda on a massive scale. Only weeks before the presidential election of 2008, 100 newspapers and magazines across the country distributed millions of DVDs of a documentary entitled “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West,” in Sunday editions, and 28 million more DVDs were mailed directly to voters in swing states. The film has also been repeatedly shown on Fox News TV. In lurid and alarming scenes, the film (distributed by an otherwise unknown organization called the Clarion Fund, Inc.) bluntly intercut images of Muslims and Nazis to make the point that they are basically the same.

QUESTION: Who funded the Clarion Fund, and what was the direct electoral impact of this distribution timing?

The essential message of this film, again, was that American Muslims are planning to infiltrate and dominate America, and so any claims by Muslims to be “moderate” are part of a devious pattern of deception. The impact of this mentality seems to be demonstrated by Associated Press reports revealing over six years of New York City police spying on Muslims in mosques, small businesses, and universities over a wide region. The secret “Demographics Unit” responsible for this apparent abuse of civil liberties has not generated a single lead or uncovered any evidence of terrorism.

QUESTION: What broader research explores how conspiracy narratives against minority groups justify state surveillance programs?

It is hard to say whether the organized networks of Islamophobia have in fact had the chief responsibility for pushing American opinion against Islam. There are clearly sectors of American culture that are predisposed to be hostile to Islam in any case. While it is true that conservative and evangelical circles typically hold anti-Islamic attitudes, as Juliane Hammer points out in her essay, there are also plenty of liberals who are quick to denounce the alleged sins and shortcomings of Muslims. Furthermore, as Kambiz GhaneaBassiri observes, news media and elected officials benefit from the fear of Muslim terrorism with enhanced revenue or political power. So, in effect, Islamophobia fits into certain structural aspects of the way American society deals with recent minorities during times of crisis.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of how American society scapegoats recent minority groups during crises, echoing historical treatments of earlier immigrant/religious minorities.

Exploring the connections between British and American views of Islam over three centuries, they address enduring stereotypes and anxieties focused on Muslims, beginning with the standard eighteenth-century portraits of Muhammad by Humphrey Prideaux and Voltaire, which depicted him (with somewhat contradictory logic) as both an impostor and a fanatic. Perhaps, because of their limited contact with Muslims (outside of Tripoli and the Philippines), Americans tended to rely on the advice of the British, who claimed extensive experience with Muslim subjects in their Indian colony.

XREF: Connects to broader historiography about how colonial knowledge transfer shaped American orientalist thinking before direct American contact with the Muslim world.

It is striking to see how the fictional possibility of American Muslims was used as an extreme hypothetical example, as when the 1789 Constitutional debates on the “religious test” for the presidency entertained the notion that even a “Mahometan” could be considered for that office. It was evidently only after the 1857 Indian revolt (largely blamed on the Muslims and the last Mughal emperor) that British officials began to subscribe to a paranoid suspicion of a Muslim threat to their

QUESTION: The 1789 debate over the religious test considered even a 'Mahometan' for the presidency — worth investigating how the founding generation imagined religious pluralism.

This Manichean vision of struggle between forces of light and darkness has left its legacy in apocalyptic depictions of Islam, alongside the Catholic Church, as vehicles of the Antichrist in opposition to evangelical truth. The recurring theme of the fear and threat of Islam in eighteenthto twentieth-century America, reinforced in this fashion by the perspective of British colonialism, helped to consolidate the concept of Islam as a single homogeneous whole, an essentialized portrait that was severed from any historical context.

DEFINE: Explains the process of 'essentialization' — collapsing Islam into a single, ahistorical, homogeneous entity through apocalyptic framing.

GhaneaBassiri concludes that, while bigotry and prejudice have regularly played roles in the building of American cultural unity by suppressing diversity, attacks on out-groups divert attention from real crises and often lead to the expansion of state power and the erosion of civil liberties.

XREF: Echoes broader historical patterns of scapegoating and its relationship to authoritarian state-building that appear in other political-historical sources.

But she widens the field of associations to include domestic politics, imperial wars, feminist negotiations, and "Western" claims of superiority—and it includes the polite Islamophobia of liberals as well as conservatives.

Muslim women, whose voices are rarely sought out, are regularly both attacked in anti-Muslim hate crimes and viewed with pity as victims who need to be saved from their own religion. Genuine issues of domestic violence (which exists in every community) have been seized by opportunistic Islamophobes as another weapon for bashing Islam.

In the political realm, as Hammer points out, neoconservative attacks on Islam generally include a gender-egalitarian and women’s rights perspective. This ostensible intervention on behalf of women oppressed by the sharia reinforces Islamophobia among Americans; it claims to be interested in saving Muslim women while simultaneously casting them as foreign and dangerous, in this way turning women’s bodies into the tools of political agendas of imperialism and minority discrimination. Nowhere is this more evident than in the condescending feminist concern about the oppression of Afghani women, which conveniently justified the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan, although such concerns did not arise in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan praised the Afghan mujahidin as freedom fighters.

To use the language of political scientist Carl Schmitt, shifting Muslims from the category of enemies (Islamophobia) to friends (Islamophilia) simply perpetuates the same essentializing logic, but with an equally distorted positive view of Islam. The shortcomings of the “good Muslim, bad Muslim” model are all too evident, since there are real differences among Muslims, and Shryock demonstrates this point with an amusing recital of the characteristics of the “good Muslim” stereotype. Requiring the “good Muslim” to be the unimpeachable US citizen automatically alienates any Muslim who has criticism of particular US policies. Islamophilia therefore is bound to be a failing proposition, for even as Muslims become more American, the bar for acceptance is set higher, since no one really believes that they have even denounced terrorism.

But the friend–enemy distinction can only be overcome if Muslims and non-Muslims recognize each other as an inescapable part of the same zones of interaction.

When confronted with the commonality of Islamophobic themes of the fanatic Muslim man, the oppressed Muslim woman, and an intolerant Islamic religion, defenders of these views often respond that their prevalence must reflect their truth. After all, they argue, all stereotypes have some seed of truth. The ironclad quality of this tautology—that past repetition of an allegation is justification for its reiteration—recommends a different tack in refutation. A historical evaluation of these claims that demonstrates their persistence despite historical changes helps demonstrate how the core of American and British Islamophobia derives from received truisms that have established—and continue to establish—basic expectations about how Muslims behave. These expectations shape how information about Muslims is interpreted so that what fails to fit within this frame of reference (e.g., Muslim tolerance, nonviolent Muslim protest) often is overlooked.

DEFINE: Explains how a tautological defense of stereotypes works: their repetition is taken as evidence of their truth.

If a Mohammedan, Turk, Egyptian, Syrian or African commits a crime the newspaper reports do not tell us that it was committed by a Turk, an Egyptian, a Syrian or an African, but by a Mohammedan. … If an Irishman, an Italian, a Spaniard or a German commits a crime in the United States we do not say that it was committed by a Catholic, a Methodist or a Baptist, nor even a Christian; we designate the man by his nationality.

A historical exploration of British and American literature between 1690 and 1947 demonstrates the roots and qualities of Islamophobia that Britons and Americans have shared. Meanwhile, significant differences between the perspectives found in the two countries demonstrate how these were fashioned by differing concerns about their own societies. In order to emphasize this difference, we choose to compare American views of Muslims with those found among Britons who had lived in India. In the latter context, predominantly white Christian Britons found themselves a minority in a land once ruled by successive Muslim rulers who left impressive vestiges of their once-mighty empires. As a ruling elite, Britons had to adapt their Islamophobic inheritance to the exigencies of governing tens of millions of Muslims. In the United States, engagements with Muslims appeared to be a matter of international affairs alone,

Before beginning, we need to outline the parameters of this study. First, by “Islamophobia,” we refer to a largely unwarranted social anxiety about Islam and Muslims. Much more could be said about British and American stereotypes about Muslims. Other groups have also suffered negative stereotypes in these societies, but few communities have been perceived as so threatening. Hence, our argument here focuses only on the features of Muslims that have evoked such fear among the majority without exploring many of the other accusations about Muslims—such as their misogyny, their opposition to modernity, their commitment to a sensual religion, and their association with specific races.

DEFINE: Provides the study's working definition of Islamophobia as unwarranted social anxiety, distinguishing its focus on perceived threat from other stereotypes.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no one influenced British and American attitudes toward Islam more than Humphrey Prideaux. In 1697, this Anglican theologian published his seminal book on the topic, The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in the Life of Mahomet . The book’s popularity led to eight editions in 25 years with copies finding their way to the American colonies as early as 1746. 3 Although the volume’s central thesis—that a self-serving Muhammad intentionally deceived his followers by masquerading as a prophet—had long existed in Europe, his work made the allegation commonplace.

Builds on: "Americans relied on British advisors for views of Islam."

By the end of the eighteenth century, two American publishers released new editions to an audience shaped by revolution and religious schisms both at home and in France. The publisher of the second American edition sought to address the twin hazards of centralized government and oppressing dissent and omitted altogether the section devoted to the deist “apostacy” that so motivated Prideaux. To the editor, John Adams was the real threat, a modern Muhammad. 7 Thus, the same denigrations of Muhammad were adapted to critique different Anglo-American situations over the course of a century.

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how historical figures are weaponized rhetorically to attack contemporary opponents, a recurring pattern across eras.

These two early examples demonstrate three significant dimensions of Anglo-American Islamophobia that would be rehearsed repeatedly over succeeding centuries. First, depictions of Muslims— and of the final Islamic prophet in particular—often served as a foil serving social critiques of British and American domestic issues entirely unconnected to Islam. Just in the various editions of the two influential examples noted above, depictions of Muhammad’s life aided endeavors to warn Britons and Americans against deism, federalism, political tyranny, religious apathy, and religious zealotry.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and ongoing scholarship on how images of the Other are weaponized for domestic political purposes.

Second, the perception of Muslims and Islam as a threat pervaded so broadly that even the most ardent secularists and Christians (these groups were not mutually exclusive) could utilize them as foils serving quite divergent agendas. Prideaux saw Islam as the anti-Christian product of a power-hungry imposter. Voltaire viewed Muhammad’s excesses as a warning to governments that espoused religion. As we shall see, secularists like Thomas Jefferson often included Muslims as an extreme example marking the lengths to which toleration should be practiced. Simultaneously, Christians often viewed Islam as—if not the greatest threat to Christianity—the largest obstacle to its universal expansion.

