Introduction
Rising vitriol against global Muslim communities cannot be simply understood as the result of what Muslims do, interpretations of Islam (however defined or understood), or the nature of Muslims as a community. Rather, growing anti-Muslim sentiment is directly linked to changing global economic and political conditions in the 21st century. “Islamophobia,” which is a term commonly used to describe anti-Muslim racism, is linked to larger geopolitical trends, and is an institutionalized public discourse that relies on epistemic principles and employs its own political economy. 1 Gender, race, and sexuality lie at the heart of these epistemologies. In this collaborative essay, we aim to generate scholarly dialogue on the centrality of gender, race, and sexuality in epistemologies of Islamophobia.
We begin by offering a robust conception of Islamophobia, one that enables an understanding of the discursive and material conditions of its production and grounds it in an intersectional feminist framework of analysis. We then elucidate how Islamophobia is an industry that relies on a consuming public, a product of sorts, that builds on histories of colonialism and Orientalism, and that pivots around issues of gender and sexuality. Next, we elaborate on specific pedagogical strategies that each of us employ within the classroom to demonstrate a praxis grounded in an intersectional and transnational feminist anti-Islamophobia framework. Finally, we highlight the ways that the discourse of Islamophobia is appropriated and deployed to bolster hegemonic state power and justify nationalist militarization. Drawing on the fields of gender studies, ethnic studies and anthropology, this multidisciplinary impetus is based on studies from a number of Muslim cultures – in the United States, Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran and Egypt – to produce practical and theoretical interventions into the discourses and practices of Islamophobia.
Crafting a Feminist Space to Engage Islamophobia
As feminist scholars working on gender and Islam, we were drawn together by our mutual scholarly interests and formed an informal collective in 2016. 2 At first, we shared our concerns around the deployment of Islamophobic rhetoric in the US presidential election campaigns and in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings that fueled a heightened suspicion of Muslim Americans. 3 These circumstances bolstered nationalist sentiments in support of harsher domestic counterterrorism initiatives and surveillance of Muslim American communities. In most academic settings, we felt the lack of intellectual spaces to think through how debates about terrorism and counterterrorism have been unfolding in the context of Southern California (including in Orange County, Los Angeles, and the Inland Empire), and how communities of Muslims are racialized as potential threats to US national security. It became clear to us from our discussions that local iterations of Islamophobia that locate violence within Islam, or in communities of Muslims, are not isolated from a global climate of dehumanizing Muslims. This link between Islamophobia and the larger geopolitical climate provided us with an impetus for research and collaboration.
In our feminist scholarship and teaching, each of us has been working on a range of issues pertaining to global Muslim communities, i.e., women’s participation in religious-based movements in Egypt and Pakistan, 4 feminist activism of Iranian and Malaysian women, 5 and Muslim American women’s integration into the United States’ Countering Violence Extremism initiative. 6 As a collective, we coalesced around our desire to respond as feminists working on gender and Islam in different contexts, and as activists concerned with how narratives of Muslim incivility and Islamism are central to the US narrative of progress, and hence justifications for dehumanization, and violence. Our collective enabled an intellectual un-thinking of the naturalized binaries of “West” vs. “Islam,” while simultaneously enabling a robust re-thinking of the complex entanglements of war, terrorism, Islamophobia, militarized masculinities, and narratives of US exceptionalism.
Our general purpose has been to bridge the lack of resources and the intellectual isolation, and to pool together our individual research projects and scholarly endeavors to build a community of feminist scholarly activism and teaching grounded in Southern California’s specific landscape. The goals of our collective were as follows: (1) to engage in intellectual dialogue and reading of the epistemological origins, production/circulation, and deployments of Islamophobia; (2) to create pedagogical interventions that we can share across our classrooms and campuses; and (3) to organize scholarly events to disseminate and engage our collaborative work with others in our campus communities.
Epistemologies of Islamophobia
Our objective is to move the discussion from the narrow emotive dimension where phobic reactions are elicited, to resituating Islamophobia within the social, economic, and political contexts that produce and sustain it. Definitions of Islamophobia range from seeing it as it first appeared in the 1997 Runnymede Trust Report as an “unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims,” 7 to understanding how epistemic racism emerging from colonialist discourses of othering in the fifteenth century inform Islamophobic discourses. 8 Bridging the view that illustrates the emotional reactions elicited by Islamophobia and the racial dynamics informing its practice, the University of California, Berkeley Center for Race and Gender articulates a contextual understanding of Islamophobia that takes into account current geopolitical shifts:
Islamophobia is a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure. It is directed at a perceived or real Muslim threat through the maintenance and extension of existing disparities in economic, political, social and cultural relations, while rationalizing the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve “civilizational rehab” of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise). Islamophobia reintroduces and reaffirms a global racial structure through which resource distribution disparities are maintained and extended.
