The stigma of being Muslim in America


On Sunday, we heard from the imams of the Quba Islamic Institute, who explained how they arrived at the decision to forgive the man accused of setting fire to their gathering place. The fire occurred just days after three Muslim students, Deah Barakat 23, Yusor Abu-Salha 21, and Razan Abu-Salha, 19, were shot and killed in Chapel Hill, N.C., in an incident many charge was prompted by a hate for Muslims. One of the imams’ reflections involved their effort to step outside the narrative of hate and anger that shapes public perception of “those who are different.” In this post, Rice University Professor Ussama Makdisi’s analysis explains a history in this country that he believes makes hate crimes against Muslim- and Arab-Americans far more likely.

The Chronicle Editorial Board


By Ussama Makdisi

The terrible murders in North Carolina of three young Americans—“Muslims” is how they are ubiquitously represented—are not simply a hate crime. They are a reminder of America’s long and deeply ambivalent history with Islam, Arabs, and the Middle East.

At the time of the establishment of the United States, Islam as a religion was generally an object of aversion in the Protestant Anglo-American world.  The Prophet Muhammad was routinely described as the “false” prophet.  Borrowing heavily from older English representations of Islam, many Americans associated Islam and the Ottoman empire with despotism.

Yet there was also a certain kind of curiosity about the Orient and the Arabs.  The Deist Thomas Jefferson read the Quran and had an apparently deep interest in Islam. Protestant missionaries who despised Islam, nevertheless wanted to “save” faraway Muslims as individuals, that is, to convert them. There was very little hatred or fear of Muslims or Arabs as individuals.

Indeed, after the First World War, an American writer by the name of Lowell Thomas helped to invent the myth of Lawrence of Arabia that also romanticized Bedouin Arabs. At the same time, thousands of Arab immigrants, the vast majority of whom were Christian, made new lives in America.  Although they were often derided as “oriental” in a racially stratified society, they were able to assimilate relatively easily.

It was only in the second half of the 20th century that Arabs began to be feared and loathed and suspected as individuals.  Why this was the case was not because of a new wave of Arab and Muslim immigration to America that began in the 1960s.  Rather, the stigmatization of Arabs and Muslims occurred principally because of politics in the Middle East and because of the enormously consequential U.S. role in the region.

Arab hijackings of American airliners in the 1960s and 1970s were directly a response to U.S. support for Israel.  The Iranian hostage drama was similarly a direct response to U.S. support for the Shah of Iran.  In both cases, Arabs and Iranians responded to the undeniably massive U.S. interference in Arab and Iranian societies.  Individual Americans were, in fact, scapegoated for the policies of their government.

As a result, it was no longer just Islam as a religion which was denounced.   Arabs and Muslims (many Americans still can’t tell the difference between the two groups) as individuals were now to be feared.  The ubiquitous and insidious Hollywood portrayal of the Arab as a (non-white) terrorist beginning in the 1970s consolidated this shift from a loathing of Islam to a representation of Muslim and Arab individuals as ticking time bombs.

The attacks of 9/11 massively reinforced and rationalized this perception of Arabs and Muslims as cruel and hate-filled. An almost continuous feed of U.S. government propaganda and news cycles have since then depicted Arab and Muslim men as a threat to the freedoms that Americans notionally possess.  Muslim women, in turn, have been routinely pictured as oppressed headscarf-wearing victims who need to be liberated through American intervention.  The headscarf, in other words, marks not only an allegedly peculiar Muslim form of the oppression of women, but is one of a panoply of symbols, including images of Muslim men praying, chanting anti-American slogans, or burning U.S. flags.  All depict Muslims as inherently un-American.

Government racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, the routine news of drone attacks that kill Arab and Muslim “militants” or “terrorists,” and the associated glorification of the U.S. military in its apparently endless war against “evil” —most recently the American sniper Chris Kyle who killed hundreds of Iraqis in their own country, heightens this constant message that Muslims and Arabs as individuals are always a potential threat and danger.

The effect is to render American Muslims an inassimilable minority despite the government platitudes that the U.S. is not technically at war with Islam and that the U.S. does not legally discriminate on the basis of religion.  But behind this official toleration is a very different reality that effectively marks the American Muslim citizen as a paradox and contradiction.

Unlike other major immigrant groups such as Catholics and Jews who have also had to contend with the prejudice of white Protestant mainstream, Arab and Muslim Americans have to contend not only with prejudice, but with a set of U.S. polices that have helped to ravage, and continue to ravage, their countries of origin in the Middle East.

These policies have led to various forms of deplorable blowback, that, in turn, are sensationalized and decontextualized in the mainstream media so that Arab and Muslim Americans are stigmatized no matter what they do and who they actually are.  This cycle does not directly authorize hate crimes.  But it makes it far easier and far more legitimate in this country, which already has its own deep and unresolved history of racism, to hate, fear and slander Arabs and Muslims today more than any other group in America.

Ussama Makdisi is a Professor of History at Rice University.  He is the author of Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001.