Islamophobia and Racism
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On January 12, 2014, I gave a talk at the Third Presbyterian Church in Rochester, NY, about Islamophobia and racism.
Since I am a filmmaker, I like to add an audio-visual dimension to everything I do, so I started with a Ted Talk by Melissa Boigon and then proceeded to focus on certain aspects of Islamophobia and explore how they overlap with the definition racism.
Melissa’s 10-minute talk is a great way to break the ice and get into the meaning and nature of Islamophobia:
It’s important to remember that barely three decades ago, Islam had been a marginal concern located on the edge of western consciousness. In fact during the cold war, the militant, conservative "Mujahideen" in Afghanistan, who had been fighting the evil Soviets with America’s help, were welcomed warmly by President Reagan. He invited them to the White House and called them “freedom fighters.” In order to jog our collective memory, please listen to this:
This was the 1980s, before we decided to invade and occupy Afghanistan ourselves.
Although Western imperialism and the knowledge it produced over centuries of colonialism were always suffused with Orientalist constructions of the “other,” the present preoccupation with Islam began with 9/11. All of a sudden “Islam” became a globalised issue, shaped by countless images and sound bites transmitted relentlessly and indiscriminately by Western media.
The Muslim world became a silent object that does not speak, but is spoken for, an anonymous background against which stands the reporter dispatched from the metropolis.[1]
It was this frustration at being constantly talked about while being willfully shut out of that discourse which motivated me to make a documentary called “The Muslims I Know”[2] in 2008. The idea was to give actual Muslims a chance to be a part of the ongoing conversation about them.
The creation of images and messages by Western media is not an objective or random process. It’s an intentional, fairly involved process of applying editorially distorting filters to news reporting. Nowhere is this reductionism and distortion more evident than in reports of conflicts in the Middle East.
Viewers are given a few minutes during which they watch and hear descriptions of wreckage, smoke, burnt cars, scorched bodies, severed limbs, blood, and wailing widows. With no attempt to explain the underlying causes and histories of the crises in question, the reports merely compound existing misunderstandings. The confusion is such that roles are often reversed, with the victim mistaken for the oppressor.[3]
For a better understanding of reporting on the Middle East, I strongly recommend a documentary that you can watch on YouTube or Vimeo. It’s called “Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land” and it provides a striking comparison of American and international media coverage of Israel/Palestine.
Also, we have to be aware of the nature of media. The media industry is unequivocally corporate, narrow and tightly controlled in the United States. Do you know how many companies own 90% of American media? A whopping 6. They include: Comcast, the Walt Disney Company, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, CBS Corporation, and Viacom.[4] Six business corporations that sell us entertainment also produce 90% of our news. It’s truly stunning.
The presence of Muslim minorities inside western countries has created another level of hysteria. Fears of an existential Muslim threat overlap with fears of immigrants and aliens. Some of these fears, and the language in which they’re expressed, are reminiscent of anti-Semitism in Europe prior to WWII. Of course I’m not talking about the Holocaust, nothing like that has happened to Muslims in the West, so far. But anti-Semitism also manifests itself below the level of ethnic cleansing and genocide, it manifests itself through damaging stereotypes and how they mold mainstream culture.
Just like Muslims today, Jews were always perceived as the “other” within. They were accused of separating themselves from the mainstream on account of religion and culture. They were accused of harboring hostile feelings against the majority: they didn’t want to integrate and they were not loyal to the state.[5] In short, they were “corrupting” wholesome European culture. The exact same accusations are leveled at Muslims, who are often portrayed as being incompatible with Western modernity. The fear of Sharia law is kept hanging over our heads, as if it were an actual danger. First of all, do you know what percentage of the American population is actually Muslim? It’s 1.6%, so there’s hardly any fear of the country being overtaken by Islam. Secondly, the very idea of a Sharia “threat” is a deception.
