Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there.
President George W. Bush, September 20, 2001
It’s not right to respond to terrorism by terrorizing other people.
Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War
“America is a wonderful place,” Harjit Sodhi would routinely tell his older brother, Balbir Singh Sodhi, trying to coax him to follow in his footsteps and move from Punjab, India, to California. Balbir loved his home country, and the people and places that colored the only life he knew. Leaving India, and everybody behind, would be extremely difficult. But his brother, Harjit, would lobby him every time they spoke.
His brother finally convinced him in 1988. Holding back tears while packing his bags, Balbir left India to reunite with his brother in California. He left home for a brave new world, where his appearance was no longer a common sight but the object of stares, suspicion, and in the years to come, fear.
Like many other immigrants, thirty-seven-year-old Balbir worked odd jobs to make ends meet in Los Angeles. He worked at a 7–Eleven convenience store for several years, and after hearing that he could earn more for himself and his family as a cab driver in the San Francisco Bay Area, moved north to Walnut Creek, east of Oakland, to join the ranks of the city’s fleet of cabbies. “He worked 12, 14 hours a day, and saved his pennies,” his brother Harjit shared,1 testifying to the grit and determination his brother had in providing for his family, purchasing a home, and converting the dream that lured him to the United States from his beloved India into a reality.
In 2000, he took major strides toward that dream, purchasing a beautiful home in Mesa, Arizona, and a gas station that he paid for with his hard-earned savings. His new business enabled him to provide for his two daughters in ways that were once unfathomable for the Sikh immigrant from India and, in line with a promise he made to himself before leaving for the United States, he regularly sent money back to family members relying on him back home.2 Balbir Sohdi had made it: he was a living example of the American dream realized, an immigrant who left everything behind to come to a new country, with nothing except a willingness to work hard and make a better life for himself and his loved ones. Twelve years after his arrival in America, he was a citizen, a homeowner, and the head of a thriving business. He loved the country that afforded him the opportunity to realize these goals.
Like all of America, Balbir watched the events of 9/11 unfold with shock and fear. Al Qaeda terrorists crashed three passenger planes into the World Trade Center in New York City, a city he had visited and loved, and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The terrorists killed 2,977 innocent victims, and the images of people leaping out of windows, recounting harrowing tales of near-death, and sharing stories of loved ones lost in the attacks stayed with Balbir. He was, after all, a father of two young daughters, and he could not imagine the pain of losing a loved one to a horrific terror attack. As with millions of other Americans, the 9/11 attacks strengthened Balbir’s patriotism and his love for a country that had taken him in as one of its own. He flew an American flag on his home in solidarity with the victims of 9/11, and four days after the attacks, on Tuesday, September 15, he decided to sell American flags at his Chevron gas station.
While gardening and arranging the flags in front of his station, a Chevrolet S-10 pickup pulled up to one of the pumps. The man driving the truck looked in Balbir’s direction, sizing up the brown man wearing a turban, black beard, and friendly smile. He remained inside his truck, staring squarely at Balbir. The Sikh American assumed the man was just another customer. However, this was the furthest thing from the truth, and Balbir realized this when he heard the first shot ring out from the truck. He would not hear the next four.
Balbir was not a Muslim. But according to his killer and scores of Islamophobes, he looked Muslim—he wore the same beard, had the same dark skin, and donned a turban similar to those the terrorists on television wore. Was he part of the Taliban, the extremist Muslim group that controlled much of Afghanistan, blew up ancient Buddhist temples, forced its women to wear burqas, and adopted the arcane form of Sunni Islam peddled by U.S. ally Saudi Arabia? Or was Balbir a member or sympathizer of Al Qaeda, the transnational terror network behind the 9/11 terror attacks? No. He was neither, nor was he Shiite or Sunni Muslim, Arab or Middle Eastern. He was Indian American, and his religion was Sikhism.
But it did not matter. Because to Frank Roque, who murdered Balbir on September 15, 2001, Balbir looked the way so many non-Muslim Americans imagined Muslims to look. To Frank Roque, and the growing ranks of Islamophobes, Balbir’s skin color, beard, and dress were enough to mark him as Muslim, and being Muslim was enough to mark him as evil.
After 9/11, the American legal system would embolden the public rage against Muslims (and dark-skinned non-Muslims) to usher in an era of structural Islamophobia. Seeded by the Orientalism of the past and justified by the World Trade Center terror attacks, scrutiny of and institutionalized prejudice against Muslim Americans would dramatically intensify. “For most Americans, any mention of the presence of Muslims in the United States today is bound to conjure up thoughts of 9/11 and its aftermath,”3 which tightens the bond between Muslim identity and terrorism, the stereotype that drives both private and structural Islamophobia. This also holds true for Sikh Americans and other communities wrongly stereotyped as Muslims.
The violent backlash against Muslim Americans carried out by the state and private hatemongers was intense in the months and years after September 11, 2001. The current phase of the war on terror is just as ominous. On December 7, 2015, Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims coming into the United States.4 His proposal, which he made good on during his first week as president with the (first) Muslim ban, galvanized his supporters and mobilized his detractors. Trump’s proposals, rhetoric, and—once he claimed the presidency—his policies marked a new era of American Islamophobia, one marked by brazen vitriol against Islam. But were Trump and his routine deployment of explicit Islamophobia aberrational? Or a transparent extension of the two administrations that came before his?
The Trump administration ushered in the third era of the protracted war on terror. It followed the Obama administration, a regime celebrated for its outward celebration of multiculturalism but critiqued for its expansion of the surveillance state; and before that, the Bush administration, the original architect of the war on terror. While the Trump administration promises that the war on terror will be escalated to a third, patently more hostile and brazen stage, what is palpably clear is that the “with us or against us” binary echoed by Trump binds him to George W. Bush, who first uttered those words, and to the administration that launched a war that spawned Islamophobia as we know it today.
