Islam

After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government adopted a policy of singling out and deporting all deportable persons in the United States from Muslim and Arab countries. Caught up in this dragnet, Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti was arrested and detained for two years before a court ordered his release.

Yet the ranks of the Islamophobic phalanx goes beyond the evangelical right and the Tea Party movement. Among their cadre are fixtures of the security establishment, the foreign policy elite and the academy.

By placing civilian law enforcement on a single continuum with military options, the government has set the stage for the (further) militarization of American society.

Representative Peter King’s (R-NY) first hearing on the radicalization of American Muslim communities exemplified the right wing’s ongoing commitment to constructing the idea of a radical, threatening Islam.  The hearing also exposed what is, at best, liberal acquiescence, and, at worst, liberal partnership in that dangerous agenda.   Most profoundly, the hearing made clear the extent to which the war on terror has robbed public discourse of any meaningful vocabulary for contesting the universe in which Islam poses legitimate concern for the American public.

The Global War on Terror’s fixation on al-Qa‘ida as a roving band of "foreign fighters" allows the U.S. to claim that it is not fighting a war on Islam, but rather helping local Muslim populations rid themselves of narrow-minded interlopers  seeking to impose a puritanical brand of the religion.  This hunt for foreign fighters animates broader attempts to monitor and control Muslim diasporas outside the "west."  At the same time, the legal impunity of other foreign fighters – namely, U.S. forces and their contractors – is pushed into the background.

I have just characterized the killing of our lifetime’s Public Enemy Number 1, as an act of violence. The association is disconcerting. It does not readily compute. But what else does one call an act that requires the raiding of a home, and the shooting of an unarmed man, and others, until they are dead?

The good mutants work in spaces servicing the global economy. The bad ones want to destroy freedom, democracy, free markets. New mutations are arising in the politics of fear and the War on Terror.

Mukhtar Mai was gang-raped on orders of a tribal court and then paraded naked in town. Rather than suffering in silence, she’s taking her rapists to court, challenging Pakistan’s laws, patriarchal norms, cultural practices and social taboos.

"Free speech is neither an invention of the Western world nor is the Muslim world necessarily at odds with it. The key is to realize the weight that a "progressive" Muslim voice has in this discourse."

Typecast and stereotyped, required to assimilate or questioned of their loyalties, the debate continues about who South Asian Muslim youth are. Instead, they should be understood in the socioeconomic and cultural context—and their multiple identities and civic commitments should be recognized.