you broke the ocean in
half to be here.
only to meet nothing that wants you.
Nayyirah Waheed, “Immigrant”
“When will my son come home?” asked the stranger on the other end of the phone, in a language and voice that were intimately familiar. “When will my son come home,” she repeated, desperately seeking to be consoled by a stranger who could only offer tenuous guidance during a moment of absolute madness.
It was Saturday, January 28, 2017, the morning after President Trump passed the first rendition of his Muslim ban, and a Yemeni mother somewhere in Michigan was reaching out to anybody and everybody she could to inquire about when and whether her son, who had left for their native country to bring back his new bride, could come home. She was only one of a countless number of Muslim mothers who, at the time of the departure of their daughters or sons, could not imagine that the casual farewell they bid might very well be their last.
Roughly forty-eight hours earlier, on the morning of Thursday, January 26, my own mother dropped me off at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. I was en route to Washington, D.C., to speak at the George Washington University School of Law, ready to share my new research on Islamophobia and the heightened civil liberties challenges the newly inaugurated administration posed for Muslim Americans.
“Be careful,” my mother told me, as she always did, before we arrived at the terminal.
“Don’t worry,” I replied, as I always did, and I embraced her and bid her goodbye.
“When will you come back home?” she asked, a routine question, fully expecting me to return safely from yet another work-related trip. I walked away from the curbside and into the terminal, pausing before walking inside to wave goodbye one final time. She remained parked, as she always did, watching me depart with the hope, and that distinctly motherly concern, that I would come home safely several days later. It was a routine scene for us; my mother always dropped me off at the airport for my many work-related trips, expecting that I would come back home with an exciting story of some kind, or a memento from an event I spoke at.
“When will my son come back home?” the woman on the phone again pled, this time with tears that highlighted her rising fear and desperation. Despite my legal education, years of practice, and background teaching immigration and constitutional law, I had no answer. I was stumped. Particularly for Muslim immigrants from the seven restricted nations listed on President Trump’s Muslim ban, the world had turned entirely on its head. The law did not matter now, it seemed.
On the morning of Friday, January 27, I arrived at the GWU School of Law, where I was to lecture about the structural Islamophobia the new administration was poised to expand. I had no idea that the first step would be taken so soon. Just hours later, the Muslim ban was no longer a campaign proposal, a hashtag, or a slogan shouted at rallies; it was a real policy. My friend, West Virginia University law professor Atiba Ellis, leaned over during a presentation to show me the update on his phone: “President Trump signs travel ban.” This pushed my good friend, American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee legal director Abed Ayoub, to call me and demand, “We need you at the office, as soon as possible.”1 I rushed out of George Washington University Law School and raced from Foggy Bottom to the committee’s headquarters on foot, at the intersection of 20th and L, fearful of the destination the country was heading toward and even more fearful of the intersection at which we—Muslims inside and outside the country—found ourselves.
The Muslim ban passed by Trump on Friday, January 27, 2017, impacted scores of Muslim immigrants and their family members. But it was more than just a stand-alone policy that wrought mayhem in American airports, broke up families, and formally ushered in a heightened form of structural Islamophobia. It also foreshadowed what was to come with this new administration—a form of Islamophobia that would be common and continuous, enforced in new laws and policies. The ban was part and parcel of a broader, stark Islamophobic vision that tied Muslim identity directly to terror suspicion.
The fights against the first Muslim ban and the one that followed on March 16, 2017, were in and of themselves daunting. But they foreshadowed more, and perhaps even more ominous, challenges ahead. The fights unfolding at airports, within communities, and in courtrooms witnessed unprecedented coalitions—grassroots unions spanning racial and religious lines—coalitions needed to meet the challenge of today’s Islamophobia, and even more importantly, to meet the “the fire next time.”
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes, “I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them. They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it. And do not want to know it.”2 The book that Baldwin wrote in the midst of the civil rights movement has remained tattooed on my brain since I read it for the first time as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and it rose to the fore of my mind in the immediate wake of the Muslim ban. Baldwin became my greatest companion, again, in the midst of the hateful tide that emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign season and ultimately came to define it.
