Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics is a powerful introduction to the scope of Islamophobia in the U.S. Nazia Kazi highlights the vast impact of Islamophobia and its connections with the long history of racial inequality in America.

In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the "War on Terror." Importantly, Kumar contends that Islamophobia is best understood as racism rather than as religious intolerance. An innovative analysis of anti-Muslim racism and empire, Islamophobia argues that empire creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism, which in turn sustains empire. This book, now updated to include the end of the Trump's presidency, offers a clear and succinct explanation of how Islamophobia functions in the United States both as a set of coercive policies and as a body of ideas that take various forms: liberal, conservative, and rightwing. The matrix of anti-Muslim racism charts how various institutions-the media, think tanks, the foreign policy establishment, the university, the national security apparatus, and the legal sphere-produce and circulate this particular form of bigotry. Anti-Muslim racism not only has horrific consequences for people in Muslim-majority countries who become the targets of an endless War on Terror, but for Muslims and those who "look Muslim" in the West as well.

In response to the events of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a "war on terror" ushering in an era of anti-Muslim racism, or Islamophobia. However, 9/11 alone did not create Islamophobia. This book examines the current backlash within the context of Islamophobia's origins, in the historic relationship between East and West. Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of media studies and Middle East studies at Rutgers University and the author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike. Kumar has contributed to numerous outlets including the BBC, USA Today, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics is a powerful introduction to the topic of the anti-Muslim landscape in the U.S. In it, Kazi shows that Islamophobia is not a set of anti-Muslim attitudes and prejudices. Instead, this book shows how Islamophobia is part of a greater reality: systemic U.S. racism. In other words, Islamophobia is neither a blip nor a break with a racially harmonious American social order, but rather the outcome of destructive foreign policy practices and an enduring history of white supremacy. This book illustrates how popular understandings of Islamophobia are often flawed. For instance, the assumption that the right wing is especially anti-Muslim overlooks the bipartisan history of Islamophobia in the U.S. The author draws from years of ethnographic fieldwork with Muslim American organizations to show how diversity and inequality among Muslims in the U.S. drastically shapes the experience of Islamophobia and racism. While swaths of undocumented, working class, or incarcerated Muslims bear the brunt of U.S. racism, a small subset of relatively privileged Muslim spokespeople hold the platform from which to speak about Islamophobia. The book is engaging for readers, as it shifts between a historical analysis (for instance, of the arrival of enslaved Muslim from Africa during the settling of the United States), the voices of those from the author’s research with Muslim American advocacy groups, and commentary on the current political landscape. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the roots of U.S. racism as an inherent part of the nation’s economic and foreign policy practices. Since 9/11/2001 and, more recently, the ascendancy of Trump, there remains a growing curiosity about Muslims and Islamophobia. The book offers a nuanced view on racism and Islamophobia that is often missing from popular understandings on the topic.

The decade since 9/11 has seen a decline in liberal tolerance in the West as Muslims have endured increasing levels of repression. This book presents a series of case studies from Western Europe, Australia and North America demonstrating the transnational character of Islamophobia. The authors explore contemporary intercultural conflicts using the concept of moral panic, revitalised for the era of globalisation. Exploring various sites of conflict, Global Islamophobia considers the role played by 'moral entrepreneurs' in orchestrating popular xenophobia and in agitating for greater surveillance, policing and cultural regulation of those deemed a threat to the nation's security or imagined community. This timely collection examines the interpenetration of the global and the local in the West's cultural politics towards Islam, highlighting parallels in the responses of governments and in the worrying reversion to a politics of coercion and assimilation. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in race and ethnicity; citizenship and assimilation; political communication, securitisation and The War on Terror; and moral panics.

Despite its emblematic place within contemporary racism and its increasingly important position in defining relations between states and ethnicised minorities, Islamophobia remains a contested, frequently unrecognized and largely under-theorized form of racism. The Politics of Islamophobia provides a definitive contribution to these debates, offering a theoretically sophisticated account which draws upon a series of substantive case studies to position Islamophobia as an expression of racialized governmentality. By taking into account connections across different national contexts, and by moving beyond the limiting framing of the "war on terror" which has dominated recent debates, this book offers a new perspective on the study of Islamophobia.

