INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
5. “Nous sommes tous américains” (We Are All Americans) [editorial],
Le Monde, September 13, 2001.
9. The six members are Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, and Taiye Selasi.
13. Abdellali Hajjat and Marwan Mohammed,
Islamophobie: Comment les élites françaises fabriquent le “problème musulman,” Cahiers libres (Paris: La Découverte, 2013); Houda Asal, “Islamophobie: La fabrique d’un nouveau concept, État des lieux de la recherche,”
Sociologie 5, no. 1 (2014),
http://sociologie.revues.org/2185.
14. Mayanthi Fernando,
The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); John Bowen,
Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).
16. A virulent wave of critiques against “
islamo-gauchisme” was triggered by the publication of Vincent Geisser’s
La nouvelle islamophobie (Paris: La Découverte, 2003). Polemical articles on this topic have been published in right-wing magazines such as
Causeur and
Riposte Laïque. For an academic discussion of the French political science approach to Islamism and post-Islamism, see the landmark debate organized by the journal
Esprit, August 2001,
http://www.esprit.presse.fr/archive/review/detail.php?code=2001_8. For a more recent critique of the Left’s discourse on Islamism, see Jean Birnbaum,
Un silence religieux: La gauche face au djihadisme (Paris: Seuil, 2016).
21. Nilüfer Göle,
Musulmans au quotidien: Une enquête européenne sur les controverses autour de l’islam (Paris: La Découverte, 2015).
22. François Cusset,
French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze et Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (Paris: La Découverte, 2005); Justin Vaïsse,
Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
23. On the reception of the work of Saba Mahmood in France, see Nadia Marzouki, “La réception française de Saba Mahmood et de l’asadisme,”
Tracés, no. 15 (2015): 33–51, doi:10.4000/traces.6256.
26. Jocelyne Dakhlia and Bernard Vincent, eds.,
Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, vol. 1,
Une intégration invisible (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011).
27. Denise Spellberg,
Thomas Jefferson’s Quran: Islam and the Founders (New York: Knopf, 2013); Kambiz GhaneaBassiri,
A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
28. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad,
Not Quite American: The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004); Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith, eds.,
Muslim Communities in North America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Sulayman S. Nyang,
Islam in the United States of America (Chicago: ABC International Group, 1999).
29. William Lancaster, “Speech in the Ratifying Convention,” July 30, 1788, Center for the Study of the American Constitution,
http://csac.history.wisc.edu/nc_lancaster.pdf; Denise Spellberg, “Could a Muslim Be President? An Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Debate,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 4 (2006): 485.
32.
Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, “2010 U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Study,”
http://rcms2010.org. An updated survey of the Muslim population in the United States, undertaken by the Pew Research Center, projects that the number of American Muslims will double by 2050, growing from 1 to 2 percent of the general U.S. population. See Besheer Mohamed, “A New Estimate of the U.S. Muslim Population,” January 8, 2016, Pew Research Center,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/06/a-new-estimate-of-the-u-s-muslim-population/.
34. Mucahit Bilici,
Finding Mecca in America: How Islam Is Becoming an American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 9.
35. Steve Friess, “Proposed Mosque in Detroit Suburb Draws Strong Opposition,” September 8, 2015, Al Jazeera America,
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/9/8/proposed-mosque-in-detroit-suburb-draws-sharp-opposition.html; Niraj Warikoo, “Proposed Mosque in Sterling Heights Stirs Opposition,”
Detroit Free Press, September 10, 2015,
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/macomb/2015/09/09/proposed-mosque-sterling-heights-stirs-opposition/71885024/.
38. For an in-depth study of the internal debates of American Muslim communities and their ambivalent modes of identification to America or to an imagined global
ummah, see Zareena Grewal,
Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
40. Lisa Stampnitzky,
Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
43. Li, “Jihadism Anti-Primer.”
44. When, on November 20, 2015, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether he endorsed the idea of constituting a “database” to track Muslims in the country, the Republican candidate answered positively, albeit elusively: “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases” (quoted in Lauren Carroll, “In Context: Donald Trump’s Comments on a Database of American Muslims,” November 24, 2015, PolitiFact,
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/nov/24/donald-trumps-comments-database-american-muslims/; and in Vaughn Hillyard, “Donald Trump’s Plan for a Muslim Database Draws Comparison to Nazi Germany,” November 20, 2015, NBC News,
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-says-he-would-certainly-implement-muslim-database-n466716).
45. Ed Pilkington, “Donald Trump: Ban All Muslims Entering US,”
Guardian, December 7, 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/07/donald-trump-ban-all-muslims-entering-us-san-bernardino-shooting; Max Boot, “The GOP Makes Radical Islam’s Case,”
Commentary, October 2, 2015,
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/conservatives-republicans/the-gop-makes-radical-islams-case/; Jacob Heilbrunn, “After 2012, the GOP Set Out to Be More Inclusive: What Happened?”
Politico, November 21, 2015,
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/gop-islam-refugees-213383; Ed Pilkington, Ryan Felton, and Nicky Woolf, “‘Beyond Terrifying’: Muslim Americans Shocked by Trump and Carson Quotes,”
Guardian, November 20, 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/20/muslim-americans-outrage-donald-trump-ben-carson.
46. Amy Davidson, “Trump and the Man in the T-Shirt,”
New Yorker, September 18, 2015,
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/trump-and-the-man-in-the-t-shirt; Theodore Schleifer, “Trump Doesn’t Challenge Anti-Muslim Questioner at Event,” September 18, 2015, CNN,
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/17/politics/donald-trump-obama-muslim-new-hampshire/.
48. E. J. Dionne,
Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016).
52. Christopher Bail,
Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).
54. Mussarut Jabeen and Yusor Abu-Salha, StoryCorps,
Morning Edition, NPR, February 13, 2015,
https://storycorps.org/listen/yusor-abu-salha-and-mussarut-jabeen/; Bill Chappell, “‘We’re All One,’ Chapel Hill Shooting Victim Said in StoryCorps Talk,” February 12, 2015, NPR,
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/12/385714242/were-all-one-chapel-hill-shooting-victim-said-in-storycorps-talk.