Nine days after the 9/11 terror attacks, President George W. Bush addressed a shaken, angry, and permanently transformed nation. In his address, President Bush declared, “This is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom. . . . The civilized world is rallying to America’s side. They understand that if this terror goes unpunished, their own cities, their own citizens may be next. . . . We are in a fight for our principles.”5
President Bush’s speech, which specified that America’s target were terrorists who “practice[d] a fringe form of Islamic extremism,” was saturated with appeals to an ideological, cultural, and civilizational war—indeed, the very standoff Huntington wrote about in The Clash of Civilizations. The speech was more than just a demonstration of resolve to the American people and the world at large; it was, most fundamentally, a declaration of war, a “war on terror,” as it came to be known, against an enemy the state explicitly identified as Al Qaeda and the “Islamic extremists” who supported it. In practice, the war on terror has been against Islam as a civilization, and a war on Muslims everywhere.
This war is dramatically distinct from its predecessors and unlike conventional wars in general. Its target is not a nation-state or empire, but rather the vague and amorphous concept of terrorism, conflated with Islam and the billions of its believers presumed to be sympathetic to or in cahoots with terror. The state has linked Muslims, whether immigrants or citizens, living in the United States or abroad, to the suspicion of terrorism, and it has formally enacted a two-front war: the foreign war, and the surveillance, policing, and cultural wars deployed within the country.
This two-front war spurred the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led by Republican Tom Ridge, who would oversee the vastly broadened surveillance, prosecutorial, and punitive measures the state could enforce against those it deemed to be terrorism suspects. The wholesale restructuring of the state’s national security system; centralization of surveillance, immigration, and terror policing within one entity; and the sweeping counterterror policing programs that followed would be politically enabled by the unfathomable terror that unfolded on our television screens on 9/11 and the gut-wrenching images of mothers holding up photos of their sons or daughters to television lenses, makeshift memorials springing up in American cities large and small, and most poignantly, the stories of the 2,996 people whose lives were taken.
Not too long after the tragic events of 9/11, the American public forgot the specific identity of the individuals and faction that committed the largest terror attack on American soil. This forgetting was abetted by presidential declarations of civilizational wars, politicians who internalized the rhetoric and lexicon of “Islam’s bloody borders,” and a public hungry for revenge and already intimately familiar with the images and ideas of “Islamic extremism.” As the days passed, the nineteen culprits of the attack on the World Trade Center became an afterthought. The state and the public were more keen on prosecuting and punishing all Muslims for a conspiracy perpetrated by a handful of terrorists.
It did not matter that fifteen of them were Saudi nationals, or that all of them were committed to Salafi-jihadism, an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islamic thought that brands entire Islamic sects as “apostates.” It did not matter that they were hired guns carrying out an Al Qaeda conspiracy. None of the specifics of the story or the nuances of the narrative seemed to matter. They were, simply, Muslim, indistinguishable from all the other Muslims in the world.
By the foundational principle of American criminal law that holds only the people guilty of committing crimes responsible for them, only the nineteen men and their aiders and abettors were convicted. And yet, at every level of American public and private life, Muslims were increasingly considered collectively culpable. Two law scholars even made the claim that “Saudi Arabia’s dedication to building Wahhabism globally should make Saudi Arabia civilly liable for at least some small part of the harm caused by the Wahhabist-inspired terrorists.”6 The cornerstone principle of American rule of law was turned on its head for the 1.7 billion Muslims across the globe and the 8 to 10 million living in the United States, now presumed to be guilty until proven innocent. “Guilty until proven innocent” forms the fundamental definition of Islamophobia. War-on-terror policies have rolled it out by law, expansive surveillance, policing programming, and outright war.
After 9/ 11, America’s vengeance was instantly unleashed on two Muslim-majority countries. President Bush rolled out his global war on terror in 2001 by first invading Afghanistan, home to the Wahhabi-inspired Taliban, which gave safe haven to many of the perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks. Two years later, Bush declared war on familiar foe Saddam Hussein, driven by the baseless claims that the Iraqi dictator had collaborated with Al Qaeda and was developing weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration baselessly speculated could fall into the hands of Al-Qaeda and other terrorists.
With the capture and execution of Saddam Hussein on September 30, 2006, President George W. Bush finished the first leg of the civilizational war his father had launched more than a decade before. He put an end to the standoff with the Iraqi dictator, making way for the broader war to come. Iraq was sent into a spiral of bloody sectarian civil war, chaos, and division, making it the perfect vacuum for Al-Qaeda terrorists and the more menacing ISIS terrorists born on its battlegrounds (examined in chapter 5).
The second front of the war on terror was at home. In his September 20, 2001, speech, President Bush addressed Muslims and Muslim Americans directly, claiming, “We respect your faith. It’s practiced by millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. . . . The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends . . . our enemy is a radical network of terrorists.” However, his appeal to a civilizational war overshadowed his distinction between “peaceful” Islam and the extremism manifested by Al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorists and his delineating between good and bad Muslims. And more immediately, his revelation of the surveillance and policing measures on the horizon signaled that Muslim American life would never be the same.
“We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror at home,” Bush declared in the same address, foreshadowing the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, which was signed into law a month later. The PATRIOT Act devastated the civil liberties of Muslim citizens and immigrants, enabling the “addition of roving wiretaps [and] the ability to secretly survey email communications,” generally without warrants or a basis for suspicion, even of American citizens.7 Although the act specifically stated that “Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and Americans from South Asia are . . . entitled to nothing less than the full rights of every American” and that their “civil rights and civil liberties . . . must be protected,” in practice the disproportionate surveillance, collection of computer and phone data, and prosecution diminished the citizenship and civil rights of these groups. The fact that this had to be stated indicated a purpose to police these specific groups. The PATRIOT Act’s broad and vague definition of “terrorism” was religiously neutral, but it envisioned Muslims as its targets and was subsequently enforced against this population.
