Why Aren't Muslims' Religious Freedoms Equally Protected?Rutgers Professor Explains
By Hannan Adely
NorthJersey.com
Fordham Law News – Fordham University
Why does a country that prides itself on religious freedom allow discrimination against its Muslim minority? The contradiction is the focus of a new book, “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom,” by Rutgers University law professor Sahar Aziz.
Aziz argues that Muslims are treated as a suspect race, rather than as a religious minority to be protected from persecution. She compares their plight to past discrimination against Jews, Catholics and Black Muslims, groups that were also ascribed negative traits and portrayed as threats to America.
Aziz was inspired to write the book after witnessing how Muslim Americans faced suspicion, surveillance and discrimination after 9/11 because of their faith. She felt personally harassed when, as a law student, she organized a 2004 conference about women in Islam that was surveilled by Army Intelligence officers who tried to obtain video and a roster of attendees.
“Those are the type of experiences that cause you to feel you are second-class citizens, that cause you to feel that you don’t have the right to speak and to challenge dominant narratives without being harassed,” said Aziz, director of the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights.
Aziz spoke about her book, published Nov. 30 by the University of California Press, and the future of the “racial Muslim” in an interview with The Record and the USA TODAY Network.
You write that the roots of anti-Muslim bias stretch far back in history. Can you explain?
Aziz: Muslims were portrayed as the antithesis of Western modernity, enlightenment and liberalism. Those ideas came with European settlers to the US but weren’t triggered in earnest until after 1965 when national quotas in American immigration law were lifted. You started to see a shift in immigration, with more people coming to the US from the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and the Far East.
That is when you see the precursor to the post-911 tropes. Portrayals of Arabs, often incorrectly conflated as being all Muslims, was that they were violent terrorists, especially when viewed through the lens of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
You saw this build-up, so when 9/11 happened, it wasn’t a sudden transformation. It was really a culmination of various factors increasingly portraying people from that part of the world in a very negative light and as threats and as outsiders to the country.
After 9/11, law enforcement and elected leaders defended surveillance in Muslim communities, mosques and schools under the guise of national security. Why was this allowed?
Aziz: When the story broke about the NYPD mass surveillance program [in Muslim communities], I was thinking about how to sue them alleging this was religious discrimination. At this point, it was very clear the targets were Muslim, but the equal protection doctrine is weak. Title 6 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the law that prohibits discrimination, does not include religion – it only includes color, race and national origin.
When you merge that fact and these 10 years of clear systematic targeting of a religious minority, then the dots connected clearly that what Muslims were experiencing was racial discrimination.
What parallels do you see with past discrimination against Jews and Catholics?
Aziz: Their religion is what racialized them as socially non-white, as outsiders, and there were material harm consequences to that. There were quotas at universities that kept Jews out, jobs that refused to hire Jews and Irish and Italian Americans. There were laws on the books in multiple states that didn’t allow Catholics to run for office or hold certain elected positions.
It was out in open, and it was normal. They had to overcome many of these forms of racism through assimilation, through advocacy and litigation.
You write that Jews and Catholics eventually were accepted as part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. What could the future hold for Muslims?
Aziz: What we are seeing post-9/11 with Muslims is that even if you perform your identity in a way that is quote-un-quote similar to white American culture, your Muslim identity marks you the same way skin color marks African Americans. That’s when it’s much more about racism than it is about xenophobia.
These are open questions because it is hard to predict with a country that will no longer have a racial majority starting in 2040. However, what we know at least for the current moment, and for the last 20 years, is that being a Muslim has operated as a racial marker.
Some Muslims seek a shared Abrahamic national identity that includes Islam, but a younger generation is rejecting this approach, you write in your book. Can you explain?
Aziz: If you Americanize according to white Protestant culture norms, then we will give you this conditional status, but you will always be precariously and conditionally an insider and only if you can typically pass as white. [Younger Muslims] are not accepting that bargain anymore.
They are looking to shape American society in a way that is not this hierarchy where white is on top and black on bottom and immigrants are constantly competing and scrambling and fighting each outer to be as white as possible and avoid any association with blacks.
How has racialization shaped the conversation about refugees from Ukraine compared to those from Muslim-majority countries?
Aziz: What racialization does is it dehumanizes the group that is racialized. For example, with Syrian refugees, the Western world was looking at them like this hoard of national security threats, like this hoard of terrorists that were coming to invade Europe, rather than humanizing them as refugees trapped in war who left out of desperation and who needed food, shelter.
In the US, Trump was openly calling them a Trojan Horse stating he did not want to let them in. The first version of the Muslim ban put a mortarium on Syrian refugees.
Meanwhile, Ukrainians are being let in as fellow insiders, as white people, as Christian people we should treat with humanity and decency.
These are the types of comparisons that bring to light why racialization matters and why it can be so devastating harmful to those who are racialized. It’s not simply an academic thought process. It is a very real phenomenon that hurts people ranging from dignitary harms and insults to loss of liberties, loss of life, torture, indefinite detention.
Do you still face the same scrutiny today? For instance, you have been maligned for tweeting or hosting events with individuals viewed as pro-Palestinian.
When comes to that particular issue, your First Amendment rights are highly restrained. You still have an acceptance of attacking Muslims and Arabs and presuming things about them that are negative that would never be tolerated if the same behavior was conducted against another group. That speaks volumes about the racialization of Muslims and the acceptability in mainstream society of Islamophobia.
What do you hope readers take away from this book?
As a country that prides itself on religious freedom, and prides itself on being liberal and enlightened, If we do not challenge and stop the racialization of Muslims and other minorities, we are the biggest losers in the long run because fundamentally the nature of our country is going to change. - The Bergen Record
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity)
