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Book Reviews
Rethinking Islamophobia:
Race, Empire, and Islam in a Global Context
Review Article by Nicole Nguyen

The Rise of Global Islamophobia in the War on Terror: Coloniality, Race, and Islam,
edited by Naved Bakali and Farid Hafez. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.
264 pages. $140 cloth.

Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years after 9/11, by Deepa Kumar. Lon-
don: Verso, 2021. 304 pages. $19.95 paper, $9.99 e-book.

S ince the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, scholars have historicized,
theorized, and documented anti-Muslim racism and its dynamic manifestations. The Rise
of Global Islamophobia in the War on Terror and Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire
advance these interventions by centering the role of empire in the making of anti-Muslim
racism and its articulation with global, regional, and local racial formations, from early
modern Spain to contemporary South Africa. By tracing how geopolitical conditions, local-
ized histories, power relations, and knowledge production processes have influenced con-
temporary racial formations, both texts deftly show how the global war on terror has shaped
anti-Muslim racism in context-specific ways.
Unlike other studies, Deepa Kumar’s revised version of her 2012 book, Islamophobia and
the Politics of Empire (no subtitle; Haymarket Books), describes anti-Muslim racism as “an
ideology and set of practices rooted in empire” that can take on liberal and conservative for-
mations (p. 15). Kumar’s careful excavation of anti-Muslim racism and its shifting manifesta-
tions across history and context demonstrates the contradictions inherent in any racial forma-
tion and shows that anti-Muslim racism is neither inevitable nor permanent. Such an analysis
supports academic and popular calls to end anti-Muslim racism and imperial formations.
To stage this analysis, Kumar first locates modern anti-Muslim racism in the form of
proto-racism that emerged once “European nations were in a position to actually challenge
and eventually dominate once-powerful Muslim empires,” as with the Spanish maritime
empire in the sixteenth century (p. 20). Drawing on Edward Said’s work, Kumar examines
how the eventual French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt relied
on knowledge production processes to depict native people in ways that justified colonial
operations. The Enlightenment era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ushered in
scientific thinking that prioritized reason over religion, which led to the development of
scientific racism that would later justify the transatlantic slave trade and colonial conquest.
As the British Empire emerged as a capitalist, imperialist nation during the Industrial Revo-
lution, it developed new ideologies to legitimize its tactics. These ideologies developed
out of British colonists’ encounters with both local and overseas “Others,” demonstrative
of how “projects of racialization have both domestic and international contexts that shape
them” (p. 31). Shifting colonial conditions required the production of specific cultural texts,
narratives, and vocabularies to justify military conquests beginning in the sixteenth century.
Given the perceived civilizational differences between Muslims and Western societies,
nineteenth-century Orientalist scholars drew on the imperial logics operative in their spe-
cific social contexts to “make sweeping generalizations about how the racialized Muslim

MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL ✭ VOLUME 77, NO. 1, SUMMER 2023

