Chapter6 Unfree Muslims Islamophobia and the (Im)Possibilities of Muslim Belonging in America

Placing Islamophobia

“I am not Islamophobic,” declared Jon Ritzheimer when I interviewed him about his anti-Islam protests. In his imagining, phobias are rooted in an irrational fear, and for Ritzheimer, there is nothing irrational about hating Islam. While Ritzheimer’s critique of the term is an expression of his hate toward Islam, academically speaking, Islamophobia as a descriptive label of particular kinds of hate tends to be vague and undefined, covering a gambit of conceptual frames, though all focusing on particular sets of behaviours. Despite the vagueness of the term and lack of conceptual clarity, it is widely used and circulated in popular media and even in academia. Islamophobia has become a convenient catch-all term used by a variety of organizations monitoring hate, such as the Council of American-Islamic Relations Islamophobia Watch Department and the UK website for documenting “anti-Muslim bigotry,” Islamophobia Watch.7

There are multiple conceptual frames employed to define Islamophobia that I map into four broad categories: as acts of hate, as a discursive representation, as an expression of racism, and, finally, as a mode of governmentality. Many academic studies merge these different ways of understanding Islamophobia, providing significant analyses to power, government policies, and a virtual “industry” of producing anti-Islamic messages, often driven by racist ideologies. These studies interrogate what Mahmood Mamdani calls “Culture Talk”—the assumption “that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and it then explains politics as a consequence of that essence.”8 As a critique of the simplistic historical reimagining of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, Mamdani documents how the geopolitics of the American “War on Terror” and its long history in the Cold War, reconstructs global antagonisms, arguing that “it is no longer the market (capitalism), nor the state (democracy), but culture (modernity) that is said to be the dividing line between those in favour of a peaceful, civic existence and those inclined to terror.”9 For Mamdani, the distinction between Islam and the West is imagined to be modernity and Islam’s incapacity of being modern. Many of the tropes and images employed by Islamophobes and Reformationists document Islam’s apparent traditionalism and anti-modern ideas and practices. I suggest these assumptions are predicated on the idea of freedom because modernity, in their eyes, is an evolution toward greater and greater freedom of the individual, something Islam does not accept, in their estimation.

Mamdani’s political history reminds us that, counter to Huntington’s assertion that Islam is anti-democratic, Muslims around the world have and continue to clamour for more democratic participation. Only, countries like the United States and France seem to have a greater aversion to Muslims being democratic. From Algeria to Palestine (where the United States rejected election results), from the Arab Spring to the military and monarchic dictators of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (where the United States supports oppressive dictators with extensive military aid), over and over again, Western “democracies” undermine democratic movements and possibilities in Muslim-majority countries. Despite this history of undermining or outright denying Muslims democratic polities, the myth of Islam’s rejection of democracy is naturalized in the discursive imagining of Islamophobes, like Huntington, who argues that “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures.”10 For Islamophobes, Islam is so incompatible with modernity, so counter to liberal values of equality, liberty, and fraternity, so inherently dictatorial in its demands on adherents, so oppressive of women, that, regardless of history, Muslims are incapable of desiring democracy. Lack of freedom is the leitmotif of Islamophobia.

In what we might consider “popular Islamophobia” as distinct from Huntington’s “academic Islamophobia,” fear becomes the dominate theme. In these representations, Islam preaches violence as encoded in the Qur’an, in the life of the Prophet Muhammad, and in Islamic history. Academic studies of this variant of Islamophobia focus on analyzing the discursive construction of the Muslim Other, following in the path of Edward Said’s ground-breaking Orientalism and his later work, Covering Islam.11 Such studies focus on the media, political cartoons,12 and Hollywood movies. Some studies dig behind the circulation of anti-Muslim imagery and media rhetoric to identify key actors and funders of the “Islamophobia Industry.”13 These studies interrogate popular perceptions of Americans toward Islam, Muslims, and Arabs in particular, and attempt to delegitimize the self-proclaimed “experts” of Islam predominately producing and circulating anti-Islamic messages, commentators such as Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson, Frank Gaffney, and David Yerushalmi.

The discursive constructions of Islamophobia draw upon a variety of framing techniques to depict Islam as violent and manipulative, with the capacity to construct a liberal façade behind which lies a diabolical menace to Western civilization. Through cherry-picking, stereotyping, and false causalities in their depiction of Islam, “experts” such as Daniel Pipes focus attention on the uniqueness of Western civilization and on Israel as a frontline state in the battle against Islam. Pipes continuously repeats catchphrases and loaded terms to create an illusion of an evil totality—terms such as “jihad,” “Islamists,” and “Sharia.” Even the titles of Pipes’s articles imagine the (Islamic) barbarians at the gates of Western civilization: “Islamic London,” “Willfully Ignoring the Jihad against America,” and “Islamist Violence Will Steer Europe’s Destiny.”14

