There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
“This is the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil. A U.S. government source has told CBS News that it has Middle Eastern terrorism written all over it,”1 reported Connie Chung minutes after the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City was bombed on April 19, 1995. The words from Chung were uttered with the certitude that the culprits of what would become known as the Oklahoma City bombing were “Middle Eastern,” a people from a region broadly conflated with Islam and, over and again, terrorism.
The swift reporting of “Middle Eastern terrorism” did not come from the mouths of lay citizens or reactionary hatemongers, but were the words of Connie Chung, a journalistic icon who spoke only when she was entirely certain—or so my sixteen-year-old mind believed, because she spoke from behind one of the nation’s most respected media desks. This country, of which I was a citizen, had been attacked by the region my family hailed from, which indicted my family and me and drove a sharp wedge between both halves of my identity, Muslim and American. In the immediate wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, I felt obligated to choose between them.
I ran to my mother, who was still sleeping, echoing what Chung reported live on television. “Mama, a government building in Oklahoma City was bombed by Muslims,” I relayed, instantly causing her to jump out of bed and race over to the television. It had only been two years since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, an incident that spurred considerable backlash against the Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim American communities concentrated in the metropolitan Detroit area where we lived. Mosques were vandalized, children accosted, women with headscarves attacked—the robust underbelly of anti-Muslim attitudes and hatred were fully exposed. However, this attack in Oklahoma City was far bigger in scale than the World Trade Center bombing, claiming the lives of 168 men, women, and children, injuring 680 more, and destroying hundreds of other buildings near the federal building.
“This was the deadliest attack on American soil,” several news anchors repeated, with many prominent journalists rushing with lighting speed to proclaim that the Oklahoma City attack had “every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East” and that “the betting here is on Middle East terrorists.”2
How could they be so certain that the culprits were Muslims only minutes after the attack had taken place? Did these journalists, and the handful of “self-proclaimed ‘terrorism experts’” they routinely relied upon (none of whom were Muslims)3 swiftly compile evidence from the scene of the explosions to substantiate their findings? Or were their expert conclusions driven more by their imaginations, laden with ideas and images of terrorism that conflated it deeply with Islam and the Middle East, instead of the circumstantial evidence typically needed for good-faith assessments?
“The hate toward us is going to get far worse,” my mother whispered in Arabic as she absorbed the words coming from the screen, and I nodded in agreement, fearing she and my older sister, Khalida, would be more vulnerable to the looming hate violence because they wore headscarves. We braced ourselves for the backlash, particularly after hearing stories of an elderly Muslim man being assaulted at a community grocery store, the Al-Fajr mosque in Indianapolis being shot up, and an editor of an Islamic newspaper being threatened, “We’ll shoot you! We’ll send you back. You don’t belong here.”4
Everybody, most notably my mother, was on high alert, frightened that our community mosque, or worse, one of us, would fall victim to a bigot. A seamstress and single parent, my mother feared what the world had in store for her and her three children. The following morning, she ordered my brother Mohammed and me, with her piercing eyes and words, to come “right back home after school,” and gave special instruction to my sister to “be sure you are always with somebody, don’t stay by yourself,” fearing that Khalida’s headscarf would isolate her, make her a target.
This experience was not unique to my family or within the Muslim American community concentrated in the metropolitan Detroit area, but was akin to the fear and storyline that united Muslims who were summarily cast as accomplices in the Oklahoma City bombing. It was years before 9/11, but the animus and violence that descended on our hometown felt a lot like what was to come six years later.
Minutes after the Oklahoma City attack, and well before a formal investigation into the bombing had commenced, the mainstream media, the majority of the American public, and soon after, the state ruled that “Middle Eastern terrorists” were the culprits, focusing the collective rage on Muslims at large. Regardless of our status as citizens, the faith that held us collectively culpable made us vulnerable to the backlash and scapegoating that was sure to come. Just as swiftly as leading journalists blamed Muslims for the Oklahoma City attack, our status as Americans was materially diminished to second- or third-class citizenship,5 if not entirely stripped from us. This was further illustrated by how the external allegations of blame converged with the internal swelling of fear, promptly denying Muslim Americans of the opportunity to partake in the national mourning for the scores of lives lost that Wednesday in Oklahoma City.
