CHAPTER TWO
The Roots of Modern Islamophobia
I think Islam hates us.
Donald Trump, March 9, 2016
The intense hostility of the people of Moslem faith to all other sects, and particularly to Christians, affected all their intercourse.
Judge Stephen Field, U.S. Supreme Court, May 25, 1891
The sun’s familiar rays crept through the crack of the door. The lord’s voice, synchronized with the sun, summoned Omar Ibn Said from his slumber. With a water-pot near his bedside, Omar performed the customary ablutions in Fayetteville, North Carolina, as he had every day in Futa Tooro, West Africa.1 He meticulously cleansed his dark brown skin in line with the ancient Islamic custom, beginning with his feet and finishing with his face. Omar then set out on foot for the first of the five daily prayers.
The fajr summons grew louder.2 Omar marched alongside his companions to heed his overlord’s call. He paused when he reached his assigned plot on the green field, pointing his wiry brown frame east toward Mecca, the Holy City on the other side of the world. He fondly reflected on his daily prayers on the banks of the Senegal River, where he once sourced the water to cleanse his body every day before worship. Flanked by Muslim brothers to his immediate right and left, Omar bowed his head and dug his black, wrinkled hands into the North Carolina fields—not to pray, but to pick.3
Picking cotton simulated a choreography that Omar knew only as prayer before the Middle Passage—when he and many other men, both Muslim and non-Muslim, were densely packed onto slave ships en route to a distant, foreign land. Far from home, Omar repeated these prayer motions diligently and hypnotically. Although picking cotton resembled the Islamic prayer prostrations, the law that marked him as a slave because of his blackness and made him the property of his white master conflicted with the dominion of the Qur’an, Islam’s holy book. Although he presented himself as a Christian to the slave masters and the white world, his outward conversion was a shield from punishment, one that enabled him to continue to observe Islam, his native faith. He remained lodged between the clashing identities of Muslim and black slave until his death in 1864—one year before the abolition of slavery and the legal dissolution of the legal line that segregated both halves of his identity.
• • •
More than two centuries before a “Muslim ban” headlined the New York Times or led to the detainment of thousands of Muslims at airports across the United States, Muslims were statutorily barred from becoming American citizens. They were deemed threatening to and unassimilable within American values and society. In line with the demonization of this entire bloc of immigrants, the courts prohibited Muslim immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens from 1790 to 1944. During this span, Muslim identity, by law, was viewed as contradictory with American citizenship.
Days after then-candidate Donald Trump doubled up on his plans for enacting a Muslim ban on the campaign trail, I wrote in the Washington Post that “Donald Trump’s calls for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and, more recently, for ‘extreme vetting’ of anyone seeking to immigrate to the United States have been condemned as breaks from this nation’s traditions of religious tolerance and welcoming immigrants. Actually, Trump’s proposal reflects a long-standing, if ugly, strain of U.S. immigration policy, one that restricted the entry of Arab and South Asian Muslim immigrants and barred them from becoming citizens until the middle of the 20th century.”4 For Trump, “Make America Great Again” was not forward looking, but instead sought to weaken multiculturalism, which his proponents deemed a threat to America’s national identity.5 It also sought to revitalize backward policy that explicitly conflated extremism with Islam, and to codify both goals in immigration policy.
Trump’s Muslim ban proposal, which he advanced by way of three executive orders, was driven by the same discourse and stereotypes that prohibited Muslims from becoming U.S. citizens from 1790 through 1944. The characterization of Muslim immigrants as an enemy race during this period of American history, called the naturalization era, is echoed by the modern characterization of Muslim immigrants as fundamentally different and unassimilable, as potential terrorists, and, in the case of Syrian refugees fleeing war, as cloaked “ISIS terrorists.”6
During the naturalization era, immigrants seeking citizenship were bound by the prerequisite of being found to be “free white persons” by a civil court. However, what defined whiteness was not allowed to extend beyond Christianity, and especially Protestantism, and Islam stood as its rival and thus was considered irreconcilable with whiteness. Therefore, up until 1944, Muslim identity precluded one from being deemed white by law and therefore eligible for citizenship. Furthermore, the Naturalization Act of 1790 also curbed the migration of Muslims to the United States, as they were largely aware of the opposition their religious identity would spur at ports of entry like Ellis Island. The Naturalization Act persuaded many Muslims considering emigrating to the United States to stay home, while those who did travel across the Atlantic for the promise of a better life were largely destined to become lifelong aliens in a new land, restricted from becoming naturalized citizens on account of their Muslim identity.