thinks and behaves” (p. 42). While the nineteenth-century era of capitalist imperialism con-
tributed to the early racialization of Muslims, Kumar contends that it was the twentieth-
century colonization of Muslim-majority lands and subsequent denial of rights to colonized
subjects that ushered in modern anti-Muslim racism. While Orientalism has had a long
presence in the United States, it was only in the post–World War II context that anti-Muslim
racism took shape and serviced the emergent empire-building drive as the United States en-
tered the Middle East and North Africa as “an imperial hegemonic power” (p. 49). As North
Africans intercepted US ships and took their white sailors prisoner, captivity tales captured
US interest and depicted North Africans as cruel enslavers. Continued contact with North
Africans, however, dispelled some anti-Muslim myths and revealed that enslaved people in
the American South faced more brutal conditions. At the same time, romanticized narratives
of the region emerged alongside images of the “backward” and “savage” Other.
These contradictory depictions were articulated with legal decisions related to immigra-
tion, naturalization, and citizenship after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1917, which
barred immigration from the Asian Pacific region. However, by the 1940s, Arab Muslims
were “incorporated into legal definitions of whiteness on the grounds that they were part of
the Semitic race” (pp. 57–58). Black Muslims, however, did not enjoy the benefits of proxi­
mity to whiteness, evident in the surveilling, criminalizing, and intimidating of the Moorish
Science Temple of America and the Nation of Islam as well as in the earlier enslavement of
African Muslims.
In excavating this history of racialization, Kumar deftly shows how, since its inception,
“anti-Arab racism [has] operate[d] through a transnational frame whereby empire targets
Arabs living in the United States when it goes to war in the [Middle East and North Africa]
region” (p. 59). For example, as the US confronted postwar liberation movements across
the globe, it relied on Orientalist scholars to “develop systematic knowledge about vari-
ous parts of the world in order to facilitate imperial domination” (p. 60). This led to the
formulation of modernization theory, which depicted a polarized world divided between a
modern, superior West and a backward, inferior East. Through these racialized frameworks,
the US justified its targeting of Arab Americans as terrorist threats after the Arab-Israeli war
of 1967 and, later, of Iranian Americans following the 1979 Iranian revolution and hostage
crisis. The distinct formulation of anti-Muslim racism in the United States — most evident
in the figure of the terrorist — emerged through its imperial domination of the Middle
East and North Africa. Bolstered by anti-Muslim research published by think tanks and
Orientalist scholars, anti-Muslim racism crystallized around the geopolitical interests of the
United States as it emerged as a hegemonic power. Such an analysis, however, unintention-
ally elides anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, which, while reflective of the racialization of
Arabs qua Muslims and the US security state’s collapsing of Muslim and Arab identities
into the terrorist frame, can eclipse the distinct and differential experiences of non-Muslim
Arabs in the Middle East, North Africa, and the US.
The postwar social construction of the Muslim terrorist continues to persist in the impe-
rial imaginary today, evident in transnational global war on terror policies and practices like
indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, and blanket surveillance. Although conserva-
tives and liberals have invoked different logics, vocabularies, and narratives to activate anti-
Muslim racism, all administrations have advanced anti-Muslim policies that supported their
geopolitical agendas, as in George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan following the
September 11 attacks, Barack Obama’s deployment of thousands of troops to Afghanistan and
later Pakistan, and Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. As Kumar explains, “there is a dialectical
relationship between far-right racism and liberal racism. All these racisms sit on a spectrum
with each influencing the other” (p. 180). Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire illustrates
how this dialectical relationship emerges in the context of imperial relations of force.
Further exploring the imperial roots of anti-Muslim racism, Naved Bakali and Farid
Hafez’s edited volume, The Rise of Global Islamophobia in the War on Terror, examines
the rise of anti-Muslim racism in settler societies, imperial states, and formerly colonized
 MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL ✭ 99