Before we could fully absorb the magnitude of the attack and brace ourselves for the collateral hatred that would come our way, investigators found the real culprits. Two days after the bombing, Attorney General Janet Reno revealed the name and identity of the culprit. He was not Arab or Middle Eastern, but white. He was not Muslim, but Christian. He was not even an immigrant, or the child of immigrants, but a born-and-bred citizen from the American heartland.
Timothy McVeigh was a former military man who attended Ku Klux Klan protests, wore white power T-shirts, and conspired with other white supremacists to carry out the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995. McVeigh’s identity clashed with the strategically crafted and furiously deployed caricature of the Middle Eastern Muslim extremist, an image that had become synonymous with terrorism in the minds of most Americans. This, despite studies indicating that 77 percent of “terrorism and related events” in the United States in the 1980s were committed by U.S.-based white men.6 However, for journalists who were quick to indict Muslims, the force of stereotypes trumped the weight of these statistics. Perhaps they did not take the time to check who was actually responsible for terrorizing Americans; journalists, like people at every level of public and private life, allowed themselves to be swept up in prejudice and stereotypes.
There were no “Middle Eastern terrorists,” despite what Chung and a myriad of reputable journalists reported on that day. Mainstream news anchors incessantly stoked fears about and warned of subsequent attacks by Muslim boogeymen who were nowhere to be found in Oklahoma City. The boogeyman in their midst was a white Christian man, aided and abetted by other white Christian men.
But it did not matter. The conflation of terrorism with being Muslim and Middle Eastern was deeply institutionalized within CBS, ABC, CNN, and the rest of the American media industry, which endorsed a stereotype already stamped on the minds of the millions of Americans who collected in front of television screens to watch the carnage in Oklahoma City. Even after revealing McVeigh as the culprit, journalists like CNN’s Wolf Blitzer desperately peddled the notion that “There is still a possibility that there could have been some sort of connection to Middle East terrorism,”7 even after the highest-ranking lawyer in the land ruled that no Muslims or people of Middle Eastern descent had been involved. And so the backlash continued in Dearborn, Michigan; Patterson, New Jersey; Chicago; Los Angeles; and other concentrated Muslim communities across the country. In many ways, the violence was even worse against Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners living outside of such communities. While concentrated Muslim communities were easy targets for hatemongers, they had the networks, institutions, and leadership to soften the blow and brace for the backlash. Muslims and Muslim families in areas where they stood alone, or in scarce number, had no immediate sources of support or refuge.
This chapter examines the period immediately before the formal emergence of modern Islamophobia on September 11, 2001. This era witnessed the rearticulation of the Orientalist binary that pitted Islam and the Middle East—imagined as one monolithic civilization—against the West, a geopolitical theory known as a “clash of civilizations.” The theory became an immensely influential essay-turned-book by Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington.
This clash between the United States (as proxy for and guardian of Western civilization) and Islam revitalized and redeployed the stereotypes rooted in Orientalism and armed the state with a supposed reason to mount a pre-war on terror against Muslims on the domestic front and Arab and Muslim-majority countries abroad. The conversion of clash of civilizations theory into formal national security strategy and policy was enabled by the media misrepresentations of Islam, which primed the polity for the war on Muslims long before the war on terror.
A wall once bisected Berlin. The western half of the city belonged to the Federal Republic of Germany, a sovereign nation wed to the same democratic and capitalist principles as its European neighbors to the west, and the United States. The eastern half of Berlin was a satellite of the Soviet Union, guarded from 1961 to 1989 by the iron curtain of communism. West versus east. Good versus evil. The German city with a wall dividing it, smack in the heart of the European mainland, stood as a vivid symbol of the familiar binaries that have long driven the politics of empire and the propaganda campaigns crafted to fuel them.
American identity during the Cold War (1947–1991) rested heavily on detesting the Soviet Union and the ideas, images, and icons that represented it. Performances of this hate validated one’s citizenship, patriotism, and Americanness. Hollywood and television glorified the savior state (the United States), armed with the humanitarian mandate to vanquish a nemesis that threatened not only its own citizenry, but also the stability of the world at large. Freedom-loving soldiers like Rambo and fighting archetypes like Rocky battled rival communists in battleground nations, the boxing ring, or wherever the threat loomed and lingered.8 Being American during the Cold War rested largely on hating the Soviet Union and communism, and performing that hate through political rhetoric, associations, and opposition to anything affiliated with the Soviet Union. Our identity, as Americans, was defined by who and what we hated. And for those aspiring to become American, performance of this hate was a vital part of the process of becoming American.