XREF: Connects to how groups deploy out-groups as rhetorical foils — parallels contemporary political instrumentalization of Islam and other minorities.

Very few Muslims lived in North America and those who did—enslaved African Muslims—seldom were recognized by European Americans as such. Recent scholarship estimates that, among the millions of Africans forced into American servitude, perhaps one out of five was a Muslim. Yet, severely repressive conditions meant that Islamic practices and identities seldom passed to successive generations.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade and religious identity in diaspora; also relevant to histories of African Muslims in the New World.

Locke's comments voiced three aspects of contemporary Anglo-American Islamophobia. First, that the Ottomans represented an exemplar of bad government and, second, that Muslims offered a nascent threat (of varying degrees according to the author) to every non-Muslim political order under whose jurisdiction they lived. Third, Locke, like Jefferson and the citizens of Chesterfield County, expressed the possibility that (at least some) Muslims could coexist under a non-Muslim government.

DEFINE: Clarifies that 18th-century Anglo-American Islamophobia had three distinct strands, one of which was a conditional willingness to permit Muslim coexistence. Builds on: "Prideaux's polemic shaped British and American views of Islam."

Locke and others used fictive Muslims to indicate the extremity of their inclusivity, knowing how acutely their audiences would view any actual Muslim presence as a threat. Each time statesmen took Muslims as an extreme example, they helped reinscribe the liminality of Muslims in the popular imagination.

XREF: Connects to colonial-era discourse analysis, how rhetorical examples in philosophy silently shaped social hierarchies — resonant with Said's Orientalism.

Mill demonstrates here a dynamic common among Britons in India: the identification of a specific characteristic supposedly unique to one religious group might be the reason that one Briton praised Muslims relative to Hindus and the reason another condemned Muslims in favor of Hindus. The manliness that Mill saw curtailing despotism would be viewed as the very engine of Muslim tyranny by others. However, as with Mill, few Britons considered either community superior to their own. In this manner, Britons often positioned themselves as the normative middle ground between two extremes of human behavior and belief.

The third aspect of pre-1857 conditions that mitigated British Islamophobia was the model of tolerance some Britons saw as instrumental to Mughal success. For instance, long after Mughal political power had evaporated, Anglican bishop Reginald Heber reported in his Indian travelogue (1828) that "the fierce Mohammadans" only had begun to question British control because Britons had disrespected the Mughal court. … This pre-1857 generosity toward the erstwhile Mughal empire would be significantly undermined by the mutiny of many of the Company's Indian soldiers, the uprising among parts of the population, and the slaughter of British civilians.

XREF: Connects to the book's overall argument about how the 1857 mutiny hardened British Islamophobia.

Depictions of Aurangzeb's reign—characterized by temple destruction, Sikh oppression, and the jizya tax—conformed much more closely with the prevalent picture of the Ottomans, the exemplar of Muslim prejudice and tyranny. For most, though, this last great Mughal provided the exception that proved the rule, his stereotypical Muslim intolerance for non-Muslims standing in unwelcome contrast with the remarkable inclusiveness of his predecessors Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan.

XREF: Connects to wider historiography on Mughal religious tolerance versus the Aurangzeb narrative, and Orientalist framings of Islamic empires.

Although Britons in India differed from Americans because of the active (if exaggerated) threat to their political order, both shared a conviction regarding two alleged qualities of Islam that made it a perennial menace: the proclivity of Muslims to spread their religion and to do so violently.

XREF: Connects to broader Western orientalist discourse and the shared colonial worldview between British and American imperial imagination despite their differing positions.

In colonial America, many Protestants associated Islam and Catholicism with the Antichrist. 73 Indeed, Prideaux considered related the rise of Muhammad and the bishop of Rome’s claim to reign over all churches. Hence, the “ Antichrist seems at this time to have set both his Feet upon Christendom together, the one in the East , and the other in the West .”

XREF: Connects to early American religious history and Protestant polemics against both Islam and Rome as twin antichrist figures. Builds on: "British and American writers both feared Islam's violent proselytizing"

As already seen, many authors viewed Christian division and degradation as the cause of the successful rise of Islam. How better to reconcile the triumphant truth of Christianity with its historical setbacks beginning in the seventh century than to portray the conquered churches as corrupted? Prideaux viewed Muslims as a tool used by God to punish the sinful Eastern churches. God raised “the Saracens to be the Instruments of his Wrath, to punish them for it.” 75 Simultaneously such an explanation chastised contemporary dissenting Christians with the threat of God’s possible punishment and explained the loss of Christendom’s heartland while denigrating Islam.

DEFINE: Explains Prideaux's interpretive framework: Muslim victories framed as God's tool to punish corrupt Eastern churches, reconciling Christian truth with historical setbacks.

Despite the shared conviction among many Britons and Americans that Islam stood in inherent antagonism to Christianity and the sentiment among some that it should be destroyed, Britons in India— especially those serving the government—remained conflicted about how to proceed. Although some of its servants viewed Muslims as antithetical to Company aims, the EIC initially preferred to minimalize Christian missionary activity, concerned that resulting antagonisms might disrupt commerce.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on colonial pragmatism versus ideological missions, and the tension between commercial and religious imperial goals.

Such convictions presumed a singular Islam that required all adherents to act in prescribed ways. This helped make a pan-Indian conspiracy plausible in many British imaginations. The stereotype of the inherently intolerant, aggressive jihadi that informed British concerns for a potentially India-wide Wahhabi conspiracy rested on a reified understanding of Islam that pictured the religion as a self-motivating agent.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial studies on orientalist reification of religions and the construction of monolithic religious identities.

Missionaries, too, often referred to an essentialized Islam, as Zwemer demonstrated 30 years earlier, “In India Islam has abandoned, as untenable, controversial positions which were once thought impregnable.” 86 Again, others dissented. For instance, in response to the anti-Muslim sentiment he observed filling a newspaper’s columns following the Muslim assassination of a British chief justice, the Orientalist W. Nassau Lees portrayed the multi-vocality of Islamic law, emphasizing how most Islamic jurists had ruled that Muslims could live under a Christian government, although some groups—such as Wahhabis—would not.

XREF: Resonates with scholarship on religious legal pluralism and how outsiders essentialize vs. nuance religions.

Some volumes more than echo past perspectives: Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the Cross (1993, 2006), for instance, begins by citing Zwemer. This book’s goal of providing Christians with counterarguments to Islamic beliefs—“preparing you with strong apologetic answers” 89 —reflects how the perpetuation of Islamophobia often represents more of an effort to positively define those making the allegations than accurately describe Muslims or Islam.

SEED: Could become an essay about how polemical writing functions as identity construction rather than accurate description — applicable far beyond religious apologetics.

The globalization and democratization of the flow of information allow Muslims nearly everywhere to take note of the currency of Islamophobic sentiments. Most recently, in the Pakistani film Khuda Kay Liye (2007) a sadistic American official begins his abusive interrogation of a Muslim by declaring, “Not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.” The film thus connects this truism— regularly repeated in the United States and United Kingdom—with state-sanctioned violence against Muslims. It is precisely through such a dynamic that Samuel Huntington’s thesis regarding a clash of civilizations—perhaps more extreme in its reception than its author intended—becomes perceived, if not actuated, reality.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about the self-fulfilling nature of the clash of civilizations thesis and how rhetoric shapes geopolitical perception.

A similar finding was made by another empirical study that inquired into whether or not attitudes toward religious beliefs and practices affect public opinion toward Muslims. This study concluded that they did not have a definitive effect. Rather, “Muslim stereotypes are underpinned by a similar set of factors to those that underpin stereotypes of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians—notably, authoritarianism and a preference for cultural homogeneity.”

A cross-national study, conducted in the United States, Germany, France, Spain, and Britain, found that perceptions of an impending threat to national security drive negative attitudes toward Muslims, in addition to negative out-group attitudes. This study argued that “threat perception is a major, and perhaps the single most important predictor, of ingroup attitudes toward outgroups.”

The realization that anti-Muslim attitudes are embedded in larger social and political processes than the fear of Islam begs the question of why has American society resorted to religion as an explanation for acts of terror committed by a very small portion of the world's vast Muslim population, thereby stigmatizing American Muslims to the point that large number of Americans are willing to tolerate discriminatory profiling of Muslims and to deny American Muslims their constitutional rights to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and to build places of worship.

QUESTION: What are these larger social and political processes driving anti-Muslim sentiment beyond fear of the religion itself?

The realization that anti-Muslim attitudes are embedded in larger social and political processes than the fear of Islam begs the question of why has American society resorted to religion as an explanation for acts of terror committed by a very small portion of the world’s vast Muslim population, thereby stigmatizing American Muslims to the point that large number of Americans are willing to tolerate discriminatory profiling of Muslims and to deny American Muslims their constitutional rights to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and to build places of worship.

QUESTION: What are the specific larger social and political processes driving this scapegoating beyond a simple fear explanation?

Part of the answer to this question lies in the media’s and the political elite’s reinforcement of the association of Islam with violence. However, do these institutions simply reflect the larger society’s understanding of violence in terms of religion, or do they have a stake in promoting the stereotype of Islam as a violent belief system?

QUESTION: The author explicitly poses whether institutions merely reflect society or have a stake in promoting the stereotype — this is a genuinely open question worth pursuing.

In the case of the media, it is very likely that many of its members themselves understand the violence of events such as the attacks of 9/11 in terms of religious ideology, but there are also many economic and structural factors in the way in which news is reported that hinder more complicated explanations. There is no doubt that in the American media market, violence is considered newsworthy and attracts an audience that turns to the media for explanations of it. Islam, or the history of militant Muslim organizations, such as al-Qaeda, or the role of the United States in militarizing Afghanistan during its struggle against Soviet occupation in the 1980s are all complex topics requiring resources, expertise, and money to explore properly, and they are not topics that are likely to attract large audiences.