55. Nadia Marzouki, Duncan McDonnell, and Olivier Roy, eds.,
Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
57. However, a study prepared by a consulting firm based in Toronto, 416 Lab, shows that the
New York Times’s depiction of Islam in the past twenty-five years has been more negative than the portraying of alcohol, cocaine, or cancer. See Dorgham Abusalim, “Study: ‘NYT’ Portrays Islam More Negatively Than Alcohol, Cancer, and Cocaine,” March 5, 2016, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs,
http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/study-nyt-portrays-islam-more-negatively-than-alcohol-cancer-and-cocaine/. On the condemnation of Islamaphobia, see Elahe Izadi, “Obama, Thomas Jefferson and the Fascinating History of Founding Fathers Defending Muslim Rights,”
Washington Post, February 3, 2015,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/11/how-thomas-jefferson-and-other-founding-fathers-defended-muslim-rights/?postshare=711449961904599&tid=ss_tw-bottom; and David W. Dunlap, “Record of Mosque Hints at Muslims’ Long History in New York,”
New York Times, December 9, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/nyregion/mosque-shows-that-muslims-have-long-been-a-part-of-new-york.html?smid=tw-share.
62. Dunlap, “Record of Mosque Hints at Muslims’ Long History in New York.”
64. Bilici,
Finding Mecca in America, 192.
65. The template for this kind of “monster” humor would be the cartoons and movies of the Addams Family.
69. Robert N. Bellah “Civil Religion in America,” in “Religion in America,” special issue,
Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–2. For a critical discussion of the concept of civil religion, see, among others, “Reconsidering Civil Religion,” July 30, 2010,
The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (blog), Social Science Research Council,
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/category/exchanges/religion-american-politics/reconsidering-civil-religion/; and Robert Wuthnow, “In America, All Religions Are True,” in
American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 128–63.
71. Talal Asad,
Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen, eds.,
After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
72. Rosemary Hicks, “Religious Pluralism, Secularism and Interfaith Endeavors,” in
The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, ed. Julianne Hammer and Omid Safi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 158.
73. Bilici,
Finding Mecca in America, 201.
76. Conor Friedersdorf, “The New Intolerance of Student Activism,”
Atlantic, November 9, 2015,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/; Isaac Stanley-Becker, “A Confrontation over Race at Yale: Hundreds of Students Demand Answers from the School’s First Black Dean,”
Washington Post, November 5, 2015,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/05/a-confrontation-over-race-at-yale-hundreds-of-students-demand-answers-from-the-schools-first-black-dean/.
3. On the liberal argument, see Cécile Laborde,
Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Andrew March,
Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). On the republican argument, see Patrick Weil, “Lifting the Veil,”
French Politics, Culture & Society 22, no. 3 (2004): 142. On the postcolonial argument, see Joan Wallach Scott,
The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
4. Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: Harper, 2015); Rémi Brague,
On the God of the Christians: And on One or Two Others (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013).
5. Olivier Roy,
Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Patrick Haenni,
L’Islam de marché: L’autre révolution conservatrice (Paris: Seuil, 2005); Nilüfer Göle,
Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe (Paris: Galaade, 2005).
1. MUSLIM AMERICANS
2. For a complete presentation and exhaustive analysis of the history of relations between religions and politics in the United States, see, for example, Denis Lacorne,
De la religion en Amérique: Essai d’histoire politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007); Franck Lambert,
The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Robert Wuthnow,
America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
4. Among Muslim immigrants, 41 percent come from the Middle East or North Africa, 26 percent from Southeast Asia, 11 percent from Sub-Saharan Africa, 7 percent from Europe, 5 percent from Iran, and 9 percent from other countries.
5. There is a higher rate of naturalization among Muslims. The average naturalization rate across all immigrant groups is 47 percent.
8. Studies of this type attribute a normative value to criteria of ideological moderation, participation, and conformity to mainstream practices without genuinely questioning these concepts. They also tend not to state explicitly what criteria are used to describe a given form of religiousness as moderate or dogmatic. Thus the Gallup study classifies Muslims into three categories: the isolated, the tolerant, and the fundamentalist. None of these recent studies inquires into the significance of the category of religion.
11. Pew Research Center,
Muslim Americans: No Sign of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2011), 6.
12. For the historian David W. Bebbington, the four main features of Evangelical Protestantism are the importance of conversion, the focus on the Bible, the centrality of the crucifixion, and active engagement, as discussed in
Evangelicism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2–17.
13. Sébastien Fath,
Dieu bénisse l’Amérique: La religion de la Maison Blanche (Paris: Seuil), 89. Fath, a specialist on Evangelical Protestantism, defines fundamentalism as “an orthodox reaction to the progressive liberalization of Protestant theology at the end of the nineteenth century…. [It] particularly defends the infallibility of the Bible, Millennialism, and separatism” (
Militants de la Bible aux États-Unis: Évangéliques et fondamentalistes du Sud [Paris: Autrement, 2004], 202). See also Michael D. Lindsay,
Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
14. Evangelicals’ support for Israel and, consequently, their opposition to a number of Muslim countries also have a theological basis. Fundamentalists subscribe to the millennial doctrine that states that the re-creation of Israel is the precondition for the return of Christ. See Fath,
Dieu bénisse l’Amérique, 96.
15. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri,
A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 20.
16. Cyrus Griffin, “The Unfortunate Moor,”
Natchez Southern Galaxy, December 13, 1827, in
African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook, ed. Allan D. Austin (New York: Garland, 1984), 135, cited in GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America, 20.
17.
Freedom’s Journal of New York City, June 20, 1828, in
African Muslims in Antebellum America, ed. Austin, 157, cited in GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America, 28.
18. In
France, nineteenth-century thinkers, military officers, and colonial officials adhering to Auguste Comte’s philosophy argued that Islam was theologically superior to other religions because it is, according to them, more rational and less metaphysical than others and therefore closer to the positivist philosophy. They opposed Ernest Renan’s racist theories in “Islamism and science.” They included people such as Charles Mismer and Christian Cherfils, a French deputy who converted to Islam. On the history of orientalism and admiration for Islam in France, see Maxime Rodinson,
La fascination de l’Islam (Paris: La Découverte, 2003); and Sadek Sellam,
La France et ses musulmans: Un siècle de politique musulmane, 1895–2005 (Paris: Fayard, 2006).
19. George E. Post, “Arabic-Speaking Negro Mohammedans in Africa,”
African Repository, May 1869, 129–33, cited in GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America, 52.
20. GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America, 30.
21. James Freeman Clarke,
Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology (Boston: Osgood, 1871), 18.
23. Only a select few African American ministers in attendance attempted to criticize the triumphalism of the Parliament of Religions, one example being Bishop Benjamin Arnett of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
24. Edward Wilmot Blyden,
Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1887), 10.
25. Gilles Kepel,
À l’ouest d’Allah (Paris: Seuil, 1997).
26. GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America, 219.
27. Yusuf Nuruddin, “African-American Muslims and the Question of Identity, Between Tradition Islam African Heritage and the American Way,” in
Muslims on the Americanization Path?, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 215–62. See also Aminah Beverly McCloud,
African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995); Richard Brent Turner,
Islam in the African-American Experience, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Ernest Allen Jr., “Identity and Destiny, the Formative Views of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam,” in
Muslims on the Americanization Path?, ed. Haddad and Esposito, 163–214; Sohail Daulatzai,
Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); and Robert Dannin,
Black Pilgrimage to Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also Sherman A. Jackson,
Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Martha F. Lee,
The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 1988); and C. Eric Lincoln,
The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).
29. Opposed to this thesis, Lawrence Mamiya argues that although Elijah Muhammad, the NOI’s founder, first addressed lower-class blacks, he turned his attention very quickly to try to attract middle-class members, in “From Black Muslims to Bilalian: The Evolution of a Movement,”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 21, no. 2 (1982): 138–52. His son, Warith Deen Muhammad, a Republican, was well liked in middle-class African American communities, whereas Louis Farrakhan, who took over direction of the NOI in 1981, aimed to represent the lower classes.
30. GhaneaBassiri,
History of Islam in America, 141.
32. Angel Rabasa, Cheryl Bernard, Lowell H. Schwartz, and Peter Sickle,
Building Moderate Muslim Networks (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Center for Middle East Public Policy, 2007). For a detailed analysis of this approach, see Nadia Marzouki, “De l’endiguement à l’engagement: Le discours des think tanks américains sur l’islam depuis 2001,”
Archives de sciences sociales des religions 155, no. 3 (2001): 21–39.
33. Angel M. Rabasa, Cheryl Bernard, Peter Chalk, C. Christine Fair, Theodore Karasik, Rollie Lal, Ian Lesser, and David Thaler,
The Muslim World After 9/11 (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, Project Air Force, 2004),
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND_MG246.pdf.
34. Jean-Marie Donégani,
La liberté de choisir: Pluralisme religieux et pluralisme politique dans le catholicisme français contemporain (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1993), 40. Donégani distinguishes between
intransigeantisme and
intégralisme.
35. See, for example, Juan Cole,
Engaging the Muslim World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Emile Nakhlé,
Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’
s Relations with the Muslim World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
37. Samuel J. Rascoff, “Establishing Official Islam? The Law and Strategy of Counter-Radicalization,”
Stanford Law Review 64, no. 1 (2012): 125–90.
38. Scott Thompson, “House of Wisdom or a House of Cards? Why Teaching Islam in U.S. Foreign Detention Facilities Violates the Establishment Clause,”
Nebraska Law Review 88, no. 2 (2009): 344n.29, cited in Rascoff, “Establishing Official Islam?,” 139.
41.
The first attempt by Muslim Americans to unite and defend their civil and political rights dates from the early 1950s. The Federation of Islamic Associations of the United States and Canada was created in 1954 by Abdullah Igram. The organization seeks especially to unite Muslim immigrants of Lebanese origin and does not encourage its members to get involved in civic life. The Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) was created in 1963 in Urbana, Illinois. Identifying its mission as in line with the reformist project of thinkers such as Sayid Abul Ala Mawdudi and Sayid Qutb, the MSA’s principal aim is to help students arriving from Muslim countries in their daily affairs. Quite quickly, however, the MSA expanded into preaching activities (
da’wa) and established several professional organizations, notably the Islamic Medical Association, the Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers, and the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. See Gutbi Mahdi Ahmed, “Muslim Organizations in the U.S.” in
The Muslims of America, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 11–25.
42. The Muslim Public Affairs Council was founded in 1988 with three missions: defend the civil rights of Muslims, foster dialogue between American Muslims and the rest of society, and encourage the participation of Muslims in political affairs. To further consolidate a Muslim American identity, MPAC works at building alliances with non-Muslim associations and developing cordial relations with the media and members of Congress. The objective of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, founded in 1994, is to defend the image, interests, and rights of Muslims. It ensures that the civil liberties of Muslims are respected, makes efforts to disseminate a positive image of Islam and of Muslims to the American public, and aspires to give more weight, unity, and empowerment to the Muslim community. In its choice of language and mode of operation, CAIR resembles other civil rights organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, more than it resembles a religious organization. Nevertheless, CAIR also claims to want to contribute to improving society and the political life of Americans through the positive lessons of Muslim values.
43. The Ohio Department of Public Safety published “A Guide to Arabic and Islamic Culture,” which explains that jihad “does not signify holy war, as many would have it, but rather a fight to achieve personal betterment.” This guide also indicates that “if extremists kill in the name of
jihad, ordinary Muslims consider such actions as deviating completely from the true religion of Islam.” The federal government also created new posts, such as the State Department’s special representative for Muslim communities, a post occupied by Farah Pandith from 2009 to 2014. See Rascoff, “Establishing Official Islam?,” 153–60.
45. The complete First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
48. Ibid. See also Winnifred Fallers Sullivan,
The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
50.
Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of the State of Oregon, et al., Petitioners, v. Alfred L. Smith. Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of the State of Oregon, et al., Petitioners, v. Galen W. Black, 494 U.S 872 (1990), Legal Information Institute,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/494/872. It was in reaction to this more restrictive interpretation of religious freedom that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed in 1993—a law that reestablishes the criterion of a compelling state interest.
51.
Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984), Justia,
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/465/668/case.html. With this expression, the Court was referring to the Lemon criterion defined in
Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). In this case, which concerned the government’s financing of the salaries of teachers at who were employed at religious schools but who were teaching nonreligious subjects, the Court established the Lemon test to define the circumstances under which a law may violate the establishment clause. The Lemon test stipulates three conditions to guarantee respect of the establishment clause: “First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion.”
52.
Lynch v. Donnelly, from the concurring opinion of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who sided with Justice Warren Burger (author of the opinion of the Court) along with Justices Byron White, Lewis F. Powell Jr., and William Rehnquist.
53. Ibid., from the dissenting opinion of Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens.
54. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, “The Religious Expert in American Courts,”
Archives de sciences sociales des religions 155, no. 3 (2011): 41–60,
https://assr.revues.org/23305.
55. Sullivan,
Impossibility of Religious Freedom, 8.
60. Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir,
Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, 2011), 9.
63.
U.S. Department of Justice,
Report on the Tenth Anniversary of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, September 22, 2010.
64. Stephen Sheehi,
Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2011).
65. Deepa Kumar,
Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
66. Martha Nussbaum,
New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
68. Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, dir.
New Muslim Cool (Specific Pictures, 2009).
69. The show was shocking precisely for its soporific banality. Thus the Florida Family Association attempted to prove that with such ordinary images of Muslims, the television channel was complicit in a clandestine project to spread Muslim law, or Sharia, across the land by sedating the usual wide-awake vigilance of the average American.
2. THE MOSQUE CONTROVERSIES
1. Akbar Ahmed,
Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2010); Akel Ismail Kahera,
Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender, and Aesthetics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
2. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (
http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/documents/rluipa.php) replaces an earlier law from 1993, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1997 in the case
City of Boerne v. Flores. The RFRA required the state to show more flexibility when it came to demands made in the name of religious freedom. As such, it was found to violate the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment, and its application in the states was terminated.
6. For a detailed discussion, see Nadia Marzouki, “Offense morale contre liberté religieuse, la controverse de Ground Zero,”
Revue française de science politique 61, no. 5 (2011): 839–65.
7. The name of Geller’s blog alludes to the best-selling book of the conservative, libertarian philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand,
Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).
8. The English Defense League is a British right-wing movement whose leading mission is fighting against “Islamic radicalism.” See Matthew Taylor, “The English Defense League: Inside the Violent World of Britain’s New Far Right,”
Guardian, May 28, 2010.
9. Robert Spencer,
The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (Washington, D.C.: Regenery, 2006). The book is banned in many Muslim countries, notably Pakistan.
10. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer,
The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’
s War on America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
11. Robert Spencer, “Why There Should Be No Mosques at Ground Zero,”
Jihad Watch, May 24, 2010.
12. New York City is divided into five administrative units, or boroughs: Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Each borough is directed by a borough president whose role is to inform and advise the mayor about the borough’s problems and its budget. Each borough also has community boards, whose members are appointed by the borough president to make recommendations to government agencies about problems in their neighborhoods. There are fifty-nine community boards spread over New York City.
13. Mosab Hassan Yousef,
Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices (New York: Tyndale House, 2010).
14. The Landmarks Preservation Commission is charged with applying the law that relates to the preservation of historic buildings and monuments. The New York commission was created in 1965.
15. Andrew Cuomo is quoted in the
New York Post on July 5, 2010, as saying, “America’s very foundation is diversity and tolerance, and this is why we should let this project go forward, even though it’s understandable that it makes certain people uncomfortable and is offensive to some.”
16. Andrew Cuomo was elected governor of New York in November 2010.
17. Carl Paladino was a registered Democrat from 1974 to 2005 and then became known for his conservative positions, similar to those of former president Ronald Reagan.
18. Paladino called for changing New York’s state constitution, which in his view had wrongfully transformed New York into a “European-style welfare state.” He notably favored the elimination of the Medicaid program. See Anemona Hartocollis, “Paterson’s No. 2 Calls for Medicaid Overhaul,”
New York Times, September 19, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/nyregion/20medicaid.html?_r=2&ref=nyregion.
19. The power of eminent domain allows the government to seize property and expropriate a citizen of his private property without his consent in order to build on it something of general public good.
25. Landmarks Preservation Commission, public hearing.
27. Mateo Tassig-Rubbo, “Sacred Property: Searching for Value in the Rubble of 9/11,” in
After Secular Law, ed. Winnifred F. Sullivan, Robert A. Yelle, and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press/Stanford Law Books, 2011), 322–41.
28. Glenn A. Fine to Robert S. Mueller III, “Investigation Regarding Removal of a Tiffany Globe from the Fresh Kills Recovery Site” (memorandum), 11, December 17, 2003, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General,
https://oig.justice.gov/special/0403a/final.pdf.
29. Taussig-Rubbo, “Sacred Property,” 326.
30. David Silverman, “Atheists File Suit to Block WTC Memorial ‘Cross,’” July 25, 2011, American Atheists,
http://www.atheists.org.
32. Landmarks Preservation Commission, public hearing.
34. Geneviève Zubrzycki,
The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
36. Created in 1985, the Dove World Outreach Center is a charismatic evangelical church. Functioning almost like a sect, the church has been directed in an authoritarian way by Pastor Terry Jones and his wife, Sylvia, since 2001. Since its founding, the church has been noted for its stands against abortion and homosexuality, and for its Islamophobic declarations.
37.