In addition to the mandate that no one who was not “white by law” could become a U.S. citizen,7 America’s first Muslims were also enslaved and reduced to chattel. Muslims comprised a sizable portion of the population of Africans kidnapped, shipped, and auctioned off to slave masters on the other side of the world. One study has estimated that 46 percent of the slaves in the antebellum South were kidnapped from Africa’s western region, encompassing modern-day Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Senegal, Ghana, and neighboring states, which boasted “significant numbers of Muslims.”8 However, the racial construction of blackness and the legal enforcement of slavery not only eroded and ultimately extinguished the Islam they brought with them and practiced on plantations, but the vantage point of American law, institutions, and individuals also prevented the recognition of these pioneer Muslims for who they were: bona fide observant Muslims. They not only established the first Muslim communities in the American colonies, but they also helped build the very economic and infrastructural foundations of the United States.
In conjunction with the racialization of blackness as synonymous with property and slave, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Orientalism manufactured a racially narrow understanding of Muslim identity as exclusively Arab or Middle Eastern.9 Thus an entire religion was remade into a racial identity. If black meant property and slave, and Muslim meant Arab or Middle Eastern, then black Muslim was a legally contradictory and impossible identity in early American history. This contradiction of racial constructions erased the pioneering Muslim American population from the pages of mainstream American history and, as examined in chapter 6, continues to drive the dissonance between black identity and Muslim identity that grips the minds of far too many.
This chapter investigates the deep and old roots of modern Islamophobia, roots that wove through the foundations of American state and private structures, from antebellum Southern plantations to Northeastern federal courts. More closely, it examines the intersection between Orientalism, blackness, and whiteness, probing Orientalism’s dynamic system of dehumanization and the place where that system meets the race-making project of constructing blackness to designate property, a project that could not exist without the mirroring project of constructing whiteness to signify the heights of humanity and the gateway to the full-blown privileges of citizenship. While the architects of Orientalism were European, and the white supremacist racial taxonomy became the backbone of American law as framed by legislators, judges and statesmen, the two systems overlapped to manufacture two narrow and dissonant definitions of black and Muslim identity.
Orientalism informed not only how race was understood during the formative stages of American history, but also how it was constructed. Orientalism helped guide, and fluidly tweak, the parameters of whiteness. And in the same way that blackness stood as the racial antithesis of whiteness, the necessary other without which whiteness would not exist, the Orientalist construction of Islam marked the faith as the civilizational foil of the West, a contrast that was necessary for the emerging United States to envision itself as an extension of Western civilization. In order to solidify itself as part of the West, and an extension of Europe in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had to follow in the footsteps of Europe and establish itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world.
UNDERSTANDING ORIENTALISM
The most trenchant and influential critic of Islamophobia, in both its past and modern configurations, was not a Muslim. He was, rather, a man born to a Palestinian Christian family who eventually crafted the foundational theory and framework that not only uncovered the roots of modern Islamophobia, but provided the intellectual language and tools to combat it.
Edward Said (Saʼeed), one of the most influential intellectuals of the past century, seldom (if ever) used the word “Islamophobia” in his writings or lectures. Said passed away on September 25, 2003, just over two years after the 9/11 attacks, a time of intensifying hostility toward Arabs, Muslims, and other peoples from the Middle East, which would ultimately give rise to the system of bigotry that we currently know as Islamophobia. He committed much of his life as an academic and intellectual to grappling with Orientalism, the system that preceded and mothered Islamophobia, challenging a long line of thinkers who fed the discourse that the West, and particularly the United States, was rightly locked in a cultural, civilizational, and military crusade against Islam. Said’s landmark book, Orientalism, is “one of the most oft-quoted texts across the various disciplines engaged in studying the Middle East or Islam” and has immortalized him among thinkers and activists grappling with the caricaturing of Islam and the demonization of Muslims.10 One cannot understand Islamophobia until one has thoroughly examined Orientalism, and every project aimed at demystifying or deconstructing Islamophobia must begin with Said’s work.