Nobody spoke as trenchantly as Baldwin did about the racial injustice and dignity stripped from blacks in the United States. But apart from his unmatched ability to give complex analysis a humanity that made you feel his writing, Baldwin’s prescience while surrounded by immediate and imminent peril was unmatched. He looked beyond the challenges in front of him, and during a moment of mass hysteria and fear, I looked to Baldwin as my guide. The words he wrote nearly half a century ago provided clarity that public intellectuals of today were unable to muster up, and the guidance even the law could not provide. So, I listened closely to Baldwin, and turned to him more than I did anybody else, trusting that he would shepherd me to the answers the law or the living could not identify.
“When will my son come home?” Her voice haunted me days later as I embraced my mother at the same airport terminal where she left me days ago. It haunted me weeks afterward, when Trump ordered drone attacks in Yemen, the country of the woman’s birth and the one to which her son had traveled to meet his new bride. It haunted me months later when Trump passed his second Muslim ban, after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a temporary restraining order on the first ban. In a bizarre twist of fate, or a reversal of God’s plan, the woman on the other end of the phone could have been my mother, and I could have been her son, detained at the airport where she left me—bidding farewell as she looked in my direction, with a mother’s look of concern and care, fully expecting me to return home. That could’ve been me, I thought as I spoke to the Yemeni mother the morning after the Muslim ban, and she could have been my mother.
The crimes the state dealt on that day, detaining thousands and leaving thousands more deserted in distant lands, far from their mothers, was only the most recent blow dealt by structural Islamophobia. Islamophobia had been fully institutionalized, and the Trump administration expanded it with lightning speed. More crimes against innocents, and more injury, were on the horizon. The fires of today, as Baldwin wrote, often foreshadow greater ones ahead. Preparing for the fires in the distance enhances one’s ability to fight them and protects those most in danger.
There are lessons to be learned by examining the new politics of Islamophobia formally ushered in by the Trump administration, and the blueprint it provides for a new wave of politicians, pundits, and institutions sure to follow in Trump’s footsteps. How can we best sustain the new fronts, coalitions, and movements that are galvanized to resist Islamophobia on the ground in America? And how do we face the fear looming in the minds of Muslim Americans everywhere, the elephant in the room: another terror attack, and how such an attack might cause the state to unleash even more harmful policies against Muslim citizens and immigrants? These questions, juxtaposed with the recurring question of that Yemeni mother, still scroll through my mind.
November 9, or 11/9—the date Donald Trump was elected president—felt like 9/11 all over again. While the two dates were separated by a generation, the election of Trump restored the fears Muslim Americans had after 9/11.3 Muslim Americans faced scapegoating, rising hostility, and hate crimes, and most strikingly, an executive branch that subscribed to the worldview that the United States was at war with Islam. Some argued that “the profound changes in America’s political culture and values in response to 9/11 created a crack that Trump, the entrepreneur and political opportunist, was able to open wide enough so as to slip into the White House.”4 The war on terror and the Islamophobia it proliferated sowed the seeds of hate that lingered long after 9/11, and Trump identified, marshaled, and molded them into a winning campaign strategy.
Roughly a month after 9/11, I attended a coalition-building meeting with a range of activists from organizations in the metropolitan Los Angeles area. The meeting, attended by students, organizers, nonprofit employees, and others, was diverse along racial and religious lines. But the meeting became tense minutes after it began. A Chicano organizer commented, “Where were Arabs and Muslims when profiling was a black and Mexican issue?” The poignant statement spurred head nods across the room, and an affirmation by a young black woman who shared, “I get that Muslims are experiencing a lot of discrimination right now, but you weren’t at this table until your community became targeted.” These statements were not aberrational, but widely held. As Kimberlé Crenshaw claims with regard to race and gender, men of color want women of color to “ride or die for them, but [they] won’t ride or die for us.”5 These words were true with regard to Muslim Americans and communities of color in the immediate wake of 9/11, and I heard them over and again at meetings, in discussions with friends, and at organizing sessions in California, Michigan, and places in between.
These words were very painful, but they were indisputable. Like the old saying goes, nothing hurts more than the truth. The broader Muslim American population, with the exception of the black Muslim community and other discrete groups, was not part of the progressive movement until it was targeted. But a sea change began within Muslim America, particularly among the generation that endured the rampant Islamophobia that arose after 9/11. Many Muslim individuals in Arab and South Asian American communities became more visible, involved, and integral in progressive circles and causes for racial justice. In addition to the aftermath of 9/11 and the pain and injury it inflicted, the Movement for Black Lives pushed the successive generation even further to the left and led them to embrace a more universal racial justice message. Muslim Americans, along with the black and brown, LGBTQ, and progressive elements they worked with absorbed that the mission for racial and social justice was a collective one, and not transactional. The framing of activism was shifting for the better, and the culture moved along with it.
