Cutting Off the Roots: The Inner and Outer Struggle of being Arab Muslim in an Age of Islamophobia
By Sabrina Bojeh / Fall 2021
Oftentimes, when you’re growing up, you tend to be embarrassed of your family. Maybe you’re embarrassed by a certain situation or your loved ones just tend to be very loud in public. In my case, I was embarrassed because of who we are. Islamophobia is part of a large problem of xenophobia that we struggle with in this country. Growing up as a Muslim Arab-American was a difficult experience that I tend to try to forget about but in this essay we’re going to dive deep into how Islamophobia affects the connection that Muslims have to their religion and culture, how it’s an extremely important social problem, and how certain systems and causes give rise to these issues to further continue.
Growing up I used to hide the fact that I am a religious and ethnic minority in a country that was still struggling with the aftershocks of 9/11. When the attack had happened I had just turned one, a baby who didn’t yet know the struggles that she was going to deal with even 20 years later. There were many instances that made me want to forget who I am but the earliest one that made me open my eyes to the discrimination that Muslims face was in middle school. I vividly remember walking to class after lunch when a guy I didn’t know, other than the fact that I’ve only seen him in the halls, screamed “terrorist” at me. My 11 year old self, who simply went to school and interacted with a certain few, was shocked at the time. My Arab English teacher was the only one who stood up for me and even then nothing happened to him other than a “go to class”. That was the start to my hatred and self-loathing towards my religion and culture. I slowly disassociated myself from anything that indicated who I truly was. I never allowed my hijabi mother near me in public as I tried to shy away a couple steps behind at malls and made her drop me off a block away from school. I never hung out with my noticeably Arab dad and lied to anyone who asked me what he did for work as he was the stereotypical Arab taxi driver. I never connected with my identity in any form and as far as I was concerned, I was a white American going as far as telling people that I was white and going to church with my friends on occasional Sundays. I repressed my ability to speak, write, and read Arabic. It even created a disconnect from my family back home in Palestine that called me Americanized and it felt as though I had no where I truly belonged.
In this essay, I also hope to discuss my experience as an Arab Muslim in a time where being either was taboo, all the experiences I had with people gunning us down to scream slurs at us in the streets all the way to the feeling of disidentity I felt for years. We’re also here to discuss the systems that allow this to happen as well as solutions for our future. It wasn’t until the interconnectedness that I felt in college did I truly start to understand myself and my place in the world. Growing up, you never receive directions to organizations or resources that help you feel at home or like your story matters. The interconnectedness we talked about in class isn’t available. Navigating a world where there’s the hegemonic belief that Middle Easterners are dangerous or that those who came from Middle Eastern countries are third world could be tough at times and it’s hard to believe that you’re not alone. But others struggle with the same burden and oftentimes this isn’t an individual problem that a certain race or religion faces. Unfortunately, there are many groups that struggle to belong and finding interconnectedness truly helps heal the identity.
Many believed that the hatred Muslims receive was simply a spontaneous reaction to terrorism and that it will diminish as the effects and the anniversary of 9/11 turn into history. This has shown to simply not be true. As we enter the 21st year since 9/11 occurred, we can still see Islamophobia being rampant among people in the West, including governmental systems. We see it as recently as 2017 when President Trump ended up signing a Muslim Ban, banning people from seven predominantly Muslim countries and suspending all Syrian refugees from entering the country. The Islamophobia that was fostered by President Trump at the time had affected Muslim Americans’ health. To help us make sense of this point, we can turn to the study conducted by the Yale School of Public Health. The findings provided evidence that displayed how “change in federal immigration policy can directly affect health outcomes among people residing in the United States legally” (Greenwood). In the study, Muslim Americans from Muslim majority countries that had primary care visits show that they were diagnosed with stress and that it was already pretty high before the Muslim ban enacted by President Trump. After the ban, numbers rose in the amount that missed their appointments and the amount of ER visits a year after. This data reveals the dramatic effect that these types of policies, that target a certain group, can do to one’s health. And certain groups throughout American history have been known to show traumatic responses and psychological distress for years to come due to hatred. One of the most common known being African Americans who experience generational trauma to this day. We are also able to connect the Muslim Ban to that of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 where the Chinese were believed to be “invading and threatening the land” (Twohig, Day 5). This example reveals how hegemony and the hierarchy operates by showing us how history rhymes and that certain groups or races of people were also seen as dangerous and turned into inhuman others. But the meanings attached to race change over time and are never static. They will constantly be given new meanings that can be challenged (Twohig, Day 5). It is comments and policies, such as the Muslim Ban and Chinese Exclusion Act, from large politicians and governmental figures that breed and foster hatred, anger, and resentment for a whole group for years to come, in this situation, causing Islamophobia to continue years after the initial 9/11 tragedy.