Though written two years after the Boston Marathon bombing, “Willfully Ignoring the Jihad against America” argues against those who depicted the act as “terrorism returns,” as the headline in the USA Today declared on April 13, 2016. Pipes does not see the bombing as an isolated event but rather a series of terrorist acts perpetrated against Americans but ignored by the media and others. With no data to support his claim, he asserts that “Islamic inspiration often serves as the motivation of Muslim-on-infidel attacks around the globe” (emphasis added; the catch phrase “infidel” creates a sense of victimhood by all non-Muslims). He further states that “Americans—including USA Today headline writers—barely know about the steady drumbeat of attacks, leaving them unaware about the scope of ideological Muslim-on-non-Muslim violence currently underway.” Here, again without any actual data, Pipes creates a specialized knowledge, enlightening the rest of us about the reality of Islam. Later, when he does provide examples of Muslim violence, he offers no insights into motivations, connections, or support from external terrorist networks. One such example is the gruesome beheading of two Coptic Christians in New Jersey by a Muslim man in 2016. Pipes hints that the motivations for the act are unknown; therefore, he argues Islamic terrorism is mystifying and erratic, and therefore all the more terrifying. What Pipes fails to include in his article is that the perpetrator was a well known violent criminal with a long criminal record, including two armed robberies.15 Was his heinous crime motivated by Islam or by his own psychological bent? None of this appears to matter, for according to Pipes, given that the perpetrator is Muslim, all Islam is guilty, in its totality.

Also missing from Pipes’s judgement against Islam is comparative data. For example, do individuals of other religious traditions perpetrate crimes against those they see as fearful and consider to be non-believers at the same rates as Muslims? Is this a general pattern or one only Muslims are prone to? Obviously, for the Islamophobes, such information is irrelevant. The erroneous assumption that Muslims only act based on their belief in Islam, combined with the loaded catch phrases and terms, creates an image that Muslims are automatons of a fascistic religion.

Muslims themselves become targets of violence by individuals who internalize their fear of Islam. Never asking themselves if following their own hateful ideology makes them unfree, such perpetrators become the foot soldiers of Islamophobia. According to the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, between 2014 and 2017, Americans “warmed up” to Islam from 40% to 48%. However, that is still less than half the population, meaning that, at the time, 52% of Americans had negative feelings about Islam. Furthermore, Muslims ranked the lowest of all the other religious groups that Americans felt “warm” toward: atheists (50%), Mormons (54%), Hindus (58%), and Jews (67%).16 The survey was conducted in January 2017, before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States, after which many observers acknowledge an increase in hate acts directed toward Muslims. Even before, despite the increasing “warmth” toward Muslims, hate crimes against Muslims increased. In 2016, there were 127 reported hate crimes, up from ninety-one the previous year and fifty-six in 2014—much higher than reported in the year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.17

These increasing acts of violence against Muslims in the United States parallel similar trends of an increase in other forms of discrimination in the workplace, in schools, and on the streets. Mosques are increasingly vandalized and Muslim women who choose to wear the veil, the ultimate sign for Islamophobes of the lack of freedom in Islam, are “freed” by having their veils ripped off in public by good Samaritans trying to save them.18 In these various acts of violence, direct and indirect, Islamophobia becomes a form of racism. The racialized history of Islamophobia exposes the deep roots of the racist nature of the American state from its foundations in slavery to the “Black scare” of the 1960s, as Edward Curtis argues.19

Along with Curtis, a number of scholars map Islamophobia as a form of racism, recognizing that “as a social construct not based on phonotype, race and thus racism [are] not limited to biological categories.”20 America is assumed to be white and Christian and practices a “racial agnosticism” in which Americans “forget or whitewash the past in order to safeguard American innocence and reinforce the status of American ideals as universal and American opportunity as perpetually open to all who are willing to avail themselves.”21 Open to all, that is, except followers of Islam, socialists, Asians who spread the coronavirus, and any other undesirable imagined at any given time, such as Irish and Italians a century ago before they too entered the echelons of whiteness.

Anti-Black racism in the United States is deep, running through our national veins; it is a part of who we are as a country. Racism toward Blacks is institutionalized in the US Constitution, our electoral practices, and our judicial system. However, this systemic racism against Blacks is related to, but different from, the hatred mingled with fear held toward Islam and Muslims. For the majority of Muslims in the United States, there is no history of slavery, no being considered only three-fifths of a human to be counted for political representation, no segregated neighbourhoods. There are, however, similar experiences of discrimination and policing on the street and in everyday life that link anti-Black racism and Islamophobia.

The association with whiteness and the assumed inherent, uncritical correlation between white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant culture and being American, and the dismissal of Islam and Muslims, falls along a variety of fault lines—civilizational, racial, modern, and ideological. Underling each of these primary fault lines is a belief in freedom that the Other has not yet achieved or is incapable of realizing. The accumulative effect is to map Islam as inherently un-American and thus, for many, un-Western. The fundamental assumption is of an America and a West that is not just white, but Christian and liberal, inheritors of a great civilization traced to ancient Greece and articulated in modernity through the Enlightenment and liberal thought. Islam is thus not just the Other of the West but an inherent part of it, even as it is rejected.22

