Key Terms And Concepts For Understanding U.S. Islamophobia

Introduction

This handout contains definitions and explanations of some of the key terms and concepts that appear in various places in JAAMR resources and in many of the articles, interviews, videos, and curriculum about Islamophobia that are posted or linked on this and other websites.

For information about government programs and policies that have targeted U.S. Muslims since 9/11, visit the “War on Terror/War on U.S. Muslims: Post-9/11 State-Sponsored Islamophobia.”

 

This handout includes the following terms and concepts:

Islamophobia/Anti-Muslim Racism

We use the terms “Islamophobia” and “anti-Muslim racism” interchangeably.  While there are many definitions of Islamophobia, we believe that the most accurate ones describe it in systemic or structural terms in addition to addressing individual actions and attitudes.

Islamophobia

  • “Islamophobia is a racialized system that oppresses Muslims and black and brown people locally and globally.” (Movement to End Racism and Islamophobia)
  • “Private [or individual] Islamophobia is the fear, suspicion, and violent targeting of Muslims by individuals or private actors. This animus is generally carried forward by nonstate actors’ use of religious or racial slurs, mass protests or rallies, or violence against Muslim subjects. . . .”

“Structural Islamophobia is the fear and suspicion of Muslims on the part of institutions—most notably, government agencies—that is manifested through the enactment and advancement of policies. These policies are built upon the presumption that Muslim identity is associated with a national security threat, and while they are usually framed in a facially neutral fashion, such policies disproportionately target Muslim subjects and disparately jeopardize, chill, and curtail their civil liberties. . . .”

“The third dimension of Islamophobia focuses on . . . the process by which state policies legitimize prevailing misconceptions, misrepresentations, and tropes widely held by private citizens.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, “Islamophobia: Toward a Legal Definition and Framework”; see also Beydoun, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear)

Anti-Muslim Racism

  • The scholars and activists who developed the #IslamophobiaIsRacism Syllabus reframed “‘Islamophobia’ as ‘anti-Muslim racism’ to more accurately reflect the intersection of race and religion as a reality of structural inequality and violence rooted in the longer history of US (and European) empire building. Conceptually, a focus on anti-Muslim racism is connected to an analysis of history and forms of dominance–from white supremacy, slavery and settler colonialism, to multiculturalism and the security logics of war and imperialism–that produce various forms of racial exclusion as well as incorporation into racist structures.” (Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Arshad Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Sohail Daulatzai, Lara Deeb, Carol Fadda, Zareena Grewal, Juliane Hammer, Nadine Naber, and Junaid Rana, “ISLAMOPHOBIA IS RACISM: Resource for Teaching & Learning about anti-Muslim Racism in the United States”)

Anti-Arab Racism

Anti-Arab racism relates to U.S. Islamophobia in part because of the common conflation of Arab Americans and Muslim identities.  Arab Americans have always been largely Christian (more than 60%), with about one-fourth being Muslim and smaller numbers belonging to other religious groups.  Though “it’s still different from being a Muslim,” some Arab Jews in New York City after 9/11, for example, “were arrested or detained because [the police] thought they were terrorists.”  Although Iranian Americans are Persian, they are impacted by anti-Arab racism because of the common misperception that they are Arabs.

While anti-Arab stereotypes are central to the centuries-old concept of Orientalism, and anti-Arab U.S. laws and policies go back to the arrival of the first Arabs in this country, anti-Arab racism intensified after World War II, most notably after the 1967 war.

  • “I use the term anti-Arab racism to locate Arab American marginalization within the context of U.S. histories of immigrant exclusion (e.g., the history of Asian exclusion, anti-Mexican racism, and Japanese internment) in which the racialization of particular immigrants as different than and inferior to white has relied upon culturalist and nationalist logics that assume that ‘they’ are intrinsically unassimilable and threatening to national security (Naber, 2006). I would argue that anti-Arab racism represents a recurring process of the constriction of the Other within U.S. liberal politics in which long-term trends of racial exclusion become intensified within moments of crisis in the body politic, as in the contexts of World War II and the aftermath of Muslims 11, 2001. Anti-Arab racism after World War II emerged as an interplay of U.S. military, political, and economic expansion in the Middle East, anti-Arab media representations, and the institutionalization of government policies that specifically target Muslims and Arab Americans in the United States. Since World War II, the proliferation of anti-Arab government policies and perceptions of ‘the Arab’ as nonwhite Other within U.S. popular culture has coincided with the increasing significance of oil as a commodity to the global economy and the United States’ expanding interests in military and economic intervention in the Middle East. . . .”  (Nadine Naber, “Introduction: Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formation”)
  • “In their one hundred plus year history in the United States, their social status [as a racialized ethnic group] has changed from marginal white to a more subordinate status that shares many features common to the experiences of people of color. . . . While the early Arab American experience (1880-1930) was largely similar to that of white ethnics as measured by residential, employment, and marital patterns as well as land ownership, voting, and naturalization rights (although there are some localized exceptions), the Arab American experience since the late 1960s has been decidedly different. After that moment in time, dominant themes of the Arab American experience have been exclusion, prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and selective policy enforcement . . . .” (Louise Cainkar, “The Social Construction of Difference and the Arab American Experience”)
  • “[T]he 1967 Arab-Israeli war signified a turning point in the impact of U.S. involvement in the Arab region on Arab diasporas in the United States. The 1967 war marked the U.S. state’s confirmed alliance with Israel as well as an intensification of U.S. military, political, and economic intervention in the Arab region, anti-Arab media representations, and anti-Arab discrimination and harassment within the United States.” (Nadine Naber, “Introduction: Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formation”)

 

For more information, see “Islamophobia-Israel Network.”

Clash of Civilizations

The “clash of civilizations” is a post-Cold War concept that was introduced by Bernard Lewis in 1990 and subsequently popularized in Samuel Huntington’s 1996 The Clash of Muslims and the Remaking of World Order.