I met Edward Said six months before his untimely death, following a public lecture he gave at UCLA. Said spent some of his address warning the audience about a “new era of Orientalism” following the 9/11 attacks, an era characterized by a war on terror built upon the epistemological, normative, and legal architecture of Orientalism. Said addressed the illegality of wars launched in the name of “defeating terror” and the counterterror dragnets that implicated Arab and Muslim Americans on account of their ethnic or religious identities. His lecture was more than simply a contextualization of Orientalism within the challenges of the post-9/11 era; in retrospect, it was a lecture that highlighted the intimate nexus between Orientalism and Islamophobia. Muslims in the United States, and indeed the world, lost Said when they needed him most.
Well before Islamophobia was devised and deployed to explain the demonization of Islam and Muslims, Said’s Orientalism illustrated the extensive history and complex process by which Islam and its adherents were othered, or more specifically, constructed and cast as inferior and subhuman, unassimilable and savage, violent and warmongering. Islam was everything the West was not, and it was assigned these and other damning attributes in order to elevate the West and characterize it, and its people, as progressive, democratic, and modern.
The fundamental baseline of Orientalism was casting the Muslim world as the mirror opposite of the West. Said opens Orientalism with this: “The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.”11 The process of characterizing and vilifying the Muslim world, which Orientalists dub the Orient, became the very way in which the West, as well as its principal thinkers, statesmen, and tastemakers, came to define itself. This mirrored identity was very much a fluid dialectic, whereby the shifting characterizations of the Muslim world—informed by political engagements with Muslim-majority nations, colonial interventions and projects, and most intensely, clashes—would also inform how the West saw itself.
Anthropology scholar Daniel Martin Varisco, the author of an excellent analysis of Orientalism’s strengths and shortcomings, articulates that “This radical distinction between East and West is labeled by Said as both ontological and epistemological,” pointing to the depth to which this system impacted individual and institutional views of Islam and its adherents.12 Orientalism penetrated every sphere of European, and later, American life, from art to pedagogy, from foreign policy to domestic law. Its foundational thesis and attendant stereotypes drove a grand narrative and “discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.”13 Orientalism was a discourse first, and then the narrative and its attendant ideas gradually morphed into material objects in the form of literature, art, formal state policies, academic disciplines and departments, and most saliently, the very worldview from which state leaders and governments engaged Muslim-majority states and their inhabitants.
Based on a binary that made Europe the antithesis of the “Orient” and “Orient” synonymous with the “Muslim world,”14 Orientalism spawned the corollary view that Muslims were a monolithic racial or ethnic bloc, imagined in the narrow form of an Arab or Middle Eastern. Critical race theorists call this process “racialization,”15 and contend that “races are not biologically differentiated groupings but rather social constructions.”16 Races, and racial categories, therefore, are fluid and dynamic constructs that are shaped and reshaped in line with political, economic, and cultural interests. In line with this process of racialization, Orientalism (re)made “Muslim” into a race. This conversion of Muslim identity from a religion into a race changed a diverse population represented in every corner of the globe to the narrow form of the Arab, or as stated by Islamophobia scholar Erik Love, anybody “who looks Middle Eastern.”17 Orientalists limited the geographic and civilizational bounds of the Muslim world to the majority-Arab regions in North Africa, the Levant,18 the Gulf, and the Arabian Peninsula. These contiguous regions, also home to sizable non-Muslim and indigenous non-Arab populations, were consolidated into one region called the “Middle East,” itself a product of Orientalist perspective, creation,19 and geographic ambiguity.
AMERICAN ORIENTALISM
Orientalism was essential to Europe’s colonialist, imperialist project; it was the fuel without which foreign conquest into Muslim-majority nations could not have run—and the early colonists carried it with them into what would become known as the United States. Orientalist discourses have shaped state policy since before American independence. Many formative statesmen viewed, “Islam as the antithesis of the ‘true faith’ of Protestant Christianity,”20 illustrating just how pervasive this worldview was during the embryonic stages of American history, and how well it was embedded at the very top of American government.