Racism, as Curtis and others note, is not an anomaly of wrong beliefs, intricately interwoven into the national imagination and institutionalized into systems of discrimination. Rather, racism is a form of governmentality, an integral part of the modern, liberal, capitalist state.23 That is, racism and Islamophobia, along with anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments, are strategic to the expansion and deepening of state powers, penetrating the everyday lives of people. Racism, in its various expressions, is constructed through a Foucauldian “regime of truth” that functions “as a tool to support and sustain how people act in the social.”24

What Foucault delimits is that such state powers are not merely coercive but are productive. While there is extensive state policing of Muslims, particularly with the very unfree, illiberal Patriot Act passed after 9/11, the real mechanisms of control are constituted into ideas of citizenship and national patriotism, creating ways for Americans to police one another to advance the American ideal. Here is where Islamophobia becomes more than a mere discourse of Orientalist representations and becomes actions carried out by “patriots” on the ground; Islamophobia is transformed into a lived code of discrimination and varying degrees of violence.

The “Islamophobia industry” inspires acts of hatred against Muslims by producing and circulating vitriolic anti-Islamic messages. The industry comprises layers of actors who feed one another, creating a greater sense of legitimacy, at least in their eyes, and self-righteousness.25 On one end of the loop are the “experts” such as Daniel Pipes, Richard Spencer, and Steve Emerson, who circulate information on the evils of Islam and the illiberal behaviours of Muslims. They act as pundits for conservative news programs, directly feeding media images and giving context to particular events.26 These experts justify the hatred of Islam that is then amplified by a series of social media activists, such as Pamela Geller. Geller’s role in the Islamophobia industry is not just as amplifier but as provocateur. Geller provides fodder by “proving” how illiberal and scary Muslims are, in her estimation, by orchestrating spectacles to elicit violent responses by Muslims. One of her most infamous provocations is the annual Muhammad cartoon drawing contests, such as the one in Garland, Texas, on May 3, 2015.

Dubbed a “free speech event,” Geller solicited drawings of the Prophet Muhammad to put on display and arranged for the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders to be the keynote speaker. Of the event, Geller wrote, “There should have been Cartoon Exhibits all over the free world, to show the jihadists and their stealth allies in groups that are doing all they can to intimidate the West into abandoning the freedom of speech that we will not kowtow to violent intimidation.”27 For Geller, on one side is freedom, on the other, Islam.

The event did, in fact, provoke a counter action by two young men, spurred on by an online Islamist provocateur. The two men from Phoenix, AZ drove to Garland with guns and body armour. They did not make it far from their car when they were shot and killed by local security guards. Both men, Elton Simpson, a convert with online connections to a number of radical Muslims aligned with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and Nadir Soofi, regularly attended prayers at the ICCP. It is for this reason that Jon Ritzheimer organized his protest at ICCP on May 29, three weeks after the failed attack on the “First Annual Draw Muhammad Contest.”

Pipes, Emerson, Geller, and Ritzheimer all play different roles in the production and circulation of anti-Islam messages and images. Ritzheimer, though, takes Islamophobia a step further, making it an action, spewing hatred directly at Muslims, protesting with guns in front of their mosques. Islamophobia is a lived reality, not just a discourse of hate, fear, and suspicion. As a realm of anti-Muslim actions, Islamophobia parallels anti-Black racism in the United States but diverges from it in that Islamophobia is predicated on the assumption that Islam is an ideology, that it has a political agenda. For American Islamophobes—and remembering that they come in all ideological and political stripes themselves: alt-right, conservative, liberal, and progressives—Islam is the problem, not Muslims. Islamophobia is thus more akin to anti-communism and anti-Antifa than it is to anti-Black racism. Perhaps in Europe, Islamophobia is different—particularly in the United Kingdom and France, where there are larger pockets of Muslims residing, longer histories of migration, and of sordid pasts of colonial conquest and oppression. In the United States, Islamophobia is about the inherent un-Americanness of Islam.

The Islamophobic experts, provocateurs, and foot soldiers work in tandem to expose how Islam is counter to the American values of freedom, democracy, and equality. As Ritzheimer asserted during our interview, Islam is “this full-blown ideology of a way of life how everything needs to be.” Geller’s “freedom of speech” event exposed just how non-freedom loving Muslims are, driven by their Islamic ideology. Ritzheimer and others imbibe that approach and act on it on the streets.

Taking Islamophobia to the Streets

Jon Ritzheimer served in the Marines in Iraq on several tours of duty as part of the US occupying forces. He was dishonourably discharged for obtaining a tattoo on his arm, a violation of Marine policy. When he returned to the United States, Ritzheimer was angry and “still needed a purpose. I needed, you know . . . I got that warrior mentality, that warrior spirit. I needed a cause, if you will. And I set my crosshairs on Islam. And it was very easy to do.” He went on to elaborate how “we were indoctrinated from boot camp and, and they don’t turn that off. So the veteran when he comes home is naturally inflicted. And I’ve been battling with that; I still battle with that to this day.” He was trained to be a soldier, to defend the country based on who the state deems as a threat, to kill the enemy, to take the lives of other human beings.