Fear became widespread. After 2001, many, particularly Republicans, started to believe that the religion of Islam and Muslims in general are inherently violent. The work of the Pew Research Center helps us see the major shift in the growth of suspicion of Muslims years after 2001. The study, conducted as recent as 2021, showed that 50% of the population surveyed saw Islam and Muslims as violent while a whopping 72% of Republicans surveyed expressed this view (Doherty and Hartig). This is a great increase from the study conducted in 2002 where 25% of the population and 32% of Republicans associated Muslims with violence (Doherty and Hartig). This data reveals a large upward trend in the amount of people that believe Muslims are inherently violent even 20 years after the 9/11 incident. More fear seems to be at play than back in 2001-2002 when the tragedy had just occurred. This is due to the depicted character of Muslims in the media, politics, and society. Racial ideologies have come to play as they get embedded into culture, policies, and structures that people see on a daily basis. These ideologies in this instance have come to reward whiteness while punishing those who are non-white, or in this social issue, Arab and/or Muslim.
Now that we’ve examined the statistics of Islamophobia and just how major it is in the United States, we can consider some of the ways that Islamophobia manifests itself into our lives and how it’s compelled to continue. We can see these racial ideologies at play in everyday life or sometimes through certain policies or rules that tend to favor or unfairly disadvantage a certain group over another. For example, for the past two decades, we’ve seen instances of extreme surveillance on Muslim Americans. Mohamed Bahe, a Muslim American who’s family immigrated from Algeria, recalls how his organization, Muslims Giving Back, had a volunteer who turned out to be a paid informant for the New York Police Department (Khan and Ramachandran). It wasn’t until a year later did they find out, and once they did the Muslim community withdrew from all volunteer work and anything that had to do with the organization. Extreme surveillance makes citizens not want to participate in their communities and oftentimes leads to mistrust in the government and others. We even see this extreme surveillance at the airport with new policies that came out around 2001 regarding TSA. Even though everyone is required to participate, it often slips between the cracks when they further investigate and profile those who are, or appear to be, Muslim. My family has been on that end of the stick multiple times, stuck waiting in a cold and empty holding room for hours at a time while they violate my mother’s right to privacy. Making her take off her hijab, strip her clothes, patting her down carefully, and invading her with interrogative questions, something other Americans don’t tend to experience on their vacations.
A debate even started to form on whether protecting civil liberties or protecting the country from terrorism was more important. Many Muslims started to fear what could be taken from them. My family for years removed themselves from engaging in politics or having political views in fear of getting their citizenship taken away. And when I told my parents that I was going into politics and law I can vividly remember the look of terror on their faces. They believed that silence was the way to survive. Muslims get “depicted and treated as less civilized, non-human, and outside of the democratic promises” (Twohig, Day 4) as they navigate a racially ideological America. They are dehumanized and no longer fit into the box that the United States made when they had created the democratic promises of this country. When you no longer fit, you no longer are seen as deserving of those liberties and freedoms. Muslims were turned into the newest face of Caliban. Caricatures popped up in newspapers around the world depicting Muslims as evil jihadists hell bent on violence and torture. It created the stereotype that Muslims and Islam is directly connected to violence and death and that our religion justified these actions. The systemic racism through the media created an image that Muslims are no longer deserving of the rights and liberties they are entitled to as citizens but those who are printing and creating this media did as they had the freedom of speech and press. This isn’t the first time that a group of people have been “othered” in the United States. We saw a similar situation when Japanese Americans were put into internment camps and seen as dangerous due to Japan bombing the American soil of Pearl Harbor. A whole group of people were mistrusted and had to suffer the consequences, revoking their civil liberties in favor of those who were fearful of them.
Systemic racism tends to favor those who are the status quo, or white. In this instance it’s being used against Muslim Americans and is sustained through the thinking and practices of the war on terror (Kundnani). The war on terror tends to help dehumanize Muslims, making them seem like the enemy and as dangerous individuals. This helps justify the killing of thousands of them overseas, the over surveillance on American ground, and the hatred for the group as a whole. The continuance of this mutual relationship between the war on terror and the systemic racism that is held has been helpful to the ideologies that Americans hold on Muslims. When you come from a religion that preaches peace, it can be very difficult to know others see you as dangerous. It’s caused erasure in many and a cutting off of all roots of the love they have for their religion, culture, or themselves.
