The Haze of Islamophobia
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A characteristic of the War on Terror was that the West did not really ever tangibly know what it was fighting. Any Islamist movement that spurred anywhere in the world, whether it’d be in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, or even the Philippines, it was the Islamist that was the threat. With the enemy becoming so difficult to pronounce or to articulate, anti-Muslim racism becomes, in my opinion, just as undefined, haphazard, and wishy-washy as the America’s imperial projects and its War on Terror. “In the current racial formation, Islam and Muslims have taken on a familiar, yet strange, meaning that is often evoked in terms such as ‘war,’ ‘conquest,’ ‘terror,’ ‘fear,’ and ‘the new crusades.’” The racial figure of the Muslims ranges far and wide to include populations that come not only from the Middle East, but Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere. “In the context of the Cold War and the subsequent War on Terror, religious identities are often cast as political identities that mobilize religious idioms.”
“Drone” by Heems to me is a satirical reference to this haphazardly conducted policy that is the War on Terror. Drones are a fact of life for the racialized, and those who do not identify with Islam at all, like the Hindus, also have to face violence for the Orientalist understandings of Islam. In “Drones” stones are thrown not just at mosques, but at temples. Racism is a part of culture, generalization of different peoples into one group is common sense, and the definition of a “Muslim” to a Westerner is likely contained in arbitrary lines that stretch far and wide.
Rana’s text details the racialization of Muslims and the superimposition of racial characteristics. Islam and Muslims being included in the US racial formation, as well as in the global system, led to this racialized Muslim constructed between cultural and biological concepts as ‘geographically external other.’ Matters of empire only exacerbated this emphasis on the externalization of the racialized Muslim.
As it relates to the term ‘Islamophobia,’ it in theory would not relate to race as concept. Race is operational used as a concept premised on a biological notion, and so it follows that Islamophobia cannot be racism, becasue religion is a social practice and is not biologically preordained. Islamophobia would result from a belief in Islam’s cultural and religious inferiority.