What Ritzheimer was never able to do is see the Other as similar to himself; that was not part of his training. In fact, just the opposite—the enemy has to be seen as less than you, as less deserving to live, as someone worthy of being exterminated. He was trained to kill and had been dismissed from his mission unceremoniously. Ritzheimer was angry, he was “indoctrinated,” and he needed a purpose but was unable to see that perhaps some of those he felt most threatened by were themselves angry and searching for a purpose, that perhaps they acted out in ways similar to Ritzheimer—with violence against the Other. For Ritzheimer, his anger is his, unique, an individual’s mental state. That of Muslims, however, is collective, by dint of their being Muslim, followers of Islamic ideology (whatever that might actually be or mean). He is free to make choices, but they, the Muslim Other, act out Islamic ideology, according to him and many others. Muslims are not individuals but part of a collective horde that needs to be stopped.

So, when the attack on Geller’s event in Texas occurred and the two perpetrators were traced to the Phoenix Mosque, Ritzheimer was compelled to take action, acting on his Marine instincts “to do good and do right.” He obviously was not alone when he staged his armed protest outside the ICCP. He was joined by a few dozen others, a mixture of people including some “Marine buddies” of his, all sharing the belief that Islam was inherently evil and Muslims did not belong in the United States.

Ritzheimer’s experiences in Iraq loom large in his recounting, troubled by his experiences there and his return to civilian life, though he never provided specific details. He says,

I went to Iraq a few times, came back very angry and a devout atheist at the time. But intrigued with what I saw over there believing it was Islam. So who would send someone to put a bomb on their kid and send him out? Or send their kid out to try and kill other people? Was it money? What was pressing these people?

He never made it clear what exactly he witnessed, how many kids he saw with bombs or fighting, particularly as Iraq is not known for having child soldiers. In fact, according to Human Rights Watch, the only groups using child soldiers were two Kurdish militias in northern Iraq, both of whom were aligned with the US occupying forces.28 In short, what he claims he “witnessed” were undoubtedly fed to him by a machinery of disinformation, one that he was either inclined to listen to and believe or one that was imposed on him through the Marine Corps to vilify and dehumanize Muslims.

As with the self-declared experts on Islam and radical Muslims in the United States, facts are not important. The threat, for them, is not really about security; it is about values. Security is a convenient trope that reflects on just how uncivilized and intransigent Muslims are. The real threat is the erosion of American values of liberty, democracy, equality, and freedom. Fear of terrorism and the loss of life are convenient rallying cries to galvanize the American public into very “unfree” actions. That is, liberal America has always been more than willing to act illiberally to advance its liberal credentials—coups, invasions, and occupations, all deepening domestic security apparatuses to “protect” Americans. This embodies Ritzheimer’s own political ideology, for which he spent a year in a federal prison for taking part in the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon with Ammon Bundy and other libertarian, anti-government extremists. Ritzheimer is a member of both the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, organizations that have come to greater attention following the January 6 Capitol insurrection of 2021.

Following the mosque protests in 2015, Ritzheimer went through a period of self-reflection. He confesses that, in looking back, “I am not that guy anymore. At all. I was so unhinged. I was just lost. And consumed with anger and hatred. But it is definitely not me anymore. And I’ve got a different perspective, if you will.” He has reached the point where he knows how he conducted himself at the protest was wrong. Recounting, he reflected, “Looking back, wearing that shirt was not right. I lost the moral high ground with it. Would Jesus do that? I think he would go to their doorstep and tell them it was wrong, sure. But would he wear a shirt that said, ‘F Islam’? Probably not.” He even told me he was willing to return to the mosque and offer a public apology for his actions in front of the community. However, while he admits his tactics were wrong, he holds on to the underlying beliefs that drove them—that there is something inherently wrong with Islam, that it is un-American, and that it is counter to the ideals of freedom enshrined in the US Constitution. Muslims, he says, he can accept, but not Islam. If they keep their religion to themselves, perhaps, just perhaps, there is a place for Muslims in America. But he has his doubts that such privatization of religion is possible for Muslims.

Today, Ritzheimer’s “crosshairs” are no longer focusing in on Islam. His battles of returning America to its original, foundational values inscribed in the Constitution and the life and thoughts of the Founding Fathers are focused on government overreach, particularly the judicial system, and are driven by two experiences. The first is his conversion from atheism to born-again evangelical Christianity. The second emerges from his experiences of being with Ammon Bundy and others at the Malheur Refuge Center and his time in prison. Both experiences have influenced Ritzheimer’s approach to Islam today and raise a number of questions on the multiple strands, or manifestations, of Islamophobia.

In the months after the Phoenix Mosque protest, Ritzheimer started to question his atheism. Through a Messianic Jewish friend (who was part of the later occupation in Oregon) and others, Ritzheimer began to open himself to the possibility of believing in Jesus Christ. After the ICCP protest, threats against his life were made, and he moved his family to San Diego, while he remained at their house outside Phoenix.