In addition to mobilizing action and solidarity, the BLM movement was fiercely educational. It inculcated Muslim Americans with the language of racial justice, and words that were once confined to sociology, anthropology, or law school classes, like “intersectional feminism,” “structural racism,” and “white privilege,” became routine terms for non-black Muslim American teens, college students, and organizers, who began to speak in terms of collective liberation instead of discrete community interest. Racial and social justice was less about just us and centered more on collective liberation.
This dynamic was made vivid in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim ban and the weeks that preceded and followed it. Critical race theory and its language were now mainstream and were translated into praxis and protest by organizers of every shade. For critical race theorists like myself, it was fascinating to see this blossom, in real time, on the street, at protests, on social media, and in other spaces unconfined by the four walls of a classroom. Young Muslim American activists were increasingly identifying themselves as “intersectional feminists,” and teens at mosque gatherings spoke fluently about the “school-to-prison pipeline” during protest actions. The politics of coalition were clearly evident, and the language of protest on full display.
The very airports that, overnight, became holding cells for Muslim immigrants from the seven restricted countries underwent another radical transformation. On Saturday evening, January 28, 2017, only twenty-four hours after President Trump signed the Muslim ban, airport terminals became sites of mass protest. Corporate and nonprofit lawyers marched into JKF and LAX airports to provide pro bono guidance to detained immigrants; activists of all races and faiths gathered outside and inside, chanting, “No ban, no wall!”; and the unprecedented coalitions that had already been forged on the streets of Ferguson, Chicago, and other cities where the BLM Movement was formed now reconvened, signaling to the Trump administration—and all those who supported it—that the resistance was strong, diverse, and fully intent on resisting every step of the way.
The fight against Islamophobia, the swift resistance signaled, was no longer narrowly placed on the shoulders of Muslim Americans, but was carried by a broadening coalition that was beginning to understand this rising form of animus as a central civil rights issue. This was on full display during the historic women’s march staged in Washington, D.C., on January 21, 2017, strategically slated to take place the day after President Trump’s inauguration. Hundreds of satellite marches took place around the world and across the country, including in Chicago, where I attended the march alongside my younger brother Mohammed and his fiancée, Fairouz. We joined the protest on Wabash Avenue, where signs demanding “Impeach Trump” and “Down With Islamophobia, Xenophobia and Racism” were juxtaposed with the gaudy Trump name showcased on the Trump International Hotel and Tower, where the protest convened. The crowd seemed infinite, and the diverse faces, shades, and voices that comprised it reflected a microcosm of the American people, vividly proclaiming that the Islamophobia unleashed by the newly inaugurated president would be staunchly opposed. We marched alongside individuals of every age, creed, and color for miles, and stopped to take photos near a diverse group of young protestors.
“We have your back, sister,” a young white woman who identified as queer and held up Frank Shepard Fairey’s portrait of a young Muslim woman in an American flag headscarf, said to Fairouz. Fairouz, like the woman in the portrait, wore a headscarf.
“Thank you, we got your back too,” Fairouz responded, followed by a warm embrace that signaled far more than a moment of political solidarity.
Reducing that moment, and the millions more like it that took place on that day and in the turbulent days that followed, to mere “politics” would diminish its importance and the momentous shifts sweeping across the country. It was a moment of human recognition by one white woman who represented millions more who felt precisely the same way she did, who recognized that Islamophobia was real, and that the menace it posed to Muslim Americans like my sister-in-law Fairouz was even more real.
That encounter reminded me of another intersection in my past. While living in Orlando, I would frequently drive by the Pulse nightclub on Orange Avenue en route to a café where I liked to read and write. The club was on my right on my way to the café, on the left when I drove back home. I thought nothing of it at the time. But only weeks after moving for a job back home in Detroit, the club I had routinely passed became the focus of the entire world. On the night of June 12, 2016, ten days after I left Orlando, Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse nightclub and indiscriminately opened fire, killing forty-nine people and injuring fifty-three more. Suddenly, the nondescript club I had driven past over and over was the site of another horrific terror attack.
