Since Islam is “against us” and “out there,” the necessity of adopting a confrontational response of our own toward it will not be doubted.
Edward Said, Covering Islam
Minneapolis is worlds away from Mogadishu, Somalia. It feels especially distant during the cold and seemingly endless Minnesota winters. And yet, the eastern Twin City is home to the largest and most concentrated Somali population in the United States, a predominantly Muslim diaspora that migrated en masse to Minnesota following the 1993 civil war, with waves of newcomers gravitating toward the Somali hub every year since. Minneapolis has been dubbed “Little Mogadishu” by many, a title that, depending on who you ask, is linked either to the large presence of Somalis in the midwestern city or to the images of turbulence and terror the capital city of Somalia conjures up.
In the last two decades, Minneapolis has become the center of the Somali American experience, and because Islam is central to Somali identity for so many, one of the epicenters of the broader Muslim American experience. While Detroit and its Michigan neighbor, Hamtramck, the first officially Muslim-majority city in the United States, have garnered attention from media and scholars as the lifelines of the Muslim American experience, any accounting of Muslim Americans that does not dedicate ample attention to Minneapolis, and Somali American life in this city, is incomplete. A short stroll through Little Mogadishu reveals that the most salient dimensions of Muslim American life, from surveillance to systematic racism to the struggles of negotiating assimilation alongside spiritual identity, are vividly showcased on these streets.
Ahmed was born in Little Mogadishu two years after his parents settled in Minnesota, building community with other Somalis seeking refuge in the heart of the American Midwest.1 It is the only home he has ever known. Today, Ahmed studies biology at a nearby college, regularly attends a local mosque, and, in line with his parents’ request, sends some of the money he earns from his part-time job to family members in Somalia. He also helps his parents, who live on a modest income supplemented by federal assistance and food stamps, pay their rent each month. A diehard Minnesota Timberwolves and Vikings fan, Ahmed’s social media timelines are flooded with posts about the teams’ latest victories and losses, and from time to time, status updates about the political and economic tumult in Somalia—a nation that he has never visited, but like many first-generation Somali Americans living in the city, has a strong affinity for.
Ahmed is every bit Somali and American, effortlessly switching from English to Somali, blending both beautifully into a distinctly harmonized tongue. Indeed, both languages, and the cultures they represent, make Ahmed neither Somali nor American alone. He is both, coexistent and combined to form a distinct identity shared by the thousands of Somali American youth and twenty-somethings living in Minneapolis and throughout the country.
The year 2014 marked a critical turning point for Ahmed. During the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims are obliged to abstain from food and water from sunrise to sundown, Ahmed found himself spending more time in the mosque. He would make the short walk over when he found time between classes and his work shifts, and he became a fixture at the mosque in the early morning, when brothers and sisters convened to make taraweeh, the special Ramadan prayers. Like many young people of faith, whether Christian or Jew, Hindu or Buddhist, Ahmed was drawn to Islam at the crossroads of his teenage and adult years, smitten by the beauty of the Qur’an he finally picked up to read closely, and drawn in by the tight-knit community that surrounded him. Ramadan drew him closer to Islam and closer to the community, and he found himself drawn to maintaining a more pious lifestyle beyond the Holy Month. Faith changed Ahmed from the inside, and gradually his enhanced spirituality would become more manifest on the outside. Ahmed always knew Islam and was always around the mosque, but months before his nineteenth birthday, he fully embraced it as a way of life.
At the end of Ramadan in 2014, Ahmed kept a beard to signify his piety. He skipped spending weekend nights with friends at downtown clubs in favor of evenings discussing politics, community concerns, and faith at the “Somali Starbucks” on Riverside Avenue. His Facebook statuses began to reflect the spiritual growth and personal maturity Ahmed was experiencing, and in line with developing a stronger social justice bent, he began forming critical opinions of American foreign policy and domestic counterterror policy. Quotes from the Prophet Mohammed and other important Islamic figures filled his Facebook page, while pictures of grand mosques in the Middle East, Africa, and beyond were the snapshots he featured on his Instagram account, instead of selfies or pictures of his dream cars.
Everybody around him noticed his shift for the better, particularly his family and closest friends. Apart from spiritual growth, Ahmed’s academic performance dramatically improved, his professional drive and sense of purpose sharpened, and his commitment to social justice and community philanthropy strengthened. But this personal development, which would seem benign for young men of other faiths, spelled danger for Ahmed, a Muslim and a young black man; he occupied perhaps the most dangerous intersection of identity during the American moment in which he lived, a period of radical reform on the national security policing front.
