***

At the time the attack took place, we were in the middle of our prayers…Two armed men sadistically gunned down 93 people in our mosque. There were dead bodies everywhere. … It took us four days to bury our martyrs at Rabwa. We began at dawn after Fajr and continued till Maghrib.

“Seventeen-year old Waqar lost his father during the May 28th attacks. He now faces persecution on a regular basis at his college and from the general public for being an Ahmadi. The imam of the village has also declared him wajib-ul-qatl. “I was preparing for my intermediate examinations when this barbaric attack took place,” Waqar told us.” (“A Question of Faith: A Report on the Status of Religious Minorities in Pakistan”)

***

The perpetrators removed and broke the tombstones of graves. They also told the caretakers that they were not supposed to write the Kalima or Bismillah on the tombstones because, “Ahmadis are infidels.”

***

“Maulana [Fazlur Rehman] thought I would declare Ahmadis Muslims but Imran Khan is not a munafiq (hypocrite)”

***

Have you noticed how Khan’s statement goes unnoticed and gets brushed aside by good people, even those who interact with Ahmadis like a decent human being ought to? The euphoria of elections and the romance of the Great Khan rumbles on. That’s how numerical minorities are made into political minorities as issues of horrific violence become ‘minority issues’ and thus minor issues. Their time will come, it is said. First, bigger issues, like corruption, need to be tackled. Until issues of majoritarian violence on minorities are actively and relentlessly pushed to the table of high politics from below, their time won’t come. The majority is vested in making sure that it does not.

Muslims are [...] seen as dispensable because they can be marginalized at any time as not really part of ‘us’; they are always required to perform and thereby prove their loyalty– either by statements distancing themselves from international conflicts where other Muslims are involved or, perhaps more frequently, by maintaining a tactical silence.

– Peter Morey, Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims

At every new incident of what officials dub an act of terror, American Muslims fall over themselves to condemn the act as quickly as possible. It is then reported by say, NPR, that x Muslim organization has condemned the act though we the viewers/listeners should not assume that Muslims had anything to do with the act in the first place. Then right-wingers and liberals start quibbling about whether or not Muslims condemned the violent act or violent acts in general, or whether Islam is a religion of the sword or does it means peace. The possibilities of other reflections are foreclosed since everyone has something to say about the Moslem. The discourse remains firmly mired in what Islam is or is not with respect to terror. Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin in Framing Muslims show how stereotyping and framing “stak[es] out the territory within which ‘Muslimness’ and ‘Muslim issues’ are recognized and valorized.” “Such structures are prevalent, although more subtle, in supposedly liberal media as they are in the more predictable fulminations of the conservative right,” they write.

The calls that Muslims condemn this or that act and the resulting condemnation work as a pair– the latter acquiescing to the former and being one of its intended responses– both ensure that the Islamophobic merry-go-round will keep on going round and around. This politics of condemnation ensures that Muslims in the US won’t criticize the US actions abroad or even domestically, and that they will not partake in dissent, a fundamental aspect of democratic citizenship. It is one of the means of the curtailment of their engagement, as citizens and as critical voices. To participate in this condemnation circuit is to go along with a depoliticization of Muslims which aims to make them docile patriotic subjects or scapegoats. 

This politics of condemnation fashions a certain kind of Muslim self. It lets certain people and organizations speak for Islam and Muslims in certain set ways. That, in the process, helps them define what it means to be a Muslim in America and shape Muslim communities in a particular direction. Morey and Yaqin bring attention to what they call “‘professionalization’ of the role of Muslim representatives.” Professional Muslims swiftly condemn events like the Boston bombing even before any details had emerged but say nothing about drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, or the wars that the US launches at will. These condemnations of terrorism find their place in the imperial propaganda machine: Look our Muslims are on-board with America’s war on terror, they are on the side of Freedom.

I find Suburban Mosques and Islamic Centers to be thoroughly deploiticized spaces that often entertain “diversity tours” for corporate leaders and perform Muslimness through prayer demonstrations and the like. (Well, they are political just in a House Muslim kind of way.) Nary a peep of dissent, only the politics of patriotic acquiescence and Muslim performativity. What then remains an easily accessible Muslim voice of dissent for a politically engaged Muslim? Devoid of any political engagement with issues of social justice in the wider society, the focus of such spaces is on navel-gazing and self-stereotyping (the Noble savage variety). In these spaces Islam becomes confined to prayer rituals and is denied any relevance to social life and lived experience – a private(/ized) faith, if you will. 

The making of a depoliticized Muslimness is itself is the doing of the WoT that places fear in the hearts of Muslims that they dare not say a political word in mosques and gatherings with Muslims for fear of spies in their midst or for the fear of placing their mosque and community on the surveillance map of this police state. Statements condemning non-state terror or apologetic statements to the tune of ‘Islam does not condone terror’ are the only individual or collective “political statements” acceptable for a Muslim to utter. Say anything else and the reaction is: OMGZ, this dood is TEH RADICAL ISLAMIST; or mixing religion and politics is a no-no– well, unless it is in the service of the American empire.

When it comes to Muslim minorities, interfaith dialog is dubbed as the favored form of engagement whereby the normative White Christian sits down with an exotic Brown Muslim to learn about the latter’s belief and culture. A good old thanksgiving enactment. The discussion items would revolve around Islam and X (violence, women, democracy, American values … pick your favorite). The discussion would not however include, for instance, White privilege, racism, imperialism, state surveillance, proliferation of prisons, and the immigration detention and deportation regime. This interfaith multiculti stuff too becomes a depoliticized space. Here too a Muslim is only that– a foreign religious body. She has no politics and no American history whether inside or outside the US, at least not one in which the normative citizen is implicated.

There are, however, other venues for coalitions in which Muslims and non-Muslims can come together in a politically meaningful way outside the frame within which Muslims are confined as tolerated outsider exotic Others. Social justice issues provide such spaces where Muslims can form alliances with other Muslims and non-Muslims. (Speaking of which, this is one of the cutest stories to come out of OWS.)

Rich  immigrants hold disproportionate influence over suburban and countryside Muslim communities since they are the ones who bankroll mosques and are thus able to establish themselves as ‘Muslim leaders’ entitled to speak for Islam. Consequently such mosque communities and Islamic centers become bastions of political conservatism. So, don’t count on the good Muslim doctor to come out against anti-immigrant state policies, anti-black and anti-Latino Police brutality, or the economic inequality. In fact, you can count on him for demonizing the poor and families on welfare in coded racist Reaganite speech, and, of course, flag-waving. If only the Right abandoned Islamophobia, the good doctor is an ally like any other prick in a Porsche. 

Following is the writing that happened before the writing, or what didn’t make the cut. 

***

In everyday conversations racism is taken to be a form of prejudice and xenophobia, something in the realm of ill-feeling (bigotry) and bad thinking (ignorance), but not anything structural. This conceptual muddle gets murkier when it comes to describing the hostility faced by Muslims. Is ‘Islamophobia’ a kind of racism? A common reply is that since Islam is a religion and not a race, no. This argument is premised upon a conception of race as fixed, and not as a concept the meaning of which has been made and remade continually through history in different contexts. It also takes for granted that race is rooted in biology, that it is not a social construct, and ignores the fact that whatever race may be, it is not necessarily read from skin-color and other biological markers in isolation from cultural markers such as dress, name, and comportment. And it blurs distinctions between Islam and Muslims: Islam is not a race, but Muslims do come in (many) “races” all of which are bludgeoned into one Islamophobic box with one fell racist swoop.

“Islamophobia is a gloss for the anti-Muslim racism that collapses numerous groups in the single category ‘Muslim,’” (p30) writes Junaid Rana in his Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in South Asian Diaspora. Though written in jargon-laden academic prose largely inaccessible to the general reader, Terrifying Muslims offers an important corrective to those who consider Islamophobia to be not a deep-seated structural issue. Such apolitical and ahistorical conceptions lend themselves to prescriptions of interfaith dialogue as a remedy, and worse be appropriated by the very generative forces of racism. And so we have the shady statist strategy of “cultural diplomacy” in the service of US empire, whereby Imam Abdul Rauf goes on international tours sponsored by the State department to ”build bridges” between America and the Muslim world, whitewashing in the process the anti-Muslim violence in the US and abroad. Rana places Islamophobia squarely in histories of racism, capitalist labor extraction, imperial conquests, and state practices – in short, it isn’t something that can be overcome by droning on about interfaith dialogue while drones continue to turn people into “bug splats,” in the U.S. military parlance, and places into free-fire kill zones.

