The Aetiology of American Islamophobia

Afpakwar | By Arshad Zaman

E PLURIBUS UNUM – The Motto Carried by the American Eagle.

America subscribes to the ‘melting pot’ rather than the ‘mosaic’ model of unity—seeking unity from diversity (E pluribus unum: Out of many, one), rather than unity in diversity. Confronted by the ‘Other’ the American way is to absorb or to eliminate; living with diversity is not an option. Historically, race (Native, and African Americans) and ideology (communism) have raised the most profound anxieties among Americans. Muslims have come to be seen as being burdened by both.

Until the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, which led to a spike in oil prices, Americans had been scarcely aware of Islam and Muslims. They knew of “Arabs” (pronounced to rhyme with ‘Ahab’, the hero of Moby Dick), as a race—a primordial unit of American thought—of sensuous women (as in the popular 1960s TV serial, I dream of Jeannie) and unruly men, who lived in deserts under which there was oil that Americans needed, and who like Goliath terrorised the little David that was Israel.

In 1973, however, as Americans queued at petrol stations, Walter Cronkite informed them on CBS Evening News that Arabs were “Mawz-lems” who subscribed to a religion, “Iz-lum” (that is how he, and following him Americans until recently, pronounced these words). That many Arabs are Christians (1.5 million in America today) as well as Jews was and is even today a well kept secret from most Americans; as is the lack of church and clergy in Islam, and the differences between shi`a and sunni Muslims.

Although the Nation of Islam was a precedent, mainstream Islam did not emerge on the radar of American consciousness until the 1979 revolution in Iran, and even then it was seen more as a curiosity than a menace. The revolution blindsided the Americans; they simply could not understand why a ‘mediaeval cleric’ would be preferred by Iranians to a modern, progressive ruler, the Shah of Iran. The detail, that the CIA had engineered a coup in 1953 [for CIA’s account, see New York Times; also, GWU] against a democratically elected secular government to install him, a dictator, was largely forgotten.

Blindfolded American hostages being paraded before the public by their Iranian captors, November 5, 1979. © Bettmann/Corbis.

In America, the Iranian revolution was spun not as a triumph of democracy over dictatorship, but as that of Islam over Modernity. Especially maddening was the Ayatollah’s insistence on his own categories, neither accepting nor rejecting the dichotomies on offer to non-Western peoples. Reflecting this perplexity, “Who lost Iran?” became an abiding genre of American journalism—Time magazine of 4 December 1978 carried an article of this title, as did the American Thinker of 27 February 2010. To add fuel to fire, on November 4, 1979 some Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy and ended up taking 52 Americans hostage, until January 20, 1981.

Walter Cronkite

It was this traumatic “hostage crisis” covered night after night on prime time television, more than the revolution itself that provided Americans with their archetypes of Islam and Muslims. ABC—one of only 4 TV channels that existed in those days before cable and Internet—ran a nightly special, America Held Hostage; and Walter Cronkite added to his signature sign-off “that’s the way it is” a running count of the number days the hostages had been in captivity: “on this, the four hundred and fifth day” etc. In his 1981 book, Covering Islam, Edward Said documents the birth of the reductionist racist caricature of Muslims and Islam that emerged. By 1990, a Yale professor of Pakistani-Welsh descent, Sara Suleri, would say that “the only form of licensed racism today is anti-Muslim racism.”¹

This popular anti-Muslim racism acquired intellectual respectability during the 1990s. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 both altered the balance of power in the Middle East and threatened the future of the military-industrial-financial complex in America. A Christian-Zionists alliance, aided by Israeli intelligence, re-cast the Palestinian uprising (intifada) against brutality and occupation, as Muslim terrorism against democratic Israel. Further, tapping into an abiding American phobia, an ‘–ism’ was added to Islam, to create ‘Islamism’ as the new Communism. While the manufacture of Islamism fulfilled a vital need of Christian soldiers and statesmen for a new enemy, to fit the role Islam itself had to be re-imagined. By the end of the 1990s, a good Islam (a faith–not unlike modern Protestantism) had been separated from a bad Islam (an ideology—at once political and militant) [see here].

A recent photo of Ishmael Reed and Tennessee Reed. (Courtesy: Red Room)

“9/11” acted as rainfall on seeded ground as America found a new bête noire. On October 10, 2001 the New York Times reported that “Black New Yorkers joke among themselves about their own reprieve from racial profiling,” as “flying while brown” has replaced “driving while black” in the language of racial grievance. In the December 7, 2001 issue of Time magazine, African-American novelist Ishmael Reed wrote, “Within two weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, my youngest daughter, Tennessee, was called a dirty Arab, twice.”[See Moustafa Bayoumi.] In a February 10, 2008 New York Times book review, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, discussing racial profiling, dispensed with an African-American example, “nearly all of us have a civil liberties threshold: Imagine Pakistani madrassa graduates lining up at airport security; race matters in such cases, and need involve no animus.” In the ongoing 2010 Census in America, a new race has been added: “Pakistani”!

In sum, race is the essential substance onto which Americans graft all the attributes—like religion, or the propensity to violence—that constitute an individual, and a people. This essential negritude of Muslims, and the deliberate misreading of Islam as Islamism–laughable as the notion is to Muslims, an ‘ideology’ bent on world conquest (like communism)–requires that Muslims re-construct Islam to accept the moral–as opposed to the military, technological, or economic–superiority of the white race, or else accept exile, or death. This has profound consequences not only for America, but for the rest of the world.

An abbreviated version of this article appeared in the Express Tribune, on 17 June 2010.