The New Crusades brilliantly describes China's war on Islam. It also examines the hypocrisy of some of the powers that be, standing alongside Ukrainians rightfully, but silent on China's active genocide of Uyghurs.

QUESTION: The claim of genocide in Xinjiang is politically contested; worth verifying sources and definitions before relying on it.

His experience was formative in the ways that living in a discordant state of existence always is; the promises of formal equality under the law say one thing, but the exceptions allowed by a panoply of justifications for second-class treatment created something entirely different.

XREF: Connects to critiques of formal vs. substantive equality, resonance with civil rights scholarship and legal realism.

"Muslims are being racially constructed as terrorists," he observed during one of our retreats, noting how "the War on Terror was a global imperial project."

XREF: Connects to theories of racialization, Orientalism (Said), and scholarship on the War on Terror as a racializing project.

Khaled's ability to speak from within and to serve as an effective interface between communities was crucial in galvanizing Muslim and Arab communities to find common cause with their Black and Brown neighbors. While the coalitions to preserve affirmative action could not overcome the coordinated efforts of well-resourced and highly organized factions bent on destroying it, the brainstorming, debating, and organizing that we pursued in partnership with the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) would deepen our understanding of the parallel and overlapping dimensions of Islamophobia.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on cross-racial coalition building and intersectional organizing, echoing themes from civil rights movement histories.

Khaled and his family fled war to land in one of the poorest, and most segregated cities in the United States. He experienced firsthand how American imperialism abroad delivered him into the belly of the beast, where systematic forms of discrimination faced by poor, Black, and Brown people are taken as natural facts of life.

XREF: Connects to discussions of how US foreign policy and domestic inequality are linked, a thread running through critiques of empire at home.

For example, Uyghur Muslim women locked away in Chinese prison camps must endure the intersecting fury of torture and sexual violence rooted in a genocidal project that rips them from their children. Their "Islamophobic intersection," if you will, is dramatically unlike that of a French Algerian male in Paris, whose masculinity is marked with the suspicion of terrorism in a liberal state that criminalizes headscarves worn by his mother or sister—dimensions of the global Muslim experience that Khaled understands well, and brings to life in this book. Race, gender, location, the form of government in a host nation, and so much more determine the circumstances that Muslims occupy in countries across the globe unified by a War on Terror that spreads Islamophobia beyond borders and across intersections.

XREF: Connects to Crenshaw's intersectionality framework; the highlight explicitly invokes "intersection" in that sense.

Explosions that, in that apocalyptic aftermath that Beirut knew so well from wars past, revealed that more than 200 people were killed, 300,000 people were left homeless, and more than 100,000 homes were destroyed. For “a nation pitied” for its modern misfortunes with war and the internal rifts that sink it even deeper, the Beirut blasts revealed that terror is an enterprise not tied to any one faith or nonfaith. While news outlets and pundits pushed us to blame the catastrophe on the familiar list of Muslim networks, in line with War on Terror impulses, the truth revealed that global crusade’s fundamental lie: that terrorism is a uniquely Islamic enterprise. Sometimes, terror is a consequence of corruption, negligence, and as this book illustrates, religious and even secular ideology. More than often, terror is the outcome of old empires and their modern successors, chiefly the United States—my country—which occupies the citadel of neocolonial wars on terror and the new crusades they have spawned.

XREF: Challenges the War on Terror framing that terrorism is uniquely Islamic, echoing critiques in postcolonial and critical terrorism studies.

Like its epistemological mother, Islamophobia is strategic with its deployment of “imperial feminism,” and as governments across the globe spearhead Islamophobic crusades in the form of hijab bans and the regulation of Muslim women's bodies, disregarding Islamophobia's gendered dimensions would veil its most menacing tentacles. … Following the intellectual direction of pioneering Muslim feminists like Fatema Mernissi, The New Crusades seeks to unveil how societal and state-sponsored Islamophobia is often first concerned with policing female bodies: “The so-called modesty of [Muslim] women is in fact a war tactic.”

XREF: Connects to contemporary debates about hijab bans in France and the weaponization of 'imperial feminism' in Western foreign policy discourse.

It cannot be reduced to neat technical terms or meticulously crafted definitions intended for scholarly citation. While academic discussion of Islamophobia is vital to our ability to understand it, and indeed to fighting it, it must be coupled with the voices of those on the ground who endure it.

QUESTION: What counts as 'lived experience' evidence versus academic framing, and how do they productively combine? DEFINE: Clarifies that Islamophobia is a phenomenon that cannot be fully captured by scholarly terminology alone.

It is that unmistakable feeling that rears its menacing head when disaster strikes, then struts alongside you while you try to pick up the pieces and stave off indictment, or worse, demonization, by keeping your head down, concealing your faith, or apologizing for evil acts to which you bear no connection.

The culprits of the Beirut explosion were not Muslim terrorists or “Islamists,” but the slow-plotting terror of government kleptocracy, corruption, and neglect. Terror of a less conspicuous sort, enabled by former empires and abetted by foreign banks.

XREF: Reframes violent disasters as outcomes of systemic governance failure rather than ideological attacks — connects to accountability and kleptocracy literature.

The new set of crusades that target Muslim populations across the world, facilitated and fueled by the American campaign that came into being after the 9/11 terror attacks, are not pointedly religious battles between occidental Christendom and oriental Islam, but political and cultural wars. They are waged against Muslims in nations where Islam has been cast as unassimilable with that nation’s societal values, oriented as inimical to political quests for racial purity, or profiled as threatening to national security.

In addition to primary sources, this book draws on foundational scholarly literature from within the law, social sciences, humanities, media studies, and beyond. With regard to cases where access to data is sparse and suppressed by authoritarian regimes like China, the stealth work of journalists and direct testimony of individuals in the diaspora brought firsthand accounts of stories hidden by digital authoritarianism and postmodern firewalls.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of surveillance states, digital authoritarianism research, and censorship scholarship on China.

The American War on Terror cemented this dictate, and during the two decades after the 9/11 terror attacks, it strategically expanded and exported connected crusades into nations across the globe. This dictate, which held Muslim identity as presumptive of terror suspicion, was the principal product of this global project, which countries across the globe adopted—and then adapted—to fit their domestic political ambitions. Since its inception, the War on Terror has gradually metastasized into a network of crusades against Muslims in nations in Europe and Asia, Africa and the Americas. In a short time, it has birthed new campaigns of persecution in some nations, while emboldening existing cultural and political wars in other countries.

To echo Kumar, Islamophobia is empire. Fueled by the War on Terror and its fundamental baseline, which ties Muslim identity to terrorism, a new kind of empire, advanced by a network of governments with distinct anti-Muslim crusades, has taken shape.

DEFINE: Defines Islamophobia not as mere prejudice but as an imperial structure tying Muslim identity to terrorism across a network of governments.

Chapter 4 moves east from the Indian subcontinent to China and Myanmar, sites of horrific ethnic cleansing against two indigenous Muslim populations. I examine the American War on Terror’s facilitation of the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China’s disputed northwest territory, Xinjiang. In 2014, that mass persecution devolved into a full-scale elimination program encompassing mass detention, torture, and the criminalization of Islam through law and violence. I then delve into the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, which like its Chinese counterpart is a campaign steered by the government to remove a people from land the state desperately covets.

A world marred by Islamophobia has inspired new fronts of resistance and leadership that are central to the spirit of The New Crusades. Celebrating the most compelling figures that challenge global Islamophobia forms the core of chapter 6. In the aftermath of the Christchurch terror attacks, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern issued a refreshing and timely challenge to the Islamophobic populism spreading across the world, a populism spearheaded by strongmen like Narendra Modi and Donald Trump.

The majority of these refugees were older, well into their sixties and beyond. Their eyesight had been stripped by the merciless sun under which they sold vegetables and fruits in order to feed their families. It harvested cracks in their eyes as they worked, day in and day out, between those unrelenting desert crevices that bound them and the ungodly power above that blinded them.

These were new songs written between the walls of makeshift hospitals, under an oppressive sun that tuned out the music of life as it stripped lives of their eyesight. A corner of the Horn of Africa where Europeans unsaw the natives as real people, and recorded laws and the history that followed to strip them of dignity, followed by American successors with new marching orders. But there is music in unmaking the dehumanizing word of empire, and Kalsoum’s sublime prayer sang with lyrical rebellion. “This is exactly how the music called jazz began,” wrote James Baldwin, “and out of the same necessity: not only to redeem a history unwritten and despised, but to checkmate the European [and American] notion of the world. For until this hour, when we speak of history, we are speaking only of how Europe [and America] saw—and sees—the world.” But there is a very great deal in the world which Europe does not, or cannot, see.

XREF: Connects to James Baldwin's writing on jazz and Black music as redemption; parallels with broader postcolonial theory about subaltern voices. SEED: Could be an essay on music as anti-colonial resistance, comparing Kalsoum to jazz and other traditions of rebellion.

Wajir, Kenya, like Los Angeles or Detroit, was another theater of the War on Terror's “field of fight,” where the new “world war” pursued terrorist boogeymen and -women near and far.

“Radicalization theory” focused exclusively on Muslims, and like eugenics or the bell curve and grand racial or religious theories crafted before it, saw Islam as inherently violent. Islam itself, a religion so heterogeneous and deeply layered, was deemed prone to terrorism by a new theory that, like other bigoted philosophies, reduced the “essence” of entire peoples to vile stereotypes.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of how academic frameworks can pathologize entire populations, similar to how eugenics deployed scientific legitimacy for bigotry.

Americans did not see little Mohamed or Kalsoum or the refugee population of Wajir as victims of cruel circumstance, but as presumptive radicals. They were, despite the depth of their despair and the darkness of their sight, always terrorists in the making, always two steps from becoming full-fledged terror threats. The two agents did not see Wajir as a place of humanitarian crisis, but as a rugged training ground for terrorists.

The American War on Terror sees Muslims, the fastest growing religion in the world, with nearly 2 billion adherents, as presumptive terrorists. This vision of Muslim identity has blinded the architects and agents of this war to the genuine contours of Muslim life in American neighborhoods and the unimaginable plight of refugees falling into the cracks in Kenya.

But more than two decades in, it is clear that the War on Terror is no longer just America's imperial project. It has morphed and metastasized into a global crusade—a crusade encompassing a circuit of interconnected campaigns unfolding within nation-states, in which governments weaponize the faux theory that Muslims are a demographic threat and that Islam inspires "extremism" and "radicalism." These governments launch their own campaigns in the name of the War on Terror, institutionalizing the baseline that expressions of Muslim identity are tied to terrorism. This has been written into laws across the world, legitimized by a war started and spearheaded by the world's greatest superpower.

XREF: This echoes critiques of the global security state and counterterrorism literature beyond US-centric analysis.

I traveled in many of these countries and observed Washington's ever-present footprint in the policies of governments that saw their Muslim populations through the lens of the War on Terror and its prism of lies. These governments have adopted its rigid frames to carry out domestic crusades that further additional political objectives in their own lands. For governments in India and China, France and Myanmar, and regimes beyond and in between, Islamophobia has been wielded as a blunt weapon.

It became a common thought of mine, while speaking to these individuals, that being blind could make life more tolerable than seeing what they saw every day, what stalked them at every turn. I felt ashamed for having that thought, but learning about the depths Islamophobia has sunk to in China and the heights of violence it has risen to in India revealed dangers so existential, and conjured up fears so extreme, that I have no choice but to level the harshest possible indictment at the American War on Terror. It is a war far more gruesome than war as we know it, more ominous than dystopian novelists could imagine, one that has spiraled into crusades of mass internment and ethnic cleansing in parts of the world seen and unseen.

SEED: Could frame an essay contrasting real-world state violence against speculative dystopian narratives to argue fiction underestimates reality.

These are dangers that cannot be fully understood without the words of the people who face them directly, who live an existence where dodging persecution is a daily ritual that accompanies their five prayers or their fasts. I met these Muslims wherever I could, and they were keen on meeting me and sharing stories that few others care to hear. We spoke near their schools and in their living rooms, in neighborhoods that they have never left and cities where they live as exiles. When the pandemic arrived and everybody was quarantined and confined, I spoke to even more Muslims around the globe, conducting virtual interviews and meetings, communicating on social media platforms and phone apps, connecting on digital terrain where our virtual footprint likely summoned the scrutiny of agents from Washington and other new War on Terror capitals.

SEED: The method of giving voice to those facing persecution — and the surveillance risk of interviewing them digitally — could seed an essay on ethical journalism and source protection in the surveillance era. XREF: Connects to the author's broader methodology across books of witnessing and testimony from marginalized communities.

While the virus put much of the world on pause and sank everybody into paranoia, it spawned new strands of Islamophobia that kept the War on Terror in motion. From distant corners of the globe, I learned about the horrors of harvested Muslim organs and toddlers seated atop the corpses of their dead grandfathers, how Muslims in New Delhi were scapegoated for the outbreak of the coronavirus, and how French laws banned Islamic head and face coverings but mandated face masks.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on pandemic-heightened scapegoating and how crises revive existing prejudices against minority groups.

What explains the world of difference between the Ukrainian struggle for freedom and the ongoing quests for self-determination in Muslim-majority lands? Why are Ukrainians “freedom fighters,” while Muslims struggling for that very same dignity and independence in occupied Kashmir or the West Bank, Gaza or Yemen are dubbed “terrorists”? Theaters where a protracted war on terror renders anybody Arab, Brown, or Muslim as a putative terrorist, notwithstanding the righteousness of their struggle or the unhinged imperialism of their opponents. Shortly after the invasion, I wrote in the Washington Post that “the public's ideal of freedom fighter and terrorist is intensely racial, which enables the seeing of lay Ukrainians taking arms and throwing molotov cocktails as heroes and Muslims engaged in the very same acts, in pursuit of the same self-determination, as extremists.” Terrorism was made in the image of the dark and brooding Muslim, while the blonde-haired and blue-eyed archetypes out of Ukraine that saturated our television screens and social media timelines were shrouded with the innocence and valor of whiteness, the very face of racial domination that reigned over the nation that made the War on Terror, its new global crusade.

DEFINE: Contrasts how the same acts of armed self-determination are labeled 'freedom fighter' for white Ukrainians and 'terrorist' for Muslim populations.

The American War on Terror, spearheaded by an administration bent on exacting revenge on a single terror network, has devolved into something unrecognizable from its original form. It has spawned a monster that has mutated wherever it has landed, that has been shaped and then reshaped by the histories and marching orders of its local host.

Islamophobia varies across national and cultural lines but retains regardless of location the fundamental trait crafted by the architects of the War on Terror: the conviction that the threat of terror is inextricably linked to Islam, and Muslims anywhere and everywhere carry its threat wherever they roam. Both old and new crusades have reduced the Islamic essence to one of violence, unseeing Muslims as real people and unmaking them into standing myths of terrorists.

DEFINE: Defines Islamophobia as reducible to the conviction that Muslims universally carry a terror threat, shaped by War on Terror architects.

It was a short drive, but mapping the racially segregated landscape that is metropolitan Detroit, Lincoln Park felt like an entirely distant place. It was downriver but in many respects felt like down south, where the sight of Confederate flags and menacing stares from white men in pickup trucks were common.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of redlining and white flight in Detroit, such as the 8 Mile Road divide.

“I did not know what I was getting into,” John recalled, as he stared down at his coffee cup. “But I knew that our country was attacked, and that I wanted to help defend it.” John did not attend college, and he was thrust into parenthood before he himself was a fully formed adult. He was a fighter, and had always been. The tattoos that he wore testified to that, but the scars hidden beneath them were an even stronger witness to the fights he had endured, including some that got the best of him.