Terrorism struck a city I made my home for two years, less than two miles from where I lived. The majority of the victims were LGBTQ, and they were predominantly Latinx, and the culprit had been born to a Muslim American family. The familiar conjectures of “Islamic extremism” and “ISIS radicalization” were immediate, and as expected the media and politicians pounced on them. But the victims, the families of the victims, and the leadership of LGBTQ groups did not bite. Instead, they rejected the scare-mongering and scapegoating that pervaded the mainstream media and that politicians clamored for and capitalized on for votes, while Muslim American groups, by and large, fell short of reciprocating in terms of solidarity with LGBTQ groups.
Without question, leadership within the LGBTQ community could have very easily pushed the Muslim extremism and terror narrative following the Orlando shooting, considering the mainstream media’s fixation on the trope that Islam is inherently homophobic. But for the most part, LGBTQ leadership, at both the national and local levels, did not take the bait, perhaps because the leaders were cognizant of a specific group that tied their victimized community to the one being vilified. The LGBTQ community showed great solidarity with Muslim Americans during a time of unspeakable tragedy, but there was more at play than one marginalized community standing alongside another.
“Solidarity” is a term infused with much power and possibility. But it is also a term that implies boundaries and divides, and neglects that individual identities—standing alone—can oftentimes be the most powerful expressions of solidarity. The aftermath of the Orlando shooting sounded a signal about the existence of LGBTQ Muslims and the coexistence of these two identities. LGBTQ Muslims demand equality on two fronts, despite the Islamophobia unleashed from one direction and rejection coming from the other; in the aftermath of the Orlando shooting, but also well before that, they were a group at the crossroads of complex emotions and even more complex existential challenges.
“Gay and Muslim American,” for far too many people, reads like an oxymoron. Yet, is a coexistent yet largely hidden identity that characterizes the experience of many Muslim American men and women. Muslim America has long been caricatured along monolithic racial, spiritual, and political lines—misrepresentations that distort its multilayered and rich diversity. Muslim America is not only caricatured as being patriarchal, misogynistic, and sexist, but also stridently homophobic. These are stereotypes, but it is true that the wounding words of homophobes have drowned out the far-too-scarce declarations of support and solidarity within the Muslim American community and, at their extreme, have intimidated supporters into silence.
Few struggles are as daunting as those faced by LGBTQ Muslim Americans, who are stigmatized beyond and from within their spiritual communities. Indeed, a sizable segment of the Muslim American population feels that coming out must be accompanied by renouncing one’s adherence to Islam. This is not unique to Islam, of course, and is echoed by segments of Christian, Jewish, and other faith communities. Evangelical Christians, including Vice President Mike Pence, are active proponents of conversion therapy—a pseudo-science that seeks to convert one’s sexual orientation.
As with much of evangelical Christianity, there is sentiment within the Muslim community that homosexuality and adherence to Islam are clashing lifestyles that cannot be integrated. The accusation that Islam is homophobic is more frequent and fierce, and is intensified by assigning to the whole of Islam the crimes of fringe groups like ISIS, which infamously threw a gay man off a roof in Mosul. Yet, despite the vapid and simplistic indictments coming from beyond the bounds of the Muslim American community, or the disavowals and denial issued from within, LGBTQ Muslims can only be who they are, observing the faith they know and love while pursuing lives and love like everybody else does.
I returned to Orlando on July 14, 2017, and visited the Pulse nightclub, which had been converted into a memorial honoring those killed roughly a year earlier. Pictures of the victims and notes from family, loved ones, and complete strangers adorned the makeshift shrine built around the fence and driveway of the club. The victims were predominantly brown men who resembled my family members and could have very easily been mistaken as Arab or Muslim, and very likely, targeted by Islamophobic violence. Hate, whether along lines of religious, racial, or sexual orientation, usually has a common source.
As I marched alongside my brother and his fiancée in Chicago, I thought about the struggle of Muslim Americans who identify as LGBTQ, those yet to come out, and others who live by dividing their lives in two. Some of these people are friends I have known since childhood; others I met later in life through political organizing. I reflected on how the Orlando shooting hit close to home on two very intimate, and existentially perplexing, fronts for them. Many of them were devout Muslims, possessing a spirituality and faith that inspires me, but burdened with the fear that coming out may alienate them from family, friends, and the communities they have grown up in and loved since youth.