In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security named Minneapolis as one of the pilot cities where Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) policing would be implemented. CVE was a recently established program, formally implemented by the Obama administration in 2011, whereby local law enforcement (the Minneapolis Police Department) collaborated closely with federal security agents to help identify prospective “homegrown radicals” and try to prevent them from enlisting with a terrorist organization or taking part in a terror attack. CVE policing focused almost entirely on Muslims and concentrated on Muslim communities like the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis that Ahmed called home. Religious piety was considered by CVE policing policy to be one of the signals of a Muslim becoming radicalized, particularly when the shift toward religiosity was an abrupt one.
This left Ahmed, whose embrace of faith was in line with his quest for personal growth and theoretically protected by the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, in the crosshairs of CVE policing and terror suspicion. To the Minneapolis Police Department and the DHS agents it collaborated with, Ahmed’s spiritual growth signaled risk and prompted suspicion. His name made its way onto the list of “subjects of interest”—all of whom were Muslim men, whether Somali, Arab, black, or white—tallied by Minneapolis police officers as suspected of “being radicalized” by Al-Shabab, ISIS, or other Islamic transnational terror networks. Ahmed’s spiritual growth and placement on the suspect list all happened in less than a year.
Ahmed had no idea he was a suspect until one Saturday morning when two police officers, who had been carefully observing him and his social media for weeks, stopped over at his family’s home to question him. The officers were acting with the help of an informant, a school acquaintance who kept tabs on Ahmed in exchange for reduced probation time for a crime he had committed. Ahmed had done no wrong, he had no prior convictions, no criminal record at all, and yet he was deemed a subject of interest—a prospective radical on account of his nationality, neighborhood, and especially, his spiritual evolution from secular to devout Muslim. Like thousands of Muslim youth in Minneapolis, and millions more across the country, Ahmed’s faith marked him as suspect of radicalization—not a crime or criminal activity, not hateful or violent behavior, but rather the Islamophobic, prejudice-driven fear that his faith might spur him toward terrorism.
CVE policing, the signature structural Islamophobic program implemented and enforced by the Obama administration, shifted the focus of the war on terror from foreign terrorist organizations to “homegrown radicals,” in line with DHS’s belief that Al Qaeda, and more potently, ISIS, was inspiring “homegrown radicalization.” CVE policing extended the Islamophobic presumption that an expression of Muslim identity, whether through religious practice or observance, physical markers, or even political activity (perceived as Muslim-related), is indicative of radicalization and deserving of suspicion and investigation. This story is not Ahmed’s alone, but a common tale of Muslim youth, men, and women throughout the country.
The bustling and narrow streets of Old Havana were a panorama unlike anything seen back home in the United States. The sounds of salsa reverberating and the chorus of Spanish coming from every direction signaled that I was very far from home. Cuba’s communist foundation and its turbulent relationship with Washington, D.C., made home feel ever further away, even though I was only ninety miles away from Miami.
It was Thursday, May 25, 2017, two days before the holy month of Ramadan, and I roamed around the Old District in search of Havana’s only mosque, the Mezquita Abdallah. My brown skin and ethnic ambiguity helped me blend in nicely and I was ignored by the street peddlers pestering tourists from Europe, Canada, and other origins. Yet I would soon learn that my religious identity would cast me as an outsider, as it did back home in the United States.
Confused by the maze of streets and limited by my lack of Spanish, I asked a passerby if he knew where the mosque was located. He paused, inspected my lightly bearded face and snickered, “Why, are you with ISIS?” For me, worlds away from home and momentarily free—I thought—from the continual looming presumption of suspicion and guilt attendant with American Islamophobia, this was no laughing matter. First, it signaled the obvious, that Islamophobia was indeed a global phenomenon; second, it showed with stark clarity that ISIS had become the preeminent global face of the Muslim terrorist not only in the United States, but also around the world. I could not escape the connections people made between Islam and ISIS, whether at home or on vacation.
On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALS in Pakistan killed Osama Bin Laden, the head of Al Qaeda, the terror network behind the 9/11 terror attacks. His death was celebrated all over the United States and marked a major political victory for the Obama administration. It also marked a critical turning point in the war on terror. The assassination of Bin Laden led to the gradual decline of Al Qaeda as the principal Islamic terror network in the world, opening the door for ISIS, its more violent offshoot, to assume that mantle. ISIS’s mission was to establish, and expand, a caliphate, an Islamic state, in the heart of the Arab world. This caliphate became the primary theater for ISIS’s two-front war, a war that also included staging terror attacks outside of the Middle East, most frequently in Europe. Simultaneously, the terror networks in Europe were busy recruiting thousands of disaffected youth and young adults to either join ISIS in the Arab world or carry out terror conspiracies at home.