The Islamophobia Industrial Complex
By linking the emotive to the historical, social, and political contexts producing Islamophobia, this attempt to generate a more robust definition of Islamophobia is a good place to start understanding the phenomenon within the very discursive and material conditions that produce it. We seek to strengthen such efforts by bringing an intersectional and transnational feminist lens to examinations of the ways in which Islamophobia constructs racialized, gendered, and sexual Others. Since the election of President Trump and the subsequent emboldening of white nationalist politics, Islamophobic discourse has become increasingly consumable among certain communities, and we are interested in the ways in which these communities become vulnerable to the rhetoric of Islamophobia. In a roundtable discussion at the 2016 National Women’s Studies Association conference, a member of our collective, Catherine Sameh, urged us to push deeper on these questions: Why is it that this particular form of racism and xenophobia becomes so powerful? Why is the binary of the so-called progressive Western, queer, feminist world versus the “backwards” anti-queer, anti-feminist Muslim world so resonant with some? What about populations that are anti-feminist and anti-queer in their own communities, and yet are vulnerable to this understanding of Muslim populations? What becomes projected onto Muslim bodies? What real, genuine, legitimate anxieties do people have, that then get displaced onto the Muslim body? To what extent does the precarity of many, not just white, but working-class lives become such fertile ground for the racism and fear-mongering that we are seeing? To answer these questions, we believe we must start with intersectional and transnational approaches that seek to provide an economic analysis that is deeply feminist and anti-racist.
Our point of departure, therefore, is thinking about Islamophobia not simply as an emotional reaction, or a fear towards Muslims. While the roots of Islamophobia are historical – resting on the colonial racialization of Muslims, Islamophobia in today’s neoliberal world operates by building on factors that are both historical and affective. What distinguishes contemporary processes of othering and racial discrimination is their mode of operation. In our view, Islamophobia operates as an industry. Like any industry, Islamophobia draws on a consuming public, as well as a consumer product.
A recent study revealed that approximately $206 million were placed at the disposal of seventy-eight organizations in the United States. The job of thirty-three of those organizations “is to promote prejudice against, or hatred of, Islam and Muslims.” 9 Findings from the Brookings Institute corroborated these facts, showing how anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States is funded by conservative organizations. Each of these foundations invest in normalizing familiar anti-Muslim tropes by creating blogs, interviews, talking points, articles, and newspaper coverage. When a Muslim perpetrator commits an act of terrorism, the blame falls on the global community of two billion Muslims. Therefore, this rhetoric, these constructed knowledges about Muslims, are manufactured, managed, and marketed through the industry of Islamophobia.
As a political economy that builds on historical structures of colonialism and Orientalism, Islamophobia pivots around issues of gender and misogyny. A central organizing principle of social structures, gender is the essential building block of societies. It is therefore unsurprising that gender is historically constituted as an underlying identifier of discourses that construct “the Muslim.” Islamophobia is produced around an ideology that portrays Muslim men as misogynists, sexually repressed, and/or sexually powerful. As Leila Ahmed argued, the discourse of the veil in nineteenth century Egypt emerged when anti-suffrage British colonialists justified Britain’s economic and cultural occupation of Egypt through notions of “saving” Muslim women. 10 In response, nationalist Egyptian men centered women as bearers of authentic “Muslim culture” in their anti-colonial struggles.
In contemporary gendered discourse, postcolonial constructs of difference are still extended to notions of Muslims as intolerant of LGBTQ populations rendering them incompatible with liberal western norms and culture. Jasbir Puar uses the concept of “homonationalism” to describe the deployment of homosexuality in the service of empire, pointing specifically to the way that tolerance of the sexual other is used as a measure of progressive liberal politics. 11 That roughly half of western individuals or populations around the world are opposed to gay marriage does not figure in these reifications since the west is homogenized as progressive and tolerant. It is, thus, imperative for feminist scholars to stay attuned to the erasures enacted within anti-Islamophobia scholarship and activism and to the differential experience of Islamophobia on gendered, classed, and raced bodies, locally and globally.