Rana’s argument is not about Islamic theology but rather, “about the formal and informal forms of discrimination committed against practitioners and those believed to be practitioners of Islam.” ‘The Muslim’ in his analysis is not simply the followers of Islam, but “a category that encompasses many nationalities, social and cultural practices, religious affiliations (from Muslim Sunni and Shia to Christian, Sikh, and Hindu) and social realities, that, through the process of state and popular racialization, is generalized.” In other words his argument is not that Muslims are targeted as a religious group, but “that it is as a social group that Muslims are racialized.”

So, what if you know all that already; why then should you read Rana’s book?Much of the literature on Islamophobia focuses on the hostility against Arabs. As important as it is in its own regard, this literature unwittingly contributes to the widespread conflation of Arabs with Muslims and vice versa. In contrast, Rana’s focus on South Asia and South Asians in the context of Islamophobia, in itself, is refreshing. Other than that, this is what Rana says:

My book is structured in terms of the double meaning of “terrifying Muslims.” The first meaning of “Muslims that are terrifying” is explained through the framing of racial representations, depictions, and rationales that depend on a system of social hierarchy. In the second meaning of “to terrify Muslims,” I describe the process of disciplining and policing this racial logic of the first meaning to the demands of globalization.

In terms of academic genealogy, this research follows the legacy of Edward Said and his critique of Orientalism as a form of knowledge and power as it is tethered to the practices of imperialism and the machines of war. In this context, I examine how racism and domination is a tool of twenty-first century imperialism in which an American empire has been created in terms of broad regional and global formations of what scholars call colonialism without colonies. Further, labor migration is a historical and contemporaneous aspect of what I describe, using the concept of the global racial system. In this approach, I argue that racism is not specific to the geographic boundaries of certain countries but is global in terms of territorial scope and its philosophical approach of expansion and malleability as a concept of oppression.

The book is also focused on developing an under-researched aspect of the scholarship on the South Asian diaspora, one that focuses on Pakistan and Muslim South Asia. Much of this literature has focused on the diaspora that is of Indian origin, largely because of demographic differences. Yet populations from countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh have extremely important diasporic population across the world. There are some important class distinctions between these populations that place many of them in what would be described as the working class or working poor. Because of the roles of patriarchy and state-controlled migration, many of the initial migrants from these countries are men, which has led to particular gender formations that cast them under notions of racialized masculinity.

In the context of the United States, much of this book examines how Pakistani immigrants are located as people of color in relationship to their place of origin and religion. Thus, even as they are classified as South Asian American, because of their religion they are often understood as linked to or are mistakenly combined with Arab Americans. In this way, forms of racializing Muslims take Arab and South Asian Americans as a singular group, which confuses complex histories and geographies.

Finally, my book addresses the anthropology of the state and labor migration to examine how institutions are central to people’s everyday lives. This is one of the key theoretical interventions of the book, in terms of offering a view of how a number of state systems can be a part of the labor migrant experience and are linked in creating what I call labor diasporas in the global racial system. 

1.

Rana’s book is about Muslims and migrants. Both have been demonized, and each as the other. Rana studies the racism that operates in the neoliberal imperial economic order structured through two malleable figures, the terrorist and the migrant, “woven together in the figure of ‘the Muslim’ as a racial type”  in “a global system of racializing the Muslim as migrant, criminal, and terrorist.” (p5) This conjured figure of ‘the Muslim’ is central to the system of policing Arab , Muslim, and South Asian immigrants “crafted through a broad logic of anti-immigrant racism.” (p9)

Rana’s multidisciplinary study is divided in two sections – state and migration, and race and migration— and “addresses the use of the categories of race and racism on Muslim bodies as they circulate in the global economy through concepts, media images, popular culture, narratives of migration and diaspora, and the production of illegality, criminality, and terror.” (p18) The crux of the first section, “Racializing Muslims,” is an exploration of the history of race and racism as it pertains to the processes of racialization of Muslims, and how these processes intertwine and are imbedded in the global economy and neoliberal capitalism. Rana delineates the concepts of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism, by examining the place the figure of the Muslim occupies in the Euro-American imagination, constructed as a threat to white Christian supremacy and in relation to the anti-Jewish racism “by employing a racial logic that crosses the cultural categories of nation, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality.” (p19). Rana explains Islamophobia, “through the workings of biopolitics of the racialized body that is essential to the rationale of the U.S. racial state,” and shows “how Muslim immigrant communities are placed in the U.S. racial formation and in the global racial system.” Rana also studies the racialization of Muslims in the visual and discursive realms, that is, through representations and conceptions of Muslims in contemporary discourses of terrorism, fundamentalism, sexism, and labor migration, and finds that “the process of racializing Islam through social identities takes place through a kind of translation of the body and its comportment via a combination of identifiers, such as dress, behavior, and phenotypic expression.” (p27)

This “conjuring of an enemy,” and specifically the Muslim enemy, has a long, sordid history. Instead of discussing how the category of race is deployed in Islamophobic discourses, Rana traces the “modern history of the race concept in relation to Islam” to shed light on how ‘Muslim’ became a racial category. Rana locates anti-Muslim racism in the “global racial system” that was “formed in relation to struggles for decolonization and the march of capitalism,” and contends that “the racialized figure of the Muslim is a contemporary example of this system.” (p26) Rana not only places Islamophobia – a fairly recent term—at the center of the formation of race but also argues that “anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia are central to the narrative of modern nations – and to modernity itself—because they emerged in the contact between the Old World and the New World.” (p28)

He lays out a history of racialization of Islam, the starting point of which he locates in the fourteenth and fifteenth century anti-Semitism of Reconquista, which targeted both Jews and Muslims much the way Islamophobic attacks have targeted Muslims and Sikhs in present day America. This, bear in mind, is not merely intolerance of certain religions, which we moderns like to relegate to a matter of beliefs. Religion, as conceived at that time, constituted much more than that. It was considered a state of being which mapped people onto a socio-cultural hierarchy, from civilized to barbarian. “These were clearly innate and naturalized categories in which religion was regarded … as a level of human evolution.” (p32)

While the expulsion of Moors is normally understood to have happened as a consequence of war and conquest, Jewish expulsions are thought to have occurred as a result of anti-Semitism, giving birth to modern racism. This is the conception that Rana deconstructs to locate anti-Muslim racism in this historic moment of formation of racism. To think of anti-Semitism in Catholic Spain “as an exclusive racial concept for Jews is a narrow interpretation” since “Catholic Spain constructed its enemy in Muslims and Jews as infidels, or heathens, and non-believers in relation to Christianity.” (p37) The Moors and Spanish Jews were cleansed through conversion and tests of purity of blood, hinting at the coming together of race and religion and the evolution of these concepts. Spanish Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity were subjected to tests of religious purity that “conflated ideas of genetic descent and biology with those of religious faith and cultural notions of kinship.” (p35) The Catholic Church issued certificates of blood purity placing “those with ‘pure’ Hispanic and Catholic genealogies above those with mixed , or ‘tainted’ heritage.” These cultural notions of religion and bounded kinship, Rana contends “are important predecessors to the modern notion of race that solidified in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century.” Phenotypically similar, many in Catholic Spain could pass as one or the other religious group. This anxiety about religious passing meant that cultural markers of dress and comportment became all the more important in the Catholic Church’s central obsession at the time: identifying Crypto-Muslims and Crypto-Jews that have not been sufficiently cleansed of their “impurities.” It is in this context that “[r]eligious passing came to be identified racially through the logic of darkening in which Moors were associated with darker skin color despite their actual appearance, and by relying on other kinds of available evidence, such as occupation, location of residence, dress, class and rank, and for men during Inquisition examinations and ‘religious’ riots, the foreskin.” (p36)