In the case of the media, it is very likely that many of its members themselves understand the violence of events such as the attacks of 9/11 in terms of religious ideology, but there are also many economic and structural factors in the way in which news is reported that hinder more complicated explanations. There is no doubt that in the American media market, violence is considered newsworthy and attracts an audience that turns to the media for explanations of it. Islam, or the history of militant Muslim organizations, such as al-Qaeda, or the role of the United States in militarizing Afghanistan during its struggle against Soviet occupation in the 1980s are all complex topics requiring resources, expertise, and money to explore properly, and they are not topics that are likely to attract large audiences. Under these circumstances, the media has little incentive to ask whether or not Islam really explains “Muslim terrorism.” … We are, thus, left with a media that, rather than providing explanations of the political realities of our time, reflects society’s understanding of Islam and violence and has created a looping effect that fuels Islamophobia.

XREF: Connects to 'looping effect' concepts from Ian Hacking and to manufacturing consent arguments from Chomsky.

By attributing exclusively religious motivations to al-Qaeda’s acts of terrorism, even while disassociating these motivations from the “mainstream Islam,” the state, which in a democratic society is charged with the protection and representation of its citizens, found a way in which it could increase its control over its citizens and erode their right to due process in the name of their own protection. Once the state, and more specifically the executive branch, are given such powers, they do not relinquish them easily.

QUESTION: What specific due-process erosions does the author document? Worth tracing the evidence behind this claim. XREF: Connects to securitization theory and Agamben's work on the state of exception.

While the media has very little incentive to challenge religious explanations of events like 9/11, the state has a definite interest in perpetuating them because this association provides a rationale for the expansion of the state’s authority and control with the majority of its citizens’ consent who seek protection against another violent attack. Consequently, both the media and the state reinforce through their actions, if not always by words, the association of Islam with violence that has ostracized a segment of the American population on the basis of religion.

XREF: Relates to critical media studies and state power analysis (Chomsky/Herman's propaganda model, manufacturing consent). SEED: Potential essay angle on how supposedly neutral institutions (media, state) share reinforcing incentives that shape public perception of minority groups.

It is the loss of confidence in national institutions to mediate ethnic and religious conflicts at the local level that pushes nativism on the national agenda. The events of 9/11—having happened after a contentious presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush and, at a time, when America was still grappling with its own role abroad as the world’s sole superpower and its identity as a multicultural society—occurred in just such an era, one of deteriorating faith in America’s democratic institutions of governance. … Put differently, democratic processes do not forge a cohesive national identity.

An outcome of this close association of religion with national interest and identity in American history has been to leave religious differences open to politicization. Religious minorities find themselves not only theologically but also politically suspect as doubts are raised about their national loyalties and adherence to democratic principles. In the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States was moving closer to civil war, the nativist American Party elected six governors in 1855 on a platform of national homogeneity and "American feeling" fueled largely by anti-Catholic sentiments and opposition to new Catholic immigrants.

XREF: Connects to contemporary debates about religious minorities and national loyalty, as well as political nativism in other eras and countries.

As the twentieth century approached, an epoch when industrialism and urbanism were leading to social chaos in America, Catholicism was juxtaposed to "American values." The nativist Josiah Strong admonished Americans in his popular book, Our Country (1888), that Rome could not "make 'America Catholic' . . . without bringing into conflict the diametrically opposed principles of Romanism and the Republic, thus forcing all Romanists in the United States to choose between two masters, both of whom they now confess to serve." In 1928, when Al Smith won the Democratic presidential nomination, newspapers and magazines cast him as "Rome's Tattooed Man."

XREF: Connects to the broader history of American nativism and the anti-immigrant sentiment that also targeted other groups in the same era.

Because of its prominence in America's national narrative, the politicization of religion has not been solely a means of exclusion; it has also served as a means of assimilation, at least for white non-Protestants. The First Amendment allows religious minorities to organize and to establish themselves locally in this country, long before they appear on the national radar. By the time their presence could be politicized as a subversive threat, they usually have developed enough roots and means in the United States to be able to defend themselves against such attacks, and they often do so by reading themselves into America's political narrative in terms of constitutional freedoms.

This revival of religion, Herberg noted, was further fueled by "the collapse of secular securities in the historical crisis of our time." By the onset of the Cold War, the United States had become a "triple melting pot" of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism.

United against Communism, Americans rallied around "a common 'American religion' of which each of the three great religious communions is regarded as an equi-legitimate expression." "In its crudest form," Herberg explained, "this identification of religion with national purpose generates a kind of national messianism which sees it as the vocation of America to bring the American Way of Life, compounded almost equally of democracy and free enterprise, to every corner of the globe; in more mitigated versions, it sees God as the champion of America, endorsing American purposes, and sustaining American might." 29 Herberg criticized this "fusion of religion with national purpose" because it silenced religious critiques with regard to the purpose of the state. Indeed, as seen by contemporary portrayals of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the South and Malcolm X in the North, it deemed any religious expression that appealed to social purposes and conceptions of justice outside of the state's political and legal apparatus as radical and militant or dangerous.

QUESTION: Herberg's framing suggests a direct lineage from Cold War civil religion to modern culture-war contestations over religion's role in the state.

Ironically, while social discrimination against religious minorities is politically activated when confidence in America's institutions is at a low ebb, religious minorities' assertion of their rights through a defense of constitutional liberties speaks to the vitality of America's democratic institutions and their transformative role in assimilating minorities.

XREF: Connects to discussions of how marginalized groups' assertion of rights paradoxically reinforces the constitutional order — a theme in civil rights and political theory literature.

The assimilation of racial minorities in America has had a different history from that of religious minorities. While religion has had a unifying role in the development of American national identity, race has not. The religious and ethical notion that "all men are created equal" did not apply to blacks during the formation of the American republic, and institutionalized racial discrimination was legal in large portions of the country until the mid-1960s. The Naturalization Act of 1790 granted citizenship only to "aliens being free white persons."

DEFINE: Distinguishes the historical assimilation of racial versus religious minorities in the US.

While the First Amendment established a relationship between religious minorities and the state that was beyond the reach of governmental authorities, the Constitution did not guarantee any citizenship rights to nonwhite races. It left decisions related to race to state and local governments. Consequently, racial minorities developed varying relations with the governing institutions of this country, depending on where and when they lived. They also could not define their place in America by fighting for their constitutional rights since it offered them no specific shield to guard against discrimination such as the protection that the First Amendment gave to religion; unlike religious freedom, racial equality was not part of America’s national narrative prior to the passage of civil rights legislation.

XREF: Contrast between First Amendment protections and absent racial protections parallels scholarly work on the Constitution's racial silences, e.g., coverage of the Three-Fifths Clause and 14th Amendment debates.

Despite many years of institution building on the part of racial minorities in this country, these communities have had a much greater uphill battle finding a place in America's national narrative and body politic than their white, religious counterparts. While the First Amendment established a relationship between religious minorities and the state that was beyond the reach of governmental authorities, the Constitution did not guarantee any citizenship rights to nonwhite races. It left decisions related to race to state and local governments. Consequently, racial minorities developed varying relations with the governing institutions of this country, depending on where and when they lived. They also could not define their place in America by fighting for their constitutional rights since it offered them no specific shield to guard against discrimination such as the protection that the First Amendment gave to religion; unlike religious freedom, racial equality was not part of America's national narrative prior to the passage of civil rights legislation.

The history of Islam in America is a harrowing reminder of the disjuncture between religious and racial modes of integration in American history prior to the mid-1960s. When in the late 1920s, Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple, he deliberately chose to organize African Americans around a distinct Islamic national identity because he recognized the roles race and religion played in America’s national identity and in the economic and social assimilation of minority communities. … In hindsight, Noble Drew Ali was naive. Religion did not wash away prejudice based on phenotype. His efforts to counter the stigma of black skin by defining a distinct, black, Moorish national identity was up against America’s white, Protestant national narrative, and brought him and his followers under state surveillance.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on race, religion, and the nation-state in America, and to the limits of identity redefinition against entrenched national narratives.

When contemporary anti-Muslim bigotry is viewed in the larger context of the history of religious and racial prejudice in American politics, instructive patterns emerge that have gone unnoticed in the public square because most Americans have sought to understand the violent events like 9/11 and the bigotry against Muslims in terms of religion. The lesson in this history is that bigotry and prejudice have played a central role in US history as a means of controlling racial and religious diversity and building national unity. Today, Muslims may be targets of this pattern of democratic governance, but with tomorrow's crisis, it may be another group. Some American Muslim organizations are even keen to discover this other group, to push it on the national stage, and to shift the target away from American Muslims; they routinely make a point of publicizing and condemning acts of violence committed by fundamentalist Christians as acts of terrorism.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of scapegoating and how in-groups are defined by out-groups in political science and sociology.

Building national unity at times of crisis by ascribing undesirable values to religious out-groups has been a pattern of governance in America's democracy that has often obfuscated the political and economic sources of the crisis to the benefit of the state. Today's explanations of 9/11 in terms of religion and our contemporary conceptualizations of anti-Muslim bigotry in terms of a social phobia of Islam continue this pattern at a significant cost to every American's civil liberties.

QUESTION: Worth tracing the historical examples of this pattern — which crises and which out-groups were scapegoated, and at what cost to civil liberties each time.

Though Islamophobia has deep roots in both American culture and US society, its vitality in those domains is a result, at least in part, of the state repression of political dissent organized around Islamic symbols and themes. Long before 9/11, the US government was concerned about the possibility that Muslims on American soil would challenge the political status quo. Beginning in the 1930s, this fear resulted in formal government surveillance and prosecution of African American Muslim civil and religious organizations and their members. Organized and state-supported Islamophobia was not confined to the use of state surveillance, local police departments, and the US courts. After World War II, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used mainstream media to prosecute a war of disinformation about Muslim groups, and by the 1960s, engaged in aggressive counterintelligence to repress what it deemed to be the threat of political radicalism among Muslim Americans.

XREF: Connects to similar dynamics of surveillance of other politically dissident groups in US history (civil rights era, anti-war movements).

Scholars have documented the consequences of such fears, images, and appropriations in US politics and society before, but they have not yet paid ample attention to the role of the state and particularly the FBI in producing such irruptions and iterations of Islamophobia. This chapter explores the reasons for and forms of government surveillance, media manipulation, and finally counterintelligence behind the making of Islamophobia in the twentieth century. It argues that though Islamophobia may be a social anxiety, its salience in US society is not exclusively the reflection of certain cultural and political interests, including those of some evangelical Christians, pro-Israeli activists, academic orientalists, and mass media; Islamophobia is also the product of the state's legal and extralegal attempts to control, discipline, and punish Muslim American individuals and organizations.