“We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act, and find them before they strike,” President Bush continued, signaling that the privacy rights Muslim Americans, tenuously held before 9/11, would be further eroded. A year later they would be eroded further still with the enactment of the National Security Entry and Exit Registration System (NSEERS), a Muslim immigrant registry that remained on the books for fourteen years. Twenty-four of the twenty-five countries of interest listed in the NSEERS legislation were Muslim-majority nations, which was a clear manifestation of the structural Islamophobic presumption that Muslim identity was correlative with terrorism. NSEERS was predominantly concerned with tracking the activity of Muslim immigrants, particularly while they were within the United States, as evidenced by the nations it honed in on and the arrests made after its enactment. Immediately after it went into force, 80,000 men were entered into the NSEERS registry, the vast majority of them Muslims, “2,870 of whom were detained and 13,799 placed in deportation proceedings within two years after 9/11.”8
The domestic war on terror ushered in the era of full-fledged, state-sanctioned Islamophobia, complete with the foundational structures, signature policies, and all-hands-on-deck governmental will to police virtually every dimension of Muslim American life. Although the rhetoric coming out of the White House insisted that the target of the war on terror was Al Qaeda and, in the words of President George W. Bush, “the governments that supported it,”9 the actions taken and the injuries inflicted revealed that the war was also being waged against Muslim citizens and immigrants.
More than ever before, the war on terror made Arab, Middle Eastern, and especially Muslim identity a proxy for terrorism. Any manifestation of Islam, whether at the individual or institutional level, at the level of ideas or expression, triggered fear of terror. And this fear invited suspicion, surveillance, and possible prosecution by the state. Muslim American households, communities, and mosques were closely monitored, and religious organizations, political groups, student associations, and more were surveilled by DHS, federal agents, and informants. Structural Islamophobia was in full swing, and the laws and programs installed by the state communicated to the American people that Muslims were suspicious and their faith the source of terrorism that threatened national security.
The mainstream media corroborated this and related messages. In her book Arab and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11, Evelyn Alsultany observes, “Xenophobia and outright racism flourished on the airwaves; the pundits of Fox News were always a reliable source of antagonism. At the same time, a slew of TV dramas cashed in on the salacious possibilities of Arab and Muslim terrorist threats and assured viewers with depictions of the U.S. government’s heroic efforts to combat this new, pulse-quickening terrorism. These shows, from network and cable channels, alike—include—but are not limited to—24, Sleeper Cell, NCIS, JAG, The Grid, The Threat Matrix.”10 In his landmark book Reel Bad Arabs, Jack Shaheen observes, “A far-too-common scene shows a mosque with [Muslims] at prayer, then cuts away to showing civilians being gunned down,”11 which affirms, emphatically, the conflation of terrorism with Islam—the very crux of Islamophobia.
A personal experience of mine illustrates the point. Richard Alvarez, a classmate from law school, revealed to me one day, “If not for you, I would probably have the worst opinions of Muslims. You guys are always the bad guys in the movies I love.” This admission did not surprise me—even from a Mexican American law student who would eventually become one of my closest friends. Damaging images of Muslims were ubiquitous when I was in law school, and perpetuated (to great profit) by news media and, as highlighted by Alsultany, by entertainment media. “Growing up in West Sacramento, I did not know any Muslims, or anybody who came out and said they were Muslims,” Richard said, reflecting on his upbringing in the largely working-class Chicano neighborhood in northern California. Law scholar John Tehranian echoes Richard, observing that “The average American has little direct contact with the Middle East or even with Middle Easterners [or Muslims]. Instead, popular perceptions are driven by indirect contact through the mediating force of mass communications. In news and entertainment programming, fear is reflected, cultivated and magnified to devastating effect.”12
The lines between news and entertainment media were often blurred, as representations of Muslims in television dramas and on the big screen matched the religious and racial profiles of the Muslim terrorists the Bush administration hotly pursued; they were almost always Arab or Middle Eastern (the two are routinely conflated), bearded, male, and Muslim. These male representations were sometimes coupled with female representations of the subordinate mother or wife (or wives), whose role was to aid, abet, and harbor the terrorists. Although the portrayals of Muslim women on screen were flatter, less frequent, and less damaging than the depictions of their male counterparts, the tropes were recurring and were directly or indirectly linked to terrorism. This private Islamophobia, unfolding on screen, was triggered by the structural Islamophobia made more expansive and explicit by the Bush administration, which spurred a second wave of private Islamophobia.
The Bush administration’s war-on-terror policies authorized and emboldened private vigilante violence against Muslims, and perceived Muslims like Balbir Singh Sodhi, violence that skyrocketed after 9/11. In 2001, the FBI reported that “hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims multiplied by 1,600 percent from 2000 to 2001.”13 This figure, frightening on its own, does not include “hate incidents,” acts that do not rise to the level of a crime and that are unreported, sometimes because of fear on the part of the victim. Hundreds of mosques were targeted and attacked, neighbors of Muslim (or perceived Muslim) families began making baseless reports to the FBI and law enforcement, and individuals were removed from airplanes without any kind of process or justification.
The wave of hate crimes and hate incidents inflicted on Muslim individuals and institutions was not confined to the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Structural Islamophobic policies characterizing Muslim citizens and immigrants as a dangerous fifth column continued to fuel private Islamophobia for years after. In 2007, the Council on American Islamic Relations reported receiving about 1,900 complaints of abuse and held that anti-Muslim physical violence rose by 52 percent between 2001 and 2003.14 Many assumed that private Islamophobia would decline after 9/11’s immediate aftermath, but the continuing wave of attacks on mosques, unarmed and armed rallies and anti-Muslim protests, and violent attacks against Muslims and perceived Muslims proved otherwise.
