INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

A Euro-American Debate over Islam

“In France, it’s illegal for a Muslim woman to wear a head scarf at a public school. In the United States, it’s illegal for a clothing store to refuse to hire a Muslim woman because she wore a head scarf to her job interview.”¹ This is how a journalist at the New York Times recently summarized the differences between the French and American debates over Islam. In June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the discriminatory character of the decision by the clothing merchant Abercrombie & Fitch to not hire Samantha Elauf because she was wearing a head scarf. This ruling stood in sharp contrast to another one made in France a month earlier. In May 2015, a middle-school principal in the Ardennes twice sent home a student because he judged her skirt to be “too long” and claimed it constituted an “ostentatious symbol” (ostentatoire) of religious affiliation.² The contrast between these nearly simultaneous decisions is striking. However, is it correct to go from this juxtaposition to taking each case as exemplary of two presumably opposed “models” for the public management of Islam? My uneasiness with this sort of opposition was one of the main reasons that led me to write this book. Such attempts at classification seek not only to isolate distinct political forms but also to place them in a hierarchy. Thus one finds oppositions between “open” and “closed” secularisms, or else “authoritarian” and “liberal”; and Muslim communities are labeled “well integrated” or “excluded,” and the like. These approaches are seductive not only because they feed into what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” but also because they make increasingly complex societies more readable. However, by insisting only on the irreducibility of social structures, juridical forms, or political traditions, one overlooks considering the capacity for hybridization inherent to and enabled by the circulation of ideas, fears, and individuals.

A major feature of the evolution of public controversies over Islam in the United States and Europe since 2000 is the trend toward a standardization of anti-Muslim arguments and of the objects around which Western fears and fantasies crystalize. The differences when it comes to legal rules and habits about the separation of the religious and the political, the sociological particularities of Muslim populations, and colonial histories are well known. And yet one can notice the anti-Muslim narrative becoming more formulaic and narrow on both sides of the Atlantic since 2000. Themes such as Islamization in disadvantaged suburbs; the use of mosques as training camps for jihadists; the oppression of Muslim women by their brothers, husbands, or fathers; stealth jihad; and taqiyya are the standard talking points in the discourse of anti-Muslim groups in both the United States and Europe—a discourse that has contaminated the mainstream public debate everywhere.

THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH REACTIONS TO THE CHARLIE HEBDO ATTACK

The reactions provoked by the attacks against the headquarters of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket Hyper Casher on January 7–9, 2015, are a telling illustration of this process of synchronization and increasing interconnection between the debates over Islam and Muslims in Europe and the United States. Certainly, at first glance, the reactions were expressed in a different register in France and the United States. In France, the Charlie Hebdo attack was mostly presented as a cultural aggression against laïcité (France’s particular separation of church and state spheres that dates from 1905) and freedom of expression. French Muslims were publicly called on to collectively condemn the violent actions of the Kouachi brothers, Chérif and Saïd. With the exception of a few discordant voices—notably the researchers Olivier Roy, Didier Fassin, Farhad Khosrokhavar, Jean Baubérot, and François Burgat—the collective rhetoric was marked by a sense of duty and calls for unity. In America, responses were more moderate, perhaps on account of the geographical distance from the events and the cautionary effect of numerous cases of inept media bungling since 2001. With the exception of a few news anchors who evoked the supposed existence in Europe of lawless “no-go zones” occupied exclusively by Muslims, the news analysis tended to be more nuanced and carefully critical than in France.³ Whereas the French debate was saturated with dogmatic interpretations of laïcité and declarations of the “right” to blasphemy, in the United States the discussion was about responsibility, accountability, contextualization, and a moral obligation toward an economically disadvantaged category of the population. While condemning the attacks and repeating their attachment to the principal of free speech, several American commentators expressed doubts about the alleged national unity on the day (January 11) that multiple massive public demonstrations took place simultaneously in Paris and many large French cities. “We have been here before,” declared Adam Shatz in a blog of the London Review of Books on January 9, two days before the Sunday demonstrations.⁴ According to Shatz, the slogan “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie,” though it can also be read as “I follow Charlie”), which was spontaneously adopted and relayed mechanically by a large portion of the French public, intellectuals, and political class, reveals a nostalgia for the period immediately after the September 11 attacks when it was still possible to entertain illusions about a clear distinction between the good guys and the bad guys.⁵ The Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau condemned the brutal execution of his French colleagues but also raised a question about the social usefulness of satire when it is systematically targeting a disadvantaged social group. “Satire should punch up, not down,” he affirmed, while pointing out the difference between the right to offend and the obligation to offend.⁶ Anthony Faiola, reporting from France for the Washington Post on January 13, wrote of the uncomfortable feelings among French Muslims who were constantly being asked to apologize for a murder that they did not commit.⁷ Dalia Mogahed, a director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and a consultant to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, posted a declaration on her Facebook page beginning “JeSuisDalia” to denounce the propensity of many to condemn all French Muslims for an act committed by two individuals. “I am Dalia. I represent a community of exactly one. I answer for the crimes of exactly one person. I apologize for the actions of exactly one woman.”⁸ On the Daily Show for January 13, 2015, host Jon Stewart mocked the noticeable presence at the January 11 mass march of several heads of state famous for their lack of respect for free speech. In April 2015, six members of the PEN writer’s association opposed awarding a medal for “Courage and Freedom of Expression” to Charlie Hebdo.⁹ The novelist Peter Carey justified this position, denouncing “the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.”¹⁰ An open letter to the PEN directors, signed first by the six protesting authors and then by two hundred more writers, points out the difference between what is permitted by law and what is morally appropriate: “[T]here is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.”¹¹