The ACLU has published a detailed report on the subject. Here is a brief description of the report’s findings from the ACLU’s website:
A new report by the ACLU, Nothing to Fear: Debunking the Mythical "Sharia Threat" to Our Judicial System, examines, in detail, the cases repeatedly cited by anti-Muslim groups as evidence of the alleged "Sharia threat" to our judicial system. The report concludes that these cases do not stand for the principles that anti-Muslim groups claim. Rather, these court cases deal with routine matters, such as religious freedom claims and contractual disputes. Courts treat these lawsuits in the same way that they deal with similar claims brought by people of other faiths. If Sharia law were completely banned from consideration, it would be nearly impossible for Muslims to bring First Amendment claims when their religious rights are violated because the court could be barred from referring to a Muslim plaintiff's religious beliefs. This result would be patently unfair because it would single out Muslims for disfavorable treatment in our judicial system and render them second-class citizens.[6]
It is good to remember that the invocation of an “occidental” or opposite identity is often needed to stabilize national identity, especially in times of uncertainty. Over and over again in history, we see how socio-economic and political malaise is accompanied by the resurfacing of the “us vs. them” narrative.
The Runnymede Trust has identified eight components that define Islamophobia. This definition, from the 1996 report “Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All” is widely accepted, including by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia.[7]
The eight components are:
1) Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc. Do you know how many countries are included in what we simplistically call “the Muslim world”? There are 57 countries in the vast geographic and diverse cultural expanse known as the Muslim world.
2) Islam is seen as separate and “other”.
3) Islam is seen as inferior to the West.
4) Islam is seen as violent, aggressive.
5) Islam is seen as a political ideology, not a world religion.
6) Criticisms made of the West by Muslims are rejected out of hand.
7) Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and the exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
8) Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.
Whenever the media indulge in any of these assumptions, they are in fact indulging in islamophobia. It has become a new form of racism because although Muslims are considered to be a religious group, not a race, they are nevertheless constructed as an ethnic category or a race.
Many argue that the term “Islamophobia” does not adequately express the full range and depth of antipathy towards Islam and Muslims in the West today. It is an inadequate term and a more accurate expression would be “anti-Islamic racism” for it combines the elements of dislike of a religion with active discrimination against the people belonging to that religion.[8]
The same kind of racial coding markers are at work here as those that apply to people of another race – these markers are eminently visible and impossible to miss. They work just as well for Muslims, who are often differentiated in America by clothing or skin color.[9] “Muslim” is always conflated with “Arab” or even with “Sikh.” There have been horrific attacks on Sikh temples and the Sikh community at large because Sikhs are perceived as being Muslim, not on account of their religion but due to racial markers.
The Ted Talk I started with, opens with a news report in which a woman pushed someone in front of a train in New York because she “hated Muslims and Hindus since 9/11.” Again, that’s hardly a religious or political articulation of hate. It’s clearly racist. Muslims and Hindus have completely different religions and could be from completely different parts of the world, but they’re being lumped together on account of how they look, they are being identified as the “other,” a monolithic category that can provoke discrimination and violence.
Islamophobia and racism come together most forcefully when we consider that the oldest and largest contingent of American Muslims is still Black. In “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States,” Alison Kysia shows how Muslims have been part of the American story since the beginning of colonization. For example, she describes a Muslim-led revolt against Diego Columbus (the eldest son of Christopher Columbus) that took place in 1522.
In “Mapping the Intersections of Islamophobia & #BlackLives Matter: Unearthing Black Muslim Life and Activism in the Policing Crisis,” Donna Auston elaborates on the close bonds between Islamophobia and racism as follows:
Parallels can be drawn fairly easily, of course, between Islamophobia and anti-black racism as specific manifestations of a similar impulse, but making the leap to consider them intimate bedfellows may seem like an analytical stretch. In public discourse, we easily link anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination as being nearly one and the same. Yet, in spite of the fact that a full one-third of the U.S. Muslim population is black, we rarely tend to think of issues of anti-black racism, poverty, mass incarceration, or police brutality as legitimate “Muslim” issues. This is because we rarely consider black Muslims.