This racialization of religion was then “transposed on indigenous peoples of the New World” by Catholic Spain where it encountered other “heathens,” and in Rana’s words, “Native Americans were made sense of via stereotypes of Muslims,” such as sexual deviancy. (p38) Moreover, “the British described American Indians as descended from North African Muslims and perceived them as having similar cultural practices and values… Through Christian eyes, both Muslims and American Indians were seen as sodomite who engaged in widespread homosexuality.” Notions about sexuality are part of the material used in racialization, and in this case, deeming Muslims and Native American sexual perverts and homosexuals rendered them immoral in the conquerors’ eyes legitimizing their domination, conversion, or destruction. “The ideological enemy created of the Moor in Christian Europe served the purpose of racializing Native Americans.” (p39)

Racialization of religion “subsequently took on significance in relation to black America and Muslim immigrants.” (p31) Muslims came to America with Columbus as Moorish sailors and explorers, but later on they were brought to America as African slaves who continued to practice their religion. Starting from the early twentieth century, Ahmadiyya movement “one of the first multiracial models of American Islam, provided an important link between immigrant Muslims and African Americans.” The Ahmadiyya movement forged vital links between African Muslim movements such as The Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple, and South Asians “in forging pan-Islamic unity” and to “overcome racial and ethnic separation that existed not only within the Muslim community, but in the U.S. and around the world.” (p41) African converts to Islam thought that through their religious conversion to a religion that deems itself above race, they can become de-racialized and lay claim to citizenship rights as American. This, however, underestimated “Christian America’s longstanding antagonism towards Islam.” (p41)

This complex genealogy of entanglements of race and racism, construction of Others, and justifications of imperial conquests, shows that notions about Islam and Muslim were mobilized throughout American history in understanding those deemed threats to White Christian Supremacy —the Turk, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants. Indeed, as Rana writes, “Scholars of American Orientalism have argued that, throughout cultural, popular, and diplomatic history, Islam and Muslims have been part of the American imagination.” (p41)

2.

Globalization is said to have, in that asshole‘s phrase, “flattened” the world, that is, by connecting its disparate parts and bringing it closer together, it is said to have leveled the field, flattened hierarchies, and provided for greater social and geographic mobility for people. However, beneath this gloss lie the realities of growing inequalities within and across societies, hardening of boundaries, and fattening of security states across the world. “In this process, the meaning of labor migration itself has changed, partly through the meaning of the dynamics of migration industry, but also through the meanings attached to migrant workers themselves across the globe,” (p3) writes Junaid Rana.

To understand the anti-immigrant racism manifest in anti-Muslim racism, in the second section of the book, “Globalizing Labor” Rana focusses on the transformation of South Asian labor migrations into a large South Asian labor diaspora within the global racial system, connecting post-Abolition indentured labor migration under the aegis of British empire in the colonial era during which a million and a half people were indentured from the Indian Subcontinent to work in plantations in Asia Pacific, the Caribbean, and East and South Africa between 1837 and 1917 (p100), to present day labor migrations to the Gulf and the Global North in the American imperium. Rana compares the contemporary labor migrations with those of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century indentured labor in order to shed light on the exploitation of these labor diasporas and on how South Asian migrations and labor diaspora has been historically part of the global racial system. Rana provides a fascinating ethnography of the migration industry to illustrate the formation of formal and illicit labor migrations and the construction of notions of illegality.

Where is Pakistan on the contemporary map of the global racial system? As if surgically removed from the ambit of the culture and politics of the Indian subcontinent, or South Asia, which it has been historically a part of, “it seems to have shifted geographically to become part of the Middle East. In fact, in the global War on Terror, the Muslim world is increasingly imagined as a single geopolitical mass.” (p5) In this imagination South Asia– a regional concept and a geographic term–  is considered synonymous with India such that “India is Bollywood and technology; Pakistan is terror and trouble.” Pakistani immigrants in the US however, contends Rana, are “simultaneously understood as South Asian and Middle Eastern, a classification that combines national origin, religion, ethnicity, and culture into a unitary conception of race and racial formation.” (p20)

The Pakistani state, as a client-state, is also an ally in the war on terror. This duality structures American counter-terrorism policy towards Pakistan, one which dispenses carrots in terms of military aid, and sticks through drone bombings, simultaneously. And it has dire consequences for Pakistani migrants. Similar dynamics are at play for migrants from the Middle East, who, along with Pakistani migrants have been increasingly targeted by the U.S government for detention and deportation. This is so, as Rana explains, because the “conceptions of globalized racism are based in the circulation of specific racialized regionalisms that imagine the Muslim world as connected and interdependent.” (p9) Such overstatement of the connections and similarities between Muslim majority societies homogenizes them as one essential demographic and geographic whole. This “Muslim World” has a singular culture— a single organism with terrorism encoded in its DNA. This racialized geographic imagination underpinned US government’s domestic counterterrorism initiatives such the Special Registration program that exclusively targeted male Muslim migrants from Muslim countries. This ‘Muslim world’ “in turn, is imagined as part of a geography that connects migratory networks of Muslim countries to the metropoles of Northern countries in the global economy.” (p9) Buttressed by a critical reading of the Hollywood film, Syriana, Rana contends that Pakistani immigrants in the US are “simultaneously understood as South Asian and Middle Eastern, a classification that combines national origin, religion, ethnicity, and culture into a unitary conception of race and racial formation.” (p20) Conflating diverse populations as Arabs and South Asians, Rana holds, is cardinal to producing a visible target. The terrorist virus carrying Muslim migrant is to be contained, removed. Racial panics and notions of migrant illegality are technologies of control vital for this quarantine.

Panics and perils are central to the anti-immigrant narratives through which migrants are identified as religious and racial subjects, and by invoking tropes of illegality, criminality, and terror, made into objects of fear to be policed and targeted with racial violence. “In its simplest sense, terror is about manufacturing fear,” writes Rana. “The War on Terror seeks to manage this fear by making the categories of friend and enemy coherent.” (p55) Immigrants have historically been pressed into serving as the scapegoat for whatever is perceived to be the current threat to, for instance, the US public and the nation. Through a crackdown on them, the security state allays the public’s desire of law and order and justifies its expansion. “Perils and menaces, such as the ’yellow peril’ that targeted Asian Americans and the ‘red menace’ of internal communism and socialism, have been constructed throughout U.S. history. The most recent articulation is the ‘Islamic peril.’” (p7) A parallel to construction of perils and foreign devils is what Rana calls the ‘migration fantasy.’ That is, constructing America as the land of opportunity, “no matter how tormented this dream has become.” This brings to fore the complicity of migrants and their home countries, and the role of desire, the fabled ‘American dream,’ in bolstering America as a place of perfection which then the state claims to guard against the contaminating brown or yellow foreigners.

Belonging for citizens is also produced through discourses of migrant illegality. In Rana’s words, “migrant illegality connotes not only the non-citizen, but also the foreigner, the outsider, and, most often, the immigrant.” (p139) Illegality is a legal construct of state that is reconfigured constantly to render migrants deportable. The selective policing and deportation of Pakistani and Muslim migrants under the pretext of criminality and terrorist threat is how the American War on Terror constructs a racialized migrant illegality to enable the state to deploy legal and extralegal violence. Beneath all the sophisticated legal stratagems, terminological gymnastics, and security jargon that the War on Terror is talked about, this war, as experienced by immigrants, is good old xenophobia and state-endorsed racism.

Racism is central to the deportations, detentions, torture, and a crackdown on Muslims through immigration policies and national security initiatives such as the Special Registration, profiling, and surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods on the one hand, and on the other, “vigilante attacks” on Muslims by concerned citizens inevitably taking their cue from the state that has mobilized and militarized them, not the least by asking to report activities they deem suspicious, an initiative that has resulted in reports generated on ordinary “Muslim-looking” people (read as “terrorist-looking”). This violence is constitutive of the US security and imperial state in the contemporary era. The site for the constitution of this sovereign power is the Muslim body –racialized and made visible through a set of profiles, a Muslim phenotype if you will, to be purged from the body politic through racial violence.