Feminist Approaches to anti-Islamophobic Pedagogy
What kinds of choices do we make about what to teach and how do we make these difficult decisions? For anyone who teaches about gender and Islam – a field fraught with cultural and political minefields – it is a challenging undertaking to meet our curricular goals in ten or sixteen weeks. The responsibility we feel in the feminist classroom is quite great, and we are certainly committed to give our students the resources they need to critically engage their friends and families around the complex epistemologies and politics of Islamophobia.
To articulate a feminist approach to the study of Islam and Muslims as a pedagogy that takes account of the complexity of Islamophobia as a lived experience, as well as a race episteme, we ask a number of key questions: When things are shifting so quickly, how can we as educators be really intersectional and transnational in our analyses? How can we teach about where the colonialist discourse of the veil comes from? How do we actually talk about early periods in Islam and women’s involvement without painting an overly romantic picture of Islam’s founding period? How do we talk about heteropatriarchy within Muslim contexts without feeding into Orientalist or apologist discourses? How do we validate students of Muslim heritage whose experiences of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism compel them to reassert claims of authentic Islam and Muslim identity while steering the course of feminist politics?
Unfortunately, we have to make difficult choices, for example, we might choose to momentarily suspend feminist politics in order to highlight the oppression and stigmatization of Muslims without airing the “dirty laundry” of heteropatriarchy within Muslim communities. At other times we could be compelled to talk about the actual oppression of women within Muslim cultures, trying to make those links to other local patriarchies, but risking reifying the notion of Muslim men as essentially patriarchal and violent. It is both difficult and urgent to cover all these issues in a comprehensive and comparative manner in a short amount of time. These challenges can sometimes fill us with anxiety, guilt, and even despair.
The Politics of Intimacy and Everyday Life
Sameh shared how she tries to focus some of her lectures and lesson plans on changing structures of family, kinship, and intimacy within Muslim contexts as an important point of departure from, for instance, the over determination of the veil. She finds it exciting to discuss the new literature dealing with emergent masculinities, and the changing roles within family structures in diverse Muslim communities. To shift from reductive notions of Muslims as unchanging and frozen in time, she draws on teaching materials to highlight contestations within the family, and shifting understandings and practices of kinship, intimacy, and sexuality over time and space within Muslim communities. This is not a comprehensive approach, but part of a larger strategy that seeks to humanize Muslims as people who negotiate daily life in similar ways to others around the world who are dealing with divisions of household labor, shifting patterns of intimacy, sexuality, marriage, children, and divorce. Teaching students that like everywhere, people are having conversations within their societies, including struggles around gender roles, and situating these shifts within changing economies, helps students see the complexities and nuances of Muslims’ everyday lives. This approach helps students see that Muslims themselves are complex social actors who express different conceptions of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, and negotiate the relationship of their individual desires and aspirations to community practices and expectations. Sameh finds showing documentary films to be effective because students have often only seen Muslims on the screen as Orientalist tropes. Moreover, many have never been to a Muslim majority country. Trying to get at the kind of deep and rich humanity of everyday Muslims through the scholarship and visuality around intimacy and gender is one approach educators might experiment with.
Teaching Against an Industry: Humanizing the “Living Dead”
For Hafez, educators must bear in mind that teaching about Islam today is teaching against the necropolitics of power. 12 Mbembe’s analysis of sovereignty as an expression of the ultimate power to determine life or death for entire populations of the world, deeming those unfit to be human as “the living dead,” must be brought to bear on analysis of Islamophobia. Teaching about people who have been so dehumanized, to the point where they are considered to be unfit to live and are reduced to bare life in camps or destroyed metropolises (e.g., Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen), is a serious undertaking. Such bodies have to be considered carefully and unpacked consistently in the classroom by pointing to the systemic ways that underpin the processes of dehumanization. Not only is it crucial to treat Islamophobia as an industry, but it is just as important to begin to view it as an episteme, because it is systematic in its classification of human life. It is important to be aware that many students come to the class having already naturalized these elements of necropower. If sovereignty itself is constituted through these parameters of who lives and who dies, as Mbembe points out, and if Muslim bodies are deemed to be “the living dead,” then when students come to the class, we need to be aware that they have internalized these issues as subjects of that kind of sovereignty.
Some students may come to class with a few or all of these sorts of assumptions: that Islam is anti-modern and irrational; that Muslims are violent extremists; that Islam is misogynist; and that terrorism springs from a vein of fanaticism in Islamic teaching. How do we begin to tackle and dispel such deeply inculcated ideas?
