and they will say Chrysler, Ford, or GM. My dad worked at Ford. My uncle worked at GM. A lot of those jobs have gone now. Most Arab Americans went into small businesses: running gas stations, groceries, you name it.31
Today, despite the working-class black and Arab origins of American Islam, the mean family income of Muslims in the US is roughly similar to that of the population as a whole. For every cab driver, cleaner, or unemployed refugee there is a doctor or engineer living in the suburbs.32 Following reforms of immigration policy in 1965, the US government began to carefully admit selected immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Who was allowed to settle was fine-tuned to the needs of US capitalism, and the geopolitical imperatives of the cold war. High-flying students from the Third World were recruited to American campuses as part of a brain drain rivalry with the Soviet Union. Many, including significant numbers of Muslims, stayed on. The proportion of South Asians in America’s Muslim population increased. These settlers were destined for professional employment—the immigration selection process had already filtered out those without technical or professional skills of use to the US economy. But it was easy for Asians themselves and others to believe there was something inherent to “Asian culture” that made them a model minority in the US against which blacks and Latinos could be unfavorably compared.33
For the new Arab-American middle class there was the possibility of making what the law scholar John Tehranian has called a “Faustian pact with whiteness”: choosing to pass as white in order to avoid racial discrimination.34 The US government’s Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for identifying official racial and ethnic categories, formally defines people from “Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa” as white.35 Assimilation to a suburban American whiteness was an option for many Arab Americans, especially Christians and nonpracticing Muslims, but it came at a price: collective invisibility and loss of identity. In its own way, this invisibility amounted to a form of second-class citizenship within the emerging parameters of post–Civil Rights Act multiculturalism: hiding in the mainstream was a racial performance that threatened to fall flat if the actors raised political issues on behalf of their group. When Arab organizations turned to the question of Palestine, they quickly lost their whiteness and came to be seen as dangerous aliens.
In the late 1960s, Arab Americans formed organizations such as the Association of Arab-American University Graduates and the Organization of Arab Students to contest US support of Israeli aggression in the Middle East. These were immediately the target of the pro-Israel lobby, which portrayed Arab activists as spies and foreign radicals.36 In 1972, the Nixon administration issued a set of directives known as Operation Boulder that enabled the FBI and CIA to coordinate with the pro-Israel lobby, subjecting nonviolent Arab-American political activists to surveillance and harassment.37 Such surveillance continued into the 1980s, as media coverage of the Iranian revolution and conflict in the Middle East gave rise to new stereotypes of Arabs as dangerous fanatics. In 1985, Alex Odeh, a leader of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in California, was murdered in a bomb attack, likely carried out by the Jewish Defense League.38 Two years later, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) arrested seven Palestinians and the Kenyan wife of one of them in Los Angeles, accusing them of distributing subversive literature. The investigation turned up no criminal activity but, as foreign nationals, the “LA8” were nevertheless vulnerable to deportation proceedings due to their political allegiance, under the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act. Government documents made it clear the aim was to disrupt constitutionally protected political activity.39 The government continued its efforts to deport them until it finally gave up twenty years after the initial arrests. Around the time of the arrests, a secret INS document was leaked to the Los Angeles Times. It outlined plans for the roundup of up to five thousand foreign nationals suspected of links to “terrorism”—i.e., support for the Palestinian cause—and their incarceration in camps in Louisiana. The May 1986 document, entitled “Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan,” detailed how “selected aliens” from eight Middle Eastern countries who were suspected of being “engaged in support of terrorism” could be arrested on nebulous charges and deported on the basis of secret evidence.40
It was in the 1980s that the template of the war on terror was first hammered out: a fight against terrorism as ideological cover for state violence directed at those resisting US and Israeli power, whether they happened to be terrorists or not; a selective use of the term “terrorism” to exclude all those state and nonstate actors using violence to achieve our political ends (such as the Contras in Nicaragua); and a suturing of Israel and the US as defenders of “Western values” against “Islamic fanaticism.” The message worked perfectly for the US television news audiences. The idea that Israel might be involved in suppressing a legitimate movement for national liberation became unthinkable. Much of the groundwork for this approach was laid by Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli permanent representative to the United Nations, through a conference organized in Washington, DC, in 1984. In a subsequent collection of articles edited by Netanyahu—entitled Terrorism: How the West Can Win—a number of contributors argued that terrorist violence was endemic to Islam. For instance, the political scientist P. J. Vatikiotis claimed that terrorism is rooted in the “dichotomy, in fact, between the Islamic and all other systems of government and authority,” an ideological clash that is “clear, sharp, and permanent” and “marked by hostility.” While he accepted their “nothing in