Claiming Belonging

Muslim American Advocacy in an Era of Islamophobia

Emily Cury

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501754005
  9781501753596
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501753602
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy

Claiming Belonging dives deep into the lives of Muslim American advocacy groups in the post-9/11 era, asking how they form and function within their broader community in a world marked by Islamophobia. Bias incidents against Muslim Americans reached unprecedented levels a few short years ago, and many groups responded through action—organizing on the national level to become increasingly visible, engaged, and assertive.

Emily Cury draws on more than four years of participant observation and interviews to examine how Muslim American organizations have sought to access and influence the public square and, in so doing, forge a political identity. The result is an engaging and unique study, showing that policy advocacy, both foreign and domestic, is best understood as a sphere where Muslim American identity is performed and negotiated.

Claiming Belonging offers ever-timely insight into the place of Muslims in American political life and, in the process, sheds light on one of the fastest-growing and most internally dynamic American minority groups.

1

DISCRIMINATION, ADVOCACY, AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

Muslim American advocacy is not new. It’s always been there. It’s always existed. It’s always going to be there. It’s part of our Muslim identity, and it won’t stop because Muslims are at the center of the justice space right now.… But Muslims today cannot identify themselves as being for Muslims and not for anybody else. You can’t do that. That’s not in the prophetic example, that’s not in the teachings, and that’s not who we are.

—Jaylani Hussein, author interview, October 20, 2018

Anti-Muslim prejudice has rather deep roots in American history. From its inception, the nation adopted the European Orientalist discourse through which Islam is constructed as a false religion and Muslims from around the world are racialized as Arab, nonwhite, and therefore biologically and morally inferior.¹ Until 1944, Muslims (along with other immigrants who did not meet the criteria of being “free white persons”) were barred from becoming American citizens. Arab Christians were also denied citizenship, partly due to their perceived cultural closeness and racial mixing with Muslims.² Thus, from early on, Muslims in the United States were racialized as nonwhite and, consequently, undeserving of full inclusion. And though they would eventually win the battle to be considered “white” by the US government, the designation did not shelter them from racial prejudice and institutionalized discrimination.³

Muslims today continue to be seen through the prism of race. Indeed, the best predictor of anti-Muslim bias is the existence of deep-seated racist beliefs about the inherent inferiority of African Americans and other marginalized groups.⁴ In their pioneering work measuring old-fashioned racist attitudes toward Muslim Americans, Lajevardi and Oskoii find that, among a set of more than one thousand survey respondents, Muslims rank as the most dehumanized group in the United States.⁵ These racist attitudes have real social, economic, and political consequences, as we know so well from the experiences of African Americans and other marginalized communities. Not surprisingly, Lajevardi and Oskoii find that racist attitudes toward Muslims are a strong predictor of support for policies that target and exclude them, such as patrolling “Muslim neighborhoods” and curtailing immigration from Muslim-majority countries, and of support for the politicians who espouse such policies, including President Trump.⁶ Muslims have been the source of much political debate and vitriolic rhetoric since the 2016 presidential campaign, a period that has also seen a steady rise in hate crimes against this group.⁷ For better or worse, citizens tend to take their cues from the political elites they follow and admire.⁸

As data on rising hate crimes against Muslims show, the intensification and mainstreaming of anti-Muslim bias has led to a number of important outcomes for American Muslims and the organizations that represent them. At a most basic level, these facts have cemented Muslims’ status as a major out-group in American society, an internal other, whose religious beliefs and practices make them inassimilable, “suspect citizens” deserving of surveillance and, when necessary, punitive action. However, being targets of suspicion, disdain, and aggression has also made Muslim advocacy organizations more visible, helped engender clear policy goals among them, and, consequently, strengthened a sense of shared Muslim American identity.