Muslims were consequential figures in Anglo-American history from the eighteenth-century onward. Some of them were among the most educated Americans of the era—of any race or class. These elites were literate in Arabic and often fluent in more than one language. They had ties not only to their homelands but also to global Muslim networks of scholarship, trade, diplomacy, and travel. Contrary to the images that most Anglo Americans had of Africa, these Muslims came from cultures that celebrated literacy, scholarship, calligraphy, poetry, and Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam in which Muslims cultivate personal and intimate relationships with God.

Muslims in the 13 colonies and the United States may have numbered in the tens of thousands—though the number of Muslims in other parts of the Americas was surely much higher. Historian Allan Austin has reckoned between 1711 and 1808, about 5–10 percent, perhaps as many as 30,000–40,000 of slaves brought to the 13 colonies and the United States, were Muslims.

XREF: Connects to broader knowledge about the diversity of enslaved African identities and the common erasure of Muslim presence in early American history. Builds on: "Roughly a fifth of enslaved Africans in America were Muslim."

Job was a religious man whose devotions, fasting, temperance, and food preparations—he butchered his own meat in order to make it halal , or permissible—were seen as noble by his English hosts. He was an excellent conversation partner who refused to convert to Christianity, despite reading the New Testament in Arabic. Job challenged the doctrine of Trinity, observing that the word “trinity” was not included in the New Testament and expressed his concern that his English brothers and sisters were being led to engage in shirk , the association of anything with the one God. Job insisted that God was not three in number but one; even Prophet Jesus, who was born of a virgin and who performed miracles, was not God, he said. If his English sponsors were disappointed by Job's refusal to convert to Christianity, their disappointment was not recorded by Thomas Bluett, Job's biographer. Bluett was happy to note, however, that Job was especially critical of the English Protestants' political and religious rivals, the Roman Catholics, whose African missionaries practiced idolatry, he argued.

QUESTION: Job's story suggests early encounters where African Muslims challenged Christian doctrine to Western audiences — worth tracing his actual biography for more. XREF: Connects to the broader history of Muslim-Christian interreligious debate and the early Atlantic slave era.

His interaction with the state and its competing interests is a tale whose implications are important for understanding antebellum US history and especially the early relationships between the US state and the Muslims under its authority.

Secretary Clay apparently intervened in the case because he thought that freeing him might help smooth relations with the North African Barbary states with which the United States military had fought two wars—one from 1801 to 1805 and the other from 1815 to 1816. Why did Clay think that the freeing of a Muslim from West Africa might have some effect on North African Muslim leaders? This was no simple error of geography. It was also an expression of Clay's racialist thinking. Like other slave holders, Clay likely thought of Muslim slaves literally as a "breed apart." The elites among them were seen not only as better educated but also as more "civilized" than non-Muslim slaves and thus, it was assumed, these Muslims had to be not only from different religious and ethnic communities but also from different racial stock. Ibrahima could not possibly be of pure "Negro" origins; for Clay and others like him, Ibrahima must have had Arab or Moorish blood in his veins.

XREF: Connects to broader historical scholarship on racial categorization and how Europeans and Americans rationalized educated, elite non-Westerners by postulating racial mixture—echoes of Hamitic hypothesis and racial hierarchy thinking.

But Northerner supporters of Abdul Rahman were not exactly believers in the beloved community, either. They, too, were thoroughly racist in their attitudes toward black people—they just happened to be opposed to slavery because they saw it as a sinful stain on the American soul. Their answer to the problem of freed slaves was to transport them—that is, English-speaking, American-born blacks—to Africa. The freeing of Abdul Rahman and his family did not challenge the views of northern whites; it confirmed the notion that blacks were a foreign element in a white republic.

Ibrahima's departure from American soil is an important indication of his friendliness to northern US interests, especially those associated with the administration of President John Quincy Adams. He veiled himself in the social, ethnic, religious, and class differences of a Muslim prince—covering up the fact that he had been in America for approximately three decades. His very marginality within American culture meant that he was a useful vessel for his white allies. Impressing his patrons by writing in Arabic, he could rely on his education to demonstrate the differences between him and most other slaves. Invoking a royal heritage, he set himself apart from other black people.

XREF: Reveals the constructed, performative nature of identity that resonates with how marginalized figures navigate power through assumed personas.

In sum, this Muslim American was willing to eschew any claims to constitutional rights, to support evangelical Christianity, to buoy white business interests in Africa, to accept white prejudices against blacks, and most importantly, to leave the country. As long as Muslim Americans were willing to behave in this manner, there was no conflict between them and the state. But when Muslim Americans began to agitate for equal rights, to oppose US foreign policy, and to reject racial apartheid, they became downright dangerous.

XREF: Connects to broader frameworks of how minority groups are tolerated by states only when compliant, paralleling dynamics seen with other marginalized communities in US history.

Such concerns were amplified in the development of domestic securities agencies such as the nascent FBI, which focused on the spread of "dangerous" groups such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the Communist Party. As enormous federal, state, and local resources were committed to Jim Crow segregation, a racial apartheid system implemented most strongly in the southern United States but present in the North as well, the fear of America's people of color uniting with colonized people abroad put the growth of Islam among black Americans at the front of the federal government's surveillance and suppression agenda.

DEFINE: Clarifies that the FBI's surveillance of groups like UNIA and the Communist Party extended to Islam among Black Americans, framed through fear of international solidarity.

On the one hand, he emphasized the ecumenical appeal of Islam as a religion of social equality; on the other hand, Sadiq argued that Arabic and Islam were part of an explicitly African past that had been taken from blacks when they were enslaved. He endorsed the activities of black nationalist and pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey and sought converts from Garvey's UNIA. In this era of the new nativism, when the Ku Klux Klan rose to political prominence based on a combination of Protestant Christianity, white supremacy, and terrorism, the Ahmadi linking of domestic struggles for racial liberation to what Sadiq and others identified as a rising call for self-determination, the deep spirituality of the Qur'an, and black historical achievements under Islam was a powerful message that convinced over 1,025 mostly African American people to convert to Islam from 1921 to 1925.

XREF: Connects to Black nationalist history and the parallel rise of Marcus Garvey's UNIA and the KKK in the 1920s. SEED: An article angle on how minority religious movements recruit by fusing spiritual and political self-determination appeals.

What alarmed the FBI about African American Muslim groups on the eve of World War II was that many of them, or at least some of their members, saw Japanese people as potential allies. The transnational ties and diasporic consciousness of black Muslim Americans were viewed as increasingly subversive as thousands of African Americans, Muslim or not, put their hopes in the messianic prophecy that the Empire of Japan would liberate them from the cage of American racism through a military invasion. By the 1930s, black Muslims, black Jews, advocates of black emigration to Africa, and black advocates for pan-Asian solidarity declared their public support for a fellow "colored" nation, and a Japanese national, Major Satokata Takahashi, formed a "Development of Our Own" group to galvanize such feelings in Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis.

XREF: Connects to histories of transnational black internationalism, pan-Asian solidarity movements, and the pre-WWII anti-colonial imagination beyond white solidarity frames. QUESTION: How widespread and organized was this Japanese-alliance sentiment among black Americans, and how did the FBI's alarm shape broader surveillance of black Muslims?

RACON's final report, the Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States (1943), reveals the way in which the FBI attempted to discipline religious conduct in the United States. The report creates a profile of pro-Japanese African American organizations that warned of Islam's links to pro-Japanese sentiment. It then attempted to catalog all of the various Muslim groups popular among black Americans as a way of measuring the security risk to the US nation-state.

XREF: Connects to FBI surveillance history, COINTELPRO, and the broader treatment of Black nationalist and religious movements as domestic threats. QUESTION: What methodology did the FBI use to link Islam to pro-Japanese sentiment in Black communities? This warrants deeper investigation. Builds on: "Black American Muslims viewed Japan as a potential liberating ally"

The articulation of pro-Japanese sentiments was evidence of sedition, and as the dream of a Japanese invasion spread among thousands of African Americans in the early 1940s, the government arrested the African American leaders suspected of stoking such feelings. Among the 25 leaders arrested was Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975), leader of the NOI. Muhammad was acquitted of the sedition charge, but was sent away for refusing to register for the military draft. 44 His arrest and prosecution signaled the emergence of a larger pattern for dealing with African American Muslims who criticized the United States. These black Muslims would rarely engage in any genuinely treasonous activity against the United States, but they did capitalize on their imagined ties with foreign states and “foreign” traditions like Islam to resist, at least in rhetorical terms, the policies of the US government toward people of color both at home and abroad.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on black internationalism and how marginalized groups invoke foreign connections as a resistance strategy.

Hoover’s commitment to curtail not only Communism but all forms of African American protest against racism resulted in a culture of suspicion at the FBI and in the executive branch more generally that sought to monitor and ultimately influence the practice of Islam among African Americans. There is some evidence that agents entertained the possibility that Islamic religion could be practiced in an apolitical way, but at the same time, Islam inevitably came under suspicion because of its association with African American protests against white supremacy. In sweeping Islamic religious practice, of various types, into the machinery of anti-black state suppression, Hoover and the FBI created mechanisms and meanings that framed Islam as a danger to the US nation-state. It did not matter for Hoover’s RACON whether black Muslims were explicitly pro-American or not. Islam was a sign for the FBI on the eve of World War II of pro-Japanese sympathy. It was enough to tar Islam as a problematic political symbol that deserved to be disciplined through surveillance, and if possible, prosecution.

XREF: Connects to COINTELPRO-era surveillance literature and histories of FBI targeting of civil rights and Black nationalist movements. SEED: A potential essay angle: how national security surveillance of religious practice blurs the boundary between political and religious activity. Builds on: "FBI surveilled Black Muslim groups as wartime security risks."

