Sherene H. Razack - Nothing Has to Make Sense

Muslim International

Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana, Series Editors

With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire

Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana, Editors

Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Arc of the Journeyman: Afghan Migrants in England

Nichola Khan

Tolerance and Risk: How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims

Mitra Rastegar

Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy through Anti-Muslim Racism

Sherene H. Razack

Sherene H. Razack

Muslim International

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis | London

Portions of chapter 2 are adapted from A Site/Sight We Cannot Bear: The Racial/Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Womans Niqab, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 30, no. 1 (2018): 16787; doi: 10.3138/cjwl.30.1.169; reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press, https://utpjournals.press. Portions of chapter 2 are adapted from The Racial/Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Womens Niqab: A Site/Sight We Cannot Bear, in Law, Cultural Studies, and the Burqa Ban Trend: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Anja Matwijkiw and Anna Oriolo (Cambridge, UK: Intersentia, 2021). Portions of chapter 3 are adapted from A Catastrophically Damaged Gene Pool: Law, White Supremacy, and the Muslim Psyche, in With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire, ed. Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana, 183200 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Portions of chapter 4 are adapted from We Didnt Kill em, We Didnt Cut Their Head Off: Abu Ghraib Revisited, in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel Martinez HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido, 21745 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

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For my brother Zai

Once they are all in our heads, it is difficult to distinguish between ghosts, demons, and dream figures.

Rene L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects

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Figure 1. (a) Allah Is Not God T-shirt by TeeChip. (b) Anti-Muslim protestors at free speech rally (Screenshot/Fox10). (c) Im Not Anti Islam, Islam Is Anti Me T-shirt by Anti Terror Designs. (d) Infidel T-shirt by Gadsden and Culpeper American Heritage Shoppe.

In 2020, the year of Black Lives Matter protests worldwide and a global pandemic, anti-Muslim T-shirts were in fashion. Sold everywhere, they adorned protestors at freedom of speech rallies in Europe and North America and were worn by political constituents of both the right and the left, an indication of the political capital to be gained from denigrating Muslims. The slogans ranged from in-your-face declarations that Allah Is Not God, Mohammed Is Not His Prophet (Figure 1a) and F**k Islam (Figure 1b) to cartoons from the French magazine Charlie Hebdo depicting Muslim men and boys as rapists, to a more restrained Im Not Anti Islam, Islam Is Anti Me (Figure 1c) expressing a liberal feminist position about Islams misogyny. The T-shirts are pedagogical sites that circulate an anti-Muslim affect and provide a window into contemporary attitudes to Islam and to Muslims. Through this window we see that Muslims remain entrenched in popular culture as a culturally backward, uncivilized people of a religion that is antithetical to Christian and Western traditions. Muslims are cast as historical enemies and imagined as murderous avengers invading and polluting white, Christian nations. Over time the details of political imaginaries shift. The Muslim of the military expeditions and wars of the Middle Ages and the barbarous occupiers of the Holy Land folds into refugees at the border of Europe, bearded patriarchs controlling women, and ultimately morphs into al-Qaeda and ISIS. Throughout, Muslims are figures of a global politics proclaiming the civilizational superiority of Europeans and of white Christendom.

What links the overtly ideological T-shirt to the one that trades on ideas of freedom and the rights of women is the structure of feeling to which they are both connected: a shared emotional investment in whiteness achieved through the Muslim as racial Other. When we analyze the work that T-shirts dotheir circulation of an anti-Muslim affectand refuse the distinction between extremists and liberals, we are able to see their joint contributions to the material project of white supremacy. We see how anti-Muslim feeling rides in on ideas of democracy, human rights, and womens rights and how overt expressions of white power derive from and are sustained by an edifice of white entitlement. The T-shirts offer clues about the affective worlds of the anti-Muslim subject, worlds in which whiteness must be protected. As emotions travel between individuals and feed into both a liberal and a far-right politics that urges bans on including Islam in the school curriculum, a denial of protection for Muslim children subjected to racist bullying, bans on the wearing of hijabs and niqabs in public settings, surveillance, indefinite detention, and torture of Muslims, we can see the formation of a powerful anti-Muslim affect and the racial violence it underwrites in law and society across the West.

This book is about how racial feelings and emotions form a deeply sedimented anti-Muslim affect. Traveling through law and society, an anti-Muslim affect forges a global whiteness as it moves. In considering the Muslims importance for various anti-Muslim constituencies, the people for whom whiteness, Christianity, and the Muslim as archetypical enemy come together to provide a deep sense of purpose, selfhood, and national belonging, the book is particularly attentive to the legal and political projects initiated by white political actors. Given the level of racial animus they express, anti-Muslim T-shirts may give the impression that anti-Muslim racists are a part of a rising white nationalist politics in ascendance throughout the West over the past decade. The anti-Muslim animus in which they trade, however, has a much wider and older provenance in the making of white Western hegemony. Whether wearers of anti-Muslim T-shirts or not, anti-Muslim political actors range from those expressing an open white nationalism to others maintaining that Muslims threaten Western liberal values of democracy, secularism, and gender equality. For each end of the continuum, however, the Muslim is a figure who requires discipline that can take the form of lethal force, evictions from political community, imprisonment, surveillance, and stigmatization. Regardless of the level of force they endorse, anti-Muslim political actors all consider the Muslim as anathema to white Western civilization and turn to the state to authorize disciplinary measures against Muslims who are imagined as posing a specific