On September 11, 2015, he was driving to San Diego alone to be with his family to celebrate his daughter’s birthday. The drive, following Interstate 8 from Gila Bend, through Dateland, Yuma, and into California, cuts through a desolate, barren desert landscape. As he related to me, along the drive, alone, he started to beseech God for guidance. His emotions overtook him; he pulled over to the side of the highway, kneeled, and began crying, praying, asking God for a sign so that he could accept Him into his heart. Finally, recomposing himself, he continued the drive, still in doubt, still hoping for a sign. As he crossed over the hills heading into coastal southern California and reception for his mobile phone strengthened, he checked his news feeds. The first post was a headline that a construction crane collapsed in the holy city of Mecca—auspiciously, for Ritzheimer, on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. This was his sign from God.

In the accident inside the Haram Sharif, the mosque surrounding the sacred al-Ka’ba, 111 Muslims were crushed to death, all of them pilgrims from around the world, many of them poor peasants achieving the once-in-a-life-time dream of visiting Mecca. “I was not happy there was death,” Ritzheimer told me. “But here I am one of the most notorious, outspoken people against Islam. Just got done asking God for a sign and pouring my heart out and on this day of all days, September 11. I’m just like . . . it was too much to be just coincidence to me. And I felt an instant whoosh! All of my anger, all of my everything just kind of vawhoosh and I was just like shocked; it felt like I was hit by lightning.” From that day forward, Ritzheimer has identified as a Christian. While he is sorry that lives were lost, the reality is, for him to be saved, to find God, 111 Muslims had to die and nearly 400 be seriously injured.

There is a deeper meaning to that event for Ritzheimer as well, one that freed him from his anti-Islam mission, allowing him to refocus his energies on anti-government activities. For Ritzheimer, the crashing crane in the most holy of Islam’s sacred sites meant that he no longer had to advocate against Islam, because “God’s got this!” It turns out that in his vision, God too is an Islamophobe.

In my interview with Ritzheimer, he also related how his finding Jesus Christ in his life mitigates how he expresses his hatred, though the hatred remains. Today, as a born-again Christian, Ritzheimer differentiates between Islam and Muslims. He hates Islam but loves Muslims and wants them to be saved too. He is now motivated to save Muslims from themselves. If they want to stay practising Islam, he claims, he has no problem with that, as long as their faith remains fully private; if they want to be American, then they must accept the idea that America comes first. While his own extreme views against the government are seen by many as highly problematic, for him, they are expressions of his patriotic duty to abide fully and truly to the US Constitution. In this configuration, the Constitution, as a text, is read literally, it is a fundamentalist interpretation that Ritzheimer and his fellow libertarian activists hold onto. This sort of dogmatism is only acceptable when directed toward the United States of America, the American flag, and the US Constitution—obviously, not the Qur’an.

Again, we find an inherent contradiction in the expression of freedom and unfreedom. Muslims are criticized for blindly following a text that dictates how they should behave and think. Because Muslims blindly follow the Qur’an, and because according to the logic of these libertarian activists, the text is flawed and violent, they are justified in committing violence against Muslims to protect “our way of life,” “our values,” “our freedom.” These ideals, they argue, are enshrined in the US Constitution, which is sacrosanct, untouchable; a fixed text with a singular interpretation that we must rigidly—dare I say, blindly—abide by to achieve a great society. In short, the logic of this expression of Islamophobia is that we must behave the way Muslims are perceived to behave—dogmatically following a text with no individual agency.

Through his conversion, Ritzheimer shifts his focus away from Islam toward Muslims, though today he is more concerned about the deteriorating nature of the American government. His energies are focused on taking direct action against the state, leaving the purification of Islam to God. But he does remain concerned about Muslims, and his new approach is aligned with a more mainstream attitude toward Islam—for it to be truly Western, American, modern, liberal, there must be a “reformation.”

The sentiments behind Ritzheimer’s conversion reaffirm the basic mapping of Islam as something other than rational, civilized, modern, and American/Western—the values held across the political and ideological spectrum in the United States. In mapping Islam as America’s illiberal Other, Islamophobes like Ritzheimer, Geller, and Pipes show the impossibility of Muslims ever being American.

But the question is whether such an impossibility is rooted in the supposed inherent evils of Islam or in the inherent racist incapacity of Americans and Western liberalism to accept those they imagine as the non-liberal Other? How tolerant is liberalism truly? How free are Muslims to be Muslim in Western liberal societies? Or more poignantly, As W. E. B. Du Bois famously asked of African-Americans, “How does it feel to be a problem?” But the question that is never asked is, why is American liberalism predicated on seeing everyone else as “a problem”? Why are American values so inherently intolerant of anyone who is not liberal?

