The Impossibility of Muslim Life: A Study of State Surveillance, Student Elision, and Campus Life

• In Event: 56.021 - Beyond State-Sanctioned Schooling, K–16: Imagining Black, Brown, and Indigenous Futurities

Abstract

In responding to the conference theme, I ask can colleges provide equal education while situated in a culture that dehumanizes particular bodies. Specially. I ask a seemingly simple question—what possibilities exist for Muslim life in the United States? A quick response may note that millions of Muslims live as citizens with equal protections, even if discrimination occurs occasionally. Such an equality narrative assumes that anti-Muslim racism springs from a terrorism moral panic, and is at its core, comparable to anti-Irish or anti-German discrimination of the 19th century. This line of reasoning culminates with Muslims being the “new minority” who must go through a trial by fire to become “American.” Such a narrative looks ahead with the idea that if Muslim communities engage wholeheartedly in the “great American project” they will be accepted as full-fledged citizens. If political targeting, murder and discrimination result in eventual participation in the state, this trial (by fire) continues to have a hung jury for Native peoples and the descendants of enslaved Africans. Thus, the history of colonial empire is replaced with a narrative of progress and renewal of the “great American project” in constructing a Muslim-American narrative.
To explore this question I draw from a global race framework to inform a historic and cultural analysis of Muslim personhood. I examine how the contemporary political contexts of state policies, policing practices, and popular portrayals of Muslim life coalesce with historic constructions of Muslim bodies in the Western world to construct the Muslim as the perpetual suspect—the suspect of material [terrorism] violence (Maira, 2009), of gendered and sexualized violence (Puar and Rai, 2004) and promiscuity (Shaheen, 2003), and of cultural violence (Rana, 2011). I argue that contemporary surveillance interpolates (Althusser, 1971) this myriad of histories upon the bodies of Muslims, and limit the forms of life they have access to.
The argument is evidenced through a14-month study, beginning in summer 2011, after the revelation that the NYPD was spying on Muslim communities in New York City and beyond (Associated Press, 2012). I engaged in a multi-site participatory action study with Muslim undergraduates throughout NYC, exploring political activism. I collected over 40 hours of video and audio recordings, along with field notes from community meetings, social gatherings, and political events as well as data from multiple interviews with 15 participants and three focus groups.
I explore how students who believed their campus was complicitous with the NYPD specifically, or the state surveillance apparatus generally, understood their participation with campus life and their pedagogical opportunities at their particular institutions. I examine how the students’ narratives of elision from social life, exclusion from particular classrooms and conversations, often unknowingly cite the historic narratives discussed above. I argue the Muslim serves as a case study of how ideologies of otherness serve as ghosts haunting the sociological present (Gordon, 2008). I contend that these intersections make the campus not simply a place of isolation and marginalization, but of psychic violence, erasure and rupture in the lives of young Muslims.

Author

• Arshad Imtiaz Ali, George Washington University