The government’s fear of Islamic political movements after World War II shows the ways in which state power was inscribed and enforced in this period. Islamophobia became a form of government discipline that utilized propaganda, violence, and fear. There was irony in the fact that the government frequently accused Muslims, especially the NOI, of fomenting a race war, when it was the government that actively fashioned Islam as a threat to US domestic peace, international relations, and civil rights. Though government interference in the practice of Islamic religion was limited by US law during World War II, new legal and extralegal techniques were used to discredit the practice of Islam among black Americans after World War II. Restricting the religious freedoms of Muslims, manipulating mainstream media, stoking violent conflict among African American organizations, and even trying to break up marriages, the Department of Justice and the FBI reached into the heart of US society to create hatred of and between Muslim Americans.

XREF: Connects to surveillance-and-dissent historiography, from COINTELPRO tactics to Red Scare-era disciplining of activist groups. QUESTION: What specific legal and extralegal techniques did the FBI and DOJ deploy, and how did courts receive challenges to them?

Not all of the federal government’s techniques for controlling the practice of Islam were successful. One of the government’s strategies, for example, was the denial of First Amendment protections to Muslim prisoners. The Justice Department argued that since the NOI was not an authentic religious movement—but rather a “cult” that operated as a political organization—its followers in prison did not have the right to meet or conduct religious services. By redefining Islam as a “cult,” the government could avoid the messiness of legal protections for religious expression. But the repression of Islamic practice in both state and federal prisons ended up expanding rather than limiting the rights of prisoners to practice the religion of their choice.

XREF: Connects to broader dynamics where legal repression backfires and expands rather than contracts rights through litigation and precedent.

Even the FBI admitted internally that drawing additional attention to the NOI may have backfired, making the organization and its leaders Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X even more popular. There was also a larger context to the movement's growth. The US prosecution of the Cold War, its manipulation of newly independent African and Asian states, the beginning of the Vietnam conflict, and the lack of real progress on social equality at home made the religious and political critique of the NOI convincing to many both inside and outside the movement.

XREF: The Streisand effect—attempts to suppress attention backfire and amplify it. Parallels to counterproductive surveillance/COINTELPRO operations.

But there was no more effective symbol of both domestic and international political resistance to US power than Muhammad Ali, whose principled stand against the Vietnam War resulted in the forfeiture of his world heavyweight boxing crown. Ali, a hero to many people of color and leftists around the world, was seen as a fifth column—the enemy inside the walls—by the US government, which sought to blunt his rising popularity by any means available. In this case, the US Army drafted him. In 1966, at the height of the military conflict in Vietnam, Ali proclaimed that he was willing to give up his boxing crown and go to jail rather than be inducted. He said that he was a conscientious objector whose religion prohibited the killing of innocents. Casting the Vietnam War as a racist and immoral conflict, Ali also stated that the US participation was hypocritical: quipping that "no Vietcong ever called me nigger," Ali pointed out the irony of the United States defending freedom abroad when it still had its own problems with racial equality at home.

QUESTION: How did Ali's conscientious objector claim hold up legally, and what were the long-term consequences of his conviction and appeal?

In an ultimate insult to the first amendment, the US Supreme Court in 2010 decided in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project that offering training in nonviolent, peaceful protest techniques to groups designated as terrorist organizations by the executive branch could be prosecuted as material aid to terrorists.

QUESTION: How far does this ruling reach — does it also criminalize purely academic or advocacy speech about these groups' methods?

Obama also personally ordered the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, two US citizens who produced speeches and web materials in support of al-Qaeda. We will never know whether they were guilty of committing terrorist acts because they were killed by drones, an act that many civil libertarians saw as a violation of constitutional guarantees of due process and trial by jury. More recently, the White House gave its support to the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the executive branch to detain foreigners and perhaps Americans accused of “substantially supporting” terrorism indefinitely without trial.

QUESTION: Does this represent a durable erosion of constitutional protections or an isolated counterterrorism overreach? XREF: Connects to broader debates about executive power in the post-9/11 era and indefinite detention.

These aggressive approaches to managing Muslim American dissent have been accompanied by simultaneous attempts to “reach out” to Muslims. The administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have hailed Islam as part of America’s religious fabric, using symbolic incorporation to craft Muslim American citizenship as another resource in the prosecution of US interests both at home and abroad.

Builds on: "Muslim Americans were accepted only when subservient to state interests"

The suppression of politically engaged, critical American Islamic voices is a long tradition. The disciplining of Muslim American politics has been a critical component of US statecraft for decades. In an era in which the government negotiates with, occupies, makes peace, and wages war against more Muslims than ever before, there is little reason to hope that state Islamophobia will end any time soon.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on state surveillance of minority political speech, and to post-9/11 civil liberties scholarship.

Islamophobia is gendered in the way described above, in that gender is inherently part of social construction; thus, there have to be elements of Islamophobia that can be described as gendered. Furthermore, as Krista Riley pointed out above, the genderedness of Islamophobia can productively be explored through a nuanced study of the ways in which Muslims are represented and described as gendered. This genderedness is most obvious in the representation of Muslim men as violent terrorists (both against “us” and Muslim women) and the representation of Muslim women as oppressed and silenced (by Muslim men, Islam, and Muslim culture). Muslim men and women in these representations (or stereotypes) are two sides of the same coin: The violence of oppressive Muslim men is demonstrated in their treatment of their women; and the oppression of Muslim women is perpetrated by violent Muslim men. No other factors or influences can be explored or considered in such a neatly organized scenario.

Zine uses the term "gendered Islamophobia" but then somewhat narrowly defines it as "specific forms of ethnoreligious and racialized discrimination leveled at Muslim women that proceed from historically contextualized negative stereotypes that inform individual and systematic forms of oppression."

DEFINE: Clarifies Zine's specific narrowing definition of gendered Islamophobia to ethnoreligious and racialized discrimination against Muslim women specifically.

Kahf argues, is connected to developments in European societies rather than changing roles of actual Muslim women in their own societies in the same time periods.

QUESTION: This raises the interesting question of whether any literature accurately reflected actual Muslim women's lives, or whether European projection always dominated.

Mohja Kahf has argued in her study of representations of Muslim women in Western literature from the twelfth to the nineteenth century that rather than the image of the Muslim being a feature of all such literature, the particular representation of Muslim women as oppressed is in fact a product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In previous centuries, other and very different depictions of Muslim women can be found, and the transformation of those images, as Kahf argues, is connected to developments in European societies rather than changing roles of actual Muslim women in their own societies in the same time periods.

XREF: Challenges the common assumption that Western literature has always depicted Muslim women as oppressed; connects to Edward Said's Orientalism as a related critique of Western representation.

The young woman in our experiment was an actor, but many of the hateful words she heard were based on the experiences of Chicagoborn Nohayia Javed, who was watching our experiment from the control van. Javed said she has continually suffered verbal abuse and said she has even been physically attacked by fellow Americans— just because she is Muslim.

That her findings from more than a decade ago (and before 9/11) are still relevant is evident in her conclusion where after reviewing a set of cases in which Muslim women sued for religious discrimination, she found that women often fail to win accommodation of their religious and minority needs, especially when employers can reasonably argue that such accommodation would mean a loss of profit on their part.

QUESTION: Are there notable exceptions where courts did compel accommodation despite profit concerns? What standards vary across jurisdictions?

This section discusses several examples of Islamophobic discourse in which the oppression of Muslim women by Islam takes center stage. This oppression takes many forms, but it is emphasized, written, and spoken about, and publicized by a range of actors from Newt Gingrich to Pamela Geller and Phyllis Chesler. And it serves a neoconservative and right-wing agenda to mark Islam as a religion not only foreign to the United States but also threatening the very foundations of its society. The assumed gender inequality and oppression of women by Islam is juxtaposed with a quintessentially American gender-egalitarianism and respect for women's rights that can only be described as ironic in the face of recent political developments regarding women's reproductive rights in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential elections.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and post-9/11 analyses of how discourses about Muslim women serve broader political agendas. Builds on: "Depictions of Muslim women reflect European societal shifts, not Muslim realities."

By rejecting Islam as foreign to American society and the legal system, by justifying military intervention in Muslim majority countries, and by chastising Muslim communities for insisting on their freedom to practice their religion, this form of Islamophobic discourse inscribes Muslim women's bodies with meaning that they have no control over and uses them as pawns or tools, both in a politics of neoconservative imperialism internationally and a political agenda of scapegoating a conveniently targetable minority population and its religion domestically. Neither allows Muslim women any agency unless they are willing to denounce both their religion and their communities and societies.

When in March 1999 Mavis Leno, wife of talk show host Jay Leno, took up the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban as a cause on behalf of the Feminist Majority, the oppression of Muslim women in Afghanistan overnight became a cause of concern for celebrities, politicians, and public opinion. Highlighting the horrendous conditions imposed on Afghan women allowed for the construction of a discourse that painted them as helpless victims, and Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban as brutal oppressors in the name of their religion. The resurrection of this trope conveniently ignored the fact that through the mujahidin, the Taliban had indirectly come into power and military might with the support of the US government which had provided such support to develop a counterweight to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

XREF: Connects to broader narratives about humanitarian intervention rhetoric masking geopolitical interests, and US foreign policy blowback.

In the group that “Fear Inc.” has described as validators of Islamophobic discourse, one can find, depending on the definition, a rather long list of names. Men and women who are either laying claim to their Muslim identity and thus speak on behalf and/ or against fellow Muslims, as well as a number of former Muslims who have renounced their affiliation with Islam but claim intimate knowledge of the religion, its practices, and its cultures.

DEFINE: Defines who counts as 'validators of Islamophobic discourse': both Muslims claiming identity and former Muslims claiming insider knowledge.

It is at the more complicated intersections, when secular American feminists decide to become spokespersons for Muslim women and against their oppression, that Islamophobic rhetoric and expression becomes somewhat more difficult to debate.

Builds on: "Feminist rhetoric can justify imperialist military interventions."

Well-intentioned and yet patronizing discourses on “white women saving brown women from brown men” abound and have a distinct history of their own. Such feminist discourses have been described as imperial feminism, as feminist orientalism in relation to Muslim women, and as outright racist.

XREF: Connects to Spivak's famous 'white men saving brown women from brown men' formulation and postcolonial feminist critiques like Mohanty's and Ahmed's work.