John’s father had earned an honest living at GM, and John wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps. He wanted to stay home, hold a normal job, attend the same Catholic church that set his childhood Sundays, and raise his children in Lincoln Park. But he ran into a dead end after dropping out of high school and when globalization sent most of the auto jobs at Ford and GM abroad, where labor was far cheaper. For his generation, the American Dream—and the vehicles needed to realize it—were being shipped abroad. The days of new sedans elegantly cruising down Southfield Road were replaced by “hillbilly elegies” scored to the tune of “declining home values” that “trap[ped] people” in white towns like Lincoln Park, towns that faded from working-class oases to opportunity deserts.

XREF: Connects to Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy' themes of working-class decline and the hollowing out of American manufacturing towns.

Hussein lived less than ten miles from John, a short drive down Southfield Freeway in the very Detroit where I grew up and where my mother still makes her home. His neighborhood blossomed into what locals lovingly refer to as “Little Iraq.” It’s a one-mile drag where Shia Muslim barber shops and bakeries, storefront mosques and restaurants proudly bear the names of Iraqi towns and villages that the proprietors left behind to build new lives in the Motor City. These were not just businesses, but shrines they reconstructed along a central artery of an Arab American capital. After several wars in Iraq and endless bombs over Baghdad, a semblance of Iraq was built in the belly of west Detroit.

In this section of the city, refugees from Iraq landed in that rare Muslim community where Shia Islam—the religion’s minority sect—was the majority. A place where Iraqi storefront mosques sit along Warren Avenue and processions honoring Shia martyrs march down Greenfield Road. A place where Shia Muslims like Hussein found sanctuary from the sectarian persecution inflicted by another Hussein, Saddam.

The terror within is always real. While the terror without is often manufactured, to marshal support for wars that deceive the masses at home and advance the interests of elites abroad. The marching orders of empire, history clearly reveals, never benefit the children thrown into its fires. "The poorest among us are the most disposable" is as quintessential an American slogan as any, and the indigent margins of Detroit and its outer enclaves represent that.

XREF: Echoes the classic 'wag the dog' critique of manufactured consent for war, linking to Chomsky-Lippmann propaganda theory.

"How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?" asked historian Howard Zinn, a question that pierced the façade of lies surrounding the War on Terror.

SEED: Could be developed into an essay questioning how 'just war' framing legitimizes state violence while criminalizing non-state violence.

The force of American history stood with George Bush as he prepared to address Congress on September 20, 2001. Its darkest passages, when presidents who spoke from that stage branded entire masses of people irredeemable savages, chattel, and three-fifths human, lurked like shadows behind him. Vile terms like "enemy aliens" and "enemy race" would resurface; terms used to place people in internment camps decades earlier would be wielded again.

XREF: Connects to the historical pattern of dehumanizing language in American presidential addresses, from slavery-era rhetoric to WWII-era internment framing, and how it recurs in post-9/11 discourse.

The same formula was used in the earliest and middle passages of American slavery. Because indigenous peoples were thought to be too “unruly” to serve as slaves and white indentured servants became too costly, the American appetite for cheap labor turned to the westernmost regions of Africa for human capital. To justify African enslavement, legal gatekeepers invented “Blackness” as a category that branded all Africans as property to be sold and owned, a classification oriented against whiteness, its “superior opposite.”

XREF: Connects to how racial categories are socially constructed rather than natural, paralleling discussions of other invented identity classifications.

The language of “national security” and “enemy aliens” that emerged into the parlance of the day during the War on Terror was also not new. These terms, and the hysteria that surrounded them, were first deployed to round up Japanese people on the American West Coast from 1942 through 1946. Nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in concentration camps after the Pearl Harbor attacks of December 7, 1941.

XREF: Connects the terminology of national security and enemy aliens from WWII internment to its reuse in the War on Terror. DEFINE: Identifies 'national security' and 'enemy aliens' as historically recycled discursive terms.

In 1993, eight years before those two airplanes crashed into the twin towers in New York City, Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard professor, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine: “The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

QUESTION: The framing sets up a civilization-clash thesis. Worth examining whether this prediction held or how it framed subsequent discourse.

Huntington said it himself: “To define themselves, people need an other.” And he authored the script for the War on Terror, which found that ideal, ominous other in the entire religion of Islam.

XREF: Connects to the broader "clash of civilizations" thesis and identity-formation literature in political science and sociology.

There existed “civilization” and an irredeemably violent creed bent on destroying it. This civilizational paradigm emerged in the ideological engine that drove the War on Terror, summoning Americans living on the nation’s margins, like John, to be sent to a foreign land as fodder for a baseless fight. Fodder in the name of “freedom” that marches like empire, and from the vantage point of the millions of Muslims who have died in its name, “democracy” that strikes like terror.

XREF: Connects to post-9/11 discourse critiques and the notion that counter-terror ideology recapitulates imperial frameworks.

This was the world we lived in, where the demand for war was only outpaced by the supply of those willing to be fed into its ravenous belly. Fresh meat, fresh fodder for an imperial appetite without limits. There were few jobs for a man his age. The cost of college had skyrocketed and the prospects of making a living wage without an undergraduate degree had plummeted, particularly in a pandemic-stricken world that hardly “ended the War on Terror” or the “9/11 era,” and especially for Muslims and working-class men like John and that young boy, ready to feed himself to the war and its wolves in Washington.

SEED: Could anchor an essay on the quiet economic conscription behind military recruitment — the way cost of college and wage stagnation serve as a pipeline to enlistment. FICTION: The 'fresh meat, fresh fodder' framing offers a visceral register for a character caught between economic precarity and the imperial war machine.

The young man stared the world that the War on Terror had made square in the eye. College was too costly, the pandemic accelerated mass layoffs, and the burdens of the world were growing heavier. War is what remains, so he walked toward it, into the only door left open for him. Peddled dreams waited with lofty promises of valor and victory, and a sales pitch about democracy and terrorism that matched the imagery of his favorite video games and Hollywood blockbusters.

Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, and its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

FICTION: This imperial self-justification could fuel a story where an empire's noble rhetoric contrasts sharply with its actual plunder, or where a protagonist slowly realizes their civilization's mission narrative is self-deception.

Almost instantly after the 9/11 attacks, the US launched a bloody war in Afghanistan. There was a bloodier one on the horizon. Less than two years later, a second war would be launched in Iraq—a nation said, despite lack of evidence, to be hiding “weapons of mass destruction” and “harboring Al-Qaeda terrorists.” A nation that, in the days that followed, would be sunk into a bloody sectarian war spurred by an illegal American crusade that left millions dead, and by subsequent proxy “conflicts within Islam” that continue to claim the lives of innocents.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on pre-9/11 US foreign policy, Iraq War justifications, and the post-9/11 'war on terror' narrative.

New wars, in essence, are only contemporary extensions of preexisting campaigns. This was particularly the case with Islam, a target of American empire and aggression from the 1970s through the 1990s, well before it, and its global population of adherents, graduated to the pinnacle of racialized threat. In 1994, seven years before the War on Terror, Said made perfect sense of a world marred by it. In Representations of the Intellectual, a collection of masterful speeches Said delivered in London, he stated, “Dealing with the Islamic world—all one billion [plus] people in it, with dozens of different societies, half a dozen major languages including Arabic, Turkish, Iranian, [and English], all spread out over about a third of the globe—American or British academic intellectuals speak reductively . . . irresponsibly of something called ‘Islam.’ ” These European and American voices, which Said labeled “Orientalists,” flattened Islam into a singular system, a solitary whole stripped of any complexity or heterogeneity.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism thesis; the 'new wars' as extensions of preexisting campaigns echoes his broader critique of imperial epistemology.

Said pushed forward, explaining how a cabal of formative Orientalists hijacked the very definition of Islam, ascribing to it a meaning that clashed with its essential being: “By using this single word they seem to regard Islam as a simple object about which grand generalizations spanning a millennium and a half of Muslim history can be made, and about which judgments concerning the compatibility between Islam and democracy, Islam and human rights, Islam and progress are quite unabashedly advanced.” Or in cogent War-on-Terror speak, Islam against civilization and everything that the civilized world valued, prized, and stood for. George W. Bush aptly summarized Samuel Huntington for the layman, proclaiming, “They hate our freedoms.” In both old and new crusades, “they” were Muslims.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the critical theory tradition about how Western discourse constructs the 'Orient' as a homogeneous object.

Islam was more than just a religion, and more often, in the minds of Orientalists, not a religion. Rather, oldand especially new-guard Orientalists framed it as a competing political system—a totalitarian system made in the mirror image of the West, or what Said labeled the “Occident.” Islam, therefore, was a rival “civilization” mangled by Western hands to facilitate their imperial ambitions and justify the violence they inflicted on masses of Muslims who—far from the shores of Europe—were painted as imminent threats. The imminence was not physical or even geographic, but tied to memory and lucid in the imagination; namely, the memory of those old and original Crusades, always present in the collective psyche of Europe, and later, the United States.

XREF: Connects to Said's 'Orientalism' and the broader postcolonial theory the reader is likely engaging with.

The new War on Terror discourse was intellectually emaciated and obsolete, but as revitalized and repackaged by the likes of Samuel P. Huntington, it provided an undeniably powerful paradigm and potent language for a world in which the images of falling towers and bearded terrorists were seared deep in the imagination. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” to no surprise, “utterly stormed Washington” and curated the framing of the War on Terror.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of how intellectual frameworks shape foreign policy discourse post-9/11.

American history has proven, through formative passages of puritanical ethnic cleansing and eugenics-driven racial apartheid, that discourses need not be true or even intelligible. Discourses of imperialism and dehumanization just have to be resonant, palatable to crowds bent on vengeance, then remade into law.

XREF: Connects to discourse theory (Foucault) and how false narratives gain institutional power through emotional appeal rather than accuracy.

Everything was the same. Everything except the labels, the laws, and the casing that concealed the same lies. Said’s master discourse, Orientalism, laid the intellectual foundation for understanding the hate that Washington crafted into the War on Terror, which it then globalized and exported. It was shipped off like a new line of Chevy trucks—manufactured at first by American hands on Detroit assembly lines, but then handed off to others to manufacture more inexpensively for the benefit of the brain trust at home.

A year after the 9/11 terror attacks, Leti Volpp, law professor at the University of California in Berkeley, published the influential legal treatise “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in the UCLA Law Review. The article drew an essential conclusion—and an even more essential connection—to Said’s Orientalism and its potent role in driving the War on Terror’s foundational and ferocious tropes. … Volpp observed that the War on Terror, through its propaganda and war-making machines, was potently remaking and “redeploy[ing] longstanding Orientalist tropes.” These four words—compact but cogent, efficient yet immensely instructive—tied the vicious rise of Islamophobia to the potent bank of misrepresentations of Muslims that were embedded in the imaginations of governments, institutions, and people long before the 9/11 terror attacks took place. In short, as I have written before and echoed countless times, Orientalism is the mother of Islamophobia, and its dense memory of intentional distortions, meticulous lies, and “mythical abstractions” accelerated the War on Terror and expedited its spread on the domestic and global fronts. Americans did not have to look far to source their disdain for Islam and its adherents—American legal and political history was saturated with damning stereotypes and destructive narratives.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and its legacy beyond literary study into political and legal discourse.

James Baldwin, the founding father of America’s hidden soul, adroitly observed that “history is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” Perhaps nothing represents this more than the War on Terror and its epistemological lifeline, which draws on the vile history of Orientalism to vilify, and then victimize, Muslims through state-sponsored Islamophobia and its accompanying tentacles of private propaganda and jingoism. Orientalism, and its deceitful history of fabrications and tropes, is an “invented past” that leaves Muslims in that deadly intersection of sub-humanity and threat, which its progeny, Islamophobia, seeks to perpetuate to drive new crusades, every bit as deceitful and violent, against Muslims around the world.

QUESTION: How does Orientalism's invented past continue to shape modern state policy toward Muslims?

The War on Terror was never intended to be an exclusively American crusade. It was framed, at its very inception, as a “civilizational fight” by President Bush, and then peddled and promoted as such by the cabinet of hawks that steered his administration. Like most everything produced in America, the War on Terror was peddled globally—and pushed with the capitalistic zeal that distinguishes the United States. … It was then, and remains, a crusade in which the United States served as the front runner and enlisted nations to fight alongside it. Washington then managed a motley crew of nations keen on exploiting the War on Terror for their own political gain and for fundamentally domestic pursuits; local Muslims were both the practical means and the political menace to achieve those ends.

XREF: Connects to post-9/11 historical narratives about the 'Global War on Terror' framing and allied participation.

The days of “shock and awe” were behind us, and the War on Terror ushered in a new era of smash and grab. This new model offered other nations a template of propaganda and punishment they could emulate that was endorsed by the world’s principal superpower. A superpower that exported “democracy” with bullets, bombs, and bullying of weaker nations, and in line with its new “with us or against us” directive, threatened the world to align itself against Islam or feel the might of that terror itself.

QUESTION: The claim that this 'new model offered other nations a template' deserves scrutiny—what specific nations adopted this template, and with what evidence?

The War on Terror birthed new wars and resurrected old ones, emboldening governments to scapegoat their Muslim populations for any political or economic woe, real or fabricated, that troubled their regimes. The Islamophobia reared by the War on Terror blazed a new path for populist movements and the demagogues who led them. They led anti-Muslim campaigns and planted the flag of a “clash of civilizations” atop their nation’s political terrain to stir hysteria, turned their ire and guns on Muslims, and then seized power.

XREF: Relates to the broader discourse on how post-9/11 security policies reshaped domestic politics and minority relations worldwide.

Islamophobia equipped nations around the world with the capacity to level their Muslim populations without firing a single bullet. Governments in China and India, for instance, that had long relegated their Muslim communities to inferior status now had an American blueprint for persecuting them with impunity, and even more importantly, a thumbs-up from Uncle Sam to crack down like never before.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how Western ideologies and foreign policy export frameworks that get repurposed by other regimes. Relevant to discussions of American soft power and its unintended global authorization. QUESTION: Worth probing: what specific policies in China and India did this 'blueprint' enable, and how did the American framing get invoked domestically?

However, as this book reveals in the coming chapters, these new crusades against Muslims were anything but protective and defensive; instead, they were offensive and violent at their very core. The objective of “countering terrorism” or “shoring up national security” functioned as a modern disguise for a pernicious and hidden campaign: policing, punishing, and persecuting Muslims.

Words meant little and war spoke volumes. This theme continued after the architects of the War on Terror made way for a president who marched into history and marched the crusade forward. President Obama brandished his words with brilliant precision, replacing the Bush administration’s civilizational sword with oratory traps of seduction.

That was, after all, Obama’s genius. Words were weapons designed to lull and disarm and then, when all defenses were down, the drones were deployed abroad and informants were carefully placed in American mosques. President Obama was fully wed to the War on Terror, but an iteration of it that aligned with neoliberal strategy and sensibilities.

XREF: Challenges the popular framing of Obama as a departure from Bush-era counterterrorism policy, connecting to broader critiques of 'neoliberal' governance and soft-power rhetoric.

The force of Obama’s words crumbled along with new fronts of Orwellian aggression. While unfurling spellbinding oratory smoke screens, Obama deepened the wounds of the War on Terror and opened new ones. Behind the veil of progressivism, he deployed a nonstop fleet of drones that killed scores in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—all Muslim-majority countries. These attacks flouted common principles of international law and wiped scores of innocent Muslims from the face of the earth. In addition to the drones, Obama carried forward the war in Iraq, established and expanded counter-radicalization policing, and failed to close the detention camps in Guantanamo.

XREF: Contrasts with the dominant American narrative of Obama as a liberal corrective to Bush-era war policy.