Islamic doctrine links it specifically to terrorism,” there is nevertheless “a general Islamic injunction that power belongs to the believers for use against unbelievers, and that the latter should be fought until the earthly order is established under Allah.”41 President Reagan reportedly decided to launch his attack on Libya in 1986 after reading excerpts from the conference in Time magazine.42 The Reagan administration was further encouraged by Claire Sterling’s book The Terror Network, which claimed the Soviet Union was conducting a secret campaign of terrorism against the West.43 When Reagan’s newly appointed CIA director, William Casey, told his analysts to investigate the book’s claims, he was unaware that its findings were in part based on earlier CIA disinformation campaigns in Italy, the aim of which had been to deliberately confuse terrorism with communism.44 Terrorism became the number-one foreign policy issue for the US. The link in the popular mind between Islam and terrorism was sealed. Cultural theorist Edward Said described how, by the late 1980s, Islam called up “images of bearded clerics and mad suicidal bombers, of unrelenting Iranian mullahs, fanatical fundamentalists, and kidnappers, remorseless turbaned crowds who chant hatred of the US, ‘the great devil,’ and all its ways.”45
By the end of the cold war the model minority, or passing-for-white, approaches were becoming less workable for American Muslims. US multiculturalism had tended to function as a selective openness to ethnic identity, requiring that groups entering the mainstream abandon any desire to reshape the basic contours of American political life. Cultural diversity was tolerated up to the point that it challenged the continuity of the existing system. In the early twentieth century, Jews and southern Europeans were welcomed into the American mainstream if they distanced themselves from communism and anarchism; to those who did not, the state responded with the Palmer raids and deportation. But for American Muslims, the perceived association with radicalism and terrorism was getting harder to avoid. The experience of Rehan Ansari, a Pakistani living in New York in the 1990s, was typical of the Muslim professional class:
I had a job on Wall Street with a brokerage house in 1993 and one of the brokers used to think it was funny asking me how the Hizbollah was doing at least once every morning. He used to like rolling the word around in his mouth. My response to him was model minority. When the World Trade Center bombing happened that year, I was no longer with the firm and wondered what he would say if we were to meet again.46
For reasons similar to those in the UK, Muslim identity became an increasingly common basis for community organization in the US of the 1990s. These organizations had grown from the root of the Muslim Student Association (MSA), which had been created at a meeting at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1963. The MSA’s early activists were students from the Middle East and South Asia who had been influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami movements in their home countries. After their studies, they settled in the US and took up professional jobs, and were conservative in religion and politics; the local and national organizations they founded, such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), reflected this. Some, having been active in Islamic politics in the dangerous context of Arab autocracies, now wanted to leave political activism behind; for them, the chief objective of Muslims in America should be to preserve cultural and religious identity within the framework of official multiculturalism while assimilating socioeconomically, as they had seen Jews do successfully. For others there was a desire to build social movements that could engage the wider society, either with an Islamic message or to lobby on foreign policy issues. In neither case was there a strong connection with the African-American Muslim experience.
Insofar as they had a political agenda, the national Islamic organizations that came to prominence in the 1990s were concerned with campaigning in support of Palestine—an activity that was increasingly in danger of being criminalized. The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act gave birth to the “material support statute,” which became the basis for prosecution of Muslim Americans for expressing an “ideology” and allowed government evidence to be heard in secret in detention hearings and trials, effectively removing the right of defendants to challenge the prosecution. It was a power used mainly against Arabs and Muslim Americans. In the LA8 case, the judge had refused to allow the government to present evidence in secret; the 1996 act was designed to remedy that. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party had deepened its ties with the pro-Israel lobby during the 1990s. In what is now a largely forgotten piece of pre-9/11 history, the major Islamic organizations decided to respond to these trends by allying with the Republicans in the 2000 elections, hoping that in return for American Muslim votes, the GOP would be a vehicle for a more balanced Middle East foreign policy. In 1999, George W. Bush hosted meetings between Muslim and Republican leaders and visited an Islamic center in Michigan. On the campaign trail he celebrated Americans who regularly attend a “church, synagogue, or mosque.” And in one of his presidential debates with Vice President Al Gore, Bush criticized the 1996 secret evidence legislation, which President Clinton had signed into law. Conservative activist Grover Norquist proclaimed in the American Spectator that “Bush was elected President of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote.”47