THE OVERLAPPING DEBATES ON ISLAM IN THE UNITED STATES AND IN EUROPE

These divergent assessments of the reactions to the attacks on January 7–9, 2015, do not permit one to conclude that there exist two opposed models for understanding and managing Islam. As noted, there has been a standardization and increasing interconnection of the types of questions and forms of debate that are happening, even if they may give rise to differing responses. Specialists of religion in France have criticized for years the paradoxical process of a sanctification of the Republic and a sacralization of laïcité, but they start from premises that are different from those underscored by American analysts. For Olivier Roy, the French stigmatization of Muslims is a direct effect of the transformation of laïcité into religion-phobia more than the manifestation of postcolonial treatment: “I think today we are more in a state of hyper-laïcité than in an extension of the colonial set-up. This hyper-laïcité affects all religions, but more so Islam. It is more a refusal to take into consideration religion in the public space—it is a religion-phobia.”¹² American specialists often reproach their French colleagues for underestimating the continuity of state treatment of Islam even after the official end of colonialization as well as the process of racialization that is at work in the rejection of Muslims. The French reply to these criticisms by pointing out the American tendency to overestimate racial and postcolonial factors—a bias they see as linked to the history of America’s formation as a nation. It would be wise to avoid essentializing either position. A new generation of French researchers is making its mark through attentive examinations of the racial dimension behind the othering of Muslims.¹³ In America, social scientists such as Mayanthi Fernando and John Bowen have gone beyond the racialist aspects and shed light on the properly religion-phobic dimension of discrimination against Muslims in France.¹⁴ At any rate, it is clear that these quarrels between different academic chapels on either side of the Atlantic demonstrate the increasing overlap between discussions on Islam in Europe and the United States.

The back-and-forth discussion provoked by Michael Walzer’s January 2015 article published in the magazine Dissent, in which he accuses American intellectuals on the left of having improperly closed their eyes to the defects of Islam and Islamism, also illustrates this process of unification when it comes to the manner of debating Islam on both sides of the Atlantic.¹⁵ The denunciation of an alleged collusion between leftist intellectuals and Islamists has been routine practice in the French public debate since the late 1990s.¹⁶ It is therefore interesting to see the same debate reappear in the United States fifteen years later. To strengthen his criticism of the term “Islamophobia,” Walzer refers to the French author Pascal Bruckner.¹⁷ Instead of confirming the hypothesis of distinct models, this cross-cultural weaving of references and arguments in the debates on Islam in the United States and Europe gives rise to convergent lines of questioning. Disagreements over Islam that formerly were treated behind closed doors, as it were, within distinct national territories are increasingly cited and recited across different contexts, and these activities have real social and political consequences.

In short, the Charlie Hebdo affair is not just a French story treated intra muros. In its wake, questions were asked in the United States about the way Americans had discussed Islam since 2001 and about the limits that should or should not be imposed on the liberty to caricature a religion in the American context. The affair also gave the Islamophobic activist Pamela Geller the idea of organizing a caricature-the-Prophet contest in the town of Garland, Texas (near Dallas), that took place on May 4, 2015. The organization of this event provoked the anger of two extremists associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who ended up shooting at several people in the vicinity and were then shot dead. These acts of violence, in turn, served as the pretext for the organization of an anti-Muslim rally on May 30, 2015, mounted by right-wing motorcycle enthusiasts who defended free speech in front of a mosque in Phoenix, Arizona. One sees clearly how in only a few months, an attack and polemic that erupt in Paris trigger other attacks and polemics in several American cities. Emmanuel Todd’s contrarian book Qui est Charlie? (Who Is Charlie?) turns up in a review in the pages of the New Yorker.¹⁸ The extreme-right politician Marine Le Pen is granted space on the opinion pages of the New York Times after the attacks of January 2015.¹⁹ The same welcome is extended to the controversial novelist Michel Houellebecq ten months later after the attacks in November.²⁰ Going in the other direction, one may observe the Daily Show’s sketches about French prejudices against Islam, and France also expresses its indignation at the Islamophobic murder that took place in faraway Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

My book starts off from the observation that, despite the well-known differences in political traditions, constitutional setups, and sociodemographic characteristics between Europe and the United States, the polemics and policies concerning Islam are increasingly interdependent. In this regard, one could repeat the comment made by Nilüfer Göle, who notes that a public European space is being created in a negative, paradoxical way as a result of the standardization of polemical debates over Islam.²¹ In a way, the presence of Muslims in Europe and America contributes to giving coherence to an otherwise elusive Western public space. Positioning Islam as otherness allows one to create and give substance to a common public space, defined in a reactive manner by values and traditions presumed to be opposed to those of Islam.

Could it be, then, that the Western disputes over Islam are not, as is commonly believed, the direct result of certain legal traditions and particular sociological characteristics? My hypothesis is that the public controversies over Islam are not simply the latest manifestations of the contradictions and internal breakdowns of each “tradition” or “model” (in the United States, the contradiction between open secularism and persistent racism; in France, the contradiction between an ideology of equality and an intransigent and exclusive laïcité). The disputes over Islam in the Unites States and Europe reveal a more profound and transversal conflict within the majority of secular democracies—one that concerns the definition of the very meaning of the political community. The contemporary controversies over Islam expose fundamental misunderstandings about the social contract and democracy. What the disputes over mosques, wearing the veil, Sharia, and halal all put on display is the opposition between two distinct registers for the justification of the conditions for belonging to the political community. One of them, in conformity with the liberal philosophical tradition, insists on the normative dimension of constitutional rights that guarantee the equality of citizens. The other register, by insisting on a populist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, evokes another source of normativity, founded this time on the appropriateness of certain emotions and behaviors. Therefore, this book does not seek to conduct or present the results of a comprehensive or exhaustive sociological field study of American Muslims; its goal is to understand the sources of discord, the misunderstandings, and the rancor that surround the political definition of living together democratically when these conflicts crop up in controversies over Islam in the United States.

A FRENCH-TUNISIAN PERSPECTIVE

My analysis has of course been partly inspired by my knowledge of the French debates over Islam, but what is presented here is not just a “French” perspective on Islam in America. In France, there is a long-standing affection for analyzing American social, historical, and political life—from Alexis de Tocqueville to Thomas Piketty, from François Cusset to Justin Vaïsse.²² However, throughout the preparation of this book, I made it a point to bring in for questioning the tendency of both countries to caricature each other. This study is the result of many years spent in the United States—during my doctoral studies, which allowed me to do exchanges at Berkeley and Princeton; as a postdoc at Yale; and then during shorter stints since 2010 to do research in New York, Washington, D.C., and Tennessee. Each of these stays gave me the chance to further my research project as I conducted interviews and observed debates unfold day to day, but they also led me to discover new ways of thinking about the relation between religion and politics. It was very nourishing for me to have the chance to spend the 2004/2005 school year on the UC Berkeley campus, the same year that the media hurricane about banning the veil in public schools was in full force back in France. It was during that year that I discovered the work, still largely unknown in France, of thinkers such as Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood. Their critiques of liberalism and secularism altered and sharpened my perception of Western polemics over Islam and the stakes involved.²³ But during my years in the United States, I was also often surprised at the uncomprehending looks and even disappointment that I received from some of my interlocutors when I expressed my reluctance to view France as simply an Islamophobic and racist power whose policies toward Muslims had not changed one bit since colonial times.