After the Orlando shooting, I listened to them closely as they sought to harmonize both halves of their identity, at a time when they were enduring attack from all angles. “You can’t be Muslim and gay,” they often heard while among Muslim family and friends; while in the company of their non-Muslim friends and acquaintances, they were subject to the rhetoric and hate of Islamophobia. Where was their safe haven? I reflected. Would the unprecedented coalitions being forged today, along lines of inclusion, acceptance, and solidarity, offer a better tomorrow for LGBTQ Muslims? Some vocal elements within the Muslim American community gave reason for hope, while the familiar silence and scorn of others countered it with concern. I was unsure where this wing of the broader Muslim American march would veer, but in the spirit of consistency and collective liberation, I promised myself that I would be a part of helping it march forward.
“Can you take a picture of us?” the young woman asked me at the women’s march, waking me from my walk down memory lane.
“Sure,” I responded, snapping several shots—and after they disapproved of my first photos—more pictures of the queer white women and my headscarved sister-in-law, who had far more in common after 11/9 than they would have had following 9/11. We bid farewell, and marched onward.
“I stand here before you unapologetically Muslim American!” shouted Linda Sarsour, one of the national co-chairs of the women’s march in Washington and an undeniable voice for an emergent movement of progressive Muslim American activists, advocates, and thinkers led and dominated by women. “Unapologetically Palestinian American. Unapologetically from Brooklyn, New York. Sisters and brothers, you are what democracy looks like,” she continued, addressing the estimated half million people attending the march in Washington and the millions more watching from home and afar. Loud and proud, donning a black puffy Patagonia jacket and a white headscarf, with her signature Brooklyn slang and swag, Sarsour claimed her position as not only a visible leader of the Muslim American community, but of the broader movement against the new administration.
Sarsour was already a fixture, widely known to black and brown, straight and LGBTQ, Muslim and non-Muslim activists, occupying a platform that few Muslim Americans, let alone women, held before her. She was hardly a new commodity in social justice circles, but an activist who had earned her stripes in her native New York City and later emerged as one of the most forthright voices against sexism, racism, and anti-blackness within the broader Muslim American community. She symbolizes the new face and voice of Muslim America—the coalitional spirit that her generation, and the generations following, are championing.
In an article written in the immediate wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, Sarsour and I, two Arab American Muslims, stated, “Institutional and structural racism is still robust in the US. This is evidenced by the disparate incarceration rates of brown and Black Americans, the decimation of affirmative action and race-conscious legislation in the US, and the crumbling public education systems in minority-populated communities with the all too common cold blooded murders of people of color.”6 The killing of Martin, we wrote, was not an aberrational or unexpected act, but a vile emanation from a deeply institutionalized racism, as Sarsour powerfully asserted, both in print and in person. Sarsour had arrived, and her cross-racial literacy and coalition-building genius would blaze new trails for young Muslim American leaders to follow.
Sarsour’s rallying words have resonated beyond the walls of Muslim American spaces and penetrated deep within the hearts and minds of a broad milieu of Trump resisters. Her ascent, in great part, symbolizes the arrival of Islamophobia as a mainstream civil rights issue mentioned in the same breath as racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Sarsour has risen along with other Muslim American grassroots political and legal leaders who helped forge vital coalitions before the ascent of Trump—women like black Muslim activist Donna Auston and Somali American Asha Noor, who come from communities at the very intersection of racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia and speak about the perils posed by Islamophobia in ways that reach broader audiences. This broadening of leadership and audience, and a growing legion of allies, has been absolutely vital in the short term to confront the structural Islamophobia the Trump administration has been poised to expand. It is even more important in addressing the blueprint of political Islamophobia that will be followed by politicians waiting in the wings, and the private Islamophobia it will embolden.
Islamophobia is no longer a term uttered exclusively by academics in ivory towers, or a word that only comes out the mouths of Muslim American activists and advocates. It has been featured on the Twitter timelines of Jewish and Christian college students, discussed by young politicians rising in response to the hate coming from Trump and those following in his footsteps, and the frequent topic of news headlines and opinion pieces featured in the Washington Post and the New York Times. Islamophobia has fully arrived, as has the consciousness around it and the will to combat it, marshaled on street corners, social media platforms, college and university campuses, in airports, and in public and private spaces in between and beyond. A new crop of Muslim American leaders, the majority of them women, is taking charge of the broader campaign to counter Islamophobia.