Notable figures in early American history also regarded Islam, and the Muslim world, as the civilizational foil of the United States. Republicans and Federalists used Islam and its most important prophet, Muhammad, to caution against threats to liberty and “unbridled despotism.”21 In The Crescent Obscured, Robert Allison observes, “Americans regarded Muhammad as a dangerous false prophet and as the creator of an evil religious and political system. . . . Islam, as the Americans saw it, was against liberty, and being against liberty, it stopped progress.”22
The parameters of American democracy and the bounds of liberty would be measured against how the framers of the Constitution imagined Islam. This was Orientalism in action. The architects of the United States adopted wholesale the Orientalist worldview and its attendant representations and misrepresentations. These distorted stereotypes of Islam and its followers would shape the contours of the law and policy that would engage Muslim-majority nations and states, and just as potently, domestic law and policy.
While the framers disagreed about and hotly debated matters ranging from the breadth (or limits) of federal power to the sovereignty of the states, anti-Muslim animus was not a wedge issue. It was a matter that unified the fiercest rivals at the Constitutional Convention and beyond. As Allison writes, “Both Republicans like Mathew Lyon and Thomas Jefferson, who welcomed the progressive libertarianism of the French Revolution, and Federalists like John Adams, who feared the consequences of unchecked democracy, agreed that liberty and human progress were good things and the unbridled despotism of the Muslim world was a bad thing for preventing it.”23
If America wanted to be democratic and free, then purging every manifestation of Islam—whether in the form of ideas, institutions, or individuals—was a mandate, the Republicans and Federalists generally agreed. These views held by early statesmen at the federal and local levels would eventually, inevitably, evolve into law, policy, and institutional memory and drive the state’s perception of Islam and its policing of both real and imagined Muslims.
Although Muslims toiled inside and outside of plantations in antebellum America, some of them perhaps owned by the very men who framed formative U.S. institutions and charters—thereby living in close proximity to the men claiming to be experts on Islam—Muslim identity in the minds of the founding Americans was less about religious identity and more about racial, cultural, and civilizational identity. Muslims were not adherents to the world’s second largest religion, in the mind of founding American Orientalists, but rather an alien, unassimilable people from the Middle East.
American Orientalism is hardly a relic of the past. It is, rather, a phenomenon that lives on today and steers how politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens think about Muslims and frame Islam. It is fluid and potent. It is the root system that gave rise to and drives Islamophobia. Justifying fear of and violence against a people requires a foundational system that actively dehumanizes that people. We cannot understand American Islamophobia without understanding its predecessor, American Orientalism.
ANTEBELLUM ISLAM
An enslaved African and a devout Muslim, Omar, whose story opens this chapter, exemplifies members of the first, yet largely forgotten, Muslim communities in the United States. Research affirms that Muslims were not a negligible element, but an integral segment of the enslaved African population in the antebellum South. Social scientists estimate that 15 to 20 percent, or, “as many as 600,000 to 1.2 million” members of the aggregate enslaved African population were Muslims.24 That is a staggering figure, particularly when juxtaposed with the dearth of attention given to, and public knowledge of, enslaved African Muslims in that time period of American history.
Although these enslaved Muslims prayed, observed Ramadan, maintained pious lifestyles, and forged spiritual communities while bonded to slave code and slave master, the law preempted seeing them as bona fide Muslims.25 Blackness, the antithesis of whiteness, was constructed to justify and perpetuate the enslavement of African peoples, and systematically reduce them to property. But this was by design. In her landmark treatise Whiteness as Property, UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris observes, “The hyper-exploitation of Black labor was accomplished by treating Black people themselves as objects of property. Race and property were thus conflated by establishing a form of property contingent on race—only Blacks were subjugated as slaves and treated as property.”26 The creation, construction, and consignment of blackness onto the bodies of Africans washed away, from the eyes of the law and those expected to abide by and enforce it, the spiritual identities of enslaved Africans. Enslaved African Muslims were black, the law held, and thus property. And property could not adhere to any organized religion, let alone believe in Islam. Furthermore, the enslaved black population hailed from the western regions of Africa, an area beyond what Orientalism had demarcated as the “Muslim world.”
Eliminating the religious identities of slaves was central to the process of bifurcating black from Muslim identity during the antebellum era. Although Africans thrust into the American slave market hailed from a diverse range of tribal, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, their heterogeneity had no relevance to the law’s conversion of them into property. Legal recognition of the religious identities of Africans would amount to a concession to their humanity and undermine the project of converting them into subhuman beings whom it was ethically permissible to enslave.
