reflexive racism and pretty drones
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Rana posits Islamophobia as a reflexive racism—an entrenched yet contradictory prejudice rooted in the historical interactions between Islam and the West. Shaped by Enlightenment thought, decolonization struggles, and the rise of modernity and capitalism, this racism thrives on fluid boundaries between culture, nation, and race. Anthropology, with its colonial roots, played a key role in legitimizing these ideas by reinforcing racial hierarchies and scientific frameworks that deepened racialization within Western thought.
Rana demonstrates how this dynamic has reduced diverse Muslim experiences into the monolithic category of "Muslim." He traces anti-Muslim sentiment from 15th and 16th century Catholic Spain, where Jews and Muslims were racialized as Others, to the transposition of these models onto indigenous American groups and African slaves. Early Spanish ethnographies of Native Americans even led the British to conceive of indigenous populations as descendants of North African Muslims. This blurred the lines between biology and culture, positioning Muslims as central to early racial formations that allowed the Christian West to define itself against those seen as belonging to "lesser" stages of religious and civilizational development.
This reduction parallels how Muslims are seen as a "geographically external other." Pakistan, a Muslim state, is often isolated from the broader South Asian cultural fabric, perceived more as part of the Middle East. The Muslim world is often reduced to "a single, geopolitical mass," just as the term "Hindu" once broadly referred to South Asians regardless of religion.
Heems disrupts these oversimplifications through self-referential lyrics (he is both a shayar and a steeze) and commentary on drone strikes, comparing their arbitrariness to ice cream preferences. His lyrics too collapse distinctions, lumping politicians together as drone-strikers, while weaving in South Asian references, double-entendres about stones (drug use, anti-Muslim attacks, stoning of the devil), and nods to his Queens hometown. In this sense, Heems embodies the melancholic migrant, flipping reductive narratives whilst longing for some semblance of peace and home.