Dynamic organizers and activists like Margari Hill in Los Angeles and Namira Islam in Detroit, Drost Kokoye in Nashville and Darakshan Raja in Washington, D.C., have crushed the Islamophobic myths that Muslim women are appendages of men, silent, subordinate, and powerless. In fact, they often lead and direct men, and have stood at the fore of institutions that have brought about the kind of progressive reform that exposed the fumbling and futility of male gatekeepers. The dominance of Muslim American women on the ground is mirrored within academia, where the most potent voices are those of Muslim women, including Sahar Aziz of the Rutgers School of Law, Zareena Grewal at Yale, Su’ad Adul Khabeer at the University of Michigan, Intisar Rabb at Harvard Law School, Shirin Sinnar at Stanford Law School, and Amna Akbar of the Ohio State Law School. Muslim American women have also become giants in the media world, with moguls like Amani Al-Khatahtbeh debunking stereotypes with her MuslimGirl movement, Dena Takruri changing the narrative with her widely viewed AJ+ reporting, and Malika Bilal leading the digital media wave with her program The Stream. Muslim American women have been outshining Muslim American men, and this is better for the movement against Islamophobia.
Unlike the post-9/11 moment, when (non-black) Muslim Americans were largely absent from radical and progressive spaces, cross-racial coalitions, and efforts pushing for racial justice, Muslim Americans are now integral participants, collaborators, and leaders. They issue marching orders and mobilize the swelling legions of allies needed to fight the fires ahead, and to navigate the new politics of Islamophobia that loom beyond the current administration. The rise of this leadership, on national and local levels, highlights that Muslim Americans are not only leading the charge against Islamophobia, but are also visible and vocal on the front lines of social justice matters that impact targeted communities of all types. Today’s politics of coalition building and sustained solidarity are retrenching the transactional and self-interested politics of previous generations, which gives reason for optimism—albeit an optimism that, if not converted into sustained action reaching beyond Trump and the Islamophobia of today, will mean little.
While the core structural Islamophobic baseline, which assigns the presumption of terror suspicion to Muslims, guided the two previous presidential administrations, Trump peddled and mainstreamed an outwardly explicit Islamophobia to match it. The success of his campaign, which most pundits and experts doubted up until his “historic and stunning upset” over Hillary Clinton on November 9, 2016,7 proved that explicit and unhinged Islamophobia was an effective campaign tactic. It resonated with a sizable segment of the American electorate, which registered its approval in the voting booth. Despite the fact that the United States had seemed, on the surface, to become a more progressive and inclusive society in recent years, hate still proved to be a winning message.
Trump’s campaign rallies, where Islamophobia, xenophobia, and racism openly thrived, and which were dubbed by some as “racism summits,”8 offered a glimpse of the country the candidate promised to deliver. The Muslim ban became far more than a central policy proposal; it was a core component of the grand vision for the America that Trump intended to preside over and of the broader structural Islamophobic policies he was poised to enact when elected. The words “Muslim ban” became a common chant at his rallies; Islamophobic slurs and slogans were emblazoned on paraphernalia worn by his supporters; and Muslims were ejected—for no other reason than being Muslim—at several of his campaign pit stops.9 The bulk of the “heaping doses of anti-Muslim rhetoric” that saturated the 2016 presidential campaign was contributed by the Trump campaign,10 which strategically employed “political Islamophobia as a campaign strategy” to mobilize and galvanize voters.11
Trump’s deployment of political Islamophobia proved resonant and effective. Raising boisterous cheers at rallies and debates when he conflated Syrian refugees with ISIS, and doubling up on the Muslim ban by calling for “extreme vetting” of all Muslim immigrants coming into the country, his message obtained wide Republican voter support in national polls. Only days after he introduced the proposal for a Muslim ban, a December 9, 2015, Bloomberg poll found that over two-thirds of likely Republican voters supported the idea.12 Over half of likely Republican voters said they “strongly support[ed]” the ban, with 14 percent expressing “not so strong favor” for the measure.13 On the other side, 25 percent of likely Democratic voters either supported the ban or were unsure, illustrating that Trump’s explicit Islamophobic appeals resonated not only with a large majority of Republican voters, but with a sizable segment of Democratic voters as well. These figures again illustrate that Islamophobia is not exclusive to the right and the swelling segment of new-wave conservative hatemongers dubbed the “alt right,” but, as examined in chapter 1, is also a rising form of animus on the left.