Criminalizing religion was vital to the project of stripping the humanity of Africans and reducing them to “beasts of burden” pushed to inhuman limits to maximize revenue for their slave masters. Frederick Douglass observed that “elevating” a slave through better treatment gave witness to the humanizing effect of religion and the dehumanizing effect of keeping a person’s religion from them. Douglass famously stated, “Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog; but feed and clothe him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort, and dreams of freedom intrude.”27 Part of the “spiritlessness” Douglass speaks of had to do with barring slaves from feeding their spirits with the soul food of religion. Denying slaves religion kept them bound to their condition. Religion, and in this instance Islam, would inspire the enslaved to question their condition, contemplate resistance, and as illustrated by a series of slave narratives from within and beyond the United States, rebel, revolt, and seek liberation.28
The narrow construction of black and Muslim identities drew a sharp line between the two racial classifications, which preempted seeing both as coexistent identities. Slave codes codified the belief that slaves were a godless people incapable of practicing religion, while formative immigration and citizenship policy restricted the naturalization of an alien bloc of people from the Muslim world, which it classified as Muslims (or during the naturalization era, “Mohammedans”). Enslaved Muslims occupied the intersection of these two irreconcilable racial configurations. Although they were black and Muslim, the law furiously denied conjoining these identities, because doing so would undo the subhuman blackness branded upon the bodies of the enslaved, while also disrupting the narrow way in which Muslim identity was racially configured.
Although black Muslim identity was denied to enslaved Muslims by law, they still strove to practice their faith while in bondage. Sylviane Diouf writes, “A double minority—religious and ethnic—in the colonial world, as well as in the enslaved community, the West African Muslims did not succumb to acculturation but strove hard to maintain their traditions, social values, customs, and particular identity.”29
The common practice of Islam and the observation of its traditions moved Muslim slaves in close proximity with one another to reconstruct spiritual communities while enslaved. These reconstructed Muslim communities were built across tribal and ethnic lines, and even brought in converts from among the enslaved and emancipated Africans of different faiths. Prayer, observing Ramadan,30 making charitable donations, and striving to meet Islam’s “Five Pillars” remained a core pursuit for many Muslim slaves.31 Faith was also a bond between enslaved Muslims that spurred frequent communication within and without the boundaries of individual plantations, fostering new Muslim communities among the disjointed slave populations in a given region of the antebellum South.
Despite slaves’ observation of Muslim traditions and Muslim lifestyles, historians (both Muslim and otherwise) examining Muslim American history have largely fallen short of recognizing Muslim slaves as the first Muslim American communities. The legal construction of black and Muslim into separate racial classifications, rooted in American Orientalism and racism, brought about the erasure of the first Muslim population in the United States. It continues to be the driving force behind a failure to recognize their descendants—today’s African American Muslims, the biggest subset of the Muslim American population—as bona fide Muslims. The marginalization of African American Muslims in the face of rising Islamophobia today is connected to the legacy of erasure that started centuries ago in antebellum America, anchored in the notion that black identity and Muslim identity are clashing and irreconcilable.
AMERICA’S FIRST MUSLIM BAN
Judge George H. Hutton peered across his bench in the direction of George Shishim. Shishim, a longtime resident of California and native of the Mount Lebanon Province (modern-day Lebanon) of the Ottoman Empire, had come to Hutton’s court to petition for American citizenship. After living in Los Angeles as a resident alien and serving as a policeman for the LAPD, he was poised to finally become a naturalized citizen and a formal member of the country he served and for which he felt a great affinity.
An immigrant from Canada, Hutton was elected to preside over the Los Angeles Superior Court in 1906. During the naturalization era, judges like Hutton held unfettered discretion over deciding which immigrants fit within the statutory definition of whiteness mandated by law, and therefore, authority over deciding whether petitioners like Shishim could become citizens. In 1909, when Shishim filed his petition, it was impossible to become a naturalized citizen unless you were white. From 1790 until 1952, whiteness stood as the legal dividing line between inclusion and exclusion from the range of privileges and benefits that came with formal citizenship. Whiteness and citizen were made synonymous by law, and the courts were the enforcers and the final gatekeepers.
