ASAMST 132AC Islamophobia and Constructing Otherness (Spring 2023)

On race and racism -- On colonialism, post colonialism and de-colonization -- On Islamophobia and Muslim otherness -- On Islam and Muslimness -- On Palestine, Zionism and interfaith discourses.

A critically acclaimed analysis of anti-Muslim racism from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, in a fully revised and expanded second edition In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the "War on Terror." Importantly, Kumar contends that Islamophobia is best understood as racism rather than as religious intolerance. An innovative analysis of anti-Muslim racism and empire, Islamophobia argues that empire creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism, which in turn sustains empire. This book, now updated to include the end of the Trump's presidency, offers a clear and succinct explanation of how Islamophobia functions in the United States both as a set of coercive policies and as a body of ideas that take various forms: liberal, conservative, and rightwing. The matrix of anti-Muslim racism charts how various institutions--the media, think tanks, the foreign policy establishment, the university, the national security apparatus, and the legal sphere--produce and circulate this particular form of bigotry. Anti-Muslim racism not only has horrific consequences for people in Muslim-majority countries who become the targets of an endless War on Terror, but for Muslims and those who "look Muslim" in the West as well. With a new foreword by Nadine Naber.

In response to the events of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a "war on terror," ushering in an era of anti-Muslim racism, or Islamophobia. However, 9/11 did not create the image of the "Muslim enemy." This book examines the historic relationship between anti-Muslim racism and the agenda of empire building. Beginning in the eleventh century and the context of the Crusades, Deepa Kumar offers a sweeping historical analysis of the changing views of Islam and Muslims in the West, examining the ways that ruling elites throughout history have used the specter of a "Muslim enemy" to justify their imperial projects. The language of Islamophobia that was developed in the context of the European colonization of the Middle East continues to thrive today in the United States. Kumar expertly exposes and debunks various myths about Muslims and Islam that have become widely accepted in the US. She goes on to analyze the US's checkered attitude towards the parties of political Islam, outlining how it has treated Islamists as both allies and enemies. By examining local conditions that have allowed for the growth of Islamists, Kumar shows that these parties are not inevitable in Muslim-majority countries but are rather a contemporary phenomenon similar to the rise of Christian, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms. The final section of the book sheds light on how the use of Islamophobia in justifying foreign policy necessitates and facilitates political repression at home. Attacks on Muslim Americans have spread to attacks on dissent in general. Kumar concludes by making a powerful case for a grassroots movement that challenges anti-Muslim racism and the projects of empire. Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of media studies and Middle East studies at Rutgers University and the author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike. Kumar has contributed to numerous outlets including the BBC, USA Today, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Death camenbsp;instantly to Imam Luqman, asnbsp;four FBI agents fired semiautomatic rifles at him from a few feet away. Another sixty officers surrounded thenbsp;building on that October morning, the culminationnbsp;of a two-year undercover investigation that had infiltratednbsp;the imam's Detroit mosque. The FBI quicklynbsp;claimed that Luqman Abdullah was "the leader of anbsp;domestic terrorist group." And yet, caught on tape,nbsp;he had refused to help "do something" violent, asnbsp;it might injure innocents, and no terrorism chargesnbsp;were ever lodged against him. Jameel Scott thought he was exercising his rightsnbsp;when he went to challenge an Israeli official's lecturenbsp;at Manchester University. But the teenager's presencenbsp;at the protest with fellow socialists made him thenbsp;subject of police surveillance for the next two years.nbsp;Counterterrorism agents visited his parents, his relatives,nbsp;his school. They asked him for activists' namesnbsp;and told him not to attend demonstrations. Theynbsp;called his mother and told her to move the family tonbsp;another neighborhood. Although he doesn't identifynbsp;as Muslim, Jameel had become another face of the presumed homegrown terrorist. The new front in the War on Terror is the "homegrownnbsp;enemy," domestic terrorists who have becomenbsp;the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures ofnbsp;policing and surveillance in the United States andnbsp;across Europe. Domestic surveillance has mushroomed--at least 100,000 Muslims in America havenbsp;been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled anbsp;secret suspect list of more than 8,000 al-Qaeda "sympathizers,"nbsp;and in another operation included almostnbsp;300 children fifteen and under among the potentialnbsp;extremists investigated. MI5 doubled in size in justnbsp;five years. Based on several years of research and reportage,nbsp;in locations as disparate as Texas, New York, andnbsp;Yorkshire, and written in engrossing, precise prose,nbsp;this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalizationnbsp;strategies. The new policy and policingnbsp;campaigns have been backed by an industry ofnbsp;freshly minted experts and liberal commentators. Thenbsp;Muslims Are Coming! looks at the way these debatesnbsp;have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowlynbsp;configured and ill-conceived antiextremism.

Terrifying Muslims highlights how transnational working classes from Pakistan are produced, constructed, and represented in the context of American empire and the recent global War on Terror. Drawing on ethnographic research that compares Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States before and after 9/11, Junaid Rana combines cultural and material analyses to chronicle the worldviews of Pakistani labor migrants as they become part of a larger global racial system. At the same time, he explains how these migrants' mobility and opportunities are limited by colonial, postcolonial, and new imperial structures of control and domination. He argues that the contemporary South Asian labor diaspora builds on and replicates the global racial system consolidated during the period of colonial indenture. Rana maintains that a negative moral judgment attaches to migrants who enter the global labor pool through the informal economy. This taint of the illicit intensifies the post-9/11 Islamophobia that collapses varied religions, nationalities, and ethnicities into the threatening racial figure of "the Muslim." It is in this context that the racialized Muslim is controlled by a process that beckons workers to enter the global economy, and stipulates when, where, and how laborers can migrate. The demonization of Muslim migrants in times of crisis, such as the War on Terror, is then used to justify arbitrary policing, deportation, and criminalization.

As racist undercurrents in many western societies become manifestly entrenched, the prevalence of Islamophobia - and the need to understand what perpetuates it - has never been greater.Critiquing the arguments found in notionally left accounts and addressing the limitations of existing responses, What is Islamophobia? demonstrates that Islamophobia is not simply a product of abstract, or discursive, ideological processes, but of concrete social, political and cultural actions undertaken in the pursuit of certain interests.The book centres on what the editors refer to as the 'five pillars of Islamophobia': the institutions and machinery of the state; the far right, incorporating the counterjihad movement; the neoconservative movement; the transnational Zionist movement; and assorted liberal groupings including the pro-war left, and the new atheist movement. The book concludes with reflections on existing strategies for tackling Islamophobia, considering what their distinctive approaches mean for fighting back.