Trump, and the brazen administration he oversaw, must be understood as progeny of the War on Terror. The culture of Islamophobia mainstreamed by the war conditioned the people to want a leader made in its image, one who made explicit the Islamophobia buried under the technical language of the law and the oratory giftwrapping of President Obama. And Trump, a salesman of the highest order, gave the people what they wanted.

XREF: Connects to broader arguments about how institutionalized security policies create the cultural conditions for populist authoritarianism.

The days of the last decade, when aging Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Samuel P. Huntington steered the discourse against Islam from inside their ivory towers, were waning, replaced by new, sharper voices. Calls to “wage war on Islam” were not only coming from fringe evangelical voices in the Deep South, but were being sounded by liberals on bright stages with big stars like Bill Maher, or on massive podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience.

XREF: Connects to broader commentary on how the 'regressive left'/'new atheism' debates of the 2010s melded with Islamophobia on mainstream podcast and TV platforms.

The new voices spewing new fictions were younger, smartly dressed, and smarter in word. They often championed liberal values, like same-sex marriage and gender equality, and touted the virtues of multiculturalism and inclusion. Their followings and influence swelled by the day, along with a singular blind spot that at first appeared to be a philosophical caveat to their modern worldviews. A caveat that, upon closer scrutiny, was in fact a catapult: a vehement aversion to Islam.

XREF: Connects to the broader 'new atheism' phenomenon of figures like Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens who championed secular liberalism yet singled out Islam for critique.

This was “structural,” or state-sponsored, Islamophobia: the enforcement, through law, policy, or formal state activity, of the presumption that Muslims were tied to terrorism.

DEFINE: Defines 'structural' or state-sponsored Islamophobia as distinct from interpersonal prejudice, grounding it in law, policy, and formal state activity.

This massacre was a tragic manifestation of “private Islamophobia.” This dimension encompasses the slurs and bigotry, mob and vigilante violence inflicted on Muslims, or people mistaken to be Muslims, by private individuals and institutions. It is the front of Islamophobia carried forward by the people, who are ordered to “see something, say something,” and relentlessly, through propaganda and law, to do something.

DEFINE: Defines 'private Islamophobia' as the dimension carried out by private individuals and institutions through slurs, mob violence, and vigilantism—as opposed to state action.

This forms the final dimension of Islamophobia—“dialectical” Islamophobia. The fluid and dynamic discourse where state action, based on the notion that Muslim identity is predictive of terror, authorizes and emboldens the populace to join the national project of punishing and persecuting Muslims. Through the ongoing process of dialectical Islamophobia, the law itself instructs people to hate or hurt Muslims.

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of 'dialectical Islamophobia,' where state discourse reciprocally instructs the public to persecute Muslims.

While its principal propagators insist that it is a myth, Islamophobia persists as one of the final forms of acceptable bigotry. It is, as I have stated time and again, that last bastion of tolerable hate that is not only palatable in the popular sphere, but a hate that pundits build careers off of, politicians claim power through, and hatemongers—seated before church stages and carrying tiki torches across college campuses—openly spew. In 2022, it is mostly acceptable to be Islamophobic. Engaging in it, by way of political statement or slur, will likely not invite the sort of reprimand tied to anti-Black, anti-Semitic, or homophobic expressions.

QUESTION: What constitutes Islamophobia, and does the author's claim of unique acceptability hold across global contexts or within Muslim-majority societies?

Perhaps denying the existence of something is what enables it to swell, spread, and garner sanction. This was true for French and American politicians’ claim that “racism does not exist” because their societies were, magically, colorblind.

XREF: Connects to the broader concept of taboo and suppression strengthening what they target. Could also relate to gaslighting dynamics in institutional contexts.

The man made no mention of Christian or Jewish fundamentalism, or the Hindu supremacy marching through India, or the weaponized secularism driving modern French nativism, treating the terms “fundamentalism,” “extremism,” and their modern cousin, “terrorism,” as inherent and exclusive to Islam. In fact, these descriptors were not only exclusive to Islam, but synonymous with it.

QUESTION: This claims a bias in how extremism is labeled. Worth investigating whether similar descriptors are applied to other religious or nationalist movements.

But that is precisely what he wanted. His performance would only be successful if it prompted the aggression and anger he conspired to incite from me. The very aggression and anger he conflated with Islam, which, in his mind, would conjure up the threat of violence on that stage, for everybody in the audience to behold.

However, the War on Terror raged onward. But new fronts of understanding were developing—and new languages, robust languages of resistance and reclamation, possibility born from pain and trenchant ideas born in the trenches of war, were being crafted to arm the targets of this War on Terror. Weapons that foreshadowed that it too could, and would be, toppled one day.

SEED: An essay could explore how marginalized groups craft counter-languages that eventually dismantle dominant political frameworks — the trajectory from pain to reclamation to overthrow.

Bourdain told the story of Rajasthan through the promise of India, the modern nation established in 1947 on the principle of secularism. A secularism that aspired to glue the nation's vast religions into one integrated community, instead of the fractured castes with fault lines drawn in blood. Although young, Mrinal knew this history quite well, as did the some 200 million other Muslims who called India home.

The "Butcher of Gujarat," a title Modi earned for unspeakable violence against Muslims while chief minister of that state, was setting a new table for India. A table where Hindu nationalism was the main and only course, and where India's commitment to secularism would be diced up and disposed of.

DEFINE: Clarifies how the author frames Modi and the policy direction of his government toward Hindu nationalism.

Modi drew up a strategy to seize power by turning back the clock and restoring the vision of Bharat—the belief that India is the holy land for Hindus—as the center of his campaign to take power.

The War on Terror created a gaping entryway for Modi's Hindutva vision. By 2014, demonizing Muslims had become a global phenomenon, and as lucidly illustrated in American media and European newsprint, one of the last remaining acceptable forms of bigotry.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how post-9/11 security discourse globalized anti-Muslim sentiment, which parallels discussions of wartime propaganda normalizing prejudice.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the ideological engine for Modi and the BJP party. Its founder, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, published the cornerstone text for the RSS movement, titled Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?. In that seminal text of Hindu supremacy, Savarkar wrote, "To be a Hindu means a person who sees this land, from the Indus River to the sea, as his country but also his Holy Land."

DEFINE: Defines the RSS's core ideological concept of Hindutva, which ties national identity to sacred geography.

Thus, Hinduism was not merely a faith and more than a racialized identity. It was in fact a political identity and movement, and for the RSS, the BJP, and the man who would become prime minister of India in 2014, an identity that obliges its adherents to actively work toward the realization of Bharat. A vision of India as the Hindu holy land that mandates the removal of Muslims—a population that BJP leaders have dubbed “termites” (Amit Shah, minister of the interior) and “foreigners” (Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh), and that swelling numbers of Hindutva loyalists have labeled “Pakistanis.”

XREF: Connects to discussions of Hindu nationalism, RSS ideology, and the politicization of religious identity in modern India.

It was precisely because of this rhetoric that Modi handpicked Adityanath to govern Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state. Rhetoric that regularly incited mob violence against the state's Muslims and vigilante attacks on its mosques, Muslim businesses, and communities.

QUESTION: What specific rhetoric and campaigns did Adityanath use, and how did this serve Modi's broader political strategy?

At the very core of Hindu supremacy was an Islamophobia native to India's historical and political imagination. Muslims were believed to be Moghuls, a foreign people, and Hindus the indigenous people of India. This grand narrative drove Modi's political agenda and made conceptions around citizenship a matter of blood and soil instead of birthright or naturalization.

XREF: Connects to citizenship debates and blood-and-soil nationalism seen in other populist movements worldwide.

The War on Terror kicked open the door for Modi and the BJP, who marched through it with the ideological mandate of Hindu supremacy and the war's aligned tenet that branded Islam as a pariah to be condemned, then cast out. American Islamophobia, packaged and promoted via the global War on Terror, opened the door for demagogues like Modi to seize their moment and capitalize on the vocabulary and violence that drove the new American crusade.

XREF: Connects Islamophobia exported from the US to domestic political outcomes in India — cross-national diffusion of ideology.

That new law, dubbed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), aimed to deny naturalized citizenship to Muslim immigrants. This was another step toward the Hindutva vision of binding Indian citizenship with Hindu identity.

A year after the War on Terror commenced, violent mobs in Gujarat were incited by no other than Narendra Modi, who was chief minister of the state during the massacre. … At least 800 Muslims were killed during the 2002 Gujarat massacre. Some researchers believe that the number was far higher, and that the death toll was intentionally diminished by Modi.

QUESTION: The book asserts Modi incited the mobs, but the reported death toll is disputed (officially ~800, with researchers suggesting higher). Worth verifying primary sources on the Gujarat riots.

In Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up, journalist Rana Ayyub observed how the bureaucrats, the police officers, and the people were given "a free hand to kill Muslims during the riots of 2002" by Modi himself. Eighteen years later, the Gujarat of 2002 would become the India of 2020. This time, the violence would happen on a national scale and had found an ally in the world's most visible orchestrator of Islamophobia: Donald Trump.

XREF: Connects the Gujarat riots of 2002 to the 2020 Delhi riots and broader national violence, spanning an 18-year arc. QUESTION: Worth verifying Ayyub's specific claim about Modi granting a free hand, and the evidence linking Trump as an orchestrator of Islamophobia.

On December 11, 2019—less than three months after Modi stumped with Trump in Texas—India enacted its very own "Muslim Ban." The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which many—including myself—compared to the executive order that President Trump signed and the Supreme Court later upheld, was more draconian and more destructive than its American counterpart. Its enactment hammered another nail in the coffin of the "promise" of Indian secularism.

XREF: Connects India's Citizenship Amendment Act to the U.S. travel ban, drawing a cross-national parallel on exclusionary citizenship policy.

Unlike Trump's ban, the CAA did not seek to restrict Muslim immigrants from entering India. It sought to wholly redefine the bounds of Indian citizenship and mark a legal stride toward realizing Modi's vision of remaking India into Hindustan. The law prohibited Muslim immigrants from three bordering states—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—from becoming naturalized citizens of India. Its immediate effect was to draw explicit lines around Indian citizenship that endorsed and entrenched religious caste, whereby Hindus stood on top and Muslims on the bottom.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on citizenship laws as tools of ethno-nationalist state-building, parallel to other exclusionary nationality regimes.

The CAA functions in conjunction with India's National Register of Citizens (NRC), which tracks the presence of Muslims in the country. The NRC has been compared to Donald Trump's proposed "Muslim Registry," and more ominously, to Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Race Laws, which excluded Jews from German citizenship.

XREF: Draws a parallel between India's NRC and both Trump's proposed Muslim Registry and Nazi Nuremberg Race Laws, connecting separate historical and political contexts.

The Modi regime has begun constructing massive internment camps in Assam, modeled after the Uyghur concentration camps in China and the Nazi camps of World War II. This is where the Modi regime plans to imprison undocumented Muslim immigrants as well as citizens like Mohammed. To make way for Hindu settlers, this is where it will relocate Muslims who are too poor to produce documents proving their citizenship or too marginalized a population to have even been extended paperwork.

QUESTION: What evidence supports the claim that these camps are modeled on Uyghur or Nazi camps? This is a strong comparison worth verifying from additional sources.

Together, the NRC and the CAA are great leaps toward making Indian citizenship synonymous with Hindu identity. These policies were enacted less than two months after Modi said "howdy" in Texas and spoke alongside the only other world leader whose Islamophobia rivaled his own.

CJ Werleman, a journalist who closely examined the New Delhi massacre, wrote, "Attackers also marked Hindu-owned properties with saffron-colored flags to help their terrorists-in-arms identify Muslim targets . . . thus mimicking a sinister measure used on the eve of the 2002 Gujarat riots, which left more than 2,000 Muslims killed and thousands more battered, raped, and abused."

Then came the coronavirus, which descended squarely on their collective back. A back that could not take any more yet would face a novel strand of Islamophobia in the very city, Delhi, where the Muslim massacre unfolded.

QUESTION: What specifically constituted the "novel strand" of Islamophobia triggered by coronavirus in Delhi? The claim leaves this unspecified and worth investigating.

"India is a gorgeous place," shared Sabina Basha through a March 3, 2020, message, "except that it has caught this disease of Islamophobia. We have existed together for a 1000 years and then, wham." The Indian college student's note, dubbing Islamophobia a "disease," came at a time when a novel virus of pandemic proportions gripped India and the world at large.

XREF: This connects to broader patterns of scapegoating minorities during public health crises, a recurring historical phenomenon.

The coronavirus preyed on the immune systems of individuals regardless of location, race, or religion, and in India it converged with Modi's rapidly spreading Islamophobia. Three months after the CAA was enacted into law, Muslim citizens were forced to face the compounded effect of hateful policy and popular scapegoating, during a global pandemic that was infected by a hysteria that knew no ceiling and had no exit. Islamophobia in India took its most vile turn yet as Hindu extremists, seeking to scapegoat Islam through any measure and purge Muslims from India by any means, blamed the outbreak of COVID-19 in India on no other than the country's Muslim community.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of pandemic scapegoating and historical blame of minority groups during disease outbreaks.

The Muslim conference, planned months in advance, converged with growing concern within India about the domestic spread of COVID-19. The state had not yet issued a lockdown, and Tablighi Jamaat conference, and religious gatherings of other faith groups, particularly India's majority Hindu congregations, continued without interruption. Modi himself even staged events attended by tens of thousands of people. The crowds at Modi's rallies were far greater than those at the Muslim groups' meetings, and his massive events were far more frequent.

DEFINE: Establishes the comparative scale of religious and political gatherings in India pre-lockdown, providing factual grounding for analyzing discriminatory policy responses.

All 200 million Muslims throughout the nation were singled out and scapegoated as disseminators of the coronavirus in India. A people already accosted by mob and vigilante violence and state policies that equated Muslim identity with foreignness and terrorism, and who were oriented as the very enemy of the Modi regime, were cast—at the height of a global pandemic that carried the "threat of universal extinction" over everybody's head—as the disseminators of its domestic outbreak.

QUESTION: How did this scapegoating translate into concrete state action, and what were the specific policies equating Muslim identity with foreignness?

In swift order, Hindutva nationalists took to social media, dubbing the virus "Corona Jihad" and Muslims "human bombs." These labels were accompanied by vile caricatures of Muslims spitting on bystanders and physicians, bigoted political cartoons spread in newspapers and disseminated on social media. Then doctored videos of Muslims disobeying stay-at-home orders went viral online, shared millions of times over within the country and beyond.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of scapegoating minorities during epidemics and to viral misinformation campaigns documented in other contexts.

After the lies came the batons, cricket bats, and boycotts. Hindu extremists mobbed and then pounced on Muslims in New Delhi. Muslims were being beaten physically, then financially. "In Punjab State, loudspeakers at Sikh temples broadcast messages telling people not to buy milk from Muslim dairy farmers because it was infected by coronavirus," and shops owned by Muslims in both big cities and small towns were boycotted as sources of COVID-19 outbreak.

Again, for Modi and his swelling following of Hindu nationalists, Indian identity is fundamentally a matter of "blood and soil." A familiar phrase to the lips of white supremacists in Europe and the United States, and in India, Hindu supremacists who view India—despite its unrivaled religious diversity—as the exclusive homeland of Hindus.

XREF: Blood-and-soil nationalism parallels white supremacist ideology in the West; a cross-cultural comparison worth tracking. QUESTION: How does this exclusive identity claim coexist with India's celebrated religious diversity?

But instead of carrying tiki torches through college campuses like white supremacists in the United States, Hindu supremacists hold federal power in India. And, with that power firmly in their grasp, they are exacting their vision through the might of state policy and mobs of private extremists, forming a violent dialectic that punishes Muslims at every turn and actively seeks to push them out of the country by way of political and legal dictates and mobs given license by both to accost Muslims.