Land of the (Not So) Free

The twisted reality of Islamophobia is that, in imagining Islam as an unfree ideology, one then grants oneself the right to deny Muslims any and all freedoms. That denial of freedom is encoded through governmental security mechanisms enacted through domestic and foreign policies. One of the most sweeping denial of freedoms in the United States is the 2001 Patriot Act, which contains provisions for surveillance, arrest, and special courts.29 On the foreign front, as mentioned, the United States has a long history of denying freedom and democracy to Muslim-majority countries. The US supported the 1953 coup in Iran that imposed the Shah as the ruler; provided extensive support to Pakistan’s military dictator Zia ul-Haq (ruled 1977–1988), who was the third largest recipient of military aid after Israel and Egypt and who oversaw the Islamization of Pakistan; and provided support to Egypt under Hosni Mubarak (ruled 1981–2011). There is also their support for countless other places with problematic human rights records, such as Saudi Arabia. A second mode of denying freedom to Muslims is through vigilante actions, such as those of Ritzheimer. For Muslim Americans, Islamophobia is a lived reality; their lives are reshaped based on fear of violence for being Muslim. It is estimated that as many as 250,000 hate crimes have been committed a year, since 2001, against Muslims, most of them unreported: that is over 650 a day.30 One should add that many victims of anti-Muslim hate crimes are not even Muslim, but rather Sikhs, such as the murder of seven Sikhs in Wisconsin by Wade Michael Page in 2012.

Given American history and social reality, it is hard to imagine the country as anything but inherently racist and intolerant. No doubt that idea is disturbing to both conservatives and progressives. The difference is that conservatives tend to see American history not as racist and discriminatory but as an increasing infringement on their own freedoms over the decades. Progressives, on the other hand, accept the horrific crimes against humanity committed by the country but imagine American history as constantly improving upon itself. Though founded in slavery, so many progressives would argue, we overcame it. Though democracy was anything but democratic in the early days of the republic, over the decades more and more people have been granted the right to vote. While it remains contested terrain, the progressive national vision maintains the country is progressing, improving its racist, discriminatory, sexist, and violent/oppressive record.

Thus, the past and the future are battlegrounds for conservatives and progressives. But underlying both imaginings are certain assumptions about the liberal values that form the foundation of the nation; these are sacrosanct. One sees them as being eroded away from an idyllic past; the other sees them as guiding principles striving to be achieved in an idyllic future. In both scenarios, though, there are forces that corrupt the liberal ideal of America, and that take the nation off course from being truly free. Today, one of those forces is Islam.

According to comedian and TV commentator Bill Maher, “In the Muslim world [extremism] is mainstream belief.”31 While Maher is a talking head with a long history of sexist and racist comments, he claims to be progressive and concerned with advancing liberal ideas. He sees Muslims as illiberal and, thus, a problem. Such an imagining is quite prevalent in progressive and leftist thinking in the United States, particularly in feminist thought. The so-called War on Terror unleashed following the 9/11 terrorist attacks became a means of “saving brown women from brown men.”32 Muslim Afghan women particularly were silenced, reduced to victims of an oppressive culture. Colonial history, regional geopolitics, and US imperialist interests in the region were easily ignored in celebrating the “liberation” of Afghan women from their burqas.33 This discourse is resurfacing today, following the Taliban victories in Afghanistan in August 2021.

Saba Mahmood clearly documents liberal unease with religious conservatives, particularly Muslims. Western/liberal feminists assume “that there is something intrinsic to women that should predispose them to oppose the practices, values, and injunctions that the Islamist movement embodies.”34 There is a rejection of alternative moral and ethical lives predicated on modes of sociality, modesty, and deportment, as embodied by many Muslim women. As a result, Muslims are imagined as lacking the free will or self-realization so intrinsic to Western liberal thought. Rather, they are conditioned by their tradition, Islam, which is then deployed to explain all acts and behavioural peculiarities performed by any Muslim. Whatever a Muslim does, by dint of being Muslim, Islam is the explanation of their actions, as detailed in the analysis of Daniel Pipe’s depictions earlier.

When Western feminists question why a woman would choose her own oppression by following the tyranny of tradition rather than pursuing her self-realization with individual autonomy, the answer is easy—Islam.35 As Mahmood points out, there is an uncritical assumption in progressive liberal thought about liberation, freedom, and individual agency that is predicated on a binary with an unliberated, unfree, non-individual Other.

Whether conservative or progressive, in the United States there is “a civilizational discourse that identifies both tolerance and the tolerable with the West, marking non-liberal societies and practices as candidates for an intolerable barbarism that is itself signalled by the putative intolerance ruling these societies.”36 For progressives, the future is to liberate those entrapped by illiberal ideologies and cultural traditions, who continue to live lives defined by irrational cultural practices, who are not free. For American conservatives, the issue is not saving Muslims from themselves but rather reforming them to accept the principles of the Founding Fathers of the United States to save America, or, to use the slogan of former President Trump, “make America great again.”

That exclusionary paradigm is comprised of various tracts, in which each foundational value of liberalism provides a map of alterity, of Self and Other, of liberal and illiberal, of free and unfree, of rational and irrational. There are, however, inherent contradictions to achieving the goals of saving liberalism from Islam. In addition to sweeping surveillance and extrajudicial powers (including the assassination of American citizens), to save Muslims from themselves, the state attempts to ban and regulate Muslim behaviour. While in the United States there is no “veil ban” as in France, there is a rise of anti-Sharia laws being passed by state legislatures. While the threat of “creeping Sharia” has never been truly documented, the implication on the erosion of freedoms is clear. In France, as Joan Scott asserts, the headscarf ban was

conceived of . . . as a valiant action by the modern French state to rescue girls from obscurity and oppression of traditional communities, thus opening their lives to knowledge and freedom, even if it meant expelling them from school. The contradiction—that legislation designed to provide choice ended up by denying it—was not perceived as such by the law’s champions. This was because of their faith in the superiority of their philosophy, their equation of it with universalism, progress, and civilization.37

