Will Muslim minorities ever by fully accepted?
By Luke Peterson
March/April 2022
In recent years, the U.S. has made great strides in recognizing systemic racism and discrimination practiced against people of color, women and other minorities. According to a statement by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which governs labor laws, hiring practices, and access to resources within the United States, federal law states that non-discriminatory practice must be extended to everyone “regardless of race, color, national origin [or] religion” in addition to several other “worthy” marginalized groups.
While several religious and marginalized groups now enjoy legal protection, a question remains: What about the practitioners of certain religions who continue to endure discrimination within various public and private institutions? Specifically, recent evidence shows that Muslims remain “otherized,” as well as discriminated against and harassed even within ostensibly liberal institutions like universities and public offices. Is it fair, then, to consider the U.S. a truly liberal democracy given the persistence of such realities? How can American institutions combat Islamophobia, or even become aware of its continued flourishing? Or has this phenomenon simply become a normalized fixture within our political, educational and cultural infrastructure? In short, is it here to stay?
If the current American political discourse is any measure to go by, the answer is, unfortunately, a resounding “Yes!” Congress now contains at least two prominent Muslim-American women who have been targeted with threats and hate speech, even within the halls of Congress itself. Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.; Palestinian) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.; Somali refugee-immigrant) both identify as Muslim and have commented upon the degree of abuse directed toward them not only from members of the public and media, but also from fellow lawmakers.
In one well-known exchange last November, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) posted a video calling Omar a member of the “jihad squad” and suggested that she would be a safe travel companion only if she were not “wearing a backpack.” The Democratic Congressional leadership swiftly rebuked Boebert; few Republican leaders joined them. This double-standard in the case of Muslims evinces a clear line between liberal and conservative. And, if Congressional districting really represents a cross-section of the American political spectrum, then roughly half of the country still deems Muslims a threat.
The Republican Representatives’ bigotry is equally troubling. According to a recent Institute for Social Policy and Understanding report, Muslim Americans have been this country’s most vulnerable religious minority for the last five years. In that report, Muslim Americans said they have experienced some form of discrimination based on their religious beliefs “at about [a rate of] 60% between 2016 and 2020.” As evidenced by Boebert and her fellow Republicans’ bigotry, “[t]his is reflected in modern political discourse, where Islamophobic violence, or threats of violence, and overall dehumanization of Muslim individuals have been fueled by political parties and have commonly gone unchecked and uncondemned by prominent political leaders” (Ayah Ziyadeh, Dec. 20, 2021, “War on Elected Muslim Women in the US: Does Institutional Islamophobia Exist?” Politics Today). Even in 2022, Muslim Americans remain condemned to a peripheral status, which begs questions related to the truly liberal nature of American democracy today.
In educational circles, the ugly face of Islamophobia is all too visible. Researching 600+ Muslim students aged 11 to 18 in California’s public education system between 2010 and 2016, CAIR found that more than 55% of them had been bullied because they were Muslim, while 33% of Muslimas reported being “offensively touched” while wearing the hijab. Further, 20% suffered discrimination by a teacher or other staff member for the same reason (Sean McCollum, Spring 2017, “Expelling Islamophobia,” Learning for Justice).
In their comprehensive “Islamophobia in U.S. Education” (2019), Shabana Mir (American Islamic College, Chicago) and Loukia K. Sarroub (College of Education and Human Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln) found that Islamophobia is an endemic problem in both secondary and higher education, even in those institutions that pride themselves on cultivating an environment of inclusivity, diversity and acceptance. Since 2016, they have noted a dramatic rise in Islamophobic attacks on school-aged and university students coinciding with an increase in attacks on mosques, Muslim community centers and Muslims themselves. They attributed this to the rise of former President Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric and his Muslim Ban. Thus emboldened, several of his supporters lashed out at Muslim students and created an environment of fear and trauma.