As we know from the experience of other panethnic groups in America, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the Muslim American identity marker. Groups are made, not given. And while the process of group making is influenced by both cultural and structural factors, the latter have been consistently found to be more significant.⁹ Sustained intragroup interaction, common economic interests, external threats, government policies, and membership in a community of faith all positively influence panethnic identity formation and collective action among marginalized groups.¹⁰ In the United States, where the race construct has historically been a major tool for structuring society and maintaining domination, external racialization tends to be the initial catalyst for panethnic group formation.¹¹ This largely punitive process occurs through acts of discrimination and antigroup violence, but it can also include positive incentives, such as affirmative action and state policies that inadvertently strengthen panethnic affiliations.¹² The emergence of Asian American panethnicity is a case in point. Violence, discrimination, and racial lumping by the larger society all played a role in the making of an Asian American identity, but so did official designation as a legal minority and eventual eligibility for affirmative action and other rights.¹³

When it comes to intragroup relations, the simple act of labeling and lumping people into a certain category has enormous consequences. The social psychologist Henri Tajfel was one of the earliest scholars to argue that prejudice was not the result of certain personality traits or authoritarian tendencies, as commonly assumed, but rather the result of an ordinary process of categorization. He and his student, John Turner, went on to elaborate these findings into the theory of social identity, a framework that has continued to guide scholarship on intragroup relations, prejudice, and discrimination. According to Tajfel and Turner, differentiating between an in-group (the group to which one belongs) and an out-group (external groups) helps individuals make sense of their sociopolitical environment and the other individuals who inhabit that environment. This social comparison is an important aspect of the process of individual and group identity formation, as people attempt to enhance their self-esteem by comparing perceived out-groups less favorably than their own.¹⁴ Accordingly, individuals always have an in-group bias in how they think of their own identities, and are less likely to trust, accept, and relate to those who seem to belong to other groups.¹⁵ In other words, we derive our sense of self from the social categories to which we belong, those from which we are excluded, and the sociocognitive characteristics we assign to each.

The American consciousness includes multiple out-groups, but not all are viewed in the same way, and their positions are not static. A group can certainly move from out-group status to become part of the majority group—Catholics, Irish, and Italians being prime examples. However, there are important distinctions between out-groups that help explain why, in time, some become more accepted by the broader society than others. In general, people are more likely to have a positive view of groups perceived to have tried to assimilate to the majority group, versus those seen to reject the norms and values of the broader society. Scholars have found that the position of Muslims tends to be especially precarious in America, as they are perceived as members of multiple out-groups:¹⁶ Muslim is a religious label, but Muslims have also been conceptualized as a monolithic and culturally deviant foreign group.¹⁷ For Muslims in the United States, “religion intersects with skin tone, gender, language, and nation of origin,” further influencing how the broader society perceives them.¹⁸ In short, Muslims in America are simultaneously a religious minority, whose practices are believed to deviate from the Judeo-Christian tradition; a relatively recent immigrant population with perceived inassimilable foreign cultural norms; and an ethnic minority, often understood through the prism of race.

Discriminated-against minorities in the United States are more likely to emphasize their dual identities (as both ethnic and religious minorities and citizens), especially when communicating with audiences who may question their belonging and identity claims. As Matt Barreto and Karam Dana argue, “perceptions that members of a group share common structural constraints is the foundation of any form of politicized collective identity.”¹⁹ An environment in which actual or perceived threat is heightened also increases voter mobilization as a means of defense.²⁰ Not surprisingly, then, periods of backlash against American Muslims, such as the 2016 presidential campaign, have resulted in their increased mobilization and political participation,²¹ a finding that is in line with the broader literature on minority activism.

In addition to these external threats, collective action and contestation are important drivers of group making.²² Indeed, panethnic organizations play an important role in framing collective grievances and presenting a unified agenda through their advocacy. However, their work and influence continue to be a source of much debate. Whose interests do these organizations represent, and whose do they ignore? Are the advocacy issues they choose to focus on a reflection of bottom-up pressures or top-down choices? Do they seek a radical transformation of the existing system that would benefit all marginalized groups, or do they seek simply to be accepted at the proverbial policy table? These questions are neither new nor unique to the Muslim American case. However, they are necessary to understand the still understudied role that Muslim American advocacy organizations play in framing and communicating a Muslim American collective identity.