My discomfort with the mania on both sides of the Atlantic to resort to drawing caricatures of those on the other side probably comes from the fact that my perception and interpretation of the world developed through my attachment to a small country with a Muslim-majority population and unknown to most Americans before 2011—Tunisia. This book is influenced, inevitably, by personal experiences in the place where I spent the first sixteen years of my life and to which I have remained close ever since. It is this insider/outsider status vis-à-vis my two countries of origin, France and Tunisia, that most likely explains my allergic reaction to essentialist categorizations. It may also be the source of my interest in the effects of mirroring, hybridity, and circulation—in other words, for the portion of freedom and creativity that individuals possess beyond and despite the weight of structures, traditions, and systems. In fact, these circulatory systems have existed for a very long time and have played a more important role than certain strict comparatists are generally willing to admit. It was a pleasant discovery during my research years, for example, to learn that one of the first instances of the diplomatic recognition of Islam by the United States occurred in 1805 under President Thomas Jefferson, who received at the White House Sidi Sulayman Mellimelli, the envoy of the bey of Tunis. Instead of serving dinner at 3:30 P.M., then the customary time, Jefferson asked that the meal be served “precisely at sunset” in order to respect the prescribed time for the interruption of fasting during Ramadan.²⁴ In August 2012, during an Iftar ceremony organized at the White House, President Barack Obama mentioned this historic event: “Thomas Jefferson once held a sunset dinner here with an envoy from Tunisia, perhaps the first Iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago.”²⁵

HYBRID ORIGINS AND IDENTITIES

This book may be situated in the tradition of “French” observers of American political life, but it is even more influenced by those analyses that examine the processes of weaving and hybridization of identities and forms of argumentation beyond the borders imposed by what are commonly referred to as “area studies.” This type of analysis has been developing in France since the 1990s, for example, in the work of Jocelyne Dakhlia, whose research aims to break up the essentialist categories of an alleged “Mediterranean world” or a “Muslim world.” Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, co-edited by Jocelyne Dakhlia and Bernard Vincent, brings together new contributions that encourage rethinking the history of the relation between Europe and the Muslim world in ways beyond the prism of fracture and conflict.²⁶ The goal is to reveal the “Islamic past of Europe” and the ancient history of “Muslim presences in Europe.” In the United States, a similar approach can be found in the research of the historians Denise Spellberg and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri.²⁷ Their work corrects the mistaken belief that the encounter between Islam and America is something recent, and instead analyzes this encounter not as a shock between two constituted bodies but as an open set of hybrid and ambivalent phenomena. The goal of this line of research is not to pacify the history of relations between Islam and the West, nor to deny the erratic character, often invisible and numerically limited as well, of the Islamic presence in Europe and America before the nineteenth century. These studies seek to reposition Islam by situating it within the interiority and intimacy of Western societies, which in turn are no longer viewed as unified and homogeneous integrating bodies. This epistemological postulate of a constitutively networked and co-extensive relation between Islam and Europe, or Islam and America, has been a major source of inspiration for this book. This study is not a historical investigation in the traditional sense but rather an offshoot of this type of problematization of the relations between identity, religion, and politics.

By defining Islam as an American religion, my analysis does not exactly follow the work of those interested in the process of the Americanization of Islam. Rather, it is inspired by recent publications that show one cannot think properly about certain fundamental ideals of liberal democracy and secular America independently of their relation, if only in theory, with Islam. Between the 1980s and the early years of this century, important studies were conducted about the waves of migration and the processes of integration of Muslims in America.²⁸ While making an essential contribution to the understanding of the diverse ways of practicing Islam in America, these studies are constructed on lines of questioning about “trajectories” and “stages” of integration, and the “compatibility” of Islam and America—as though the heterogeneity of these two objects were self-evident. Starting in the late 2000s, another current of thought emerged that begins from the inverse presupposition. The latter posits that the encounter between Islam and America is not the outcome of a slow teleology of integration. On the contrary, this thesis views the encounter as a point of departure that underlines the ambivalence, from the start, of American liberal-secular democracy and exposes what this democracy simultaneously engenders in both the most progressive direction (the principle of religious freedom) and the most inegalitarian direction (slavery and racism). Starting in the eighteenth century, Islam intervenes (albeit in a purely hypothetical form) in the debates concerning religious freedom. In the nineteenth century, the figure of the Muslim slave also plays an important role in the conflicts that oppose slaveholders and abolitionists. Spellberg has shown how, in the constitutional debates of the state of North Carolina, several Federalists opposed the introduction of a religious test for candidates to public office. She cites as evidence the words of William Lancaster, a delegate to the North Carolina Convention, who on July 30, 1788, makes the following declaration: “But let us remember that we form a government for millions not yet in existence…. In the course of four or five hundred years, I do not know how it will work. This is most certain, that Papists may occupy that chair, and Mahometans may take it. I see nothing against it.”²⁹ Dial forward to September 2015, when 29 percent of Americans (and 43 percent of Republicans) remain persuaded that President Obama is a Muslim and that Islam is a foreign body within America, and it’s clear that Spellberg’s book marks a major turning point when it comes to thinking about the relations between Islam and America. After Spellberg, the focus would no longer be on investigating the process that allows an alleged foreign body to be progressively absorbed or accepted by the American nation, or about reflecting on the efforts at harmonization between two heterogeneous entities. Following the new direction opened up by Spellberg’s research, as I do in my book, means not asking how Muslims become good Americans but asking how Americans come to take responsibility (or not) for this original, founding hypothesis that makes a place for Catholics, Jews, and Muslims in the social contract.

