Rachel Gillum’s Muslims in a Post-9/11 America: A Survey of Attitudes and Beliefs and their Implications for U.S. National Security Policy explores the consequences of counterterrorism and counter-violent extremism (CVE) policies for Muslim Americans’ identity, sense of national belonging, and trust in law enforcement. Early in the introduction, Gillum evocatively states that “the tremendous amount of resources put toward tracking…Muslim American communities may have actually been counterproductive in making the country safer and eroded confidence in American institutions” (p. 2). This key insight is explored through interviews and analysis of data from an original survey of Muslim and non-Muslim Americans—the Muslim American National Opinion Survey; MANOS–in 2013. The survey allows for a comparison of both communities’ attitudes toward political violence and the perceived legitimacy of security responses. Her findings suggest that the most socially and politically integrated Muslim American citizens are actually less trusting of US institutions, which has significant implications for policies addressing security issues through community integration and political buy-in.

In the first three chapters, Gillum provides a detailed account of the sociodemographics of Muslim Americans, exploring in-group dynamics across ethnic, racial, and denominational spheres, while connecting them to broader national security concerns. The first two chapters survey the basic assumptions about Muslims Americans underlying much of CVE policy—for example, that Muslims are more sympathetic to religious terrorism—and compare them with data from the MANOS survey and other empirical sources. Gillum reveals that Muslim Americans’ tolerance of political violence is not significantly different from other groups in US society. She further demonstrates that the community is well integrated into the broader culture with high levels of attachment to their American identity. At the same time, chapter 3 also demonstrates that most Muslim Americans still feel a heightened level of collective threat due to the social and institutional othering they experience, and they report a significant distrust of law enforcement.

The primary analytical contribution of Muslims in Post-9/11 America is found in chapters 4 and 5, where Gillum presents the results of survey experiments capturing Muslim Americans’ expectations of and willingness to assist US law enforcement. Gillum’s findings show that, in contrast to foreign-born Muslim immigrants and noncitizens, US-born Muslims are less likely to expect law enforcement to treat Muslims fairly. Furthermore, the majority of Muslim Americans are also less likely to voluntarily assist police in criminal investigations when the suspect is a Muslim, with the important exception of Black Muslims. The difference between racial groups of Muslims allows Gillum to engage in a spirited discussion on the distinct experiences of the Black Muslim minority and why, in so many cases, they represent an outlier even within the Muslim community. For example, she finds that “mainstream Black Muslims are the least likely to believe that the use of violence to oppose US influence can be legitimated” (p. 166). At the same time, Black Muslims frequently felt that the post-9/11 environment was “even harder” for them due to discrimination based on their intersectional identities of being both Black and Muslim. Still, many Black Muslims felt that they “can be effective liaisons between police and the Muslim American community and may want to help to ensure that Muslim suspects are treated fairly” (p. 165)—a rather surprising and complicated finding in light of recent protests against police brutality against racial minorities.

Although Muslims in a Post-9/11 America offers many scholarly insights, it does have some conceptual and methodological limitations. The construction and distribution of an original survey to a hard-to-reach population, as well as the insights gleaned from it, represent a substantive contribution to the scholarship on religion and politics. However, the absence of the survey instrument in an appendix makes it challenging to understand how important concepts were measured and constructed, beyond the brief discussions in relevant chapters. In a few instances, underspecified concepts, such as collective threat and integration, confuse the mechanisms that inform Gillum’s quantitative results. Based on her descriptions in the text, we identified instances where concepts were mis- or underspecified in a way that could affect Gillum’s statistical models and, ultimately, her conclusions.

For example, the concept of collective threat, which plays a critical role as an explanatory mechanism for the variance in expectations of and cooperation with law enforcement, is underspecified. Gillum defines collective threat as the feeling of attachment to a group and the likelihood to perceive and experience group-based discrimination. She measures it using three indicators in which respondents are asked to agree or disagree with the following statements: (1) Being a member of my religious community is important to my life; (2) I am treated with less respect than other people because of my religion; and (3) Americans are hostile toward my religious group. She then links this measure of collective threat to respondents’ perception of both informal and official discrimination. Gillum could have made stronger claims about the differential effects of informal versus formal discrimination if she had included multiple measures of group threat coming from different sources (the public, commercial actors, the police, the TSA, the military, governmental officials, and so on). A more nuanced approach would allow Gillum to confidently distinguish whether Muslim Americans see society, the government, or law enforcement as greater barriers to trust and cooperate with law enforcement.

Gillum also identifies integration as an important mechanism for explaining differential expectations of and cooperation with law enforcement between US-born and foreign-born citizens. Throughout the book Gillum depicts integration as a linear process over time and across generations (see the work of Alejandro Portez for a more nuanced consideration of integration), which perhaps inadvertently leads her to present foreign-born individuals as being naïve about the government, customs, and culture of their host society. Gillum then links this idea of integration to her measurement of perceptions of collective threat and relies on place of birth and naturalization status as proxy measures of integration. These methodological and conceptual leaps make Gillum’s discussion of the mechanisms underlying the connection between collective threat and a lack of trust in US institutions inferential, rather than empirical.

A significant strength of Gillum’s work in Muslims in a Post-9/11 America is her triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data. However, although Gillum describes her survey and quantitative models in the text, she neglects to use a consistent methodology to analyze her qualitative data. The impressive number of interviews (182, 43 of which were open-ended survey responses) is a rich source of information, but it is not obvious how the qualitative data were analyzed or coded, and there is little overt discussion of how frequently key concepts—such as collective threat—appear in the transcripts of the interviews. Gillum describes two distinct groups of interview subjects: Muslim community leaders and a convenience sample of contacts. Interview data are considered alongside material from topical conferences and workshops and interviews with government agencies. In the text, it is not always clear which type of respondent is speaking, making it harder for the reader to evaluate what role the social status and personal stake of a respondent plays in driving Gillum’s findings. Women are also significantly underrepresented in her interviews (only 29% of the sample), which challenges the degree to which insights from these elite interviews can be generalized to the broader Muslim community.

Finally, given the often-gendered nature of threat perception and the important public-facing role of Muslim women, the book would have benefited from incorporating a gendered lens alongside the existing security focus. Our own work demonstrates the way the headscarf, as an unambiguous marker of Muslim identity, has made women, for better or worse, the public representatives of Islam. We found that many women embrace this role because they understand that Muslim men are more likely to be perceived as a security threat. Nevertheless, a number of scholars have demonstrated that wearing a headscarf is associated with discrimination and heightened threat perception. Furthermore, Muslim women (especially covered Muslim women) are often the explicit targets of integration efforts, based on assumptions about traditional gender roles within Islam, which would necessarily affect their trust of political and especially security institutions, broadly conceived.

Overall, we find Muslims in a Post-9/11 America offers a significant contribution to the broader field of political science and the study of religion and politics through its ground-breaking focus on the Muslim American experience with law enforcement and their treatment by police. In the post-9/11 environment, Gillum demonstrates that the social and cultural fabric of US society challenges Muslim American identity through acts of prejudice and discrimination, as well as enhanced institutional surveillance and suspicion. Nevertheless, Muslim Americans willingly participate in keeping America safe. In particular, the empirical finding that Black Muslim Americans see themselves as a bridge between law enforcement and their fellow Muslim Americans is intriguing, as is their greater willingness than other Muslims to assist law enforcement. This unexpected finding deserves further investigation, especially in light of the current protests against police brutality and the experiences of the Black Lives Matter movement.