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Introduction

On September 11, 2001, I watched the televised spectacle of the Twin Towers crashing down with a sense of horror. I was deeply sorry for the innocent people who were being made to pay the price for the ravages of empire, and I was worried about whether any of my friends or relatives were in the towers. But almost immediately, I started to feel a sense of dread over what was to come: what would the United States do in response? I wondered, with a deep sense of apprehension, how many more innocent people would be killed around the world in the years to follow.

When I went to school that day, one of the first people I encountered was a colleague who jeered, “Are you happy?” Momentarily stunned, I could only stammer that I was not, and that I had just learned that some people I knew might have been in the Twin Towers at the time of the crash. Later that day, I stopped by the local Winn-Dixie grocery store, where the checkout clerk could barely conceal his contempt toward me. Eventually he flat-out asked me to apologize for what had happened that day. Again, I was taken aback. I didn’t know how to reply. As a normally outspoken activist, I wasn’t used to this sense of muteness; I just stood there and looked at him, temporarily dumbfounded.The only thing I knew beyond a shadow of doubt at that moment was that my response, when it did come out of my mouth, would not reveal that I was neither Muslim nor Arab. When I regained my composure, I asked him if he had heard of Timothy McVeigh and the other Christian fundamentalists who had similarly murdered innocent people. I asked him if he thought all Christians were responsible for these acts. He didn’t reply.

I heard shortly afterward that a young Arab student at a neighboring university had been beaten up and that the campus police had simply looked the other way. Notices were posted in our apartment complex asking people to report “suspicious” behavior and people. A Sikh Indian man wearing a turban was killed in Arizona. In the months that followed, tens of thousands of Muslims were “interviewed” by the state, and thousands were imprisoned, tortured, and deported; a whole process of demonization had begun. With wide public support, the military machine was deployed to rain death on innocent Afghans. Anti-Muslim racism—or Islamophobia—was becoming the handmaiden of empire.

I knew then that I had to organize, speak, and write about this injustice. This book is the product of ten years of such engagement with activists in the antiwar movement, students and colleagues at universities across the United States, and feedback from various independent media editors on my articles about Islamophobia. It is a collective product, in this sense—driven by the need to produce knowledge that can effectively push back against the racist propaganda and help to strengthen social movements against war and racism.

First, a note on what this book is not about. This is not a book about the religion Islam. I am not a scholar of religion and do not claim to have any special erudition on this subject. This book is about the image of “Islam,” that mythical creation conjured out of the needs of empire that has led even progressives to claim that Muslims are more violent than any other religious group. It is about the “Muslim enemy” and how this construction has been employed to generate fear and hatred.

Even before I began my study of the history of Islam, of Muslim-majority countries, and of the relationship between East and West, I knew instinctively that the Islamophobic rhetoric that passed as common sense in the United States was dead wrong. I grew up in India in a home where the neighbors on both sides were Muslims, and the azan (the Islamic call to prayer) was an everyday sound. India is home to more than a hundred million Muslims—more than most Arab nations—and, knowing from experience that Muslims are just as complex as any other group of people, I react viscerally to the stereotypes that pass as credible knowledge in the United States, the country where I have spent my adult life.

I am grateful to the dozens of Middle East studies scholars and others before me who have studied the “Muslim world” for advancing my knowledge of this subject and helping me to expose the underlying racism inherent in the logic of Islamophobia. My contribution to this corpus is a focus on Islamophobia in the American context, on which there is very little work (I use the term “American” to refer to the United States in this book only for stylistic purposes, and with apologies to my Central and South American readers). Drawing on my academic training as a cultural theorist, I situate the rhetoric of Islamophobia within the broader political, historical, legal, and societal context from which it emerges to show that anti-Muslim racism has been primarily a tool of the elite in various societies. There is some debate on whether the term “Islamophobia” is adequate to denote the phenomenon of cultural racism against Muslims. While it does have some limits, I continue to use this term not only because it is now widely accepted but also because in this book I study specifically the fear (and hatred) generated against the “Muslim threat.”

The book therefore begins by looking at the first instances in the West when Muslims were constructed as threats to Europe. This takes place in the eleventh century in the context of the Crusades and the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The chapter then goes on to outline the historic relationship between East and West from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries. Such a long view allows us to see that the image of Muslims and Islam in Europe has gone through a series of shifts and changes that corresponded to changes in the political and social realms. Thus, contrary to the idea that the East-West relationship has always been characterized by conflict or a “clash of civilizations,” I show that anti-Muslim prejudice was consciously constructed and deployed by the ruling elite at particular moments. While ordinary people in Europe did accept these ideas, for instance during the Crusades, they have also resisted them. This fluidity is all but erased by Orientalist scholars like Bernard Lewis, the author of the term “clash of civilizations.” Lewis flattens history to argue that

the struggle between these rival systems [Christianity and Islam] has now lasted for some fourteen centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.1

For Lewis, the relationship between the “Christian West” and “Muslim East” is primarily driven by conflict; this fundamental characteristic of the East-West encounter therefore necessarily persists into the late twentieth century. Chapter 1 sets out to debunk this conception by locating the image of Islam in Europe in its proper historical context.