To counter dehistoricization, course material should draw on history – in particular the history of colonialism and Orientalism. The construction and institutionalization of Muslim othering, as explicated by Edward Said, for example – is a good place to start. 13 Contextualization is another important approach, for example the genealogical approach of viewing Islam as a discursive tradition, as in the work of Talal Asad. 14 Hafez also suggests foregrounding history and context by drawing on women’s experiences from various Muslim majority societies at different periods and during important turning points in history. The work of Marnia Lazreg on Algeria is important because it historicizes the struggle of women in North Africa against French colonialism and problematizes the question of womanhood and silence. 15 Course material could include classic theoretical and ethnographic work as well, such as Lila Abu-Lughod’s ethnographies of gender in Bedouin societies, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society and Writing Women’s World’s: Bedouin Stories. 16 Both books have made inroads in the field by challenging normative ways of writing about culture, sentiment, Arab women, and in particular Bedouin women. Two critical points of departure may be helpful as well: making the point that Islam is not a homogenous, anachronistic neatly categorized religion as understood in western liberal traditions, and questioning secular education’s universalist approach to comprehending the world.
Teaching about Human Rights and the Politics of Empire
Like mainstream feminism, Islamophobia also mobilizes “common sense liberal conceptions” that posit the West as the free world and Muslims as their unfree others. Untangling the imbrications between feminism and Islamophobia in the undergraduate classroom remains a challenging but productive pedagogical task. For Shaikh, one anti-Islamophobia feminist pedagogical strategy is to hold up to scrutiny the sedimented vocabularies of gender and human rights in Muslim communities. This requires a careful unpacking of histories that have led to contemporary moments of spectacular violence against Muslim women. In teaching about Pakistan, Shaikh spends at least a week historicizing the geopolitical investment in cultivating a weaponized jihadi population through the late 1970s and 1980s. She locates the figure of the militarized Islamist in its material histories of capitalist and imperial expansionism and its strategic enlistment of military dictators like Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who institutionalized a misogynistic interpretation of Islam through enshrining it in the law, public culture, and curricula of madrassas. Shaikh finds it useful to bring in the contemporary case study of Malala Yousefzai, the activist for girl’s education who was shot in the face by the Taliban for refusing to give up her right to an education. Malala’s story offers an opening to complicate the story of human rights vis-à-vis Islamist violence in Pakistan. Shaikh’s engaged feminist pedagogy centers the following questions: Where does the story of Malala begin? How does it circulate across feminist and non-feminist circuits transnationally – for example, NGOs, UN developmentalist projects, children’s books, popular magazine, TED talks, etc.? What versions of feminism are appropriated, upheld, and visible in stories of human rights? Because of its international circulation, Malala’s story is familiar to most students in the US college classroom. She embodies a feminist courage to fight for what she believes should be her right as a girl, the basic right to an education. Students already know her as an admirable feminist icon who is upheld as a force of feminist hope amidst the most heinous crimes (kidnappings, sexual violence, selling of girls, forced marriages, etc.) being committed by Islamist groups – a familiarity that allows us to engage in a deeper feminist analysis together. But when narrated primarily as being about individual feminist agency, Malala’s story remains trapped in neo-liberal discourses that exceptionalize the individual’s will to persist and minimize the social and historic factors that create the conditions of individual struggle, speech, and agency.
In the classroom Shaikh fleshes out Malala’s story and situates her courageous actions within a longer history of Islamization in Pakistan. Filling in the history of the Taliban’s creation as a counter force to communist expansion helps students learn about the Islamist group responsible for heinous acts of violence and complicates an otherwise simplified story of liberal feminist empowerment that carries so much appeal. Contextualizing both Malala’s story and the story of her male oppressors (the Taliban) as such reveals the ways that the United States transacts in both gender oppression and gender liberation – depending on the demands of the time. The point here is not to re-center empire in every story, or to de-center the courage of the young woman’s remarkable persistence, but to demonstrate the limitations of liberal imaginations bent on finding individual heroines in historical vacuums. Going behind the individual empowerment story reveals the geo-political investments in the cultivation of misogyny. It locates misogynistic discourses about girls’ education in Islam as an appropriation in the service of nationalist projects rather than as deriving from Islam itself. It allows students to see the incoherence of the United States’ self-portrayal as an international leader of human rights.