American Cold War policy, and the real and fictive narratives it inspired, flatly saw the world as two halves: the free world and the communist world, the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, on November 9, 1989, everything changed. Berliners rushed toward the wall from both east and west, destroying a divide that had long segregated families, friends, and countrymen. Images of families reuniting, couples embracing, and bits of the crumbled wall lifted up in the Germany sky were broadcast all over the world, signaling that the Soviet Union was no more, that the “evil empire” the United States had battled for generations was finally defeated.
President Ronald Reagan famously declared, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win and they lose.” His vice president and successor, George H.W. Bush, delivered on that promise. But what, and who, would come next? In a political system dependent on the binary of good and evil, someone or something had to play the role of villain. Who would be the next villain?
The fall of the Soviet Union and the global decline of communism left a sociopolitical and existential void for the United States. After decades of saber-rattling, competition, and strife, the United States was the undisputed victor of the Cold War, inspiring celebration in Washington, D.C., and American cities and towns far from it. And now American policy needed a new geopolitical villain to facilitate its foreign policy objectives and carry forward political interests on the home front. The thrill of victory was momentary, ultimately creating a vacuum. The project of expanding the U.S. sphere of influence rested on identifying an archrival and manufacturing the state-sponsored and popular narratives that this archrival’s mission was the downfall of the United States. Again, we are what we hate; lacking that existential archrival and cultural antithesis created confusion about who we, Americans, are and aspire to be.
As evidenced by the breathtakingly swift indictments of “Islamic extremism” minutes after the Oklahoma City bombing, politicians and pundits did not have to look far. The Muslim world would succeed the Soviet Union as the next geopolitical embodiment of evil, the counterimage of America—the Cold War replaced by the formative stages of the eventual war on terror. By resurrecting Orientalist tropes and gazing toward the events unfolding in the Middle East, the United States not only found a suitable replacement, but a more visually foreign and religiously inspired archrival.
Pitching Islam as the new American nemesis did not require much convincing. Stereotypes of Islam as totalitarian, backward, and hostile were deeply embedded in the American imagination, supported by news coverage that regularly showcased airplane hijackers from the Middle East, angry mobs of Arabs collecting in city squares shouting at the camera, and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini—whom the media and policy positioned as the symbol of the faith at large (although he presided over one nation and was a member of a minority sect of Islam, Twelver Shi’ism) shouting on television, “Death to America, the Great Satan.”9 Indeed, “at the end of the Cold War, Islam became deeply entangled in America’s most recent search for a national identity” and was anointed as its new rival in the formation of this new identity.10 The United States had identified its new geopolitical enemy, and at Harvard University it found the scholar who would help justify the war it would eventually declare against that enemy.
In 1993, Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington observed a “new phase” of American geopolitical tension and rivalry. Four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Huntington would formally declare Islam, and the billions of people it encompassed, to be the existential threat that threatened American harmony and hegemony. In a widely read essay published by Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993, Huntington wrote, “The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”11
Building off of the very East versus West paradigm that framed the Cold War, and revitalizing the tropes that Orientalists ingrained in the minds of Americans and the memory of state institutions during the naturalization era, Huntington theorized that “the most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines that separate these [Islam and the West] from one another.”12 The line in the sand was drawn, and the Muslim world, once again, would be cast as the very image of threat, evil, and therefore everything un-American.
Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory did not narrowly pit the United States against “Islamic fundamentalism” or “Middle Eastern terrorists.” Rather, the clash Huntington theorized was against the whole of Islam, a faith practiced by 1.7 billion people, millions of them in the United States. Like his Orientalist predecessors, Huntington viewed Islam as a malignant monolith, writing that “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards.” In the same way that Europeans and Americans invented the Orient, Huntington constructed an “Islamic civilization” that was based on essentialist myths, arcane stereotypes, and most absurdly, a homogenization of a supremely diverse region.
Huntington’s reductionist position enabled the attendant ideas, discourses, and propaganda that Muslims were backward, warmongering, and inclined toward terrorism. This flat characterization of Islam allowed the United States, and the broader “Western civilization” it which it belongs, to continue to uphold itself as the bastion of modernity, progress, and liberalism. Revitalizing the principal Orientalist binary of “us versus them” and “they are everything we are not,” Huntington echoes, “Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are.” Huntington appropriated the basic theoretical tenets of Orientalism, dressing them with new phrases like “bloody borders,” “civilizational clashes,” and “Islamic extremists” to explain the Middle East and the world as he saw it.
Huntington’s theory was immensely influential both in private American households and, far more deeply, in American halls of power. The Clash of Civilizations, initially an influential article that three years later was expanded into a book, was the political theory du jour of the 1990s and beyond. It was broadly assigned in undergraduate and graduate courses across the country, became a New York Times best seller, and beyond the academic and popular spheres, steered policy on both the international and domestic fronts.
In addition to recasting Islam—which it falsely contended was a civilizational, sectarian, and ideological monolith—as the geopolitical rival of Western civilization, Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations equipped policymakers and pundits with a new lexicon for analyzing Islam and Muslims. It included, most notably, the phrase “war on terror.” Huntington shaped and advanced this and other terms that would become staples of the political and popular discourse. While the Bush and Clinton administrations initially resisted the framing peddled by Huntington, its ideas, concepts, and language proved immensely resonant in Washington.
Huntington’s lexicon dominates how the war on terror is characterized today; much of the mainstream language used to explain the threat of “Islamic extremism” or “fundamentalism” finds its origins on the pages of The Clash of Civilizations. The book offers a geopolitical paradigm and terminology that primed the state and society for the war on terror, a paradigm and terminology still operative more than two decades later.
Like American Orientalists of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, who enacted policy on the grounds of Islam being an enemy race, Huntington lobbied that Islam was not simply a religion, but a rival civilization and violent ideology that—despite regional wars in the Muslim world, sectarian tension and divide, and more than fives times the number of Muslims living outside of the Middle East than within it—had coalesced to stage war against the United States. More than simply a competing and inferior ideology, like communism, Islam posed a far greater civilizational threat, Huntington warned. The “bloody borders” separating Islam and the West were far older, wider, and more violent than the rift separating the United States and its fallen Cold War foe, and were rooted in a religious crusade that Muslims were bent on revitalizing. As Orientalists yesterday and Islamophobes today routinely proclaim, “Islam is not even a religion; it is a social, political system that uses a deity to advance its agenda of global conquest.”13 The famous American Orientalist and Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis echoed in his bestselling 2003 book, The Crisis of Islam, that Islam is not merely a religion, but a “civilization that grew up and flourished under the aegis of a religion.”14
Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi reflects on the work of Lewis, who contends that he, and not Huntington, modeled the clash of civilizations theory. Dabashi observed, “As early as the 1950s he [Lewis] had envisioned the clash of civilizations, and to this day he remains incensed that the idea is credited to Samuel Huntington. Since the early 1960s, he has published books which repeatedly rattle on about the opposition of the two sides, including The Middle East and the West (1964), Islam and the West (1994), Cultures in Conflict (1996), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (2001), and What Went Wrong (2003), laying the groundwork for [Francis] Fukuyama and Huntington.”15 So although he popularized the phrase “clash of civilizations” and gave it momentum in the public and political spheres, Huntington was not an isolated actor peddling the worldview that the United States was on a civilizational collision course with Islam. These scholars, Orientalists of the highest order, were simply dressing old Orientalist ideas and arguments in modern terms and catchy phrases.
It did not take much for Washington to buy what Huntington, Lewis, and their ideological counterparts were selling. “By 2000, the ideas of Fukuyama and Huntington had so utterly stormed Washington that militant Islamism had moved to the center” of its agendas.16 The rhetoric that argues that Islam is not simply a religion, but a menacing political ideology and rival civilization, is regularly uttered by politicians, illustrating Huntington’s (and Lewis’s) influence in Washington and the staying power of Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory.
It’s important to note that Huntington’s theory did not gain resonance because of its intellectual rigor; he was, after all, scathingly denigrated by scholars within political science, law, and other academic disciplines. Rather, his theory gained momentum because of its political expediency on two key fronts: first, because it filled the void for a new geopolitical nemesis left by the Soviet Union; and second, because Huntington’s simplified construction of a menacing Islamic civilization was deeply familiar, having already been embedded within the collective American imagination and the halls of power. With a new civilizational rival in place, and the theoretical framework and lexicon developed to push it forward by way of policy, the next step was peddling the threat of this repackaged menace to the American public by way of news, television, and film. A new evil empire, even more extreme and ominous that the communist threat that came before it, was conspiring to bring down America.
Muslim Americans and Muslim residents of the United States found themselves in the crosshairs of this new civilizational standoff. And unlike Russian citizens or immigrants during the Cold War, who could generally find safe haven on account of their whiteness and ability to blend in to mainstream society, Muslim Americans were generally more conspicuous and consequently more vulnerable to private and structural bigotry. As immigration and citizenship scholar Linda Bosniak argues in The Citizen and the Alien, “Formal citizenship status often fails to protect people from exclusion and violence directed at those perceived to be ‘foreign’ in character, habit, or appearance.”17 And for Muslim Americans, amid the buildup toward a “clash of civilizations” and the war on terror it facilitated, their faith, again, became the very marker of foreignness and menace.
Six months before Donald Trump announced his presidential run, Clint Eastwood’s modern wartime drama, American Sniper, hit American theaters nationwide. The film, starring Hollywood heartthrob Bradley Cooper in the lead role and based on a true story, centers on one soldier’s exploits and precision as a sniper in the Iraq War. This film was released well after the war on terror became formal state policy, but it provides a compelling case study that illustrates the resonance of the core ideas and binary seeded by Orientalism and The Clash of Civilizations. American Sniper would become emblematic of this new era of American Islamophobia and a lasting and lurid representation of the deep and robust connections between Islamophobia and the systems that came before it.
The Iraq War, a campaign of misdirected vengeance launched less than two years after the 9/11 terror attacks, provided the context for the film. In the film, “Iraqis are nothing more than fodder and foes, whom Chris Kyle [the American sniper] is hell bent on gunning down.”18 And that is precisely what he does, throughout the film, with extraordinary efficiency and a coldblooded trigger finger. One Iraqi after the other, Kyle systematically shoots down Muslims wearing headscarves and other traditional clothing, mowing down “raghead” after “raghead.”
Kyle finishes his celebrated career as a wartime sniper with 255 victims. Not a single one of them is assigned a name or given a voice; pictured from a distance and stripped of any agency, they are presumed by the sniper—and the American viewer he tacitly represents—to be guilty and worthy of death. “Whether a veiled mother, young boy, or the fictitious rival Mustafa—the black-clad, brooding embodiment of [the terrorist]” is dedicated to Kyle’s demise, and more broadly, the downfall of the United States.19 Every Muslim who appeared on the screen was a probable culprit, giving Kyle license to shoot him or her.
The film, which generated over $350 million in North America and roughly $500 million globally, was a box-office smash and a critical hit. American Sniper became the highest-grossing war film in Hollywood history20 and helped prime the American electorate for the Islamophobic rhetoric Trump peddled at his raucous campaign rallies, during the Republican Party debates, and during interviews with CNN, Fox News, and other media outlets. Indeed, many of the audiences that rushed to the theaters to watch American Sniper later raced to the voting polls to vote for the candidate who, like Kyle, spoke about Islam and Muslims in the most vile, subhuman terms.
Showcasing Islamophobia was big business, essential for currying popular support for formal law and government programs enacted to push and promote wars abroad and police and punish Muslims at home. Before 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the global war on terror, mass media centered on America’s new civilizational nemesis, Islam. Hollywood produced a range of blockbusters, including 1994’s True Lies, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; 1996’s Executive Decision, featuring Kurt Russell and Steven Segal; and 2000’s Rules of Engagement, with Samuel L. Jackson and Tommie Lee Jones. A long line of films re-created Huntington’s civilizational rivalry on screen: the American hero swooping into the desert to conquer Islamic extremism, or safeguarding Americans on the home front from the dark-skinned terrorist toting the Qur’an in one hand and a machine gun in the other. The narrative championed in these movies featured our most beloved movie stars espousing racist and religious slurs, and for two hours or more, beating, bashing, and killing Muslims.