states. The book thereby illustrates anti-Muslim racism’s transnational existence beyond
Western contexts. Drawing on legal scholar Khaled Beydoun’s concept of dialectical Is-
lamophobia that captures the relationship between interpersonal and institutional forms of
anti-Muslim racism, this edited volume locates anti-Muslim racism in the “localized histo-
ries of cultural supremacy, coloniality, race, and current-day geopolitics” (p. 5). This means
that anti-Muslim racism exists globally but emerges in forms defined by the local historical,
social, and cultural contexts.
The volume’s focus on anti-Muslim racism in settler societies, imperial states, and
formerly colonized states illustrates how colonial racial formations continue to haunt
Muslim communities. Kumar similarly argues that the production of modern anti-Mus-
lim racism depends on both colonial domination and liberal societies, which is evident
in the fact that “it was only after the United States assumed its role as a preeminent
imperial power in the [Middle East and North Africa] region and Asia that anti-Muslim
racism was established as a global/domestic means of social control” (p. 12). In settler
societies, racial ideologies that developed during colonial expansion have facilitated
the contemporary construction of Muslims as internal threats to state security. In for-
mer imperial states, colonial histories have “textured” interpersonal and institutional
anti-Muslim racism, particularly given the recent increase in migration from formerly
colonized places to formerly imperial states (p. 3). In the Netherlands, for example,
the sixteenth-century colonial administration in the East Indies treated Muslims as a
threat to the colonial order and driven by “political Islam.” As Muslim immigrants ar-
rived in the Netherlands in the 1960s, Dutch legislation and European academics again
defined Islam as a totalitarian ideology and therefore a threat to state security. Lastly,
in formerly colonized states from the global South, global war on terror policies and
security practices have perpetuated anti-Muslim colonial histories. For example, the
Chinese mobilization against Uyghurs is rooted in a logic of cultural genocide that
emerged from preexisting forms of anti-Muslim racism that first justified territorial
expansion into the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and that now organizes con-
temporary security policies that criminalize Uyghurs as a terrorist threat. The context-
specific colonial/­imperial histories and corresponding racial logics have shaped how
anti-­Muslim racism manifests today.
In addition to the focus on how colonial and imperial histories inform contemporary
expressions of anti-Muslim racism, the volume deftly documents the role media outlets,
think tanks, and universities have played in advancing anti-Muslim logics, discourses, and
practices that de-historicize and depoliticize contemporary conditions. Given its roots in the
British Empire, Australia’s media outlets have reinforced European ideologies of race to
portray Muslims as terrorist threats, thereby amplifying anti-Muslim animus and justifying
anti-Muslim policies. In the United Kingdom, media outlets similarly constructed the rise
of economic immigration by Muslims in the early 1970s as a security threat, while erasing
the economic and geopolitical conditions driving migration, such as the 1974 Arab oil cri-
sis, the 1979 Iranian revolution, and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. State policies
often have driven everyday forms of anti-Muslim racism through interpersonal forms of
discrimination, harassment, and bullying. In South Africa, think tanks produced research
reports to inform public policy that advances US military and security goals by representing
South African Muslims and Islam as terrorist threats.
As anthropologist Sean Roberts notes in his chapter, anti-Muslim racism “is not a mono-
lithic ideology” as it “has interacted around the world with pre-existing forms of racism and
prejudice against Muslims that are grounded in local contexts” (p. 205). Bakali and Hafez’s
edited volume illustrates the context-specific expressions of anti-Muslim racism as well as
the symbiotic relationship between interpersonal and institutional racisms. Through this
multi-scalar analysis, the edited volume does well to expand scholarship beyond critiques
of Orientalism in Western societies by following the permutations of anti-Muslim racism
and their articulation with preexisting racial formations in specific contexts.
100 ✭ MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL

Although Bakali and Hafez’s edited volume showcases anti-Muslim racism’s ever-­
expanding reach, its transnational focus uplifts emergent pathways for coalition building
and political mobilization across contexts. As Kumar writes in her book, “resistance mat-
ters. Resistance in client states or countries headed by US-backed dictators can disrupt
imperi­al aims and create the conditions for solidarity as well as resistance in imperial cen-
ters” (p. 17). In doing so, Bakali and Hafez’s edited volume eschews what Kumar docu-
ments as a fatal form of resistance: multicultural inclusion that “does little to dismantle
the fundamental source of anti-Muslim racism — empire” (p. 8). Rather than identify
examples of such transnational forms of resistance, the volume gestures toward such pos-
sibilities. In this way, both Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and The Rise of Global
Islamophobia in the War on Terror offer conceptual frameworks for understanding anti-
Muslim racism as a global phenomenon rife with political possibilities for transnational
resistance that can militate against the imperial regimes, power structures, and colonial
histories defining local contexts.

Nicole Nguyen, Associate Professor, Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of
Illinois Chicago
HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.3751/77.1.30
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