In the article in question, Eltahawy provides a long list of acts, laws, and behaviors directed against women in various Middle Eastern countries and argues that compared to that list, the debates over women’s reproductive rights in the United States (between Democrats and Republicans) are not worth much of the agitation they have produced. … Just as regime-appointed clerics lull the poor across the region with promises of justice—and nubile virgins—in the next world rather than a reckoning with the corruption and nepotism of the dictator in this life, so women are silenced by a deadly combination of men who hate them while also claiming to have God firmly on their side.

XREF: Relates to ongoing comparative arguments about which society oppresses women more, a common trope in both feminist and anti-feminist discourse. QUESTION: Is Eltahawy's comparative framing methodologically sound, or does it rely on cherry-picking worst cases?

Does calling out Salafists and Islamists on their misgogyny and speaking on behalf of Egyptian as well as Muslim women in the “we” form count as reform of Islam from within, or is it rather its deconstruction from within?

QUESTION: The highlight poses a genuine question about whether internal critique constitutes reformation or deconstruction — worth exploring how the author resolves this tension. Builds on: "Islamophobic discourse's validators include self-identified and former Muslims."

Nina Burleigh tried to balance her previous coverage of the incident by publishing an article on the Time website titled, "Shaima Alawadi's Murder: A Hate Crime against Women?," in which she argued that "Domestic violence against women is a plague on all nations and cultures. It is certainly not limited to Islamic-refugee communities. But American authorities need to pay closer attention to the plight of women in these communities."

QUESTION: The incident raises the question of whether Shaima Alawadi's murder was actually a hate crime or domestic violence, and how the media reframed the narrative.

As tragic as Alawadi's death is, there's an important conversation happening here. Was this a case of Islamophobia at its worst? Was this a case of a daughter trying to avoid marrying a man she didn't want to marry? Was this a case of a husband who would not let his wife divorce him? … We cannot forget the most important part of this matter here— Shaima Alawadi is dead. … Someone killed an innocent woman and they must be held accountable. I can only hope that justice will be brought in her honor and in her memory, and that it happens sooner, rather than later.

QUESTION: The highlight frames multiple unresolved explanations for Alawadi's murder; this invites a deeper look at the actual case outcome.

Is Islamophobia on the rise, and if so, is this a long-term trend, or a passing scapegoating focus on a particular religious minority community in the United States? Are there broader global connections—Islamophobes certainly have them—between developments in the United States, in Europe, and elsewhere, as suggested in much of the literature on Islamophobia? If it is a passing trend, should scholars and activists just wait for the wave to pass and for hatemongers to move on? The answer is clearly no, regardless of how short or long lived the current trends might be. Islamophobia is much more than a discourse, a set of ideas circulated on the Internet and in print. It is an ideological construct that has real impact on real peoples' lives, and thus, cannot and should not be ignored.

DEFINE: Frames Islamophobia as an ideological construct with material consequences, not just rhetoric or online discourse.

Focusing on the gendered dimensions of such discourses reveals the complex intersections of feminist, antiracist, and leftist, as well as liberal and neoconservative agendas, and equips those who care with the tools for nuanced responses including analysis of the particular contexts producing and sustaining Islamophobia, and the possibility for informed and effective alliance building.

DEFINE: Explains the analytical framework — that gender-focused discourse analysis exposes the converging feminist, antiracist, leftist, liberal, and neoconservative agendas behind Islamophobic rhetoric.

Does the confidence of our political vision as feminists ever run up against the responsibility that we incur for the destruction of life forms so that "unenlightedned" women may be taught to live more freely? Do we fully comprehend the forms of life that we want to so passionately to remake so that Muslim women and men may live a more enlightened existence? . . . Would an intimate knowledge of life worlds that are distinct from, and perhaps even opposed to, our cosmopolitan lifestyles ever lead us to question the certainty with which we prescribe what is good for all humanity? At a time when feminist and democratic politics run the danger of being reduced to a rhetorical display on the placard of Islam's abuses, these questions offer the slim hope that perhaps a dialogue across political and religious differences . . . can yield a vision of coexistence that does not require making certain life worlds extinct or provisional. It requires us to entertain the possibility . . . that one does not always know what one opposes and that a political vision at times has to admit its own finitude in order to even comprehend what it has sought to oppose.

QUESTION: This raises deep questions about how feminist universalism interacts with cultural difference and the ethics of remaking others' lifeworlds. Worth chasing into the fuller argument about cosmopolitanism's blind spots.

I will begin with a simple claim: current forms of Islamophobia are not based primarily on a fear of Islam or hatred of Muslims. Hostility toward Muslims has a very long history in Western societies, as do admiration for the accomplishments of Islamic civilization and strategic alliances between Muslim and Christian polities. 2 The variants of Islamophobia explored in this volume borrow heavily from this old complex of ideas, but they are more directly related to the ambiguities of nationalism, a modern ideology that blends fellow feeling and cultural difference in complex, often unconvincing ways.

DEFINE: Reframes Islamophobia, distinguishing older hostilities from a nationalism-driven modern variant. QUESTION: What specific ambiguities of nationalism feed Islamophobia, and how does it reconcile with long-standing religious prejudice?

Hence, a mystery lies at the heart of national identity: It is a compelling reality secured not by official laws or customary likenesses, but by a constantly renegotiated blend of the two.

DEFINE: Frames national identity as an emergent, negotiated construct blending legal and cultural elements rather than a fixed essence.

Islamophobia is symptomatic of our inability—in some cases, our explicit refusal—to let Muslims take part in the construction of national identity. … It is also pronounced in countries with large Muslim minorities, like Nigeria and India. 5 What distinguishes Western forms of Islamophobia from anti-Muslim politics more generally is the tendency to depict Islam as a block to authentic citizenship.

QUESTION: How does this citizenship-based definition of Islamophobia compare to accounts centering on security or cultural threat?

Islamophobia can also generate Islamophilia, an apologetic and generically affectionate relationship to Islam and Muslims. As I will show, Islamophilia itself can pose serious challenges to the effective incorporation of Muslims in American society. This is so for two reasons. First, advocates and opponents of Muslim inclusion often share underlying assumptions about Islam, citizenship, and national belonging, and a positive or negative spin on those assumptions does little to modify their political effects.

QUESTION: What specific mechanisms make Islamophilia counterproductive to the same extent as Islamophobia? Builds on: "Positive stereotyping perpetuates the essentializing logic of Islamophobia."

Islamophobia can also generate Islamophilia, an apologetic and generically affectionate relationship to Islam and Muslims. As I will show, Islamophilia itself can pose serious challenges to the effective incorporation of Muslims in American society. This is so for two reasons. First, advocates and opponents of Muslim inclusion often share underlying assumptions about Islam, citizenship, and national belonging, and a positive or negative spin on those assumptions does little to modify their political effects. Second, popular views of Muslims, and state policies related to Islam, are shaped by historical traumas that have been woven into narratives of national identity.

QUESTION: What specific shared assumptions about citizenship and national belonging do advocates and opponents both hold? Worth exploring the underlying ideology.

This is so for two reasons. First, advocates and opponents of Muslim inclusion often share underlying assumptions about Islam, citizenship, and national belonging, and a positive or negative spin on those assumptions does little to modify their political effects. Second, popular views of Muslims, and state policies related to Islam, are shaped by historical traumas that have been woven into narratives of national identity. Whether they are interlaced with fear or affection, the narratives of trauma that are commonly applied to Muslims living in the West are peculiar in the extent to which they focus on people and events located outside the time/ space of nationhood.

In a fascinating study of memory politics in Germany, the Netherlands, and France, Nancy Foner and Richard Alba show how commemoration of the Holocaust, which is meant to foster tolerance and a protective stance toward the rights of minority populations, has actually shored up prejudice against Muslim immigrants, who are widely portrayed as religiously intolerant, homophobic, sexist, and anti-Semitic.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how well-intentioned educational or memory initiatives can backfire, and to critiques of tolerance discourse that excludes certain minorities.

Because they are a religious community and not a racial one, Muslims cannot be counted in the US Census nor do affirmative action policies apply to them. Similarly, because Arabs and most other Middle Eastern immigrant populations are defined as “white” by the US Census, they do not count as a minority population in any official sense. Like Muslims, Arabs cannot benefit from affirmative action programs, and their status as white is fragile; it fades once they are publicly identified as Arab or Muslim, attributions that expose them to unwelcome governmental attention and a wide range of negative stereotypes.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on racial formation, Arab American studies, and how legal classification confers or denies minority protections in the US.

United States, Arab and Muslim populations are economically well off compared to the larger society; they are more highly educated; they are politically moderate overall, fiscally liberal, and socially conservative; they express high levels of "pride in being American"; and on measures of confidence in key public institutions, such as the police, the courts, the federal government, and public schools, they actually score higher than the general public. 8 Even more surprising (to some) is the fact that this Americanizing profile is often stronger among new immigrants than it is among Arabs and Muslims who are born or have lived for long periods of time in the United States. 9 On the whole, Arab/Muslim populations in the United States would appear to be mainstreaming rapidly.

The answer to this question is that the two trends—the positive and the negative—are part of one process. Over the years, I have given this process several names: mainstreaming, disciplinary inclusion, crisis identity formation. In each case, the central idea is the same. As political constituencies and as sites of local community formation, Detroit's Arab/Muslim populations make substantial gains during times of political crisis in the Middle East, especially when the United States is directly engaged in violent conflict with enemies defined as Arab, Muslim, or both. These gains are possible only to the extent that (and only because) local Arab/Muslim communities are seen as ambiguously American, and ambiguously Other. Attempts to remove this ambiguity in moments of crisis generate mainstreaming effects that are also, of necessity, marginalizing effects. The process is traumatic and empowering; it already has a long history; and the 9/11 attacks were rapidly assimilated to its logic.

Local religious leaders urged Muslims not to engage with protestors, to be friendly, to ignore unkind words. Self-policing was intense, as mosque leaders did their best to monitor the behavior of "the shabab " (young men). City leaders feared that local Muslims would overreact, that Jones had to be muzzled to protect the community from its own worst impulses, and that if someone killed Jones (this possibility was widely discussed), it would do great harm to the reputation of Dearborn, Detroit, and Muslims in the United States.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of how communities manage external provocations and self-police to protect group reputation.