While Al Qaeda and Bin Laden had been focused centrally on attacking the West, ISIS’s objectives were grander and more complex. Fawaz Gerges writes that “conceptually and operationally, there exist important differences between Al Qaeda Central and ISIS, even though they belong to the same Salafi-jihadist family. Bin Laden and [current Al Qaeda leader] Zawahiri never wavered from viewing America as the real enemy and consistently reminded their followers that ‘the focus should be on killing and fighting the American people and their representatives,’ a mission ISIS and its leadership embraced and, to great horror, continued.”2 However, in addition to fighting this “far enemy,” ISIS was also committed to a “near war” with what it considered a primary foe, Shiite Muslims in the region. Growing out of the tumult of the Iraq wars and the vacuum those left in Iraq, and the violent clashes and anarchy in Syria, ISIS gained considerable momentum in relative obscurity for nearly a decade.
The mainstream American news media finally turned its attention to ISIS in 2013, and most prolifically, in June of 2014, when the terror network took over the Iraqi city of Mosul. Although ISIS had been conspiring in the shadows for more than a decade, Mosul marked a critical turning point that signaled it was no trivial movement, but a rapidly expanding regional power bent on accelerating its territorial control, ideological influence, and, for nations far from the Arab world, its global terror reach. In The Atlantic, David Ignatius observed, “Like many consequential events, this one didn’t sneak up on policymakers; they simply didn’t see what was taking shape in front of them. ISIS told us exactly what it was going to do, and then did it. This was a secret conspiracy hiding in plain sight.”3 In relative obscurity, ISIS had enlisted and mobilized legions of followers, mounted successful offensives in Iraq and Syria, and chewed up more and more territory, capitalizing on regional tumult and global neglect to emerge as an unprecedented terror menace.
If its victory in Mosul was not enough to demand the attention of policymakers and the mainstream American media, its “pornographically violent” and vividly crafted videos of beheadings and executions, distributed through social media platforms, demanded attention.4 Striking fear in the hearts of viewers was its primary aim, but ISIS also spent millions of dollars to use these videos as propaganda, hoping to inspire wayward youth, men, and women looking for a cause or a calling in the Arab world, Europe, and the United States.
The news became rife with stories asking, “Why did three American kids from the suburbs of Chicago try to run away to [join] the Islamic State?”5 and headlines such as “The Americans: 15 Who Left the United States to Join ISIS.”6 Fixation on ISIS, and fear of its reach and resonance within Muslim American communities, became the subject of daily news stories. Although it never took much to trigger the embedded fears that conflated Muslim identity with foreign violence, the emergence of ISIS and the counterterror policing model it helped spur marked a critical shift in the framing of Muslim terrorism.
The primary profile of the Muslim terrorist was no longer that of the foreign actor who traveled to the United States to carry out an act of terror. The new image was the “homegrown radical,” who was (likely) born and bred in the United States, by all measures American but vulnerable to recruitment and ideological conversion by ISIS on the basis of his or her Muslim identity alone. Thus any and every Muslim American (particularly Sunni Muslims, since radicalization is disproportionately linked to Sunni terror networks like ISIS) was presumed to be vulnerable to radicalization, and therefore subject to the suspicion and surveillance of the state.
The powder keg of war and sectarianism in Iraq and Syria have facilitated ISIS’s expansion, and its systematic killing of Shiite Muslims, Christians, and ethnic minorities has added to that apocalyptic mix. The conflict in Syria and the crimes of the Assad regime have also played into the sectarian vision of ISIS, leading many to believe that its “power will only be enhanced . . . by Assad’s continued hold on power.”7 Moreover, its advances in the Arab world are accompanied by horror abroad, as illustrated on November 13, 2015, in Paris, when ISIS attackers, in separate but coordinated bombings and shootings, killed 130 people and injured roughly 400. This followed the Paris attacks in January 2015, when terrorists killed seventeen people at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a kosher grocery, and in the suburb of Montrouge. These attacks helped fuel the rise of private and structural Islamophobia in a nation where both were already rampant, as demonstrated most vividly by the rise of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, who finished second in the May 2017 presidential runoff, claiming nearly 34 percent of the national vote. Like Trump, Le Pen capitalized on virulent Islamophobic rhetoric, claiming that Muslim and French identities are irreconcilable, echoing the longstanding rhetoric that Islam is unassimilable, hostile, and inherently at odds with the West—a rhetoric deeply embedded in the American imagination and, today, one of the latent drivers of CVE policing.
CVE policing was the new counterterror paradigm, and in terms of encroaching on the privacy of Muslim Americans and presuming guilt based on religious identity alone, the “new PATRIOT Act.”8 Actors with (real or nominal) Muslim identities, such as the perpetrators of the terror attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando, were instantly presumed to have ISIS ties and to be acting in furtherance of ISIS objectives. As with the Oklahoma City bombing more than two decades earlier, and the hundreds of attacks committed by Muslim and, overwhelmingly, non-Muslim actors since, mainstream media spun the same fantastic and trite narratives of Muslim terror conspiracies, basing them on the thinnest pieces of information or no evidence at all aside from the ethnic or religious profile of the actor.