WHEN THE FRINGE BECOMES MAINSTREAM

Since the publication of this book in France in May 2013, American debates about Islam and Muslims have not let up. Whether via news outlets, blogs, and editorials or in other forums for discussing foreign and domestic policy, questions about the rights of Muslims and the acceptability of Islam are increasingly a part of everyday debates in the United States. The local battles over Sharia that I discuss in this book have continued since 2013.³⁰ State legislatures, notably in Texas, have continued to debate bills banning all reference to foreign law.³¹ Laws of this type have passed in North Carolina (August 2013) and Alabama (November 2014). In these two states, Muslims represent less than 1 percent of the population, and no troublesome legal conflict linked to Islamic law had occurred in either of them that would justify the need for such legislation.³² Thus legislation prohibiting foreign laws remains a solution to a nonexistent problem, just as the legal specialists of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) demonstrated in 2011.³³ The true purpose of these laws also remains the same—to reinforce the populist vision about the otherness and dangerousness of Islam. Muslim American organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and associations for the defense of civil rights continue on their side to resist these projects and to inform the public about what Islamic law is and about the harmful stigmatizing effects of the anti-Sharia bills. The pursuit of exclusion paradoxically creates a form of inclusion. The sociologist Mucahit Bilici observes that the anti-Sharia projects “negatively recognize Islam and include it in American law by trying to exclude it.”³⁴

Local controversies triggered by the opposition of residents in certain neighborhoods to a mosque construction project are still a regular occurrence. The motives invoked to oppose are always questions of zoning and the risk that increased traffic on Fridays would disrupt the tranquility of the neighborhood. In some cases, the arrival of Christian Arabs fleeing civil war and persecution has contributed to the transplantation of interreligious Middle Eastern conflicts to small-town America and resulted in improvised alliances of convenience between Arab Christians and anti-Muslim Americans. In September 2015, Chaldean Christians from Iraq, who make up 5 percent of the 130,000 inhabitants of Sterling Heights, Michigan, launched a virulent campaign against a local mosque construction project. To justify their opposition to what they referred to as the “mega-mosque,” these Iraqis recycled the well-worn arguments about the risk that it would serve as a training camp for terrorists and that it would lead to the collapse of real-estate prices in the neighborhood.³⁵ Despite the counterarguments of Muslims, the city’s planning commission rejected the mosque proposal. Mayor Michael Taylor claimed that the decision was based on “objective land use criteria and not emotional feelings tied to religious beliefs.”³⁶

Disputes over mosques also reveal internal differences within Muslim communities that turn on conflicts between generations, differing theological visions, and conflicting attitudes toward a democratic organization of the mosque. In May 2015, a significant conflict erupted, again in Michigan, when the imam Hassan al-Qazwini announced that he was leaving the Dearborn Islamic Center of America in protest over the opaque and authoritarian management of its board of directors. This imam, who had led prayers at this Shiite mosque for eighteen years, departed along with the members of the Young Muslim Association who had complained about the mosque’s insufficient inclusion of young people and women.³⁷ The simplistic media coverage of the mosque controversies tends to obscure the profound differences that exist within Muslim communities. The divergent views are the understandable expression of the wide diversity of origins, beliefs, practices, and daily lives of American Muslims. Yet these disagreements are often resolved in a discreet, semiclandestine manner. Muslims, sensing they are constantly being watched and under suspicion as accomplices to terrorism, compensate by projecting the image of a harmonious and peaceful community. The pressure exerted by the Manichaean thrust of the media debate inhibits the public expression and development of the diversity inherent to Muslim American communities.³⁸ This pressure requires that they position themselves first along the bipolar axis Muslim versus anti-Muslims, and in so doing they reinforce, despite themselves, the polarization of a debate from which they would most likely prefer to extricate themselves.

ISIS: NEW FORMS OF AN OLD DEBATE

Since 2013, debates have been marked by the arrival on the media and political stage of the phenomenon known as the Islamic State, or ISIS. The mediatization of the brutality orchestrated by ISIS has considerably slowed the meager gains in the public conversation over Islam, which until then was making some progress at conveying the complexity and variety of Muslim societies. The most passion-driven reactions to the attacks of 2001 had begun to yield, albeit with difficulty, to somewhat richer and more nuanced discussions, thanks notably to the expert public testimony produced by some think tanks and by some media outlets. The reality of a long and costly war in Iraq had moderated enthusiasm for the traditional hawkish discourse of a good U.S.-led coalition opposing an axis of evil. The “Arab Spring” uprisings, especially in Tunisia and Egypt, allowed Americans to discover an uncharacteristic image of the Muslim world—the sight of young people demonstrating, independently of any religious references, against dictatorship and corruption. Since 2013, the meticulous care that ISIS brings to the staging and dissemination of their horror shows has been a major blow to the efforts of all those in the West and in Muslim-majority societies who have been trying to initiate a more factual and nuanced discussion. Talking points organized around a “clash of civilizations,” the alleged intrinsic violence of Islam, and its incompatibility with Western values have returned to center stage and have once again been energetically exploited by populist politicians and Islamophobic activists.