These and other pedagogical strategies allow Shaikh to demonstrate the interplay between imperial violence and Islamist violence while complicating feminist frameworks underlying human rights discourses. In the end, the teaching goes beyond imparting knowledge about the history of gender, nation building, and Islam in Pakistan, and enacts a simultaneous deepening of the feminist lenses through which gender studies students understand and engage the world.
Teaching in Troubled Times: Gender, Islams, and Feminist Politics
Basarudin’s students are mostly first-generation college students from immigrant backgrounds. The following are examples of what students have gleaned about Islam and Muslims from the media: “Islam is a cult,” “Prophet Muhammad is a pedophile,” “Muslim women wear a veil,” “Sharia’ law is taking over America,” and so forth. As a feminist scholar of Malaysian Muslim heritage, Basarudin is hyper vigilant about the challenges faced by “native” scholars working with the communities they are embedded in and, to a certain extent, draw sustenance from, struggle with, and pledge political allegiance to. How does a feminist educator negotiate knowledge production that is not limited to teaching transnational intersectionality, but also address the competing meanings of embodying these commitments in the classroom? How does one practice feminist politics and refrain from self-erasure, as well as inculcate the diversity of Islamic interpretations and Muslim practices within the rapidly shifting global context in ten weeks of teaching? As a part of her feminist pedagogy, Basarudin deconstructs heteronormative and heteropatriarchal perceptions about Islam and Muslims by drawing on her experiences of growing up in an urban Malay Muslim family in Malaysia, becoming an immigrant woman of color in the United States, and researching feminist activism in Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Such intimate positioning encourages students to understand how gender, religion, and culture intersect differently in specific geopolitical contexts and to think critically about the necessity of circumventing the theorizing of Islam as an ahistorical or predetermined factor in politics and culture.
Basarudin utilizes various interdisciplinary foundational readings to center the historical development of Islam, transnational feminist and postcolonial frameworks, and imperial wars the United States has waged. 17 Basarudin also brings to the fore the representational politics of Muslim women and its relationship to the white savior industrial complex by demonstrating the link between imperialist feminist projects and violences that are embedded in humanitarian endeavors. The challenges of teaching gender and sexuality in Islam also encompass balancing competing perspectives of students of Muslim heritage, who, amidst the rising climate of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism, feel a heightened need to assert monolithic interpretations of Islam and engage in apologist discourse. The diversity of textual interpretations and Muslim practices, as well as Muslim feminist activism (that are pushing back against misogyny and heteropatriarchy), unsettle these students who wish to present a unified narrative of victimhood and who are also grappling with their own positioning and identity politics within and beyond the classroom. They resist the de-centering of monolithic Islam through a feminist analytical framework, which makes the classroom a messy, yet generative space in which to complicate the debates on gender and sexuality in Islam. These factors and more, provide students will the capacity to understand that the study of gender and sexuality in Islam is deeply complicated and multilayered, and that attempts to simplify it will often lead to foreclosing dialogues and debates.
Feminism and Islamophobia: Travels and Translatability
In this section we examine the fluidity of the concept of Islamophobia, that is, the ease by which it is appropriated to bolster various forms of power in different geographical and cultural contexts. Basarudin and Shaikh’s ethnographic research in Southern California tracked the debates and dynamics surrounding the national Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program, a counterterrorism initiative that emphasized partnerships between Muslim communities, local law enforcement, and federal agencies in order to strengthen surveillance of activities that could lead to potential acts of terrorism. Basarudin and Shaikh’s analysis grapples with the problematic appropriations of liberal feminist discourse in the service of state surveillance and empire. Given that prominent voices in communities of Muslims often remain male, and/or male-centric, and largely anti-feminist, they are conscious that partnering with state agencies gives women visibility (through funding, public platforms, appointment to leadership positions, etc.) and allows them to intervene in mainstream narratives of their oppression. At the same time, CVE draws on gendered and racialized profiling of Muslim males as the hyper-visible terrorist archetype, and mines internal dynamics of patriarchy to deepen the state’s policing powers.
Anti-Islamophobia activist-intellectuals within the Muslim community see CVE as problematic in that it casts all Muslims as potential terrorists, deepening existing stereotypes and suspicions of them, even as statistics show that it is white supremacist and right-wing organizations who have perpetrated far more acts of terrorism on US soil. 18 In their opposition of CVE these intellectual-activists posit “American Muslims” as a cohesive group that is under attack – a strategic deployment of a racialized identitarian politics to serve a political and analytical purpose. But like any identitarian movement that is not consciously attuned to the difference that constitutes it, such impulses are unable to grapple meaningfully with how internal hierarchies (of gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, etc.) exert pressure onto the category of Muslimness from within. The point is not to dismantle a nascent analytic (Islamophobia) that creates space for the study of systematic discrimination against Muslims, but to avoid its reification by simultaneously considering what its deployment enables and what it inhibits. Indeed, CVE initiatives do create opportunities for select Muslim women to step into prominent speaking and positions, and yet the contours of this speech are already constrained by and mired in state surveillance agendas that criminalize the Muslim community as a whole.