Staying at home and social distancing, for Muslims in India, may be a matter of life and death. Not as much out of fear of the global virus that has had much of the world confined and quarantined, but out of fear of a far more ominous and deadly pandemic—Indian Islamophobia.

Modi blazed the ideological pathway for the enactment of India's own "Muslim Ban"—which immediately restricted Muslim immigrants from bordering Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan from becoming Indian citizens, but had far broader implications. Like Trump's travel ban, the CAA marked the apex of an Islamophobic vision that was rapidly becoming reality in India.

XREF: Connects India's CAA to Trump's travel ban as parallel Islamophobic policies, suggesting a global pattern worth cross-referencing. QUESTION: Worth investigating the specific provisions and broader implications of the CAA beyond the three bordering countries mentioned.

Around the periphery of the mosque, Hindu extremists armed with weapons, and others brandishing only bare fists, shouted the Hindu nationalist slogan "Jai Shri Ram" as their feet pounded the pavement. This chant signaled, for Muslims who heard it, that violence was coming their way. And that violence came in droves. In the India remade by Modi, those words were not only a spiritual chant for a Hindu deity, but also the "three most polarizing words in India," which could signal anti-Muslim violence.

DEFINE: Explains that 'Jai Shri Ram' carries a coded meaning of impending anti-Muslim violence for Muslim listeners in Modi's India.

A virus that in the years to come would spread into Karnataka, where hijab bans at public schools and colleges would prohibit Muslim women from pursuing their educations. A virus that devolved into new forms, including the bulldozing of Muslim homes and businesses, a form of state-sponsored Islamophobia that destroyed the brick and mortar symbols of Muslim life in cities across India, foreshadowing more violent stages of ethnic cleansing still to come. A virus that spurred the assembly of a developing network of prison camps in Assam, on the eastern edge of India, where undocumented Muslim citizens would be cast as "immigrants" under the CAA, uprooted from their homes and incarcerated indefinitely.

XREF: Connects to themes of state nationalism and minority targeting, potentially relevant to the reader's understanding of contemporary authoritarian governance patterns.

Under Modi and the BJP, Islamophobia is far more than an epicenter of global Islamophobia; it is a laboratory for one of its most virulent strands.

XREF: Connects to comparative work on ethnonationalist regimes and how state ideologies develop and export globally. QUESTION: What specific policies or rhetorical strategies constitute the 'laboratory' function, and what other countries import them?

Kashmir is, if anything, a land of living and lurid juxtapositions. A place so breathtaking, so overwhelming to the senses, that it seems destined to attract foreign devils, and in some instances, devils who have eyed it for decades. They have created a hell that seems to sink lower and lower, and when India functionally annexed Kashmir in October 2019, it reached a new bottom.

QUESTION: The vivid language ('hell that sinks lower') invites verification of what specific conditions have deteriorated since October 2019 annexation—worth researching concrete details on the ground.

Kashmiris, living in flux and under an Indian military siege, photographers like Ahmer are their poets, their reporters, and their intellectuals. All at once, their photos speak because activists and politicians and freedom fighters cannot. There is no freedom of speech or tolerance of dissent in a Kashmir suffocated by India, where the slightest acts of individuality are branded subversive, and in a world where the War on Terror seeps into every crevice.

XREF: Relates to broader discussions of art-as-resistance and how oppressive regimes transform creative work into political speech.

The most ubiquitous photo shared by Indian media outlets showcased the young boy being held in the arms of a lionized Indian military man who patted him on the cheek and appeared to speak softly to the shaken boy, accompanied by headlines declaring that the occupying soldier "saved the boy from Kashmiri terrorists."

XREF: Connects to theories of media framing and propaganda in conflict zones, where visual narratives shape public perception of military occupations.

That little Kashmiri boy was not sitting on the ground. Despite what India showed us with its fictive frames, he was not alone. He sat on the stomach of his grandfather's limp body. The grandfather, Bashir Ahmed, was dead. He had been murdered. … Bashir Ahmed was killed by crossfire that would not have taken place had Indian military not been in Kashmir.

QUESTION: The claim about crossfire and Indian military presence raises a contested political question worth verifying through multiple sources.

That ended in August 2019. On August 5, the Indian parliament enacted the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act, which opened the door for greater military presence and Indian state control of the disputed territory. It was tantamount to annexation.

If Islam does not figure into Modi's portrait of India, then it surely does not align with what he has in mind for Kashmir. By exporting Indian Islamophobia into Kashmir, Modi's designs to claim the coveted territory became clear, and after 2019, built considerable momentum. Designs comprised of doctored pictures staged by the state and taken by the amateur hands of a military force, designs in which Islam is excised—and Muslims excluded—from Kashmir and a sublime panorama they will only know as unwanted visitors.

XREF: Connects to sustained coverage of Kashmir's 2019 revocation of Article 370 and Modi-era Hindu nationalist politics. QUESTION: The mention of doctored/staged images by the military invites further investigation into state-managed visual propaganda in contested territories.

That was the Modi regime's very objective: black out Kashmiris, and in the process, strip them of the ability to document their daily struggles under Indian occupation. Roya, and scores of activists and students, journalists and academics, were disarmed of their final weapon. Once that last line of communication to the external world had been stripped away, the door was open for the Indian regime to beat innocents in the street, ransack homes and mosques, jail activists and journalists, and extrajudicially kill anybody who sought to resist the terror.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on authoritarian communication blackouts and how information suppression precedes or enables human rights abuses, as seen in other conflict zones like Myanmar and Xinjiang.

In the immediate wake of the blackout that followed the revocation of Kashmir's special status, India detained and arrested hundreds of local leaders and politicians. The objective was clear: gut Kashmir of its political and activist class and make way for Indian Hindutva rule. Prominent leaders like Farooq Abdallah and Mehbooba Mufti, the last chief minister of Kashmir and Jammu State, were imprisoned indefinitely.

XREF: Connects to the 2019 revocation of Article 370 and the broader crackdown in Kashmir following the special status change.

The blackout was not temporary. It continued, full-scale, from early August 2019 until late January 2020. … During that horrific six-month stretch, India suspended landline and cell phone connections and internet services, and it flooded Kashmir with nearly a million troops.

QUESTION: What precipitated this blackout and what were its broader legal and political consequences for the region?

The blackout was not completely lifted in January 2020. In order to maintain control over the predominantly Muslim population of Kashmir and keep tabs on the "terrorists," India restored only limited (2G) internet service. That move by the Modi regime was another instance of image-doctoring, representing to the world that the blackout was lifted while concealing the challenges of carrying on with no access to social media, video communication, and a slow and often interrupted connection.

XREF: Relates to prior discussion of India's lockdown/isolation of Kashmir and the concept of image-doctoring as a governing tactic.

"It is very slow—and a good joke. India wants to deceive the world by saying we have restored internet, but we can't even access email with 2G speed," stated Sajeel Majid, a thirty-five-year-old restaurant owner in Srinagar.

DEFINE: Clarifies the gap between officially restored internet and actually usable service in post-restriction Kashmir.

Ali Hussein Mir, a Kashmiri who lived in India but relocated to Dubai, echoed Roya. "Being a Kashmiri is a synonym of being a terrorist if you are living outside of Kashmir and inside India. If you wear a skullcap (kufi) while going to the mosque, people look at us as if we are wearing a bomb." Muslim identity is intimately tied to terror suspicion, while being Kashmiri stands for the quest for self-determination that stands in the way of Modi's Hindutva designs for Kashmir.

Islamophobia is the familiar scapegoat legitimized by the War on Terror, readapted to suit the local interests of dictators and demagogues. In fact, American researchers and hawks within the Bush administration singled out Kashmir, during the earliest stages of the War on Terror, as a site of "cross-border terrorism." That is what the War on Terror gifted to Indian imperial designs. Namely, that whenever Muslims stand in the way of ambitions of hegemony and Hindu supremacy, they can be remade, with full prejudice and without due process, into terrorists.

A place where India has deployed one soldier for every thirteen residents, and swarms of photographers pushing propaganda in place of the authentic images snapped by the locals.

In December 2021, my friend Professor Farhan Chak, a Kashmiri leader for self-determination, convened the first Russell Tribunal on Kashmir. It was held, appropriately, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina—another site of Muslim genocide. Among Kashmiri leaders, our Bosnian hosts, and committed friends, I spoke: "In Kashmir—at this very moment—law sits at the very center of a two-faced genocide just as concerned with murdering a culture, a history, an identity as it is with murdering the Kashmiri bodies whose very existence—whose very being—is an act of rebellion and expression of 'terrorism' to an imperial, occupying, and genocidal Indian regime."

XREF: Connects to the Russell Tribunal history and to legal scholar arguments about law as an instrument of occupation, e.g., lawfare scholarship.

Days within the prison blended together until they blurred into one. "In the morning we had one minute to use the bathroom. If we used it longer, we got punished," Jelilova shared. Following the bathroom drill, inmates were forced to sing Communist Party jingles: "Long live the Communist Party" and "I love China." After weeks, the Mandarin rolled from the prisoners' tongues and muted the native Uyghur they were restricted from speaking. These imposed disciplines were designed to treat the "illness" and systematically "wash [the captives'] brains clean" of it. Their ailment? The very ethnic and Muslim identity that defines who Jelilova and 15 million other Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang are, and what, in a surveillance society designed to subjugate them, they struggle to remain.

XREF: Relates to other coverage of China's Xinjiang internment camps and forced assimilation policies.

But the middle-aged Uyghur woman and the vast majority of the prisoners were no terrorists. That very word was "stripped of its meaning" and deployed by the state to suppress a people long cast as oppositional and subversive. The state deployed counterterrorism law to intensify its crackdown on the Uyghurs, doing so behind the curtains of the camps and the digital walls that surrounded Xinjiang, or what the Uyghurs call East Turkistan. Eventually, Jelilova confessed to the charge of terrorism.

QUESTION: Worth pursuing the factual record of how anti-terrorism law has been applied against Uyghurs, and whether confessions were coerced.

The global War on Terror legitimized that charge, then intensified the Han supremacist campaign to suppress and stamp out the Uyghurs. Supplemented by domestic counterextremism laws and the regime's "Strike Hard on Terror" Campaign, Xinjiang, the autonomous region in western China that is home to roughly 11 million Uyghurs, has been reengineered into a postmodern panopticon—an enveloping digital surveillance prison—that tracks every breath and mines every move of its Uyghur Muslim captives. The new policing technologies that extend Beijing's eyes into every facet of Uyghur life are the building blocks of China's new state of surveillance, where the threat of incarceration looms throughout a society characterized by total "e-carceration." One where predictive algorithms, tracking software, and facial recognition cameras are planted throughout the province and rooted inside the devices that accompany Uyghurs wherever they go.

DEFINE: Introduces the term 'e-carceration' and the postmodern panopticon concept applied to Xinjiang's surveillance apparatus.

Although the distinctions between present-day Xinjiang and Nazi Germany are dramatic, particularly with regard to mass deaths and mass punishment, the parallels cannot be ignored. Over 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, moved from concentration camps into gas chambers. To date, there is little evidence of mass deaths in China, but torture and ethnic cleansing and its concomitant project of "cultural genocide" have been widely documented. Those two words I had uttered throughout the talk—"concentration camps"—had struck a chord with at least one audience member.

QUESTION: The author flags the danger and limits of the concentration camp analogy herself, conceding there is little evidence of mass deaths in China. Worth holding this tension when comparing scales of atrocity.

It precipitated a criminalization of Islamic practice and a number of Uyghur and Kazakh cultural traditions. Initially only religious leaders were sent to camps, but by 2017 the War on Terror became a program of preventing Uyghurs from being Muslim and, to a certain extent, from being Uyghur or Kazakh.

XREF: This connects to broader discussions of ethnic cleansing and the 'War on Terror' being repurposed for internal repression.

Shortly after the UN broke the news of the concentration camps, Sigal Samuel of The Atlantic fleshed out the hell unfolding in the camps. She reported that inmates were "forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic beliefs and those of fellow inmates, and recite Communist Party propaganda songs for hours each day." Male inmates were compelled to shave their beards, which signify piety for Muslims, and others were force-fed pork and alcohol, which Muslims are categorically forbidden from consuming. These force feedings were also done during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, to shame Uyghurs and to strip them of the dignity that their faith gave them.

QUESTION: The systemically religious nature of the abuse suggests deliberate targeting of faith identity as a weapon of state control.

These concentration camps, which hold at least ten times the number of Japanese Americans the US government locked away during World War II, are where Uyghur Muslims are attempted to be remade into atheist Chinese subjects.

Why? Answers can be traced to prevailing economic and geopolitical pressures; nations fear the economic hit they will likely take if they challenge or sanction China for its ethnic cleansing of the Uyghur people. China is an economic superpower, and nations across the world rely on it heavily for imports, investment, and trade. China's economic hegemony abroad has enabled it, as its stature grows, to deepen its genocidal authoritarianism at home.

Yet the paradox of prayer symbolizes the imminent perils of being Muslim in Xinjiang today. The more Uyghur Muslims are unwilling to relinquish their spiritual identity and disavow Islam, the likelier they are to be taken away and kept far from everybody they love and everything they know.

FICTION: The irony of piety increasing persecution could seed a character study of a devout Uyghur whose faith both sustains and endangers them.

The mosque in Kashgar, topped with domes adorned with beautiful blue and yellow hues that summoned the praise of those who worshipped there, was a shattered shell, razed by a Chinese bulldozer that converted it into a morbid shrine of ethnic cleansing and the genocide waiting around the corner.

QUESTION: When exactly was this mosque destroyed, and can the demolition be independently verified against reporting on Uyghur cultural destruction?

Despite there being no proven Al-Qaeda presence throughout the Chinese mainland in 2001, President Jiang nodded. However, his expressions of approval and commitment to support America's War on Terror masked a different objective, and a dramatically distinct target. The War on Terror would be the perfectly timed guise, an ideological Trojan horse, cloaking a longstanding objective in Beijing to obliterate the Uyghur and their way of life.

QUESTION: This is a serious geopolitical claim about China's motives in the War on Terror. Worth verifying against other sources on Xinjiang policy and the UN human rights reports.

But 9/11 happened, creating the opening for a "final solution." Miles Maochun Yu, a researcher at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, observed, "The Chinese government took advantage of the U.S.-led Global War on Terror after the 9/11 attacks and essentially steamrolled Washington into declaring the insignificantly weak East Turkistan Independence Movement as a terrorist group. For political expediency, Washington accepted the Chinese demand with great reluctance albeit urging Beijing for restraint and religious freedom in its crackdown on these 'Uyghur terrorists' seeking independence."

XREF: Connects to U.S.-China relations and the War on Terror reconfiguring geopolitical alliances and human rights priorities.

However, the internment of Uyghur Muslims is only the tip of the ominous state architecture of ethnic cleansing. China's designs to crush Uyghur self-determination have mutated into a crusade to decimate an entire people. Chinese Islamophobia, in short, is a state-sponsored campaign that seeks to uproot the Islam indigenous to East Turkistan, and in its place, seed Han customs and the Communist mandate of total control.

QUESTION: The passage uses politically loaded terms like 'East Turkistan' and 'ethnic cleansing' — worth verifying against multiple sources and framing carefully as contested terminology.

The camps, called "reeducation centers" by the Chinese government, grew in size and number in 2018. Today, some estimates hold that as many as 3 million detainees may be locked away behind the impenetrable walls of 500 camps. Many inside the global Uyghur movement, including Rushan Abbas of the Campaign for Uyghurs in Washington, DC, who I marched alongside in July 2022 in front of the Chinese embassy there, believes the number could be far higher. In addition to the horrors already outlined, Uyghur Muslims are forced to learn Mandarin in an effort to excise their culture and religion, and are also compelled to perform slave-like labor that reportedly pumps out products for American and European companies, including Adidas, Hugo Boss, and Apple.