In my opinion, no discussion of Islamophobia is complete without conducting an assessment of American pop culture and the television, film and other media products that it regularly disseminates to audiences nationwide, given that Hollywood’s contributions to contemporary American culture profoundly influence the country’s moral and ethical value systems. The last several decades have seen a proliferation of Hollywood films and other cultural products designed to acquire public support for Washington’s political and military agendas to remain a hegemonic and ideological actor on the international political stage. For example, propagandistic movies such as “The Hurt Locker” (2008), “The Kite Runner” (2007), “The Green Zone” (2010), “Lone Survivor” (2013), “Restrepo” (2010), “The Messenger” (2009), “The Kingdom” (2007) and “American Sniper” (2014) have sought to induce large segments of the American populace to endorse and support the armed forces as well as Washington’s wars of choice and, in so doing, to demonize Islam and Muslims worldwide, especially those populations unfortunate enough to be in the path of a recent American invasion. The groundbreaking book “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People” (2001), a 100-year historical tour of representations of Arabs and Muslims and how Hollywood really began with Orientalist Arab stereotypes, dissected a slanderous history dating from cinema’s earliest days to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters that feature machine-gun wielding and bomb-blowing “evil” Arabs by Award-winning film authority Prof. Jack G. Shaheen (d. 2017), noting that only Native Americans have been more relentlessly smeared on the silver screen.
Presenting an exciting ahistorical and decontextualized world, one full of car chases, gun fights, near-miss explosions, love affairs, passionate romance and thrilling, high-tech espionage the “mission” at hand is immediate, critical and, most importantly, righteous. In this myopic value system, a minimized indigenous society is used only as set-props and backdrops. Muslim culture, Middle Eastern societies and local populations are no more than staging material set in place to tell the story of American do-goodery and ethnic and religious supremacy.
In these products, only the white Christian protagonist and his/her allies are not one- dimensional characters. The white hero is reflective and thoughtful, intelligent and responsible. The protagonist has a family, a personal history and is presented as a “complete person” with which the viewing audience can easily relate. These people make difficult but ultimately righteous life-and-death decisions and are always infused with moral and religious rectitude. However, their non-white Muslim antagonists are expendable and dispensable, and callously disregard their own life and/or that of their families. Why? Because they’re obsessed with martyrdom and prefer death and destruction to life, liberty and lawfulness.
As a result, these “sociopaths” prove to American viewing audiences that the Arab, Muslim and Other has less objective human value than the white protagonist and his/her comrades. This differentiation in terms of form, function and, crucially, motivation between the American hero and the Muslim villain provides a video record of racial and cultural stratification reified and sustained by an active, conceptual vocabulary that helps construct subjective and largely inflexible frames of collective association and deflective dissociation — the ever-popular us vs. them.
In our politics, schools and, most certainly, our cultural products, the U.S. promotes the construction of Muslims generally, and of Muslim Americans specifically, as a present Other. These simplistic, often binary constructions derive from our assertions that Muslims like Reps. Tlaib and Omar are decidedly unlike us. They are reified wherever we allow Muslim students to be victimized by bullies and bigots. And they are ubiquitously distributed in our film and TV products, which portray Muslims as having a profound disregard for humanity, the likes of which we simply cannot fathom. Muslims are in the U.S., therefore, but remain outside its mainstream cultural and political spaces. In other words, we allow them into American society, but only in a muted form.
And so, disturbing as it is for those concerned about American racism, Republican neo-fascism, and the true embrace of liberal democracy in the U.S., Islamophobia remains a de facto form of engagement in public institutions. While its documentation and identification may be on the rise, the country and its foundational institutions still have a great deal of work to do when it comes to rectifying these practices and enfolding our Muslim brothers and sisters within the banner of legal protection from discrimination, as is being done for so many other marginalized groups today.
Luke Peterson, PhD (The University of Cambridge [King’s College]), Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, works on investigating language, media and knowledge surrounding political conflict in the Middle East. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he regularly contributes to local, national and international media.