If the crimes committed by ISIS appear to present unheard-of levels of savagery and media savvy, the intellectual and political analysis of these events has done little beyond recycle well-worn lines of reasoning. An article by Graeme Wood, for example, “What ISIS Really Wants,” rehashed the old two-sided debate between an explanation based on ideology (Islam explains everything) and an explanation based on social and geopolitical structures (Islam explains nothing).³⁹ As Lisa Stampnitzky has remarkably demonstrated, this either/or approach to the problem contributes to the same type of depoliticization of analysis as that produced by the studies of terrorism that circulated widely starting around 2000.⁴⁰ This is what leads anthropologist Darryl Li to affirm that “discussions of jihad today are like a secularized form of demonology. They stem from a place of horror that shuts down serious thinking about politics…to reinforce this sense of radical cataclysmic difference.”⁴¹ Li regrets that by systematically linking the matter of jihadist violence to that of Islam, the analysis collapses into a closed discussion around the single question of authenticity. One may note that most discussions about ISIS turn on the question of determining if its terror strategy is fundamentally Islamic or, on the contrary, a disfiguration and departure from what would be “true” Islam.⁴² However, by obsessing over whether the enemy is truly or falsely Islamic, the properly political dimension of the ISIS phenomenon ends up being neglected. The habit of stating the problem of terrorism and jihad exclusively in terms of more or less Islamic radicalization impedes thinking about the question of radicalness itself. By approaching the phenomenon as a matter of radicalization, understood as a denaturing of authentic Islam or a deviance from an acceptable civic posture, one bars oneself from thinking about the dimensions of political and autonomous choice that are proper to the jihadist engagement. In contrast, Li calls for “taking radicalism seriously as a political orientation, whether its idiom is Islamic, communist or anarchist.”⁴³ For the most part, however, discussions of ISIS have unfortunately reinforced the tendency that’s been around since roughly 2005, and which I discuss in this book—the normative routinization of the most provocative and irrational arguments about Islam.

THE UNHINGED VERBIAGE AGAINST ISLAM IN THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

The 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, which was already in full swing in 2015 and frequently marked by the provocative outbursts of a loudmouth Republican candidate, businessman Donald J. Trump, offers a good illustration of this normalization process. In November 2015, Trump stated his support for the idea of an increased surveillance of Muslims.⁴⁴ A month later, he proposed prohibiting all Muslims from entering the country.⁴⁵ During a town-hall meeting in the fall of 2015, he noticeably failed to correct the remarks of a participant who affirmed that President Obama is a Muslim, saying: “We have a problem in this country, it’s called Muslims. Our current president is one.”⁴⁶ The claim by another Republican candidate, Ben Carson, that a Muslim could never be elected president also caused a stir. At a press conference on September 21, 2015, Muneer Awad, the director of CAIR, reminded his audience that article 6 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”⁴⁷

Some Republican candidates did denounce these moves to stigmatize Muslims. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) criticized Trump’s pronouncements and underlined their un-American character. This difference in attitude toward Muslims is consistent with the account given in this book about the divergent opinions within the Republican Party—ranging from personalities such as former representative Newt Gingrich who are obsessed with the Islamization of America to others such as Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) who warn about the danger of a new McCarthyism. This presidential campaign confirms that since 2012, Islam has been a decisive issue in the ongoing battle within the Republican Party between those who, like Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, call for the party’s strategy and discourse to move back to the center toward the preoccupations of young people, women, and minorities and those who support the party’s rightward shift.⁴⁸ But despite the opposition voiced by some important figures within the Republican Party, the repeated provocative statements by the most extreme candidates have a harmful effect. As I show in chapter 3, on the anti-Sharia movements, the effect consists in successfully nudging the default setting of public debate on Islam further and further to the right. One notes that certain political figures who in the past had distinguished themselves by their refusal to yield to anti-Muslim paranoia did not speak out clearly against the pronouncements of candidates such as Trump. One example is New Jersey governor and Republican candidate Chris Christie, who, in 2010, had firmly denounced those opposed to the construction project of the Islamic center near New York City’s Ground Zero. He also expressed his disagreement with the anti-Sharia movement, calling them “crazies,” and publicly supported Judge Sohail Mohammed, the first Muslim American to be named a superior court judge. In 2015, Christie’s statements against welcoming all Syrian refugees and his hesitation about denouncing Trump’s outbursts were deeply disappointing to Muslims in New Jersey. “He has abandoned us and has moved on,” declared Mohammed Hameeduddin, the Muslim American mayor of the city of Teaneck. “He’s going more toward the position of the national Republican primary voter.”⁴⁹

The divergence noted in this book between Republicans and Democrats continued to be in evidence during the campaigning in 2015. All the Democratic candidates quickly denounced the Islamophobic statements of their Republican adversaries. During a campaign stop at the University of Minnesota on December 16, 2015, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton strongly criticized Trump’s proposal to bar all Muslims from entering the country. The same day Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) met with leaders at a mosque in Washington, D.C., to reaffirm the full citizenship and belonging of American Muslims. In his State of the Union address on January 13, 2016, President Obama also repeated that “it’s just wrong” to stigmatize citizens based on their Muslim faith.⁵⁰ On February 3, 2016, President Obama, during his first official visit to a mosque, also quoted Thomas Jefferson and mentioned that Jefferson owned a Quran.⁵¹

However, despite the obvious gulf that separates the two parties, the unhinged and widely circulating extreme discourse against Muslims limits the practical effectiveness of civil counterstatements by Democrats and Muslims. Moreover, since all the time and space allotted to them is devoted to these urgent counter measures, there comes to be only a single standard reply: No, Muslims are not terrorists, and they have the same rights as other American citizens. There is no time remaining to broach themes such as the diversity of American Muslims, their relations with other religions, or the multiple forms of their engagement in the civic and political life where they live. My study, which focuses on the period 2008 to 2013, comes to a conclusion similar to that of Christopher Bail, whose study of the period 2001 to 2008 appeared in 2015.⁵² Having conducted a quantitative analysis of the influence strategies of 120 organizations engaged in the debate over Islam, Bail shows the fringe organizations have an exceptional capacity to influence the terms of the debate and captivate the attention of journalists. If the American conversation on Islam is sliding ever rightward, it is not because the discourse of extremist anti-Muslim organizations is reflecting or in harmony with supposed Islamophobic predispositions of the American public. Rather, it is because the resources of these organizations, when it comes to media access and sheer money, give them unprecedented power to manufacture and naturalize hate speech and hateful feelings.

