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Junaid Rana is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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TERRIFYING MUSLIMS

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................viiINTRODUCTION. Migrants in a Neoliberal World.................................11. Islam and Racism..........................................................252. Racial Panic, Islamic Peril, and Terror...................................503. Imperial Targets..........................................................744. Labor Diaspora and the Global Racial System...............................975. Migration, Illegality, and the Security State.............................1346. The Muslim Body...........................................................153CONCLUSION. Racial Feelings in the Post–9/11 World.....................174Notes........................................................................181References...................................................................203Index........................................................................221

Chapter One

Today, racism has been largely—though not entirely, to be sure—detached from its perpetrators. In its most advanced forms, indeed, it has no perpetrators, it is a nearly invisible, taken-for-granted, "commonsense" feature of everyday life and global social structure.... [If] we define racism as The routinized outcome of practices that create or reproduce hierarchical social structures based on essentialized racial categories, then we can see better how it extends from the transnational to the national to the experiential and personal, from the global debt burden to racial profiling, from Negrophobia to Islamophobia. —Howard Winant (2004, 126)

From Racial Existentialism to Racial Phenomenology

How did "Muslim" become a category of race? In this chapter, I tackle the thorny question of the racialization of the Muslim and the modern history of the race concept in relation to Islam. As a historical pattern and process, the racialization of the Muslim reveals important details in the expanding and flexible concept of race. Examining how the Muslim is racialized establishes a historical and analytical framework to situate the condition of the Pakistani migrant in the contemporary global racial system discussed throughout this book. The question of whether "Muslim" constitutes a racial category places the debate within the arena of what might be called racial existentialism, which struggles to identify categories of race and, in its extreme, to deny the power of modern racism by arguing that race as a concept is no longer important. Rather than simply entertain questions about whether the concept of race is valid and how it is used in forms of Islamophobia, I contend that anti–Muslim racism is better understood by examining the complex variations of the concept of race and the history of how and when "Muslim" became a category of race.

From the inception of the race concept, Islam has been at the center of creating, representing, and justifying a system of dominance and control that has shifted according to historical context and practice. In the contemporary theory of racializing Muslims into the global racial system, the boundaries of race lie between the body and performances that aim to restrict and subjugate. To frame this historical discussion, I discuss the Muslim body in relation to the race concept to suggest a materialist approach from which the racialized Muslim is understood through everyday codes and interpretations. The configuration of "Muslim" as a category of race overlaps with the political economies of migration and recent domains of spatial surveillance and policing of religious, national, and ethnic groups. Further, conceptions of globalized racism are based on imagining the Muslim world as connected and interdependent.

To trace this history, I begin by framing the Muslim body not in a transcendental or theologically metaphysical sense but as an object of visual interpellation and translation. Feminist philosophers of the body have taken a phenomenological approach to elaborate the idea of the racialized body (Ahmed 2000, 2004, 2006; Alcoff 2001, 2006). Following their insights, I elaborate a racial phenomenology in which the Muslim is understood not only as a totalized biological body but also as a cultural and social entity constructed within a number of discursive regimes, including those of terrorism, fundamentalism, patriarchy, sexism, and labor migration. By invoking this idea of racial phenomenology, I examine bodies that appear in the visual register as characteristics of race and as performances of characteristics that are read as racial.

The Muslim body as an important site of the racial imaginings of sovereign power has its own particular history of survival in the United States (Roediger 2008). To trace the place of Muslims in the U.S. racial scheme, I take as an epistemological starting point the theory of a global racial system. Following the influential theory of racial formation as a structural model for understanding power relations as driven by racial divides (Omi and Winant 1994), as well as discursive critiques of race and racism (Goldberg 1993, 2002, 2009; Silva 2007), several scholars have elaborated the global racial system as one that was formed in relation to struggles for decolonization and the march of global capitalism (Mullings 2005; Winant 2001, 2004). Thus, the global racial system pervades social systems that span numerous, dynamically related historical, sociological, and geographic scales. The figure of the racialized Muslim is a contemporary example of this system. Incorporated into the U.S. racial formation through the domestic and global War on Terror, it can be traced to multiple histories and conceptual frameworks.

The concept of race is mired in historical antecedents that move discursively between religion and race, culture and biology, and that are directly pertinent to the discussion of anti–Muslim racism and the related phenomenon of Islamophobia. The process of reframing Islam from a religious category into a racial category in the contemporary U.S. speaks to a wider historical discourse that emanates not only from racism and the maintenance of white Christian supremacy, but also from the historical pre-eminence of imperialism and the maintenance of empire. Specifically, the process of racializing Islam through social identifications takes place through a kind of translation of the body and its comportment via a combination of identifiers, such as dress, behavior, and phenotypic expression. Gender and sexuality are also key components in understanding the place of the Muslim in this historical logic of racialization. The processes of queering and feminizing are simultaneous to the racializing of Islam and Muslims through a historical precedent that imagines religious groups as enemies.