Among Muslims, feelings were mixed. Many people believed Jones should be at liberty to do and say whatever he wanted, but people understood the desire to defend the Qur'an from injury. As a local school teacher told me, "My son said he would jump in to stop Jones from burning the Qur'an. I could not tell him this was wrong. I was proud of him. I wanted to support the way he felt, but I wanted to defend free speech. It was a strange moment for me." The idea that free speech exists on special terms in Dearborn, or that risking it was imprudent and possibly dangerous, was found among Islamophobes (who like to claim that Dearborn is ruled by Islamic law), among friends of the Arab/Muslim community (some of whom hold their current positions because Arab voters elected them), among members of the local ACLU, who denounced the court's ruling against Jones, and among Muslims who do not think anyone should be allowed to insult the Prophet Muhammad or his teachings.

The choreography of the Jones visit was much more complex than this brief sketch can convey, but it serves well as an example of disciplinary inclusion. The Muslim community was supported during this crisis by institutions of the larger society, and it was carefully controlled in the process. The rejection of Terry Jones represented both a commitment to the Americanness of Dearborn's Muslims, who deserved respect, and an acknowledgment of the (supposed) inability of (some) Muslims to accept certain kinds of free speech. Local Muslims were brought into an ecumenical, public rejection of religious bigotry, all the while being told, directly and indirectly, by Muslims and non-Muslims, that reactions of the Danish cartoon variety—physical attacks, threats, burnings in effigy, angry chants of "death to ____!"—would be counterproductive and would confirm what many Americans believe: that Muslims are irrational and intolerant.

XREF: Connects to Foucauldian ideas of discipline and control operating through seemingly benevolent institutional support.

The choreography of the Jones visit was much more complex than this brief sketch can convey, but it serves well as an example of disciplinary inclusion. The Muslim community was supported during this crisis by institutions of the larger society, and it was carefully controlled in the process. The rejection of Terry Jones represented both a commitment to the Americanness of Dearborn's Muslims, who deserved respect, and an acknowledgment of the (supposed) inability of (some) Muslims to accept certain kinds of free speech. Local Muslims were brought into an ecumenical, public rejection of religious bigotry, all the while being told, directly and indirectly, by Muslims and non-Muslims, that reactions of the Danish cartoon variety—physical attacks, threats, burnings in effigy, angry chants of "death to ____!"—would be counterproductive and would

In the end, the Terry Jones affair was considered a public relations triumph for Dearborn and its Muslim citizens. When Jones returned to the city several weeks after his initial arrest, he was heckled by 700 protestors who gathered in front of Dearborn City Hall. As Jones repeatedly recited the Pledge of Allegiance, called for a ban on shari`ah law, and asked the US government to monitor all American mosques, Mayor O’Reilly stood by, urging protestors to remain calm. He personally restrained anyone who tried to break through the barricades that police had erected to separate Jones from the crowd.

We're an easy target because people who hate others, in this case anyone who hates Islam and who hates Muslims, they're going to come here because they figure that this is the place to carry out their hate. It's sad because in this community, we get along. In this community, we're working it out really well, and we're all Americans. But, you know, people from other places who have strange ideas and who have limited information and don't care, they act out, and he's acting out . . . We had great leadership here, people from our Arab community who communicated and got the situation in hand, along with our police, we got the tempers down, and we got them back where they belonged.

XREF: Connects to broader research on how outside actors provoke local tensions, and how indigenous community leadership defuses conflict better than external intervention.

The logic of disciplinary inclusion is pervasive in Detroit’s Arab and Muslim communities. The contradictory messages sent to them during the Jones affair were mild by the standards set during the War on Terror. When, after the 9/11 attacks, federal authorities began to freeze the assets of Muslim charities that sent money overseas, area Muslims localized their almsgiving, building new mosques, renovating old ones, and opening Islamic schools in Detroit, thereby enlarging the infrastructure of American Muslim identity.

DEFINE: Clarifies how the term 'disciplinary inclusion' works in this context — external pressure from the state shapes internal communal behavior and identity-building.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI has run massive counterterrorism investigations in greater Detroit, sending special agents into mosques and interviewing religious leaders and laypeople. As a result, many immigrant congregations have undergone what can only be described as strategic Americanization campaigns, revamping their boards, replacing older, conservative, Arabic-speaking members with younger, moderate, American-educated professionals, and making a concerted effort to introduce themselves to the larger society through open houses and da`wa (missionary and teaching) events. Self-policing is now the norm. Many imams record their Friday sermons, so that they can defend themselves against accusations of anti-Americanism.

SEED: This is a rich angle for an essay on how state surveillance reshapes the internal governance and self-presentation of religious institutions — the pressure toward moderation as a survival strategy. Builds on: "Repressive prison policies inadvertently expanded Muslim prisoners' religious rights."

Andy Arena, FBI special agent in charge of the Detroit office, has repeatedly told mosque leaders that they have nothing to fear as long as they preach “the true Islam.”

In short, it is hard to imagine an American ethnic or religious community that is so enthusiastically embraced by the political and cultural mainstream even as it is relentlessly stigmatized, surveilled, infiltrated, scapegoated, and intimidated by federal law enforcement agencies.

QUESTION: This contrast between cultural embrace and law enforcement targeting is striking — worth understanding what community is being described and how this paradox is maintained. Builds on: "Crisis moments both empower and marginalize Detroit's Arab communities."

To complicate matters further, the US State Department uses Dearborn as a promotional tool in its public diplomacy campaigns abroad, producing high-gloss videos (available on YouTube) that show a robust, influential, unapologetically Arab Muslim city in the heart of the American Midwest. … In short, it is hard to imagine an American ethnic or religious community that is so enthusiastically embraced by the political and cultural mainstream even as it is relentlessly stigmatized, surveilled, infiltrated, scapegoated, and intimidated by federal law enforcement agencies.

XREF: Connects to the broader paradox of Muslim communities being simultaneously showcased as American success stories and subjected to surveillance—resonates with other post-9/11 civil liberties accounts.

Simply put, there has not been a time during the last century when Detroit was unaware of its Middle Eastern communities, and these populations seem always to be active in public life. Governors attended their fund-raising banquets in the 1950s; mayors attended their mosque openings in the 1930s; their political meetings and community protests were dutifully reported by the local press in the 1920s, and the opening of the Highland Park Mosque in 1921, the handiwork of Syrian, Turkish, and Balkan Muslims, received several columns— and a photograph of three turban-wearing, flag-waving imams—in the big Detroit newspapers.

XREF: Counteracts common narratives that Arab/Muslim American civic presence is recent or post-9/11; connects to scholarship on early 20th-century Arab immigrant communities in Michigan. SEED: Possible essay on the deep roots of Muslim American civic life in Detroit, challenging assumptions about when these communities entered mainstream public life.

Governors attended their fund-raising banquets in the 1950s; mayors attended their mosque openings in the 1930s; their political meetings and community protests were dutifully reported by the local press in the 1920s, and the opening of the Highland Park Mosque in 1921, the handiwork of Syrian, Turkish, and Balkan Muslims, received several columns— and a photograph of three turban-wearing, flag-waving imams—in the big Detroit newspapers.

XREF: Connects to the broader narrative of early Muslim American civic participation, contrasting with assumptions that such engagement is recent.

This overlap of inside and outside, an artifact of global immigration and modern regimes of citizenship, is what drives Islamophobia and imbues it with missionary zeal. Pastor Jones must remind America that Muslims, even the ones who live here with us, as us, are really Them. Mayor O’Reilly, in response, must remind Pastor Jones that “we’re all Americans.”

QUESTION: How does this framework extend to other immigrant groups whose insider/outsider status provokes similar anxieties?

The decision to cast Muslims in this role is a political act; moreover, it is one that can be contested. Not everyone agrees that Muslims are existentially alien, and Muslims who live as citizens in the United States or France or Canada are not, by strict legal reckoning, Others or strangers, even when their fellow nationals see them as outsiders. This overlap of inside and outside, an artifact of global immigration and modern regimes of citizenship, is what drives Islamophobia and imbues it with missionary zeal.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's orientalism and work on manufactured/national enemy figures.

What is most problematic about Islamophobia is its essentializing and universalizing quality, which casts Islam itself and all Muslims as real or potential enemies.

Builds on: "Apocalyptic anti-Islam rhetoric homogenized Muslims into a timeless monolith."

How can we constructively oppose this essentializing impulse in ways that do not simply reinforce it by cultivating its opposite: namely, the image of the Muslim as “friend,” as a figure identified with the Self, characterized as familiar, and with whom legitimate conflict is not possible? This image, too, is impervious to nuance, and it can be coercive when applied to Muslims, who might have differences—with non-Muslims and fellow Muslims alike—they think are worth asserting and maintaining. When “friendship” is subordinated to the demands of sameness, whether conceived in national or human terms, it can be just as coercive, just as prone to misrecognition, as the sentiments of hostility it is meant to correct.

XREF: The critique of the 'friend' as coercive opposition echoes themes in Edward Said's orientalism and contemporary debates about positive stereotyping and model minorities. Builds on: "Positive regard for Islam can itself hinder Muslim inclusion."

As a stereotype, the “good Muslim” has common features: He tends to be a Sufi (ideally, one who reads Rumi); he is peaceful (and assures us that jihad is an inner, spiritual contest, not a struggle to “enjoin the good and forbid the wrong” through force of arms); he treats women as equals, and is committed to choice in matters of hijab wearing (and never advocates the covering of a woman’s face); if he is a she, then she is highly educated, works outside the home, is her husband’s only wife, chose her husband freely, and wears hijab (if at all) only because she wants to. Good Muslims are also pluralists (they recall fondly the ecumenical virtues of medieval Andalusia and are champions of interfaith activism); they are politically moderate (advocates of democracy, human rights, and religious freedom, opponents of armed conflict against the United States and Israel); finally, good Muslims are likely to be converts, Africans, South Asians, or, more likely still, Indonesians and Malaysians; they are less likely to be Arabs, but, as friends of the “good Muslim” will point out, only a small proportion of Muslims are Arabs anyway.

The same is true of Islamophobic discourses. There are Muslims who advocate and practice violence, oppress women, hate Jews, would like to see the universal establishment of shari`ah law, and so on. Counting them and calling them out is not as important, or as dangerous, as the categorical stigmatization that occurs when phobic portrayals of Muslims come to dominate a political field, thus setting the terms on which Islam is deemed pre/modern, un/ safe, and un/acceptable.