Governor Phil Bredesen signed the bill into law (House Bill 1598) on July 1, 2009. The law adopts the criteria of the state’s superior compelling interest concerning the free exercise of religion. When someone claims that his right to religious freedom is substantially burdened by a law, it is up to the state to demonstrate that its superior compelling interest is in jeopardy. This law was a new local reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in
City of Boerne v. Flores (521 U.S. 507 [1997]), which held that a similar law—the Religious Freedom Restauration Act of 1993—was unconstitutional.
38. Quoted in Christian Grantham, “Residents Express Concerns over New Islamic Community Center,”
Murfreesboro (Tenn.) Post, June 18, 2010.
39. Tennessee Open Meetings Act, Tennessee Code § 8-44-101.
40. What follows is largely taken from information and quotations that appeared in this newspaper.
47. Bob Smietana, “Anti-Muslim Crusaders Make Millions Spreading Fear,”
Tennessean (Nashville), October 24, 2010.
48. Derek Prince was born in India to British parents. He studied philosophy, notably with Wittgenstein, and humanities at Cambridge University. He was sent to Palestine for his military service from 1942 to 1945. Some years after the war, he immigrated to the United States with his Danish wife, Lydia Christensen, and founded the Derek Prince Ministries.
49. Sébastien Fath,
Dieu XXL: La révolution des “megachurches” (Paris: Autrement, 2008). See also Anne C. Loveland and Otis B. Wheeler,
From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003).
52. The Tennessee Freedom Coalition is a nonprofit organization with 501c3 status whose stated mission is to educate the public; militate in favor of lower taxes and against Social Security, abortion, and Islamic radicalization; and advocate for a better balance between the population and the federal government. It presents itself as a grassroots movement of determined individuals who want to restore freedom and America’s “traditional values.”
57. “The litigation against the mosque’s opening finally came to an end on June 2, 2014 when a bid by opponents to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of the United States was rebuffed, with the court declining to take the case” (“Islamic Center of Murfreesboro,” Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Center_of_Murfreesboro).
58. Osama Bahloul, interview with the author, Murfreesboro, October 26, 2011; Lena Sbenaty, interview with the author, October 27, 2011, Murfreesboro.
59. NewGround was founded in 2006 with the aim of creating dialogue between the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Progressive Jewish Alliance. Its goal is to improve relations between Jews and Muslims through various intercommunity activities, internships, study abroad programs, and conferences.
60. CAC presents itself as a grassroots organization of citizens whose aim is to fight against the infiltration of the Islamic threat in suburban and small town America. CAC’s three leading causes are opposing the construction of mosques, the wearing of Islamic religious symbols in schools, and Sharia. Mano Bakh is one of the most active members within this organization.
62. CAC has close ties with the Center for Security Policy, the think tank of the neoconservative Frank Gaffney, a leader of the anti-Sharia movement.
63. Quoted in Cuevas, “Controversy over Building New Mosques in the US.”
64. Paul W. Kahn,
Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 7.
65. For Kahn, this opposition is what defines the different political visions in Europe and America:
European constitutional courts, for example, have no trouble declaring legislation unconstitutional. They do so, however, in the name of individual rights, not in the name of the popular sovereign. The American Supreme Court founds its claim for legitimacy on its capacity to speak in the voice of a transhistorical popular sovereign. The method of legal reasoning for European courts, on the other hand, is “proportionality” review, which is just another name for balancing the various interests—including rights—that are at stake in a situation. (Ibid., 13)
66.
Thomas M. Scanlon,
Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
67. Patricia Paperman, “L’absence d’émotion comme offense,” in
La Couleur des pensées: Sentiments, émotions, intentions, ed. Patricia Paper and Ruwen Ogien (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1995), 175–97.
68. Even though they may cite, for example, a study conducted by researchers at Duke University that shows regular attendance at a mosque lowers the risk of a person becoming radicalized. See David Schanzer, Charles Kurzman, and Ebrahim Moosa,
Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans (Durham, N.C.: Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, January 6, 2010).
69. Judith Butler,
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).
3. THE ANTI-SHARIA MOVEMENT
1. Newt Gingrich, “America at Risk: The War with No Name” (speech delivered at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., July 21, 2010).
Citizens United is an organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizens’ control. Through a combination of education, advocacy, and grass roots organization, Citizens United seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security. Citizens United’s goal is to restore the founding fathers’ vision of a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens. (
http://www.citizensunited.org/who-we-are.aspx)
3. The documentary especially deplores the fact that the expression “global war on terror” was replaced by “Overseas Contingency Operation,” and that the words “Islamic extremism” and “jihad” were removed from strategic documents about national security. See Scott Wilson and Al Kamen, “Global War on Terror Is Given New Name,”
Washington Post, March 25, 2009.
8.
The academic committee is composed uniquely of university professors who wish to educate a new generation of students devoted to the philosophy of “peace through strength” and prepare them for careers in defense and homeland security. The creation of this committee was required, according to the CSP, because of the general incapacity of the current American university system “to contribute to the war effort.”
9. Former Muslims United, a small group created in 2009, is very active in antimosque activities, especially educating public opinion about Islamic intolerance and about the duplicity of so-called moderate Muslims. The group is represented by media personalities such as Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat, and Ibn Warraq.
10. The study, originally published by the CSP on September 22, 2010, in Washington, is now available in an expanded 370-page version on Amazon, which is linked to by the CSP affiliated website
http://shariahthethreat.org/.
11. Andrew McCarthy was in charge of the trial against Omar Abdel Rahman in 1995 and is the author of numerous polemical books opposed to Islam, the American Left, and the Obama administration. See, for example,
The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (New York: Encounter Books, 2010), and
How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda (New York: Encounter Books, 2010).
12. Center for Security Policy,
Shariah: The Threat to America: An Exercise in Competitive Analysis (Washington, D.C.: Center for Security Policy, 2010), 120.
19. Elliott, “Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement.”
22. Asifa Quraishi-Landes, “Rumors of the Sharia Threat Are Greatly Exaggerated: What American Judges Really Do with Islamic Family Law in Their Courtrooms,”
New York Law School Law Review 57, no. 2 (2012–2013): 244–57. See also Nadia Marzouki, “Les débats sur le droit islamique aux États-Unis et au Canada, entre égalité formelle et pluralisme,” in
La Charia aujourd’hui, ed. Baudouin Dupret (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), 280–94.
