Islamophobia (Part Two)

In our last blog on Islamophobia (read here) we began looking at the definition of Islamophobia. Now we dig a little deeper and unpack three forms of Islamophobia (private, structural and dialectical) as created and described by Khaled A. Beydoun in his book American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. Much of this blog is taken directly from Khaled’s book. Read his book for more depth and context.

Read the following overview of Islamophobia and the three breakdowns providing insights to Islamophobia’s complexities. Take note of the distinctions and connections, and the thoughts and sensations that may rise up within you.

Overview of Islamophobia

According to Khaled, Islamophobia is a system that redeploys stereotypes of Muslims deeply rooted in the collective American imagination and endorsed by formative case law, foundational policy on immigration and citizenship, and the writings and rhetoric of this nation’s founding fathers. Islamophobia is a modern extension and articulation of an old system that branded Muslims as inherently suspicious and unassimilable and cast Islam as a rival ideology at odds with American values, society, and national identity.

Khaled describes three dimensions of Islamophobia: private Islamophobia, structural Islamophobia, and dialectical Islamophobia, the ongoing dialogue between state and citizen that binds the private Islamophobia unleashed by hatemongers like the man who murdered Deah, Yusor, and Razan from our previous blog (insert link to blog here) to the war-on-terror policies enacted by Presidents George W. Bush, Obama, Trump (and Biden).

State policy and policing targeting Muslims is viewed as entirely divorced from the private hate-mongering sweeping throughout the United States today.

Khaled’s definition of Islamophobia frames the state as a potent collaborator that influences and drives the acts of individual hatemongers, or Islamophobes, making it complicit in the range of hate crimes and hate incidents targeting Muslim individuals and institutions.

Condemnation of Muslims is engaged in without Muslims being included in discussions and decisions, and it masquerades as intellectual critique without even a rudimentary understanding of the faith and its various schools of thought.

Private Islamophobia

Private Islamophobia is the fear, suspicion, and violent targeting of Muslims by private actors. These actors could be individuals or institutions acting in a capacity not directly tied to the state.

Private Islamophobia can target specific individuals, as in the case of the students in Chapel Hill (Deah, Yusor, and Razan), and it can hone in on collective communities, institutions, and even non-Muslims.

Structural Islamophobia

Structural Islamophobia, the second dimension, is the fear and suspicion of Muslims on the part of government institutions and actors. This fear and suspicion are manifested and enforced through the enactment and advancement of laws, policy, and programming built upon the presumption that Muslim identity is associated with a national security threat. These laws, policies, and programs may be explicitly discriminatory, like Muslim bans, which explicitly restricted immigrants from Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States.

Islamophobia is deeply entrenched, fluidly remade and reproduced, and deployed by the state to bring about intended or desired political ends. Structural Islamophobia is manifested by historic policy and state action against Islam and Muslims, and most visibly today, by the abundant laws, policies, and programs enacted to police Muslims during the protracted war on terror and the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Foundational stereotypes, which portray Islam as irreconcilable with American values and society and Muslim identity as foreign, subversive, and harboring an inherent propensity for terrorism, move state agencies to enact policies that profile and closely police Muslim citizens and immigrants. Such policies assign the presumption of guilt to Muslims at large, and in turn diminish the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.

Perhaps the best way to think about structural Islamophobia is by analogizing it to structural racism. Both are cultures embedded within government institutions. Both have pre-existing narratives and spread stereotypes based on understanding a people in flat, damaging, and subhuman terms, stories that are then institutionalized at every level of public and private organizations, institutions, and agencies. These stories are manifested in seemingly benign decisions or routine functions we have accepted as normal.

Dialectical Islamophobia

The final dimension of Islamophobia is the least detectable, but it is the very thread that binds the private and structural forms together. Dialectical Islamophobia is the process by which structural Islamophobia shapes, reshapes, and endorses views or attitudes about Islam and Muslim subjects inside and outside of America’s borders. State action legitimizes prevailing misconceptions, misrepresentations, and stereotypes of Islam and communicates damaging ideas through state-sponsored policy, programming, or rhetoric, which in turn emboldens private violence against Muslims (and perceived Muslims). Islamophobia at its core is the presumption of guilt assigned to Muslims by state and private actors. But it also must be understood as a process, the one by which state policies endorse popular tropes. This ongoing process is most intense during the aftermath of terrorist attacks

The state’s rubber-stamping of widely held stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, through the enactment of surveillance programs, religious and racial profiling, restrictive immigration policies, and the war-on-terror campaign, is the cornerstone of dialectical Islamophobia. This exchange—by which citizens absorb the suspicion and demonization the state assigns to Muslims by way of (structural Islamophobic) law or state action—is an ongoing dialectic that links state policy to hate and violence unleashed by private citizens.

Like other forms of bigotry, Islamophobia is contingent on media representations, political rhetoric, and most saliently, formal law, policy, and programming.

For more information and a general overview, watch: What is Islamophobia?

Digging Deeper

For additional education and resources, the following videos provide various perspectives of Islamophobia. Take note of where you see your own Islamophobia and the various ways we try to disguise Islamophobic views and actions as normal.

'No mosques in my backyard': Koreans confront Muslims over building a mosque next door

Islamophobia: What it means and what’s being done to stop it | CBC Kids News

Why Hollywood misrepresents Muslim communities

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