Rana “examines the post-9/11 world of racial terror and violence as seen in the U.S. detention and deportation system and in the migration patterns that have resulted in massive returns to Pakistan and other parts of the diaspora from the United States.” (p18) It is in this last line of investigation that Rana posits that the Muslim body constructed through racialized fear, is imagined as a site of control and containment through detention and is literally disappeared through deportation. And these processes of detention and deportation “reproduce sovereignty in spaces of self-governance and zones of autonomous state-sanctioned force such as detention.” This relentless violence has hit Pakistani immigrants hard, especially the working class migrants and neighborhoods. The estimated figure for returned Pakistanis since 9/11 is well over 100,000. The 120,000 strong Brooklyn’s “Little Pakistan” has lost half its population. If this had happened elsewhere, it would have been labeled, rightly, ethnic cleansing. But to label and to make those labels stick is a function of power.

I conclude with a quote from the author: “In a gesture towards the history in which the racialized figure of the Muslim was created, the global War on Terror constructs an enemy in vulnerable populations such as easily deportable and expendable transnational workers who can be isolated through everyday practices of terror prevention.” Working class Muslim migrants have borne the brunt of much of this violence, though surely violence and racism has not left Muslim American citizens and well off migrants unharmed. To write off this American nightmare as a hopeless case is to do disservice to the actual victims of this violence. Such cynicism would only strengthen the hand of the oppressor as it throws under the buss the continued struggle and mobilization of working class laborers and migrants worldwide, in the Gulf, in the West that Rana lays out in the conclusion of his book, or of the domestic servants in Pakistani homes.

George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History 

Ashis Nandy, Exiled at Home: Comprising At the Edge of Psychology, The Intimate Enemy and Creating a Nationality. Read The Intimate Enemy here.

Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier 

Tram Nguyen, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11

Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (South Asia Across the Disciplines). Read Kafila’s review here.

Ann Juanita Morning, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. Read some of Ann Morning’s work here.

Michael Omi, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (Critical Social Thought)

John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam

Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (Critical Cultural Communication)

Daisy Rockwell, The Little Book of Terror. Read reviews here.

Pardis Mahdavi, Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai. Read Jadaliyya’s interview with her.

Andrew Gardner, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain. Read some of Gardner’s work here.

Aman Sethi, A Free Man. Read an excerpt.

Alyssa Ayres, Speaking Like a State: Language and Nationalism in Pakistan

***

2011, 2010

+++

…the WoT discourse bears a rigorous logic immune to simplistic “political,” “contextual,” or “anti-racist” antidotes. Its explicit core concept is grievance, its core empirical focus is the trajectory of grievance, and its core causal inference is the humiliation or indignity of the grievance. The argument above is, crucially, indifferent to the grievance’s substance. The partial silencing of political grievances in favor of voicing cultural or economic grievances matters but is secondary to the ideological function of the grievance format. As it happens, moving from the Arab or Muslim “mind” to economic, cultural, or political “root causes” of violence has not removed but re-situated and reinforced Islam’s unique anti-modernism. Crude racism indicts the racist but even the compassionate or media-savvy consumers see 9/11 or suicide-bombing as an overreaction to grievance, in which Muslims react unlike other aggrieved people. “Why not march peacefully, produce a Gandhi or Mandela, form civil society, use micro-credit for grassroots mobilization?” The answer is deduced: Islam’s disposition. If racist, this inference represents the new racism of the “war on terror.” It is racism derived from a logical, empirical proof rooted in the humane sensitivity to suffering and pitched explicitly against the spitting hatred and contempt for an inferior other. The proof is flawed but its rational-induction marks the new derived racist logic of the WoT — call it the anti-racist racism of grievance-talk.

…

The broad pro-war sentiment, I believe, accepts each of these interlocked components of the official policy. I wish to summarize the discourse before going into detail: As we have seen, some unique quality of Islam seems, empirically, to cause or permit an extremist minority of Muslims to overreact to common grievances with homicidal violence. We ought to oppose those grievances —mainly domestic political and economic deprivation — but the anti-American terrorists they have spawned are irremediable Enemy Muslims. With our Friend Muslims we must defeat Islamist terrorism in a “long war.” This indefinite conflict pits America’s universalist “culture of life” [Good America] against Islamism’s insular nihilism [Bad Islam(ism)].

I need to clarify here that the WoT and its discourse are racist toward Islam intrinsically, and not only toward Islamists, pace official ceremonies and disclaimers, and not only as a by-product of biopolitical sovereignty. Indeed, the trajectory of the war discourse is enormously significant; it is how the argument for the endless war, permanent state of exception, and all attendant civil, social, and human rights violations and atrocities proceeds that matters— especially: how Islamism is (1) separated from Islam; (2) opposed to the U.S.-Islam alliance; (3) re-identified with Islam; and (4) recoded as Islam’s ineluctable anti-U.S. enemy. The logic of the argument refolds Islamism and anti-U.S. terrorism into Islam in the end, on grounds that even as a tiny, breakaway “exception to the rule,” Islamic militarism is endemic to Islam.

Sayres S. Rudy, “Pros and Cons: Americanism against Islamism in the ‘War on Terror.’”

Immediately after 9/11, ex-diplomat and Pakistani columnist, Irfan Husain was flooded with emails from Americans wanting to understand “where the suicide bombers had come from.” In Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam and the West Husain sets out to answer their question, “Why us?” To do so, Husain “was forced to confront the prejudices and atavistic desire for vengeance that millions of Muslims harbour.” (p5) Americans are too focused on local issues, he tells us, to know the forces of history that came crashing into the Twin Towers. Faultlines is premised on an essential difference between Westerners and Muslims. (West and Judeo-Christian West — and when speaking of the West in history, Christendom — are used fairly interchangeably.) Since “the ongoing confrontation between Islam and Christiandom began long before either faith was born,” and “bin Laden and his ilk are driven at least partially by events that happened a millennium or more ago,”  Husain explores the “historical and religious factors that separate the Muslim world from the West – especially America.”

A narrative of human progressundergirds Faultlines with the US, the leader of the West, its vanguard. Muslims are the backward other of progress: “[W]e tend to forget what Christendom was like when it was the same age as Islam is today. Imagine, for a moment, that it is the year 1400 in Europe. This would be the Dark Ages, before the Reformation, and well before the Enlightenment.” (p226) … ‎”Obviously the rest of the world isn’t going to wait for centuries for Muslims to catch up and enter the 21st century.” This Muslim lagis the essential divide, a fatal fault-line between Islam and the West, which Husain brings into being with his historical narrative of a millennium-long conflict between Islam and Christendom. The US is now heir to this history: “the leadership of the Western, Judeo-Christian world has passed on to America; with this mantle goes the poisoned chalice.”

Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” pulsates through Husain’s exposition, guides his analysis, and stays his hand as he rides through the well-trodden road of explaining, in Lewisian terms, the roots of Muslim rage: “My book is an attempt to explain the causes of the resentment and anger that millions of Muslims harbor toward America and the West.” (p15) This separation of Muslims and the West is the binding thread of the book and the bedrock of Husain’s analysis. It cleaves history on these two axes, and finds the US and the West at the right side of history.

For this fault-line to make sense, a negative Muslim exceptionalism is needed. ‎”Faith is probably the most important element in a Muslim’s identity — an idea quite alien to most Westerners, who usually define themselves in terms other than purely religious ideas. If asked who they are, most Muslim believers would reply ‘Muslim’ before naming their nationality or ethnic group.” … ‎”Islam unites Muslims in the Western diaspora* in a way that other faiths do not.” … “The downside of this bonding is that it delays integration. Whereas most other migrant communities do their best to blend in with the majority by adopting to the mainstream modes of behaviour, Muslims tend to cling to their own dress, customs, and traditions. This makes them stand out and, in the post 9/11 climate of suspicion and hostility, makes them targets of selective profiling.” The Moslems are the most religious race. To top it of, Husain approvingly draws on Caldwell’s book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West in his ruminations about European Muslims. (see Matt Carr, or Pankaj Mishra, or Kenan Malik on that Eurabia-monger.)