23. Quoted in Elliott, “Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement.”
24. State Question 755, House Joint Resolution 1056, HJR 1056, Section C, drafted May 25, 2010, and submitted to a vote on November 2, 2010.
25.
Quoted in James C. McKinley Jr., “Oklahoma Surprise: Islam as an Election Issue,”
New York Times, November 14, 2010. Note how Reynolds slides from Judeo-Christian principles to Christian values, thus omitting any reference to Judaism in the second part of the sentence.
26. United States Constitution, Article VI, clause 2.
31. This federal appeals court hears cases that cover a district comprising six states: Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming.
36. Jill Schachner Chanen, “Anti-Sharia Bills Under Review,”
Abajournal, May 1, 2011.
41. In June 2011, the ACLU and MPAC organized “A Solution in Search of a Problem,” a day of debate about the anti-Sharia movement,
43. Quoted in Elliott, “Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement.”
52. The Christian Legal Centre is a lobby composed of lawyers whose aim is to advocate in favor of a Christian point of view in British law and politics.
53. Patrick Haenni and Stépane Lathion,
Les minarets de la discorde: Éclairages sur un débat suisse et européen (Fribourg, Switzerland: Religioscope, 2009).
54. Michael Kimmelmann, “When Fear Turns Graphic,”
New York Times, January 14, 2010.
55. Janet Hook and Tom Hamburger, “New York Mosque Debate Splits GOP,”
Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2010.
59.
Muneer Awad v. Paul Ziriax, Oklahoma State Board of Elections, et al., United States District Court, Western District of Oklahoma, 11–12 (my emphasis).
60. On this point, see the detailed study by the research team Religare: Alidadi Katayoun, Marie-Claire Foblets, and Jogchum Vrielink,
A Test of Faith? Religious Diversity and Accommodation in the European Workplace (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012).
4. THE FACE OF ANTI-MUSLIM POPULISM
1. Michael Kazin,
The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).
7. Hofstadter,
Paranoid Style in American Politics, 21. See also David Brion Davis, ed.,
The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971).
8. Quoted in Kambiz GhaneaBassiri,
A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 104. See also Denis Lacorne,
De la religion en Amérique: Essai d’histoire politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 106; and James Freeman Clark,
Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14674/14674-h/14674-h.htm.
9. Norman Cohn,
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), quoted in Hofstadter,
Paranoid Style in American Politics, 38.
10. Hofstadter,
Paranoid Style in American Politics, 37.
13. For a comparison of the discourse of European and American populist movements about religion and Islam, see Nadia Marzouki, Duncan McDonnell, and Olivier Roy, eds.,
Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also Hanz-Georg Betz, “Culture, Identity and the Question of Islam: The Nativist Agenda of the Radical Right,” in
The Far Right in Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Peter Davies and Paul Jackson (Oxford: Greenwood World Press, 2008), 114–15; and Hans-Georg Betz and Susi Meret, “Revisiting Lepanto: The Political Mobilization Against Islam in Contemporary Western Europe,”
Patterns of Prejudice 43, nos. 3–4 (2009): 313–34. For a detailed account of the links among different Far Right anti-Muslim figures and movements, see Institute of Race Relations, “Breivik: The Conspiracy Theory and the Oslo Massacre,”
Briefing Paper, no. 5, September 2011,
http://www.irr.org.uk/pdf2/ERA_BriefingPaper5.pdf. On the Eurabia paradigm, see Matt Carr, “You Are Now Entering Eurabia,”
Race and Culture 48, no. 1 (2006): 1–22.
14. Sindre Bangstaad,
Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (London: Zed Books, 2014); Liz Fekete, “The Muslim Conspiracy Theory and the Oslo Massacre,”
Race & Class 53, no. 3 (2012): 30–47.
15. Alan Lake is the pseudonym of the English millionaire Alan Ayling, a central figure in European anti-Muslim movements and a leading financial backer of the English Defense League. See Nigel Copsey, “The English Defense League: Challenging Our Country and our Values of Social Inclusion, Fairness, and Equality,”
Faith Matters, October 2010,
http://faith-matters.org/images/stories/fm-reports/english-defense-league-report.pdf.
16.
Die Freiheit, founded in 2010 in Berlin, seeks to restrict immigration and fights against the Islamization of Europe. Its founder’s Islamophobic positions led him to be expelled from Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party.
17. “Dhimmitude” comes from the Arabic word
dhimmi, which refers to indigenous Jews and Christians governed and protected by Islamic law.
18. Quoted in Institute of Race Relations, “Breivik,” 3.
19. Quoted in Lesley Hazleton, “Sleaze,”
Accidental Theologist (blog), May 27, 2011.
21. Patrick Haenni and Stéphane Lathion, eds.,
Les minarets de la discorde: Éclairages sur un débat suisse et européen (Fribourg, Switzerland: Religioscope, 2009).
22. Secularism implies an accepted secularization that is welcomed, even decided on, by a group, community, or society. On the place of Islam in European discussions of feminism and religion, see Schirin Amir-Moazami, Christine M. Jacobsen, and Maleiha Malik, “Islam and Gender in Europe: Subjectivities, Politics and Piety,”
Feminist Review 98, no. 1 (2011): 1–8; Schirin Amir-Moazami, “Muslim Challenges to the Secular Consensus: A German Case Study,”
Journal of Contemporary European Studies 13, no. 3 (2005): 267–86; and Jane Freedman, “Women, Islam and Rights in Europe: Beyond a Universalist/Culturalist Dichotomy,”
Review of International Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 29–44.
23. Olivier Roy,
Secularism Confronts Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Jean Baubérot,
La laïcité falsifiée (Paris: La Découverte, 2012); Valérie Amiraux, “L’affaire du foulard en France: Retour sur une affaire qui n’en est pas encore une,”
Sociologie et sociétés 41, no. 2 (2009): 273–98; François Lorcerie, ed.,
La politisation du voile en France, en Europe et dans le monde arabe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005).
