Case Study: Finding The Good Muslim
This case study appears as part of the post: The Second Doctrine: US Exceptionalism.
It surprisingly took National Geographic Magazine until 2018 to turn its attention to the US's Muslim communities. And when it did, it whitewashed the post-9/11 US from the Islamophobic social, cultural, and political space that it is into a Muslim utopia of freedom, liberty, self-expression, and achievement. But first, some background details because it is a history that the media deliberately erases. The US has long maintained a vast political, economic, military, and intelligence footprint in the Middle East. Moreover, events such as the discovery of oil in the Middle East in the 1950s, the post-WWII diplomatic and military confrontations because of the support for Israel, the oil crisis of the 1970s, the aftermaths of the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the military invasion of Iraq in 2003 are central to political, economic and social development in the US itself.
For at least the last 100 years, Muslims and Arabs, whether the US wants to admit it, have been significant players in defining US historical, social and political developments. But not in a way that the US can be proud of or integrate into its historical and social narratives. The Muslims and Arabs have never entirely capitulated to US domination or accepted the repression of their cultural worlds and political aspirations. It is, however, a remarkably sordid history.
[There are just too many books to mention, but some noteable ones include: Jack Shenker, The Egyptians: A Radical Story, The New Press, 2017; Eric Walberg, Islamic Resistance to Imperialism, Clarity Press, 2015; Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America, Minnesota University Press, 2012; Elizabeth F. Thompson, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020; Salim Yaqub, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.–Middle East Relations in the 1970s, Cornell University Press, 2016; Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism, Zed Books, 2012; Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the U. S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, Beacon Press, 2014; Ian Johnson, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade, 2010; Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Metropolitan Books, 2006; Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom; Myth-making on the Saudi Oil Frontier, Verso Books, 2009; Karine V. Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921, The University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, Public Affairs, 2020; ].
Its unquestioned support for Israel has required it to undermine Arab political aspirations and misrepresent them as fundamentalist religious extremisms. It has also required the dehumanisation and demonisation of Muslims in the US. Representing the Arabs and Muslims as deviant, violent, calculating, fundamentalist, misogynist, and untrustworthy has helped silence criticism of US interventionism, militarism, and support for compliant dictatorships in the Middle East. [Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the U. S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, Beacon Press, 2014; Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, Vintage Books, 1992].
Muslim life in post-9/11 USA has been one of fear, anxiety, insecurity, and uncertainty. A life lived in silence, compliance, and obedience for fear of deportation, harassment, or imprisonment. Muslim political speech has been criminalised, and those expressing outrage at US militarism and genocidal violence in the Middle East are labelled as “terrorist sympathisers” and carried off to prison. [Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! : Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror, Verso Books, 2015; “Material Support/Thought Crimes Prosecutions,” National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, online at https://www.civilfreedoms.org (last accessed, April 2021); Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson, “When the FBI Knocks: Racialized State Surveillance of Muslims,” Critical Sociology, Vol. 45(6) 2019:871–887; Jeanne Theoharis, “My Student, the Terrorist,” The Chronicle for Higher Education, April 3, 2011; Alex Delmar-Morgan, “Islamic charities in UK fear they are being unfairly targeted over extremism,” The Guardian, July 20, 2015; “Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity: Chilling Muslim Charitable Giving in the ‘War on Terrorism Financing’,” Report American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), June 2009; ].
As the US continues its violence and massacres in the Middle East, it perpetuates a form of domestic terror against its Muslim populations, ensuring that they do not veer into speaking. Muslim life in the US is one in which “every day, normal behaviour becomes suspicious when practised by US Muslims, which would otherwise be acceptable, mundane, and unremarkable for ordinary white Christians.” [Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson, “When the FBI Knocks: Racialized State Surveillance of Muslims,” Critical Sociology, Vol. 45(6) 2019:871–887].