Freedom, then, is framed within the nation, a national ideal, something for the members of a nation. Those outside, invaders, immigrants, “illegals,” those who want to erode “our freedoms and values,” and those who undermine our ability to be “great” are afforded the status of being unfree until and unless they convert themselves, reform themselves, or transform themselves into members of the nation, holding the same values, same aspirations as normatively imagined. Freedom today is constrained, entrapped within the nation. It is not a universal value or a means of struggling against oppression, but rather a debased idea; freedom today is a warped reflection of an idea, trapped inside a funhouse of “freedom of choice.”

Conclusion

As agents of the nation, freedom and liberalism in general provide a pathway for imposing unfreedom on others deemed outside the nation. This imagining of the Other as unfree and then imposing unfree acts upon them because of their lack of freedom is the condition of peacelessness. The lack of peace is not an inherent quality of the Other, but rather an imagining of the Other through the lens of the nation and employing the state and various modes of governmentality to dictate and define the place of the Other. Through the liberal nation, the Other is forever a condition of conflict that needs to be managed, segregated, and/or converted.

Does the Other always have to be a threat? Does the Other always have to be imagined as the site of non-peace? Is it possible to transcend the Kantian notion of our human propensity for evil that then requires restrictions, policing, and ultimately Othering? The nation-idea is predicated on a divisive imagining of community, of some belonging and others not and being a potential threat. While Benedict Anderson linked the nation to the idea of an “imagined community,” in reality, there is no community encapsulated within the nation-idea except one bounded, segregated, and dependent on policies and practices of exclusion.

What the liberal imagination lacks, confined within the bounded structures of the nation-idea, is a sense of collective freedom. To move toward peace, collective freedom must be inclusionary in its imagining, an understanding of a collective oneness. While never a socio-historical reality, the Islamic concept of ummah, of community, is one step in realizing our human potential. Yes, within Islam, that illiberal, unfree, violent Other, are values and ethics that provide the possibilities for human peace, for a people’s peace.38 Rather than erase the ethical values of diverse cultural traditions, rather than mapping them in a hierarchal structure, rather than binding them to particular communities, we need to enter into a dialogical relationship between Self and Other.

Jon Ritzheimer as a nationalist is unable to see beyond the greatness of America’s foundations and uses his Christianity to construct a superiority of traditions. He was willing to walk across the street during his violent protest of the Phoenix Mosque and shake hands with the Imam, yet he is willing to return to the mosque and apologize. Ritzheimer is far from an ideal model of imagining people’s peace, but within him is the kernel of possibility, predicated on a human ethic of concern and respect. Once we break down the walls of the nation-idea that we have internalized into our own worldviews, peace will find a place in our world. Once we stop limiting our ethical values only to our community and start seeing the human potential in the Other as well, peace will find a place in our world. Once we free our own hearts from the unfreedom of hatred, peace will find a place in our world.

Notes

1. 1 Based on data collected by the Organization for Security and Cooperation’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights: https://hatecrime.osce.org/united-states-america?year=2020.

2. 2 Fazia Patel, “The Islamophobic Administration,” Brennan Center for Justice, April 19, 2017, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/islamophobic-administration; see also Mohsin Hassan Khan, Farwa Qazalbash, Hamedi Mohd Adnan, Lalu Nurul Yaqin, and Rashid Ali Khuhro, “Trump and Muslims: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Islamophobic Rhetoric in Donald Trump’s Selected Tweets,” SAGE Open 11 no. 1 (2021): 1–16.

3. 3 Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49.

4. 4 The term “liberal” leads to much confusion in American discourse. Predominately, “liberal” is used to indicate the left side of the political spectrum associated with the Democratic political party, progressives, and socialists. The term also implies the prevailing philosophical orientation of Western thought emerging from the Enlightenment. I use the term “liberal” throughout this chapter with this latter connotation. When referring to left-leaning politics, I employ “progressive” or “leftist,” though neither is particularly accurate as an all-encompassing term. The chapter is concerned with liberal philosophical ideas, particularly as relating to individual freedom and liberty, values inherent in both right- and left-wing political ideologies in the United States. As discussed later, although the Left and Right diverge in their relationships to the past and the future, both sides uphold these values, and others such as democracy, equality, and tolerance, as inherent in an imagined American ideal.

5. 5 Anouar Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), xi.

6. 6 For a critique of this binary rooted in Western thinking, see Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 2005).

7. 7 The website was discontinued in January 2015, but remains online as a resource at http://www.islamophobiawatch.co.uk/.

8. 8 Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 17.

9. 9 Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 18.

10. 10 Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations?” 40.

11. 11 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Said, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).

12. 12 Peter Gottschalk, Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Sentiment: Picturing the Enemy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).

13. 13 Nathan Lean and John Esposito, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012).