The Trump campaign and administration highlight that the deployment of explicit Islamophobia is a tried, true, and proven political strategy. The rhetoric Trump used on the campaign trail appealed to sizable segments of the American electorate, providing national and local politicians with a blueprint to follow. “Trumpism,” and the politics of hate on which it capitalized, evolved into a political strategy for both upstart and established politicians. Incoming and incumbent candidates at all levels of politics, seeking to win in jurisdictions where the rhetoric of explicit Islamophobia finds fertile ground, will certainly look to Trump as a guide.
The “Trump effect,” or Trumpism, may very well prove to be more destructive and lasting than the polarizing president it is named after.14 And yet, the effect and the movement represented by Trump are not entirely new. They have roots “as far back as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot’s third-insurgencies in the 1990s”15 and, as this book highlights, far beyond. Given these deep roots, Islamophobia will remain a fixture in the rhetoric of politicians and a staple of political discourse in the United States for a long time to come—a situation that will become even more violent and intense if the country experiences another terror attack committed by a Muslim actor. This leaves Muslim Americans perpetually one attack away from an explosive rise in private and structural Islamophobia, a fear that all Muslim Americans carry with them and can never fully evade.
Donald Trump was not the first American demagogue to mobilize hate and division in order to claim political office, and he certainly will not be the last. Particularly in a nation where minorities will soon outnumber whites, Islam is the fastest growing religion, and the wealth gap grows wider and wider, explicit racial and religious populism will likely be a routine (and robust) dimension of the American political landscape. And this landscape will be most profuse, and violent, in the aftermath of a terror attack.
However, this new era of Islamophobia requires no terror attack to incite hate and backlash. The murder of Nabra Hassanen, a seventeen-year-old Egyptian American girl in Sterling, Virginia, in the early morning of June 18, 2017, illustrates that very point. After completing her Ramadan prayers at 3:00 a.m., Nabra and her friends walked from the All Dulles Area Muslim Society Mosque to a nearby McDonald’s, eating one final meal before the day’s fast began. On their way back to the mosque, Nabra and her friends crossed paths with Darwin Martinez Torrez, who chased the teens with a baseball bat. All of them except Nabra escaped. Martinez struck Nabra in the head with the baseball bat, threw her into his car, and drove off. She was later found dead at a pond miles away from her mosque.
Police swiftly ruled that Nabra’s murder was no hate crime, but the result of road rage, implying that the two cannot coexist. I attended Nabra’s vigil in Reston, Virginia, on June 21, 2017, alongside my close friends Abed Ayoub and Mohammed Maraqa and thousands who came together only blocks away from her home. Her friends were there, as were her parents. Her father echoed what he told investigators and police immediately after he learned about his daughter’s murder: “He killed my daughter because she is Muslim. That’s what I believe.”16 Every Muslim American at the vigil that day agreed with Nabra’s father, as did millions more who followed her story and mourned her death from afar.
One attack away—a phrase that has double meaning for Muslims. The first meaning, as illustrated by Nabra’s murder, is that Muslim Americans are perpetually in danger of an attack that may end their lives, an attack that is more likely to come during the holiest times, like Ramadan, when Muslim Americans are worshiping, congregating, and celebrating. The second meaning, discussed below, is the perpetual fear Muslim Americans have of the next terror attack, which, depending on the identity of the culprits and the scale of the attack, spells enhanced structural Islamophobia and, if imaginable, even more intense private hate and backlash.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” wrote James Baldwin. So I read, and read more, until I was moved to write and pursue a career in teaching. The study of American legal history is, perhaps more than anything, an examination of how law was molded and maneuvered to accumulate power for the elite few, and to justify and inflict horror on the remaining masses. Laws were made to enforce the displacement and extermination of one people (Native Americans) and the enslavement of another (African Americans), and to mark an entire faith group (Islam) as unassimilable and violent. The tragedy of Islamophobia unfolding in America today rises from seeds sowed centuries ago, and it stands alongside other tragedies, similar and distinct, experienced by a host of other groups.
