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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...