Yet the private Islamophobia of the media was no aberration at all in this respect, but rather an extension of the structural Islamophobia shaped and enforced by the state, which likewise built its suspicion and surveillance of Muslim Americans, like Ahmed in Minneapolis, on the slimmest pieces of evidence, overwhelmingly focusing on the religious identity and lifestyle of the actor. In the words of my younger brother Mohammed, “The more you pray, the more you’re prey.”
In August 2011, President Obama formally implemented CVE policing, which would become the primary counterterror surveillance program and the signature Islamophobic policy of his administration. CVE theory contends that through collaboration between DHS and local law enforcement, individuals suspected of becoming radicalized can be identified, persuaded from adopting a “radical” ideology, and prevented from taking terrorist action. “To its proponents,” writes New York University law professor Samuel Rascoff, “counter-radicalization begins with the uncontroversial proposition that manifestations of violent extremism are rooted in ideas and social-behavior processes. Understanding and addressing these ideas and processes will help prevent future attacks and thus should play an important role in American counterterror policy.”9
Sahar Aziz, a Rutgers law professor and leading scholar on Muslim Americans and national security matters, adds: “Operationally, the objective is to stop people from embracing extreme beliefs (an inherently subjective and vague term) that might lead to terrorism, as well as to reduce active support for terrorist groups.”10 While “extremism” is framed in racially and religiously neutral terms, and CVE policing is theoretically focused on all culprits of extremism, it is disproportionately if not entirely focused on “ideas” and behavioral “processes” linked to Islam and expressions of Muslim identity. Radicalization, therefore, is theorized as an exclusively Muslim phenomenon, much like its precedent and related enterprise, terrorism.
Furthermore, “radicalization theory suggests that the path from Muslim to terrorist is a predictable one.”11 It links radicalization—or propensity for radicalization—with specific “religious and political cultures within Muslim communities.”12 In line with FBI guidelines, CVE policing philosophy breaks down the “identifiable and predictable process by which a Muslim becomes a terrorist into four stages: 1) preradicalization; 2) identification; 3) indoctrination; and 4) action.”13 During the first stage, the Muslim subject’s radicalization potential is dormant, untapped; the second stage involves gravitation toward conservative religious expression; during the third stage, the Muslim subject has adopted or embraced an ideology deemed “extreme”; and finally, in the fourth stage, the subject is conspiring to take terrorist action. Since the Muslim subject is viewed as a greater threat at each successive stage, CVE policing seeks to apprehend the subject at the earliest stage possible.
According to DHS, the predictive pathway toward radicalization makes it preventable. And prevention is at the core of radicalization theory, which centers exclusively on Muslim subjects and geographies as presumptive sources of terrorism. Muslim Americans suspected of radicalization have engaged in no criminal act. And yet young Muslim men, like Ahmed in Minneapolis, are disproportionately vulnerable to the dragnet of CVE policing, which makes the Islamophobic leap that Muslim masculinity plus piety equals a desire to enlist with ISIS or another terror network. Muslim American women who exhibit the same piety are generally profiled as harborers of homegrown radicals, and with rising frequency, homegrown radicals themselves.
Today, CVE policing ranks among the most destructive forms of structural Islamophobia. Its strategy and enforcement, while framed in a facially neutral fashion, is “cloaked in expertise about the process by which Muslims become terrorists.”14 Individuals who maximize their Muslim identity, or “Muslimness,” by freely expressing their faith and exercising their First Amendment rights, expose themselves to being profiled by the state as refusing to assimilate, as religiously conservative, as extreme or subversive, to name just some of the “bad Muslim” tropes that open the door to CVE suspicion. In short, the more Muslim one is, the more likely one will be pegged as a subject of CVE interest.
CVE policing is driven by the same fears that fuel private Islamophobes to vandalize and burn down mosques, isolate and attack Muslim men with beards or women with headscarves, and rally in front of religious centers and advocacy organizations. But instead of enforcing Islamophobia by way of vigilante violence, CVE policing plants informants in mosques and other spaces where Muslims congregate, and mobilizes local law enforcement to keep a watchful eye on Muslim communities. It also turns Muslim Americans against one another, and intentionally (or at minimum, consequently) divides Muslim communities.
In order to prevent radicalization among Muslims Americans, DHS is tasked with cultivating strategic partnerships with Muslim American communities. CVE could not succeed without robust and active Muslim American “engagement,” specifically, community informants and stakeholders. Partnerships with individuals and institutions within Muslim American communities are vital for advancing CVE. This enables DHS to pivot from electronic surveillance to being deputized, on-the-ground watchdogs. DHS strategically “maps” gatherings and communities and then taps informants within mosques, organizations such as Muslim student associations on college campuses, community centers, and other “places for religious and political discussion and gathering.”15 In addition to monitoring subjects of interest through deputized informants, CVE also assigns FBI and law enforcement agents to monitor internet activity, piercing the privacy of Muslim Americans on the ground but also in virtual spaces.
