Making Sense of Anti-Muslim Animus: Untangling the Roots of White Supremacy

Sherene H. Razack charts the legacy of antipathy toward Muslims, underscoring its role in upholding white supremacy.

Posted on August 28, 2024 in Featured Review

Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy Through Anti-Muslim Racism, by Sherene H. Razack. Minnesota, 2023. 276p, 9781517912345 $112.00, 9781517912352 $28.00, 9781452967127

The United States today is witnessing white Protestant Evangelicals and other Christians pushing for the establishment of Christian theocracies. This wide-flung movement seeks to promote laws that will back its proponents’ mission to challenge what they perceive to be the country’s out-of-control liberal thrusts. Some of the issues at the forefront of this conflict include bans on abortion under all circumstances, as well as bans on books that deal with topics that make this white religious constituency uncomfortable, including slavery, Islam, or anything negative about the settler roots of the United States or Canada.

Across the world, most of the Arab world and West Africa are struggling with the realization that they are still dependent on the West for viability, with puppet leaders selected by American and European powers. After colonization replaced traditional languages with European ones, restructured education systems, and began and continued a long violation of colonized lands for their mineral wealth and labor, former colonies were left without infrastructure or feasible economies following independence. The resulting smorgasbord of issues spans gender issues, economics, or law, only one of which is usually the single subject of a text. In all of this, the crisis of Muslims as a racial Other legally deemed unworthy of recognition as human, banned from countries under the guise of protection, or posited as targets of white supremacy has not been investigated. The unspoken driving force bolstering this phenomenon is the linkage between Christianity and whiteness.

Sherene Razack (women’s studies, Univ. of California, Los Angeles), a leading critical race and feminist theorist and the founder of UCLA’s Racial Violence Hub, here explores racial violence, anti-Muslim racism, imperialism, and critical race feminism. Her deeply researched text investigates the anchors of anti-Muslim racism and how they contribute to upholding white supremacy, employing an arsenal of evidence from many disciplines to support her argument.

Razack argues that there is a deep-rooted animus against Muslims in the West, which sustains the making of whiteness and its project of hegemony.

This volume captures a chaotic legal, political, and cultural atmosphere that has not quite yet transitioned past the pandemic in a transnational reading. Acknowledging both far-right and liberal impulses underlying anti-Muslim sentiments, Razack argues that there is a deep-rooted animus against Muslims in the West, which sustains the making of whiteness and its project of hegemony. This text unravels court cases and cultural events as evidence in support of this bold statement.

In the introduction, Razack considers the lack of order in the Muslim world, which is generally controlled by Europe, as one of the reasons for the mass migration to Europe by many people from the region, prompting the West’s need to demonstrate white hegemony. She makes a distinction, however, between whiteness in Europe and settler colonies like the United States and Canada. Europe’s history with Arab Muslims lies in the challenges between Christianity and Islam, tensions that have existed for millennia and are concretized in the works of classical Christian writers, artists, bards, and poets, which have made the antipathy toward Muslims widely known through fictional subjugation. From Shakespeare’s Moors and Saracens in Europe to Sunday school lessons in early American texts, cartoonish pictures shown in settler colonies, and sermons on the primitive nature of the Middle East. European and later American and Canadian children learned about the supposed laziness, dishonesty, and licentiousness of Arab Muslims and the supposedly false prophet of Islam through an association with the names and stories of European writers and painters.

This trope of the uncivilized terrorist is most emphatically displayed in Abu Ghraib through the treatment of prisoners taken in the War on Terror, for whom new terms were legally introduced into the lexicon, such as enemy combatants and non-persons. Razack ties together legal scholar David Cole’s volume Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (2003) and philosopher Denise Ferreira de Silva’s journal article “No-Bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence” to explain how enemy combatants are racialized. Razack explores Ferreira de Silva’s thoughts on “the Western concept of Man” to which Muslims do not belong (p. 35). Here, again, are the delimiters that science uses in categorizing humans and their abilities, with white people on top and Black and brown people on the bottom. States decide whose attributes contribute positively to society and whose do not. Whoever is deemed a danger to the state faces the long arm of the law as an extension of the state’s punitive authority, which is today often exerted against Muslims. Following this introduction Razack moves on to proving her argument.

In the political and social context of the United States following 9/11 … the public was inundated with newspaper images and television broadcasts constantly displaying the horror of that day, leading many to view Islam negatively.

Chapter 1 explores how the defense of Christianity has found its most salient thrust in banning books and omitting Islam from elementary school curriculum on world religions. To demonstrate this, Razack considers the case of a small school district in Northern California in 2001, noting how teachers encouraged students studying Islam to memorize a portion of the Qur’an and to understand fasting and prayer. In the political and social context of the United States following 9/11, however, the public was inundated with newspaper images and television broadcasts constantly displaying the horror of that day, leading many to view Islam negatively. One parent from the district thus took umbrage at the thought of what appeared to be the indoctrination of her child.

The lower court and the Court of Appeals found no violation on the part of the school, but broadcast and social media did. While the family lost the case, it became a foundational reference for several organizations, including the Thomas More Law Center, in the fight for Christian rights. These groups continue to argue that, while Islam presents itself as a religion of peace, 9/11 proves that it is not. On the opposite side, groups such as CAIR (the Council of American-Islamic Rights), which was established to protect the rights of American Muslims, are continuing targets of attacks that Muslims are un-American.

In chapter 2 Razack examines the gendered dimension of this hostility through the lens of women’s dress, a frequent point of contention in perceptions of Muslims in Western nations. Women’s dress in particular has long been an indication of national origin in the West. For instance, the face coverings that some Muslim women choose to wear as a modest article of clothing immediately set them apart as Other in Western societies where to cover one’s face seems unthinkable unless one is sick or a criminal. Razack continues her investigation of the ongoing banning of Muslim women’s head coverings across the West in the third chapter.

Today, the question becomes, is terrorism an inheritable gene?

Chapter 4 turns to consider racialization in greater historical depth, opening with the chilling reminder that five hundred years ago, the Spanish Inquisition turned religions into races, specifically for Jews and Muslims. She points to questions of how one inherits culture, religion, and political position, which arose during the inquisition. It was then, and is now, presumed that no matter how long a group of people live in another culture and among other faiths that they will supposedly revert to the culture and faith of their ancestors when given an opportunity. Today, the question becomes, is terrorism an inheritable gene?

While the author’s position in this examination of anti-Muslim support for white supremacy is unique, her book could go even further in expounding her argument. For example, she could marshal far more evidence of anti-Muslim, anti-Black, or anti-immigrant animus. Although Razack does not claim that anti-Muslim animus is the only force bolstering the push for white supremacy, her argument is couched in the ambiguities of other emotional charges against the West, making it hard to discern what the real argument is. Her use of known and not well-known researchers complicates rather than clarifies. The mixture of peripheral feminist arguments with those of economists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists muddle the argument further.

This text is not for the general reading audience as it references selectively a wide range of disciplines and researchers and uses a rather viscous language that is sometimes difficult to penetrate. The author does, however, point to interesting historical events that can be used in making the case for a Western-led animus against Muslims, which today finds its home within white Evangelical Christianity’s bid for white hegemony. That the arguments against Muslims do not make sense contributes appropriately to the title because nothing has to.

Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Islamic Studies, Law & Society, Middle Eastern Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences

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Aminah B. Al-Deen is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at DePaul University. A prolific author and a nationally renowned scholar on Islam in the US, she founded the nation’s first Islamic studies program.

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