14. 14 Daniel Pipes, “Islamic London: ‘Run, Hide, Tell,’” Gatestone Institute, February 5, 2018, http://www.danielpipes.org/18201/islamic-london-run-hide-tell; “Willfully Ignoring the Jihad against America,” DanielPipes.org, June 15, 2015, http://www.danielpipes.org/19400/willfully-ignoring-the-jihad-against-america; and “Islamist Violence Will Steer Europe’s Destiny,” The Japan Times, October 10, 2018, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/10/19/commentary/world-commentary/islamist-violence-will-steer-europes-destiny/.

15. 15 John Heinis, “Jersey City Man Gets 2 Life Sentences for Gruesome Murders, Decapitations,” Hudson County View, September 22, 2016; hudsoncountyview.com/jersey-city-man-gets-2-life-sentences-for-gruesome-murders-decapitations/.

16. 16 Pew Research Center, “7. How the U.S. General Public Views Muslims and Islam,” July 27, 2017; https://www.pewforum.org/2017/07/26/how-the-u-s-general-public-views-muslims-and-islam.

17. 17 Katayoun Kishi, “Assaults Against Muslims in U.S. Surpass 2001 Level,” Pew Research Center, November 17, 2017; https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/15/assaults-against-muslims-in-u-s-surpass-2001-level/.

18. 18 See https://islamophobia.org/reports/cairs-2021-mid-year-snapshot-summary-report-of-anti-muslim-bias-incidents/ for a summary of anti-Muslim violence and discrimination in the first half of 2021 alone.

19. 19 Edward E. Curtis IV, “The Black Muslim Scare of the Twentieth Century: The History of State Islamophobia and Its Post-9/11 Variations,” in Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, edited by Carl W. Ernst (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 75–106.

20. 20 Curtis, “The Black Muslim Scare,” 76; see also James Carr, Experiences of Islamophobia: Living with Racism in the Neoliberal Era (London: Routledge, 2018).

21. 21 Sherman Jackson, “Muslims, Islam(s), and American Islamophobia,” in Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, edited by John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 93–106, at 94.

22. 22 Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

23. 23 Curtis, “The Black Muslim”; Tariq Masood and N. Meer, “The Racialization of Muslims,” in Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives, edited by Salman Sayeed and AbdoolKarim Vakil (London: Hurst Publishers, 2010), 69–83; Steve Garner, Racisms: An Introduction (London: Sage Publications, 2010); Craig Considine, “The Racialization of Islam in the United States: Islamophobia, Hate Crimes, and ‘Flying while Brown,’” Religions 8, no. 9 (2017): https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/8/9/165.

24. 24 Carr, Experiences of Islamophobia, 19.

25. 25 See Lean and Esposito, The Islamophobia Industry; Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (New York: Verso, 2015); Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir, Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2011) https://www.americanprogress.org/article/fear-inc/; Aboubakar A. Bokar, “The Political Economy of Hate Industry: Islamophobia in the Western Public Sphere,” Islamophobia Studies Journal 5, no. 2 (2020): 152–74.

26. 26 An example would be when Steve Emerson informed CBS’s news audience following the terrorist attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, that “Oklahoma City, I can tell you, is probably considered one of the largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East.” He went on to assert that the bombing “was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait.” Despite being completely incorrect on predicting who was responsible for the terrorist attack (it was the homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh), Emerson went on to establish quite a career, particularly after 9/11 when he became an informant for the FBI on Muslim radicals in the United States.

27. 27 As quoted in Max Fisher, “Don’t Call the Hateful Muhammad Art Exhibit Attacked in Texas a ‘Free Speech Event,’” Vox, May 4, 2015; https://www.vox.com/2015/5/4/8545831/texas-attack-pamela-geller.

28. 28 Human Rights Watch, “Iraq: Armed Groups Using Child Soldiers,” December 22, 2016; https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/12/22/iraq-armed-groups-using-child-soldiers-0.

29. 29 Hina Shamsi and Alex Abdo, “Privacy and Surveillance Post-9/11,” Human Rights 38, no. 1 (2011), 5–9, 17; Derek H. Davis, “The Dark Side to a Just War: The USA Patriot Act and Counterterriorism’s Potential Threat to Religious Freedom,” Journal of Church and State 44, no. 1 (2002): 5–17.

30. 30 Brian Levin, “Explaining the Rise of Hate Crimes against Muslims in the US,” The Conversation, July 19, 2017; https://theconversation.com/explaining-the-rise-in-hate-crimes-against-muslims-in-the-us-80304.

31. 31 Council of American Islamic Relations, “Bill Maher,” October 5, 2017; https://islamophobia.org/islamophobic-individuals/bill-maher/.

32. 32 An argument made by Lila Abu-Lughod, in which she draws on Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of colonial feminism in her “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783–90, at 784.

33. 33 See Tariq Ali’s The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London: Verso Books, 2002) for a study of the historical contradictions of the US’s illiberal foreign policy toward Muslim countries.

34. 34 See Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2 (emphasis in original).

35. 35 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 11.

36. 36 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6.

37. 37 Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 125–26.

38. 38 See Yasmin Saikia and Chad Haines, ed., People’s Peace: Prospects for a Human Future (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019).