(*Aside: By “Muslims in the Western diaspora” he probably means Muslims in the West and not Western Muslims living in a non-Western country or in a Western country other than theirs i.e. “Muslims in the Western diaspora.” But this is unlikely to be a gaffe. He does consider Western Muslims to be ipso facto diasporics and out of place. Regardless of how many generations they’ve lived in the West, they are perpetual outsiders. He refers to their Western societies as “host communities,” implying that Western Muslims are guests in the West and hence, are not in their own homes, and so, they should behave like good guests. Newsflash: They are at home and they will walk around in their pjs or whatever and do as they wish.)

Enter, the Muslim rage: The West has moved on but the Muslims have not, since “[b]eing relegated from their prominent position in world affairs to the status of losers has not been easy to accept, especially as they continue to languish at the bottom of world rankings.” (p72) They are seething with anger at their impotence, an anger they displace onto the West: “Given that it is easier to hold a superpower responsible for Israel’s ascendency than to accept that it is their own weakness that has contributed to this state of affairs, most Muslims naturally end up blaming America.” (p10) But Husain’s Lewisian canard has a bit of a twist.

It is crucial for the book that Moozy rage has no parallels. Many other peoples were colonized but Moozies were especially pissed off for being dethroned from global prominence. While colonialism injured many peoples, “[f]or Muslims, in particular, the past weighs heavily on their collective psyche.” (p72) As for ‘American imperialism’ (yes, in quotes): the American foreign policy makes a lot of the world angry “but nowhere in the world have they provoked the kind of visceral hatred as in the Muslim world.” This hatred is explosive:  ”…once they are told their acts of terrorism are not only sanctioned by Islam, but they also lead straight to heaven, they are quickly brainwashed into becoming human bombs.” The Iraq war would only add more fuel to this fire of Muslim hatred. And so, Husain was against the Iraq war because it will spread anti-Americanism which will only  distract us from the good war in Af-Pak.

Fortunately, “the trajectory of mankind’s progress has remained remarkably steady.”(p15) Financiers and technocrats call the shots and ideology is becoming irrelevant. Islamic extremism, “a reaction to the forces of globalization that have transformed the world,” (p13) is spoiling the neoliberal paradise: “Islamic extremists want to drag the world back to a period in which they counted for something.” Invoking “primitive tribes” lashing out with rage and impotence to modernization, he foresees religious extremism to die out as well. There is a small matter of genocide in that historical imagery, but that need not detain us. It is for progress, after all.

Since the US has the largest military in the world, “it is inevitable that it has assumed the role of world policeman.” “Its economic and financial interests are so far-flung that it needs to maintain a global military presence.” The cop, however, is hated even by law-abiding citizens. (p54) Empire is thus America’s cross to bear for “mankind’s progress” –White man’s burden for the 21st century, if you will.

Speaking of barbarism, drones attacks are “necessary and effective.” (p181) They do foster resentment, but it is only the Pakistanis not living in the places under the aerial sovereignty of America’s humanitarian drones that have their panties in a twist. In contrast, the people subjected to drones, in North and South Waziristan, say that the damage they inflict is more contained than Pakistan Army’s artillery fire. Husain interprets their comparative preference for not being indiscriminately bombed at a mass-scale as them welcoming these attacks. The natives have no objections to being killed. In fact, they ask for it.

Prescriptions:

So what to do? Well, mosques and madrassas need to be state-controlled as in Turkey or monitored as in the US. Drones are good but only in the short term.  The long term solution is to provide these unwashed Muslim masses some education. The Arab Spring gives him hope. The US-supported autocrats spent more than 5 percent of their GDP on education on average in the past 40 years. And now, the educated youth demand their rights and wish to take their destinies in their own hands instead of blaming the West. (p187) (X exists and now Y occurred, therefor X caused Y.) (Also, Palestinians should follow the example of the Arab movements and quit blaming the West for the continued colonization of their land, the ethnic cleansing, and their treatment as a third-class citizens within Israel, unconditionally supported by the US.). But unstable places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia are fucked beyond redemption.

Oh, also, can we hez more diplomat parties like we used to? That will help winning hearts and minds too.

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The consensual argument for U.S. anti-terror hegemony (1) rejects crude racist caricatures, (2) emphasizes intra-cultural diversity, (3) deploys social-anthropological research methods, (4) avoids ahistorical and acontextual abstractions, (5) foregrounds political and economic grievances, (6) lets the Other speak, and (7) expresses a reluctant, confused, and evolving sense of the “Orient.” The WoT has embraced the anti-essentialist heart of Orientalism, rendering Saidian anti-imperial ideology-criticism otiose. Said won. Now the war of America against militant Islamism can proceed, free from Orientalism’s legatees.

Sayres S. Rudy, “Pros and Cons: Americanism against Islamism in the ‘War on Terror.’”

The challenge that Husain’s book presents is how to respond to something so hackneyed that its counterpoints too have become clichés, and, to some extent, even appropriated by it. “Contrary to the general perception of Muslims as a monolithic mass of threatening would-be terrorists, there are many shades of opinions, just as there are within followers of any faith. One crucial difference exists: Extremist followers from other religions generally do not turn into suicide bombers.” (p147) There are many kinds of Muslims—conservative, liberal, fundamentalists, moderates, and extremists etc.—who can be rendered good ones or bad according to the exigencies of empire; Islam is a religion of peace, as Bush and Blair never tired of proclaiming, and extremists are a very tiny minority. Most Muslims however share their warped worldview.  Hence this tiny minority of anti-Modern Bad Muslims, an exception to the Muslim whole, says something about the whole: Islam has a unique propensity for producing the violent fringe. The empire is simply magnanimously helping the good Muslims triumph against the bad ones for a better and safer world. Those skeptical of empire’s benevolence can read the good Muslim’s touching testimony to the metropole.

Husain is only explaining to the American man something that he won’t understand, that the rest of the world lives with and deals with historic memory. Its conflicts tap into that memory. Americans have trouble understanding how that can be, because Americans don’t have historic memory inflecting the present! The American is the new man. Irfan, the Oriental sage, is just informing this new kind of man about the hatreds of the old world.

In sum, Teh Moslems are crazy, my dear American man-child reader. Take it from me because I am one. Love, Irfan Husain

“If religion is often thought of as a major danger, “Islam” is often represented as a uniquely intractable instance of active religion in the modern world. In the modern world “religion”has-or at any rate, we believe that it should have-its proper appointed place. Islam, presented as a “religious civilization,” is a construct not only of the media but also of intellectual discourse. That is the discourse in which the rich and diverse history of Muslim societies across three continents and one-and-a-half millennia is reduced to the essential principles of a distinctive “religious civilization. ”

Such essentialist characterizations of “Islamic civilization” are carried out sometimes sympathetically and sometimes with hostile intent, but in either case they prompt people to explain the many authoritarian .or violent trends in Muslim countries in terms of an essential “Islam.” There are several objections to such an explanatory procedure, but I shall confine myself here to the most obvious: No liberal in the West would suggest that the Gush Emunim in Israel represent the essence of Judaism, or that the assassination of abortion doctors in the U.S. by pro-Life activists represents the essence of Christianity, Liberal scholars today would rightly object to the suggestion that the powerful authoritarian campaign throughout India for Hindutva (which some observers have likened to Nazism)” expresses the essence of “Hinduism”;yet Western writers continue to identify an essential “authoritarianism” in Muslim countries and attribute it to Islam’s monotheistic beliefs.

The Western intellectual discourse on ”Islamic civilization’’ goes back at least to the first half of the nineteenth century, but in our own day scholars (von Grunebaum, Gibb, Watt, Lewis, Crone and Cook, Geertz, Gellner, and many others) have continued to reproduce it. This discourse is not invariably hostile, but it does make it possible to represent the contemporary Islamic revival as the outcome of a civilizational essence reacting violently in self-defence against the challenge of Modernity. I contend that the very idea of “civilization” -a nineteenth-century invention-is not helpful for thinking constructively about the cultural and political problems of our time. On the other hand “tradition”-often falsely opposed to “modernity” and “reason” since the Enlightenment-is a far more promising concept.