It’s understandable that you might look at this problem and think “well what can we do now?”. Policies must change and we must make a conscious effort to neutralize Muslims as regular human beings and citizens no different than anyone else. We’ve made important progress this year as President Joe Biden withdrew the U.S. military from Afghanistan (Montanaro and Ordonez). One of the most important countries that have been part of the war on terror was finally removed from the continuance of the ideology that Muslims are dangerous and that we need to protect the country from them. I believe that slowly we can move towards a future where Muslims are no longer seen as a threat and that that ideology is no longer backed by the US military/government and their doings that justify it. When we start to humanize Muslims in the eyes of the public, it can shift the view that many hold. People will start to normalize seeing Muslims as regular citizens and human beings when they start to get accepted as part of the communities they live in. Humanization occurs, for example, when companies start to become inclusive by adding hijabi models to their campaigns, you start seeing hijabis and Muslims in the media and on TV, start praising and acknowledging Muslim work in academia, and start to see us as people rather than a threat. When we start showing up in the news for good rather than anything bad that occurs I believe we can achieve a level of interconnectedness as Americans who also contribute to society and not as “others” who need to be feared and watched.
One of the most important ways for us to be able to combat the ideology that Muslims are dangerous is to tackle the media. News coverage of Muslims is oftentimes centered around inaccurate portrayals, and more likely than not, violence. It fuels stereotypes and fear in the public who tend to relay those thoughts leading to Islamophobia creating the hegemonic belief that Muslims are dangerous. When news breaks out about a terrorist or violent act involving a Muslim, the news tends to keep circulating for weeks, gaining coverage more than a similiar incident that would include a non-Muslim, further fueling the ideology that only Muslims must be inherently violent. We must be able to show the side that is not often portrayed. Our communities are full of Muslims that contribute love, compassion, heart, and soul into things they do. We can see a shift as there has slowly been more representation from people such as Hasan Minaj, a popular comedian on cable TV every night, or Representative Ilhan Omar, a Muslim refugee in Congress, or Ibtihaj Muhammad, a Team USA Olympic athlete who was the first to wear a hijab in competition (Burke and Stix). These figures are slowly breaking the stereotypes that surround Muslims as people are able to see that we’re human beings who joke, like sports, and participate in politics just like everyone else. When we humanize Muslims in the eye of the public, then we are able to create communities and people that have their individual unique stories and tie them closer together through their diversity.
In conclusion, Muslim Americans have suffered through Islamophobia for decades since the 9/11 attack. The racial ideology that they are dangerous is dangerous to us as a country that prides itself on diversity and progressiveness. This has resulted in Muslim Americans to be at the bottom of the hierarchy, feared and created into an inhuman other. Islamophobia affects the connection that Muslims have to their religion and culture, the acceptance of themselves, and creates an internalization of whiteness. Islamophobia is an extremely important social problem that we must address through the systems that give rise to this ideology to continue. When there’s a hegemonic belief that Muslims and Middle Easterners are on the bottom of the social hierarchy, then they end up being excluded from the democratic process that makes this country so diverse. We must work progressively towards a future where no race is created into Caliban and make sure that we create and foster an environment of interconnectedness.We must tackle social and political systems that hold down and encourage the continuance of issues such as Islamophobia. I believe political and governmental institutions play the biggest role in this systemic problem and are pivotal in creating an environment that repeals the hatred of Muslims through policies and actions to protect and integrate instead of divide. Lastly, I hope you as a reader have gained a little insight into how this social issue affects a large population of people in our country and just how damaging it is to the promises made by our founding fathers centuries ago.
Works Cited
Burke, Daniel, and Madeleine Stix. “25 Influential American Muslims.” CNN, Cable News Network.
Greenwood, Michael. “Trump's 'Muslim Ban' Harmed Health of Muslim Americans, Study Finds.” YaleNews, 27 Aug. 2021.
Hartig, Hannah, and Carroll Doherty. “Two Decades Later, the Enduring Legacy of 9/11.” Pew Research Center - U.S. Politics & Policy, Pew Research Center, 15 Dec. 2021.
Khan, Saher, and Vignesh Ramachandran. “Post-9/11 Surveillance Has Left a Generation of Muslim Americans in a Shadow of Distrust and Fear.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 16 Sept. 2021.
Kundnani, Arun. “One of ‘Them’ or One of ‘Us’?-Arun Kundnani on Islamophobia, Racism and Terrorism.” Versobooks.com.
Montanaro, Domenico, and Franco Ordoñez. “Biden: 'I Do Not Regret My Decision' to Withdraw from Afghanistan.” NPR, NPR, 16 Aug. 2021.
Twohig, Niall. WCWP 100, Day 4, October 5, 2021, University of California, San Diego.
Twohig, Niall. WCWP 100, Day 5, October 8, 2021, University of California, San Diego.