Indeed, the structural Islamophobia enacted by the Bush administration, and confirmed by media channels “redeployed [the embedded] Orientalist tropes” that Muslims were vile, violent, and bent on destroying the United States.15 The national security policies of the war on terror were far more than merely protective actions taken to bolster the country’s ability to preempt and prevent terrorism; they were a resounding call to action. They were a call to the broader polity to stand on guard and keep your eyes open, to participate in the national project of defeating terrorism by reporting suspicious activity, to enlist as informants, and, as demonstrated by the horrendous uptick in hate crimes and hate incidents, to take the law into your own hands if need be.
Although 62 percent of Americans “don’t happen to have a friend who is a Muslim” and 87 percent admitted to never having been inside a mosque,16 private Islamophobes acted upon what the media told them about Islam and Muslims. Violent, warmongering, immutably alien and unassimilable, brown, hostile to anything and everything America—that’s what Americans saw and heard, incessantly and in heavy doses, which mobilized a vengeful public to pounce on a people, and a faith, they were overwhelmingly ignorant of. Droves of innocent citizens and immigrants were victimized, and modern Islamophobia—the system of bigotry we know today—was not only born, but rampant and rife.
In many ways, the signature stamp and enduring legacy of the Bush administration are the infrastructure, policies, and strategy of the war on terror. For eight years, the administration would tweak and enhance its surveillance programs, its scrutiny of immigration and restrictions on Muslim immigrants, and its brutal and prolonged war in Iraq—which would claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and scores of American soldiers.
The war on terror did not end with its architects, and neither did Islamophobia. Both would enter a new phase with the landmark election of Barack Obama, the first African American elected to the highest office in the land, and the president who would shift the counterterror model to focus more closely on Muslim American communities.
“What is shariwa law?” Steve asked me. I seemed to be considered the resident expert on everything Islam and Muslim.
“Do you mean Shari‘a law?” I responded, wondering why the middle-aged white international lawyer took a sudden interest in Islamic jurisprudence, or the faith at all.
“Yes, Shari‘a law!” he confirmed, stumbling through the pronunciation. “I don’t know, I just hear it popping up again and again on the news, especially with this Ground Zero mosque debate out of New York City.”
“Well, I’ll start by saying this,” I began, prepping my old work colleague for an explanation free of the typical loaded sound bites and flat misrepresentations of the complex body of Islamic jurisprudence. “First off, it isn’t a codified system of law, but rather scripture that is up for interpretation.”
“So, sort of like the Constitution,” he responded.
“Yes, in many respects, both documents have general and sometimes vague ideas that can be construed differently and are open to debate. Some provisions are clear, but more are contingent on the perspective of the reader. That’s why relying on experts and scholars is important, but like constitutional law scholars or Supreme Court justices, there are diverse positions and varying interpretations of Shari‘a.”
“That makes sense,” Steve responded, with a tone indicating that I had changed his view of the widely misunderstood phrase, a phrase that has been contorted by the media and their pundits into some sort of call for an Islamic takeover or violent war, which is completely upside down.
Shari‘a law is not monolithic. It is not a menacing body of uniform law ordained by a state, “or one book or a single collection of rules. Shari‘a is divine and philosophical.”17 Interpretation of Shari‘a, or Fiqh, ranges depending on the degree of education and expertise of the individual, the individual’s method of construction, age, gender, race, and a wide range of other variables. Mirroring the diversity of the global Muslim population, interpretation of Shari‘a is heterogeneous. And “Shari‘a law” as characterized by the likes of Sean Hannity or Ben Carson is a tool used to stir up more fear and confusion about Islam and Muslims, like “jihad,” “fatwa,” and other Arabic words that have been distorted and deployed to incite Islamophobia.
Fear of Shari‘a law proliferated again in 2011, resulting in a series of bills being introduced in states across the country. Capitalizing on the intense Islamophobia spurred by debate over a possible Muslim community center near Ground Zero, the congressional hearings on “Islamic radicalization” called by Representative Peter King, and the extended war on terror, a number of states introduced legislation that sought to ban Shari‘a law. The proposed bills were not standalone or isolated, but part of a broader movement driven by a partnership between conservative think tanks and politicians, which looked to convert the private Islamophobia saturating the country into structural policies adopted on the state level. The movement to ban Shari‘a law, debated within and carried forward by state legislatures, illustrates how structural Islamophobia also unfolds beyond the federal level and within state governments.
Proponents of anti-Shari‘a legislation defined Shari‘a law as a “‘totalitarian ideology’ and ‘legal-political-military doctrine,’ committed to annihilating Western civilization as we known it today.” Relying on principal Islamophobic baselines that frame Islam as a competing political ideology (sometimes referred to as “Islamo-fascism”) as much as religious scripture, Shari‘a law abolitionists authored a model statute that “would prohibit state judges from considering foreign laws or rulings that violate constitutional rights in the United States.”18 The model statute, titled “American Law for American Courts,” was passed on to allies within state legislatures and subsequently rewritten into bill form. Using this template, conservative legislators sought to pass copycat bills in their respective states, bills that, depending on enforcement, could materially infringe upon a range of civil liberties for Muslim Americans and endanger Muslim American life.
