Abstract
Excerpted From: Natsu Taylor Saito, Race, Religion, and National Identity Review of Sahar Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom (UC Press, 2022), 50 Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 169 (March, 2023) (70 Footnotes) (Full Document)
In the United States, as in many other places, “Muslims are being treated as a race, and more specifically, a suspect race, rather than as a religious minority to be protected from persecution.” As a result, targeting Muslims is not seen “as a threat to religious freedom.” This is the longstanding and seemingly intractable problem addressed by law professor Sahar Aziz in her book, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.
Religious liberty is among the most vaunted of “American values” and is presumptively protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which both prohibits state-established religion and purports to guarantee the free exercise of religion. And yet, being Muslim in this country means being subjected to a near-constant barrage of Islamophobic rhetoric and, for many, living in fear of physical assault. When identity is constructed in a manner that triggers both racial and religious discrimination, and this reality has been normalized, how should we respond?
This daunting question is tackled head-on by Aziz, who brings her considerable talents as a scholar and writer to the complex, multi-layered nature of Muslim identity in the United States today. Descriptively, she provides an intersectional analysis of how race and religion have been and continue to be constructed and conflated, and situates this analysis in the historical context of American racial and religious exclusion. Analytically, she assesses the differential treatment of five “types” of immigrant Muslims as they are perceived by the American mainstream and looks to what motivates and perpetuates anti-Muslim sentiment. She then returns to the central question--one that affects all subordinated peoples--of how to maintain one's identity with dignity in a society built upon the systematic denigration of racial and religious “others.”
Through her book, Aziz invites us into a world of multi-faceted realities, rendered comprehensible by her clear and carefully constructed explanations. Once there, we find ourselves face-to-face with the perennial dilemma of how to deal with the contradictions between this country's stated values and legal principles, and the realities of racialized exploitation and subordination. Will simply identifying the contradictions force a correction? Can we use “the master's tools,” as Audre Lorde termed them, to dismantle the master's house? Or should we, perhaps, settle for restructuring that house? What is the goal here? Aziz argues that it should be something beyond acceptance into mainstream America.
Leaving room for different goals, the solution Aziz envisions is “to change our national identity to reflect the diversity of races, cultures, and religions of Americans and to eliminate the ensuing racial-religious hierarchy that privileges those at the top.” This brings us to what is, for me, the most interesting question raised by Aziz' analysis: Is such an equitable and pluralistic social order possible within a settler state where racial and religious hierarchies are so deeply embedded in “American” identity? As readers, we will likely have a wide range of responses to this query, but we will always be indebted to Sahar Aziz for giving us the framework for meaningful discourse.
[. . .]
The persistence of the vilification of Muslims is one of those very important questions that “haunt our present,” and I suspect that, as Munshi cautioned, effectively addressing it will entail some type of “social and epistemic upheaval.” But that is why it is such an important issue, and why The Racial Muslim is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the dynamics of race and how they intersect with religion. Sahar Aziz renders coherent the complexities of who is identified as Muslim in the United State today, the history of Islamophobia in this country, and the interests that continue to perpetuate anti-Muslim sentiment. She explains how religious identity has been racialized and how racism has been and continues to be deployed to undermine religious freedom. None of us have the answer to resolving racial and religious inequality in the United States, but this work provides us with knowledge and perspectives critical to the struggle to create a world in which everyone can live with dignity. As such, it is essential reading for anyone concerned with racial and religious justice in the United States.
Natsu Taylor Saito, Regents' Professor Emerita, Georgia State University College of Law.