QUESTION: Numbers vary widely between estimates; detainee totals resist independent verification.

Old genocidal tactics are modernized to bring about a more efficient and expeditious elimination of a people, and chants of "never again" are being drowned out by cries for help. Uyghur Muslim women are being sterilized to prevent childbearing, and their heads are forcibly shaved in public. The sights inside the camps of piles of Uyghur hair harken back to the "image of the glass display of mountains of hair preserved at Auschwitz" in World War II Germany.

QUESTION: Historical continuity explicitly drawn to Auschwitz, worth verifying rates/facts of sterilization and forced shaving claims.

The China Tribunal, a human rights group that probes the harvesting of human organs, reported that “the Chinese government was taking hearts, kidneys, lungs and skin” from Uyghur Muslims.

Locked up, uprooted from home and family, as much as 25 percent of the Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang is currently experiencing or has endured the horrors of the largest network of concentration camps since World War II.

QUESTION: What are the specific sources and estimates behind this 25 percent figure? Worth verifying against independent human-rights reporting and official Chinese statistics.

This fear is a weapon that the Chinese government has wielded to deter and intimidate Uyghurs from exercising their faith, enforced by way of a ubiquitous police presence in Uyghur Muslim communities, by tapping neighbors, classmates, and colleagues of targeted subjects as informants and spies, and perhaps most nefariously, by recruiting Uyghur children to monitor and implicate their own parents as “terrorists.”

QUESTION: Religious freedom in Xinjiang is heavily contested ground. Worth verifying these claims against other sources given the political sensitivity.

It was late July 2020, and I had been closely following the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims—an indigenous people from the Asian nation of Myanmar—since early 2017, months after the armed forces violently cracked down on the Muslim minority group in Rakhine State.

The harrowing tales of children slaughtered, women raped, and 1 million Rohingya displaced from their homes and thrown into perpetual exile generated an endless list of questions I had for her.

QUESTION: The 'endless list of questions' hints the source has deeper knowledge of the Rohingya situation worth exploring further.

The hour between her arrival and her departure highlighted that there was an ocean between my understanding of the “Rohingya genocide”—as it has been labeled and litigated—and the experienced depths of its iniquity. An ocean, like the ones Fatima crossed, affirmed that it had poured into every pore of who she is and had become her home.

QUESTION: This raises the gap between legal/labeled framing of atrocity and experiential knowledge — worth exploring how narrative form bridges or fails to bridge that ocean.

Fatima's old home exists only in her head, and her new home is that ocean that haunts her from within and surrounds her very being. She is an exile, which Edward Said articulated is "strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted."

In 1991, Suu Kyi won the Peace Prize for her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights. The woman who claimed that esteemed honor and declared, "It is not power that corrupts but fear," later turned her back on her humanitarian courage and those very words. Three decades later, she was back in Europe defending herself, and her Buddhist populists carrying out the violent campaign against the Rohingya people, against charges of genocide.

XREF: Connects to the tension between Buddhist pacifism and ethno-nationalist violence seen in Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

An ocean of change can take place in thirty years, and its revealing waters can wash the reverence off of a peace icon and reveal a villain underneath. Suu Kyi stood idle and silent as her nation's armed forces ripped through Rakhine State in western Myanmar in late 2016, the beginning of an unfathomably violent onslaught on the Rohingya minority people that sought to exterminate them from the face of that land, or to push them into the ocean never to return.

QUESTION: This recounts Aung San Suu Kyi's fall from grace. Worth tracing the full arc from Nobel laureate to accused bystander and what it says about leadership under pressure.

But the first charge toward genocide took place in 1982. That year, Myanmar's legislature enacted the Burmese Citizenship Law, which mandated that residents provide conclusive evidence that their parents resided in the country before it gained independence in 1948.104 The law, many critics argued immediately after its passage, was intended to strip the Rohingya people of their citizenship status. Just like the Citizenship Amendment Act in India, the law marked some people—Muslims in India and Rohingya in Myanmar—as segments of the population whose citizenship can be stripped by the state.

XREF: Connects to the Indian Citizenship Amendment Act, mentioned in the passage, and to broader patterns of citizenship-stripping as a precursor to ethnic violence.

Their Muslim identity set them apart from the nation's overwhelmingly Buddhist (90 percent) majority, and the Citizenship Law converted them into stateless beings at home. A small but visible minority comprising 4 percent of Myanmar's population before the violent crackdown of 2017 sliced those figures to even paltrier numbers, Rohingya have been called "illegitimate citizens" and "Bangladeshis" by the government, and after the War on Terror crept in, "terrorists"—that familiar indictment that Muslims all over the world have come to know.

DEFINE: Illuminates how the 'illegitimate citizens' and 'terrorists' labels function as mechanisms of legal identity stripping.

The War on Terror, and that inescapable label with which it branded Muslims everywhere, opened the floodgates for genocide in Myanmar. A genocide driven by an expeditious Islamophobia that, before the 9/11 terror attacks and the crusade that followed, declassified Rohingya Muslims as citizens and sought to plunge them into the ocean.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on the post-9/11 global Islamophobia and its local manifestations beyond Western theaters.

"If you call somebody a terrorist, you can do anything imaginable or unimaginable to them," shared Abed Ayoub, a Washington, DC–based immigration lawyer who has helped several Rohingya refugees resettle in the United States. "Especially in places like Myanmar, where the value of Muslim life is next to nothing."

XREF: Connects to historical patterns of dehumanizing labels preceding atrocities — genocides in Rwanda, Holocaust, etc.

Police and soldiers gang-raped Rohingya women and girls, some of them still children. Private citizens joined in, ransacking Rohingya businesses and breaking into homes, where they beat up elders and shot fathers and raped mothers in front of children. The horrors did not stop there. … The United Nations collected evidence of mosques being burned to the ground. Schools were raided and razed. Entire villages were flattened, and the people who called them home were sent off without any knowledge of where they would end up.

QUESTION: What mechanisms of accountability have been pursued for these documented atrocities?

And babies, some short of their first birthdays, were thrown into burning fires while their mothers were handcuffed by thugs. The thugs laughed as the babies cried, until those flames silenced them for good and their cries were succeeded by the cries of their mothers. Cries that sounded like their souls were thrust out of their bodies forever.

FICTION: Powerful visceral imagery for depicting atrocity and trauma in narrative work — the contrast of infant cries giving way to mother's cries is a sharp dramatic device.

Both are myths cultivated and curated by Western tropes and a War on Terror that reared another ugly face in Myanmar. Buddhism was manipulated and made into a death cult by Suu Kyi and her military generals, who unleashed a genocidal Islamophobia on the Rohingya people, a people native to Rakhine State.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how religion is co-opted by nationalist and militarized state power — parallels to Christian nationalism or Hindu nationalism debates.

In August 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR) moved that Burmese military generals should be tried for genocide. A year later, Suu Kyi stood before the ICJ in The Hague, facing those very charges. Approximately 30,000 Rohingya were killed by the state's “clearance operations” that began in 2017, and nearly 1 million were pushed out of their homes and into the ocean.

In May 2020, three wooden boats carrying hundreds of Rohingya refugees floated between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. The refugees floated there, back and forth with the winds, during the holy month of Ramadan. Their numbers shrank after they were turned away from port after port, with scores of children, elders, and others meeting death as the boats drifted. Those boats, for tens of thousands, would become hearses for the departed.

SEED: Powerful imagery ('boats as hearses') could anchor a narrative essay on maritime refugee crises and state indifference.

As of 2015, the population of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar was 1 to 1.3 million. Following the massacres and mass displacement, the figure is estimated to be 150,000 to 200,000. A staggering decline that reflects the decimation of a proud people, a people buried beneath the news headlines and lost at sea.

QUESTION: What were the precise causes and timeline of the decline beyond 'massacres and mass displacement'? The figures warrant deeper investigation into the genocide's mechanics.

Today, Myanmar is building military bases where Rohingya Muslim homes and mosques once stood, the human rights organization Amnesty International claims. Those Rohingya Muslims who survived the massacres and sank their feet into the soil of their homeland and refused the call of the ocean “continue to suffer the most severe” restrictions and repression. Branded “illegal” by Islamophobic laws that exposed them to the very violence that claimed the lives of their loved ones and thrust others into distant corners of the globe to live—as best they could—as invisible transients and unwanted exiles.

“The people could not take any more,” Ibtissam recalled, “the death of those two boys symbolized so much pain—pain that our nationality and religion made us different. Pain that this was not really our country.”

SEED: This could seed an essay on how symbolic deaths crystallize broader communal grievances about belonging and citizenship.

While the law's language was facially neutral, meaning it did not explicitly name Islam or the hijab itself, it sought to ban the wearing of headscarves, or hijabs, by Muslim girls and women.

DEFINE: Clarifies the legal concept of 'facially neutral' language that nonetheless targets a specific group in practice.

The law, which came to be known universally as the Hijab Ban, solidified what the theaters of police brutality in Bondy, Clichy-sous-Bois, and other Parisian ghettos manifested a year later during the riots—that “Muslim” and “French” were clashing identities.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of secularism (laïcité) and national identity tensions in France, including the 2005 riots.

By “taking the veil,” the French state took its most strident step toward stripping its Muslims from a place in the nation. More specifically, it ushered in a new order of gendered Islamophobia bent on policing Muslim women's bodies—women who were stereotyped as “powerless” beings oppressed by the “violent” Muslim males in their families. While Islamophobia imagined Muslim men as “terrorists,” its feminine dimensions cast Muslim women as imminent victims of that tyranny who desperately needed to be “saved” by the French state and its law.

XREF: Connects to feminist critiques of state paternalism and postcolonial scholarship on gendered orientalism (e.g., Spivak's 'white men saving brown women').

Early on, leaders along every plot of the ideological spectrum dubbed the hijab a “marker of difference” and an “affront to civilization,” sound bytes that infected the political discourse and invited bigoted extremists into French corridors of power. Fringe populist political parties were now front and center, and the explicit Islamophobic rhetoric that once conflicted with French political sensibilities was now mainstream.

In April 2011, the French parliament enacted additional legislation making it illegal for Muslim women to wear conservative coverings, including the niqab and the burqa. Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France at the time the measure was enacted, declared, “In our country, we can't accept women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. That's not our idea of freedom.”

The law, driven by the belief that Muslim women were being “imprisoned” behind a “screen” by their husbands or fathers, simultaneously perpetuated two entwined gender stereotypes: that Muslim women are weak and subordinate, and that Muslim men are violent and oppressive. This gendered Islamophobia reified the longstanding imperialist narrative that Muslim men were bent on war and tyranny, and that Muslim women—the immediate victims of this violence—needed saving. Writing in the California Law Review, Nura Sediqe and I unveil this gendered Islamophobia as a “relational dialectic that fluidly produces and reproduces how societal and state actors position Muslim masculinity as oppositional and antagonistic to Muslim womanhood; ascribe unique political meaning to Muslim male and female bodies, and normative value to identity markers associated with their respective gender expression; and enforce law distinctly across gender lines, particularly within the areas of religious exercise, counterterror policing, and immigration—legal realms where Islamophobia is pervasive and pronounced.”

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of 'gendered Islamophobia' as a relational dialectic that alters legal treatment across religious exercise, policing, and immigration.

The bodies of Muslim women, in societies where state-sponsored Islamophobia is rising or robust, are typically the first sites of state policing and legal regulation. This is vividly the case in France, starting with the Hijab Ban and expanding into other realms of feminine Islamophobia.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of how states regulate women's bodies as sites of national identity, similar to veiling debates elsewhere and reproductive regulation. SEED: Potential essay angle: tracing how France's Hijab Ban expanded into other legal restrictions on Muslim women, as a case study in state-sponsored feminine Islamophobia.

This is how laïcité impacts French Muslims, descending on them like a disease that infects every sector of French society, and rising to the proportion of a plague in 2004 with the enactment of the Hijab Ban—a law that, arguably, stands as the world’s most lucid representation of structural Islamophobia, and which has caused the passage of copycat policies in Belgium and Quebec, and a proposal in Denmark.

In May 2019, the French senate passed legislation banning mothers who wear the hijab, like Ibtissam, from accompanying their children during school events and trips. "The ban, proposed by the centre-right Republicans party, builds on an existing prohibition on the wearing of the garments in both primary and secondary schools." The new ban brands Muslim mothers as outcasts and undesirables in the minds of their sons and daughters, like Farah, who are trapped between the deeply politicized French classroom and their Islamic households.

In France, Islamophobia is a plague that long preceded the War on Terror. A plague that befell on Muslim women first, as the disproportionate victims, then spread onward. A plague spawned and spread by a "Muslim world" that sits at the continental footstep of Europe. Where French colonialism in African and Arab nations pulled the immigrants concentrated in the banlieues into the belly of France, and the imperial conquest of Algeria that lasted from 1830 to 1962 formed a colonial bridge that Ibtissam's parents crossed into the Paris streets that saw them as imperial subjects, not citizens, the same way France sees their children and grandchildren.

DEFINE: Frames French Islamophobia as rooted in colonial history rather than post-9/11 geopolitics. XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial theory on how imperial relationships shape metropolitan attitudes toward migrants.

But another student of French Islamophobia, masked at the mouth, would enter a classroom with the French flag lording over it, proselytizing about the dangers of the pandemic while peddling fears of that older longstanding plague. … French President Emmanuel Macron walked into the Pierre Ronsard Elementary School neatly dressed, with a black face mask decorated with a tiny French tricolor covering his mouth. … Macron staged the event, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, to announce that the face mask he wore was to be mandated for every resident of France moving forward. Those who violated the policy would be fined 135 euros (roughly $150) and asked to return home to collect a mask before venturing out again.

SEED: An essay angle: how public-health directives get staged and weaponized as cultural assimilation rituals, drawing a parallel between pandemic masking and colonial-era civilizing missions.

The pandemic exposed the fundamental hypocrisy of the French plague. While every citizen was ordered to cover their face, Muslim women who covered their face for religious purposes were legally reprimanded and fined 150 euros, fifteen more than the penalty for violating the new face mask mandate. One face covering was legally mandated, the other legally prohibited. Even if a Muslim woman like Ibtissam wore the very same piece of cloth around her face as a niqab instead of a face mask, the intention of wearing it for Islamic purposes could garner punishment. It took a pandemic to expose the absurdity of this French policy and the capricious nature of a gendered Islamophobic regime that denied the free exercise of religion rights to Muslim women.

DEFINE: Contrasts the niqab ban, framed as religious freedom denial, against the pandemic face mask mandate that made face-covering compulsory.

But masks can only protect you from so much. Whether they are thin pieces of cloth covering your mouth to keep out the coronavirus, or thinly veiled principles like laïcité, touted to protect secularism but tilted to spread Islamophobia and infect the national body with that virus, masks eventually have to come off. And when they do, the real faces of French hypocrisy and bigotry are revealed for everyone to see and behold.

QUESTION: The author analogizes laïcité to virus-protective masks, framing it as a cover for prejudice. This rhetorical move invites scrutiny of how secular principles can be weaponized.

A treatment where fraternity, equality, and liberty—most vitally, liberty—is realized for Muslim women, the social demographic most vulnerable to this plague, and the part of the French body most policed and persecuted by its culture wars.

