THE DUAL SECURITIZATION OF ISLAM IN AMERICA

Although there has been a long history of association in the US media and other domains of popular discourse between Islam and concepts that carry a negative connotation (e.g., terrorism, lack of democracy, oppression of women; see Said Reference Said1997), the aftermath of the September 11 attacks solidified these associations in the minds of a much broader swath of the American public. This same period also saw the advent of a new phase in the production of “Islamophobia” that was characterized by the idea that not only were militant Islamic movements outside the United States now the preeminent threat to national security, but that Muslims living inside the United States should also be regarded as potential sources of harm to both security and American values (Bilici Reference Bilici2012; Shryock Reference Shryock2010). For the first time, American Muslims were singled out as a group and subjected to a form of racialization premised on stark friend/enemy distinctions (Schmitt Reference Schmitt2007). What was distinctive about this approach was that it went beyond the various forms of ethnic and racial discrimination that many immigrants to the United States (e.g., Italians, Irish, Poles, Latinos) have faced over the years. Rather, and more in keeping with the precedents of McCarthyism, the treatment of Japanese during World War II, and suspicions raised in the past about American Catholics, the idea arose that American Muslims were agents of an external ideology that sought to infiltrate and/or cause harm to the United States. This trend was fed by and, in turn, reinforced by various developments in the legal and policy spheres whereby American Muslims were seen (both by themselves and others) as the primary targets of legislation such as the Patriot Act and various initiatives by law enforcement involving surveillance of American Muslim communities. Efforts by governments in the United States and Western Europe to explain various aspects of their domestic and foreign policies—particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—have focused on the threat of terrorism rather than Muslims or Islam at large. The cumulative effect of these various trends resulted in a public discussion of Islam in most Western countries framed primarily in terms of national security—a phenomenon described by some scholars as the securitization of Islam (Croft Reference Croft2012; Kaya Reference Kaya2012).

The latter part of this same decade—we can use the election of Barack Obama as an inflection point—saw a marked shift in this conversation. The ending of the war in Iraq and a perceived sense of progress on the part of the United States in degrading and dismantling the infrastructure and capacities of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network led to a diminution in the level of hysteria surrounding Muslims in the United States and imminent threats to national security. Yet the discourse on Muslims and security remained, taking on a significant new dimension. Although several incidents such as the Fort Hood shooting and the attempted attack on an airliner in Detroit—both in late 2009—kept alive the connection between Islam and terrorism, this layer of symbolic association was interwoven with a new emphasis on the idea that Islam posed some ontological threat to the American way of life. A series of events in 2010 and 2011—including threats by a pastor in Florida to burn copies of the Qur'an, controversy over plans to build what was claimed by some to be a mosque near the site of Ground Zero in New York City, congressional hearings focused on American Muslim communities, and a campaign to stop the introduction of Islamic law in the United States that culminated in several states passing ballot initiatives prohibiting shari'ah—all ushered in a renewed sense of Islam as not just a threat emanating from foreign terrorists but a potential source of ideational harm directly present in the United States itself. This phenomenon I call the “dual securitization” of Islam in America: an integrated and self-reinforcing form of bimodal discourse in which Islam and Muslims are seen as both a threat to the physical security of the United States as well as a threat to the foundational values of the republic. In other words, Islam functions as a compound security construct similar to “communism” during the Cold War (threat of nuclear weapons combined with an ideology antagonistic toward the American way of life).

THE GOVERNANCE OF MUSLIMS

The most important aspect of the post-September 11 US debate on Islam and Muslims—at least for scholars and teachers—has less to do with the politics that have arisen around Islam and more to do with the ways we have created knowledge about Muslims and even how we use terms like “Islamic” and “Muslim” as analytical and ontological categories. Here, I turn specifically to the approach to Islam adopted by the administration of Barack Obama from 2009. The new US president signaled very early in his tenure that he was committed to remedying the prevailing negative image of the United States held by many Muslims around the world in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and what the previous American administration had styled as a “Global War on Terror.” Addressing the Turkish parliament in April 2009, Obama sounded the keynotes of a new approach:

Here, then, is a shift in the US discourse on Islam whereby Muslims cease to be regarded as a source of potential harm to the United States and figure, instead, as potential partners in endeavors such as human development, economic growth, and the advancement of science. This vision received its most detailed treatment in the speech Obama gave in Cairo in June 2009, where he called for a “new beginning” in relations between the United States and Muslim communities around the world (Obama Reference Obama2009b). During the next two years, the US administration created or restyled a wide range of new programs—in entrepreneurship, education, science, and public diplomacy—focused on engaging Muslim communities around the world.Footnote ² At the US State Department, a new position, Special Representative to Muslim Communities, was created in the Office of the Secretary of State.