FROM WORDS TO DEEDS

The increasingly unhinged character of public discourse creates a climate that favors the passage from words to deeds. The number of assaults against Muslims and attacks against mosques increased considerably during the fall of 2015 after the attacks in Paris. Gunshots were fired outside a mosque in Connecticut, and threats were made against an Islamic center in St. Petersburg, Florida, among other incidents. On Facebook, there have been calls to murder Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, where one-third of the 96,000 residents are Arab Americans. Soiled pages of the Quran have been thrown at a mosque in Pflugerville, Texas. Pigs’ heads are regularly placed at the entrance to mosques, such as in Philadelphia, and there have been attempts at arson—for example, at the mosque in Coachella, California.⁵³

The murder of three students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in February 2015 is without a doubt the Islamophobic act that most upset the American people and international opinion. What the Chapel Hill tragedy illustrates is not simply an arbitrary and reprehensible execution of three young Muslims by an Islamophobic individual. The arguably more salient feature is that it stages three exemplary American citizens opposed by an individual who perceives himself and is perceived by others as basically lost and a loser. All the testimonies and commentaries compiled after this triple murder entirely agreed that Deah Barakat; his young wife, Yusor Abu-Salha; and Yusor’s sister, Razan Abu-Salha, were model students, actively engaged in the associative life of their community, part of a large circle of friends, advancing toward successful professional careers, and proud of their American identity. In May 2014, Yusor Abu-Salha had given an interview posted on the site of the organization StoryCorps, an oral-history project, in which she expressed her strong attachment to her country:

Growing up in America has been such a blessing…. Although in some ways I do stand out, such as the hijab I wear on my head, the head covering, there are still so many ways that I feel so embedded in the fabric that is, you know, our culture. And that’s the beautiful thing here, is that it doesn’t matter where you come from. There’s so many different people from so many different places, of different backgrounds and religions—but here we’re all one, one culture.⁵⁴

Her murderer, Craig Hicks, on the contrary, represents the archetype of the small-time white guy, down and out, unemployed, in and out of marriage several times, and a self-described libertarian partisan of gun-ownership rights who would spend his evenings alone, spewing hate about other religions on social media. Contrary to what was affirmed by some commentators, one cannot deny the Islamophobic dimension of Hicks’s act and view it as simply excessive anger resulting from a disagreement over a parking space. And yet Hicks’s act is also more than the violent expression of theological-political discord. It is an affective attitude—examined in these pages—whose features are rage, resentment, and a consciousness of finding oneself falling behind or being downgraded. This attitude can lead to a reactionary acting out via a sacralization of territory—it might be land in one’s neighborhood where a mosque risks going up or something as small as a parking spot. This study seeks to demonstrate that Islamophobic words and deeds in America express, above all, the rage and resentment of part of the population that considers itself bumped downward and reacts to this experience of lost status and wounded honor by seeing certain territory and the U.S. Constitution as holy.

THE AFFIRMATION OF THE LANGUAGE OF RECOGNITION

All the same, it’s important not to get stuck on this somber overview because alongside and despite the unleashing of words and deeds of hate, the recognition of Muslims on political, legal, and cultural levels is growing stronger. This is the effect of the matching efforts of the tenacious engagement of Muslim Americans and the support—if not always widespread, at least more audible—of a portion of media personalities and politicians, civil rights organizations, and Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant leaders. The banalization of hate speech has, in turn, revived a discourse of equality and pluralism. The virulence of certain hateful acts and utterances has had the positive effect of forcing a certain number of journalists, politicians, and association presidents to come out of their silent shells and articulate a clear position. It is perhaps this that most distinguishes the specifically American character of the debate on Islam from its European counterparts. In Europe, and notably in France, the discourse in favor of equality and against discrimination toward Muslims, restrained as it mostly is to certain academic circles, has become almost inaudible to the larger public. Populist rhetoric, laïcité preaching, and identity politics have gained hegemonic status and together have turned Islam and Muslims into the principal enemy of the nations of Europe.⁵⁵ Unlike in the United States, these discourses in Europe cut across partisan and ideological lines. The ramped-up focus on laïcité in France can be found coming from leaders on the left and the right. And it’s the Socialist Party, borrowing a tactic usually associated with the playbook of the Far Right, that proposed the highly controversial measure of punishing those convicted of terrorism by stripping them of their nationality—a measure interpreted as largely symbolic but that would have the effect of establishing an illegitimate distinction between citizens of older “French” stock and citizens of Arab origin.⁵⁶ Thus, despite the striking standardization of their lines of reasoning, the American public debate over Islam is different from the French debate on one important point: in the United States, the virulence and absurdity of Islamophobic utterances by certain political figures limits but does not completely inhibit the development of a battle of ideas. The firmness and clarity with which two leading American newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have condemned Islamophobia in news pieces and editorials on an almost daily basis since 2015 has no equivalent in the mainstream European print media.⁵⁷ In France, every article or utterance denouncing Islamophobia is almost systematically paired with someone’s countervailing statements affirming that blasphemy and offending Islam are civil rights and that Muslims lack a sense of humor and critical distance. In the United States, however, in reaction to the unleashing of verbal violence that has become more and more widespread, one can witness the clear affirmation of a discourse that takes up the work of historians to show that the Founding Fathers had already envisioned the full compatibility of Islam with American citizenship. At the same time that in France sociologists are being scolded by Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who accuses them of wanting to “excuse” terrorism as they try to explain its causes, in the U.S. historians’ arguments are increasingly being used in the media battle against Islamophobia.⁵⁸

In reply to the literalist and fundamentalist interpretations of history and the Constitution that populists close to the Tea Party regularly deploy, journalists, academics, and other specialists advance another reading of the history of the country’s founding principles and of religious freedom. In September 2015, after the Republican candidate Ben Carson stated he did not believe a Muslim was fit to become U.S. president, Denise Spellberg responded with an article titled “Ben Carson Would Fail U.S. History.”⁵⁹ Similarly, it was history and the Constitution’s basic principles that were turned to when underlining the absurdity of the arrest of fourteen-year-old Ahmed Mohamed on September 14, 2015—the day he walked to school with a clock that he had built by himself but that one of his professors mistook for a bomb. In her reply to this incident, Spellberg recalls that such profiling of Muslims is contrary to the principle of religious freedom as defined by Thomas Jefferson, who coincidentally had also once designed a clock:

Using the Polygraph to write five years before his death, Jefferson, our first “infidel” president, championed the rights of Muslim citizens, writing that he intended his Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom “to comprehend within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination,” wherein he wrote these immortal words: “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions.”⁶⁰

Along the same lines, several nonspecialized media outlets have run stories analyzing the ancient presence of Muslims in New York.⁶¹ In the New York Times, for example, David Dunlap retraced the ancient history of a Muslim quarter known as “little Syria,” and he reminds readers that, for New Yorkers, Muslims have long been their “neighbors” and not foreigners.⁶²