Anti-Shari‘a bills became prominent items of discussion in state legislatures across the country. “As of June, 2011, there were forty-seven bills in twenty-one states that were seeking to ban the use of Shari‘a and/or any category of international law.”19 Spearheaded by the Louisiana and Tennessee legislatures, nearly half of the country’s states entertained the idea of banning Islamic law. One state, Wyoming, even engaged the idea of prohibiting its courts from citing other states that might permit the use of Shari‘a law. In addition to crippling the ability of judges and juries to engage the religious and cultural dimensions of Muslim subjects coming before the courts, anti-Shari‘a legislation conflicts with the Establishment Clause and, perhaps more acutely, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, thereby endangering the rights of Muslim Americans to freely practice their religion of choice. These bills disregarded the constitutional cornerstone of separation of church and state and scoffed at the foundational right of free exercise.
A number of states passed explicit anti-Shari‘a legislation or superficially neutral but de facto Islamophobic measures that restricted state courts from considering foreign, international, or religious law. While not explicitly including the words “Islam” or “Shari‘a,” these laws are specifically aimed at the faith and the citizens who observe it. The 2016 presidential race and the induction of the Trump administration facilitates even more opportunity for states to pass anti-Shari‘a bills. Indeed, the prolific spike in private Islamophobia since Trump was inaugurated, emboldened by the structural policies enacted by him on the federal level, have furnished the anti-Shari‘a movement with momentum and support from Washington to introduce more bills, and very likely, enact more state laws.
While this legislation conflicts with the First Amendment’s principle of separating church and state and preventing the states from meddling in the religious affairs of their citizenry, the ferocity of Islamophobia in America today, at both the federal and state levels, reveals that there is always an Islamophobic exception: violating core constitutional principles is deemed justifiable or permissible as long as the target is Islam or Muslims.
The anti-Shari‘a movement that reached its climax in 2011 illustrates that Islamophobia was just as pervasive during the Obama administration as it was during the George W. Bush era. And while the charismatic and fresh-faced politician came into office promising an end to the war on terror, what came to pass was entirely different.
In 2008, Kameelah Mu’min Rashad was all in: “The first black president or first woman president? Wasn’t a hard choice for me,”20 reflected the African American Muslim woman and prominent activist, who backed the man who inspired so many and rode “hope” all the way into the White House and the history books.
Like many, she did not believe that she would see a black president in her lifetime. Rashad explained, “Honestly, I never imagined a black president before Obama. It seemed so far-fetched or something that would only be possible in Hollywood. For me, Barack Obama was an appealing candidate not because of his individual competence or brilliance. I was equally if not more impressed by Michelle Obama. The fact that he was married to this incredibly accomplished, well-educated, honest, unapologetic black woman was really all the convincing I needed.”21 A black president and first lady seemed a fantasy only years before for Rashad, and for millions more who shared her view, but the sudden emergence of Barack Obama as a presidential contender pushed the black Muslim mother of two to be part of his historic campaign.
An Obama administration also meant newfound hope for Rashad’s two children, Laila and Bilal, who were five and three at the time. She canvassed homes in Philadelphia, the symbolic and demographic capital of the African American Muslim experience in the United States, lobbied friends and colleagues, and pushed mosque congregations to vote for the transcendent black man with the Muslim middle name. Her efforts, part of a grassroots presidential campaign like no other, lifted Barack Hussein Obama to the White House.
• • •
On February 3, 2015, President Obama finally visited an American mosque. His stop at the Islamic Society of Baltimore came seven years into his presidency, a span that encompassed the rise and fall of the Arab Spring, escalating private Islamophobia, and a protracting war on terror targeting Muslims abroad and Muslim Americans stateside. Obama’s lengthy avoidance of American mosques is made even more glaring when juxtaposed with his famous speech at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, a global center of Islamic education and thought, delivered a year into his first term.
On June 4, 2009, in Cairo, Obama openly challenged the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric and policies advanced by the Bush administration. In front of an audience of thousands at Al-Azhar University, and watched by billions more around the world, the newly elected president stated, “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”22
His words were a direct rebuttal to the war on terror carried out by his predecessor, George W. Bush, for eight years. And for those watching, particularly Muslim Americans at home, the speech signaled a rebuke of the structural Islamophobia established and expanded by the Bush administration, and the private Islamophobia it authorized. It was a new day, or at least it seemed that way.
Following his Cairo speech, Obama was celebrated by Muslims and Muslim Americans as a transformative leader who could undo the damage wrought by previous administrations and reconcile tensions between Muslims and the United States. However, the seven years between Obama’s historic Cairo speech and his address to Muslim Americans in Baltimore witnessed the expansion of structural Islamophobia (with the formal establishment of Countering Violent Extremism [CVE] policing, discussed in chapter 5) within his administration and a growing opposition among Muslim Americans.
Criticized by many Muslim Americans as long overdue, President Obama’s first visit to an American mosque climaxed with a speech that condemned private Islamophobia. But behind the words was a counterterror mandate that drove that private Islamophobia forward. Mirroring his own relationship with Islam and Islamophobia, defined primarily by resisting allegations that he himself was an undercover Muslim, President Obama’s engagement with the faith can be best characterized as strategic accommodation and intentional distance.
While campaigning for the presidency, Obama’s opponents, most notably Donald Trump, called Obama a Muslim in order to undermine his campaign and deepen perceptions that he was a foreigner. Perceptions that Obama was Muslim continued into his second term, illustrating how years-old allegations developed into widely held beliefs. Certainly, “the prominence of Obama’s middle name as a signifier of his Arab/Muslim identity would not leave him until the last days of the presidential campaign, if ever.”23 These beliefs had a considerable impact on Obama; as a result of them, he chose to limit his outreach and engagement with the Muslim American community.