After the heyday of the cold war, the pattern of immigration had shifted again: Muslims coming to live in the US were now more likely to be seeking asylum, fleeing conflict, joining family, or entering on H1B temporary work permits linked to employment in information technology (IT) or engineering. A significant Muslim population developed in northern Virginia based on the local tech industry. In the western suburbs of Houston, Texas, Muslim immigrants came to take up jobs in the energy sector. Somali refugees settled in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, and Columbus, Ohio, beginning in the late 1980s, often facing severe unemployment in their new homes. In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, refugees from Egypt and Lebanon who arrived in the 1990s likewise struggled to live anything like the American Dream. They were often at risk of raids by the immigration authorities and disproportionately stopped and frisked on the subways.48
It was the more precariously situated refugee populations that bore the brunt of the post-9/11 government crackdowns on Muslims in the US: the roundups of foreign nationals, intensifying surveillance, and racial profiling. The majority of American Muslims—perhaps as many as 80 percent—do not attend mosques and have a secular outlook. But irrespective of their own lack of belief in, affiliation with, or practice of Islam, since 9/11 they have become “Muslim,” because others perceive them as such.49 In his analysis of French anti-Semitism, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of a similar process in which being Jewish was ultimately not based on a biological race or a religious belief but on a social relationship: “The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew.”50 Similarly, after 9/11, the experience of being Muslim was rooted more in a social than a theological identity. Many suburban Muslims hoped that the negative atmosphere after 9/11 would be temporary, and that, after it had passed, they could return to their status as Asian model minorities or go back to passing for white. In the meantime, the best strategy was thought to be excessive displays of patriotism and declarations of loyalty to the American way. A 2011 Pew survey of Muslim Americans found that 44 percent display the United States flag at home, at the office, or on their car.51 To these more affluent Muslims, more recently arrived working-class immigrants who had not assimilated were something of an embarrassment, bringing what a Muslim businessman in Houston, Texas, refers to as “a lot of baggage from back home” such as “anti-American sentiment.”52
For the national organizations, the basic question raised by the new after-9/11 climate was whether to follow a strategy of declaring one’s loyalty to America and presenting Muslims as model citizens, or to instead move in the direction of protests against the war on terror foreign policy and attacks on Muslims’ human rights in the US, particularly those of foreign nationals. Overwhelmingly, the leadership chose the former path: they were ill equipped to do anything else, given their own conservative outlooks. The traditions of civil rights organizing that existed among African-American Muslims were an obvious resource, which by and large was not drawn upon by the major Islamic organizations. Having generally discounted the African-American experience from their idea of what it means to be an American Muslim, it was hard for the national organizations to embrace it; and while the activities of African-American Muslims might on occasion be seen by wider society as un-American, their social being was not considered alien as such, and their experience was therefore significantly different from that of Arabs and South Asian Muslims after 9/11. Beginning in the 1990s, there had been some attempts to unify African-American and immigrant Muslim experiences, as the former drew closer to orthodox Sunni Islam and the latter grew accustomed to seeing themselves within the framework of US multiculturalism The Muslim American Society, for example, tried to bring the movement-building tradition of black civil rights to US Muslims, arguing that organizing against the government on foreign policy and civil rights issues was not disloyalty but a truer form of patriotism. It launched a civic education program and voter registration drives and sought to build coalitions with other minorities. But fear in the community was a major barrier.53
Race proved at least as strong a factor as religion in shaping the experiences of US Muslins in the period after 9/11. As Dawud Walid, an African-American Muslim activist in Detroit, notes:
Arab Americans were right at the door of what’s called “whiteness” in America. Whiteness in America doesn’t mean skin color. It’s a level of assimilation and social fluidity. Even on the census, Arabs are considered white. But now socially they’re not white any more—9/11 took away their social white card. So some of these people want to do whatever they can do to be accepted as white. To be accepted in the mainstream. Now, I’m black, and we have a different history in this country. I’ve never desired to be white, and it’s impossible for me to be white. Hence, from us black Americans who are Muslims, you will hear a different type of talk. And sometimes they think that we’re more like the angry black people. It’s not that. It’s just that I want a dignified space for us in America. It’s not my goal to be accepted by certain people. And I don’t have any fear of being deported. I’m coming from a totally different psychological disposition.
While some were still hoping that the door to whiteness might in time open again, for the moment, after 9/11
their treatment by the federal government reflected their reracialization. Dawud added:
Even those people who have made it—successfully, financially, and educationally—their money won’t stop them from getting handcuffed at the Canadian border or being questioned by the FBI. I know people who are millionaires who this has happened to. Even a political relationship with the Bush administration didn’t help them. One of the wealthiest Muslims in this area, an Arab American, who is a big donor to the Republican Party and has given a million dollars to the GOP—it didn’t stop him from getting handcuffed when he flew back into the country.54
The Arab-American comedian Dean Obeidallah joked:
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 6