Islam is a major tradition in countries where Muslims live. It is not the only tradition, of course, but one that still constitutes a significant part of the lives of most Muslims. Because Muslim societies are in crisis, Islamic tradition is in crisis too. It has to be defended, argued through, and reconstructed if it is to be viable. I refer here not simply to intellectual traditions, to philosophy, theology, history, etc., which (so we are continually told by critics of Islam) are in a state of decay. I am thinking in the first place of ways of living that are articulated, in diverse conditions, by Islamic tradition. But in order to be viable we should not take it for granted that that tradition needs to be remade in the image of liberal Protestant Christianity.

People are now increasingly conscious of living in a single interdependent world, but Muslim societies have always been variously conscious of their dependence on other civilizations, especially on the Hellenic and Persian worlds and on Indian, Chinese, and African societies. Muslim empires in the past (contrary to what has been alleged about Islamic intolerance) were more tolerant of a diversity of religions and cultures than Europe was. Hence, even Europe may have something to learn from that history of comparative tolerance. Western scholars who concede this history sometimes insist that non-Muslims lived under Muslim rule as “second-class citizens. ” Such expressions seem to me entirely anachronistic because no one in those hierarchical empires was “a citizen,” and the mass
of Muslim subjects can not in any meaningful sense be regarded as part of “the ruling class.” Besides, Muslim rulers often employed Christians, Jews, and Hindus in positions of power and trust-who therefore had authority over Muslims. In saying this I do not intend to imply that Muslim rulers and populations were never bigoted and never persecuted non-Muslims. The social and moral assumptions around which such empires and kingdoms were constructed are, of course, no longer viable, but they did embody certain principles of toleration that were absent not only in Latin Christendom, but in post-Enlightenment European states too. They did not require everyone (whether Muslim or not) to live according to a single set of “self-evident truths. ”
What I wish to emphasize here is that the zealotry so characteristic of many Islamic political movements in recent times is a product not of the mainstream historical tradition of Islam. It is the product of modern politics and the modern state. Many academic commentators have pointed to the modern ideologies and organizations characteristic of contemporary Islamicists. Such analyses are nearly always conducted to demonstrate
the speciousness of the claim to authenticity made by these movements. By asserting that there is a sharp split between “traditional Islam” and “modern developments” these analysts imply that authentic (“traditional” ) Islamic tradition cannot become genuinely modern.

I believe that these commentators are mistaken in making this sharp opposition. But more important, they rarely go on to ask themselves what their conclusion indicates about modern historiography and the modernizing state. They fail to note that it is the unprecedented ambition of the latter, its project of transforming the totality of society and subjectivity in the direction of continuous productive progress, that creates a space for a
correspondingly ambitious Islamicist politics. Islamic history had no such space. That space, with its totalitarian potentialities, belongs entirely to Western modernity.

Indeed, there was no such thing as a state in the modern sense in Islamic history-or, for that matter in pre-modern European history. There were princes, of course, and dynasties (the modern Arabic word for “state,” dawlah, is an extension of the classical Arabic word for “dynasty”), who headed centralized institutions for securing law and order, extracting tax, etc. But there was no state in the modern sense of a sovereign structure that stands apart from both governors and governed, which it is the government’s duty to maintain, and which articulates, through the territory it controls, the entirety of society.

Western orientalists, as well as Muslims who call for the establishment of an Islamic state, have taken for granted that the rise of Islam in the seventh century saw the establishment of a theocratic state in Arabia, one in which religion and politics were indissolubly fused together. For Islamicists and orientalists later Muslim history is seen as a falling away from that model, a process in which a separation occurred between religious and political institutions. For Islamicists this separation constitutes the betrayal of a sacred ideal that Muslims are required as believers to restore; for orientalists the lingering connection defines a schizophrenic compromise that has always prevented a progressive reform of Islam. (These political histories, incidentally, should not be confused with the belief held by pietists that successive generations after the Prophet declined in virtue.)

But contemporary Muslim scholars are beginning to ask whether it is right to represent Islamic history in these terms at all. That representation, it may be argued, is the product of a nineteenth-century European historiography in which the modern categories of “religion” and “state” are used anachronistically. After all, the Prophet Muhammad did not seek divine authority for all his political actions, and it is known that his followers often argued with him without being branded apostates. He had to rely on personal loyalty and on persuasion to keep his followers because he possessed no coercive state institutions. Indeed, it was the Prophet’s immediate political successor, Abu Bakr, who first undertook military action against fellow Muslims throughout the Arabian peninsula designed to subordinate them by force to centralized political authority. It was he who introduced the argument that obedience to an Islamic prince was a necessary part of being Muslim.

However, I stress that even the principle of subordination to an Islamic prince does not constitute an Islamic state in the modern sense. This is a complex historical and theological theme which cannot be pursued here. I touch on it merely in order to question the idea that the indisputable fact of an original Islamic theocratic state remains the real cause
of contemporary Islamicist ambitions.
In my view it is irresponsible to invite readers to regard Islamicist politics as an outgrowth of tendencies essential to an original politico-religious Islam. The idea that Islam was originally-and therefore essentially-a theocratic state is, I argue, a nineteenth-century European one, developed under the influence of evolutionary theories of religion. Of course its European origin does not in itself render it invalid. My reason for mentioning that nineteenth-century origin is simply that if today’s Islamic militants have accepted this perspective as their own, this does not make it essential to Islam. (It is necessary to add, however, that my argument is not intended to undermine the validity of any kind of “politicized Islam”; I claim only that “a religious state” is not essential to the tradition of Islam. )

It also won’t do to represent all forms of Islamic revival as merely accidental growths caused by deteriorating economic conditions combined with Western ideologies. People respond to contemporary conditions, they are not passively determined by them. Their traditions and interpretations of history, and therefore their formulation of the problems they face, are part of these conditions.

In fact, Islamic movements of revival predate the impact of Western modernity in Muslim countries. Thus in the eighteenth century (to go back no farther) there were several attempts at social reform and theological renewal in the Muslim world. In general the reforming thinkers took pains to distinguish between the absolute truth of the divine text and the authority of interpretive positions adopted by traditionalists and legal scholars over the centuries. Perhaps the most interesting of these eighteenth-century thinkers was Shah Waliyullah of Delhi, writing at the time of the breakup of the Mughal empire in India. In Arabia, at the same time, the Najdi reformer Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab joined forces with the Saud family to establish the political entity that eventually became today’s Saudi Arabia. A little later, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Osman dan Fodio developed far-reaching educational and political reforms in West Africa on the basis of a carefully argued Islamic position. Like other Muslims of their time, they accepted unquestioningly the divine authority of the Qur’an, and the exemplary status of the Prophet. Yet each produced remarkably distinctive theological and practical solutions to what he perceived as the principal problems of his place and time. The rich and subtle thought of Shah Waliyullah contrasts with the austerity of Ibn‘Abd al-Wahhab, and the latter’s rigor with Osman dan Fodio’s principled flexibility. These and other Islamic reformers have their intellectual heirs today, Muslims who attempt, with varying resources and in very different conditions, to address the problems of the modern
world. They should not be seen, therefore, as simply reacting to Western ideas and conditions.

When analyzing the violence-collective and individual-which we witness in Euro-American countries, perceptive analysts point to the conclusion that something is structurally wrong with their political systems as well.as with their economies. That conclusion is certainly widespread among most Muslims about their own countries. (It is often wrongly stated by Westerners that Arab-Muslims are allergic to self-criticism. Such statements confuse despotic rulers with the people they rule.) In any society whose inhabitants undergo and acknowledge a wide-ranging social crisis, intense and passionate conflict over principles of renewal are almost inevitable-and thus zealotry finds its place, as European history surely  attests. In this respect those who insist on secularism as the solution to all our political ills are no different from the zealots who speak in the name of Islam-or, for that matter, in the name of any other living religious tradition.