My aim in providing a comparative ethnology is to argue for a complex history of race and racism based in a theory of the cultural that is not linear but multivalent. This chapter engages in a framework that brings together comparative race studies and intersectional analysis to define the coordinates of the figure of the Muslim in the War on Terror and in the global racial system.

Ethnology and the Muslim Question

The figure of the Muslim in the ethnological archive is complex and fluid. From Orientalist studies to contemporary studies of Muslim populations, historical contexts and interpretations have influenced scholars who examine the complex social, cultural, and political formations of Muslim societies. Recent scholarship, for example, elaborates on Karl Marx's writings on the Jewish question, asking what the Muslim's place is in relation to Enlightenment modernity and late capitalism (Majid 2004, 2009; Mufti 2007). I refer to this provocation as the "Muslim question" and advance the intellectual agenda by addressing conceptual linkages to modern forms of racialization. In particular, my interest in the Muslim question is to examine how Islam became a racialized conception in the contemporary U.S. as part of the maintenance of modern statecraft, the racial state, and twenty-first century notions of empire and imperial sovereignty. Similarly, others have tracked the Muslim question as a longstanding interaction between Europe and Islam that defines the terms of modernity, civilization, empire, and nationalism, as well as modes of violence and war (Majid 2009; Moallem 2005).

Relying on select ethnological, historical, and philosophical evidence, I argue that anti–Muslim racism and Islamophobia are central to the narrative of modern nations—and to modernity itself—because they emerged in the contact between the Old World and the New World. Although "Islamophobia" is a fairly recent neologism, it has long existed as a conceptual framework; as a kind of racism that developed in relation to the history of the concept of race. Even though my arguments ultimately are situated in the context of recent U.S.-based racial formations and the rubric of old and new racisms, I nonetheless argue that Islamophobia and anti–Muslim racism must be understood in a global historical context.

The history of the concept of race is intimately tied to Islamophobia in that the racializing of Islam took place as the foundation of the concept of race took root. Islam and Muslims are a central part of the concepts of race and racism through histories that span European and American forms of Orientalism and the formation and maintenance of empire through war and conquest. The conceptual history of Islamophobia is based in a theory of racial ascription of bodily comportment, superimposition, and dissimulation—that is, the assorted ways to define "race" based on visual attributes such as skin color and phenotype, as well as customs and costumes. The process of racializing Muslims involves placing biological and cultural determinism in a contradictory logic purporting that race is immutable and essential but simultaneously mutable and fluid. Including Islam and Muslims in the U.S. racial formation, as well as in a global racial system (Mullings 2005; Silva 2007; Winant 2001, 2004), requires a historical conceptualization of old and new racisms in which a theory of race is socially constructed between the concepts of the cultural and the biological.

The racialized Muslim developed as a geographically external other that was demonized not only through notions of the body, but also through the superimposition of cultural features onto Muslim and non–Muslim groups. Because this process was not based exclusively on phenotypic or physical difference (although this was often imputed), some have been able to use a strategy of dissimulation—that is, disguising or concealing religious difference—to keep themselves from being interpreted in racial terms. In the American context of racial formation, for instance, Islam represented a liberatory identification for African Americans; however, this presented a threat to white Christian supremacy that was then used to further racialize immigrant and black Muslims. Thus, the figure of the Muslim became racialized through social and cultural signifiers across national, racial, and ethnic boundaries.

Ethnology, long associated with the field of anthropology, has as one of its central preoccupations the taxonomic classification of cultural and racial difference (e.g., Hodgen 1964; Stocking 1987). The observations presented as ethnological analysis in early anthropological practice often examined moral elements, social structures, languages, and cultural practices to ascertain fundamental, or innate, differences among peoples. Much of this scholarship has been debunked as racialist thinking, but it persists in common historical and practical use. In this sense, a critical analysis of ethnology offers fruitful terrain for investigating the meanings attributed to the figure of the Muslim in the scholarly archive. Here I understand "the Muslim" as a unit of analysis that is central to the examination of Islamic societies, cultures, and communities. The Muslim, in this sense, is a diverse figure that is differentiated by its national, transnational, sectarian, ethnic, racial, gendered, and classed meanings. The Muslim is also a transmigratory, global figure that enters and exits multiple terrains; thus, we can speak of the Muslim in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. As part of the ethnological analysis, I argue that at least four essentialized tropes are important in understanding the racialization of the Muslim: the infidel savage, the slave/captive, the terrorist, and the immigrant.