It characterizes the causes of conflict in the post-Cold War world as fundamental “cultural” differences between Islamic and Western civilizations, rather than “history, politics, imperialism, neo-colonialism, struggles over natural resources, or other factors.”

The virulently anti-Muslims “clash of civilizations” concept views more than 1.8 billion Muslims as adherents to a religion that is monolithic, inherently violent and backward, dangerous, insular, inferior, and incapable of change.

This concept provides an ideological foundation for both the U.S.-led “war on terror” and the adamantly pro-Israel belief that “the West” must support Israel, because it is a bulwark against Muslims/Muslims who supposedly are committed to destroying “the West.”

Cultural Racism

The concept of “cultural racism” challenges the biological concept of racism that is based on phenotypical differences, such as skin color or facial features.  Cultural racism views in negative terms “cultural” markers, such as dress/appearance (e.g., beard or headscarf), actions (e.g., praying, attending a mosque), language (e.g., Arabic, Persian, Urdu), or name (e.g., Mohammed, Khadijah).

For “newer immigrant populations,” write Saher Selod and David G. Embrick, “Muslim signifiers and symbols have become riddled with essentialized racial meanings such as foreign, violent, aggressive, and misogyny. Taken together, these stereotypes result in the belief that a Muslim body is incapable of upholding democratic or Western ideals and values.”

  • “I refer to ‘cultural racism’ as a process of Othering that constructs perceived cultural (e.g., Arab), religious (e.g., Muslim), or civilizational (e.g., Arab and/or Muslim) differences as natural and insurmountable. In the context of my field research, the term ‘cultural racism’ helps to explain cases in which violence or harassment has been justified on the basis that persons who were perceived to be ‘Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim’ were rendered as inherently connected to a backward, inferior, and potentially threatening Arab culture, Muslim religion, or Arab Muslim civilization.” (Nadine Naber, “‘Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!’: Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11”)

“Good Muslim/Bad Muslim” Paradigm

The division of Muslims into two categories— “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims”—perpetuates Islamophobia.  Islamophobic assumptions are at the core of the “good Muslim-bad Muslim” paradigm.

Mahmood Mamdani, who introduced this concept, explains that it rests on the notion that, in a post-9/11 world, “unless proved to be ‘good,’ every Muslim [is] presumed to be ‘bad.’  All Muslims were now under obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war against ‘bad Muslims.’”  “Bad Muslims” might, for example, be “terrorists,” supporters of “terrorism,” potential “terrorists, violent extremists, a fifth column trying to take over the U.S. government, or a threat to Jews and Israel.

All Muslims, Palestinians, Arabs, South Asians, and others who are often conflated with Muslims are thereby expected to act in certain ways:

  • “Good Muslims” promptly and publicly condemn every attack by someone who identifies as Muslim and claims or appears to have an ideological motivation.
  • They cooperate with government “anti-terrorism” programs, including “monitoring” their own community.
  • They do not demand equal protection under the law when government programs violate the civil liberties of Muslims and other targeted groups.
  • They support government “anti-terrorism” policies and programs at home and abroad.
  • They do not criticize Israeli policies in public.

For those who buy into the “Good Muslim-Bad Muslim” paradigm, it is essential to identify the “good Muslims,” so they know whom they want to associate with and support.  Many mainstream Jewish and other pro-Israel groups apply an Israel-related litmus test to Muslim or Arab American groups or individuals that demands that, as a precondition to collaboration with the pro-Israel group, Muslims or Arabs not criticize Israeli policies, publicly denounce anti-Semitism (something not demanded of prospective Christian partners), and publicly dissociate themselves from—and perhaps condemn—groups or individuals that are pro-Palestine or are allegedly linked with Hamas or “terrorism.”

Muslim and Arab Americans and others have sharply critiqued the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” paradigm and the Islamophobic assumptions behind it. These critics highlight the right of Muslim Americans “to express dissent, even ‘radical’ or heretical ideas”; and condemn “the prerequisite to speaking”—the demand that Muslims and Arabs must affirm their “loyalty” to U.S. and Israeli policy before they can even be “allowed” to speak.

Hate Crimes/Hate Incidents

Hate incidents and hate crimes are commonly defined as bias-motivated acts committed by individual non-state actors, rather than by people acting in their capacity as government officials.  As we discuss below, however, pervasive state-sponsored anti-Muslim racism both affects the legal (and commonly held) definition of “hate crimes,” which excludes the impact of state Islamophobia, and undermines the accuracy of hate crime data, which is collected by the FBI and local police departments that have themselves been responsible for anti-Muslim hate incidents.

One definition of Islamophobia that JAAMR uses challenges the common view that there is a clear demarcation between “hate crime/incidents” and government-sponsored Islamophobia.  As Khaled Beydoun writes in American Islamophobia, this definition “frames the state as a potent collaborator that influences and (periodically) drives the acts of individual hatemongers, or Islamophobes, making it complicit in the range of hate crimes and hate incidents targeting Muslim individuals and institutions.”

Hate Incidents and Hate Crimes Defined

“Bias incidents are defined as cases in which there was an identifiable element of religious discrimination. Hate crimes are criminal offenses against persons or property, or incidents that can be charged as such under relevant state or federal statute.” (“CAIR Report: Anti-Muslim Bias Incidents, Hate Crimes Spike in Second Quarter of 2018”)

Hate incidents might include bias-motivated hate speech (e.g., verbal comments, emails, flyers, posters) that does not damage property or threaten violence or is directed at a specific person or group.  Advocacy groups like CAIR and SAALT urge community members to report hate incidents to them.  Recent examples of anti-Muslim incidents include:

  • the use of stereotypical Muslim attire in a UCLA ROTC training that associates Muslim civilians (“the enemy”) with violence;
  • the appearance on University of Texas Dallas and Austin campuses of “dozens of anti-Muslim posters that read ‘Imagine a Muslim-free America’”;
  • a meme on the Facebook page of former Congressman Allen West that said, “General James Mattis will exterminate Muslims as Secretary of Defense under Donald Trump”; and
  • a Washington middle school “student blurting out in class, ‘I hate Muslims’ while the class was learning about major religions.”

