Can Critical Race Theory Address Anti-Muslim Racism?

• In Event: Toward a Critical Muslim Youth Studies: Conceptual and Empirical Debates and Tensions

Abstract

In this paper I examine how critical race theory in education can engage historic and global racial formations. Specifically, I use the figure of the Muslim to engage CRT in a robust discussion of racial otherness. Using the intersectional and multiethnic formulations of Muslimness as an emergent racial identity in the U.S., I argue that CRT has not accounted for the multifaceted ways race, race thinking and racial projects have been deployed and practiced historically and globally. I argue that racial hierarchy and power was built at the intersections of religious and racial otherness, with the figure of the Muslim serving as the archetypal Other upon which racial boundaries were inscribed. Beyond theoretical interest, such conversations are essential to understanding the experiences non-dominant children and youth e bring to learning spaces.

This paper takes a global racial framework within critical ethnic studies, specifically drawing from history, and cultural studies alongside educational studies. I examine three historic flashpoints as key moments evidencing the intersections of racial otherness, Islam and the West. First, the Spanish Inquisition was the first instance of state racial violence in the making of the modern nation-state (Majid, 2009). I explore the “internal border” drawn by western modernity, specifically drawing the North African Muslim (Moor), Jew, and Gypsy (among others), as racialized bodies outside of the Occident (Mingolo, 2000). Second, I explore historic texts and original sources racializing and attributing danger to enslaved African Muslims slaves in the Americas. I examine the Bahia uprisings (Reis, 1993), the Haitian revolution (Diouf, 1998; Reis & Gomes, 2009), writings about African Muslims enslaved in the Americas (Diouf, 1998) and first person narratives (Austin, 1997; Ibn Said, 2011). Third, I examine the 1955 Conference of Afro-Asian Solidarity (Bandung) as a modern marker of the intersections of race and religion in the global anti-colonial, non-alignment movement. I argue that the Muslim body in the Western world broadly, and in the Americas specifically, has occupied a particular space of danger, particularly through literacy and opposition to western imperialism.

I utilize these historic examples to contextualize the place the Muslim occupies in the contemporary west, and particularly in the U.S. I trace the logic of the Spanish inquisitional commandment of ‘convert or die’ as it was exported through the colonization of the Americas, Africa and Asia (Dussel, 1981). Although the verb has changed over the past half millennium: ‘convert’; ‘civilize’; ‘develop’; ‘neoliberalize’; ‘democratize’; the threat remains (Grosfugel, 2008, p. 17). I examine how these historic narratives serve as ghosts haunting the sociological present of Muslim youth today (Gordon, 2008). CRT can extend itself by addressing anti-Muslim racism directly as well as through examining the Muslim as a case study of how race, racial thinking and racial discourses can change phenotypically, while ideologies that undergird the construction of otherness persist. In the case of the Muslim, such ideologies reify notions of Muslim violence which structure how Muslim students are engaged by educators, and how issues of the Muslim world are taught in U.S. schools.

Author

• Arshad Imtiaz Ali, George Washington University