Confronting Islamophobia in the United States: Framing civil rights activism among Middle Eastern Americans

Patterns of Prejudice

Volumn 43, Issue 3-4, 2009, Pages 401-425

  Love, Erik ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Advocacy; Anti Muslim prejudice; Civil rights; Islamophobia; Middle Eastern Americans; Racial formation; Racialization; Racism

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350561684     PISSN: 0031322X     EISSN: 14617331     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00313220903109367     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. Edward Said, 'The imperial bluster of Tom Delay', Counterpunch, 20 August 2003, available at www.counterpunch.org/said08202003.html (viewed 12 May 2009).
2. Michael Ellison, 'Sikh shot dead in US "retaliation" attack', Guardian, 17 September 2001, 10.
3. Despite the term's offensive colonialist origins, for want of a better alternative, for brevity's sake and in part because it reflects the contemporary mainstream American definition, the term 'Middle East' will be used in this article to refer to Northern Africa and Southwestern Asia, and 'Middle Eastern Americans' can be defined as members of the diverse groups of immigrants and their descendants who identify with or trace their heritage to those regions.
4. Although surveys provide conflicting numbers, it appears that South Asians constitute the largest subgroup among Muslim Americans. Most studies indicate that the majority of Arab Americans are non-Muslims, but this may have changed over the past decade. See Yasmeen Shaheen-McConnell, 'Arab Americans: demographics', 2003, available on the Arab American Institute website at www.aaiusa.org/arab-americans/22/demographics (viewed 12 May 2009);
5. Pew Research Center, Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center 2007), 15, available on the Pew website at www.pewresearch.org/pubs/483/muslimamericans (viewed 12 May 2009);
6. and Philippa Strum, 'Executive summary', in Philippa Strum and Danielle Tarantolo (eds), Muslims in the United States: Demography, Beliefs, Institutions (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 2003), 1-4.
7. Racial scapegoating in the United States, as a method of producing white American solidarity and nationalism, dates back to the founding days of the nation. See Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998).
8. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge 1994).
9. Ibid., 78-89.
10. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books 1995);
11. Yen Le Espiritu and Michael Omi, '"Who are you calling Asian?" Shifting identity claims, racial classifications, and the Census', in Paul M. Ong (ed.), Transforming Race Relations: A Public Policy Report (Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center 2000).
12. John Tehranian, 'Selective racialization: Middle-Eastern American identity and the Faustian pact with whiteness', Connecticut Law Review, vol. 40, no. 4, 2008, 1-33 (2).
13. I raise this issue here only tangentially to counter briefly the frequent claim that an era of 'colour-blindness' has begun in which race no longer matters. For a more thorough discussion, see Junaid Rana, 'The story of Islamophobia', Souls, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007, 148-61.
14. Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press 1998);
15. Aminah Beverly McCloud, 'Islam in America: the mosaic', in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane I. Smith and John L. Esposito (eds), Religion and Immigration: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Experiences in the United States (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press 2003), 159-74 (160).
16. Karen Leonard, The South Asian Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1997), 39-84;
17. Amir Marvasti and Karyn McKinney, Middle Eastern Lives in America (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield 2004), 3-40;
18. Mohammad T. Mehdi, 'Arabs and Muslims in American society', in Wilbur C. Rich (ed.), The Politics of Minority Coalitions: Race, Ethnicity, and Shared Uncertainties (Westport, CT: Praeger 1996), 249-56 (249).
19. Kathleen Moore, Al-Mughtaribun: American Law and the Transformation of Muslim Life in the United States (Albany: State University of New York Press 1995), 47-67.
20. Ibid., 29.
21. There is extensive scholarship on the 'racial pre-requisite cases' involving Middle Eastern immigrants. See Sarah Gualtieri, 'Strange fruit? Syrian immigrants, extralegal violence and racial formation in the Jim Crow South', Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 2004, 63-85;
22. John Tehranian, 'Compulsory whiteness: towards a Middle-Eastern legal scholarship', Indiana Law Journal, vol. 82, no. 1, 2007, 11-17.
23. Gualtieri, 'Strange fruit?', 1.
24. Moore, Al-Mughtaribun, 47.
25. Marvasti and McKinney, Middle Eastern Lives in America, 19-21.
26. Islamophobia also affects non-immigrant Muslim Americans; the work of these groups to confront Islamophobia will be discussed below.