…

Muslim residents in Europe should certainly not be confused with states and political movements in the Muslim world-even if there are sometimes connections between them. But in any case, we should not give in too easily to the demands of European nationalists for absolute and exclusive loyalties from their citizens. One can participate in a responsible and committed fashion in political structures without conceding the validity of such demands. As it is, bankers and trade-unionists, intellectuals, scientists, and artists, all have personal and professional attachments that transcend the borders of the nation state. Jews, Catholics, and recent immigrants in a world of increasing migration, all have loyalties that are not exhausted by the constitutional demands of the nation state. Why should Muslims in Europe be expected to be different?

It is often asked whether Muslim communities can really adjust to Europe. The question is more rarely raised as to whether the institutions and ideologies of Europe can adjust to a modern world of which culturally diverse immigrants are an integral part. Europeans were, after all, ready to change their attitudes to accommodate Jewish communities with an unprecedented respect.

It is only since the Second World War that we encounter the frequent use of the term “Judeo-Christian civilization” as an indication of that change. The new idea of Judaism as an integral part of “Christian civilization”- and not merely a prelude to or a tolerated margin of it-has credibility not because of an indisputable “objective” past, but because Euro-Americans now wish to interpret and reconstruct another kind of relevant past for their civilization. (Of course anti-Semitism is not dead in Europe or America. But anyone who aspires to respectability in the liberal democracies of the West cannot afford to be identified publicly as an anti-Semite.

There is no good reason whatever why, as Muslim immigrants become full members of European states and the European Community, Europe’s past achievements-for that is what talk about its “civilization” amounts to-should not be reconstructed in richer and more complex ways, in order to accommodate Islamic history. After all, much of the intellectual and social history of medieval Christendom is intimately linked to that of medieval Islam.

So, too, one hopes that another kind of history-for-the-present may emerge in countries where Muslims are in a majority-overlapping with that of other societies, and connected to them by a multiplicity of relations, in a fashion quite unlike the one envisaged by Huntington. This does not mean that the differences between Muslims, Christians, and Jews should be synthesized into a lowest common denominator to which all can happily subscribe. Nor does it mean that every identity should become so mobile that-as some post-modernists would have it-no one can be continuously one kind of moral being belonging to a distinctive community.

What it does mean is that the members of each tradition should be prepared to engage productively with members of others, challenging and enriching themselves through those encounters. Too often in post-Enlightenment society “to tolerate” differences simply implies not taking them seriously. This has certainly been the attitude behind religious toleration bequeathed to the modern secular state by the European Enlightenment. But it is no longer adequate to regard “religion” simply as a type of private belief. In a political world where everyone is said to have the right to construct himself or herself, “religion” is now also a base for publicly contested identities such it is at the very centre of democratic politics, from which only the most determined anti-democratic power can keep it out.”

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See also “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam“

What Fanon and Cesaire required of their own partisans, even during the heat of struggle, was to abandon fixed ideas of settled identity and culturally authorized definition. Become different, they said, in order that your fate as colonized peoples can be different; this is why nationalism, for all its obvious necessity, is also the enemy.

Edward Said, Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors

Imperialism takes varying and distinct forms in different places or colonies. At home it creates/shapes nation/nationalism as its anchor, and (eventually) in the colony as a reaction. In both cases, nationalism is the bastard child of empire. For the colonized, it was perhaps an anti-imperial necessity. Inter-national politics in the post-colonial era is still, however, formulated within the imperial field. If we were “strong,” the logic goes, we wouldn’t have been colonized in the first place, and so, we need to be “strong” and big to fight hegemonic designs of regional and global powers. In short, fight empire with empire.

Something of this convergence of these imperialisms can be seen in Pakistan’s “strategic depth” paradigm, a fantasy emerging within the context of Cold War super-power confrontation. The Pakistani state took the opportunity to expand, in imperialist terminology, its “sphere of influence.” As Eqbal Ahmad writes:

The attainment of “strategic depth” has been a prime objective of Pakistan’s Afghan policy since the days of General Ziaul Haq. In recent years the Taliban replaced Gulbadin Hikmatyar as the instrument of its attainment. Their latest victories, specially their capture of Mazar Sharif, the nerve centre of northern Afghanistan, brings the Pakistani quest close to fulfillment if, that is, such a thing as “strategic depth” does exist in the real world. … The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s support of the anti-communist Mujahideen ended Islamabad’s hostile relations with Kabul, and rendered its influence dominant over Afghanistan. Pakistan has misused this gain to its detriment. Its Afghan policy — the quest for a mirage mis-named “strategic depth” — has deeply alienated trusty old allies while closing the door to new friendships. Its national security managers have in fact squandered historic opportunities and produced a new set of problems for Pakistan’s security. … Policy-makers in Islamabad assume that a Taliban-dominated government in Kabul will be permanently friendly towards Pakistan. The notion of strategic depth is founded on this presumption.

A decolonizing force, nation-state is ultimately a mini-replica of the beast. As a hegemonic system, it is a foe to be fought. National politics may provide some relief, but solidarity and criticism needs to be formed above the nation and below it. Critique should not be against “both” nation as/and empire in a horizontal sense, as if the violence of/within the two forms is somehow disconnected and separate, but in a holistic manner, eschewing the analytic walls erected by them. We are complicit in, tied up with, and trampled on by both.

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On March 21, 2012, Shaima Alawadi, a 32 year old Iraqi woman, was fatally beaten with a tire iron in Southern California. A note found near her said, “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist.” The investigators asserted that it was an isolated incident and that other Iraqis need not worry. Lumping disparate peoples into threats and describing violence against them as “isolated incidents” works in tandem. The former justifies sustained national violence and the latter diverts our attention from the systemic nature of this violence. What we see instead are “isolated incidents” of violence suspended outside the broader societal context and exigencies of the national security state, and exceptional events, neither the latest in a long chain of violence on a particular group of people nor as an episode in the nation’s deep history of violence and dispossession.

Alia Malek’s work of oral history, Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice gives the lie to the frame— isolated incident— that holds within it the image of the idyllic American society as it effaces its systematic injustices. By including the violated as victims of isolated crimes, it excludes the chorus of their voices. It shuts out the stories of unrelenting violence: of racial terrors such as beatings and violent deaths; of legal terrors such as incarcerations, detentions, and deportations; of routine, everyday violence such as bullying at school, employment discrimination, traveling made arduous, racist jibes and sneers. In Malek’s words, “the personal stories and lived experiences of these realities remain excluded from the general understanding of the American experience, as well as the mainstream narrative about 9/11 and the War on Terror.” In Patriot Acts that chorus pushes at the constricting margins of the frame and shows those that will see beyond isolation, the lives damaged and scarred, the families shattered.

Walking back home with an Indian co-worker on the day of 9/11, Malek noticed that it wasn’t her but her non-Muslim, non-Arab, Indian friend who was getting nasty stares and sneers. “Ironically,” Malek writes, “I, as a fair-skinned Arab, look the part much less, given how Arabs and Muslims are visualized in the American imagination.” This is a fundamental insight. Racism, tied intimately to nationalism and empire, doesn’t make studied and careful distinctions. Its essential distinctions are centered on itself: They are not us. The construction of enemies, of majorities and minorities, is the constitutive violence of the nation. It labels and targets particular kinds of ‘Others’ at a given historic juncture, and especially those perceived to be cosmopolitan, people of suspect loyalties and having links with the enemy without. Minorities are the foil against which the unity of the nation is constituted and injustices obscured. That foil for the present day America is the racialized figure of the terrorist, the Muslim: Dark skinned, bearded and beturbaned, or behijabed, Middle-Eastern-looking, and/or having Middle Eastern sounding name. And the violence arrayed against it targets immigrants in general.

In Patriot Acts, Rana Sodhi describes how he and his brothers fled the anti-Sikh violence and prejudice in India in the 1980’s and came to the U.S “for freedom, a safer place, and a better life.” The post 9/11 backlash turned that American dream into a nightmare. Rana says that “Every time there’s a new event – the Iraq war, the London bombings, the Madrid bombings, [… ]—there is a resurgence of racism, and Sikhs are often the first target.” A couple of days after 9/11, a friend of Rana called him expressing concern at the rising violence against Sikhs and that “they are showing bin Laden’s picture on the TV, and he looks like a Sardar.” Tragedy struck on September 15, 2001, when Rana’s brother, Balbir Sodhi, was gunned down in front of his gas station in Mesa, Arizona. That was the first reported post 9/11 hate-murder. (Almost a year later, another of his brothers, a taxi driver, was shot dead in San Francisco. It was not deemed a hate crime, but Rana disagrees.)