The heroes and villains on screen were molded in the image of their counterparts on the news. Evelyn Alsultany, one of the nation’s foremost experts on representations of Arabs and Muslims in the media, observes that,
Significant shifts toward portraying Arabs and/or Muslims as terrorists in the 1970s are evident not only in Hollywood filmmaking but also in U.S. corporate news media. . . . [The] Americans’ association of the Middle East with the Christian Holy Land or Arab oil wealth shifted to a place of Muslim terror through news reporting on the Munich Olympics (1972), the Arab oil embargo (1973), the Iran hostage crisis (1979–1980), and airplane hijackings in the 1970s and 1980s. The news media came to play a crucial role in making the Middle East, and Islam in particular, meaningful to Americans as a place that breeds terrorism.21
The images and ideas filtered by the news media were virtually indistinguishable from film, and vice versa, affirming and reaffirming the ideas that the United States was at war with Islam and Muslims were vested in killing Americans at home and abroad.
The Muslim world presented in this American media is one contiguous and consolidated territory, gripped by endless war and irredeemable turbulence, a perfect vacuum for cultivating terrorism and terrorists. Its inhabitants are backward and static, nameless and angry, violent and irrational. They are not people to be engaged or judged in individual terms, but rather a faceless bloc that can be explained with sweeping ease and reduced to a fundamental essence.
A series of new stories arose in the 1980s and 1990s, priming Hollywood and television for a new wave of Orientalist propaganda. I will examine two: the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–1981 and the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
The Iran hostage crisis, which lasted from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981, cast the new Islamic government of Iran and its charismatic bearded and turbaned leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, as the modern embodiments of Islamic evil. The overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979 gave way to the rise of a new Islamic theocracy in Iran, unseating one of the strongest U.S. allies in the region with a regime it would anoint as one of its greatest adversaries.22 The turnover of power also led to the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the holding of fifty-two American diplomats as hostages. President Jimmy Carter, who ultimately lost his bid for reelection in 1982 because of the events that unfolded in Iran, dubbed the takeover of the American embassy an “act of terrorism.”23
News coverage of the hostage crisis echoed Carter’s words to a captive American audience that watched the news in record numbers. Special programming such as ABC’s America Held Hostage communicated the message that America at large, and Americans everywhere, were being victimized by the brown, bearded Muslim extremists in the Middle East. The fear stoked by the mainstream news also warned of a Muslim takeover stateside, corroborated in the minds of viewers by the rising Muslim population and the “significant rise in the number of mosques and Muslim associations in the 1970s and 1980s.”24 Again, citizenship did not protect Muslim Americans from being roped into guilt and conflated with an incident that was neither representative of Islam nor unfolding domestically, but one perpetrated by a specific nation-state on the other side of the world.
The hostage crisis lasted for 444 days, and mainstream television and print media capitalized on each day to deliver story lines, images, and narratives that drove the fear of Islam and a new encroaching Muslim threat into the private confines of every American home. Although the Soviet Union still stood as the primary geopolitical threat to the United States throughout the duration of the hostage crisis, coverage of the crisis alerted Americans to the threat that would eventually supplant it. Indeed, “the Islamic revolution of Iran and the hostage crisis became emblematic of the ‘threat of Islam,’”25 which news coverage readily and regularly delivered to an American public that could not turn away from its television screens. As Nathan Lean tells in his compelling book The Islamophobia Industry, reporting on the hostage crisis netted considerable revenues for television news networks and newspapers, and in CNN’s case established it as a major cable news station and commodity.
The collateral revenue generated by other franchises, most notably the 1991 drama Not without My Daughter (based on the book of the same title), starring Sally Field and Alfred Molina, was considerable. In the film, Molina plays Moody, the Iranian American (and tritely named) lead who transforms from a loving secular husband while in the United States into a violent extremist when his wife (played by Field) and daughter visit Iran with him. The film, based on a true story, capitalizes on the very stereotypes the news showcased during its coverage of the Iran hostage crisis, garnering a broad audience, syndication, and for the filmmakers, a proven story line for commercial success.
The nine years between the Iran hostage crisis and the Persian Gulf War in 1990 witnessed seismic reform in the geopolitical landscape and drastic changes on the American home front. The Soviet Union and the global threat of communism were no more, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini passed away in June of 1989, and following Ronald Reagan’s two terms in office, George H.W. Bush continued Republican dominance of the White House.
