Islam and Racism

[elyes_bouhouche]

Yes, Islamophobia can be a form of racism. It is based on an essential approach to culture, which makes it like racism because it treats religion as a fixed and unchangeable characteristic. In today's United States, Islam is increasingly seen as a racial identity rather than just a religion. This is the result of racism, the maintenance of white Christian supremacy, and the legacy of imperialism. This racialization of Islam takes place through visible signs, such as clothing, behaviour, and physical features (Rana 27). Indeed, Islam is now perceived primarily as a cultural practice, leading to the belief that Islam is culturally and religiously inferior to Western “culture.” Islam is thus reduced to a list of fixed and simplified characteristics. An example of this simplification is the law in France banning young girls from wearing abayas to school. The problem is that the abaya is not a religious garment but a cultural one. And here lies the problem with Islamophobia, this constant conflation of Islam/Arab/Black/Terrorist/Islamist.
Rana explains that when a person's physical appearance was no longer enough to distinguish them from other groups, culture began to mark these racial differences. For example, Muslims began to be defined in terms of “blackness.” Religion was no longer the only way to distinguish them, so they were differentiated along racial lines, creating distinctions based on physical rather than religious characteristics. Again, according to Rana, this is where the Semitic-Hamitic hypothesis appears, classifying the inhabitants of the Middle East into two categories. On the one hand, there are the Semites (Jews and Arabs), and on the other, the Hamites (Blacks). This racial ethnology began to break down with the advent of decolonization and the beginning of nationalist projects. However, the association between Jews and Muslims persisted and played a major role in the “racialization process” of the many Muslim populations by grouping them into a single group.

[pashamkhan]

The problem of distinguishing when physical differences are no longer enough is an important point to have brought out of Rana's Terrifying Muslims. I hope @elyes_bouhouche will get a chance to reiterate this in class today.