Political aversion to mosques, in President Obama’s case, exhibits a less conspicuous brand of Islamophobia. And under what circumstances did Obama—during the final quarter of his second term—finally enter a mosque and speak to its congregation? That his visit took place during his second term, and at the close of his administration, meant that the political stakes were far lower. The damage the visit could have done to his administration was minimal; he was setting his sights beyond his presidential post. He dodged American mosques and close association with Muslims until it was no longer politically expedient to do so, namely when he sought to advance his signature structural Islamophobic program: CVE policing.
The expansion of CVE policing in the aftermath of the San Bernardino, Paris, and Orlando attacks strongly suggests another motive: interest in enlisting Muslim Americans as strategic supporters of expanding counter-radicalization programming and CVE policing. And so the latent political Islamophobia of Obama’s decision to steer clear of mosques was fused with the anti-Muslim underpinnings of his cornerstone anti-terror policy, CVE policing, which Hillary Clinton would likely have expanded if she had been elected president.24
While “celebrat[ing] the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation” was the motive issued to the media for Obama’s mosque visit,25 enlisting Muslim Americans as CVE policing interlocutors and informants was the likely reason for the visit. In line with this aim, Obama made “a direct appeal to America’s Muslim youth. . . asking Muslim communities to be ‘partners’ in state and federal campaigns [CVE policing] to combat militant groups that try to recruit young followers of Islam.”26 In a speech that probably would not have been given if not for the San Bernardino shooting, President Obama called for closer collaboration with Muslim Americans to combat and counter radicalization.
Mobilizing Muslim American support for CVE policing, Obama’s cornerstone structural Islamophobic program, certainly would be bolstered by the symbolic force of the president speaking inside an American mosque. And it would strategically tap into what had been unprecedented Muslim American support for a presidential candidate, which, after controversial foreign policy decisions and the expansion of Muslim American surveillance, had been gradually eroding since 2012.
President Obama condemned the “inexcusable rhetoric” from Republican candidates and implored that “we can’t suggest that Islam is the root of the problem.”27 And yet, in direct conflict with these words was the primary political objective of his historic address, to promote a counterterror program that suggests Islam is the root of radicalization and Muslims are the lone demographic prone to becoming radicalized. The Baltimore speech, essentially, was an exercise in masterful doublespeak—President Obama used the laudatory rhetoric about Islam that Muslims so desperately wanted to hear, while warning about the threat of Islamic radicalization to mitigate the fears of everybody else.
Whereas speaking at a mosque before the Paris attacks and the San Bernardino shootings may have symbolized a connection with Islam in the minds of those who believed that Obama was Muslim, speaking in a mosque after these tragedies signaled the state mandate for expanded CVE policing. What appears to be an official acknowledgment of Islam becomes, upon deeper investigation, a calculated presidential maneuver driven by fear. This time, instead of fearing damage to his reputation or political career, President Obama pivoted—seven years later—to carry forward counterterror policies exclusively focused on Muslim American bodies and communities, policies rooted in a fear as old as the nation itself.
While the Republican Party, particularly with Trump’s ascent, became the party of blatant and explicit political Islamophobia, the Democratic Party under President Obama stood as the party of expanding structural Islamophobic policy and programming. The latter, mirroring Obama’s masterful speech at the mosque in Baltimore, used benign and gracious language toward Muslims to enlist them as informants in programming that invites great dangers into Muslim American communities. President Obama also appointed a White House Muslim American liaison in May of 2016, in part to build strategic bridges and partnerships with Muslim leaders and stakeholders, partnerships that would that enable the state to further establish and expand CVE programming in Muslim communities across the country.28
Above all, this strategy of engagement within Muslim American communities not only carried forward the baseline presumption that Muslim identity is correlative with terrorism, but also localized it by deputizing police officers to lead the charge in unearthing potential radicals and preventing them from taking action.
A tale of two mosques, beginning with a lofty speech in the heart of one of Islam’s most important religious centers in Cairo and concluding with a long overdue appearance in a Muslim American mosque eight years later, form the axes of President Obama’s administration of structural Islamophobia. His presidency began with much optimism and concluded with the bitter realization that Obama did not put an end to the war on terror launched by his predecessor, but mutated, modernized, and marched it forward. With a fresh new face, rhetorical smoke signals, and the pacifying effect afforded by his racial identity and strategic deployment of progressive ideas and language, the war on terror was craftily pushed forward for another eight years under the Obama administration, and Islamophobia swelled right alongside of it.
Obama, a landmark president who broke the racial barrier to the highest office in the land, did not usher in post-racial America, as illustrated most vividly by the Movement for Black Lives that unfolded during his second term. Nor did his administration put an end to the war on terror. The very mosques where Obama opened and closed his historic presidency were the sites on which his surveillance programming focused, where the assessment of good Muslim, bad Muslim was unfolding most furiously.
Kameelah Rashad was among the guests invited to President Obama’s Baltimore mosque visit on February 4, 2016, along with her two children, Laila and Bilal, now thirteen and eleven years old. “As a black Muslim, over the eight years of his presidency, it was difficult at times to reconcile how I felt about his presence with his foreign and domestic policies, which were detrimental to many of the communities of which I am a member,” recalled Rashad.29 The hope that pushed her to canvass for the black candidate with the middle name Hussein had, eight years later, devolved into disappointment and concern, particularly as her two children became more and more vulnerable to the CVE programming that came to define President Obama’s relationship with Muslim America.
The feeling of being perpetually out of place characterizes my life best. Born to a Shiite Muslim father from Lebanon and a Sunni Muslim mother from Egypt, I was ignorant to the differences between the two sects until my early teenage years growing up in a predominantly Shiite community, where I was singled out as “not Shiite enough” by friends. Later on, during college, acquaintances and classmates profiled me based on my last name and hometown origins and concluded that I was not Sunni enough. In addition to faith, I straddled ethnic and racial margins as an Arab living in a predominantly black neighborhood in Detroit, right outside of Dearborn’s borders, and being the target of proxy racism from Arab classmates who called me “ghetto” and warned me, “Beware of the ʻabeed,” the Arabic equivalent of the N-word, as they dropped me off at my house after school or playing basketball.