Hate crimes against perceived Muslims have included:

  • physical violence against Muslim women wearing a head covering in a public space;
  • the fatal shooting of a New York City imam walking home mid-afternoon from the mosque;
  • the shooting death of a Somali American Muslim teen in Ohio;
  • threats of violence against a Muslim cab driver by their passenger;
  • physical attacks on Muslim schoolchildren;
  • the arson, desecration, vandalism, or bombing of mosques or Islamic centers; and
  • violence against Sikhs, who are often targeted by anti-Muslim hate.

This is just a very partial list of such criminal bias offenses.

The numbers tallied by CAIR indicate a post-Trump spike of 15% in anti-Muslim hate crimes between 2016 and 2017, as well as a 21 percent increase in such hate crimes between the first and second quarters of 2018.  One characteristic of these hate crimes is the invoking of Trump as the leader who is, as one hatemonger said, “going to cleanse America and make it shine again. And, he’s going to start with you Muslims. He’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.”

Some Context for Understanding Hate Crime Data

While hate crimes are one indicator of bias, Muslims are impacted far more widely by state-sponsored anti-Muslim bias, such as the Muslim ban, surveillance based on religion and ethnicity (rather than any indicators of criminal behavior), and the bombing and occupation of predominantly Muslim countries.

While some groups are victims of hate crimes (acts by private individuals), Muslims and people from some other groups are targeted both by such individuals and by the state.  In Targeted, its 2018 civil rights report, CAIR “finds that federal government agencies have instigated more than a third of all anti-Muslim bias incidents in 2017”—especially U.S. Custom & Border Protection and the FBI.  Along with the surge in anti-Muslim hate crimes since the 2016 election, these findings, the Muslim Bans, Trump’s own words, and the unprecedented access that the administration has given anti-Muslim ideologues, illustrate the validity of Khaled Beydoun’s argument that private and structural Islamophobia are yoked in a “process by which state policies legitimize prevailing misconceptions, misrepresentations, and tropes widely held by private citizens.”

Anti-Muslim hate crime data is necessarily affected by the fraught and asymmetrical relationship between Muslims and the state.  Muslims, like people of color, immigrants, and/or LGBTQ+ people, are quite sensibly reluctant to report a crime to the very local, state, or federal agencies that are surveilling their communities, engaging in stop-and-frisk tactics, sending ICE to their homes, or engaging in other activities that target them.

Many people from such communities do not believe in cooperating with the police, even when they are victimized by crimes or violence: both for political reasons, and for fear that, for instance, reporting a hate crime can backfire if the police do not believe their account or inquire about their immigration status—actions that might turn them from victims to defendants.  Muslims are hardly likely to report crime to the police, given that, for example, a Ventura County (CA) sheriff recently stripped a woman of her headscarf; police in numerous communities have been trained by a prominent anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist; and undocumented Muslim (and other) immigrants legitimately fear that voluntarily interacting with the police will result in ICE detaining and deporting them.

The government’s hate crime reporting system has long been seriously flawed in multiple ways.  Problems include significant underreporting at the local level, failure of federal agencies to comply with reporting requirements, misunderstanding of the criteria for identifying a hate crime, and bias that prevents authorities from determining that a hate crime has even been committed.

As social justice lawyer Bina Ahmad writes, “While some could argue that it may be useful to address these flaws through, say, anti-bias training for government employees and implementation of policies and procedures that enforce agency reporting requirements, such changes would have a limited effect, as decades of liberal police reform rhetoric has been shown to only further entrench and legitimize our oppressive systems rather than fundamentally and radically dismantle and abolish them and their practices.”  Anti-Muslim hate crime data cannot be even remotely reliable until the government stops perpetuating anti-Muslim racism and can no longer be rightly viewed as an integral (and scary) part of the problem.

 

For more information, see “State-Sponsored Islamophobia” (post-9/11), “Islamophobes Connected to Government,” “Radicalization Theory,” and “War on Terror”/”Global War on Terror.”

Intersectionality

Intersectionality refers to the ways in which people experience oppression based on their ability, age, class, ethnicity, gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation, and other identities.  Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989, when she argued that:

Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender.  These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.

The concept itself predates Crenshaw, most notably in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, in which Black feminists wrote about the difficulty of separating “race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”

Activists and academics have since expanded the concept of intersectionality (the “simultaneity of oppression”) to apply to a wide range of identities and oppressions.  It is an essential concept for understanding and challenging Islamophobia, as the examples below make clear:

  • Ableism and Islamophobia: “Disabled Muslims are often the first victims of structural and institutional Islamophobia. From Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs that enlist counselors, psychologists and teachers to identify Muslim youth perceived to be “disaffected,”—thus criminalizing disability and mental illness among students—to FBI entrapment plots that target psychiatrically disabled and poor Muslims, to the disproportionate number of disabled people annually murdered by police , to the deportation by default of mentally ill people in ICE detention, to the restrictive immigration policies that bar disabled people from entering the U.S. at all — there is no shortage of examples in which the carceral state has perpetrated structural violence against disabled people, including disabled Muslims.” (Azza Altiraifi, “Where Is the Disability Justice Lens in Muslim Social Justice Work?”)
  • Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Racism: “[The] one-third of the U.S. Muslim population [that] is black . . . exist right at the intersection of these two forms of racism”—Islamophobia and anti-Black racism.” (Donna A. Auston, “Mapping the Intersections of Islamophobia & #BlackLivesMatter: Unearthing Black Muslim Life and Activism in the Policing Crisis“)
  • Anti-Black, Anti-Immigrant, and Anti-Muslim Racism: “. . . at least nine hate incidents we documented in the post-election period involved Somali-American victims. Somali-Americans are racialized in the U.S. as Black and are therefore subject to both anti-Black racism and xenophobia. More than half of the incidents targeting Somali-American victims involved severe physical violence, including death. Somali Americans, who must face the intersection of anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and white supremacist ideology, have experienced disproportionate violence and harassment, even as many of them have entered the United States as refugees and asylees seeking protection from violence in their country of origin.” (SAALT/South Asian Americans Leading Together, Communities on Fire: Confronting Hate Violence and Xenophobic Political Rhetoric)
  • Class and Anti-Muslim Racism: “Indigent Muslim Americans are disparately profiled, policed, and prosecuted and they are frequently overlooked victims of both public and private Islamophobic violence.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, “Between Indigence, Islamophobia, and Erasure: Poor and Muslim in ‘War on Terror’ America”)
  • Class and Islamophobia: “In many ways, these people [Muslim immigrants who ‘live on the margins of poverty’] are invisible. They’re largely ignored by a media that often characterizes Muslims as industrious entrepreneurs and well-educated professionals, countering Islamophobia with ‘model minority’ stereotypes that unintentionally obscure the experiences of struggling Muslims.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, “To Be Poor and Ignored During Ramadan”)
  • Class and Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Muslim Racism: “A point that is often overlooked in discussions of the War on Terror is that most of the Muslim and Arab males who were deported [in post-9/11 sweeps] were low-wage, undocumented workers. So while the targeted detentions and deportations had a chilling effect on political dissent among Arab and Muslim Americans, whose home countries and regions were being targeted by US military incursions, it also served to make even more vulnerable a class of already exploited immigrant labor.” (Sunaina Maira, “Deporting Radicals, Deporting La Migra: The Hayat Case in Lodi”)
  • Class, Gender, and Anti-Muslim Racism: “. . . working-class immigrants were often perceived to be in closer proximity to ‘geographies of terror’ (i.e., Muslim-majority nations) and were therefore perceived to be in closer proximity to the ‘potential terrorists’ than their middle-class counterparts. Throughout my field site, socioeconomic class intersected with race and gender, in that dominant discourses tended to construct working-class masculinities as agents of terrorism and working-class femininities as passive victims of ‘the terrorists.’” (Nadine Naber, “‘Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!’: Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11”)
  • Colorism and Anti-Arab Racism: “The false perception that all Jews are white permeates even the Jewish community and distorts the way we see and treat each other, creating a complex colorism. A dark-skinned Mizrahi Jew [a Jew indigenous to the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and the Balkan region] may not have their Jewish identity questioned by Ashkenazi Jews [Jews of European ancestry] but they will still experience the type of bigotry that is directed at Arab people, anyone perceived to be Muslim, and at new and undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, even a light-skinned Black, Latino, or East Asian Jew would rarely be perceived as Jewish by anyone because of our collective misperceptions about where Jews come from and what they look like. Regardless of skin color, all Mizrahi Jews experience the cultural erasure of non-European history and tradition in our Jewish institutions, in addition to the deep rooted anti-Arab racism that permeates those institutions and our society as a whole.” (“Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to Our Movement: A Resource from Jews For Racial & Economic Justice”)
  • Gender and Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Muslim Racism: “As a Latina Muslim, [Tijuana-born Al Omari is] at the intersection of three demographics spurned during President Trump’s nascent administration: women, Muslims and Mexicans.” (Cindy Carcamo, “Like an Invisibility Cloak, Latina Muslims Find the Hijab Hides their Ethnicity — from Latinos”)
  • Gendered Islamophobia: “The preoccupation in the United States with women in hijab, or presumably ‘oppressed’ Muslim and Arab women coexists with a desire to rescue them from their tradition in order to bring them into the nation. At the same time, there is a deep anxiety about Muslim and Arab men as potential terrorists and religious fanatics who are antithetical to Western liberal democracy and ultimately inassimilable.” (Sunaina Maira, “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms”)
  • Gendered Islamophobia: In 2018, Noor Salman, the wife of Omar Mateen, who slaughtered 49 people in the Pulse nightclub, was tried and acquitted of charges that she obstructed justice and aided and abetted the commission of a “terrorist” act. She reported that “her husband punched her, choked her, threatened to kill her, and coerced her into sex and left her isolated in their home.”  As “We Stand with Noor Salman,” a statement signed by 100 plus organizations, maintained:
    “The prosecution of Ms. Salman is rooted in gendered Islamophobia and patriarchy. She is being prosecuted under the guise of guilt by association as a Muslim woman married to a Muslim man who committed mass violence. As noted in the Intercept, there are numerous weaknesses in the prosecution’s case against Salman, which essentially serves as a test case to prosecute partners of accused terrorists on the grounds of complicity. The FBI has aimed to hold girlfriends and wives accountable for their partners’ actions for some time, especially when the couple is Muslim. Furthermore, Ms. Salman’s religious identity has been used by the FBI to threaten her. During the initial interrogation by the FBI which took place over 17 hours in which she was detained and questioned, including hours in which her infant child was present and no legal counsel was present, FBI officials threatened to take her son away from her and place him in a Christian home. She is a victim of the domestic War on Terror, through which the government has used racial and religious profiling tactics to subject Arabs, South Asians, and Muslims to investigations, interrogations, deportations, and prosecutions simply because of their faith, relationships, and guilt by association.”
  • Sexuality, Islamophobia, and Homophobia: “As LGBTQ Muslims, we are keenly aware of the homophobic and transphobic policies of the Trump administration, and we know that the possibility of including a question about acceptance of homosexuality on the proposed ‘values test’ [for entry to the U.S.] is not driven by sincere concern for LGBTQ people. Rather, it is intended to be a ‘wedge’ that divides our Muslim and queer communities. We refuse to be used as a wedge against our own communities and families. When members of our communities and families are stigmatized as national security threats, it harms all of us. We call upon all people to reject Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry in all of its forms.” (Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, “MASGD Statement on Trump Administration ‘Muslim Ban’”)