What drew me and millions of other tourists to the City of Light cast them out. There were, I began to learn, two cities of Paris for Malik and Médine and the million other people who call the banlieues their home. From their view, those lights signaled that the beast was always watching them. While the view from the heart of Paris, where old buildings glimmered and cold stares pierced our brown skin and bearded faces, was that the banlieue was the belly of the beast, a place where terrorists dwelled, only six miles from the center of civilization and its endless source of light.

Masculine Islamophobia, which stands oppositionally to how Muslim womanhood is imagined, conjures up the immediate fear of violence and rage, curated strategically by War on Terror handlers into the looming threat of the terrorist.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial and critical terrorism studies on how racialized masculinities are securitized.

"And because the lights of Paris epitomize cultural secularism for the world and thus 'ignorance of divine guidance' [for ISIS], they must be extinguished," Scott Atran and Nafees Hamid wrote as French police stormed the very banlieue streets that ISIS, the Islamist terror group du jour, had touched down in before them. The other side of Paris, which the state had neglected for so long and which its laws had demonized for even longer, was fertile soil for ISIS recruitment. The disaffection and despair that riddled Saint-Denis and the other banlieues opened doors for the terror network, which was looking to make pawns out of people who were pummeled by poverty and overpoliced by the state.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how state neglect and demonization of marginalized communities create openings for radicalization and extremism.

As in the United States, counter-radicalization programs disproportionately victimize poor Muslims in France. Emulating the parasitic dynamic unfolding in Muslim communities and enclaves in the United States, police and Muslim informants collaborate in France in an effort to keep tabs on subjects of interest and suppress religious expression—such as the wearing of a hijab—that the state conflates with subordination and extremism.

XREF: Directly parallels US counter-radicalization dynamics described earlier in the text — the author explicitly draws the comparison.

The stated aim is to prevent the next terror attack from rising from within the belly of the banlieue, that beast looming on the periphery of Paris. A potent justification, after 11/13, that arms the state with broad latitude to profile Muslims who live there, and to expand its broader crusade of suppressing Islam.

XREF: Relates to post-9/11 security-state dynamics and racial profiling debates in the US, offering a French parallel.

These banlieues are where the French lights and glossy lie of colorblindness come to die. Enshrined by a 1972 law prohibiting the collection of racial and ethnic data, French colorblindness facilitates the racial and ethnic inequities in education, housing, and employment that ravage the predominantly Arab, African, and Muslim residents of the banlieues. These conditions simultaneously feed anger toward the state and produce a fertile recruitment ground for ISIS. A cycle of marginalization rooted in state policy.

XREF: Connects to critiques of colorblind ideology in US race discourse, where similar arguments link official colorblindness to preserved structural inequity.

ISIS succeeded only eleven times, and the world saw the explosive lights of that evil recruitment campaign on the night of November 13, 2015. The world does not see or hear or read about the millions of failures ISIS met inside of those banlieues, and more importantly, the failures of the state to mitigate the existential despair and disaffection that prime its soil for terror recruitment. Those Muslims failed by the French state, and that ISIS failed to recruit, are victors invisible to the world.

That turban evolved into a headscarf as she aged, but remained a crown despite its changing form. I learned, each day that I lived under that roof and every day since, that the turban-turned-headscarf liberated her. And in the process, liberated us—her three children—from a rotating set of broken houses that could never be our home.

The movement to ban the hijab in France was built upon a narrative that went against everything I learned at home. Detroit was not Paris and America was not France, but the imperial tale of the headscarf as a tool of masculine Muslim oppression clashed with my mother's story, and the millions more untold. Certainly, a single vignette does not set the precedent for everyone, but it was overpowering to witness my mother's strength and certitude bloom when she placed that turban on her head. Certainly, "not every Muslim women veils," but the force of gendered Islamophobia, and its feminine fronts, has levied the most disfigured stereotypes upon Muslim women who do, women like my mother.

This committee, called the Stasi Commission, found that "whereas the secularity of public life has long since been recognized in the religious traditions of Europe, in the Commission's view Islamic scarves express a tendency towards religious isolation. . . . As symbols of the traditional subordination of women in the Islamic world, they impede the development of girls as autonomous persons. The command to wear headscarves in public exudes from the traditional ideal of female chastity that puts women under lifelong control of men."

XREF: Connects to the broader debate on the 2004 French headscarf ban and European secularism (laïcité) as cultural wedge. QUESTION: Why does the Commission treat Islamic scarves differently from religious symbols in 'European traditions'? What is the implied standard of what counts as secularly acceptable?

The Hijab Ban would plague Muslim women in France for years to come. It was followed in 2011 by legislation that barred Islamic face coverings; together, the two laws formed the flagship policies of a French Islamophobia that did not stop at the borders of the secular republic. The second and third waves would break out in Quebec, Belgium, and additional European nations that enacted copycat laws based on the French Hijab Ban.

XREF: Connects to broader study of religious dress restrictions and state secularism in Western democracies.

In March 2019, that very overlord stomped into Quebec, France's former colony in Canada, a nation widely perceived as tolerant of religious freedom, but as Palestinian Canadian law scholar Reem Bahdi reveals, houses a “deep unwillingness to challenge the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists” that comes from the very top of the nation's legal system.

QUESTION: What specific legal rulings or practices in Canada evidence this unwillingness? Worth investigating Reem Bahdi's work further. XREF: Connects to themes of institutional Islamophobia and legal system bias in Western democracies.

In June 2019, the Belgian Constitutional Court ruled that public institutions, including colleges and universities, could prohibit the wearing of religious symbols without violating the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) mandate of free exercise of religion. … With the ruling, the Belgian court endorsed what the French National Assembly had established fifteen years earlier. It held that the hijab was a deviant mode of expression and a cultural practice that fell outside the bounds of religious freedom.

XREF: Relates to French laïcité policies and broader debates about secularism versus religious expression in Europe, including Turkey and Switzerland.

The crusade against Muslims in Belgium and France, and through much of Europe, is where the “clash of civilizations” imagery is deeply embedded and most familiar. It reaches far back into a historical memory that even ordinary citizens are familiar with, fear, and register by casting votes for populist parties and casting cold stares toward headscarved women.

XREF: Connects to Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis and contemporary far-right populism in Europe.

American Islamophobia is more shortsighted, lacking the memory of its European parent. Cultural narratives of Islam as a tyrannical faith were imported into the United States from Europe, but damning tropes about the faith and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad as a “false prophet that could attract enough converts to enslave the nation” do not trickle down and permeate the minds of everyday Americans as potently as they do the French, Spanish, or Belgian people.

XREF: Relates to transnational history of orientalism and anti-Muslim sentiment; connects to broader colonial and postcolonial critique of how negative portrayals of Islam circulated between Europe and America.

The anatomy of French Islamophobia is made up of this memory and a distant past that sits at the very doorstep of the present, mirroring a “Muslim world” that sits, intimately and close, across the Mediterranean.

XREF: Coordinates with broader postcolonial scholarship on how imperial legacies shape present-day European attitudes toward Muslim populations.

For Europe, the “Muslim world” watches and waits from nearby and from within. It pumps waves of its “foot soldiers” across the Mediterranean, ready to fight on new fronts of the same longstanding crusade. A crusade where Muslim men are perceived as armed “jihadists,” that Arabic term mangled beyond recognition, prepared to strap themselves with bombs in furtherance of the violent theater of that crusade.

DEFINE: The author notes how 'jihadist' (a mangled Arabic term) functions rhetorically, framing it as a distortion rather than accurate description.

Meanwhile, Muslim women are the slowly plodding Trojan horse, planning and plotting, collectively conspiring to topple the secular law and the “civilization” it defends with that flag of Islam, that feared weapon Muslim women wear around their heads, and Muslim men brandish in their hands. Imaginations that move European states to pass law after irrational law in an attempt to remove it from existence.

In response to rising Islamophobia in France and the United States, many Muslim women who previously did not veil did so as an act of political resistance. For some, spirituality or politics, or a combination of both, spurred this pivot. In the case of Algerian women fighting for independence against the French, the hijab and the niqab were converted into instruments for liberation, through which armed revolutionaries safely passed military checkpoints under their anonymizing shields.

XREF: Connects to the veil's dual meaning as religious devotion versus political resistance, a tension echoed throughout the book.

“Having a monolithic view of feminism is suffocating,” stated Kimberlé Crenshaw. And the bruises around the necks of Muslim women attest to how the state has tried, and tried a second and third and fourth time, but failed to choke their spirit and crush the savior that only comes from within them.

XREF: Connects to Crenshaw's intersectionality framework and broader debates about homogeneous vs. plural feminist movements.

That white gunman, a terrorist with the aim of slaying as many Muslims as he could on that unholy Friday, saw them as intruders, interlopers in a land that was not theirs to live or pray in. And he assumed the call of duty from presidents and politicians who flagged all Muslims as "invaders."

Muslims in New Zealand, on the other hand, comprise only 1 percent of the island nation's total population. Islam is not nearly as embedded there as in Dearborn, nor its followers as visible. However, that Friday, March 15, 2019, would make New Zealand and the city of Christchurch central in the minds of the nearly 2 billion Muslims everywhere and a capital of white terrorism moving forward.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called the terror attacks of that Friday "one of New Zealand's darkest days." Islam's holy day was turned into the nation's most trying moment, and the hallowed halls of two mosques converted into killing rooms by a white supremacist terrorist who live-streamed the first seventeen minutes of the massacre on social media.

SEED: The live-streaming of the attack raises angles about social media platforms' complicity in amplifying terrorist violence and the policy implications for content moderation.

Although Australia and New Zealand are separated by the Tasman Sea and a colossal ocean of physical difference, a "regular white man" who crossed that sea in the days before March 15, 2019, would link the two nations. Brenton Harrison Tarrant was an Australian, not a New Zealander, two identities commonly thought to be one. The accents are similar, but what united the two countries was a kindred colonial history in which white supremacy almost completely wiped out the indigenous populations and established two predominantly white nations in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Tarrant, the terrorist who crossed the Tasman Sea from Australia and carried out New Zealand's deadliest modern terror attack, was just another "regular white man." With evil efficiency, he did what the two nations' forefathers had done to the Maoris, the Torres Strait Islanders, and the Aborigines in earlier eras. He indiscriminately murdered them, wiping them off a land that he believed was his own, not as a matter of fiat or legal status, but as a matter of blood, on account of his whiteness.

XREF: Connects to broader settler-colonial frameworks and discussions of racialized entitlement in other works on colonial violence.

Perhaps white supremacy's most absurd lie is that Europeans "discovered" lands that had been inhabited by indigenous peoples for centuries, a lie that roots the modern entitlement of "regular white men" like Brenton Tarrant, who believes that a nation of which he is not even a citizen is "his land." This is part of the broader presumption white supremacy has created over generations, particularly in settler-colonial states like New Zealand and Australia, namely, that whiteness itself triggers the presumption of belonging and ownership. On the other hand, nonwhiteness raises the very opposite beliefs: perpetual foreignness, transience, and with regard to Muslims, danger.

DEFINE: This articulates the core mechanism of settler-colonial white supremacy: whiteness itself triggers assumptions of ownership and belonging, while nonwhiteness triggers presumptions of perpetual foreignness and threat.

In Tarrant's mind, and in the white supremacist imagination, claims to land are not a historical but a purely racial matter. This was true when English colonialists wiped out Australia and New Zealand's indigenous populations from their soil and true when Tarrant—a foreign national traveling to New Zealand—walked into the two Christchurch mosques and killed fifty-one citizens and legal residents.

While the War on Terror fixates wholly on “global Islamic terrorism,” there is no such war against transnational white supremacy—a global movement in its own right. In fact, the new front of global populism that scapegoats Muslims for its political woes capitalizes on an explicit and unhinged white supremacy. Donald Trump, president of the nation that spawned the War on Terror and the leader who readapted its thesis by infamously declaring “I think Islam hates us,” is ideological inspiration for this front.

However, Tarrant did not have to look to the very top of the geopolitical food chain, and the United States, for inspiration. At home in Australia, right-winged conservative senator Fraser Anning placed the blame for the act of terror on Islam, the faith of the victims. “The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place,” Anning said to media only hours after the massacres. Anning then finished his absurd statement by adding untimely insult to unimaginable injury: “The truth is that Islam is not like any other faith. It is the religious equivalent of fascism. And just because the followers of this savage belief were not the killers in this instance, does not make them blameless.”

XREF: Connects to the broader interplay between far-right ideology and mainstream political discourse, echoing patterns in the 'great replacement' theories discussed throughout the book. DEFINE: Anning's 'religious equivalent of fascism' framing exemplifies how political rhetoric conflates an entire faith with ideological extremism.

Mobilized by digital platforms like 4chan and inspired by racial populists holding the highest offices of government, white supremacist terrorism rose violently and wreaked havoc on Jews and immigrants, Black people and Muslims. These platforms, along with mainstream social media outlets, enabled the peddling of “viral lies and falsehoods” about racial and religious minorities, which reached millions across national, hemispheric, and linguistic bounds, in turn accelerating the formation of a transnational white supremacist movement.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on online radicalization and algorithmic amplification of extremist content on platforms like 4chan and mainstream social media.

Trump's anti-Muslim campaign resonated with white men in Australia, on the literal opposite side of the world. The Trump effect on white men who blamed their woes on nonwhites was global. Regular white men, like those Abdullah spoke to on a daily basis, and Brenton Tarrant, looked up to Trump as a “renewed symbol of white identity.”

XREF: Connects to the global reach of populist white-nationalist movements and how one country's political rhetoric reverberates transnationally, echoing literature on the internationalization of identity politics.

Whiteness, regardless of the facts at hand and the slain bodies lying before it, is utterly disassociated from terrorism. Despite the mass terror committed in its name in the past, or the massacres it claims today, its hands remain clean of that indictment. Neither the power of statistics nor the force of history has been able to narrow the vast ocean that separates whiteness from the phenomenon of terrorism.

In fact, the War on Terror, a child of white supremacy and its never-ending imperial ambitions, flipped the racial script. Although the American crusade claimed the lives of millions of innocents, and continues to claim bodies as you read these words, it propagated the cardinal lie that terrorism is an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. Muslims were not merely raced or stereotyped as terrorists, but the War on Terror made the two words “Muslim” and “terrorism” virtually synonymous.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on orientalism and the racialization of Muslim communities in the post-9/11 era, consistent with Edward Said's work on how the West frames the Islamic world.

Therefore, Muslims are seen as terrorists even when performing acts utterly disconnected from that enterprise, while whites—like Roof and Tarrant—are overwhelmingly cast as actors behaving outside the accepted and understood boundaries of whiteness. Again, white culprits of terror are routinely called “lone wolves,” that is, one-off actors whose race exempts them from the very acts of terrorism members of their ideological flock commit inside the hallowed halls of Charleston churches, Pittsburgh synagogues, and Christchurch mosques.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racialized framing of crime and terrorism in media and law enforcement. SEED: Potential essay angle: how the 'lone wolf' label functions as a racial exemption that decontextualizes white supremacist violence.

Brenton Tarrant was just another regular white man. So regular that he believed that a country where he was not a resident or a citizen was his own. … So regular that he walked into two mosques and massacred fifty-one people. Innocent people he called “intruders” and “invaders.” “Intruders” in a country that they lived in and were born in. “Invaders” in a city where they owned homes and held passports that he did not.

XREF: Connects to discourse on settler-colonial logic and the normalization of white terrorism as discussed by Pankaj Mishra or Ece Temelkuran.

One photo, captured in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacres, brought it all together, tying New Zealand’s bloody beginning with its dark present. A Maori man, with a traditional face tattoo and eyes closed in mourning, locked noses with a Muslim man in the indigenous tradition called the hongi. The Muslim man, his baseball cap tilted back, stared ahead as if piercing the face of the Maori man who knew his pain, as if he had seen it before.