Olivier Roy, a prominent French intellectual and critic of counter-radicalization theory and programs as they stand today, argues that “radicalization seems more linked to individual trajectories” than collective religious behavior.16 Roy recommends that CVE strategy focus more on individual subjects and the societal conditions that give rise to radicalization, rather than on religious doctrine or religious groups at large. Societal symptoms include systemic poverty, declining education, disaffection, and hostility toward Muslims in the form of structural and private Islamophobia that isolates Muslim Americans and feeds into the propaganda of terror networks like ISIS.
Instead of seeking to mend the structural symptoms that give rise to extremism, CVE policing makes them worse by disproportionately targeting indigent, immigrant, and working-class Muslim communities. I echo Roy; I have closely researched and personally witnessed how CVE destroys communities, particularly poor and working-class neighborhoods—like the one I was raised in and still call home. If the real objective is prevention, then empowering youth instead of vilifying them should be the focus—particularly Muslim youth at the most distant and dire margins.
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Dubois writes, “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”17 DuBois’s assessment points to the intersection poor blacks endured at the turn of the century, when “separate but equal” was furiously enforced by Jim Crow laws and a Supreme Court that authorized, and legally enabled, the structural racism and systemic impoverishment of black people. His words also speak to the experience of Muslim Americans during the war on terror, and more specifically, indigent and working-class Muslim Americans, a community sitting at the dangerous intersection of poverty, Islamophobia, and the mounting scrutiny and surveillance of DHS.
As I stated earlier this book, Muslim identity is imagined far more than it is seen. Rather than observing the genuine corporeal contours of the Muslim American population, the public, and oftentimes the state, frequently visualize individual and collective Muslim bodies through an Orientalist prism. Embedded tropes dictate how Muslims are imagined along racial, behavioral, ideological, and economic lines. Since Islam is conflated with the Middle East, an imagined sphere associated with infinite supplies of oil, sheikhs, and the gaudy wealth of Gulf states, Muslims are often stereotyped as an affluent and upwardly mobile population.
Once again, statistics deconstruct stereotypes. A 2011 Pew Research Center study, the first to closely examine poverty and wealth in the Muslim American population, found that 45 percent of Muslim American households reported a household income of less than $30,000 per year, compared to just 36 percent of the general American public.18
A 2017 study by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding confirmed these figures and added insight into poverty experienced by Muslim Americans along racial lines and ethnic lines. That study reported that 44 percent of black Muslims reported an annual household income of less than $30,000 per year; for Arab Muslim American households the figure was 37 percent, and for Asian Muslim Americans it was 30 percent. Fourteen percent of black Muslims, 21 percent of Arab Muslim Americans, and 16 percent of Asian Muslim Americans reported an annual household income of $30,000–$50,000 per year. Combined, these statistics illustrate that sizable segments of the broader Muslim American population live below or dangerously close to the 2017 federal poverty level, defined as $32,960 for a family of six. These figures reveal that more than half of the black and Arab American Muslim households are either poor or working class, at 58 percent, while Muslim Asian American households figure in at 46 percent.19
Statistics show that Muslim Americans as a standalone faith group are comparatively poorer than the broader American polity, and according to a number of studies, poorer than any other faith group.20 This doesn’t just challenge the myth that Muslim Americans are overwhelmingly wealthy and upwardly mobile; it shatters it to pieces. And poverty for Muslim Americans comes with a range of other concerns and dangers, including those linked to how poverty enhances vulnerability to private backlash and state surveillance. The reality of pervasive poverty among Muslim Americans, particularly in immigrant-heavy communities, leads to their disproportionate targeting and victimization by war-on-terror policies, and, most frequently and furiously, CVE policing. It is trying to be poor in the United States, but exponentially more trying to be poor and victimized by the war on terror.