Islamophobia-Israel Network

  • “Islamophobia plays a key role in building and sustaining public and U.S. government backing for Israel. Right-wing Christian and Jewish groups dedicated to denying the fundamental rights of Palestinians deliberately fuel fear of Muslims and Arabs (commonly assumed to be Muslims) to push their agenda in the Middle East. Unwavering support of Israeli policies contributes to the characterization of Muslims and all Arabs as the “enemy” and to the perpetuation of Islamophobia, or the failure to speak out against it. A money-Islamophobia-Israel network—bound by ideology, money, and overlapping institutional affiliations—both furthers a rabidly anti-Muslim climate in this country and helps bolster the state-sponsored Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian policies adopted and promoted by the U.S. government.

* * *

“Many funders of the country’s most prominent Islamophobes also finance U.S.-based groups that espouse hardline Israeli policies and, in some instances, back West Bank Israeli settlers. Almost all of these groups spread anti-Muslim/anti-Arab hate through public statements of support for Israeli policies that range from hawkish to staunchly pro-settler.” (Network Against Islamophobia, FAQS on U.S. Islamophobia & Israel Politics”)

  • “Despite its stated commitment to “stand together to say ‘no’ to all forms of hate,” the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago (JUF) funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars between the years 2011-2014 to groups the Southern Poverty Law Center labels ‘anti-Muslim fearmongers.’

* * *

“We believe JUF support for anti-Muslim organizations is at least in part related to their willingness to deploy anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tropes to bolster U.S. support for the State of Israel. This convergence of interests helps explain, in part, the alliance between pro-Israel American Jewish groups such as AIPAC and JUF and the far-right Islamophobia network. Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum also founded Campus Watch, an organization that has compiled dossiers on professors deemed too critical of Israel.  Meanwhile, Steven Emerson, founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, has repeatedly been invited to lead sessions at the American Israel Public Affairs Council’s (AIPAC) annual conference, where he has been able to spew his strongly anti-Muslim beliefs.  Recent revelations that AIPAC contributed $60,000 to another Islamophobia network leader, the Center for Security Policy, also make clear how some pro-Israel actors see peddling Islamophobia as in the interests of the State of Israel.” (Jewish Voice for Peace-Chicago and Network Against Islamophobia, “Defund Islamophobia: How the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago Supports Anti-Muslim Hate Groups”)

 

For more information, see “Arab American Racism” and “Liberal Islamophobia and Israel.”

Islamophobia Network in America/Islamophobia Industry

In 2011, the Center for American Progress issued Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.  The focus of this report is “a small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts guiding an effort that reaches millions of Americans through effective advocates, media partners, and grassroots organizing. This spreading of hate and misinformation primarily starts with five key people and their organizations, which are sustained by funding from a clutch of key foundations.”

Fear, Inc. identified these five key Islamophobes as: Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism; Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA); and David Yerushalmi at the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE).  Some other key figures/organizations in this network are the Clarion Project; Brigitte Gabriel of ACT for America, and Pamela Geller of SIOA.  Though many have previously dismissed these anti-Muslim ideologues as “fringe,” several of them today have direct access to, and find their views reflected in, the current administration.

 

For more information about these individuals and groups, go to “Some Anti-Muslim Ideologues and the Government that Loves Them.”

Liberal Islamophobia

Right-wing Islamophobes and the neoconservative establishment, including those in the current administration, believe that Muslims are part of a civilization whose clash with the “West” results from a monolithic, insular, violent, and inherently backward “culture.”  For them, Islamophobia is not a “real” issue to address.

While we need to organize against these virulent ideologues and the anti-Muslim policies they support, we must also analyze and challenge what’s known as “liberal Islamophobia,” which opposes Islam-bashing, but then supports–or fails to oppose–government policies and programs that target and denigrate Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim. Liberal Islamophobia is pervasive, including among those of us who consider ourselves liberal/progressive/radical and have expressed our opposition to Islamophobia.

Liberal Islamophobia and Islam: The liberal and right-wing media alike push views of Islam rooted in an overarching Islamophobic assumption: When violence is committed by any individual who is, or appears to be, Muslim, Islam is to blame. (This same “standard” is never used for other religions.) Other Islamophobic beliefs rest on this one.

Liberal Islamophobia and the “War on Terror“: While liberals most often reject the “clash of civilizations” concept–the idea that there is an implacable conflict between Islam and the “West” that provides an ideological justification for the global “war on terror”–liberal Islamophobia promotes, in significant ways, key and deeply problematic aspects of U.S. foreign and domestic policy related to fighting “terrorism.”  Though President George W. Bush initiated the “war on terror” immediately after September 11, the Obama administration furthered it.

Liberal Islamophobia and U.S. Government “Counterterrorism” Programs: One typical example of liberal Islamophobia involves a fundamental inconsistency: people express opposition to anti-Muslim racism, including condemning hate crimes against Muslims, while supporting, or failing to challenge, government programs and policies that target Muslims. Each administration in power has implemented such initiatives. Support for them ignores the multiple ways that they make Muslims and other targeted people far less safe and curtail their civil liberties and rights.

Liberal Islamophobia and the “Good Muslim-Bad Muslim” Paradigm: The division of Muslims into two categories—“good Muslims” and “bad Muslims”—perpetuates anti-Muslim racism.  Islamophobic beliefs are at the core of the “good Muslim-bad Muslim” paradigm.  Mahmood Mamdani, who introduced this concept, explains that it rests on the notion that, in a post-9/11 world, “unless proved to be ‘good,’ every Muslim [is] presumed to be ‘bad.’  All Muslims were now under obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war against ‘bad Muslims.’”