Today, the many different “Muslim” communities in America are aware of the precarity of their place in the country and the fragility of the “citizenship” they carry. [Besheer Mohamed and Gregory A. Smith, “U. S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream,” Pew Research Center, July 26, 2017]. In the wake of America’s counterinsurgency and surveillance tactics in the colonies, “Muslimness” has become racialised with “cultural markers associated with Muslimness (forms of dress, rituals, languages, etc.)…turned into racial signifiers.” [Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar, “Race, Surveillance, and Empire,” March 21, 2015.] It is not a good time to be a Muslim in America unless you are a “good Muslim,” willing to praise US society and perpetuate its myth as a place of ethnic equality, freedom of speech, gender justice, economic liberty, and democracy. The “good Muslim” is the one who may use his mouth to speak in the voice of the State.
This is the Muslim who turned up in the National Geographic Magazine article Titled “How Muslims, Often Misunderstood, Are Thriving in America.” The article offers us a carefully curated view into the “good Muslim” in America. National Geographic Magazine has a unique place and credibility in American culture because of its “connections to the state, national identity, and science.” [Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic, The University of Chicago Press, 1993:5–7]. It presents the world to the Americans from a “white, educated, middle-class” worldview with an “upbeat and magnanimous style” that “invites them to look out at the rest of the world from the vantage point of the world’s most powerful nation.” [Leila Fadel, “How Muslims, Often Misunderstood, Are Thriving in America,” National Geographic Magazine, May 2018]. Its writers are committed to seeing the world only through cultural, historical, scientific, and environmental frames and are equally determined never to speak about political, military, or economic issues.
So who is the “good Muslim”? She is the one who “integrates” into the American way of life, mouths the values and ideals of its liberalism, helps launders American imperialism as “a force for good” or “democracy,” and repeatedly supports “interventions” as a way to bring “rogue” nations into “modernity.” She is the compliant, the “model immigrant” who “arrives” in America and finds freedom and liberty. She is the “Muslim” who regurgitates and relives America’s founding myths of a “nation of immigrants” that belie its actual history in white settler violence, Indigenous genocide, and chattel slavery. The “Good Muslim” is sufficiently “Muslim,” but with an Islam that is only ever an exotic cultural or individual identity. She is apolitical and speaks through individualism, consumerism, and careerism. As Kundnani pointed out, focusing on “good Muslims” is a tactic of silencing and disassociating America from its acts of violence abroad. [Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror, Verso Books, 2015:273].
It is a “Muslim” constructed to serve the interests of the imperial state. As Rastegar has argued:
Contrary to many sociological conceptions of the United States as a secular state that is neutral and non-interfering with regard to religion, there is emerging evidence that the state is seeking to constitute religious identities tied to patriotic citizenship, promote particular religious meanings and foster an ‘American Islam’ in the service of the US-led ‘War On Terror’…The United States presents itself as a place of tolerance where ‘true’ Islam can thrive. However, in producing this image, and implicitly promoting specific religious positions, the United States proves itself to be invested in constituting an ‘American Islam’ in opposition to the other ‘enemy’ version of Islam. In this process, those who do not abide by a state-supported definition of Islam are constructed as anti-modern, un-American, and potentially dangerous. [Mitra Rastegar, “Managing ‘American Islam’: Secularism, Patriotism And the Gender Litmus Test,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 10:4, 2008:455-474].
We are introduced to “Muslim” subjects that have been carefully curated. We meet a former Marine sergeant, a pastry chef, an Elvis impersonator, a Sufi practising a “peaceful” Islam, a professional football player, a radio producer, a journalism student, a police officer, a Palestinian entrepreneur, and more. “Muslim communities in America are thriving,” we are told, because of their successful integration into America’s commercial, pop, and consumer culture. “Mattel™ has even debuted a Muslim Barbie™,” the writer gushes, suggesting that there could not be a more significant indicator of Muslim “integration” in America than their acceptance into its consumer culture.
[Coincidently, Inderpal Grewal has an interesting discussion about the introduction of Barbie dolls into India and how Mattel, the company that produces Barbie dolls, “uses multiculturalism to commodify race and gender difference. Relying on the work of anthropologists…on the anthropometry of Barbie…showed that the African American Barbie had almost the same body as the “regular” Barbie, except that its back was angled differently…[For] Mattel, difference was merely a matter of costume.” But more importantly, she points out how “Barbie in a sari became meaningful in new ways. It enabled South Asian immigrants in the US to give their children what they wanted…but with a difference that recalled their “traditional” culture–and important aspect of the formation of diasporic ethnic identify in a high racialized America.” Grewal’s analysis offers an interesting consumer/capitalist frame for understanding the development of transnational and diasporic identities among “Muslim” immigrants to America. From Inderpal Grewal, Transnational American: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, Duke University Press, 2005:107–111].
The people we meet confirm American generosity, diversity, and “melting-pot” mythologies. “I feel I live here with more freedom and courage than anywhere else in the world,” says Elham Karajah, a nurse. Fatima Kebe, an industrial engineer from Dearborn, Michigan, coos, “I am thankful to live in a country that supports freedom of religion.” Then there is the man from Gaza, “born into a poor family,” who came to America, met a white American woman, fell in love, got an education, got himself a large house with a pool, and became an entrepreneur. “I wanted to show that not all Muslims are terrorists,” we hear a Palestinian-American man say, revealing how people internalise settler logic, recasting resistance to settler colonial crimes as “terrorism.” [Leila Fadel, “How Muslims, Often Misunderstood, Are Thriving in America,” National Geographic Magazine, May 2018].
The photographs accompanying the article are bright, colourful, and suitably diverse, showing “Muslims” in prayer, play, parenting, and professionalism. All the characters are either visibly identifiable by their “Muslimness” (hijabs, skill caps, prayers, rituals) or identifiable by their non-Muslimness/secularism as they are shown taking part in “American” traditions of pizza, hip hop, parties, fashion shoots and even, joining the US armed forces. We see religious devotion, professional determination, and mild debauchery, covering what the magazine believes is the acceptable spectrum of Muslim lives in the USA. We can see the depiction of differences in the photographs that illustrate the article. The photographer’s eye uses the same social, cultural, religious, and ethnic markers to identify “Muslims” as the US surveillance state–hijabs, skull caps, mosques, religious rituals, community centres, and neighbourhoods. That is, she operates with a reductive and limited definition of what qualifies as a photographable “Muslim” subject, prioritising those that most stand out for their identifiable “Muslimness.” She finds what she is looking for, i.e., the difference. She does this not only when visiting the mosques or prayer groups but also when she photographs the “secular,” who is shown in circumstances and situations the reader can easily associate with secular American culture, hence not “Muslim” culture. She offers “Muslims” becoming “American,” which is the underlying theme of the article, by showing us an Elvis impersonator, a US marine, a very typical firefighter, and a candidate for governor. Trajectories of “integration,” which are otherwise equally trajectories of disappearance.
Despite the heavy-handed and syrupy image of American social perfection, the ghosts of America’s imperial geography–its war zones, its compliant dictatorships, its settler-colonial allies–haunt the spaces between the words. We see and read about individuals from Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, yet we read nothing about them and their reasons for “arriving” in the US. Their histories and memories are carefully excised and begin only after arriving in America and after their “success.” The silences–about war crimes, about millions dead and displaced, about occupation, torture, renditions, drone killings, indefinite detentions, surveillance, deportations, and entrapment–and how these experiences inform and define the life of the diverse, complex, varied, and vastly different Muslim communities in America in American, are never considered. The writer finds the “Muslims” who stand outside history and politics and become “individuals” cleansed of political and ethical concerns, trapped within their religion as identity and the USA as their geography. At one point, the writer compares her family story to a man from Gaza. Learning that he is married to Heidi, a white American woman, and has two daughters and a son, she reflects and states:
This family reminds me of my own. My father, from Lebanon originally, also came to the United States for an education and a better future, as Ajrami did. My mother was a Unitarian Universalist, like Heidi, and she met her future husband in college and converted. My parents have raised five ambiguously tan American Muslim kids. [Leila Fadel, “How Muslims, Often Misunderstood, Are Thriving in America,” National Geographic Magazine, May 2018].
But she may share something far more than that. The man from Gaza is fleeing a US imperial geography. He has had to seek “a better future” because of the chaos, destruction, and violence created by Israel. This nation sits at the heart of the US imperial project in the Middle East and oversees an illegal, barbaric occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It is an occupation aided, abetted, and funded by the US. Lebanon, too, does not stand outside of this US imperial geography. It was the site of the first overt US military action in the Middle East. In 1958, US Marines poured out of their landing crafts onto the sands of Khalde Beach. Operation Beirut resulted from a panic created in US political corridors by Arab nationalism, a force they were determined to destroy. This was the groundwork for further US interventions in the region, including that in the second Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. [Bruce Riedel, Beirut 1958: How America's Wars in the Middle East Began, Brookings Institution Press, 2019].
The article acknowledges that Muslims "in America are living in a climate of hostility". Still, it quickly deflects any further discussion by blaming "anti-Muslim rhetoric from conservative commentators and politicians, including the president [Trump]." This is disingenuous at best and wrong at worst. Islamophobia in a post-9/11 American has become a veritable industry, funded and financed by powerful groups spewing out racist and reductive ideas about Islam, Muslims, and Arabs. [Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, Pluto Press, 2012]. However, conservatives are not the only ones to blame. US media, liberal and conservative, has peddled the worst generalisations and stereotypes about Arabs, Muslims, and Islam.
Writing in the late 1970s, Edward Said pointed out that US media's simplistic representations of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists, dictators, and oil tycoons were "thus contributing to the creation of widely held negative stereotypes that depicted Islam as 'medieval and dangerous,' as well as hostile and threatening to 'us.'" [Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How The Media and The Experts Determine How We See The Rest of the World, Vintage Books, 1997]. Muslims and Islam have predominantly been presented through the lens of terrorism and violence. A recent study revealed that nearly 61% of all articles published by the New York Times about Islam or Muslims are about terrorism, violent conflict, or war. At The Wall Street Journal, nearly 73% of all articles published about Islam or Muslims are about these same themes. [ Malia Nora Politzer and Antonia Olmos Alcaraz, “Covert Islamophobia: An Analysis of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Headlines Before and After Charlie Hebdo,” Comunicación y Sociedad, 2020, e7601, pp. 1-24].
Major US media normalise Islam and Muslims as violent, dangerous, and a threat to the nation. They create the widespread public acceptance of legal discrimination practices, mass deportation, surveillance, entrapment, harassment, and criminalisation, which have further enabled Islamophobic rhetoric, law, and life.
[ See Wadie E. Said, Crimes of Terror: The Legal And Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions, Oxford 2018; Irum Shiekh, Detained without Cause: Muslims’ Stories of Detention and Deportation in America after 9/11, Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011; Daryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, empire, and the challenge of solidarity, Stanford University Press, 2020; Shamshad Ahmad, Rounded Up: Artificial Terrorists and Muslim Entrapment After 9/11, The Troy Book Makers, 2009; Report: “Worlds Apart: How Deporting Immigrants After 9/11 Tore Families Apart and Shattered Communities,” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2004; Muzaffar Chisti, Claire Bergeron, “Post-9/11 Policies Dramatically Alter the US Immigration Landscape,” Migration Policy Institute (MPI), September 8, 2011; Petra Bartosiewicz, “NYPD Surveillance of Muslims Has Created a Climate of Fear,” The Nation, March 18, 2013; Rowaida Abdelaziz, “Michael Bloomberg’s Surveillance Of Muslims Sets Dangerous Precedent For His Presidential Run,” HuffPost, December 16. 2019; Glenn Greenwald, “Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?” The Intercept, February 26, 2015; Paul Harris, “Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI 'entrapment' questioned,” The Guardian, November 16, 2011; ].
They normalise them as anti-American and a threat to the “American way of life.” The "fear of Islam is tightly knit into the American fabric, and deeply rooted in its legal, political and popular imagination." They normalise "Muslims" as anti-American and a threat to the "American way of life." [Khaled A Beydoun, “Islamophobia has a long history in the US,” BBC News: Viewpoint, 29 September 2015]. The "fear of Islam is tightly knit into the American fabric, and deeply rooted in its legal, political and popular imagination." A normalisation of difference and framing anyone from a Muslim background through their religion creates this "tight-knit" fear. A society that has whitewashed its Christian fundamentalism into a "secularism," constructing the Other through a religious frame only sets them apart as antithetical to its norms. [Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press, 2003].
A “Muslim” with a modicum of knowledge of the post-9/11 “Muslim” experience knows better than to reveal her politics or reach for free speech rights. She knows better than to speak about her past and the threads of concern, care, anger, worry, doubt, anxiety, loss, and memory that still tie her to family, friends, and others in geographies left behind. She knows better than to speak about her anger, her humiliation, and the scars of the desperation that demand she maintain her silence. In the USA, where being a Muslim became a crime, where hundreds of thousands were deported, and others imprisoned for simply expressing the wrong political view, Muslims in the USA have learned to shut up and smile and become“model migrants.” By curating the voices that appear on the page, agents of violence become interlocutors, interpreters, and framers of the experience of the victims of their violence. US imperialism disappears behind feel-good stories, ahistorical representations, a disassociation of domestic reality from international interventionism, and amputating individual histories from imperial interventionism.
In the National Geographic imagination, individuals arrive in the USA of their own free will, "better themselves," and build a "better life." They face challenges but overcome them through individual struggle and optimism. History and memory begin only upon their arrival on the shores of the USA, and they are directed to speak of themselves only as individuals and only as "Muslims" working to "fit into" America. But this is a fantasy. Projecting your "identity" in reaction to a society that discriminates against you based on that same "identity" is an act of capitulation to the discourse of power. It is a surrender to the terms of "recognition" and acknowledgement defined by authority. The "good Muslim" is a surrender to US xenophobia.
The "good Muslim" exists only in relation to the "bad Muslim" and is constructed only in opposition to it and through the same frames used to create it. [Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, Olive Branch Press, 2013]. S/he lives only as long as US imperial paranoias and fears exist. The "bad Muslim" is the bogeyman that US imperialism and exceptionalism construct to justify its ongoing barbarism and fanaticism in the Middle East. And the US media are willing collaborators in the process, erasing and veiling the violence and anarchy of the US in the Middle East. As Anila Daulatzai and Sahar Ghumkhor point out, US imperial violence has "made itself so much at home; it is now peripheral to analysis", even when it comes to nations suffering directly under US military occupation or ongoing imperial wars. [Anila Daulatzai and Sahar Ghumkhor, “Damage Control: The Unbearable Whiteness of Drone Work,” Jadalliya, March 16, 2021].
It is not atypical to speak about the chaos, poverty, violence, and dysfunction in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq without mentioning US imperial projects, war, occupation infrastructures, military bases, puppet governments, death squads, torture centres, or military operations. The outcome can be a little short of comical, as when the New York Times recently worried that the withdrawal of US forces and an end to its illegal occupation would allow the country to fall back into the hands of the Afghans. [Julian E. Barnes, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, “Officials Try to Sway Biden Using Intelligence on Potential for Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan,” New York Times, March 26. 2021].
US exceptionalism as a force of good and US imperialism as a necessary act of good remain central to US media's normative worldview. It limits their ability to report on the world, and in particular, on regions cruelly distorted by the US imperial footprint, where they quickly become propagandists, apologists, and at best, mild critics complaining about "civilian casualties" or "loss of goodwill" rather than focusing on the original crime. They can periodically pen a piece about an "outrage" but carefully absolve the machinery of war and the executors of it, focusing instead on "rogue elements," "mentally disturbed" soldiers, or "errors of judgment." [Anila Daulatzai and Sahar Ghumkhor, “Damage Control: The Unbearable Whiteness of Drone Work,” Jadalliya, March 16, 2021; Matthew Aikens, “The A-Team Killings,” Rolling Stone Magazine, November 6th, 2013].
Or, they can write their outrage whenever someone dares point out that US imperial violence sits at the heart of so many armed resistance movements determined to throw off the yoke of their US and US-backed oppressors. "Representative Ilhan Omar appeared to equate US and Israeli' atrocities' with those of Hamas and the Taliban, prompting outrage at a time when her party needs unity to maintain its slim majority," the New York Times's Jonathan Weisman recently declared. [Jonathan Weisman, “Showdown Over Omar’s Comments Exposes Sharp Divisions Among Democrats,” New York Times, June 10, 2021]. Note the quotation marks around the word atrocity, suggesting that US and Israeli violence and murder of innocent, unarmed civilians cannot be categorised as the atrocity it is. The whitewash of US war crimes, crimes against humanity, and atrocities against civilians are repeatedly erased or recast in benign and liberal terms.