As a community marginalized on at least three tracks—poverty, religion, and race—poor Muslim Americans confront the brunt of both CVE and customary community policing. This was vividly evident in the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” and “spying on Muslims” programs, which disproportionately targeted black and Latinx men and women, and poor, urban, and immigrant Muslim communities, respectively and intersectionally. Poor and working-class Muslim American communities, like Ahmed’s Little Mogadishu neighborhood in Minneapolis, are indeed the locales DHS prioritizes and descends into to weaponize the structural Islamophobic vision that ties race, religion, and poverty to anticipated radical threat. Approximately 82 percent of the up to 80,000 Somalis in Minnesota live “near or below the poverty line.”21 The Somali community in Minneapolis has faced greater CVE scrutiny since scores of men were allegedly recruited by terrorist groups, many of them entrapped by the police on the basis of websites they visited, coerced admissions of guilt, visits to Somalia, or transfers of money to family members in Somalia.22
Furthermore, “Somalis tend to express their religious identity in traditions that resemble expression in their home country, generally maintain close ties with family and friends in Somalia, and tend to live and worship in predominantly Somali spaces. Therefore, CVE policing suspicion of Somali Americans is linked more closely to these ‘immigrant’ proxies to Muslim identity than it is to Blackness, while anti-terror suspicion of indigenous Black Muslims is more closely tied to conversion or political subversion.”23 The racial identity of Somali Americans also exposes them to conventional criminal profiling and policing, and the prospect of being gunned down by police on account of their blackness, as horrifically illustrated by the wildly disproportionate killing of black men by police around the country, including the killing of Philando Castille, a thirty-two-year-old black man shot by a policeman after a traffic stop in Minneapolis on July 6, 2016.
In 2014, DHS announced that Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis would be the first cities assigned with hardline CVE policing programs. Boston was prioritized because of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, committed by the Tsarnaev brothers; Los Angeles was chosen because of its proximity to the Mexican border, and because California as a whole houses the largest population of Muslims in the country; Minneapolis was chosen because of its concentrated and large Somali population, the majority of which is Muslim, with strong ties to the homeland. While distinct events motivated DHS to make Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis CVE pilot cities, what bound the three cities were Muslim communities that were overwhelmingly Sunni; that were presumptively vulnerable to transnational terror networks, principally Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Somali terror group Al Shabaab; and that were home to concentrated indigent, immigrant, and/or working-class Muslim populations.
However, surveillance of indigent and working-class Muslims goes beyond these three cities, and even beyond the specter of formal CVE policing. The metropolitan Detroit area, home to the most densely populated Arab and Muslim American communities in the United States, many of them poor and working class, is among the most monitored areas in the country. In addition to preexisting DHS surveillance programs in Detroit and surrounding areas like Dearborn, Michigan, proposed and in-place CVE policies focus specifically on concentrated and poor Muslim communities within the city and its suburbs. Surveillance of these communities takes on a different form and flavor because of the ethnic, national, and sectarian divisions gripping the area.
For instance, Iraqi households centered largely in Dearborn and Detroit have an average household income of $32,075 per year.24 Many of these Iraqi Muslims migrated to Michigan as a result of the 2003 Iraq War, an illegal war launched by the United States two years after the 9/11 terror attacks. Similarly, the median income of the Yemeni population is near the federal poverty threshold, standing at $34,667 per year.25 Yemeni Muslim populations are mostly concentrated in large urban centers—principally in the San Francisco Bay Area, Detroit, and New York—where the NYPD operated a “spying on Muslims” program in the tri-state area that sowed the seeds for the informal and formal policing programs that followed, including Obama’s 2011 formal implementation of CVE policing.
In addition, the metropolitan Detroit area is home to a sizable Lebanese American population, which, like the Iraqi community, is overwhelmingly Shiite. The sectarian demographics of the city have equipped DHS, and local law enforcement, with the added ability to turn Muslim American communities against one another—to mobilize Shiite Muslim Americans as informants or full-fledged partners against their Sunni Muslim American counterparts. In effect, this imports the sectarian divides of the Arab world into structural Islamophobic counterterror programming at home, in an effort to uncover the homegrown radical—who is far less real than imagined.
Turning Muslim Americans against one another is a direct effect, if not an intentional strategy, of CVE policing. This is particularly true in places like the metropolitan Detroit area, where divisions along national, generational, and most potently, sectarian lines arm DHS and its local interlocutors with the dangerous tools to carry forward CVE programming and policing. By pegging specific Muslim traditions, practices, and cultures, most notably Sunni Muslim populations, as prone to radicalization, the state is drawing clear economic, political, and sectarian divisions within the broader Muslim American population. Driven by clear articulations of the good and bad Muslim, CVE policing creates a landscape in which those who endorse CVE policing and partake in its programming as informants and collaborators are deemed good Muslims and good Americans, while those critical of it, and critical of structural Islamophobia at large, are not only perceived as bad Muslims, but more dangerously, are subjected to possible CVE policing.
CVE policing, therefore, not only capitalizes on preexisting divides within Muslim American communities, but also strategically exacerbates them and creates new rifts. For instance, DHS may emphasize the persecution of Shiite Iraqis by ISIS to engender sympathy among Shiite Iraqi Americans, or capitalize on the pointedly sectarian strife in Syria and the crimes of ISIS to resonate with Shiite Lebanese Americans. Whether motivated by sectarianism and regional politics, government grants and access to power, or some combination of these factors, DHS has exploited divisions within the Muslim American population to entrench and enhance surveillance of Muslim Americans. By recruiting Muslim American sponsors, or “native informants,” the structural Islamophobic policy that is CVE policing is not only aided, but legitimized.
