American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear - Hardcover

Beydoun, Khaled A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520297792 ISBN 13: 9780520297791

Verlag: University of California Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

On Forbes list of "10 Books To Help You Foster A More Diverse And Inclusive Workplace"
How law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the resurgence of Islamophobia—with a call to action on how to combat it.

“I remember the four words that repeatedly scrolled across my mind after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. ‘Please don’t be Muslims, please don’t be Muslims.’ The four words I whispered to myself on 9/11 reverberated through the mind of every Muslim American that day and every day after.… Our fear, and the collective breath or brace for the hateful backlash that ensued, symbolize the existential tightrope that defines Muslim American identity today.”
 
The term “Islamophobia” may be fairly new, but irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims is anything but. Though many speak of Islamophobia’s roots in racism, have we considered how anti-Muslim rhetoric is rooted in our legal system?
 
Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the United States. Beydoun charts its long and terrible history, from the plight of enslaved African Muslims in the antebellum South and the laws prohibiting Muslim immigrants from becoming citizens to the ways the war on terror assigns blame for any terrorist act to Islam and the myriad trials Muslim Americans face in the Trump era. He passionately argues that by failing to frame Islamophobia as a system of bigotry endorsed and emboldened by law and carried out by government actors, U.S. society ignores the injury it inflicts on both Muslims and non-Muslims. Through the stories of Muslim Americans who have experienced Islamophobia across various racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, Beydoun shares how U.S. laws shatter lives, whether directly or inadvertently. And with an eye toward benefiting society as a whole, he recommends ways for Muslim Americans and their allies to build coalitions with other groups. Like no book before it, American Islamophobia offers a robust and genuine portrait of Muslim America then and now.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Khaled A. Beydoun is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas School of Law and Senior Affiliated Faculty at the University of California–Berkeley Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project. A critical race theorist, he examines Islamophobia, the war on terror, and the salience of race and racism in American law. His scholarship has appeared in top law journals, including the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review. In addition, he is an active public intellectual and advocate whose commentary has been featured in the New York Times and Washington Post as well as on the BBC, Al Jazeera English, ESPN, and more. He is a native of Detroit and has been named the 2017 American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Advocate of the Year and the Arab American Association of New York’s 2017 Community Champion of the Year.

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“Deftly pairing his deep legal expertise with a searching moral dialogue, Khaled A. Beydoun breaks down U.S. Islamophobia as the full-fledged system that it is—one with a very specific history, but tightly linked to other forms of white supremacy. This book meets the moment, but it is also packed with staying power. A crucial contribution to building the powerful, broad-based, and diverse movement that is our only hope.”—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything
 

“This compelling book is an exquisite testament to what it means to subvert Islamophobia. Beydoun stands out as a brilliant scholar and advocate who gives voice and attention to the neglected stories of Black Muslims along with the poor, working class, and undocumented.”—Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School and UCLA School of Law
 

“In this political climate, Beydoun is a much-needed and critical voice, analyst, commentator, and researcher. Unapologetically Muslim and Arab American, he speaks and writes truth to power, steering us away from comfort and forcing us to confront racism through our own relationships with it. Brilliant and witty, he tells it like it is.”—Linda Sarsour, cochair of the 2017 Women’s March 


“At a time when casual hate-mongering emanates from the highest level of the U.S. government, American Islamophobia provides precisely what is necessary to understand the dark days we are living through. Beydoun brilliantly dissects the tropes that are central to the deliberate construction of Islam as the ultimate hostile other. He draws on his legal training and his experience in national security policing and civil liberties advocacy to draw a stark portrait of this ugly time of carefully curated xenophobia and mass hatred that Muslims, Hispanics, and many others are enduring. I can think of no book that could be more timely.”—Rashid Khalidi, author of Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East


“A triumphant act of moral restitution. Written with bravura flair, academic authority, and panoramic scholarly panache, American Islamophobia declares the birth of an American Muslim intellectual who wholly claims the land and envisions a bold future for it. This is no simple diagnosis of a racist pathology in a nation. It announces the brave surfacing of a subterranean voice rooted in the moral imaginary of a liberated America.”—Hamid Dabashi, author of Iran Without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation

 
“This is an urgent book for anyone seeking a comprehensive understanding of Islamophobia today.”—Evelyn Alsultany, author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11

 
“This is a highly readable, deeply personal, and fiercely intellectual analysis of endemic social and structural Islamophobia throughout American history. This book is required reading for any thinking human being.”—Khaled Abou El Fadl, Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law

 
“Political commentary, intellectual history, legal exegesis, and autobiography, this book is a powerful and moving articulation of how Islamophobia has shaped and been shaped by U.S. democracy.”—Devon W. Carbado, coauthor of Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America and Harry Pregerson Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
 
 

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American Islamophobia

Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear

By Khaled A. Beydoun

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Khaled A. Beydoun
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29779-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Crossroads and Intersections, 
1. What Is Islamophobia?, 
2. The Roots of Modern Islamophobia, 
3. A Reoriented "Clash of Civilizations", 
4. War on Terror, War on Muslims, 
5. A "Radical" or Imagined Threat?, 
6. Between Anti-Black Racism and Islamophobia, 
7. The Fire Next Time, 
Epilogue: Homecomings and Goings, 
Notes, 
Index, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

What Is Islamophobia?

Through its policies of racial profiling and racially targeted immigration enforcement, the state has adjudged all "Muslim looking people" to be terrorists.