SEED: The hongi photo bridging a nation's colonial history and current cultural trauma is a powerful visual storytelling example worth developing into an essay.

Brenton Tarrant's life story, in a matter of minutes, claimed permanent territory in our minds. This was, after all, his aim: to become immortal in our imaginations and remain alive even after he took his last breath.

QUESTION: How does one counter this form of psychic terrorism — attention removal vs. memorialization of victims?

If there is one truth that the War on Terror has unearthed and incessantly reaffirms, it is that Muslims are newsworthy only when villains, and seldom when victims. The scowls of Osama Bin Laden and the faces of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists live on in our minds. While none—absolutely zero—of the nearly 13 million Muslims killed in the years before, and especially after, the War on Terror commenced claim even a small part of our memory.

SEED: A sharp essay angle: the selective newsworthiness of Muslim victims versus villains, drawing on the striking statistic that nearly 13 million Muslims killed remain unnamed in public memory.

The promise of reversal came four days after the massacres. New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, proclaimed before parliament, "We, in New Zealand, will give him nothing. Not even his name."

XREF: Connects to the broader tradition of denying notoriety to mass shooters, echoing the 'don't name them' campaigns common after such events.

Ardern put a halt to these designs, deftly turning our collective sight in the other direction, moving the world to pay tribute and give life to the fifty-one victims the prevailing tide sought to bury. The Muslim victims, shot down by a white supremacist terrorist, who in those ninety-six hours after the last bullet was fired risked being buried and forgotten forever. That black hole in our memory that the War on Terror sets aside exclusively for Muslim victims, where there is no collective mourning and no elegies of respect are read, waited for them. Ardern did her part to fill that hole, stopping their fall into the forever of forgetting by doing what so many failed to do: saying their names and praising their memory.

XREF: Connects to patterns of asymmetric mourning in the War on Terror era, where non-Western victims are often erased from public memory.

Although inextricably tied to death, mourning is a spiritual ritual wed to life. It is, as uttered by my grandmother many years ago, an act that marks our second birth. And more importantly, an act that gives eternal life to those who have departed.

The world responded. Profiles of tribute and touching commemorations were made by millions of people around the world in the days that followed. They did so on social media platforms, the modern forums of popular speech and protest, and in parks, squares, and schools. Mainstream media outlets—which had dedicated their pages to profiling the terrorist in the wake of his carnage—also turned a new page, honoring the victims and reclaiming the media terrain they had dedicated to the terrorist. Thanks to Ardern's call, faceless statistics were fleshed out into compelling elegies for readers across the world.

Islam, for Naeem, was essentially a faith of action. It drew his deep devotion because of its emphasis on defending the oppressed, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, which took root deep within him as a child growing up in Abbotabad, Pakistan. In Pakistan, he witnessed oppression at home and in nearby Kashmir. That landscape of struggle fueled his ambition, and he ultimately climbed the ranks at Citibank and became a senior manager at its Lahore office.

Naeem Rashid was honored as a hero by millions, including Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan. That praise, however, slighted the magnitude of who he truly was and still remains. Just a regular Muslim man, who took a stand to protect his people. And to protect the lives of daughters and sons in the name of his lost son, Talha.

SEED: A profile on Naeem Rashid's actions and the gap between simplified hero narratives and the fuller human story behind them.

Although she would not have called herself that, Linda was an activist, a title so charged in today's political discourse, so depreciated, that it is often claimed before it is earned. However, her commitment to service embodied its essential meaning, and Linda's devotion to refugees and battered women, new family and old friends, elevated her to the highest order of Christchurch's community of activists.

DEFINE: Clarifies the essential meaning of 'activist' as earned commitment to service, contrasting with the depreciated political charge of the term.

But for Linda, the word "activist" was ultimately a synonym for Muslim. The philanthropic obligations mandated by her faith, in the country she loved, went hand in hand. Islam was not foreign to New Zealand, or antithetical to its values, and Linda's actions and very being represented that more lucidly than any manifesto could revise or deny.

XREF: Challenges reductive conflations of faith with activism, connecting to broader discourse on religious identity and civic belonging. SEED: Potential essay angle on how lived faith and national values align beyond political labels.

Linda was white. Her forebears were from the very continent that had come crashing down on New Zealand and wiped out its native population hundreds of years earlier. Her skin was the same color as that of the terrorist who crashed into the Linwood mosque she attended. But those he saw as invaders, Sister Linda embraced as family, opening "her heart and home" to them. And the faith the terrorist and the War on Terror marked as "savage," she clung to for salvation.

FICTION: A compelling story dynamic: an individual defying inherited legacy of settler violence to embrace those her lineage historically displaced. Strong character study material.

We will never know them like we do the white supremacist terrorists who aim for immortality after their guns are emptied and their victims' bodies lie limp on church, synagogue, and mosque floors. We will never see these Muslim victims like we do the kingpins and pawns of the terrorist networks, who stay with us long after they have been slaughtered and supplanted by another terror outfit. Or, perhaps, we begin to retrench that pattern of never with a requiem of tribute, and the humanity, memory, and new life it brings.

On March 19, 2019, Jacinda Ardern stood up, and stared down the War on Terror machine that delivered permanent death to Muslim victims while extending immortality to those who mowed them down. One woman, the head of a tiny island nation shaken by its deadliest terrorist attack, uttered a twelve-word elegy that inspired millions around the world to do the same. And, as billions of eyes fixed on her capable shoulders, she set in motion the compositions and vignettes and tributes that gave life to fifty-one Muslims after death and instilled their faces and names and stories deep within us, to live on for as long as we do.

The shock of the massacre comes at a time when Western democracies are being reshaped in line with the image of xenophobic and white supremacist populism. This process has pushed for the imposition of veil and Muslim travel bans, mounting surveillance, en masse bulldozing of Muslim homes, and restrictions on public calls to prayer—all policies that the Christchurch terrorist claimed as inspirations and that the War on Terror facilitated or laid a foundation for.

SEED: Potential essay angle: examining how mainstream policy rhetoric and the War on Terror provided the ideological scaffolding for far-right terrorism.

Ardern honored the victims with words, and more importantly, with actions, some showcased onscreen and others not captured by the camera. It was not widely known in the aftermath of the terror attacks that Ardern authorized payment for all fifty-one funerals, regardless of the victims' citizenship status, and spearheaded a new policy that restricted the sale of the military semi-automatic weapons that led to those funerals.

Ali was no politician. But everything he did, inside the ring and beyond its rope, was pointedly political. He was always aware of that. And just like he threw that blinding jab and signature right cross, everything he did and said was delivered with thudding intent.

Muhammad Ali was no politician, but he knocked out the myth that the world of sport is segregated from the realm of politics. In doing so, Ali crushed the same limiting binaries with his fists that Edward Said did with his pen. Ultimately, he proved that two spheres believed to be diametrically opposed and segregated could be harmoniously integrated. That, more than anything, was Ali's most prophetic message.

XREF: Connects Muhammad Ali's activism to Edward Said's postcolonial critique, both dismantling binary thinking in different arenas.

The crowd of predominantly white English men, all dressed in Devil Red, met at their regular tailgating section outside Liverpool's legendary Anfield Stadium. From a distance, the group of football fanatics could be easily mistaken for one of the National Action or neo-Nazi gangs that menaced immigrants and Muslims in one of the working-class neighborhoods of Liverpool. Several could be mistaken for the anti-Muslim shooter who unloaded bullets into a hookah bar in Hanau, Germany, on February 19, 2020, killing ten innocent people the evening after Mohamed Salah and his club laced up their cleats to face Atlético Madrid.

XREF: Draws a chilling visual parallel between Liverpool's 'Devil Red' supporters and neo-Nazi/anti-Muslim gangs, which contrasts the club's pro-Salah, anti-racism stance with the aesthetics of far-right extremism. QUESTION: Worth probing whether sporting tribalism and political extremism share visual or performative markers, and how such similarity complicates perceptions from afar.

It was a new day, or at least it seemed like one. A man named Mohamed shattered longstanding English records, and did so with that patented smile on his face. But the feats Salah achieved with his feet were not as earth shaking as what he did after putting the ball behind the net. Immediately after scoring a goal, Salah would fall to his knees and bow his head on the field. This was no celebration. This was prayer.

QUESTION: Worth considering how public displays of religious devotion by athletes are received across different cultural contexts.

Salah, in the world of football, was challenging the Islamophobia that encircled it and the people around it. This "Salah effect" was not just anecdotal, but measurable. "Per the Stanford University Immigration Policy Lab, Salah is credited with singlehandedly reducing Islamophobia and hate crimes in Liverpool since he signed with the club in June 2017." … The Stanford University study found that hate crimes in the metropolitan Liverpool area declined by 19 percent and anti-Muslim comments were down 50 percent since Salah joined Liverpool F.C. in 2017.

XREF: The "Salah effect" parallels the contact hypothesis from social psychology, and connects to the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab's broader work on attitude change.

Sports are no stranger to racism, and indeed, Islamophobia. It rears its ugly head from the stands in stadiums and sinks itself in news printed about Muslim athletes striving to be the best in their sport while remaining true to their beliefs. … The world of football is marred by white supremacy, as leagues throughout Europe vividly illustrate. No matter how virulent and violent the color of combat is on the most celebrated pitches in England, Spain, and Italy, it is no match for the realm of boxing—as the trials of Jack Johnson, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali demonstrate—and the broader world of combat sports. The "unforgivable Blackness" that Jack Johnson reckoned with, when he became the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion in 1908, enabled the unapologetic Black Muslimness of Muhammad Ali decades later.

By dispatching McGregor and maintaining his perfect record, Khabib became one of world sport's most visible stars. And in the process, he became even more conscious of his role and impact as a Muslim athlete in a world marred by Islamophobia. Called the Muhammad Ali of his generation, a title he himself would not accept, Khabib confronted the challenges that came his way by remaining steadfastly himself, and steadfastly Muslim.

SEED: Potential essay angle: how sporting fame converts into religious representation and advocacy for Muslim athletes facing Islamophobia.

Conscious of his unrivaled stature with Muslims and cognizant of the non-Muslim eyes that followed him, Khabib stated, "Non-Muslims don't read the Quran, they don't read the Hadith [the collected record of the Prophet Mohammed's deeds], they read you. So be a good ambassador of Islam."

Like Ali, Khabib's greatest challenges were bouts he took on outside of the ring. Hailing from Dagestan, an embattled region of modern Russia that is overwhelmingly Muslim, Khabib walks the tightrope of representing a people bludgeoned by Soviet rule and, during the War on Terror, representing an ummah—the global Muslim community—that is conflated with "terrorists" and "backwardness."

DEFINE: Defines 'ummah' as the global Muslim community, a key term for understanding Khabib's symbolic weight. XREF: Connects to the broader theme of athletes as symbols of embattled peoples, paralleling Ali's political significance.

Viewed through an international prism, Floyd's murder offered an ominous metaphor for the power inequities that exist across racial, ethnic, gender, and religious lines across the world, and it connected the killing of a Black man in Minneapolis with the unseen murders of unnamed Muslims in Kashmir, Iraq, and other places the War on Terror has turned into killing fields.

XREF: Connects domestic racial injustice to international power dynamics and War on Terror casualties — a framing that links US civil rights to foreign policy critique.

The words of a thirteen-year-old student from Seattle, Washington, unveiled the wicked racism institutionalized within police departments across the United States, and seemingly, wherever Black lives struggle to simply be. "If my blackness is threatening, I will never truly be unarmed to them," stated Desi Maher, in a city where protestors took over several blocks and organized to defund the police.

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on policing, systemic racism, and the defund the police movement culminating in 2020.

Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University, observed, "Anti-Blackness is a global phenomenon; although it manifests itself differently in different countries, it is part of the same hate, and it connects people who experience it all over the world."

Although Black and Muslim identities overlap intimately in the demographics of France, the United States, and places beyond and in between, anti-Blackness and Islamophobia are distinct branches of bigotry. Yet young Desi Maher's trenchant observation highlights the way in which both existences are ascribed deviance on account of their racialized identities. In the same fashion that law enforcement, and the judicial and carceral institutions that orbit and abet it, assign criminalized threat to Blackness, the War on Terror and its central purveyors assign suspicion of terrorism to Muslim bodies.

XREF: Parallels Western state mechanisms: criminalization of Blackness via carceral systems and suspicion of terrorism assigned to Muslim bodies by the War on Terror.

Being Muslim, in places like China or India, was enough to face the wrath of structural or private Islamophobia, while acting Muslim—freely exercising one's faith in line with one's spiritual beliefs—invited suspicion and scorn in France and everywhere that distinctive French plague of Islamophobia was exported. In New Zealand, on that unholy Friday in 2019 in Christchurch, praying before Allah invited the same murder that befell George Floyd. Fifty-one times over.

XREF: Connects Islamophobia across China, India, France, and New Zealand to a unified global phenomenon, contrasting with George Floyd's death.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor drew additional connections unseen by many, observing that "the ever-expanding security state, justified by the 'War on Terror,' becomes the pretext for greater police repression at home—which, of course, disproportionately affects African Americans and Latino/as in border regions."

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on the domestic-external security continuum, such as the militarization of policing literature.

Sometimes, the connections are so obvious that little effort is needed to make them. Five days after George Floyd was killed, an autistic Palestinian man walking to his special-needs school in the Old City of Jerusalem was gunned down by Israeli police.

QUESTION: The author implies an obvious parallel between Floyd's murder and the Jerusalem killing. Worth noting what connects these — police violence against marginalized people.

At thirty-two, Eyad Hallaq was fifteen years younger than Floyd but was profiled on account of his color and identity. Police chased the disabled man, who had routinely told his mother how much he "fear[ed] passing the police on his way to class." Eyad had good reason to fear the police, the majority of them younger than him. Shaken by fear and autism, he always paced nervously past them, which a trigger-happy policeman interpreted as suspicion on the final Saturday in May.

XREF: Connects to the George Floyd context and broader discussions of police profiling and the killing of neurodivergent and disabled people of color.

"Terrorist!" the policeman yelled, and Eyad ran. He thought of his mother while racing away from that gun, like George Floyd called his mama while being crushed by a knee. He ran toward her and away from the Israeli policeman, away from that vile lie shot in his direction. That lie that followed him because he was Palestinian, which was reason alone to stop and arrest somebody in the place he called home. He ran until he could not run any more. Until the bullet caught up with him, threw him to the ground, and stole his final breath.

XREF: Parallels the George Floyd killing, explicitly referenced in the passage, connecting police brutality across contexts.

Demographers claim that America will, in 2045, become a "majority minority" nation. This will be the first time in American history that the nation will be home to more nonwhites than whites, which leaves the "future of whiteness" in the balance as demographics shift against it.

QUESTION: What does 'majority minority' actually operationalize — self-identification, census categories, multiracial counting?

Some monuments of American apartheid stand defiantly, as living beings, far from Richmond's Monument Row and the former seat of the Confederacy. They stand in Washington, and in a White House, above a nation that is coming apart.

XREF: Links the Confederate monuments controversy in Richmond to ongoing systemic racism in the nation's capital institutions.

If popular unrest could be mounted against white supremacy and its symbolic and systemic purveyors, then perhaps a similar front could be launched against one of its most ominous modern strains—the War on Terror. More than twenty years after its creation, it was the Black Lives Matter protests and the collateral possibilities for progress they inspired that seeded the belief that a global war that seemed never ending could be slowed, or even stopped.

XREF: Connects popular uprising strategies historically used against white supremacy to the possibility of targeting the War on Terror as a related systemic phenomenon. SEED: Potential essay angle: how movement-building against one form of systemic oppression inspires tactical playbooks for others.

This is why the Black Lives Matter protests, in large part, resonated so deeply in Muslim-majority countries—manifested by demonstrations of solidarity in occupied Kashmir, murals memorializing George Floyd in war-torn Syria, and tributes to murdered Black women and men adorning the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank.

XREF: Connects to broader conversations about global solidarity movements and how American racial justice issues are interpreted through local political contexts.

Statues are powerful symbols. But their real value lies in their power as portals, as conveyors of grand narratives and malicious myths that are passed on from generation to generation. Howard Zinn describes this power through the figure of Christopher Columbus: "To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves—unwittingly—to justify what was done." The past is built into the very core of those statues, reinforced by their clay and metal surfaces that stand, individually and ubiquitously, across and even beyond the nation.

The Arab of Camus's making is nameless, faceless, and referred to only as the “Arab.” Millions of readers only know Meursault's victim as “the Arab.” His existence is narrowed and compressed into an object—far from a living being—left for dead on the book's pages and the beaches of his colonized homeland. The Arab was flatlined by Camus's pen before Meursault shot him, rendered dead by an objectification that stripped him of a name or face, a past and present, which add flesh to figures and unfold objects into individuals.

DEFINE: Explains how narrative objectification—stripping a character of name and face—functions as a form of dehumanization.

In line with Islamophobic and literary fictions, the War on Terror crusades in India and China, Myanmar and France, in the western and eastern hemispheres have targeted the very nameless and faceless objects left for dead on Algerian beaches. They are all, and at once, “the Arabs,” the “presumed terrorists,” or the “black dots” seen behind the barrels of guns or the cockpits of fighter jets. Killing an Arab, an umbrella name for Muslims and the peoples callously conflated as one, drives the mandate of the War on Terror: a crusade that unleashes Islamophobia, in distinct yet undeniably crippling forms, across the world today.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial and Islamophobia literature, and to critiques of the 'Arab' as a flattened category in Western rhetoric.

Killing an Arab is a recurring event that the world has become desensitized to. An act so common it does not bear mentioning, and for journalists curating which war victims deserve coverage, a passing occurrence for a “place . . . like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades.” The War on Terror, and the network of actual and epistemological wars that preceded it, conditioned the world not only to ignore the killing of Arabs, but to accept it.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of media bias in war coverage and the concept of 'sensationalizing' versus underreporting certain victims — echoes work on unequal news coverage of casualties. QUESTION: What specific metrics or studies quantify this coverage disparity in journalistic curation of war victims?

While Russia's advances into a country locked between European aspirations and Russian imperialism exposed the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, Western nations and their media outlets sang a common chorus. In stunning uniformity, Western halls of state and societal power condemned Russia's siege of Ukraine as “imperialism.” Then they praised the courage of the Ukrainian people fighting against an indomitable army and impossible odds. The language of resistance and the face of anti-imperialism, which long colored campaigns old and new beyond Europe, were given a white and Western face.

Killing a Ukrainian, the very horror of it, opposed the swelling tide of support rushing to that country's side. This support was, in part, the play of realpolitik, but a greater part of it reflected race and racism, and most poignantly, the entwined fervor and force of the two. An integration whereby whiteness, in the way that only whiteness can, drives the political urgency and discursive solidarity delivered to Ukraine and its soldiers and refugees, politicians and president. Whiteness is the heroism and victimhood, innocence and freedom that saturated television and handheld screens following the invasion of Ukraine.

“It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed every day,” shared a guest on BBC News—an explicit overture that did not elicit alarm but agreement from the interviewing anchor, who followed, “I understand and respect the emotion.” The guest, a former Ukrainian deputy general, made plain what sat quietly at the center of everyone's minds. White and especially nonwhite, intimately and painfully aware that white life and white struggle are extended an instant humanity that is foreclosed to Arabs and Muslims immersed in the very same struggles.

The slow and unseen quest for dignity unfolds in real time in the West Bank and Gaza. Unarmed Palestinians resisting state seizure of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah are conflated with armed militants, rendering them "terrorists." The recurring killing of civilians in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes is justified by sweeping indictments that "they are Hamas" and that "Palestinian militants are using children and women as human shields," excuses adapted by Putin in his claims that the Ukrainian resistance is spearheaded by "neo-Nazis" wielding "women and children as human shields." Lies at worst, and gross embellishments at best, hurled at victims to make them into monsters.

XREF: Echoes the dehumanization rhetoric used across conflicts — parallels with discourse on colonial occupations and the 2003 Iraq War framing. SEED: Potential essay comparing the shared rhetorical template across Israel/Palestine and Russia/Ukraine propaganda.

Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, offers another lurid illustration of the world of inconstancy between it and the Ukrainian struggle of self-determination. For nearly six years, Yemen has been relentlessly pummeled by a Saudi regime seeking to expand its regional footprint. Supported by the United Arab Emirates and backed by the United States, the grossly asymmetrical "war" has sunk Yemen into emergency famine and disaster. There has been no global condemnation of the war; instead, Yemenis struggling for their very survival have been met with silence, the American support of the Saudi sword, and the incessant indictment of terrorism.

XREF: Connects to broader discussion of selective global attention to conflicts, contrasting Ukraine with Yemen.

The contradictions are not exclusive to the Middle East. In a display of stunning militarism, Indian forces marched into Kashmir two years ago and annexed the disputed territory. Driven by an imperial mandate fueled by Hindu supremacy, Narendra Modi stewarded the legal revocation of Kashmir's longstanding autonomy, then proceeded to claim it by force. Kashmiri state leaders were jailed en masse, journalists and dissidents arrested, and men, women, and youth taking up arms to protect already precarious aspirations of self-determination were wholly branded "terrorists." Like its Russian counterpart, Indian imperialism swept into Kashmir with the arrogance and impunity of its leader, Modi. But unlike Russia and Putin, the world stood still and silent as India and Modi annexed Kashmir with brute military power.

QUESTION: The claim of global silence on Kashmir invites verification of varying international responses to India vs. Russia actions.

But what explains the world of difference between the Ukrainian struggles and the ongoing quests for self-determination in Muslim-majority lands? The narratives of the underdog against the superpower, the imperial bully flexing its might against its weaker neighbor, and David versus Goliath are ubiquitously clear, yet misrepresented or removed in relation to Palestine, Yemen, and Kashmir.

QUESTION: What mechanisms drive this selective narrative framing? Worth investigating the media and political factors behind which self-determination struggles get covered.

Within the realm of geopolitics, race, religion, and interests still matter. The three are deeply entwined, particularly in relation to the Middle East and the Muslim world, where a protracted War on Terror renders anybody Arab, Brown, or Muslim a putative terrorist, notwithstanding the righteousness of their struggle or the unhinged imperialism of their opponents. The public imagining of freedom fighter and terrorist, victim and villain is intensely racial, which enables the seeing of everyday Ukrainians who take up arms and throw Molotov cocktails as heroes and powerless Muslims engaged in the very same acts, in pursuit of the same self-determination, as extremists.

XREF: Echoes Edward Said's orientalism and critical race theory on how framing of resistance is shaped by race and empire.

The narrative of the besieged Ukrainian underdog was indelible and undeniable. It shaped the chorus of Western media support for the Ukrainian resistance and the millions of refugees flooding neighboring nations and those beyond. It dissolved traditional divides on immigration across the continent and in the United States; immigration was no longer a wedge issue, at least for Ukrainians. However, it remained virulently divisive when the refugees were Arabs or Muslims, Black or Brown immigrants washed from their homelands by Western war or economic despair.

SEED: Could develop into an essay on how the framing of refugees — as 'underdogs' vs. as threats — determines public sympathy and political consensus, comparing Ukrainian vs. Middle Eastern refugee coverage.

Media outlets across the United States and Europe and across their respective political spectrums humanized the plight of Ukrainians. Meticulous vignettes about real people packing their bags and fleeing their homeland powerfully connected the refugee crisis with viewing audiences worldwide. Ukrainian refugees had real names and stories, with real children and real lives left behind for an uncertain future in a foreign land far from home.

QUESTION: Does humanization in coverage measurably change audience empathy or aid behavior, versus demographic familiarity or proximity?

Then there were the stories, untold and unpublished, about nonwhite refugee populations. Millions of Syrian refugees remained faceless and flatly represented by media outlets, if they were covered at all, despite their massive number and harrowing struggles across countries and continents. These refugees were bereft of the humanizing tales that invite humanitarian support and the prospect of policy support; the bulk of Western media coverage devoted to Syrian refugees centered on xenophobia or the Islamophobic resistance of populist politicians and pundits.

SEED: Potential essay angle on how media framing shapes humanitarian response and policy outcomes for refugees.

The racial juxtaposition could not be any clearer and is often highlighted by the very media outlets that make human appeals for Ukrainian refugees. While Syrian and Afghan refugees languished between statelessness and media silence, outlets like France 24 mentioned them only in relation to the far-right populism sweeping the nation.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of humanitarianism and media representation of refugees, echoing work on who is deemed a deserving victim.

The impulse to cover and call out the racial double standard is commendable, but it is not enough. It always stops there for Arab and African, Black and Muslim refugees. There has been no shortage of stories comparing the rush of love directed at Ukrainian refugees to the xenophobia unleashed against nonwhite immigrants by European and American media outlets. However, this coverage is not followed up by what Afghan, Syrian, and Rohingya refugees need—the humanizing tales and layered storytelling that are faithfully extended to Ukrainians. Muslim refugees are objects of media coverage, not subjects of stories devoted to marking their humanity and making them whole.

The racism coming from the mouths of populists and pundits regarding Ukraine found unison among liberal and centrist media voices. Charlie D’Agata, of CBS News, cried on air, “[Ukraine] isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose these words carefully—city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.” … His message was clear. “European” meant “white.” Which together stood for everything wholly and “relatively civilized.” Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, the two nations decimated by two decades of American war and terror, which represented bastions of incivility, extremism, and “forever war.” Immigrants fleeing these nations, and refugees flung across the world, carried the threat of terror with them. Stained with this stigma and devoid of the whiteness held by Ukrainian refugees, they were cast as undesirables by the very nations that opened their borders and arms to the blue-eyed and blond-haired victims of the Russian siege.

DEFINE: Explains how 'European' served as a racial dog-whistle equating whiteness with civilization in media discourse.

The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalist Association swiftly condemned the racism pervading media coverage of Ukraine and the neglect of nonwhite refugee populations in the days after the Russian invasion. It maintained, through a formal statement, that “newsrooms must not make comparisons that weigh the significance or imply justification of one conflict over another—civilian casualties and displacement in other countries are equally as abhorrent as they are in Ukraine.”

QUESTION: Worth investigating how newsroom practices could systematically counter this disparity in future conflicts. SEED: Potential essay on how media framing of different refugee crises shapes public response and policy.

For Muslims who have endured these colonial and postcolonial wars and the War on Terror crusades of today, Ukraine is a painful blow. It is another reminder that their bodies, their beings, are worth less—and too often, are worthless. It is impossible for them, and those cognizant of the lurid and lucid double standards emanating from the conflict in Ukraine, to dream of a uniform standard applied across race, religion, and the realpolitik in between. It is impossible to imagine a world where the theaters of resistance in the Casbah or Kashmir receive the same light as the struggles in Kyiv.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of unequal media attention and perceived value of civilian lives across global conflicts.

It would have been impossible to meet these figures, all at once and in a span of hours, in London, or Washington, DC, or any other Western metropolis of that stature. They found safe haven, for however long it lasted, in Istanbul—a politically imperfect place that, at minimum, provided religious refuge from the panopticon of all-seeing surveillance in Xinjiang and the Hindutva imperialism in Kashmir.

In “Algeria Unveiled,” postcolonial giant Frantz Fanon wrote, “[It is] the plans of the occupier that determine the centres of resistance around which a people’s will to survive become organized.” Not on this night in Istanbul, which provided intellectual oasis and physical exodus from the Islamophobic hegemony that trapped us.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory and Fanon's work on how colonial power creates the conditions of its own resistance.

This global crusade that fuels wars against Muslims in China and India, France and Myanmar, and places beyond and in between, rages on, spawning new fronts that will unfold after the final words of this book are written.

QUESTION: What specific new fronts have emerged since this book was written? The claim that fronts 'will unfold after the final words' invites follow-up investigation.

"The central argument of this book is that anti-Muslim racism is best understood, in its myriad and ever-changing manifestations, as rooted in empire. Thus, Muslim inclusion within an imperial system that presides over war, genocide, and torture does little to dent racism."

QUESTION: What would dismantling rather than merely denting the imperial system actually require?

Gendered Islamophobia theory holds that state and societal tropes ascribed to Muslim women are oppositional to those assigned to Muslim men. It elucidates how prevailing ideas of "submissiveness" and "subordination" attached to Muslim womanhood, and the grand aim of "liberating Muslim women" that follows, are rooted in an imperial epistemology that caricatures Muslim men as "violent," "oppressive," and "tyrannical."

DEFINE: Defines 'gendered Islamophobia theory' and its core mechanism linking gendered caricatures to imperial epistemology.

"Orientalists divided human societies into civilizations that have a core set of values that drive their progress (or lack thereof). The people who inhabit these civilizations were said to have a cultural 'essence' that explains who they are across time. Essentialism of this sort is one of the pillars of race making."

Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton University Press, 2008), 30–31. "[Muslim Americans] may now enjoy nominal citizenship status, but their members are, in fact, afforded less in the way of substantive citizenship than others in society" (30).

DEFINE: Distinguishes nominal from substantive citizenship, a key concept for membership theory.

"The idea of India was a historical recognition that over time—and not always peacefully—a great diversity had collected on the Indian subcontinent. The modern republic, as a reflection of that history, would belong not to any one group, but to all groups in equal measure."

China has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras throughout its territory, "four times as many as the United States." Paul Mozur, "Inside China's Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras," New York Times, July 8, 2018.

Speculation about China becoming the next "Al Qaeda haven" continued in the years that followed, a ploy drummed up by Washington and Beijing to justify the extension of the American War on Terror into China. See Andrew Chang, "Could China Be the Next Al Qaeda Haven?," ABC News, January 6, 2006.

DEFINE: Clarifies a term/concept: how "Al Qaeda haven" was used by both Washington and Beijing as political justification rather than an accurate description.

The headscarf, or hijab, is commonly referred to as the “flag of Islam.” It is perceived by many to be a quintessential symbol of Islam that conjures up stereotypes of Muslim women as subordinate, passive, and confined. These tropes conflict with the images of women promoted by Abercrombie and Fitch, a popular clothing company that promotes a wholesome, all-American lifestyle to college-aged teens and young adults.

XREF: Contrasts with Western consumer brands' imagery; relevant to culture and representation discussions. FICTION: Tension between stereotyped Muslim womanhood and American brand identity could anchor a character study.

Renaud Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! (self published, 2018). The title of this manifesto has been adopted as the slogan of disparate white supremacist groups, in the US and globally, who believe that the “white race” is being endangered by the rise of communities of color.

The Rise of Global Islamophobia in the War on Terror, published by Manchester University Press in 2022, builds on Kumar's work and echoes the thesis that Islamophobia is an imperial project. Edited by Naved Bakali and Farid Hafez, the book offers a timely treatment of Islamophobia from a collection of scholars and non-academics. Reflecting the international status of the editors and authors, the book expands the bounds of previous volumes geographically, examining Islamophobia as it has unfolded in countries including India and China and in Muslim-majority societies, primarily adopting the framing that Islamophobia is a political weapon employed by the United States—and its proxies—to access and maximize political gain.

In that vein, the book builds on the work of Kumar but offers less in terms of depth of analysis. Kazi analyzes the Islamophobia unfolding in Asian nations and beyond from the perspective of American policy, rather than as standalone subjects.