DEFINE: Clarifies the distinction between identifying individual Muslims who hold problematic views versus the systemic 'categorical stigmatization' that shapes discourse around all Muslims.

In this light, the resemblance between the good Muslim and the good citizen of the liberal democratic state is all too obvious. The good Muslim is certainly less malign than his evil twin, but the traits that define the good Muslim are just as likely to be based on wishful thinking and a politics of fear. Neither standard is meant to be “fair” or “objective”; instead, each is meant to politicize Muslims, to package them for use in conflict situations.

If we persist in portraying Islamophobia as an irrational force of misperception—the bad citizen’s response to the bad Muslim—we will render ourselves oblivious to Islamophobia’s ultimate causes, which are not simply ignorance or xenophobia. Pastor Terry Jones is rightly criticized for both, but he has never invaded and occupied an independent (Muslim-majority) nation-state, authorized the torture of (Muslim) alien combatants held in secret prisons, killed hundreds of innocent (Muslim) people in unmanned drone attacks, propped up (Muslim) dictators against the will of their (Muslim) subjects, and given orders to detain, deport, and assassinate (Muslim) terror suspects without trial.

XREF: Connects to critiques linking institutional/state violence to prejudice, and to the broader discourse on Islamophobia as structural rather than individual. SEED: Could seed an essay on the asymmetry between individual prejudice and state-sanctioned violence against Muslims. Builds on: "US state repression fuels Islamophobia and targets Muslim political dissent."

In our rush to identify Muslim friends who think and act like “us,” we risk turning those who think and act differently into enemies. US foreign policy, before and after the War on Terror, has had devastating effects on millions of Muslims around the world, and even “good Muslims” would want to oppose US policy as well as the hate it produces at home and overseas. If we persist in portraying Islamophobia as an irrational force of misperception—the bad citizen’s response to the bad Muslim—we will render ourselves oblivious to Islamophobia’s ultimate causes, which are not simply ignorance or xenophobia. Pastor Terry Jones is rightly criticized for both, but he has never invaded and occupied an independent (Muslim-majority) nation-state, authorized the torture of (Muslim) alien combatants held in secret prisons, killed hundreds of innocent (Muslim) people in unmanned drone attacks, propped up (Muslim) dictators against the will of their (Muslim) subjects, and given orders to detain, deport, and assassinate (Muslim) terror suspects without trial.

XREF: Connects to critique of liberal framing of prejudice as purely cognitive/misperception error rather than materially driven.

If we persist in portraying Islamophobia as an irrational force of misperception—the bad citizen's response to the bad Muslim—we will render ourselves oblivious to Islamophobia's ultimate causes, which are not simply ignorance or xenophobia. Pastor Terry Jones is rightly criticized for both, but he has never invaded and occupied an independent (Muslim-majority) nation-state, authorized the torture of (Muslim) alien combatants held in secret prisons, killed hundreds of innocent (Muslim) people in unmanned drone attacks, propped up (Muslim) dictators against the will of their (Muslim) subjects, and given orders to detain, deport, and assassinate (Muslim) terror suspects without trial.

At first glance, Islamophobia would appear to be the product of a rigid, polarized worldview. It demands that Muslims be seen negatively, as threatening figures who want to dominate the West, a geopolitical space in which they do not belong and to which they cannot adapt. Yet appearances are misleading. In practice, Islamophobia owes more to the convergence of cultural and political spaces than to their separation. 40 Polarization is what Islamophobes desire, but cannot quite achieve. Anti-Muslim activists like Terry Jones, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, the Bible Believers, and the Westboro Baptist Church are drawn to Dearborn because they see it as an abomination, as a dangerous exception to the American norm. In fact, Dearborn is proof that an alternative American reality, one in which Islam is normal and Muslims enjoy political support, is possible and will become increasingly common in future.

XREF: Contrasts with conventional framing of prejudice as stemming from division or separation; connects to broader literature on contact theory and how hostile movements often target spaces where integration succeeds.

A generalized affection for Muslims is what Islamophiles desire, but cannot quite achieve, because evidence of Muslim difference persists—in food and dress, in family structures, in gender ideologies, in attitudes toward domestic and foreign policy—and because wars against Muslim-majority states and Islamist militant groups constantly reanimate a time-tested imagery of crusade and jihad.

The irony of disciplinary inclusion is the extent to which it turns phobic and philic sentiments into the very architecture of identity formation. It constructs Muslim enemies even as (or precisely because) it stipulates the qualities of Muslim friends. Disciplinary inclusion encourages the Muslim friend to control and marginalize the Muslim enemy, a contest that unfolds in the Self, the family, the community, the nation-state, and the transregional diaspora. This work is delicate, relentless, and it has given rise to its own class of specialists. Greater Detroit now has a professional class of “go-to” Muslims who can be relied upon to build interfaith alliances, meet with visiting government officials and candidates for public office, lead the mosque tours, talk to reporters and scholars, and, of course, to rebuff Islamophobes.

Builds on: "Disciplinary inclusion both supports minority communities and controls them"

The irony of disciplinary inclusion is the extent to which it turns phobic and philic sentiments into the very architecture of identity formation. It constructs Muslim enemies even as (or precisely because) it stipulates the qualities of Muslim friends. Disciplinary inclusion encourages the Muslim friend to control and marginalize the Muslim enemy, a contest that unfolds in the Self, the family, the community, the nation-state, and the transregional diaspora.

DEFINE: Clarifies 'disciplinary inclusion' as a concept that builds phobic/philic distinctions into identity formation rather than merely excluding outsiders.

When both bad Muslims and good Muslims are irrelevant and exceptional, something is clearly wrong with the terms of debate. The potential for being ordinary and unmarked disappears, as do the moral gray zones in which most of us are privileged to live, unburdened by the obligation of constantly proving our loyalty and constantly having that loyalty questioned.

XREF: Connects to frameworks on identity politics and how labels collapse moral gray zones, and to broader debates about who must constantly prove belonging.

As hegemonic as it now seems, the moral peculiarity of these rhetorical positions is revealed immediately, and quite shockingly, if one tries to apply them to Christians or Jews as such. An application of this kind is forbidden in polite, metropolitan society; indeed, the ban defines polite metropolitan society, a space in which a person's enemy or friend status does not follow immediately from his or her status as a Christian or a Jew.

DEFINE: The highlight clarifies what 'polite metropolitan society' is defined by: a space where religious identity does not directly determine friend/enemy relations.

In a brilliant turning of tables, the speakers at “Rejecting Islamophobia” suggested that the most serious threat to national security and the US Constitution is represented today by Islamophobes, who have rejected the commitment to civil liberties that is central to American political (and religious) life. “We stand for America,” said Osama Siblani, publisher of The Arab American News , “and they stand against America and the American way of life.”

Builds on: "Attacks on out-groups expand state power and erode liberties."

I began this essay with the claim that Islamophobia does not spring directly from a fear of Islam, or a hatred of Muslims, but from ambiguities rooted in our dominant models of citizenship and national belonging.

Builds on: "Muslims' violence cannot be explained by their religion alone"

I began this essay with the claim that Islamophobia does not spring directly from a fear of Islam, or a hatred of Muslims, but from ambiguities rooted in our dominant models of citizenship and national belonging. The battles being fought in Dearborn by Islamophobes, Arab and Muslim Americans, and their allies and opponents in local government, the media, and the courts are generating new, hotly contested versions of Americanism.

After ten years of intense pressure to show loyalty to the state, the result is a public Islam that is on easy terms with American national identity, so much so that it can translate itself into a secular discourse of civil liberties, becoming virtually indistinguishable from the Judeo-Christian ambient in which—in greater Detroit at least—it now thrives.

The most transformative is that Muslims can be American, already are American, and that the political system—in Dearborn—is a social field over which they can exercise considerable influence. This has nothing to do with shari`ah and everything to do with conventional electoral politics and immigrant incorporation. … The second lesson, which has been learned over and over again by the local Arab/Muslim communities, is that inclusion comes at the price of discipline.

DEFINE: Clarifies that Muslim political power in Dearborn stems from ordinary electoral politics and immigrant incorporation, not religious law — separating a common misconception from the actual mechanism.

Because these processes have produced massive governmental agencies that are reshaping the relationship between the United States and other nation-states, and between US citizens and their own state, understanding how these processes work is one of the most important social justice issues of our day. Numerous commentators have argued that, if the twentieth century was defined by problems of race and the color line, the twenty-first century will be defined by Islamophobia and the problem of integrating Muslims into modern, democratic societies, both in the West and in the Muslim world.

XREF: Parallels W.E.B. Du Bois's claim that the twentieth century was defined by the color line, the claim this passage explicitly invokes and extends.

Numerous commentators have argued that, if the twentieth century was defined by problems of race and the color line, the twenty-first century will be defined by Islamophobia and the problem of integrating Muslims into modern, democratic societies, both in the West and in the Muslim world. … We need to expose the tactical ignorance, malign and benign, which suffuses educated opinion on all things Muslim in America.

Denouncing the crude bigotry of Islamophobes will not produce a political culture of this kind; neither will polite acceptance of Muslims based on the privatization of their religious and cultural differences. Instead, a politics of mutual respect must be anchored in the realization that Muslims and non-Muslims do not live in separate worlds, in self-constituting and clashing civilizations. Increasingly, we all live in overlapping zones of interaction.

SEED: A possible essay angle: challenging both Islamophobia and liberal privatization as inadequate responses, arguing for a common-ground politics. Pays off: "Cross-religious hostility dissolves only through mutual recognition within shared spaces."

Denouncing the crude bigotry of Islamophobes will not produce a political culture of this kind; neither will polite acceptance of Muslims based on the privatization of their religious and cultural differences. Instead, a politics of mutual respect must be anchored in the realization that Muslims and non-Muslims do not live in separate worlds, in self-constituting and clashing civilizations. Increasingly, we all live in overlapping zones of interaction. This overlap will create new identities—secular, religious, national, regional, and ethnoracial—that are endlessly contested, and are worth contesting, because they are shared.

QUESTION: What concrete policies or practices would an 'overlapping zones' politics of mutual respect actually entail, versus mere denunciation or polite acceptance?