Dark-Skinned, Bearded Terrorists, and the “Queery-ing” of “Muslim Masculinities”
Several interlocutors reported incidents in which beards, coupled with dark skin and in some cases a particular form of religious dress, emerged as signifiers of “Islamic fundamentalism” or “terrorism.” Salah Masri, director of one of the largest mosques in San Francisco, explained:
I know this man who is a peaceful Tunisian Muslim that dresses in white robe with a long beard. He is extremely quiet and polite. He is a good engineer. He is an Internet web designer. After September 11, we didn’t see him at the masjid for a long time. When we asked about him, it turned out he didn’t feel comfortable changing his clothes or shaving his beard so he decided to stay home. Some people didn’t want to look Muslim. I know people who dyed their hair blond. One of them was a Turkish guy who dyed his hair blond because he thought he looked Arab or Middle Eastern. We had many cases of people shaving their beards or people who stopped attending the mosque. But why dye your hair?! He still looked Middle Eastern with it!
That Salah conflates “looking Muslim” with “looking Arab or Middle Eastern” epitomizes a consensus among many of my interlocutors that dominant U.S. discourses do not distinguish between “Arabs,” “Middle Easterners,” or “Muslims” and construct an image of an “Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim look.” Persons who closely resembled the corporate media’s “Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim look” were particularly vulnerable to federal government policies and harassment on the streets. One immigrant-rights lawyer explained that the federal government went after “the CNN version of what a terrorist looks like. He was dark, Middle Eastern, and had a full beard. He was the typical terrorist looking guy—or at least the guy who CNN portrays as the terrorist. Timothy McVeigh is a terrorist, but he is not associated with terrorism because he does not look like the typical terrorist-looking guy.” My research indicated that men who had beards, coupled with dark skin, were among those most severely concerned for their safety—particularly if they wore religious forms of dress perceived to be associated with Islam. That non-Muslim South Asian men such as Sikhs who wear turbans were repeatedly misidentified as Muslims (and in some cases killed) points to the ways in which a range of signifiers can stand in as symbols of an “Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim look.” Cases such as these reify dominant U.S. distinctions between those who are with us and those who are with the terrorists by rendering particular kinds of bodies not only as unassimilable or “fundamentally foreign and antipathetic to modern American society and cultures,” but also as threatening to national security and therefore legitimate targets of violence and harassment.1 Moreover, cases in which men considered shaving their beards or avoiding attendance at their mosque illustrate that while dominant discourses on “potential terrorists” often pulled particular bodies into association with a violent “crazy” Muslim masculinity, they simultaneously produced an internment of the psyche that they themselves come to resist, transform, or reproduce.
On the streets, perpetrators of incidents of harassment often deployed sexualized tropes in targeting men whose appearances “fit” the “terrorist profile,” reifying what Eman Desouky refers to as the “queery-ing” of Arab-Muslim subjectivities.2 Dominant U.S. discourses have often depicted the United States as feminist and gay-safe through comparisons between U.S. and Afghan views on gender and sexuality. Yet, as Puar and Rai explain, “the U.S. state, having experienced a castration and penetration of its capitalist masculinity, offers up narratives of emasculation as appropriate punishment for bin Laden, brown-skinned folks, and men in turbans.” In other words, a highly patriarchal and homophobic discourse has been central to the racialization of persons associated with “Islamic fundamentalism” and justifications for violence against them. Throughout San Francisco, hegemonic conflations between queerness, sexual deviancy, and the monstrous figure of “the terrorist” underpinned the subjection of particular masculinities to physical or epistemic violence because they “appeared” to be Muslim.3 Consider the following community activist’s narrative:
A guy from Afghanistan called into the hate-crime hotline. He had gone to help his friend whose car had broken down when he was doing some off-roading a couple of miles away from his house—which is also near a military base in Dublin. By the time his friend got out there to help him, there were two tow trucks out there. The tow truck drivers called the police because the men had beards so the drivers thought they were terrorists. They were near a reservoir and the tow truck drivers were saying things like, “Oh, okay … they’re tapping the water.” So they took them to the military base to interrogate them. Fifteen to twenty cops came. They all thought they were trying to contaminate the water. One of the guys had prayer beads with him and officers said quotes like, “your faggot beads. We’re going to f— you up; we’re going to [give you oral sex].” The officers were intimidating them.
In this narrative, the tow-truck drivers transform the Afghan men into terrorists vis-à-vis assumptions that conflate “the beard” with “Muslim masculinity” and “terrorism.” Inscribing hegemonic discourses that “they” are trying to kill/penetrate “us” on the Afghan men’s bodies, the tow-truck drivers transform them into terrorist threats/enemies within. Here, patriarchal, homophobic discourses of emasculation mark Islam—represented by the prayer beads—as “faggot,” or not quite the right/straight kind of masculinity. The police officers’ speech implicitly positions heterosexuality on the side of good and queerness on the side of evil. Moreover, as the police punish Muslim masculinities (read terrorists) with the threat of sodomy, a logic of militarized patriotism intensifies the normativity of heterosexuality. In this incident, as in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, homophobia and racism intersect in the conceptualization that sexual degradation and the transformation of Muslim masculinities into “faggots” is an appropriate form of punishment.
Underlying this conceptualization is the heteronormative conflation of shame, humiliation, and homosexuality. Trishala Deb’s response to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal offers an important critique of this conflation. She argues that we need to ask ourselves what this latest chapter (Abu Ghraib) teaches us about the inevitable homophobia and racism in military culture as well as cultures of militarization.4) She adds “that there are more than two genders and the subjugation of people who are any of those genders is not closer to femininity [or emasculization] but to dehumanization.”5
- Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [↩]
- Desouky, Eman. 2000. Re-que(e)rying the Queer: Imagining Queer Arab Women Through the Politics of Marginality and the Nation. [↩]
- Puar, Jasbir K. and Amit Rai. 2002. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20 (3): 126. [↩]
- Deb and Mustis, 2004, 7. Deb, Trishala and Rafael Mutis. 2004. “Smoke and Mirrors: Abu Ghraib and the Myth of Liberation.” Colorlife! Magazine, Summer 2004. (February 6, 2006 [↩]
- Deb and Mustis, Ibid, 6. [↩]