THE FORMATTING OF PUBLIC STRATEGIES OF SELF-PRESENTATION

This book demonstrates how, paradoxically, through arguments that borrow from the themes and forms of European disputes, Islam as built in the United States becomes an American religion in a double sense—first through the strategies of recognition adopted by Muslims and second through the formatting of Islam as a faith. The mode of public presentation of self as practiced by Muslims is formatted with strategies of affirmation and recognition that have been used by other religious and cultural minorities. This mode is defined entirely by the legal-political norms and expectations of the American public. It is as citizens that Muslims intervene in the numerous controversies described in this book. It is in the name of respect for citizen equality and for the First Amendment, not with verses from the Quran, that they claim their rights. The content of their arguments and the style of their strategy, both inspired by the example of civil rights organizations and other associations that defend religious minorities, show that it’s out of the materials of American politics, law, and the culture generally that Muslims are building the norms of their discourse and their public actions. In political and legal battles, their audience and interlocutor is the American public, not some hypothetical globalized ummah. In other words, the myths of a double allegiance, of a fifth column, of foreign infiltration, of clever disguises, or of a project to subvert the Constitution are discredited day after day by the actual practices and demands of the majority of Muslims. The idea of Islam’s fundamental foreignness to America is equally rejected by civil rights organizations, legal defense councils, think tanks, political leaders, researchers, local associations, and ordinary individuals who have mobilized since 2001 to defend Muslim rights. As a result, Muslims have won big symbolic victories in the courts. Some months before the Supreme Court’s decision concerning the treatment of Samantha Elauf by Abercrombie & Fitch, an appeals court recognized in January 2015 the validity of a complaint by a group of imams, activists, and student protestors who denounced the illegality of a surveillance program targeting Muslims developed by the New York Police Department.⁶³

But the courts and other forums for public debate are not the only battlefields where Muslim Americans have made significant gains. They are also winning recognition for themselves in artistic spheres, sports, and the fashion world. Since roughly 2000, Muslim comedians have gone after stereotypes by following in the footsteps of Jewish and Mormon minorities who have sought to reverse the sting of social stigma through humor. Some of these artists have become true cultural entrepreneurs and have successfully exported their brand into mainstream culture. Troupes such Allah Made Me Funny, Axis of Evil, and the comedy documentary The Muslims Are Coming (2013) ridicule the constant equation of Islam with terrorism. Mucahit Bilici has pointed out that airports—the ultimate “no joke zone”—have become the privileged setting where these Muslim humorists like to play out their sketches. The goal of this humor is to underscore the common humanity shared by Muslims and other citizens beyond political and religious differences. “Ethnic comedy is unfamiliarity packaged in a box of familiarity, a glimpse of charisma before it is routinized,” notes Bilici.⁶⁴ The same goal is pursued in the web series “Halal in the Family,” broadcast in September 2015 on the site Funny or Die. This miniseries, created by producer Miles Kahn and Aasif Mandvi, an actor and comic reporter on the Daily Show, presents scenes of a Muslim family living in a typically American suburban house. The four episodes in the series treat with humor the daily situations that Muslim Americans have to go through, such as dealing with the permanent mistrust and suspicion of the neighbors, the teasing of the kids at school, and diplomatic relations with other minorities.⁶⁵ The representation in visual media of Islam and Muslims has slowly improved with the appearance of positive or harmless Muslim characters in series such as Quantico, The Brink, and Community. Orientalist stereotypes are still very common, as can be seen in the series Homeland, but this aesthetic reductionism is also called out more often and more quickly than before.⁶⁶ During shooting for the series, artists who had been recruited to write graffiti in Arabic on walls of the set cleverly exposed the Islamophobic undercurrent of the series by writing slogans such as “Homeland is a joke.”⁶⁷

Muslims have also made their mark in the world of fashion, comics, and sports. The African American former basketball star and convert to Islam Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Lew Alcindor) has regularly spoken out against Islamophobia. G. Willow Wilson invented a young adolescent unveiled female character for Marvel comics who faces the same problems confronted by any American teenager. The humor usually derives from mocking common prejudices and insisting on the common humanity of all Muslims, yet other artistic forms are exploring with more nuance the complexity of the modes of identification among American Muslims. The play Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar, which ran in New York between 2012 and 2015, explores the internal contradictions of Amir Kapour (played first by Aasif Mandvi and later by Hari Dhillon), a successful architect who lives in a very beautiful New York apartment with his wife Emily, a non-Muslim and artist. The play opens with a dinner scene between Amir and his wife and another couple, an American Jew, Isaac, and his wife, Jory, an African American. The well-appointed, modernist apartment and the menu (fennel salad and roast pork) illustrate the perfect integration of these two multicultural couples and their relaxed attitudes toward religious dogmas. And yet the play evolves in such a way that the internal contradictions of all the characters, especially Amir, are put into dramatic relief. Through the story of these two couples, Ayad Akhtar seeks to evoke a more universal condition than the one of Muslim Americans. In an interview he gave to the New York Times in October 2014, he explained that he saw the “Muslim-American experience…as a repository of more eternal American themes of rupture and renewal.”⁶⁸

ISLAM AS CIVIL RELIGION

It can also be said that Islam is an American religion in a second sense. Islam is developing as a religion in a way that is in conformity with the normative definition of what a religion is in the American tradition—defined by a double ideal of post-Protestant secularism and civil religion.⁶⁹ Islam is successfully attaining recognition in the American imaginary and public space but at the price of a normalization of the field of interventions and the types of life it makes possible. To be American, Islam must become simply a faith, a form of spirituality that is soluble within civil religion. In the American post-Protestant context, the condition of inclusion for many religions within the civil religion is the moderate neutralization of a religion into faith or spirituality. The acceptability of Islam and Muslims in the eyes of the American public operates—just as was the case for other minorities such as the Jews and the Mormons in the past—via a standardization of Islam as faith. This process of self-conformity to a norm was very visible during the Sharia controversies. To fight against the state legislatures that proposed laws banning all reference to Islamic law, Muslim associations and leaders concentrated their efforts on articulating one clear message: Sharia is not a legal code but a code of ethics that serves to guide the spiritual formation of the individual. This strategy made sense in the context of general suspicion about the loyalty of Muslims who were being accused of allegiance to a parallel legal code in competition with the U.S. Constitution. This message notwithstanding, it remains that Islamic law, even if there is a great deal of internal diversity, possesses a strong normative and legal dimension, and therefore it cannot be easily reduced to a simple ethical or spiritual guide. To affirm that Sharia is a spiritual ethics is to engage in a process of self-conformity to the collective norms of what is defined as acceptable religiosity within a secular context. Thus when explaining his path to conversion, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar explains why it was that he did not join the Nation of Islam: “Although I was greatly influenced by Malcolm X, a leader in the Nation of Islam, I chose not to join because I wanted to focus more on the spiritual rather than political aspects.”⁷⁰