Liberal Islamophobia and Israel: We see repeatedly how many who oppose anti-Muslim racism in some contexts are not consistent in that opposition when Israel enters the equation. They do not, for example, consider the links between right-wing pro-Israel advocates and anti-Muslim ideologues or challenge the use of anti-Muslim narratives to bolster support for Israeli policies. While they may draw the line about what is acceptable or not in different places, supporters of Israel typically use an Israel-related litmus test to determine whether a Muslim (or Arab) is “anti-Israel” (or not sufficiently “pro-Israel) and, thus, “unacceptable.”

Islamophobia and Liberal Media Outlets: As Nathan Lean writes, “While liberal purveyors of anti-Muslim prejudice have found an open door in the conservative and far-right media spaces, including Fox News, their messages have also become a regular fixture of progressive media, including late-night talk shows, radio programming, and televised political punditry.”

Liberal Islamophobia and Muslim Women: Our work against anti-Muslim racism must necessarily include challenging Islamophobic narratives about Muslim women (and Arab women, who are often conflated with Muslims)–narratives that depict them as needing “saving” from a “sexist religion” or as lacking “agency” or some other stereotype that is rooted in an anti-Muslim woman framing. These narratives are staples of liberal politics and the liberal media in a country that perpetuate Islamophobia toward Muslim women. Considering the staying-power of these Islamophobic narratives across the political spectrum, we need to think intentionally about how to be an accountable partner, intersectional feminist, and anti-Islamophobia activist.

 

For more information and analysis about each of the above topics, go to “What Is Liberal Islamophobia?”  See also “Some Islamophobic Assumptions,” a chart that lists some of the core beliefs of Liberal and right-wing Islamophobia. 

Muslim American Communities

Although the media and others commonly refer to “the Muslim community,” multiple Muslim American communities exist—distinguished by, for example, race, ethnicity, nation/place of origin, native language, geographic location, mosque affiliation, sexual orientation, and gender identity.  Anti-Muslim racism impacts members of these different communities (an estimated 3.45 million people worldwide) in distinct and overlapping ways.

Broadly speaking, Muslim Americans include: Black people who converted to Islam or whose Muslim ancestors can be traced back to enslaved Africans; Euro-Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans who, with few exceptions, converted to Islam; and Arabs, Blacks, Euro-Americans, Iranians, South Asians, and others who are immigrants or the descendants of Muslim immigrants.

A key factor in the expansion in the Muslim American population in the last half-century is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which superseded laws with national origin quotas that favored Europeans.  According to the Pew Research Center’s 2017 Religious Landscape Study, 82% of U.S. Muslims are citizens, 58% of U.S. Muslims are immigrants, 18% are the children of immigrants, and 24% are U.S. born with U.S.-born parents.  However, we should keep in mind that, as Sylvia Chan-Malik explains, “‘immigrant’ is both problematic and imprecise when referring to Arab and South Asian Muslims in the U.S., as it plays into the notion of Asians and Arabs as perpetual foreigners and disregards generational differences and issues of citizenship.”

Below are only the briefest of overviews of the largest racial/ethnic groups of American Muslims.  So they do not include any information about those from smaller groups of Muslims, such as, for instance, #StandingRock activist Leslie Henderson Oajaca, a “Spanish speaking Indigenous Muslim of the K’iche’/Maya people of Guatemala . . . [who] has been a convert for 13 yrs.”

While each group below is listed separately, the reality is complex—including, for example, organizer Azza Altiraifi, a “Sudanese-American” who worked hard to embrace her identity as “an Afro-Arab Muslim. A Black Arab”; and the two daughters of scholar Sylvia Chan-Malik, the daughter of immigrants from China and an adult convert to Islam, and her husband, “who was born into and raised in an African American Muslim community in Milwaukee, WI.”

Arab American Muslims: An estimated 22 percent of American Muslims are Arab American, while roughly one-quarter of Arab Americans are Muslim—a percentage that has increased since the 1960s.  Arab American Muslim immigrants are primarily from Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, and Egypt.  Since 1944, the government has classified Arab Americans as “white,” even as it has largely viewed them as a suspect class. In the context of the racialization of Arab (as well as both Iranian and Mirzahi Jewish) Americans, the “white” category does not connote the dominant status usually associated with that term.  (See also “Anti-Arab Racism.”)

Black American Muslims:  An estimated 15-30% of enslaved Africans during the antebellum period were Muslims. Today, an estimated 28% to one-third of Muslim Americans are Black, a group that “comprises a complex subculture that includes Africans, Caribbean, and native-born African American Muslims.”  These subgroups include, for example, Somali and Sudanese refugees whose countries have been targeted by Trump’s Muslim Bans; and people whose heritage includes “fighting against oppression and systemic racism from the time of enslavement, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement to today.”  Although the media tend to associate African American Muslims with the Nation of Islam, the majority of them practice Sunni Islam.

Euro-American Muslims: Euro-American (“white”) Muslims are people of European heritage, largely converts to Islam, and those whose family roots are in various predominantly Muslim European countries (e.g., Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Turkey).  According to the U.S. Mosque Study, 4% of regular mosque participants are “Euro-American” (European, white American, Turkish).

Iranian American Muslims: Iran is the country of origin for an estimated 6% of all Muslim Americans, and an estimated 11% of Muslim immigrants, the highest total for a single country with the exception of Pakistan.  Although many people think that Iran is an Arab country, it is actually Persian, and its official language is Farsi, not Arabic.  Iranian Americans, including Iranian Jews, are targets of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.

Latinx American Muslims: Latinx Muslims constitute approximately 8% of the American Muslim community.  They are reportedly “the fastest-growing ethnic group in Islam”—primarily the result of religious conversion—or “reversion,” a “return to Islam” that embraces “their Islamic-Spanish heritage and identity.”  Latinx Muslims are overwhelming women, U.S. born, and from various places of origin, mostly Mexico or Puerto Rico.

South Asian American Muslims: South Asians are an estimated 28% of the American Muslim community and 35% of foreign-born American Muslims.  A post-1965 influx of immigrants, primarily from Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, was spurred by violent local political conflicts: for example, the partition of India, the civil war in East Pakistan that led to the creation of Bangladesh, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  More recently, South Asian Muslim immigration has been shaped by policies that prioritize immigrants’ skills and level of formal education.

 

See also “Intersectionality.”

Orientalism

  • “The sense of Islam as a threatening Other—with Muslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful, irrational—develops during the colonial period in what I called Orientalism. The study of the Other has a lot to do with the control and dominance of Europe and the West generally in the Islamic world. And it has persisted because it’s based very, very deeply in religious roots, where Islam is seen as a kind of competitor of Christianity.” (Edward Said Interview)
  • “Unlike the Americans, the French and the British . . . have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1978)
  • “Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.” (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1978)
  • “To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact.” (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1978)
  • “The worldview proposed by the Orientalists is one in which the ‘West’ is seen as a dynamic, complex, and ever-changing society that cannot be reduced to its key religion or any other single factor, while the ‘Orient’ or the ‘world of Islam’ is presented as unchanging, barbaric, misogynist, uncivilized, and despotic. The only logical conclusion that flows from this is that it is the responsibility of the West to intervene in these static societies and bring about change.” (Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire)
  • “While racism is central, there is more at play – Islamophobia is anchored in an Orientalist underbelly that precedes the creation of the formative American racial enterprise and its modern form, and a protracted War on Terror that extends it through formal law and policy.

* * *

“. . . the ideas and images, distorted narratives and misrepresentations thrust to the surface after 9/11 that steer Islamophobia today were sowed and legally sealed by Orientalism, which must be understood as the mother of modern Islamophobia. . . .

“American Orientalism was, in large part, a white supremacist project that collaborated with anti-Blackness and Manifest Destiny to determine whiteness and define citizenship (both formal and substantive), and underneath this all, respond to the underlying existential question: who we are (as Americans), and who we are not?” (Khaled Beydoun, “Rethinking Islamophobia”)

Racialization

A key dynamic of Islamophobia is the process through which Muslims, who identify as members of various races, are racialized.  We are far more familiar with an older form of racism that connects “race” to phenotype difference and genetic traits—skin color, hair texture, various facial characteristics, etc.

The process of racialization involves associating Muslims with certain “cultural” traits, such as: physical appearance (e.g., hijab, beards); language (e.g., Arabic, Urdu, Farsi); religious practices (e.g., mosque attendance, praying in a public space); or country of origin (e.g., countries included in recent Muslim Bans; the 28 countries—nearly all Muslim-majority—plus “American Black Muslims,” identified by the New York City Police Department as “ancestries of interest”).  (Jews and other religious groups have also been racialized by association with their own religious and “cultural” traits.)

  • “Islamophobia is . . . a specific form of racism targeting Muslims, and racialization is a concept that helps capture and understand how this works, in different ways at different times, and in different places.” (Steve Garner and Saher Selod, “The Racialization of Muslims: Empirical Studies of Islamophobia”)
  • “Differently racialized populations in the United States—First Nations, Mexican, Asian, and more recently people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent have been targets of different modes of racial subjugation. Islamophobia draws on and complicates what we know as racism.” (Angela Davis, “Recognizing Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism“)

“Radicalization Theory”

The discredited post-9/11 “Radicalization theory” was introduced in this country by the FBI and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and has since become a staple of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as congressional hearings and other government attempting to shape legislation and attitudes.  It focuses on intelligence-gathering in Muslim communities and results in stigma, suppression of religion, chilled speech and freedom of expression, mistrust within the Muslim community and selective prosecution.

  • “[‘Counter-radicalization’ and ‘countering violent extremism’] programs both have their origins in what is popularly hailed as the ‘radicalization theory’ of terrorism. This theory emerged around 2004 on both sides of the Atlantic as Western governments worked to frame the terrorist threat as a specifically Muslim phenomenon, and to develop a preventive approach to counterterrorism. Radicalization theory posits a predictable correlation between increased religiosity and politicization among Muslims and the potential for terrorism. That is, as Muslims become more ‘radical’—by observing religious tradition, for instance, or expressing any open affinity and concern for the welfare of other Muslims—they also become more likely to commit terrorist crimes, according to the theory. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department helped seed radicalization theory, giving rise to an elaborate lattice of counterterrorism practices that touch on all aspects of Muslim life.” (Amna Akbar, ”How Tarek Mehanna Went to Prison for a Thought Crime”)
  • “According to this theory, the adoption or expression of ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ religious ideas or practices places individuals on a path toward terrorism or violence, and there are observable ‘indicators’ that can identify those who are ‘vulnerable’ to ‘radicalization.’ This is false. The ACLU has repeatedly provided statements to Congress — in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 — to explain the factual and methodological flaws in reports that promote this radicalization theory. Our allies have also written reports debunking the theory. As we and others have explained, despite years of study and experience in the United States and elsewhere, researchers have not identified criteria or behavioral indicators that can be used to reliably predict who will commit an act of terrorism or political violence.”  (ACLU, “Q&A: The Myth of ‘Radicalization’”)
  • “In a report released last February [2017], the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights Ben Emmerson criticized the prevailing approach towards counter-radicalization as conceptually flawed and ineffective, noting that ‘states have tended to focus on those [areas] that are most appealing to them, shying away from the more complex issues, including political issues such as foreign policy and transnational conflicts,’ preferring instead to emphasize ‘religious ideology as the driver of terrorism and extremism.” (Azeezah Kanji and K. Hussan, “The Problem with Liberal Opposition to Islamophobia”)

After more than six years of spying on Muslim American communities in the Northeast, the head of the NYPD division that oversaw the surveillance program acknowledged under oath that it “never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.”  The NYPD’s 2007 publication, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat was removed from the NYPD website as part of a 2016/2017 ruling by a federal judge that was designed to “protect Muslims and others from discriminatory and unjustified surveillance.”