Muneer I. Ahmad, "A Rage Shared by Law"

I think it is because of the way we look and the way we dress.

Yusor Abu-Salha

Yusor Abu-Salha was far more than the headscarf she carefully wrapped around her head every morning and removed every night. The twenty-one-year-old was a fresh college graduate, having just earned a degree in biology from North Carolina State University. She had plans to attend the University of North Carolina School of Dentistry — her top-choice program — in the fall of 2015 and had begun prepping for it months before she would formally set foot in a dental school class. She wore a wide smile on her face nearly every day after ripping open the envelope that contained her letter of acceptance, and she felt absolutely fortunate about the opportunities her country granted her. She wrote, "Growing up in America has been such a blessing. And although in some ways I do stand out, such as the hijab I wear on my head, the head covering, there are still so many ways that I feel so embedded in the fabric that is ... our culture."

Yusor was also a newlywed. She had just married her college sweetheart, twenty-two-year-old Deah, who, like her, loved hip-hop music and community service, and who was working toward a career in dentistry. The two were tied at the hip, pushing their close friend Omar Alnatour to call them "the most perfect couple I have ever seen." Deah himself was a second-year student at the UNC School of Dentistry and had helped his wife piece together a compelling application so that she could follow in his footsteps. In fact, the young couple frequently talked about establishing their own dental clinic and one day lending their skills to help poor patients in the Middle East, as well as serving neglected patient communities at home in North Carolina.

These are dreams that young people in their early twenties often have. But anybody who knew Yusor and Deah also knew that these two possessed the drive and work ethic to convert these dreams into reality. Yusor's younger sister, nineteen-year-old Razan, who roomed with the young couple in their Chapel Hill apartment, certainly believed that her older sister and brother-in-law would one day make good on their dreams. Razan, who had an infectious sense of humor and loved watching Animal Planet, had dreams of her own, which included becoming an architect, something she began to work toward as a freshman at the NC State School of Design. Yusor, Deah, and Razan were three young Muslim Americans with their entire lives ahead of them, with dreams not unlike those held by other young people their age.

On February 10, 2015, the dreams of these three Muslim American students were permanently deferred and violently put to rest. Sometime before 5:00 p.m. on that day, a forty-four-year-old neighbor, Craig Hicks, executed Yusor, Razan, and Deah. The two girls were shot in the head and Deah was sprayed with bullets by Hicks after an alleged "dispute over a parking spot," several news outlets reported. Yet the execution-style murder of the three students, and the blood that poured from their heads and stained their apartment carpet, evidenced that this was no parking dispute, but a hate crime — a hate crime aimed squarely at the faith of the three. "Parking disputes don't end in triple murders," my mother later told me, dismissing the weak motive that could hardly conceal the unhinged Islamophobia that triggered Hicks's actions that February afternoon. The gruesome facts, and the history of tension between Hicks and the three students, revealed that hate was at the heart of this murder. One didn't need a law degree to draw this conclusion.

Hicks's violent murder of Yusor, Razan, and Deah shook Muslim America. It spurred vigils on college campuses and at community centers, prayers at mosques nationwide, and heartfelt displays of mourning by friends, family, and complete strangers on social media. "It could've been my friends, or maybe even me," said my eighteen-year-old niece, Du'aa Hachem, then an incoming freshman at the University of Michigan–Dearborn who, like Yusor and Razan, wore the hijab — the headscarf many Muslim women choose to wear to express their spiritual devotion. This sentiment was hardly hers alone, but was shared by Muslim Americans across the country, particularly students and young women.

The murder of the three Muslim American students also signaled that Islamophobia was racing at a frightening new clip. The sisters' hijab often invited strange looks and stares from strangers. After all, North Carolina is in the heart of the South, which becomes more "southern" when one travels beyond the relatively tolerant confines of Chapel Hill, Durham, and the broader Research Triangle area. For Hicks, Yusor's and Razan's headscarves signaled that they were Muslims — a faith routinely vilified on Fox News, one singled out as the source of "homegrown radicalization" by the Obama administration's national security program, and one brazenly slandered by the entire field of Republican presidential hopefuls vying for their party's nomination. As Yusor said to her father before she was killed, "I think it is because of the way we look and the way we dress.'" In the United States today, this hatred is especially potent given the heightening degree of Islamophobia coming from the media, the state, and other sources.

Although they lived next door to him, Hicks did not regard Yusor, Razan, and Deah as neighbors. In fact, he did not even perceive them primarily as college students. He perceived them, rather, as outsiders, interlopers, and foreigners — above all, as enemies of the state who warranted the suspicion and scowls he routinely darted their way when they crossed paths in the hallway, the common areas, or in the parking lot — and on that Tuesday afternoon inside the Finley Forest Condominiums in Chapel Hill, he believed they deserved extrajudicial punishment in the name of patriotism. Hicks decided to take the law, and the anti-terror objectives of the state, into his hands by executing them. While the students grew accustomed to Hicks's stares and scowls, they likely could have never imagined that their hate-filled neighbor would become their reaper. However, the ideas and images Hicks consumed about Islam, terrorism, and the hijab on television would mobilize his hate into unspeakable violence.

But what role did war-on-terror law and policy, founded on the narrative that Muslim identity correlates with terror suspicion, have on the murder of these three Muslim American students? Was Hicks's fear and hatred of Islam irrational, or was it fueled by the stereotypes of the faith and its followers he regularly heard...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520297792
• ISBN 13: 9780520297791
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland