Tangled in Terror

Uprooting Islamophobia

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780745345413
• eBook ISBN: 9780745345437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

'Lyrical and uncompromising - Suhaiymah writes to disrupt' - gal-dem

Islamophobia is everywhere. It is a narrative and history woven so deeply into our everyday lives that we don't even notice it – in our education, how we travel, our healthcare, legal system and at work. Behind the scenes it affects the most vulnerable, at the border and in prisons. Despite this, the conversation about Islamophobia is relegated to microaggressions and slurs.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan reveals how Islamophobia not only lives under the skin of those who it marks, but is an international political project designed to divide people in the name of security, in order to materially benefit global stakeholders. It can only be truly uprooted when we focus not on what it is but what it does.

Tangled in Terror shows that until the most marginalised Muslims are safe, nobody is safe.

Chapter 1

A history of race-making: Inventing ‘the Muslim threat’

After the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the summer of 2020, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter uprisings across the world, institutions from body cosmetic companies to universities issued public solidarity statements. These often talked of tackling racism more urgently by no longer tolerating it. Such declarations symbolised the prevalence of the idea that racism is something institutions choose to tolerate, or not tolerate, and therefore that it is an outside force brought in by ‘bad apple’ individuals, rather than something already engrained within the normal working of things. This assumption leads many to believe that racism can be resolved through individualistic approaches such as increased awareness of unconscious biases, or by acknowledging our privileges.¹ But these solutions allow institutions, organisations and governments to proclaim themselves anti-racist without addressing how systematic exclusion, exploitation and oppression based on race are central and foundational to their working. This is not the result of ignorance, or a mistake; it is a convenient and reductive reframing of the racism at hand.

Individualising racism makes it almost impossible to discuss it as a system of power related to capitalism and colonialism. Instead, in the mainstream, racism is usually only acknowledged when it manifests in physical attacks or explicit verbal abuse – as the virality of countless graphic videos shows us. But racism is rarely acknowledged when it manifests in more regular ongoing violence such as intergenerational poverty, systematic exclusion from adequate healthcare and housing, and methodical exploitation of labour.

One consequence of this is that when I say that ‘Islamophobia is a form of racism’, people think only of so-called Islamophobic ‘hate crimes’, which are by no means insignificant, but more a symptom than a cause of Islamophobia. The other consequence is that people claim Islamophobia cannot be a form of racism because Muslims are a religious grouping, not a race. But what is ‘a race’? Clarifying this question is central to any anti-racism efforts, and there can be no meaningful uprooting of Islamophobia without engaging with the history of racism in the first place.

Common sense tells us that racism exists because different races exist. But the opposite is in fact more accurate: races were invented to facilitate and justify racism. There is no natural set of races that existed prior to people devising them. In fact, a central part of the project of European colonialism was the invention of races. Since colonialism was a process of dominating and subjugating to exploit and profit from the resources and labour of colonised lands and people, colonisers classified those people and places as naturally inferior races.² This masked theft, dispossession and genocide.

For example, in the 1830s the American physician, Samuel Morton, conducted measurements of human skulls to justify colonialism and slavery as somehow ‘natural’ due to the skulls of some ‘races’ being smaller than others.³ This was a project to not only classify distinct races as having distinct levels of intelligence or strength, but to place them in a hierarchy with white Europeans at the top. Rather than a product of nature, we must consequently understand racial categories as ideological tools developed to reinforce and justify racism, which was a part of justifying colonialism more broadly.

Enlightened racism and imagined Otherness

Like Morton, others also used scientific enquiry to mask their creation of racial hierarchy as neutral and objective projects. This was particularly common during the so-called Enlightenment period in Europe – in and around the 1700s – which is important to note because in popular discourse this era is celebrated as one in which progressive ideas of human rights and universal freedom were invented. We rarely speak about the fact that those ideas were formed within what was also the golden age of colonial white supremacy and capitalism; and that that means from their very inception, liberal ideals of freedom never extended to include enslaved and colonised people. In fact, much of the work to conceptualise race was undertaken to justify not extending those ideals to everyone.⁴

Racial hierarchy was theorised by many famous Enlightenment thinkers who are still widely loved today. For example, David Hume wrote, ‘There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white . . . No ingenious, manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences . . .’⁵ By asserting this, Hume not only constructed a racial hierarchy linked to intellectual and cultural superiority; he attributed an inherent lack of value to people without ‘white complexion’.

Similarly, Immanuel Kant asserted that ‘Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites’, attributing increasingly less value to ‘yellow Indians’ and other sub-categories of his own making. He also claimed all societies must therefore follow the same trajectory as Europe to advance.⁶ This theory of development is one we see frequently used in international aid and development projects today which continue to assign non-Europeans with not only inferior value, but as occupying an alternative time altogether: stuck in a past of primitiveness, lawlessness and religious superstition, while white Europeans are modern, constitutional and enlightened.

Many other thinkers from the Enlightenment period could be quoted to demonstrate the way racial hierarchy was invented. But what is crucial to recognise in these projects of race-making is that the various classifications of humanity created ‘whiteness’ as much as any other race. Whiteness was not constructed as simply a skin colour, instead, to this day it is an ideology of power, a mark attributed to valued lives and knowledge, and a context from which European theories of equality and freedom emerged. White European supremacy is therefore baked into ideas we hold as universal common sense, not something unique to Hitler and neo-Nazis. Far from it, in fact, white supremacy is the historical inheritance of European liberal democracies, and can be seen everywhere today from NGO work, to news media, to the assumptions that underpin law, policy, childcare, borders and more.

It is important to recognise that writers advancing notions of racial hierarchy were not part of an overarching conspiracy to invent racism, though. Instead, as Edward Said famously theorised in Orientalism, whether intentional or not, the way Europeans represented racial ‘Others’ through reports, letters, novels, travel journals, paintings, map-making, economic texts or anything else, produced a body of knowledge – a discourse – which actually said less about the lands and people they were supposedly about, than they did about how Europeans imagined themselves. Indeed, Said suggested their representations were more about defining ‘the West’ as the inverse of whatever ‘the East’ was, and for this reason, he referred to their project as constructing ‘the Other’.⁷

The writings of one of Britain’s foremost colonisers, Lord Cromer, exemplify this. In Westminster Abbey, central London, a white marble memorial reads, ‘To the glory of God and in memory of Evelyn Baring 1^st Earl of Cromer 1841–1916. Regenerator of Egypt.’ Referring to him in this way suggests that Cromer saved Egypt from degeneration. However, as colonial administrator of the Egyptian treasury, he reduced the capacity of Egyptian textile factories by refusing to protect them against British imports of Egyptian cotton that was spun in the UK then sold back to Egypt. Far from regenerating Egypt, these actions deindustrialised it and extracted all value from its economy to Britain.⁸ Cromer also underfunded Egypt’s education system and flogged, imprisoned and put to death those who resisted him. On top of this, in Britain itself Cromer was a strong opponent of women’s suffrage – in fact he was the first president of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage.

Considering this, it is ironic that Cromer wrote, ‘women’s status in Egypt as well as in all the Mohammadian countries hinders their development and advancement to be amongst the civilised nations.’⁹ His statement declared a disingenuous concern for ‘women’s status’ in Muslim countries to justify colonial oppression that actively worsened economic and educational conditions for women. Cromer also wrote that Egyptian women’s veils, rather than British subjugation, were a ‘fatal obstacle’ to Egypt becoming ‘civilised’.¹⁰ Such tropes and tactics will be familiar to readers because anxieties about Muslim women’s rights and dress are still used by those who have no serious concern about women’s well-being, to justify and conceal the violence of military occupations, policing and other oppressions that this book explores. Likewise, Muslims are still depicted by academics, journalists and governments as Others who do gender ‘wrong’ – whether through Muslim men being perceived as violent patriarchs, paedophiles or sexually frustrated ‘terrorists’; or through Muslim women being imagined as their victims, or deceptive and alluring accomplices. All these characterisations are rooted in the colonial imagination where, just as Said argued, claiming that racial Others were underdeveloped was actually about establishing Britain as ‘advanced’; and declaring ‘Mohammadians’ as misogynistic was a way of claiming Europeans were stalwarts of equal rights.

Clearly, constructing and attributing racial categories with different civilisational, intellectual, physical and human value was always political, and has been the work of centuries. No single theorist or coloniser produced racial hierarchy and it is important to note that their representations of colonised people and places were inconsistent, contradictory and sometimes even challenged at inception. Nonetheless, racial hierarchy has been a central ideological tool used by Europeans to facilitate geopolitical and economic projects of enslavement, exploitation and oppression. In this book I therefore use the terms ‘Europe’, ‘West’ and ‘Western’ not to suggest they are tangible or static entities, but to refer to them as constructs themselves that are the result of long histories of violence and dispossession.

Intolerant secularism

Most conversations about racism today overlook the way that secularism was also constructed as a part of white European supremacy. This is crucial to understand and linked to another key shift during the Enlightenment period: the idea that truth stemmed no longer from God, but from European men. Rene Descartes’s famous philosophical statement, ‘I think, therefore I am’, symbolised this. Being (I am), was no longer a result of God’s creation, but man’s own rationality (I think). The ‘I’ of the statement was not imagined as universal, though. As Nelson Maldanado-Torres argues, in the context of colonialism and racial hierarchy, the concept implied, ‘I think (others do not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable)’.¹¹ In simpler terms, as Yassir Morsi writes, it meant ‘I am white, therefore I think’ – a statement about racial Others being unable to think or hold knowledge.¹²

This was symbolic of a wider shift in which humanity would now be judged not by God, but by closeness to the ideal of the enlightened European, who would himself be the judge of it – able to replace God’s standpoint and neutrality over all beings. Enlightenment Europe’s claim to leave belief in God ‘behind’ in this way was crucial. It meant that classifying Others as religious, was just another method of designating their underdevelopment compared to Europe. The construction of racial inferiority has always been connected to how we understand and judge the category of ‘religion’ then.

This is better understood by looking at the history of secularism as an idea. Far from the claim that it is a condition of living free from the influence of religion, secularism invented the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Not what it is but what it does
• 1. A history of race-making: Inventing ‘the Muslim threat’
• 2. Never-ending pillaging in the name of international security
• 3. Who is safer when the nation is secure?
• 4. Racist prediction as public duty: Prevent
• 5. Whose parallel lives? Which British values?
• 6. The revolution must be counter-extremist: Co-opting resistance
• 7. Compromising Islam for patriotism: A secular state? A Western Islam?
• 8. Destroying life and hoarding wealth in the name of border security
• 9. The feminist and queer-friendly West? The patriarchal rest?
• 10. Islamophobia’s beneficiaries
• Conclusion: A safe world on our own terms