The difficulties of categorical reification manifest in local and global conferences on Islamophobia as well. Often at Islamophobia conferences within the United States, Basarudin and Shaikh’s presentation is the only presentation grounded in a transnational feminist framework of analysis. Conversations within these progressive spaces center the collective vilification of Muslims with more specific panels on the differential impacts of Islamophobia on differently racialized bodies, or visibly gendered Muslim bodies. One must also consider the limitations of how an anti-Islamophobia paradigm and its vocabularies travel and translate or mistranslate transnationally and, at times, align in unexpected ways with different forms of power. In 2016 at an international conference in the Gulf on Islamophobia, Basarudin became profoundly aware of the limitations of the US-based conceptualization of Islamophobia (particularly as anti-Muslim racism). Organized by a research institute that brought together researchers and policymakers working on issues of Islamophobia, Basarudin found herself amidst presenters whose framing of Islamophobia was deeply reductive and problematic. Most speakers remained steeped in ahistorical and universalizing state sponsored narratives of Muslim victimhood that foreclosed any discussions of: political repression and state terrorism of dissenting groups or individuals in many Muslim majority countries; blasphemy laws that target minorities in Muslim majority countries; authoritarian gender regimes and state feminisms; state funding and sponsorship of Islamist movements; and elevation of religious bureaucracy to manufacture consent of state-sponsored Islam. Devoid of gendered and racialized transnational analyses, as well as the critical social, economic, and political contexts, the state sponsored framework reifies the notion of monolithic Islam and Muslim practices, which stunts critical discourse of anti-Muslim racism and heteropatriarchy in all its manifestations.
Such a reductive framing yields expected outcomes in which Islamophobia remains entirely an exterior problem, an assault on the cohesive Muslim ummah (community) by forces that seeking to fragment it, internal heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity are merely concerns of “Westernized” Muslims, and the racially, ethnically, and culturally dynamic communities of Muslims are united in their practices of faith without various internal issues such as racism and colorism. This international conference on Islamophobia was rife with irony. It was sponsored by a wealthy Gulf state – where exploitation, abuse, and violence against migrant Muslim workers, as well as racism are rampant – to provide a platform to discuss the global vilification of Muslims while refusing to engage critique around racism, gender, and sexuality in labor debates in the Gulf states. The ironies of this conference are evidence of why it is imperative that we remain attentive to the reification and appropriation of the framework of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism and how, at times, these are co-opted by Muslim majority nations to bolster and elide the forms of power that they yield.
Hafez’s research suggests that Islamophobia thrives in Muslim majority countries as well – albeit in different ways – often taking the form of stereotyping Muslims, political Islam, Muslim terrorism, or Islamic terrorism. Ironically, governments in Muslim majority countries often appropriate Western rhetoric regarding Muslim extremism, redeploying it into their own political rhetoric as a means of hegemonizing the public sphere and manufacturing the consent of the general populations. For example, Egypt is considered to be the center of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is often regarded as the original source of Islamist organizing. Egypt’s popular revolution of 2011 brought about a series of events that came to a head when the military regime took control of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government. The military unleashed a deadly attack on a camp of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and eight hundred people were killed. 19 Despite the horrific circumstances of these deaths, victims of the Rab3a massacre – including women and children – were soon dismissed by the official media as deserving of their end. 20 As these official accounts increasingly criminalized the Muslim Brotherhood supporters, framing them as extremist and terrorist, the Egyptian public echoed official accounts, “Good, we’re glad they’re gone. They were armed, they were militarized, they were planning to take over the government. We’re glad they’re gone. Now, that will teach them a lesson….” 21 These sentiments are not restricted to Egypt, leaders of other Muslim majority countries have often claimed that they have been fighting terrorism longer than the West has. When the terrorist attack of 9/11took place in the United States, President Mubarak reiterated that he and his government had been fighting terrorism for the longest time. Similar claims become a rationale for the militarization of many of these countries. It is salient to consider the transnational dimension of Islamophobia and how it travels across national boundaries – often creating overlapping systems of oppression that rely not on racism, but on religious persecution and class wars.