I seldom felt fully integrated as a youth in Muslim and Arab American spaces, and later in college, among generally upper-middle-class and affluent friends whose parents were lawyers, doctors, and corporate executives. I was the first in my family to leave home for college, and my mother—who came to my dorm almost every weekend with bags full of groceries—worked at a Laundromat during my sophomore year. While my closest friends led political organizations and plotted the next march or campus protest, ate at expensive restaurants and immersed themselves in college culture, I was more concerned with helping my mother pay her mortgage, partitioning my financial aid to help her and make my own ends meet, and making the forty-five minute drive home as often as I could. I left home for my studies, but home never left me, and that existential feeling of being perpetually out of place stayed lodged within me in college and beyond.
I could empathize entirely with Meursault, the protagonist in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, when he said, “I noticed then that everyone was waving and exchanging greetings and talking, as if they were in a club where people are glad to find themselves among others from the same world. That is how I explained to myself the strange impression I had of being odd man out, a kind of intruder.”30 Intruder and imposter syndrome stayed with me throughout my time at the University of Michigan, a public university that in practice catered to students from middle-class and affluent origins who explored radical politics as some sort of cultural tourism or transient experimentation, only to retreat back to the comforts of suburban life. My circumstance was the very opposite, although Ann Arbor and college life offered little retreat from the difficult realities at home, which continually loomed over me.
Many years later, my most politically radical college friends, who had the luxury of dedicating the time to activism that I did not have, retreated to the lives of their parents, shelving political activism for a quiet life in the suburbs and the professional upward mobility that a quiet, apolitical life enabled. Struggle, again, was a social fad that many of my classmates could opt out of as easily as they opted in, while the challenges I faced were no extracurricular activity, but the only life I knew.
I recall reading Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place, as a college junior.31 His experience as a stateless Palestinian, living in the United States but always longing for the home from which he was displaced, resonated deeply with me. I was not Palestinian, but an Egyptian and Lebanese American, raised on the west side of Detroit, and unlike Said, a man I consider an intellectual hero, I grew up on welfare and without the means he had. But his story spoke to me, and his experience made sense of that incessant circumstance, feeling, or spirit of perpetually being out of place: not Muslim enough in some spaces, not Arab enough in others; not Shiite or Sunni enough, cultured or sophisticated enough, or down or radical enough. Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicana feminist and one of my favorite thinkers, articulated this feeling of perpetual flux best, writing, “Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an ‘alien’ element.”32 These intellectuals articulated what I was, at that point, unable to, and just as importantly, they gave me community.
But as I approached my mid-twenties, the pressures of living at the intersection of multiple borders mattered less and less. I rebuffed them and ultimately learned that that feeling of being out of place was empowering, and more fundamentally, offered a portal toward full-fledged freedom and independence. As my friend and mentor Hisham Aidi would later tell me, “There’s might at the margins!” Not having to appease an individual, placate a gatekeeper, or conform to a narrowly defined community marked the essence of liberty and the pathway toward the person I wanted to be. And indeed, the only individual, student, activist, and Muslim I knew how to be. Being out of place was my only place, so I rejected the binaries that surrounded me and rejected the binds and burdens that compromised others and compelled them to conform.
While I was rejecting the social scripts of existential binaries, the war on terror was expeditiously crafting a new binary-driven script. You are “either with us or against us,” President Bush stated emphatically nine days after the 9/11 terror attacks, speaking explicitly to foreign nations, but also to Muslims in the United States and abroad. Many years later, President Obama echoed a similar message to Muslim Americans, claiming that “Muslims around the world have a responsibility to reject extremist ideologies that are trying to penetrate within Muslim communities.”33 This was, again, an appeal, if not a mandate, for Muslim Americans to be part of the profiling and surveillance programs installed by the Obama administration, programs that rely heavily on Muslims to serve as informants, watchdogs, and data collectors within mosques, community centers, student groups, and other places Muslims gather, including social media platforms.
The message from both Bush and Obama to Muslim Americans was clear: there were good Muslims and bad Muslims. The latter were not only the terrorist groups and their agents, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, but also Muslims and Muslim Americans who might be suspected of sympathizing with these groups. The former were citizens who heeded the call of the war on terror to participate in identifying terrorists and “homegrown radicals,” which not only showcased their patriotism, but also excluded them from suspicion of terror.
Although Muslim Americans are bona fide citizens, their religious identity induces scrutiny of their citizenship status, patriotism, and belonging. This scrutiny is strongest after national crises, and specifically in the direct aftermath of a terror attack committed by a Muslim culprit. As constitutional law scholar Kenneth Karst writes, “In times of trouble . . . fears tend to focus on particular groups of cultural outsiders as a source of danger.”34 This is particularly true for Muslim Americans, whose religious affiliation can negate any legal or material claim to Americanness and hold them out to be threatening interlopers.
September 11 functioned as the great modern juncture that “increase[d] awareness of Muslim culture and practice” in the United States,35 ushering in intensified private and structural Islamophobia. The deployment of Islamophobia after 9/11 presumed that, by virtue of their faith, Muslim Americans would prioritize their allegiance to Islam over their allegiance to their country. This assumption had implicit in it the demand that Muslims prove allegiance to the United States through performance of vivid, recurring, and over-compensatory acts of patriotism. The alternative was exposure to the full-fledged might of state and societal suspicion and violence. Leti Volpp of the University of California Berkeley School of Law theorizes that “terrorist and citizen are opposition terms. Thus the ‘terrorist citizen’ seems also an impossible subject. Putative terrorists are not considered deserving of the protections of citizenship.”36 Thus, as putative terrorists, Muslim Americans must actively perform their patriotism and (outwardly, at least) under-perform their Muslim identity to mitigate the suspicion tethered to their religious identity.
