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At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of African Muslims were forcibly brought to the United States to be enslaved. One of them, Omar Ibn Said, from Futa Toro, in modern-day Senegal, chronicled his journey and life under enslavement in a brief 15-page manuscript. “Wicked men took me by violence and sold me,” he wrote. “We sailed a month and a half on the great sea to the place called Charleston in the Christian land. I fell into the hands of a small, weak and wicked man, who feared not God at all.”
Omar Ibn Said converted to Christianity after he was forced from West Africa to the newly declared United States. His own autobiographical writings, however, provide evidence that he continued practicing Islam, as he had done in his homeland, until his death. “His outward conversion was a shield from punishment, one that enabled him to continue to observe Islam, his native faith,” writes critical theorist and legal scholar Khaled Beydoun in his new book, “American Islamophobia.”
Beydoun traces the beginnings of structural Islamophobia in the United States to Omar Ibn Said’s story, dispelling the pervading myth that it is a new phenomenon that came about only after 9/11 and intensified with the arrival of Trump to the political stage. He convincingly argues that throughout the existence of the United States, there has always been a legal framework in place that defines Islam and Muslim identity as incompatible with Americanness. Beydoun draws on the work of various theorists, including Edward Said and Kimberlé Crenshaw, to define Islamophobia as a structural phenomenon that is not simply rooted in acts of hate from private individuals and impacts Muslims occupying multiple identities, such as queer Muslims and black Muslims, in varying ways.
(Khaled Beydoun, associate professor of law at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law and senior affiliated faculty at the University of California, Berkeley Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project.)
Much like other notable works on Islamophobia by scholars like Erik Love and Moustafa Bayoumi, Beydoun looks at the scope and impact of domestic “war on terror” legislation in how it racialized Muslims and transformed everyday life within Muslim communities. What he adds with “American Islamophobia” is the terminology and language to describe the demonization of Muslims from the state — and the necessary legal and historical context to understand the depth of structural Islamophobia and the tools needed to dismantle it.
The Intercept interviewed Khaled Beydoun about the experience of Muslim and Christian immigrants from the Middle East in the early 20th century, the roots of a media discourse that otherizes Muslims, and Trump’s continuation of a long heritage of systemic discrimination.
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