Weeks before his appearance in Los Angeles Superior Court, a naturalization and immigration agent had moved to deny Shishim’s citizenship petition on the grounds that his “Arab identity,” synonymous with Muslim identity, did not meet the legal mandate of whiteness. Judge Hutton seemed persuaded by the immigration examiner’s position, which deemed immigrants from the region Shishim originated from as hostile to American democracy and values, unassimilable, and Muslim unless proven otherwise. However, although Shishim was an Arab, he was also a Christian. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Arabs in the United States in 1909 were Christians.
Short on rebuttals, Shishim closed with the lone argument that he hoped would resonate with Judge Hutton and save his petition. It was a Hail Mary, a final plea. He rose from his seat, stood firmly with his LAPD badge glistening from his jacket, and testified, “If I am Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land.”32 Shishim was effectively stating that if Jesus were white, the court would also have to find him to be white, or render an admission that Jesus was not white—an admission that would undermine the construction of Jesus as a white man and of Christianity as a portal toward whiteness. Christianity was one of the primary hallmarks of whiteness in the United States in the early twentieth century, and Shishim’s spirited appeal insisted that although he was from the Muslim world, he was not a Muslim but in fact a Christian, and therefore white.
Hutton, conditioned to believe that anybody who hailed from the Middle East was Muslim, struggled with this dissonance. But Shishim’s brilliant appeal to Christianity managed to persuade Hutton, and Shishim became the first immigrant from the Middle East to be naturalized as an American citizen and judicially ruled white by law.33 “When the court finally determined Shishim to be a white person, thus allowing for his acquisition of citizenship,” a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote that “it made every feature of his dark, swarthy countenance radiate with pleasure and hope.”34
Civil judges like Hutton were responsible for interpreting the statutory meaning of whiteness during the naturalization era. In White by Law, law scholar Ian Haney López observes:
The individuals who petitioned for naturalization forced the courts into a case-by-case struggle to define who was a “white person.” More importantly, the courts were required in these prerequisite cases to articulate rationales for the divisions they were creating. Beyond simply issuing declarations in favor of or against a particular applicant, the courts . . . had to explain the basis on which they drew the boundaries of Whiteness. The courts had to establish by law whether, for example, a petitioner’s race was to be measured by skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry, the specialization of scientist, [or] popular opinion.35
Most saliently for immigrants from the Middle East, the courts could also determine whiteness on the basis of religion. American whiteness, therefore, was very much a social construction, endorsed by law and subject to revision. In the words of James Baldwin, “No one was white before s/he came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.”36 And just because race is a social construction does not mean that racism is not real, a tenet as true during the naturalization era as it is today.
Whiteness was not merely a race during the naturalization era, but a “material concept imbued with rights and privileges.”37 The greatest right, citizenship, was inscribed into it. Thanks to the deeply embedded narrative of a rivalry between Orient and Occident, Muslims and Christians, this brought forth the functional enactment of a Muslim naturalization ban that stood in place for 154 years. In other words, Muslims have been banned from becoming citizens for the bulk of the existence of the United States as a sovereign nation. What can be labeled as the structural Orientalism that prevailed during the naturalization era is akin to the structural Islamophobia reflected in today’s laws, programs, and policies targeting Muslims; indeed, those early institutional roots shaped how law understands Muslim identity, as well as how Muslims are policed by the state.
The Muslim naturalization ban that prevailed during this era also impacted Christians and Jews from the Middle East. Although George Shishim successfully petitioned for his naturalization, not all Christian Middle Eastern petitioners overcame the suspicion that hailing from the Middle East made them Muslim. A 1913 case involving an immigrant petitioner from modern-day Lebanon, Ex parte Shahid, illustrates how Muslim identity was acutely racialized and deeply institutionalized during this time. Following George Shishim’s lead, Faras Shahid, a Maronite Christian, asserted his Christian faith to rebut the presumption that he was a Muslim. Judge Henry Smith engaged in his own brand of in-court eugenics, describing Shahid to be “about [the color] of a walnut, or somewhat darker than is the usual mulatto of one-half mixed blood between the white and the negro races.”38According to Judge Smith, Shahid’s dark skin signaled that he was either Muslim or the product of racial miscegenation with Muslims that diluted his Christianity and ultimately undermined his petition for American citizenship. The appeal to miscegenation demonstrates that Judge Smith understood Muslim identity in pointedly racial terms, and as in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” case, used the language of the “one-drop rule” to hold that any modicum of Muslim blood made Shahid, before the eyes of the court, a Muslim.
