Names and Naming: “Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!”
Repeatedly throughout my research, interlocutors’ narratives on harassment in the public sphere included stories in which particular names operated as signifiers of an “Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim” identity. Teachers and youth group leaders agreed that boys with names such as Mohammed or Osama were disproportionately harassed at school. Consider the following stories: Nayla, a Muslim American youth group leader, recalled an incident where school kids would frequently shout, “Look, Mohammed the terrorist is coming!” when a young boy named Mohammed would enter the playground. Amira, a college student, recalled reading the words, “I hate Mohammed. All Mohammeds should die,” on a wall outside the Recreation and Sports Facilities Building at the University of California, Berkeley. Reflecting on difficulties that he and his wife faced in deciding whether or not to name their son Mohammed, Saleh, a small business owner, explained: “After September 11 no one would have thought about naming their son Mohammed in this country if they wanted him to be treated like a normal person. We thought about what would happen to our son in school, and how he would be discriminated against growing up. But we felt that this is our religion and our culture, and long before September 11 we decided that if we had a second son, we would name him Mohammed. We decided not to change what we stood for, but imagine what happens when your neighbor says, ‘what is that cute little boy’s name?’ You say ‘Mohammed’ and they say, ‘Oh…’ This is how September 11 impacted even the relationship between you and your neighbor.”
Several Christian Arabs with whom I interacted were similarly targeted based on associations between their name and the notion of a “potential enemy of the nation.” In such cases, Christians were perceived to be Muslim because they had Arabic names, illustrating the ways that federal government and corporate media discourses’ conflation of the categories “Arab” and “Muslim” took on local form in the public sphere. A youth group leader at a Roman Catholic Arab American church reported that after their son Osama was repeatedly called “Muslim terrorist,” his parents changed his name to “Sam.” Recurring throughout the period of my research were similar stories of individuals who changed their Arabic names to anglicized names, including an Arab American Christian who changed his name from Fouad to Freddy after facing 9/11-related harassment. Misidentifications of Arab Christians as Muslims reify the absurd generalizations and misconceptions underlying hegemonic constructions of the category “Arab” or “Muslim.” They also reify that encounters with racism are informed by fiction and comprise a wide variety of complexities and contradictions. As Amitava Kumar put it, “In those dark chambers, what is revealed always hides something else” 1. In the cases of misidentified Arab Christians, the simple reality that not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Arabs was hidden and erased from history.
Like federal government legislation, harassment against “potential terrorist men” in the public sphere operated within the logic of nation-based racism that considers discipline and punishment the “proper mechanism to set the tide of criminality intrinsic to them” 2. Names signifying an “Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim” identity rendered particular men and boys at once foreign, or alien, to the nation, but at the same time connected, in the most familial and instinctive terms, to “the terrorists.” In this sense, nation-based racism conflates “Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim” masculinities with an inherent potential for violence and terrorism and legitimizes the discipline and punishment of “Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim” masculinities “over there” (in the countries the United States is invading) and “over here” (within the geographic borders of the U.S.). Moreover, that Saleh, in the narrative above, reconsidered whether to name his son Mohammed indicates that he came to understand that he was required to engage with the hegemonic conflation of names such as Mohammed with Muslim masculinity and terrorism. In this sense, the interpellation of subjects through hegemonic discourses produced disciplinary effects in them. While the conflation of the “Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim” and “terrorism” brought into play dualistic mechanisms of exclusion (patriot vs. enemy/with us or against us), it simultaneously induced within individuals a state of consciousness that I refer to as an “internment of the psyche”. 3 I coined the term “internment of the psyche” to refer to the ways in which engagements with gendered-racialization produced a sense of internal incarceration among my interlocutors that was emotive and manifested in the fear that at any moment, one could be harassed, beaten up, picked up, locked up, or disappeared. 4
Although gender permeated nation-based racism through the conflation of particular names with Muslim masculinity and terrorism, a mapping of nation-based racism onto cultural racism also operated to articulate “Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim” masculinity as inherently violent toward women. One cab driver told a story of his passengers’ reaction to him after they read that his name was Mohammed: “Once, a woman got in my car. She looked at me, then read my name, then asked me if I was Muslim. When I said ‘yes’ she replied, ‘how many girls have you killed today?'” In this case, a form of cultural racism that essentializes Muslimness as if the association between violence against women and Muslim masculinity is natural and insurmountable constitutes the articulation of Muslim masculinity as intrinsically connected to misogynist savagery. The woman’s reaction to the cab driver reifies what Moallem refers to as “representations of Islamic fundamentalism in the West” that are “deeply influenced by the general racialization of Muslims in a neo-racist idiom which has its roots in cultural essentialism and a conventional Eurocentric notion of people without history.” 5
Here, “religion” functions “essentially,” as “Mohammed,” like the Osama and Fouad references above, becomes monstrously subversive, a metonymic source of sedition and danger within the nation, as well as to U.S. “interests” and to “American” bodies, white and nonwhite. 6
- Amitava Kumar. 2000. Passport Photos. Berkeley: University of California Press, 74.[↑]
- Ono, Kent A. and John M. Sloop. 2002. Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 33.[↑]
- Naber, Nadine. 2006. “The Rules of Forced Engagement.” Cultural Dynamics (18)3: 235-267.[↑]
- Ibid.[↑]
- Moallem, Minoo. 2005. Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press.[↑]
- Balibar, Etienne. 1991. “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso.[↑]