Hamid Dabashi argues, “For the American imperial project to claim global validity it needs the support of native informers and comprador intellectuals with varying accents to their speech, their prose and their politics. Supported by only white men and white women, the project would not have the same degree of narrative authority. But accents from targeted cultures and climes Orientalize, exoticize, and corroborate all at the same time.”26 CVE policing in particular, and structural Islamophobia at large, cannot be carried forward without the endorsement of a cadre or cohort of Muslim Americans that rubber-stamp it. Without their legitimization, these programs are plainly and painfully exposed as patently Islamophobic. Muslim faces and voices make them seem reasonable, sanctioned by the idea that if a Muslim deems CVE policing to be legitimate, then the public at large should find no problem with it.
When CVE policing was inaugurated, the state had a ready supply of native informants in place—Muslim Americans who endorsed the structural Islamophobic policies of the state for personal gain. Examples include Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Asra Nomani, and Brigitte Gabriel, who trades on her Lebanese Christian identity (which, for the broader public, is synonymous with Muslim identity) as the basis of her expertise; these people have helped carry forward the narrative of “Islamic extremism” that supports the war on terror and programming like CVE policing. They have built careers castigating Islam, casting Muslim Americans as domestic threats, and endorsing strident war-on-terror policies.
Zuhdi Jasser, one of the most prominent and damaging Muslim informants, claims, “There can be no better way to ebb the tide of fear of Muslims in the West than for Muslims to demonstrate that we are the most important asset in defeating the very ideologies that attacked us 11 years ago [in the World Trade Center attacks]. This requires an embrace of a public critique of our faith leaders and institutions. All other approaches have been proven failures.”27 Public positions like this confirm the notion that Islam is some sort of religious or ideological monolith and that Muslim Americans are collectively responsible for not only condemning acts of terror, but also participating in the project of fighting against it. While extreme, Jasser’s position echoes the logic of CVE policing, which binds Muslim Americans with the responsibility for fighting homegrown radicalization in their neighborhoods and places of worship, households and schools. Wherever Muslim Americans congregate is deemed the front line of radicalization.
Extreme native informants, those with no meaningful Muslim American following and largely viewed as “sell-outs” by the community, were more burdens than boons for President Obama’s CVE policing program. Therefore a new crop of native informants, far more moderate and with resonance within Muslim American communities, was needed. DHS, the State Department, and other state agencies that pushed CVE policing abroad and domestically enlisted Muslim Americans from the political left and center, who became formal, subcontracted proponents of CVE policing. Many of them were located in Washington, D.C., but some were members of Muslim communities across the country where soft and hardline CVE programming was being promoted. In those communities, the Obama administration dangled huge sums of money, access to government, government jobs or the prospect of government jobs in front of those willing to endorse CVE policing and facilitate its implementation. Again, in order for CVE policing to work to its optimal effect, robust Muslim American support was necessary.
Scores of Muslim American organizations took the bait, including a “Dearborn group led by Lebanese-Americans,”28 which changed its name from the Lebanese American Heritage Club to Leaders Advancing and Helping Communities (LAHC), a decision motivated in large part by access to CVE funds from DHS. Led by its executive director, Wassim Mahfouz, the community organization had limited much of its previous activity to local political and cultural events. Then, in 2017, it received $500,000 to lay the groundwork for CVE policing in Dearborn, Michigan, home to a concentrated and sizable Muslim American population. Almost overnight, LAHC went from being a local cultural organization to a de facto policing outfit, making structural changes in order to carry out the groundwork for CVE policing in Dearborn-area schools, community centers, and meeting places. The makeover would create a slew of new jobs for LAHC staff, higher salaries, and direct reach into Washington, D.C.
Mahfouz stated, “The funding will be specifically used to sustain existing programming . . . [including] youth development, nurturing parenting, substance abuse prevention.”29 But these seemingly benign programs were given greater clarity by the DHS secretary, who released a statement the week before the LAHC announcement, declaring that “in this age of self-radicalization and terrorist-inspired acts of violence, domestic-based efforts to counter violent extremism have become a homeland security imperative. . . . The funding will go for activities that include intervention, developing resilience, challenging the narrative, and building capacity.”30 These ambiguous aims, which sound innocuous and even well intentioned, are code-speak for programming that would educate students about the threat of radicalization, develop a “see something, say something” culture in schools, and, ultimately, deputize school administrators and students to be watchdogs on the lookout for homegrown radicals—radicals, absurdly, that were as young as eleven years old and profiled because of their religious identity.
However, the funds were awarded to LAHC after the election of Donald Trump, which dramatically changed the equation. Under the administration of a president who declared that “Islam hates us,” LAHC was expected to carry out programming in elementary, junior, and high schools in Dearborn that centered on signaling forms of Islamic extremism, reporting suspicious activity by classmates, and developing informants and deputizing teachers as watchdogs—inside public school classrooms, no less, where young, impressionable minds are supposed to learn and be given a safe haven in which to grow.