Before denying Shahid’s petition, Judge Smith drilled home the Orientalist baseline that Muslim identity was indeed a racial one. In his opinion, he wrote, “What is the race or color of the modern inhabitant of Syria it is impossible to say. No geographical area of the world has been more mixed since history began. Originally of Hittite or non-Semitic races . . . then again followed by another Semitic conquest in the shape of the Arabian Mahometan [Muslim] eruption.”39 Smith’s framing of Ottoman rule as the “Mahometan eruption” illustrates his aversion to Islam, which today would be characterized as an example of structural Islamophobia. More than a century before immigration officials, politicians, and pundits would view with suspicion and fear the Muslim identity of Syrian refugees fleeing civil war and persecution from ISIS, the South Carolina court viewed Islam the same way.
In the early twentieth century, the vast majority of immigrants coming to the United States from modern-day Syria and Lebanon were Christians, not Muslims, who were nevertheless suspected to be Muslims. Some Christian immigrants, like George Shishim, were able to overcome that presumption, while others, like Faras Shahid, were not (see table). Then, in 1915, the fate of Christians from the Middle East, and specifically the Levant (modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine) would be resolved once and for all.
Naturalization-Era Cases Involving Immigrant Petitioners from the Middle East
In Dow v. United States, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals established that “Syrian Christians fit within the statutory definition of whiteness”40 and as a class of immigrants could be naturalized as American citizens. Muslim immigrants from the same region, however, were still prohibited from citizenship, as were Muslims from throughout the rest of the region that Orientalists dubbed the Middle East. Dow was a landmark decision because it emphatically held that as long as they were Christians, immigrants from the Levant were white by law, thus broadening the parameters of whiteness in the same way that earlier developments had assimilated Jewish, Irish, and Italian people. In addition, it established an early rule that Christians from the Arab world were racially different from Muslims from the very same lands, further illustrating how deeply conflated religion and race were during the naturalization era, and more specifically, how closely tethered Christianity was to whiteness and Islam was to otherness.
The Muslim naturalization ban continued until 1944.41 This had the effect of suppressing Muslim migration into the United States and of encouraging religious conversion or “passing as Christian” on the part of many who did migrate.42 In 1924, approximately 95 percent of the immigrants who resettled in the United States from the Arab world were Christians, while only 4 percent identified as Muslims.43 This illustrates the immense impact of the Muslim naturalization ban not only on who could and could not become a citizen, but also on who did and did not emigrate to the United States. Many Muslim immigrants, aware of the judicial animus toward their faith, chose not to migrate to the United States. Others likely converted or passed as Christians in order to stave off anti-Muslim animus and enhance their prospects of assimilation and naturalization.
Muslim immigrants who confirmed their religious identity, like Ahmed Hassan of Yemen, were denied naturalization when they sought it.44 In Hassan’s case, litigated in Michigan, Judge Arthur J. Tuttle’s opinion centered on the belief that Muslims “as a class would [not] readily intermarry with our population and be assimilated into our civilization.”45 Marriage was a proxy for assimilability, and for Judge Tuttle, the belief that Muslims would not intermarry with Christians, or should not intermarry with Christians, confirmed the Orientalist baseline that Muslims could not be integrated. Although Muslim immigrants began to trickle into the United States at a higher clip in 1942, the Michigan court rejected Ahmed’s petition. In addition to Hassan’s religion, Yemen’s distance from Europe and Hassan’s “darkness of skin”46 were arguments Judge Tuttle cited in rejecting Ahmed’s petition for citizenship.
Anticipating Ben Carson’s 2015 claim that “Islam is inconsistent with the Constitution”47 and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s statement, that same year, that Muslim immigration is part of an attempt to “overtake the culture” of the West,48 the Hassan court’s framing of Islam as threatening to American values and society carried the Muslim naturalization ban forward. Indeed, the very stereotypes instrumental to the courts’ understanding of Islam have been echoed, in virtually identical terms, by today’s Islamophobia-peddling politicians.