On the other hand, it was troubling to see the kind of anti-Islamophobic stance that Hillary Clinton, seemed to assume when she was believed to be the next President elect. At the time of our initial gathering in 2016, Clinton’s anti-Islamophobia was completely divorced from her militarized version of security, which continued to perpetuate hawkish policies abroad, for instance, supporting drone strikes in Pakistan, and her insistence that “good Muslims” should call out “bad Muslims.” Sameh points to the narrowness of American electoral politics and the idea that somehow one can be against Islamophobia and yet not have a critique of an increasingly militarized world that is producing the very conditions in which Islamophobia proliferates – a politics very much in line with the Democratic Party platform. Unsettling but not surprising are the ways in which a politics around anti-racism and anti-Islamophobia work simultaneously with a militarized political and economic strategy that exacerbates the suffering of millions of Muslims around the world. How do we draw out these connections, while also recognizing the important differences between the Trump administration and the Democratic administrations that preceded and will follow him? How do we create a robust critique of Islamophobia that synthesizes an anti-racist, anti-Islamophobic politics with an analysis of global political economy?
Conclusion
The questions raised in this collaborative article center around the issue of Islamophobia as an affective and historically-rooted discourse that constructs a systematic and sustainable industry reproducing its sentiments, practices, and policies. Our feminist collective created an academic and intellectual space to think through the processes that both shape and are shaped by Islamophobia in society. Through intersectional and transnational feminist analysis, our critiques of Islamophobia aimed at spotlighting the contextual factors behind the framing of Muslims as targets whether these are social, political, and/or economic. Analyzing the gendered practices of Islamophobia clarified for us not only how this discourse appeals to certain segments of the population, but how it is used to justify hyper-nationalisms, international policies, and global militarization. Seeing gender as a rationale for war on Muslim majority countries, as a system for creating difference and binaries between an “us” and a “them,” as well as a ruler for measuring civilizational progress – gender clearly rests at the heart of discourses of Islamophobia and racialization of Muslims.
From there, our analysis tackled the challenging undertaking of addressing Islamophobia as an episteme from a critical feminist perspective in our classes. Our working group shared various strategies and pedagogical approaches that aim to make this task less daunting – given the logistical challenges of teaching vast and complex subjects to students who come to us with little or vague background information. The strategies we shared – drawing on critical thinking tools such as historicizing, de-essentializing, and contextualizing; situating some of the topics broached within familiar frameworks such as kinship and family; and situating ourselves as educators who have ethnic and/or religious links to Muslim communities – are actual pedagogical practices that we have tried and tested in our own lectures and classroom settings.
As feminist scholars, researchers, educators, and activists, our research findings challenge hegemonic representations of Islam and Muslims as monolithic. Both local and global discourses on Islam and Islamism seem to converge often on the articulation of Islam and Muslims as monolithic, although with obvious nuances and ideologies that differ pertinent to their contexts and histories. Whereas Islamophobia is often tied to colonialist racializations of Muslims as others, in Muslim majority countries Islamophobia is more directly tied to systems of government and militarization – links also shared in Western contexts. Within Muslim communities critical of Islamophobia however, some of our research findings pointed to the insistence of these local communities on identifying with conceptions of an essential authentic Islam vis-á-vis stereotypes of violence or terror – a trend which complicates analysis and has little positive impact in the long term for these communities.
Works Cited
Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” American Anthropologist 104 (3) (2002): 783–90.
———. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993/2008.
———. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986/2000.
Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Aziz, Sahar, “Lone Wolf Terrorism and Anti-Minority Legislation, “The Islamic Monthly, March 2, 2015. http://www.theislamicmonthly.com/lone-wolf-terrorism-and-anti-minority-legislation/.
Basarudin, Azza and Khanum Shaikh. “The Contours of Speaking Out: Gender, State Security, and Muslim Women’s Empowerment.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 19 (1) 2020: 107–135.
Barlas, Asma. Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.
Basarudin, Azza. Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.
Conway, Gordon. Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All – Report of the Runnymede Trust Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. London Runnymede Trust, 1997.
Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley. “Confronting Fear: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States.” 2016. http://www.islamophobia.org/images/Confronting-Fear-Islamophobia-and-its-Impact-in-the-U.S.-2013-2015.pdf.