Chapter 2 focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period of massive colonization by the Great Powers. England and France in particular conquered large parts of the Middle East and North Africa. They justified this process of colonization by recourse to a body of ideas called “Orientalism.” In the nineteenth century, various European nations set up centers for the study of the Orient from which there emerged a huge body of Orientalist scholarship integrally tied to imperialism and colonization. In this chapter, and throughout the book generally, I focus mainly on the Middle East and North Africa, because it was these regions, due to their proximity to Europe, that largely informed the development of an elite Western vocabulary about “Islam.” After World War II, the United States took over from France and England, both literally and metaphorically. It began to exercise its hegemony in the region through the borrowed language of Orientalism, but also through the vocabulary of capitalist modernization, which was better suited to the new form of imperialism initiated by the United States. Chapter 3 examines the persistence of Orientalist (and some medieval) views in the twenty-first century. It outlines five taken-for-granted racist narratives about Muslims that flourish today and shows that these myths have a longer history.

The next section is about the American approach to Islam on the political stage. It demonstrates that Islamists have not always been viewed as threats to the United States. Two chapters deal with this history, chapters 4 and 7. Chapter 4 outlines the contradictory policy pursued by the US political elite toward the parties of political Islam. During the Cold War and up until the Iranian revolution of 1979, the United States enthusiastically supported forces that could Islamize the Middle East and serve as a counter to those that posed a challenge to its domination—secular nationalists and the left. In the period after the 1970s, policy makers forged alliances with those Islamists who were on the side of US imperialism and militated against those who refused to play this role. Even after 9/11, when Islamists in general were projected as the arch enemy of the United States, the aforementioned approach would continue.

Chapters 5 and 6 look at the phenomenon of political Islam on its own terms. Chapter 5 shows that the parties of political Islam are not the natural outgrowths of Muslim-majority societies, as some have argued. As in Christian-majority societies, the (misnamed) “Muslim world” has also seen a separation of religion and politics. Understanding this history allows us to see that political Islam is a contemporary phenomenon. Chapter 6 shows that Islamism, often called Islamic fundamentalism, is the product of particular historic conditions in the late twentieth century that also spurred on the growth of Christian, Hindu, and Jewish fundamentalisms.

Chapter 7 sets out to examine post–Cold War thinking within the foreign policy establishment and the path that led up to the era of the “War on Terror.” The chapter unpacks two dominant modes of thought in policy circles—those of the neoconservatives and of the realist/liberal camp. Despite the differences between these wings on questions of rhetoric and strategy, they share a common commitment to US imperialism. Their points of contention revolve around the best ways to maintain US dominance and global hegemony. These differences, however, fell to the wayside in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when conservative/neocon and liberal Islamophobes came together to prosecute the War on Terror. Since then, the United States has been willing to work out deals with the Taliban or with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

The final section of the book looks at the uses of Islamophobia in the domestic context. Chapter 8 outlines the ways in which the legal system has been bent after 9/11 to prosecute Muslim citizens and immigrants, particularly those of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent. It must be noted that even before 2001, Arabs and Muslims were persecuted by the legal apparatus and treated like potential terrorists. The aftermath of 9/11 witnessed the convergence of domestic and foreign policy, resulting in the construction of the overarching “Islamic terrorist” enemy that must be fought abroad and at home. The corresponding “green scare” (green is the color of Islam) is similar to the various anticommunist “red scares”that marked US domestic politics in the twentieth century. When a nation goes to war with an external enemy, it inevitably turns against those it sees as incarnations of that enemy within its borders: the situation of Muslims in the United States today bears a strong resemblance to that of Japanese Americans during World War II. Statistically, Americans are more likely to die from a bolt of lightning than from an act of “terror.” The focus on “radicalized” Muslim Americans serves not to keep the American people safe, but to whip up a sense of fear and paranoia which can then be used to squash dissent and win consent for violations of civil liberties at home and wars abroad.

Chapter 9 looks at the shift inward to “homegrown terrorism” at the end of the decade and outlines the part played by President Obama and the Democratic Party in creating an opening for the far right. The chapter focuses specifically on the controversy generated by the proposal to build an Islamic community center two and a half blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. The misnamed “Ground Zero mosque” controversy showed the dynamic at work: while the far-right Islamophobes sparked hatred against Muslims, liberals and Democrats fanned the flames. The net result strengthened the racist bigots and enabled a surge in Islamophobia not seen since 9/11. This was the first palpable victory for the Islamophobic and Zionist right, which had been involved in various campaigns since 9/11. The politics of liberal Islamophobia at the top of society enabled the extreme Islamophobia of the right.The far right was then able to capitalize on this atmosphere of racism, building its own ranks through the mechanics of scapegoating. Similarly, politicians used Islamo­phobia to garner votes and political leverage.