In his second year in office, President Bush formally kicked off the transition toward making the Muslim world the new geopolitical foe of the United States by launching Operation Desert Shield against Iraq and its secular dictator, Saddam Hussein. Hussein’s army had taken over the nearby state of Kuwait on June 2, 1990, and threatened to move into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the strongest U.S. allies and its primary supplier of crude oil. In response, Bush deployed American forces to Saudi Arabia, and the media machine turned against Saddam Hussein, who only years before had been Washington’s close friend and ally during Iraq’s bloody eight-year war with Iran. According to historian Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, “The event that most significantly affected the history of Islam in America at the outset of the 1990s was the Persian Gulf War.”26
Coverage of the Persian Gulf War bolstered the modern image of the menacing Arab, synonymous with Muslim, in the mind of the American viewer. The Iranians at the center of the hostage crisis were not Arab, and the Iranian government the United States tapped as the embodiment of Islamic fundamentalism was a Shiite-controlled state, whereas Hussein himself was a secular Sunni Muslim. But these distinctions were unimportant to most Americans, who conflated Iranian with Arab and had no clue what Sunni or Shiite meant. Saddam Hussein, whom the news media focused on by way of special reports, vignettes, and documentaries, succeeded his old foe, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in becoming the new embodiment of Muslim terror.
For ABC, NBC, CBS, and the upstart CNN (the only major American network that provided twenty-four-hour news coverage), the fact that Hussein was an ardent secularist and alleged pan-Arab nationalist, again, was of no importance. He was dark, Arab, and from a region tethered to the maligned faith of Islam, so he fit the role. News outlets consistently emphasized the Iraqi dictator’s identity as Muslim, shaping the narrative in line with the “clash of civilizations” binary.
Hussein, however, was no innocent bystander. He abetted the process, launching scud missiles toward Israel, adding ʻallahu akbar (“God is greater”) to the Iraqi flag, and claiming “to be the religious warrior or mujahid who was going to unfetter Mecca from its American shackles.”27 While “the whole world was watching” news coverage of the Persian Gulf War,28 the American audience was getting to know a dictator and the strategically crafted civilizational threat he allegedly represented, a civilizational threat it would meet again after 9/11 and the formal declaration of the war on terror. Hussein and his regime survived the first U.S. incursion against it. However, news coverage of the first war in Iraq would stay in the American public’s consciousness, and in 2003, George H.W. Bush’s son, George W. Bush, would tap into that consciousness and declare a second, and much more prolonged, war on Iraq.
Hollywood, television, and news media were—and continue to be—indispensable collaborators in the broad project of casting Islam as a civilizational threat. In Covering Islam, Edward Said observes, “To make ‘our’ attitudes to Islam very clear, a whole information and policymaking apparatus in the United States depends on these illusions and diffuses them widely.”29 Indeed, the “clash of civilizations” theory shaped the direction of state structures, the rhetoric of government officials, and foreign and domestic policy, and the media delivered to a primed American public the familiar stereotypes and tropes that Orientalism had originally ingrained. All of this set the conditions for the structural and private Islamophobia that would emerge after the 9/11 terror attacks.
But the state adopted policies targeting Muslim citizens and immigrants long before the structural reforms and strident laws enacted in the wake of 9/11. Almost a year to the day after the Oklahoma City bombing, the law would follow the anti-Muslim animus peddled by scholars, reported by news anchors, and featured in film. On April 24, 1996, with broad bipartisan support, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which focused on policing Arab and Muslim elements within the United States, and which stands as a principal pre-9/11 example of structural Islamophobia.
The law, on its face, aimed to “deter terrorism, provide justice for victims, [and] provide for an effective death penalty” for culprits of terrorism. However, its enforcement disproportionately targeted Middle Eastern and Muslim subjects, the very same demographic Connie Chung, the media at large, and most Americans presumed to be terrorists. The vast majority of designated foreign terrorist groups were of a Muslim character or based in the Middle East. Muslim Americans who traveled back to their homelands, sent remittances to support family members, or were involved with religious or political organizations found themselves being profiled or suspected of “abetting terrorism,” while immigrants were viewed with heightened suspicion.
The United States was locked in a “clash of civilizations” with Islam, prominent academics theorized and news anchors reported, pushing the state to enact laws and policy that aligned with this binary. Never mind the racial or religious identity of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, who represented the demographic that commits the vast majority of terror attacks on U.S. soil.30 Stereotypes, not statistics or specifics, mattered most to Orientalists, proponents of the clash of civilizations, and Islamophobes who would beat the war-on-terror drums in the era to come. Terrorism, for the state, was not defined generally or neutrally, but focused exclusively on Islam and Muslims.