Black Muslims exist right at the intersection of these two forms of racism. Baltimore and Philadelphia are two American cities where the commonly accepted narrative of who American Muslims are, where their concerns lie, and the specific cocktail of intersectional racisms that they live with is radically disrupted. Both cities have long and rich black Muslim histories—and diverse manifestations of Afro-Muslim religious expression that are as much a part of the landscape of their respective cities as crab cakes and water ice. “As salaam ‘alaykum” emanates from the mouths of Muslim and non-Muslim black residents in both places as naturally as any other greeting. Khimars, bow ties, and the iconic red fez are all items in an array of sartorial indicators of particular racial and religious life worlds.
[...] I weave together these seemingly disparate threads to draw attention to the fact that in this historic moment when we are presumably more attentive to the way that marginalization endangers the lives of the invisible, being cognizant of the ways that intersectional identities are easily erased is more important than ever. Just as much of the activism around police brutality has centered the experiences of black men while ignoring the deadly perils that black women also face from law endorsement, assumptions about who “American Muslims” are, and flattened representations of who constitutes the “black community” place black American Muslim experiences and challenges out of perceptual range.
Dominant narratives—in both media and scholarly literature tend to doubly efface the existence and voices of black American Muslims—even in this moment when black bodies are at the very center of the unrest.
No Muslim Ban Rally in Rochester, NY, Jan 29, 2017. Photograph by Mara Ahmed.
Footnotes:
[1] Soumaya Ghannoushi, The propagation of neo-Orientalism, Al Jazeera, January 27, 2011.
[2] Mara Ahmed, The Muslims I Know, Neelum Films LLC, 2008.
[3] The propagation of neo-Orientalism
[4] Media cross-ownership in the United States, accessed Feb. 2017, Wikipedia
[5] Yasemin Shooman, Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in Europe, The Jewish Museum Berlin Journal, 2012.
[6] Heather L. Weaver, Debunking the Mythical "Sharia Threat" to Our Judicial System, www.ACLU.org, May 17, 2011.
[7] Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All, www.runnymedetrust.org, 1996.
[8] Al-Maktabi, Islamophobia, www.salaam.co.uk.
[9] Donovan Schaefer, Is Islamophobia Racism?, Religion Bulletin, June 19, 2012.
Suggested Books:
Reza Aslan, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Random House (March 15, 2005)
Reza Aslan, Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East (Words Without Borders), W. W. Norton & Company, Reprint edition (November 21, 2011)
Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, Harmony (June 21, 2005)
Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims, Clarity Press (February 1, 2011)
Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, Haymarket Books (August 7, 2012)
Edward Said, Orientalism, Vintage; 1st Vintage Books edition (October 12, 1979)
Suggested Articles:
Max Blumenthal, The Great Islamophobic Crusade (an investigation of the Islamophobia industry), CBS News, December 19, 2010.
Faiz Shakir, $42 Million From Seven Foundations Helped Fuel The Rise Of Islamophobia In America, thinkprogress.org, August 26, 2011.
Usman Ahmedani, Islamophobia as a political ploy (The fixation with diagnosing Islam's ills may mask deeper anxieties about upheavals in European and American societies), The Guardian, March 29, 2012.
Max Blumenthal, Anders Behring Breivik, a perfect product of the Axis of Islamophobia, mondoweiss.net, July 24, 2011.
NGOs call for recognition of Islamophobia as form of racism: Ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on 21 March, the European Network Against Racism called the European Union institutions to recognize Islamophobia as a specific form of racism.
Muslim Americans: No signs of growth in alienation or support for extremism (Pew Center) - A Demographic Portrait of Muslim Americans
FBI: Bias Crimes Against Muslims Remain at High Levels (Southern Poverty Law Center): Hate crimes against perceived Muslims, which jumped 50% in 2010 largely as a result of anti-Muslim propagandizing, remained at relatively high levels for a second year in 2011, according to the FBI’s new national hate crime statistics.
Mychal Denzel Smith, Three Ways to Fight Racism in 2014, The Nation, January 3, 2014.