27. Prema Kurien, 'Religion, ethnicity and politics: Hindu and Muslim Indian immigrants in the United States', Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, 263-93.
28. Karen Leonard, 'South Asian religions in the United States: new contexts and configurations', in Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma (eds), New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2006), 91-114.
29. Leonard, The South Asian Americans, 77, 82.
30. Shaheen-McConnell, 'Arab Americans: demographics'; Michael Suleiman, 'Introduction: the Arab immigrant experience', in Michael Suleiman (ed.), Arabs in America: Building a New Future (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1999), 1-24.
31. Randa A. Kayyali, The Arab Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 2006), 33-4.
32. Sally Howell and Andrew Shryock, 'Cracking down on diaspora: Arab Detroit and America's "war on terror"', Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 3, 2003, 443-62 (446).
33. Marvasti and McKinney, Middle Eastern Lives in America, 3-8.
34. See Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press 2004);
35. Kathleen M. Moore, 'Muslims in the United States: pluralism under exceptional circumstances', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 612, no. 1, 2007, 116-32;
36. and Karen Leonard, Muslims in the United States: The State of Research (New York: Russell Sage Foundation 2003).
37. Pew Research Center, Muslim Americans, 1.
38. Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2005), 23.
39. See Fachrizal Halim, 'Pluralism of American Muslims and the challenge of assimilation', Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 26, no. 2, 2006, 235-44;
40. Moore, 'Muslims in the United States';
41. Rana, 'The story of Islamophobia'.
42. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books 1979).
43. Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1960);
44. John Victor Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press 2002).
45. Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2002), 3.
46. Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2001), 112-25.
47. Ibid., 82-3.
48. Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2007), 118-25.
49. Jack G. Shaheen, Abscam: Arabiaphobia in America, ADC Issues (Washington, D.C.: American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee 1980).
50. Jack G. Shaheen, 'Reel bad Arabs: how Hollywood vilifies a people', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 588, no. 1, 2003, 171-93.
51. Brian Keith Axel, The Nation's Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh 'Diaspora' (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2001);
52. Tony Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2006).
53. Axel, The Nation's Tortured Body, 79-120.
54. Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: ReganBooks 2001), 249.
55. Kevin Fedarko, 'Who wishes us ill?', Time Magazine, 29 July 1996.
56. Nabeel Abraham, 'Anti-Arab racism and violence in the United States', in Ernest McCarus (ed.), The Development of Arab-American Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1994), 159.
57. Nadine C. Naber, 'Ambiguous insiders: an investigation of Arab American invisibility', Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2000, 37-61 (42-3).
58. Hussein Ibish, 'Islamophobia', manuscript (publication forthcoming by the Muslim Public Affairs Council).
59. Juan Cole, 'Blowback from the GOP's holy war', Salon.com (online), 1 February 2008, at www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/02/01/islamophobia/index.html (viewed 13 May 2009).
60. Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2004), 114.
61. Ibid., 210-11.
62. David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House 2003), 35.
63. Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, 178-9.
64. Aladdin Elaasar, Silent Victims: The Plight of Arab & Muslim Americans in Post 9/11 America (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse 2004), 80.
65. Mohamed Nimer, 'Muslims in American public life', in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (ed.), Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2002), 169-86 (178).
66. Sunaina Maira, 'Youth culture, citizenship and globalization: South Asian Muslim youth in the United States after September 11th', Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 24, no. 1, 2004, 221-35.
67. Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, 'Government initiatives after the September 11th attack on America', in Pyong Gap Min (ed.), Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 2005).
68. For more on how the 'no-fly' lists were created, see Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (Berkeley: University of California Press 2009), 182-4.
69. David E. Kaplan, 'Nuclear monitoring of Muslims done without search warrants', USNews.com (online), 22 December 2005, at www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/nest/051222nest.htm (viewed 14 May 2009).
70. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, 'Bush lets U.S. spy on callers without courts', New York Times, 16 December 2005, A1.
71. Makeba Hunter Scott, 'Non-Muslim men allege profiling at Giants game', The Record (Bergen Country, NJ), 12 November 2005, A1.
72. See Amnesty International, Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States (New York: Amnesty International USA 2004), available on the Amnesty International website at www.amnestyusa.org/racial_profiling/report/rp_report.pdf (viewed 14 May 2009).
73. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 'Questions and answers about the workplace rights of Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, and Sikhs under the Equal Employment Opportunity laws', 14 May 2002, available on the EEOC website at www.eeoc.gov/facts/backlash-employee.html (viewed 14 May 2009).
74. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, Hate Crimes Statistics, 2006 (2007), available on the FBI website at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2006/index.html (viewed 14 May 2009).
75. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, Hate Crimes Statistics, 2001-6, available on the FBI website at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm (14 May 2009).
76. See Hussein Ibish (ed.), Report on Hate Crimes and Discrimination against Arab Americans: The Post-September 11 Backlash (Washington, D.C.: American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee Research Institute 2003);
77. The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States, annual report compiled (since 1996) by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Washington, D.C., available on the CAIR website at www.cair.com/CivilRights/CivilRightsReports.aspx (viewed 14 May 2009).
78. Leonard, Muslims in the United States, esp. appendices.
79. Muslim American Society, 'TSA develops new procedure for screening religious headwear at US airports', 28 October 2007, available on the MAS website at www.masnet.org/takeaction.asp?id=4464 (viewed 14 May 2009).
80. Muslim Public Affairs Council, 'MPAC signs onto D.C. area civic engagement program', 24 October 2007, available on the MPAC website at www.mpac.org/article.php?id=550 (viewed 14 May 2009).
81. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 'Seeking information: domestic bombing', available on the FBI website at fbi.gov/wanted/seekinfo/odeh.htm (viewed 14 May 2009).
82. Joe Stork and Rene Theberge, 'Any Arab or others of a suspicious nature...', MERIP Reports, no. 14, 1974, 3-6, 13.
83. Marvasti and McKinney, Middle Eastern Lives in America, 111.
84. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1992);
85. Aihwa Ong, 'Cultural citizenship as subject-making: immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States', Current Anthropology, vol. 37, no. 5, 1996, 737-62;
86. Felix M. Padilla, Latino Ethnic Consciousness: The Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press 1985);
87. Eugeen E. Roosens, Creating Ethnicity: The Process of Ethnogenesis (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications 1989).
88. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 56.
89. Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 3.
90. Importantly, the role of African American Muslims in anti-Islamophobia coalitions remains largely unexamined. Despite that frequent omission, there are some excellent analyses of Middle Eastern American identity formation: Anita Famili, 'What about Middle Eastern American ethnic studies', 17 May 1997, abstract available on the University of California, Irvine Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program website at www.urop.uci.edu/symposium/past_symposia/1997/ablist3.html (viewed 14 May 2009);
91. Bruce B. Lawrence, New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life (New York: Columbia University Press 2002);
92. Marvasti and McKinney, Middle Eastern Lives in America; Tehranian, 'Selective racialization';;
93. Leti Volpp, 'The citizen and the terrorist,' UCLA Law Review, vol. 49, 2002, 1575-99.
94. G. Patricia de la Cruz and Angela Brittingham, The Arab Population: 2000: Census 2000 Brief (Washington D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau 2003), available on the Census Bureau website at www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-23.pdf (viewed 14 May 2009).
95. For details, see UCLA and CUNY's joint database project, Middle Eastern American Resources Online, at www.mearo.org (viewed 14 May 2009).
96. For details, see the commission's webpage at www.middleeastern.maryland.gov (viewed 14 May 2009).
97. Andrew Shryock, 'The moral analogies of race: Arab American identity, color politics, and the limits of racialized citizenship', in Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber (eds), Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 2008), 81-113.
98. Ibid., 111-12.
99. Ibid., 112.
100. Tehranian, 'Selective racialization', 2.
101. Debra Minkoff, 'From service provision to institutional advocacy: the shifting legitimacy of organizational forms', Social Forces, vol. 72, no. 4, 1994, 943-69;
102. Debra Minkoff, 'Bending with the wind: strategic change and adaptation by women's and racial minority organizations', American Journal of Sociology, vol. 104, no. 6, 1999, 1666-703.
103. More details on SALDEF's history are available on the organization's website at www.saldef.org (viewed 14 May 2009).
104. More details are available on the organization's website at www.mpac.org (viewed 14 May 2009). For additional information on MPAC's history,
105. see Leonard, Muslims in the United States, 18.
106. More details are available on the organization's website at www.karamah.org (viewed 14 May 2009).
107. Minkoff, 'Bending with the wind', 1673.