Elmasry, Mohamad. 2015. “The Raba3a Massacre and Egyptian Propaganda.” Middle East Eye. August 14, 2015. Last accessed November 12, 2020. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/rabaa-massacre-and-egyptian-propaganda.
Grosfoguel, Ramon. “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences,” Human Architecture: Journal of Sociology of Self-Knowledge VIII (2010): 29–38.
Hafez, Sherine. An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
———. Women of the Midan: The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.
Human Rights Watch. “All According to Plan: The Rab’a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt.” August 12, 2014.
Lazreg, Marnia. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. New York: Perseus Books, 1991.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. vol. 28, no. 2 (2002).
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Sameh, Catherine. Axis of Hope: Iranian Women’s Rights Activism across Borders. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019.
———. “From Tehran to Los Angeles to Tehran: Transnational Solidarity Politics in the One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law.” Women’s Studies Quarterly Special Issue on Solidarity, 42.3–4 (2014): 162–184.
Shaikh, Khanum. “Gender, Religious Agency, and the Subject of Al-Huda International.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and 11, #2 (2013): 62–86.
University of California, Berkeley, Center for Race and Gender. “Defining Islamophobia.” Last accessed August 15, 2017. http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/defining-islamophobia.
Wadud, Amina. Qurʼan and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. New York: Oxford University, 1999.
- There are debates about the term “Islamophobia” and whether it is more accurate to replace it with “anti-Muslim racism,” the latter being more accurate in reflecting the intersectionality, structural inequality, and violence which have characterized these negative dispositions towards Muslims in the United States. We view Islamophobia as an interconnected transnational phenomenon and opted for Islamophobia as an umbrella term.[↑]
- A former member of our collective is anthropologist Sondra Hale.[↑]
- This was the shooting carried out by a Pakistani Muslim couple. For more about this incident, see: “Full Coverage: San Bernardino terror attack,” The Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-san-bernardino-shooting-sg-20151202-storygallery.html.[↑]
- Sherine Hafez, An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism In Women’s Islamic Movements (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Sherine Hafez, Women of the Midan: The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019); Khanum Shaikh, “Gender, Religious Agency, and the Subject of Al-Huda International,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and 11, no. 2 (April 2013): 62–86.[↑]
- Catherine Sameh, “From Tehran to Los Angeles to Tehran: Transnational Solidarity Politics in the One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law,” Women’s Studies Quarterly Special Issue on Solidarity, 42.3–4 (2014): 162–184; Catherine, Sameh, Axis of Hope: Iranian Women’s Rights Activism across Borders (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019); Azza Basarudin, Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2016).[↑]
- Azza Basarudin, and Khanum Shaikh, “The Contours of Speaking Out: Gender, State Security, and Muslim Women’s Empowerment,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 19 (1) 2020: 107–135.[↑]
- Gordon Conway, Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All – Report of the Runnymede Trust Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia (London Runnymede Trust, 1997).[↑]
- Ramon Grosfoguel, “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences,” Human Architecture: Journal of Sociology of Self-Knowledge VIII (2010): 29–38.[↑]
- Conducted by Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley’s Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project in 2016. Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, “Confronting Fear: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States,” 2016, http://www.islamophobia.org/images/Confronting-Fear-Islamophobia-and-its-Impact-in-the-U.S.-2013-2015.pdf; University of California, Berkeley, Center for Race and Gender, “Defining Islamophobia,” last accessed August 15, 2017, http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/defining-islamophobia.[↑]
- Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).[↑]
- Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).[↑]
- Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, Winter 15(1) (2003): 11–40. [↑]
- Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).[↑]
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).[↑]
- Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question(New York& London: Routledge, 1994).[↑]
- Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (California: University of California Press, 1986/2000); and Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (California: University of California Press, 1993/2008).[↑]
- For example, Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); Asma Barlas, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (New York: Perseus Books, 1991); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. vol. 28, no. 2 (2002); Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” American Anthropologist 104 (3) (2002): 783–90; Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Said, Orientalism; Amina Wadud, Qurʼan and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).[↑]
- Sahar Aziz, “Lone Wolf Terrorism and Anti-Minority Legislation,” The Islamic Monthly, March 2, 2015.[↑]
- Human Rights Watch, “All According to Plan: The Rab’a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt,” August 12, 2014.[↑]
- Mohamad Elmasry,” The Raba3a Massacre and Egyptian Propaganda,” Middle East Eye, August 14, 2015, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/rabaa-massacre-and-egyptian-propaganda.[↑]
- Hafez, personal interview, April 2014.[↑]
