How the War on Terror Created the “Muslim American”
This is the first of two pieces I wrote for the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. This piece, from The Nation, discusses the racialization of Muslim Americans over the last two decades.
On September 12, 2001, the day after horrific terrorist attacks shook the country, The New York Times published an editorial titled “The National Defense.” In it, the paper focused on “the urgent work of determining how an open and democratic society can better defend itself” against terrorism. Sandwiched between several security-related policy suggestions, the Times sounded this note of caution:
“President Bush and Congress must carefully balance the need for heightened security with the need to protect the constitutional rights of Americans. That includes Americans of Islamic descent, who could now easily become the target for another period of American xenophobia and ethnic discrimination.”
The warning was prescient, and we Muslims have indeed been living with dangerous xenophobia and discrimination these past 20 years. But, to be honest, the Times chose a weird way to describe us: “Americans of Islamic descent.” Nor was this odd phrasing unique to the paper. Near the beginning of the Patriot Act, the key piece of legislation passed in the wake of 9/11, is this sentence: “When American citizens commit acts of violence against those who are, or are perceived to be, of Arab or Muslim descent, they should be punished to the full extent of the law.”
What should we make of this peculiar emphasis on “Muslim descent”? “Descent,” after all, refers to something that is inherited, but Islam is a universal religion. Its message is directed to everyone, and anyone can be or become Muslim. In fact, the latest data from the Pew Research Center indicates that about one in five Muslims in the United States is a convert to the faith. The idea of “Muslim descent” presumably wouldn’t apply to these new Muslims. Yet the phrase is clearly signifying something, so what exactly does it mean?
I would argue that it means race, that most American way of organizing the world, and Muslims have become the latest hue added to the 21st century’s color line. It doesn’t matter that Islam is more properly considered a religion or that Muslims come in every shade and tone. Race thinking has never truly been about the fine points of scientific precision; it has always been about the brute facts of domination.
And domination has been what we’ve faced for 20 years now. Since 9/11, Muslims in the United States have been formed into what the political theorist Mahmood Mamdani, in another context, calls a “permanent minority.” Our differences from the majority have been used as techniques of rule, as ways of consolidating the majority’s opinion and power.
Overnight, we “Muslim Americans” went from being just another of the United States’ multitudinous religious groups to occupying a new and highly targeted administrative category—one in which we are now collectively seen as a threat, regardless of our individual actions or beliefs, as if danger is a dominant gene passed down to us by our Muslim ancestors. We are a group to be spied on, infiltrated, managed, excluded, expelled, surveyed, studied, interrogated, and subjected not only to populist wrath but also, though less often, to popular sympathy. And all of this occurs simply because of our presumed Muslimness.
In fact, Muslim Americans were not just racialized after 9/11; we were invented. The term barely existed in the popular imagination before 2001. A Nexis database search of “Muslim American” in news sources prior to September 10, 2001 (going back to a start date of January 1, 1986), reveals a scant 437 mentions. Since September 11, there have been more than 10,000, the upper limit of the database. Put another way, almost no one talked about Muslim Americans before 9/11. Then everyone did.
This is not to say that Muslims didn’t exist in the United States before that terrible day two decades ago. Muslims were in the Americas before Protestantism even emerged in Europe. First shipped from Africa as enslaved laborers, Muslims have a long and storied history in the United States, one that predates the founding of the republic. Historians have documented Muslims who fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and every other major conflict fought by the United States. Muslims in America have fashioned the American landscape by engineering new modes of building skyscrapers. They have made Nobel Prize–winning discoveries in chemistry and have changed the soundscapes of American music forever. Some, like Muhammad Ali, are remembered among our most treasured athletes, and some, like Malcolm X, are revered (though once hated) for their fight for civil rights. They were all Muslims in America, but none was Muslim American. That came later, after September 11, 2001.
Read the rest here.