As a constitutional law professor, I teach the infamous Korematsu v. United States, popularly known as the “Japanese internment case,” several times every year.17 In it, the Supreme Court, in 1944, upheld President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which compelled the rounding up and internment of 110,000 to 120,000 Japanese American citizens and residents several months after the Pearl Harbor attacks. Locked in an intensifying battle with the empire of Japan in World War II, the United States military designated the Japanese a monolithic “enemy race” that encompassed anybody and everybody of Japanese descent—including longtime U.S. residents and Japanese American citizens born in the United States.
Ruling on behalf of the court, Justice Hugo Black wrote, “We uphold the exclusion order. . . . In doing so, we are not unmindful of the hardships imposed by it upon a large group of American citizens. But hardships are part of war, and war is an aggregation of hardships. All citizens alike, both in and out of uniform, feel the impact of war in greater or lesser measure.”18 By upholding Roosevelt’s executive order mandating internment, the Supreme Court justified the discriminatory, strident, and racist policy. National security, the court opined, was the most “compelling state interest,” even if the fear that Japanese Americans would commit espionage or acts of subversion was not the product of real evidence, but of stereotypes and demonization.
The Korematsu ruling has not been overturned by the Supreme Court. And the opinion issued by Justice Black advanced an even more dangerous precedent than the ruling itself. His appeal to the “hardships of war” mirrored the standards applied today to Muslim Americans in the war on terror, standards that assign suspicion and guilt to anybody tied to an “enemy race.” The national security interests and fears of the state, real or imagined, enabled the en masse internment of individuals who had nothing to do with the Pearl Harbor attack. Due process of law and the constitutional safeguards that should have been extended to these Japanese Americans, as to all immigrants and citizens, was stripped and supplanted by the “hardships of war,” levied squarely on their backs. Citizenship did not protect them, and the guarantees tied to it did not save them from internment.
The war on terror, and the eras before it, have familiarized Muslim Americans with the “burdens of war” logic and the collective guilt Justice Black justified in Korematsu. The expansion of structural Islamophobia, by way of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act, CVE policing, NSEERS, Muslim bans one, two and three and a range of other policies and programs enacted before and during the war on terror, are driven by the suspicion and presumption of collective guilt assigned to Muslim Americans and immigrants. And what comes next in the case of another attack? What additional or expanded policing programs targeting Muslim Americans will be enacted following a large-scale terror attack?
What if something the size and scale of the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015, which claimed the lives of 130 people and galvanized a heightened state of Islamophobia in France, unfolded in a major American city?19 What degree of structural Islamophobia would be unleashed by President Trump (or his successor) if something like the Orlando shooting of June 12, 2016, were to take place under his watch?20 How might an executive already infamous for his unhinged Islamophobia respond if given the opportunity to take it even further?
Depending on the scale of the attack, might he levy unimaginable “burdens of war” onto eight million Muslim Americans and the many millions more who call the United States home? Is internment possible?21 If Muslim Americans are not already interned within the walls of their homes, mosques, or community centers, could another large-scale attack bring about en masse Muslim-American internment? Although it seems a remote possibility, the sum of pernicious legislation, still-rising Islamophobia, and the precedent of Japanese internment place that possibility firmly at the center of the collective Muslim American psyche.
This is the existential burden Islamophobia, in all of its forms, places on Muslim Americans. Citizenship, and the rights extended by it, is a tightrope that Muslim Americans must carefully walk during the protracted war on terror. Cautiously stepping forward and surviving, quietly dreading the next terror attack, and when and if it does come, praying, “Please don’t let it be a Muslim.”22 For Muslim Americans, the psychological weight of Islamophobia, which scholar Nadine Naber called the “internment of psyche,”23 is without question just as heavy as the vitriol unleashed by hatemongers and the policies enacted by the state. Muslim Americans remain confined by the fear of the next terror attack. After every horrific episode, whether in Charleston, Oklahoma City, Manchester, Orlando, or Las Vegas, Muslim Americans will stand united in prayer, echoing, “Please don’t be a Muslim,” and brace for the structural and private Islamophobia that is sure to come whether the culprit is proven to be a Muslim or a non-Muslim white “lone wolf.”