24. Tom Robbins, “NYPD Cops’ Training Included an Anti-Muslim Horror Flick,”
Village Voice, January 19, 2012,
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/nypd-cops-training-included-an-anti-muslim-horror-flick-6429945. For an analysis of this controversy, see Jeremy F. Walton, “America’s Muslim Anxiety: Lessons from
The Third Jihad,”
Revealer, February 2, 2012.
26. Mitt Romney made these remarks during a Republican Party primary campaign stop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 3, 2012.
27. Rick Santorum, interview on
Meet the Press, NBC, February 26, 2012.
28. Rick Santorum, interview on
This Week, ABC, February 26, 2012.
30. Barbara Miller Solomon,
Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England’s Traditions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 32–42.
31.
Quoted in Michael W. Hughey, “Americanism and Its Discontents: Protestantism, Nativism, and Political Heresy in America,”
International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (1992): 544.
33. Kai T. Erikson,
Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Prentice Hall, 2004).
38. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson,
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Joseph E. Lowndes,
From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009); and John M. O’Hara and Michelle Malkin,
A New American Tea Party: The Counterrevolution Against Bailouts, Handouts, Reckless Spending, and More Taxes (New York: Wiley, 2010).
39.
Skocpol and Williamson,
Tea Party, 56.
42. According to Skocpol and Williamson, “Overall, the Tea Party does not manifest this classic pattern of federated activity in which local groups elect higher-level leaders…. National organizers involved in the Tea Party are not elected or accountable” (Ibid., 98).
44. Even if the twin themes of reducing taxes and the size of government are central to the Republican Party, they are pursued more or less ruthlessly in different contexts. For certain key figures within the party, such as John Boehner, former Minority Leader (2007–2011) and Speaker (2011–2015) of the House of Representatives, government ought to conserve a certain number of prerogatives and should not be reduced in its functions as drastically as the Koch brothers would wish.
45. Adam Bonica, “Introducing the 112th Congress,”
Ideological Cartography, November 5, 2010. See also E. J. Dionne,
Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2016).
46. Jill Lepore,
The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’
s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 15.
47. Skocpol and Williamson,
Tea Party, 50.
48. Lepore,
Whites of Their Eyes, 137.
49. Glenn Beck,
Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine (New York: Mercury Radio Arts/Threshold Editions, 2009).
50. Lepore,
Whites of Their Eyes, 147.
51. Skocpol and Williamson,
Tea Party, 198.
53. Skocpol and Williamson,
Tea Party, 183.
54. Beck,
Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, 4–5.
57. Tom Mullen
A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America (Apollo Beach, Fla.: Mullen, 2013).
5. FORCING THE FIRST AMENDMENT
2. Fawaz Gerges,
America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3. See, for example, Michael L. Ross, “How Do Natural Resources Influence Civil War: Evidence from Thirteen Cases,”
International Organization 58, no. 1 (2004): 35–67.
4. Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds.,
Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
12. Robert W. Hefner and Krishna Kumar,
Summary Assessment of the Islam and Civil Society Program in Indonesia: Promoting Democracy and Pluralism in the Muslim World, February 2006, 2, United States Agency for International Development,
http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pdacg325.pdf.
22.
Reid v. Covert (354 U.S. 1 [1957]) concerned the conviction by a military tribunal of Clarice Covert, who was on trial for having murdered her husband in the United Kingdom. An accord existed at the time between the United States and the United Kingdom that stipulated that American military courts had the sole right to conduct trials for crimes committed by American soldiers stationed in the United Kingdom. Judge John Harlan stated that the Constitution ought to apply abroad unless it was impracticable or anomalous. He went on to oppose Covert’s claim to protection under the Fifth Amendment on the grounds that it was impracticable and anomalous. In its decision in
Boumediene v. Bush (553 U.S. 723 [2008]), the Supreme Court decided that it was proper to apply the principles of habeas corpus to foreign enemy combatants. Judge Anthony Kennedy argued that the habeas corpus provisions guaranteed by the Constitution extended to prisoners held at Guantanamo.
24. OIG,
Audit of USAID’
s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, 6.
26.
Agostini et al. v. Felton et al., 521 U.S. 203 (1997). In this ruling, the Supreme Court asserted that the establishment clause is not violated if public-school teachers taught in religious schools, as long as the subjects that they taught were not religious.
27.
Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U.S. 672 (1971). In this ruling, the Supreme Court authorized the use of public funds to build infrastructure within religious institutions. It was considered that, insofar as the buildings were not themselves religious edifices, it did represent excessive interference by the government into religious matters.
30. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd,
Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 79.
32. For a complete history of the genesis of the International Religious Freedom Act, see Alan Hertzke,
Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
33. For an analysis of the U.S. policy of promoting and exporting religious freedom before IRFA, see Anna Su,
Exporting Freedom, Religious Liberty and American Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).
35.
Quoted in Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Believing in Religious Freedom,”
The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (blog), Social Science Research Council,
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/03/01/believing-in-religious-freedom/. See also Donald S. Lopez Jr., “Belief,” in
Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 21–35.
36. Hurd, “Believing in Religious Freedom.”
38. Webb Keane,
Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
39. Webb Keane, “What Is Religious Freedom Supposed to Free,” April 3, 2012,
The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (blog), Social Science Research Council,
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/04/03/what-is-religious-freedom-supposed-to-free/. On the debate about caricatures of the prophet, and the discussion about the supposedly specific relationship of Muslims to the sacred, see Andrew March, “Speaking About Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims,”
Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2011): 806–21.
40. Quoted in Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Muslims Need Not Apply,”
Boston Review, January 24, 2013,
http://www.bostonreview.net/world/muslims-need-not-apply. Hurd notes that Shea publicly denied using the words “hiring a Muslim” and refuses the insinuation that she is “a religious bigot.” See also Michelle Boorstein, “Agency That Monitors Religious Freedom Abroad Accused of Bias,”
Washington Post, February 17, 2010,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/16/AR2010021605517.html?sid=ST2010021700241.