This distinction of the object “religion” into two subcategories—one, inoffensive, that is about interiority, faith, and spirituality; the other, potentially dangerous, that broaches the public expression of political and legal demands—did not get started with debates on Islam. Numerous researchers, from Talal Asad to Courtney Bender, have shown that American secularism and pluralism are not neutral concepts with respect to each religion.⁷¹ Rosemary Hicks underlines that these concepts “carry the imprint of Protestant traditions and thus privilege specific (sometimes secularized) Protestant practices and understandings of religion instead of creating an even space in which various groups interact.”⁷² In the same perspective, my book shows that in the numerous controversies over mosques, Sharia, and terrorism, the strategy of Muslim Americans to gain acceptance has been to insist on the spiritual, internal dimension of Islam, thus contributing to a reaffirmation of the normative distinction between an acceptable and a dangerous religiosity. Whether through humor in stand-up comedy and sitcoms, or through interreligious dialogue initiatives, Muslim Americans wish to get across two arguments: “We are citizens with the same rights as you,” and “We are human beings just like you because we have a faith that is equivalent to yours”—and this second message is even more important than the first. Invoking the recognition of a humanity common to all individuals and the equivalence of all faiths leads to the depoliticization of the speech of Muslim Americans and a notable reduction in the power for criticism and dissensus that this speech could potentially represent. To be acceptable, Islam must be rebuilt as a “modern” civil religion—in other words, as above all a type of faith or spirituality. The visions of the world suggested by diverse possible interpretations of Islamic theology or law are, in principle, discarded as elements troubling to the American civil religion or even considered as dangerous or anti-American. The study by Bilici shows how the public discourse of the leading Muslim organizations is founded on a strategy of resignification of Islam in two phases. First, Muslims “reposition their faith from Muslim to Abrahamic and from Abrahamic to American civil religion.”⁷³ By participating in ecumenical initiatives or by mocking stereotypes, Muslims seek to free Islam from the position of alterity into which a large portion of the public places it: “Islam becomes a ‘religion’ in neighborly contact with other ‘religions,’ primarily Christianity and Judaism. Nearness establishes the equivalence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism as ‘religions.’”⁷⁴ But this strategy of inclusion and integration contributes to a dilution of Islam into the myth of the American civil religion: “The language of ‘religion’ gives way to that of ‘faith,’ which makes Muslimness a part of the unity of American civil religion.”⁷⁵

This study of American controversies over Islam since 2008 thus reveals a double process of formatting: first, that of anti-Muslim arguments on both sides of the Atlantic, and second, that of Islam as a faith. Through this analysis, my book asks about the ever-increasing fragility of the liberal argument on which rests the defense of Muslim rights. The participants in anti-mosque or anti-Sharia demonstrations affirm not so much their opposition to a liberal discourse based on equality of citizens’ rights and religious freedom but rather the nonpertinence of this discourse. They do not deny that Muslims have rights. They simply declare their upset feelings at the fact that Muslims have the nerve to want to exercise their rights when, to them, it’s not appropriate to do so: “It’s not about rights; it’s about what is right,” the demonstrators will say. Anti-Muslim words and deeds, therefore, reveal much more than a coherent anti-liberal or anti-egalitarian ideology. They are signs of an affective disposition characterized by the visceral feeling of having been offended, betrayed, dispossessed—and by a need to have this wound recognized. This type of public claim that entails the disqualification of the liberal discourse of rights, here judged inadequate for grasping and responding to the specificity of certain collective feelings, is not only to be found at anti-Muslim demonstrations. It is the same type of affect that mobilized Yale University students in the fall of 2015. Shortly before Halloween, a professor circulated an e-mail in which she called into question the administration’s instructions to students asking them not to wear costumes that might offend minorities. The professor, Erika Christakis, took the side of free speech and defended the capacity of students to decide for themselves about the appropriateness of wearing this or that costume. Her letter, in turn, unleashed widespread protest in which students denounced its inappropriate and offensive character that they saw as disrespectful and insensitive to the reality of racial discrimination on campuses.⁷⁶ Even if this campus affair and the controversies over Islam are very different, one finds in both the same argument—“it’s not about rights but about what is right”—and the same call to defend a certain territory, whether a plot of land in the case of the mosque controversies or a “safe space” in the case of the Yale students and their campus life. The recurrence of this type of claim, which can be mobilized for reactionary or progressive agendas, leads to wondering about the growing precariousness of the liberal norm in struggles for equality.

Already fragile, these norms must not become disqualified, since it is thanks to them that Muslim Americans have succeeded in winning numerous legal battles in the courts. By closely examining controversies over Islam, this book intends to expose the politically structuring character of this opposition between a liberal-legal norm and an affective norm. The theoretical analysis of this opposition extends beyond this book’s goals. What this study does underscore, however, is the potential, both inclusive and depoliticizing, of each normative register of action. To invoke affective feelings is to propose a ritualist vision of the community, one founded on a mimicry of feelings and ways of life. Certainly, placing the struggle on the legal plain of claims for rights leads to the real integration of Muslims; however, this inclusion entails that Islam must conform to the norms of what counts as acceptable religiousness within a given legal and political tradition. In these two understandings of the political community, what is excluded, or at least strongly retrained, is the possibility for disagreement, for difference, and therefore of the political.