CVE policing in a setting like Dearborn, with its sectarian diversity, would have capitalized on already profuse tensions among Shiites and Sunnis to advance its strategy. For example, Lebanese or Iraqi Shiites would have been sought as informants against Yemeni or Palestinian Sunnis, since radicalization is generally understood and enforced as a Sunni phenomenon. LAHC’s identity as a largely Lebanese Shiite organization made it an attractive CVE policing partner for CVE policing, and the large sum of money it was set to receive would be compensation for stirring sectarian divides to facilitate the state’s witch hunt for Muslim radicals among children. While LAHC, like the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and other groups, would have garnered ample criticism for carrying forward CVE programming under the Obama administration, doing so under a Trump administration was untenable, opening the floodgates for public shaming and condemnation. And that’s exactly what followed.
News of LAHC’s receipt of these funds instantly spread through the metropolitan Detroit community and, soon after, across the country. Activists, including Abed Ayoub, Asha Noor, and myself, took action, using social media to critique the organization’s role as a subcontractor in CVE policing, particularly under an administration that openly vilified Muslims, proposed a range of damaging policies, and claimed the White House, in large part, under the banner of brazen Islamophobia. Ayoub, a Dearborn native and acting legal director of the American Arab-Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C., posted on Facebook on January 13, 2017, “Lebanese American Heritage Club. Will say it publicly. This is beyond disappointing. I’ve always respected the organization and the work you do. But this requires some explanation.” He posted a photo of the DHS press release naming LAHC as one of the CVE grant recipients for all to see.
Ayoub’s post caused a stir locally, galvanizing activists from Michigan and beyond to join in on the criticism of LAHC. LAHC had applied for the grant in secrecy, hoping that nobody would learn about its involvement with CVE policing, a program lay Muslim Americans, particularly in working-class and immigrant communities, are hardly aware of. The grassroots and social media efforts of activists, Muslim and otherwise, brought knowledge of LAHC’s collaboration with CVE policing out of the shadows.
Pressured by social media shaming, op-eds, and behind-the-scenes phone calls, LAHC declined its CVE grant nine days later. It was a major victory against CVE policing in Detroit, but a slew of other organizations, in “locations across the country such as Boston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles”—cities with already established hardline CVE policing programs—as well as other locations tapped for similar programs, accepted the funding.31 MPAC kept the reported $400,000 it received and still collaborates with DHS in carrying forward CVE policing within and beyond Los Angeles, where a hardline CVE policing program has existed since 2014. Even universities cashed in on CVE funding—the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill was the biggest recipient.
Divide and conquer is a stated objective of American foreign policy in the Arab world, and with CVE policing, it is an evolving counterterror strategy. This is evidenced by the exploitation of the tense and divided sectarian landscape in the metropolitan Detroit area, the leveraging of ethnocentric and class-based paternalism that drives groups like MPAC to advance CVE policing in places like Los Angeles, and the economic vulnerability of recent immigrant communities like the Somali population in Minneapolis, where, as Asha Noor shares, “CVE and surveillance of the Somali community has created a rift and a sense of mistrust. Individuals who were once friends are no longer on talking terms because of the choices they made: to accept grants that meant framing your community as inherently violent or to not.”32
Turning Muslim Americans against one another, as native informants or community informants, watchdogs-for-hire or sectarian rivals, is a vital cog in the war-on-terror machine, and as exhibited by CVE policing, an evolving dimension of structural Islamophobia. While foreign policy tactics in the Middle East have long capitalized on intensifying sectarianism as a strategy for intensifying tumult, division, and conquest, DHS has wielded this very strategy at home, in the heart of Muslim American communities, to bring about the same end.
The war-on-terror playbook is complex and fluidly developing, in line with the changing face of Muslim Americans. CVE policing is a testament to this complexity, as vividly illustrated by the distinct ways DHS employs this program in cities like Detroit, where sectarianism is rife, and Minneapolis, the Somali Muslim hub. Muslims, particularly youth and young adults, are either viewed as presumptive radicals or tapped by DHS as cogs in its machine. They are seldom, if ever, treated as young people whose futures and talents deserve investment.
“We need to wake up and say, ‘You know what? Enough is enough,’” stated Hibaaq Osman, whose family owns a small café in a Somali shopping mall in Minneapolis. “We are citizens, we are taxpayers, we own businesses, we need people to understand that we also are part of this country just the way anybody else is.”33 While Muslims are asleep, DHS and local law enforcement are pushing CVE policing, planting informants, and paying collaborators to be part of this new war-on-terror witch hunt—a persecution against which citizenship, sadly, offers little protection.