Sharia

  • “Sharia governs every aspect of an observant Muslim’s life. The sharia juristic inquiry begins with the Quran and the Sunna. The Quran is the Muslim Holy Scripture — like the New Testament for Christians or the Old Testament for the Jews. The Sunna is essentially the prophetic example embodied in the sayings and conduct of the Prophet Mohammed.” (Abed Awad, “What Sharia Law Actually Means”)
  • “Sharia literally means ‘path,’ and it is a set of interpretations that are dynamic and intended to accommodate the time, place, and laws (in our case the U.S. Constitution) of a particular community. Thus, Sharia is interpreted differently based on its surroundings.” (CAIR, Securing Religious Liberty Campaign Handbook)
  • “Sharia, or Islamic law, is a complex system of moral codes that governs all aspects of Muslim life. More than simply ‘law’ in the prescriptive sense, it is also the methodology through which Muslims engage with foundational religious texts to search for the divine will. For devout Muslims, Sharia governs everything from the way they eat to how they treat animals and protect the environment, to how they do business, how they marry and how their estate is distributed after death.” (Abed Awad, “The True Story of Sharia in America”)
  • “Sharia principles can be used to guide Muslims in marriage contracts, business contracts, child custody agreements, dietary customs, non-interest-based financial agreements, wills and testaments, charitable giving, and more. . . . . Sharia can be considered and enforced by U.S. courts the same way other religious laws, or foreign laws can be applied that is in a manner consistent with public policy, such as Catholic Canon law and Jewish Halacha law.” (CAIR, Securing Religious Liberty Campaign Handbook

For information about the “anti-Sharia campaign,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as based on “one of the most successful far-right conspiracies to achieve mainstream viability,” go to “War on Terror/War on U.S. Muslims: Post-9/11 State-Sponsored Islamophobia.”

“Terrorism”

  • “The term ‘terrorism’ is never used to refer to the military violence of Western states, or to the daily reality of gender-based violence, for example, both of which ought also to be labeled terrorism according to the term’s usual definition: violence against innocent civilians designed to advance a political cause (the maintenance of patriarchy is eminently political). As such, each use of the term ‘terrorism’ is an inherently political act. The definition of terrorism is never applied consistently, because to do so would mean the condemnatory power of the term would have to be applied to our violence as much as theirs, thereby defeating the word’s usefulness.” (“One of ‘Them’ or One of ‘Us’?—Arun Kundnani on Islamophobia, Racism and Terrorism”)
  • “Instead of widening the scope of who is considered a terrorist to include white supremacists and fascists, the notion of terrorism must be deconstructed altogether: to demonstrate that the term depends on spurious criteria to distinguish some forms of violence (delegitimized as terrorism) from other, equally terrorizing forms of violence (legitimized as counter-terrorism).” (Azeezah Kanji and K. Hussan, “The Problem with Liberal Opposition to Islamophobia”)

NOTE: Except when quoting someone else’s words, JAAMR puts the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” in quotation marks to indicate the racialized, contested, and highly politicized meaning of those terms.

“War on Terror”/”Global War on Terror”

The United States’ seemingly endless global “war on terror” contributes to a worldview that legitimates racism against the “terrorist enemy” at home and abroad.  As a result, the U.S. government views the pervasive civil liberties violations at home and invasions and drone attacks and other forms of violence in Muslim-majority countries as “legitimate” post-9/11 responses.

George W. Bush identified the conflict as the “war on terror” shortly after 9/11.  In 2009, Barack Obama instructed his administration to “avoid using” the term “Global War on Terror.”  Donald Trump has signed a bill authorizing a National Global War on Terrorism Memorial on federal land, while Mike Pence has maintained that the 1983 “Beirut barracks bombing was the opening salvo in a war that we have waged ever since—the global war on terror.”

  • “The promise of the ‘war on terror’ was that we would kill them ‘over there’ so they would not kill us ‘over here.’ Hence mass violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Yemen, and Somalia – in the name of peace in the west. The ‘Authorization to Use Military Force’ that the US Congress passed in the days after 9/11 already defined the whole world as a battlefield in the ‘war on terror’. President Obama continues to rely on the authorization to give his drone-killing programme a veneer of legality. This is the old colonial formula of liberal values at home sustained by a hidden illiberalism in the periphery – where routine extra-judicial killing is normalised.”  (“Violence Comes Home: An Interview with Arun Kundnani”)
  • “Racism came to be articulated [post-9/11] as wrong and indefensible and also reasoned as necessary for a short period of time (as if racialization and racism can be contained) because the United States is in an exceptional state of national security.” (Evelyn Alsultany, “The Prime-Time Plight of the Arab Muslim American after 9/11”)
  • “The racism and Islamophobia of the domestic war on terror are not simply a problem of religious difference or multicultural tolerance within the nation but are linked to global histories of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and South Asia.” (Sunaina Maira, “Islamophobia and the War on Terror: Youth, Citizenship, and Dissent“)
  • “To be a black Muslim today is to be part of [a] wide cross-section of U.S. Muslims of African descent, U.S.-born and immigrants, who are subjected to a double burden of state violence: as black people and as Muslims. They are subjected to the war on crime and the War on Terror, to surveillance, aggressive policing, and systematic civil rights violations.”  (Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, “Islam on Trial”)

NOTE: Except when quoting someone else’s words, JAAMR puts the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” in quotation marks to indicate the racialized, contested, and highly politicized meaning of those terms.