The Story of Islamophobia

Abstract

This article examines the historical construction of the figure of the Muslim through the concept of race and Islamophobia. As a threat to white Christian supremacy, and in relation to anti-Jewish racism, the Muslim is constructed through a racial logic that crosses the cultural categories of nation, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality. The placement of the Muslim in the U.S. racial formation encompasses a broad race concept that connects a history of Native America to Black America to immigrant America in the consolidation of anti-Muslim racism.

Keywords:

• ethnology
• Islamophobia
• Muslim
• race/racism
• religion

This essay was presented on a panel organized by Evelyn Alsultany at the American Studies Association in Washington D.C. and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Many thanks for comments and support from Nancy Abelmann, Hishaam Aidi, Moustafa Bayoumi, Sohail Daulatzai, and Nadine Naber.

Notes

Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 126 (italics in original).

Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (New York: Verso, 2002).

Pnina Werbner, “Islamophobia: Incitement to Religious Hatred—Legislating for a New Fear?” Anthropology Today 21(1) (2005): 8.

Recently, in the context of the Danish Cartoon controversy of 2006, the argument has been made that the term Islamophobia confuses religious hatred with religious criticism. While I have reservations with this point, I think it important to make clear that my argument is not about Islamic theology, but the formal and informal forms of discrimination placed on practitioners, or those believed to be practitioners, of Islam. In other words, it is as a social group, not a religion, that I argue Muslims are racialized.

Culture in anthropological thought is based in colonial hierarchies that defined it in terms of civilization and the imputed categories of superiority and inferiority. This reified use of culture is often a cloak for racial ideologies of separation and biological notions of purity, ultimately threatened by the possibility of miscegenation. It is in this sense that the anthropological use of ethnology as a form of racialized knowledge production is centrally complicit in constructing the ideological edifice of racial difference and hierarchy.

There is now a vast scholarship on the relationship of the concepts of culture and race. See for example Etienne Balibar and Immanual Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991); David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993); David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2002); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994); Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Visweswaran, Kamala. “Race and the Culture of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 100(1) (1998): 70–83.

Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 53.

Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, p. 61.

Ibid., pp. 61–62.

George M. Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 31.

Winant, The World Is a Ghetto, p. 41.

Ibid., p. 42.

Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, Col: Westview, 1999) pp. 67-69; Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 15.

See L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 6–12. While admitting a widespread othering of Muslims in Spain after 1499, Harvey argues that it is impossible to determine whether this was racist given their broad coloration. Nonetheless he does point out like numerous other scholars that Moor was often associated with dark complexion or darkness. Harvey's reading relies on a definition of race that is based in phenotypic difference that only views Blackness as inferior. Cf. Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 29; and Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), pp. 271–272. The problem with this definition is that it reifies notions of Black and white phenotypic descriptions when racial essentialism is far more complex.

Gomez, Black Crescent, p. 5.

Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 209–211, refers to replacing religion with race as acts of misrecognition in which a Christian demonology prefigured colonial racism. As such this provided an articulation of racial–religious categories relevant to the Reconquista and to the contemporary moment. Also see Aidi, Hishaam D. “The Interference of Al-Andalus: Spain, Islam, and the West,” Social Text 24(2) (2006): 67–88, on the on-going contemporary dilemma between Christian Spain and its Muslim past, present, and future.

Nabil I. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

Ibid., 13.

Ibid., 101.

As Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai have rightly described as the triangulation of the monster-terrorist-fag in the current racial formation, this genealogy of gender and sexuality has an old precedent in the founding logic of the race concept. See Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text 20(3) (2002): 117–148.

Miguel Gomez has written an essential ethnohistory of the Muslim slave migration from Africa to the Americas, see Gomez Black Crescent, esp chs. 1–3. On the revolt in Brazil see Joäo J. Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 153–163; and Gomez, Black Crescent.

Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington.: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 44.

See Gomez, Black Crescent.

Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, p. 110.

Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 25.

Quoted in Gomez, Black Crescent, p. 315.

See Fuad Shaban, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: Roots of Orientalism in America (Durham, NC: Acorn Press, 1991); Fuad Shaban, For Zion's Sake: The Judeo-Christian Tradition in American Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005).

See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003), for an elaboration of the biopolitical and the modern concept of race.

Besides Aushwitz other camps had similar terms that tied the Jew to the Muslim: in Buchenwald they were called “tired sheiks,” and in the women's camp Ravensbruck they were called Muselweiber, or Muslim women.

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 42–45.

Ibid., p. 45.

See Goldberg, The Racial State.

Gil Anidjar's extensive argument elaborates on the place of the Arab as an ethnic group and the Jew as a religious group within this racial economy of the enemy. In his argument race, religion, and ethnicity are central to how we understand political identities and ultimately the history of the concept of the political. It might be argued that the Muslim is an extension of this argument of racial–religious continuum in relation to Anidjar's historical object of study, Europe, as well as the U.S. See Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), p. 303.

See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), p. 174, also quoted in ftn. 39. Gobineau originally published his The Inequality of Races in 1853. He was only posthumously resurrected by Nazi Germany in the twentieth century.

Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

This was a strategy of the Zionist claim to Israel for Jews at the exclusion of Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

Edith R. Sanders, “The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective,” Journal of African History 10(4) (1969): 521–532.

Nadine C. Naber, “Ambiguous Insiders: An Investigation of Arab American Invisibility,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23(1) (2000): 37–61; Nadine C. Naber, “The Rules of Forced Engagement: Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among Arab Immigrants in San Francisco Post-9/11,” Cultural Dynamics 18(3) (2006): 269–292.

For an analysis of this in relation to the DC sniper, amongst other connections, see Hishaam Aidi, “Jihadis in the Hood: Race, Urban Islam and the War on Terror,” Middle East Report 224 (2002). Available at 〈http://www.merip.org/mer/mer 224/224_aidi.html〉.

Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), p. 36.

Prashad Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, 120–125.

Junaid Rana and Gilberto Rosas, “Managing Crisis: Post-9/11 Policing and Empire,” Cultural Dynamics 18(3) (2006): 219–234.