Chapter 10 looks specifically at the right-wing Islamophobic warriors— the new McCarthyites—and their connections to the security establishment, the media, the academy, and the political class. In this chapter I argue that the right-wing Islamophobes are not a fringe minority but rather part and parcel of the structures of mainstream American society. Like Senator Joseph McCarthy before them, the new McCarthyites play a collective role in ramping up fear and hatred against Muslims, with the full consent of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Just as McCarthy was enabled by a political system that found his antics useful in the prosecution of the Cold War, the new McCarthyites of today are useful in pushing the envelope and advancing the War on Terror.

Finally, the conclusion looks at ways in which Islamophobia can be fought and resisted. I argue that Islamophobia is about politics rather than religion per se; it therefore needs to be fought on that terrain. There was much hope in the Muslim American community and among sections of the left that an Obama presidency would mitigate, if not eradicate, anti-Muslim racism. Yet, as this concluding chapter shows, this hope for change did not materialize: Obama wholeheartedly adopted and codified Bush-era policies. After years of betrayals by the Democratic Party, sections of the Muslim American community, along with their allies in the antiwar movement and other social movements, came together to push back against anti-Muslim racism. Local movements to defend unjustly targeted Muslim Americans started to coalesce into a nation-wide movement. The NYPD’s harassment of Blacks and Latinos were connected by Muslim rights organizers with the anti-Muslim surveillance campaign, forging bonds of multiracial solidarity. I conclude by advancing the argument that it is only through such efforts, and through a politics of international solidarity that links domestic attacks on Muslims with the goals of imperialism, that Islamophobia can be successfully defeated.

I could not have picked a better year than 2011 to work on this book. The early part of the year saw the birth of the “Arab Spring”: in a matter of weeks, ordinary people in Tunisia and Egypt deposed long-hated US-backed dictators. The ensuing media coverage in the United States exposed Americans to images of Arabs and Muslims they had never seen before, at least not on such a consistent basis. The self-activity of ordinary Arabs and Muslims went a long way toward shattering long-held Islamophobic stereotypes; pro-union protestors in Madison, Wisconsin, carried picket signs that read “Hosni Walker” and “Fight like an Egyptian.” In a few short months, people in the Middle East and North Africa did more to combat Islamophobic caricatures through their activities than all of the books that have been written on the subject. And so it is to the brave women and men of the Arab Spring that I humbly dedicate this book.

Acknowledgments

Over the last decade I have been fortunate to interact with many intelligent, passionate, and wonderful people who have pushed me to think about this topic in ways that I would not if I had written this book sealed off in an ivory tower. Every question, every comment, and every interaction with hundreds of people at talks, meetings, and workshops in the United States and abroad has impacted and shaped this book. And so I must begin by acknowledging them, even if I cannot list every single person by name.

Those who have labored intensely on the book include, first and foremost, Paul D’Amato, the managing editor of the International Socialist Review. Earlier versions of some of the chapters appeared in the ISR, and they benefited from Paul’s labyrinthine knowledge of all things important (and unimportant!). He also read chapters 1, 2, 3, and 7 and offered useful feedback. Ahmed Shawki, the editor of the ISR and another incredible thinker, must be thanked for his support of the project and for catching several errors. Lance Selfa read chapters 4, 7, and 10, and his deep knowledge of the US political establishment was invaluable. Two amazing lawyers, Steve Downs and Amna Akbar, read and vetted chapter 8 on the legal apparatus. A version of chapter 3 was published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry; my thanks again to the anonymous reviewers.

I must also thank Yoshie Furuhashi, my friend from graduate school, for publishing my first article on Islamophobia in MRZine. She informed me that it received more than ten thousand hits in the first few days. I took this as a sign that I should perhaps continue to write about the topic. I want to also thank my students Hoda Mitwally and Bryan Sacks for being so willing to help me dig up a reference or cross-check a fact. And last but not least, my copy editor, Sarah Grey. Anyone who has worked with a good copy editor knows how important and integral they are to the process—Sarah was the best. While everyone named here engaged with and shaped the book in ways big and small, what errors remain are of my own doing.

Finally, a big thanks to all my dear friends for their kindness and support during a rough year, particularly Helen Scott, Megan Behrent, Anjali Ganapathy, Srinivas Reddy, Ashley Smith, Sarah Grey, Joe Cleffie, Susan Menahem, Lee Wengraf, Susan Dwyer, Virginia Harabin, and Regina Marchi.