Such episodes of direct violence are merely the tip of the iceberg of everyday violence, what historian Gyannendra Pandey calls “routine violence.” It is violence normalized and thus hardly noticed (except by those subjected to it). But it is there in administrative practices of “random profiling” at airports, and in police surveillance of ethnic neighborhoods, in the distortions in history books, in media biases and cinematic representations, in sneers and taunts, and in the dehumanizing assumptions held and opinions expressed by common folk in bars, coffee shops and workplaces. Malek quotes the Sikh Coalition’s survey, conducted in 2006, involving 439 Sikh students under 18 years old in New York City. A whopping half of them reported being bullied and “for every three out of five students who wear a turban, harassment occurs daily.” In Patriot Acts, Eighteen year old college student, Gurwinder Singh, describes how being constantly jeered and taunted with questions like “Are you related to Osama bin Laden?” “Is Osama bin Laden your uncle?” getting his patka pulled off his hair on a school bus, and being beaten up had been an everyday experience for him: “Half the time, they picked on me for the way I looked. The rest of the time, they picked on me because of my religion. It really hurt. When I was attacked, I was angry. But when they called me names, I felt lonely. They would just get away with things, and I felt so helpless.”

Surveys have also shown a lack of response from teachers and school administration. Indeed, as in the case of Rima Qamri’s daughters, the teachers and the school administration even join in the harassment initiated by other kids’ parents. Before her daughter’s troubles at school exploded into a full-blown disaster, the family had already been subjected to violence. On the first anniversary of 9/11, the windshield of her minivan was smashed and a note stuck to it that said, “Get the fuck out of this country, you sandniggers.” The police, of course, did not treat it as a hate crime. On the second anniversary of 9/11, her daughter Sana’s teacher taught a class on 9/11 and told the class that Palestinians are the enemies of America, Muslims are responsible for 9/11, the Quran teaches Muslims to hate the Christians, and that Muslims bomb Christians any chance they can get, prompting other kids in the class to name-call Sana. On Qamri’s inquiry, she found out that the teacher taught from a book, ordered by thatDelaware district for the year and was taught in every school of that district. (What is it that you said about the hate-spewing Madrassas?) Qamri’s letters to the district, the principal, the teacher, remained unanswered, andSana’s torments continued. Seeing Sana’s travails, “brought back the trauma [her father, Ali] had gone through inPalestine,” says Qamri. “He kept equating what was happening to us to what Israelis do to Palestinians.” Ali’s breakdown brought their business down. Scraping together the resources, they relocated to get their kids in a different school, but the teachers at this new “liberal school” proved to be no better. One of them had been teaching a 9/11 lesson for several years that framed 9/11 as the culmination of religious wars originating with Abraham’s sons. When Qamri confronted him, he told her that “your prophet is a killer and marauder.” The heart-wrenching downward spiral of this family continued, and bit by bit the family came apart. Ali left forPalestine in 2005, but Qamri and their children could not move and settle there since Israeli immigration laws won’t allow it. Qamri ended up home-schooling her kids for the rest of the year. High school went better, but then the girls had grown to expect the abuse, but, says Qamri, “it still hurts.”

“Dehumanizing, or in this case, de-Americanizing, individuals is often the first step toward justifying policies, laws, and treatment that would otherwise offend our sensibilities,” writes Malek. This de-Americanization and its attendant routine and racist violence stemmed from the state itself as xenophobia was institutionalized, for instance, in the marriage of immigration services and national security that goes by the name of Department of Homeland Security. Patriot Acts tells many stories of detention based on spurious, baseless charges as part of the US government’s dragnet that targeted immigrants. Adama Bah, a sixteen year old Muslim girl, was picked up by FBI from her home on suspicion that she was a potential suicide bomber for which no evidence was ever produced. She was subjected to humiliating strip searches during her six-week long detention; her family was not told where she was held; then later on her father was deported back to Guinea. Anser Mahmood, an immigrant from Karachi, owned a trucking company but his business visa had expired. He was detained based on suspicion, and locked up in solitary confinement –widely accepted (but not by the US government) as a form of torture– for four months. Mahmood describes the cell as “a twelve-by-six cell and was video monitored at all times … There were guards outside my cell. At the beginning, they didn’t let me sleep. … I wasn’t allowed to see anybody else or know who else was there. I wasn’t even allowed to make a sound, let alone talk to people.” Mahmood was eventually deported and his family followed him back to Karachi.

The dragnet widened from criminalizing immigration violations as part of national security to a clampdown on Muslim charitable donations. This was done by prosecution of large Muslim charitable organizations, such as the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), on the charges of providing material support to terrorism. HLF’s founder, Ghassan Elahi, is serving a sixty-five-year sentence, in one of the many maximum security prisons in the United States, called the Communications Management Unit (CMU), a domestic Gitmo housing mostly Muslim terrorism-related detainees. With communications severely curtailed, this solitary confinement is Elahi’s entombment. Fifteen-year-old Sara Jayousi, whose father is also serving time in a CMU on material support charges, describes how during their visits a Plexiglas wall separates her from her father. “I have not touched my father since December 2007 … All you see at the end of our visits are the handprints on the glass,” she says. “I wanna break that Plexiglas wall.” In Malek’s words, “Together, these stories weave a portrait of how the fabric of everyday life has irrevocably changed for so many in this country.”

Given that Malek is a civil rights lawyer, it is understandable that Patriot Acts is primarily focused on the deterioration in civil liberties in America, the brunt of which is felt largely, and most acutely, by immigrants from Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa, and American Muslims. This focus, while important, is limiting in taking a holistic and global measure of the destruction the war on terror has wrought. What Muslim Americans and the aforementioned immigrants have been subjected to within the heart of empire is writ large on the peoples of the ever-increasing theaters of America’s imperial wars: the tire-iron with which Shaima Alawadi was tomahawked is the shadow of the Tomahawk missile falling on a Baghdadi roof.

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ps. Do Check out this great review of the book.

I thought that both my Lahori uncles were hip. (Probably because they were from Lahore.) Most of all, I enjoyed the loud, laughter-ridden conversations between them and my mom and dad. It oddly made me feel closer to my dad. The first family vacation we took was with these two families. We went to Murree. That was my first time being in a hilly place and I loved it. The trees, the clouds, the chill in the air, the sounds, everything.

We would return their visits every year … Lahore. Dad would tell stories about how things used to be like when he lived in Lahore. We would go to parks and enjoy rides – cool electronic ones, like dodging cars (bumping cars) which I had only rarely enjoyed in my town, say, on Mela Chiraghaan.  Oh and Ice cream! My phoopha used to get us Shahi Kulfa … yumz. He worked for a newspaper and so his work hours were odd. We would only see him on his day off or during the afternoon.

Then we moved to Lahore. Those family get togethers got spread out over Eids, weddings, etc. That weeks-long co-habitation was a thing of the past. But we would still have joyful moments and crack jokes. My phoopha would pick on me and ask if I had a girlfriend. He is fond of colognes, especially Quorum, and so I bring him one every time I visit Pakistan.

Today I got a text message saying he died and that I should call back. I drove to the nearest Indian grocery store to get me a phone card. Why do I have to hear about it in a text message? That angered me … instead of grief, I felt anger. But even that didn’t last long. It turned to panic. Was I lied to? Was this a fake bad news to soften the blow that was coming later? Half an hour later, I was on the phone and the first thing I asked when I got through was if my mom and dad are ok, not how my aunt was doing. It was the old and ever-present fear that had taken a hold of me. I felt relieved that they are alive. That’s what’s left of my relation with them. Only concerned about and connected to their being alive and healthy.

My uncles and aunts keep dying without me ever seeing them before they go or even attending their jinaza. But that’s the burden of being away, I guess, of being away from all of the relations and ties that have nourished you into a grown self.

What do I do after that phone call? I’ll probably go home and go about the rest of the day as if nothing happened …