41. Letter to Senators Inouye, McConnell, and Durbin, “Re: Expressing Concern over the Appointment of Dr. Zuhdi Jasser to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF),” April 12, 2012, Council of American-Islamic Relations,
https://www.cair.com/images/islamophobia/JasserLetter.pdf.
42. Quoted in Joshua Green, “God’s Foreign Policy,”
Washington Monthly, November 2001, 28. On the power of evangelicals in the framing of foreign policy directions, see Michael D. Lindsay,
Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
43. The Puebla Institute has since been integrated within the organization Freedom House.
44. Melani McAlister, “Politics of Persecution,”
Middle East Research and Information Project, no. 249 (2008): 24,
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer249/politics-persecution. See also Elizabeth Castelli, “Praying for the Persecuted Church: U.S. Christian Activism in the Global Arena,”
Journal of Human Rights 4 (2005): 321–51.
45. On violence against Copts in Egypt, see Mariz Tadros,
Copts at the Crossroads: The Challenge of Building Inclusive Democracy in Egypt (Cairo: University of Cairo Press, 2013).
46. The text of the covenant is available online. Article 27 reads: “In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language” (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20999/volume-999-I-14668-English.pdf).
47. Heather Sharkey,
American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). For discussions about the instrumentalization of liberal-secular norms by Western imperialist projects, see Wendy Brown,
Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Mahmood Mamdani,
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004); Samuel Moyn,
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Anne Norton,
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).
48. Saba Mahmood,
Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).
49. Saba Mahmood, “
Religious Freedom, Minority Rights, and Geopolitics,”
The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (blog), Social Science Research Council,
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/03/05/religious-freedom-minority-rights-and-geopolitics/, later published as “Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 2 (2012): 418–46.
50. Paul Sedra, “Reconstituting the Coptic Community Amidst Revolution,”
Middle East Report 265 (2012): 34–38, and “Class Cleavages and Ethnic Conflict: Coptic Christian Communities in Modern Egyptian Politics,”
Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 2, no. 10 (1999): 219–35; Mariz Tadros, “Vicissitudes in the Entente Between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the State in Egypt (1952–2007),”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, no. 2 (2009): 269–87.
51. Magdi Khalil is one of the most determined advocates of this idea. Certain Coptic Egyptians have joined with intellectual Muslims to criticize the IRFA as an imperial political tool. One example is Samir Murqus, a researcher at the Coptic Center for Social Studies, who insists on the ideal of nonconfessional citizenship and national unity. See Mahmood, “Religious Freedom, the Minority Question.”
53. Thomas F. Farr and William L. Saunders Jr., “The Bush Administration and America’s International Religious Freedom Policy,”
Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 32, no. 3 (2009): 949–70.
55. The report is quoted in ibid., 962.
56. Thomas Farr, “The Intellectual Sources of Diplomacy’s Religion Deficit,”
Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 1, no. 1 (2012): 283.
59. Farr and Saunders, “Bush Administration,” 964.
60. Thomas Farr, “The Trouble with American Foreign Policy and Islam,”
Review of Faith and International Affairs 9, no. 2 (2011): 68.
68. The magazine was founded by Richard John Neuhaus, the author of
The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984), as well as
Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
70. Blandine Chelini-Pont, “La diffamation des religions: Un bras de fer international (1999–2009),”
Conscience et liberté 71 (2010): 42–68.
72. Ronan McCrea,
Religion and the Public Order of the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 132, 134.
73. Pasquale Annicchino, “Winning the Battle by Losing the War: The
Lautsi Case and the Holy Alliance Between American Conservative Evangelicals, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican to Reshape European Identity,”
Religion and Human Rights 6, no. 3 (2011): 213–19,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2200053.
CONCLUSION
1. The myth of an Islamization of Europe through immigration, high birth rates, and conversion became more widespread in the past decade, but on the basis of a crazy interpretation of actual sociological data, as convincingly shown in Raphaël Liogier,
Le mythe de l’islamisation: Essai sur une obsession collective (Paris: Seuil, 2012), 121–47.
2. Olivier Roy,
Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
3. Liogier,
Le mythe de l’islamisation, 153–67.
4. Maurice Barrès
was a conservative French novelist, journalist, and politician. Ostensibly a republican, he was nevertheless close to Charles Maurras, the founder of the monarchist party Action Française. Barrès was an ethnic nationalist who popularized the word “nationalism” and worked to have June 24 established as a day of remembrance for St. Joan of Arc—Trans.
9. Among the winning anti-Muslim candidates were Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Louis Gohmert (R-Tex.), Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.), Diane Black (R-Tenn.), and Steve King (R-Iowa).
10. The anti-Muslim complaints extend the seventeenth-century genre of the jeremiad, a rhetorical form used by Puritan pastors to lecture the faithful about their sins and put them on their guard against the risk of breaking the covenant. See Edmund Morgan,
Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963); and Perry Miller,
The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 27–40.
11. Faisel Devji,
The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
12. Michael Sandel,
Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Charles Taylor,
A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
13. Michel de Certeau, “Une pratique sociale de la différence: Croire,” in
Faire croire: Modalités de la diffusion et de la réception des messages religieux du XIIe au XVe siècle (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1981).
14. Jacques Rancière,
Aux bords du politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 184: “cet Un du sentiment en Un du concept.”
18. Roland Barthes,
Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977), translated as
A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). According to Barthes, “Every party to a scene dreams of having the last word. To speak last, to ‘conclude,’ is to assign a destiny to everything that’s been said…. With the last word, I’m going to disorganize, ‘liquidate’ my adversary…. The scene unfolds with this triumph in mind” (247 [trans. C. Jon Delogu, adapted from Howard]).
19. Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, trans. Howard, 243.
20. Thomas Scanlon,
Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
21. Jacques Rancière,
On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1995), 82.
27. Étienne Balibar,
Saeculum, Culture, religion, idéologie (Paris: Galilée, 2012).
28. Barthes,
Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 246. Howard translates
Fâcheux as “intruders.”
30. Ibid., 35–36 (my emphasis).