Islamophobia: The Life of a Concept

"Islamophobia," which emerged as a neologism in the 1970s, became popular among European antiracism activists in the 1980s and 1990s. Originally, the term grew out of a need to address the increasing animosity and violence that Muslim migrants faced in European countries, as well as to address the supposed logic of a divide between the Western world and the Islamic world. A broad sense of Islamophobia rose throughout Europe and America, and its satellites, alongside conflicts in the Middle East tied to the legacy of Zionism and the Israeli occupation of Palestine; several wars in the Gulf region; the aftermath of 9/11; and the revitalization of American imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan (events that Tariq Ali [2002] refers to as the Oil Wars). Indeed, in the second half of the twentieth century, large populations from Muslim countries migrated to Europe and North America in response to economic shifts that required large pools of new labor reserves.

Pnina Werbner (2005, 8) has argued that Islamophobia is a particular kind of racism that is grounded in the fear of social and economic deprivation which, in turn, is elicited in the complex relationship of Islam to the West, which includes Europe's history of sectarian wars, the Crusades, and the Inquisition, all of which were integral to the formation of Western capitalism and modernity. Thus, Werbner argues that Islamophobic racism is reflexive and relies on comparative histories of imperial conquest, subjection, and systematic forms of oppression that relate Muslims to other racialized groups. In this sense, one might argue that racism has always had a sort of reflexive impulse not only in its dynamic ability to modify how racists imagine their object, but also in how it operates as a relational process. In other words, Islamophobia is a gloss for the anti–Muslim racism that collapses numerous groups into the single category "Muslim."

As is evident in the word itself, "Islamophobia" refers to a fear or hatred of Islam and Muslims. In the argument over whether Islamophobia counts as racism, the first question that arises is whether religious hatred is necessarily racial. That is, if religion is not innate, can it be socially constructed as embodied in phenotypic or biological expression? Many European scholars define discrimination in terms of xenophobia and prejudice, whereas scholars in the U.S. have long argued for the importance of talking about race and racism as valid concepts of systematic oppression. Similarly, many scholars disarticulate "Islamophobia" from the concepts of race and racism, instead referring to it as a form of cultural prejudice and religiously based discrimination. In many ways, the debate over Islamophobia as racism mirrors the discussions of the utility of the race concept in the historical, conceptual shift from biological racism to cultural racism.

In the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which were heavily influenced by a concessionary multiculturalism, culture and ethnicity replaced race and racism as the tools for analyzing difference and identity. As the "post-race" argument has gained dominance, explanations for the displacement of the concept of race have themselves been essentialized according to culturalist reasoning. By this, I mean that the race concept often is operationalized as a debunked concept premised on a faulty biological notion of scientific racism; it then follows that Islamophobia cannot be racism, because religion is a social practice and is not biologically preordained (although this, of course, assumes a secular logic of religious belief and practice). Islam as religion, then, is translated as a cultural practice, and Islamophobia results from a belief in Islam's cultural or religious inferiority. So if anti–Muslim sentiments persist, on what basis can culture be recognized in groups of people? Is it enough to argue that culture is essentialized and made to seem natural in Islamophobia? And what about the non-secular interpretations that explain religious difference as a naturalized essence of people from various parts of the world? Such an untethered notion of culture is far from sufficient to answer these questions and to explain Islamophobia and its relationship to racism. Culture is central to race and racism, and, in particular, Islam and religion are an important aspect of the genealogy of the race concept.

From the conquest of the New World to the transatlantic slave trade, Islam figured as an important component in the early U.S. racial formation. Resurrecting this genealogy complicates the history of the concept of race by revealing a complex, overlapping racialization of categories such as "black" and "brown" with religious categories such as "Islam" and "Muslim." The racialization of Islam emerged in the Old World, was transposed on indigenous peoples of the New World, and subsequently took on significance in relation to black America and the Muslim immigrants. Thus, "Muslim" in the U.S. is simultaneously a religious category and a category that encompasses a broad concept of race that connects a history of Native America to black America and immigrant America in the consolidation of anti–Muslim racism.

Race and Religion

The scholarship on the history of the concept of race is curiously silent about the place of religion. For example, Michael Omi's and Howard Winant's canonical Racial Formation in the United States (1994) scarcely refers to religion. In Omi's and Winant's usage, "race" is most commonly associated with culture. In what they refer to as the evolution of modern racial awareness, they argue:

The emergence of a modern conception of race does not occur until the rise of Europe and the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Even the hostility and suspicion with which Christian Europe viewed its two significant non–Christian "others"—the Muslims and the Jews—cannot be viewed as more than a rehearsal for racial formation, since these antagonisms, for all their bloodletting and chauvinism, were always and everywhere religiously interpreted. (Omi and Winant 1994, 61)

(Continues...)

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