Although the political intent of these initiatives was to correct the approach of the G.W. Bush administration and to send a message to Muslims around the world that the United States sought their friendship and collaboration, the approach adopted by the Obama administration actually reproduced and solidified a sense of American exceptionalism vis-à-vis Muslims. No other world religion had ever been the specific target of US government outreach efforts, or earned the appointment of foreign policy officials dedicated to managing relations with its followers. “Muslim” came to function increasingly as a distinctive category of US policy, and, furthermore, one that carried ascriptive connotations. In other words, this policy approach—in defining its target audience by reference to religion—created the impression that one's Muslimness was the primary, all-encompassing identity through which 1.6 billion people in the world should be understood. This strategy had the effect of creating on the US geopolitical radar something like a quasi-operationalized ummah—a term referring to the world community of Muslims. Where US foreign policy traditionally regarded and treated individuals around the world as citizens of particular nation-states, this new trend affirmed the relevance and reality of a new category of transnational religious identity.

Viewed as a broad arc, the last 10 years of US government and political discourse on Islam can be thematized as the governmentalization of Islam. This emergent “governance of Muslims,” as I term it, has been associated with the constitution and consolidation of Muslims as a distinct object of policymaking and regulation.Footnote ³ This is seen in a wide range of governmental activities such as the Obama administration programs referenced earlier as well as previous efforts by the G.W. Bush administration not only to surveil “bad” Muslims but also to identify, support, and scale up the influence of “good” Muslims whose views were conducive to US policy preferences (Hardy Reference Hardy2011; Kaplan Reference Kaplan2005; Mamdani Reference Mamdani2005). A wide range of nongovernmental entities, from think tanks to polling research organizations, have played an ancillary role by creating new forms of qualitative and quantitative knowledge about Muslims qua Muslims through various demographic, survey, and policy studies (Esposito and Mogahed Reference Esposito and Mogahed2008; Pew Research Center 2009). The net effect of this effort—some of it undoubtedly political, some of it simply responsive to a changing discursive climate, and some of it trying to promote a positive image of Muslims—has been to create a state of affairs in the American public sphere in which Islam and Muslims do not function simply as words referring to a world religion and its followers. Rather, these terms now define a “problem cluster” that bears on various issues from the nature of American identity to the security of the homeland and its values, to US foreign policy and American conduct around the globe.

PRACTICING COUNTEREXCEPTIONALISM: ISLAM AND THE ARAB UPRISINGS

Therefore it is inevitable that the Arab uprisings—particularly as regards the role of Islam therein—would be parsed through this prevailing framework of governmentalized Islam as it came to be debated by US policymakers and the American public. Ongoing US engagement in a number of settings in which Islam seemed to be an operative political factor—for example, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, Islamic extremism in Pakistan, a nuclear-prone Iran under religious leadership, and Al-Qaeda franchises in Yemen and Africa—combined with a continuing debate about Islam and Muslims in the United States to prime a discursive environment in which the uprisings were received by many Americans as just the latest manifestation of a politicized Islam at odds with US interests and values. So, for example, new discussions about the role of shari'ah law in the Middle East were viewed by many in the United States as closely related to controversies about shari'ah in America. Particularly when it became clear that Islamic social forces would reap a significant political dividend from the downfall of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, much of the US policy debate—particularly as seen from the US Congress—was about how to manage something akin to Islamic revolutions in countries previously closely allied with the United States.Footnote ⁴ To some extent this talk was a legacy of a longer standing orientation toward Islamist parties in which they were presumed to be persona non grata to US foreign policy (however see Mandaville Reference Mandaville2012 for a countervailing perspective). My contention, however, is that much of the US reaction and response to recent events in the Middle East needs to be seen in the light of the preexisting American framing of Islam and Muslims described previously—that is, as part of a continuum that includes September 11 rather than as a significant regional rupture that requires a fundamentally different US approach to the Arab world.

Addressing the broader issue of American exceptionalism toward Islam is a tectonic project, perhaps generational in scope given where we are today. That said, the Arab uprisings provide teachers of political science with an opportunity to challenge and complexify some of the prevailing assumptions that accompany this exceptionalist discourse on Islam—and Islamists in particular. Therefore I conclude by highlighting three possible strategies for doing this.