Law scholar Natsu Saito wrote that, after September 11, “Arab Americans and Muslims have been ‘raced’ as ‘terrorists’: foreign, disloyal, and imminently threatening. Although Arabs trace their roots to the Middle East and claim many different religious backgrounds, and Muslims come from all over the world . . . these distinctions are blurred and negative images about either Arabs or Muslims are often attributed to both.”37 This is particularly true for private Islamophobes, who largely latch on to the idea that Muslim identity is a racial identity or a civilization. Meanwhile, the state and structural Islamophobic policy, over time, has become more adept at distinguishing between Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim identities.
Because Muslim and American identities are constructed as opposable, any performance of Americanness requires downplaying Muslim identity. Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati list some examples of Muslim American expressions of patriotism: “[A man] shaving before taking a plane trip. Or for a woman it might mean refraining from wearing a headscarf. For the family, it might mean placing an American flag outside the home. It also might mean refraining from doing the traditional Muslim prayers at work.”38 In addition to collaborating in the war-on-terror effort to identify terrorists in the community, performing Muslim identity in line with what the state deems “moderate” or “non-threatening” is another avenue in which the state pushes Muslim Americans to perform the “good Muslim” role.
Law scholar Karen Engle observes that those who forsake their Free Exercise rights in exchange for demonstrations of American patriotism are deemed “good Muslims” by the state.39 Those who refuse to make the trade-offs demanded by structural Islamophobia are branded “bad Muslims” whose identity signals subversion and warrants suspicion of terrorism. In this way, the war on terror and the Islamophobic policies and private behaviors it induces compel Muslim Americans to perform Muslim identity in ways that conform to the state-sanctioned perception of the “good Muslim,” concealing “negative” traits or expressions linked to subversion or terror threat, and in some instances, entirely concealing their Muslim identity. Muslim Americans who freely exercise their faith are suspected of being “bad Muslims,” and those who diminish or forsake that civil liberty are likely to be cast as “good Muslims.”40
One of the many assumptions embedded in imagining Muslim Americans as subversive is presuming that their allegiance lies with a foreign actor bent on harming the United States—in particular, allegiance to transnational terror networks like Al-Qaeda, the orchestrator of the 9/11 terror attacks, or ISIS, the emergent terrorist organization DHS holds culpable for “inspiring” homegrown radicalization and acts of terror. Under Presidents Bush and Obama, Muslim Americans were expected to rebut these presumptions by disavowing every terror attack that involved a Muslim, assisting the state as interlocutors and informants, and—in conflict with their Free Exercise rights—practicing their faith in ways that mitigated the suspicion of structural Islamophobic policies like the USA PATRIOT Act and CVE policing.
In a May 2016 article for Al Jazeera English, I wrote,
For Muslim Americans, demonstrations of good citizenship are tied to terrorism. Namely, condemning any and every act that involves a Muslim culprit. Apologizing for the actions of a deviant, distant few. And routinely on deaf ears, collective statements against the savage acts of savage actors such as ISIL. . . . Muslim Americans are riddled with the assignment of collective guilt that obliges them to disavow or apologize for entirely unrelated actors, or completely unconnected actions. . . . Unfortunately, there are only two sides, and selecting the wrong side leaves one vulnerable to identification as a bad Muslim, followed by the surveillance and state violence attendant with that classification.41
Being a “good Muslim” is hard work during the war on terror, and the binary was on vivid display during the 2016 presidential election. In addition to the brazen Islamophobia coming from the political right, the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary was also actively promoted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Journalist Nesrine Malik pinpointed how Clinton carried forward the central Islamophobic narrative that tethers Muslim identity tightly to terrorism, specifically, through the tokenization of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the gold-star parents of fallen Army captain Humayun Khan. The Khans lost their son to a suicide-bomber attack in Iraq in 2004. Like thousands of other American families, the Khans had to move forward without a child lost to war. The Clinton campaign seized on their story and sought to showcase it and the Khans during the 2016 presidential campaign. In response to this, Malik observes, “Take the Khans of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for example. They are liberal America’s final answer to the right’s toxic messaging and Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ electioneering. Rather than countering simplistic and reductionist views of Muslims, they confirmed them—something that was not lost on many, despite how desperate the situation was.”42 Clinton, and the Democratic Party at large, advanced Islamophobia by projecting a specific image of the “good Muslim,” indirectly instructing Muslim Americans to condemn terrorism, endorse American foreign and war policy, and more broadly, abstain from dissident and critical behavior. The message was to be like the Khans, who were projected as the Democratic Party’s sanctioned models for Muslim American to conform to.
Declan Walsh of the New York Times echoed this very point: “The manner in which Mr. Khan was lionized in the American media also aroused discomfort and debate among other American Muslims. Some say it has resurrected the specter of the ‘good Muslim’—the idea, born of the fertile post-2001 era, that Muslim American patriotism can be measured only by the yardstick of terrorism and foreign policy. That raised a question: Did Mr. Khan’s testimony, determined and powerful as it was, show that it takes the death of a son, in a disputed war in a Muslim land, to prove you are a good American?”43
The liberty that comes with being out of place, during the war on terror, exposed Muslim Americans who freely expressed their religious identity to the conjoined Islamophobia of the state and the citizenry. This dynamic, in turn, incentivized Muslim Americans to find their place on the safe side of the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary—or face the steadily expanding suspicion that they may be linked to terrorism, or, in line with the new language of counter-radicalization policing, that they may be “homegrown radicals.”