Advocacy Organizations: Splits and Fissures

In her 2006 book on South Asian politics, Monisha Das Gupta argues that national-level panethnic Asian organizations played a formative role in the struggle for Asian American civil rights, but that they did so mainly through a discourse of assimilation, not one of “radical transformation.”²³ According to Das Gupta, most of the top-down, national-level organizations focused on demanding citizenship rights, consequently legitimizing the nation-state as the giver of rights and conforming to the trope of the model minority. But there were other panethnic Asian American organizations, operating predominantly at the local and grassroots levels, that rejected the notion that rights were based on citizenship, working instead to make room for all underprivileged and underrepresented groups in their communities, including noncitizens, undocumented people, the poor, working-class people, and LGBTQ people.

The split between minority organizations fighting for increased access and representation and those working to build the radically new society that Das Gupta theorizes is a divide I thought of often while writing this book. Some of the organizations I studied, such as MPAC, are clearly and proudly top-down policy organizations that believe change for the community will only come about through increased access and acceptance. Salam Al-Marayati, MPAC’s executive director, exemplifies this view. “Keith Ellison has a great quote,” he told me during one of our meetings in his Los Angeles office in late 2017. “If you’re not at the table, then you’ll be the menu of the table!” We both chuckled.

Al-Marayati was at ease, with his sleeves rolled up and his shirt slightly unbuttoned. The air conditioning in his office had broken down, so we decided to sit by the reception area near the entrance. From that vantage, I could see the large conference room next to us, where a group meeting was taking place. I overheard a woman’s voice coming from another room, as she tried to coordinate a meeting with someone on the phone. Given the local news trucks parked outside the building, delivering journalists who were there to interview Al-Marayati, I assumed the person on the phone was hoping to do the same. Interest in Muslim Americans had soared since the 2016 elections and the enactment of the Muslim ban, and individuals like Al-Marayati and the organization he represented were there to fill the gaps.

Despite the commotion around us, Al-Marayati was focused and seemed eager to talk. “The biggest mistake I think people make, is thinking that our [MPAC’s] work is civil rights,” he began, catching me slightly by surprise. Had he read the piece I had recently written, arguing that Muslim American organizations were working to fight Islamophobia and demand their community’s civil rights?²⁴ I nodded, trying to disguise my self-consciousness. He went on:

If you want to be a civil rights group, then join the civil rights movement, the ACLU, the National Immigration Law Center, the National Lawyers Guild. Those are all great civil rights groups. But they don’t work on policy per se. They work on cases of discrimination and then they hold government accountable. Policy work is more about changing the policy so that there aren’t as many of these problems that you see in the community involving discrimination and harassment.… And we do that through a stepladder approach. You have to first establish a presence, then gain respect, then gain acceptance, and only then you can become influential. But we are far from there yet.… So, I’d rather just leave civil rights work to the ACLU and then spend my energy meeting with the members of Congress, meeting with the White House, meeting with coalition partners and coming up with an action plan to change a policy.

Al-Marayati was clear in his view of how progress happens—gradually—and wanted his organization to have a narrow policy focus. I have found this divide between views on gradualist versus radical transformation to exist not just between Muslim organizations but also within them. Indeed, some of the fiercest critics of national-level Muslim American organizations I met were individuals deeply involved in them. During the meetings and events I attended at CAIR, for example, it was not unusual to hear invited speakers critique the organization’s record of advocacy around victims of the war on terror and its inclusion of Black Muslims, converts to Islam, or Muslim inmates in US prisons.

Maha Hilal, a scholar, grassroots activist, and lone advocate for Muslims imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, was one such guest. CAIR invited her to speak on a panel on Islamophobia in late 2018. During the di...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Discrimination, Advocacy, and Collective Identity
• 2. From Muslims in America to American Muslims
• 3. From the Patriot Act to the “Muslim Ban”
• 4. The Rise of the Muslim American Lobby
• 5. Domestic Advocacy
• 6. Advocating for the Muslim Ummah
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index