On Forbes list of "10 Books To Help You Foster A More Diverse And Inclusive Workplace" How law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the resurgence of Islamophobia—with a call to action on how to combat it. “I remember the four words that repeatedly scrolled across my mind after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. ‘Please don’t be Muslims, please don’t be Muslims.’ The four words I whispered to myself on 9/11 reverberated through the mind of every Muslim American that day and every day after.… Our fear, and the collective breath or brace for the hateful backlash that ensued, symbolize the existential tightrope that defines Muslim American identity today.” The term “Islamophobia” may be fairly new, but irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims is anything but. Though many speak of Islamophobia’s roots in racism, have we considered how anti-Muslim rhetoric is rooted in our legal system? Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the United States. Beydoun charts its long and terrible history, from the plight of enslaved African Muslims in the antebellum South and the laws prohibiting Muslim immigrants from becoming citizens to the ways the war on terror assigns blame for any terrorist act to Islam and the myriad trials Muslim Americans face in the Trump era. He passionately argues that by failing to frame Islamophobia as a system of bigotry endorsed and emboldened by law and carried out by government actors, U.S. society ignores the injury it inflicts on both Muslims and non-Muslims. Through the stories of Muslim Americans who have experienced Islamophobia across various racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, Beydoun shares how U.S. laws shatter lives, whether directly or inadvertently. And with an eye toward benefiting society as a whole, he recommends ways for Muslim Americans and their allies to build coalitions with other groups. Like no book before it, American Islamophobia offers a robust and genuine portrait of Muslim America then and now.

Choice Top Book of 2017 Confronting and combating Islamophobia in America. Islamophobia has long been a part of the problem of racism in the United States, and it has only gotten worse in the wake of shocking terror attacks, the ongoing refugee crisis, and calls from public figures like Donald Trump for drastic action. As a result, the number of hate crimes committed against Middle Eastern Americans of all origins and religions have increased, and civil rights advocates struggle to confront this striking reality. In Islamophobia and Racism in America, Erik Love draws on in-depth interviews with Middle Eastern American advocates. He shows that, rather than using a well-worn civil rights strategy to advance reforms to protect a community affected by racism, many advocates are choosing to bolster universal civil liberties in the United States more generally, believing that these universal protections are reliable and strong enough to deal with social prejudice. In reality, Love reveals, civil rights protections are surprisingly weak, and do not offer enough avenues for justice, change, and community reassurance in the wake of hate crimes, discrimination, and social exclusion. A unique and timely study, Islamophobia and Racism in America wrestles with the disturbing implications of these findings for the persistence of racism—including Islamophobia—in the twenty-first century. As America becomes a “majority-minority” nation, this strategic shift in American civil rights advocacy signifies challenges in the decades ahead, making Love’s findings essential for anyone interested in the future of universal civil rights in the United States.

Ethnographic research in Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States helps to explain how transnational working classes from Pakistan are produced in the context of American empire and its War on Terror.

The War on Terror has established a new global order of political structures, legislation, and technologies designed to spy on the world’s Muslims. This book explains the origins and trajectories of this political system. The contributors argue that a constellation of Western ideas about Muslims have evolved over time to produce an insatiable desire for all-pervasive, ever-expanding surveillance in our contemporary moment. The book posits that the surveillance order is not, however, only the result of conceptions of Muslims. It is, rather, the outcome of centuries of European thought regarding religion, governance, and revolution. Islamophobia and Surveillance traverses the existential desire for wakeful vigilance, the religious wars of early modern Europe, colonial India, the Balkan frontier of the EU, and the walls of the United States-Mexico border. The consequences of the new surveillance order transcend the West’s Muslim Question and threaten the very existence of the liberal democratic state. This book will, therefore, be of interest to those studying a range of subjects related to international co-operation, modern political systems, and security studies, as well as Islamophobia. Islamophobia and Surveillance was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.