Reframing Islamophobia
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In her work, Junaid Akram Rana explores the racialisation of the Muslim in relation to Islamophobia and the ever changing definition of race. Rana seeks to tackle the redefinition of Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism through an examination of the “complex variations of the concept of race and the history of how and when “Muslim”became a category of race” (25). Islamophobia can be understood “as a gloss for the anti-Muslim racism that collapses numerous groups into the single category “Muslim””, which suggests that Muslims have been categorised into their own group, often based on visual markers, and not so much for biological or ethnic reasons (Rana, 30). In other words, this redefinition includes “customs and costumes” as well as “skin color and phenotype” as visual markers that groups Muslims together as a race (Rana, 28). According to Rana, the reframing of Islam as a religious category into a racial one relies heavily on the fact that racism, at its core, is a social construct, thus Islamophobia needs to be analysed and understood as a conceptual framework and “a kind of racism that developed in relation to the history of the concept of race” (28). That is to say that the interactions of Islam with the West throughout history constitutes a vital piece of the puzzle when understanding the development of the racialisation of the Muslim.
Due to this reframing, it could be argued that the West/America have developed their own tight “criteria” to be able to identify potential terrorists with drones, as President Obama puts it in his interview in Heems’ Soup Boys music video. This aligns with Rana’s argument that the Muslim body has been “constructed within a number of discursive regimes, including those of terrorism, fundamentalism, patriarchy, sexism, and labor migration” (26). Heems plays on this criteria throughout his music video and demonstrates the collapsing of many groups together mentioned by Rana. However, in this context, the grouping of all people who may be perceived as Muslim simply, because of their external appearance, is a result of the West’s preestablished stereotypes surrounding Muslims. I would argue that what Heems conveys in his music video suggests a reflection of implicit biases, or even explicit ones (in relation to the government’s use of drones during the war against terrorism), that the Western society has surrounding brown people who could fit the criteria of the Muslim. The end of the song, in which we hear Obama saying (in relation to the drones) that his “criteria for using them is very tight, very strict”, presents some irony: in the mind of the white American, it is Muslims who are the terrorists, but Heems is in fact Hindu. This, once again, links closely to the complex nature of the racialisation of the Muslim and the subsequent grouping together of people who may be perceived as Muslim.
Kamal Arora also explores this grouping together of brown people who present visual religious markers. In her article, following the the Oak Creek Gurdwara shooting of a Sikh temple in 2012 by a white supremacist, Arora speaks of her childhood experiences growing up in a predominantly white space in which she was subject to indiscriminate racism, for example being called an “uneducated Hindoo who couldn’t speak English”, despite herself being a Sikh (2). She describes her experiences, and of those of other brown people/her family, particularly in a post 9/11 context, as an extension of Islamophobia; the Sikh visual markers are often mistaken for Muslim ones. Islamophobia is therefore rooted in white supremacy and prejudice towards people considered “Other” or mistaken for Muslims regardless of whether or not they actually are Muslim.