The Muslim naturalization ban lasted until American geopolitical interests in the Muslim world shifted, specifically when the need for Saudi oil facilitated its judicial dissolution in 1944.49 The case that spurred the dissolution of the longstanding Muslim ban involved a Saudi Muslim immigrant petitioning for citizenship in a Massachusetts court. Mohammed Mohriez walked into court with his quintessential Arab physical features, dark skin kissed and colored by the scorching Saudi sun, fully candid about his religious beliefs. To borrow a phrase that prominent Muslim American civil rights activist Linda Sarsour has often applied to herself, Mohriez arrived in court “unapologetically Muslim.”50 His prospects for citizenship would fall or advance without his shrinking from his religious identity.
His case came before Judge Charles Wyzanski eleven years after the United States, and President Herbert Hoover, formed the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) with the fledgling Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which had recently unearthed phenomenal reserves of crude oil—oil needed to fuel automobiles, a booming economy, a two-front war (World War II), and American foreign policy aspirations. Judge Wyzanski’s ruling would impact far more than the citizenship fate of one Muslim immigrant. It had the potential to disrupt or enhance the economic interests of the United States in Saudi Arabia and its political aspirations within the broader Middle East—a region rising from colonialism and coveted by both the United States and its emerging rival, the USSR. On that day in 1944, when the world and America’s position in it were radically changing, the naturalization interests of Mohriez, a Muslim immigrant, converged with the foreign policy and economic interests of the United States.51 The court’s ruling would impact far more than the fate of one Muslim immigrant.
Judge Wyzanski granted Mohriez’s petition for naturalization, and so at long last Muslim immigrants could become citizens. However, political interests were more important than principle in delivering the formal dissolution of the longstanding Muslim naturalization ban. As a result of this case, Middle Eastern historian Sarah Gualteiri writes, Arab Muslims became “‘honorary whites,’ those accepted into the nation but still under suspicion that they did not quite deserve it. Whereas the Christian identity of Syrian applicants in the racial prerequisite cases had been central to their argument for whiteness, Muslim Arabs were at their whitest when stripped of their religious identity”52 —and, as exemplified by the Mohriez case, when the citizenship interests of Muslim immigrants aligned with the foreign and economic policy interests of the state.
The two cases that established that Syrian Christians and Arab Muslims were to be legally considered white, Dow (1915) and Mohriez (1944), are the basis of the modern legal classification of Arab and Middle Eastern Americans as white by law. This is a paradoxical designation considering the sociopolitical and legal stigmatization of Arab and Middle Eastern identity today,53 as well as the rise of structural Islamophobia. This has pushed activists, civic organizations,54 and scholars, including myself and law scholar John Tehranian, to advocate on behalf the “Middle Eastern and North African” (MENA) box that the United States Census Bureau may add to the 2020 census.55
Although the Naturalization Act of 1952 encouraged more Muslims to come to the United States, the Immigration Act of 1924, which had instituted quotas on immigrants from nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—home to sizable Muslim populations and many Muslim-majority nations—was still in effect. Despite a spike, from 1948 until 1965, in the number of students from Muslim-majority countries studying in the United States,56 strict immigration quotas continued to stifle Muslim immigrants’ ability to enter the United States, and suppressed their numbers within the country.57 On one front, immigration restrictions against Muslims were eroding, but the Orientalism that fed the restrictions fluidly mutated into other forms of state policy and programming.
The Civil Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, opened the door for the dissolution of these immigration quotas by way of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and it subsequently opened the door for Muslims to migrate to the United States and pursue citizenship without the obstacle of racial mandates or in-court religious vetting. As historian Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, author of A History of Islam in America, writes, “Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, . . . these new Asian and African Muslim immigrants came to the United States [and] did not have to change their names or dissimulate their religion.”58
And yet, though the rights granted in 1964 and 1965 did change conditions in many positive ways, Islamophobia was not magically removed from the United States, but rather morphed into new forms, as it had in the past. The Islamophobia that pervades government structures and the minds of Americans today rises from a bleak history, judicial memory, and a naturalization ban that stood for 154 years—a ban that was enforced by the courts long before Trump proposed another while campaigning for the presidency and rode the tide of Islamophobia all the way to the White House.