And yet, argues Nadia Marzouki in her new book, Islam: An American Religion, anti-Islam arguments in the West have become “surprisingly standardized.” It’s “no longer possible to discuss Islam’s place in Western societies without systematically invoking a series of normative oppositions: good/bad, moderate/radical, faith/law, West/Muslim, modernity/tradition, and so on,” she writes. “For a majority of Americans and Europeans, Islam remains an opaque object that one is unable to think of in any way other than as a problem, threat, or retrograde legal code.”
It’s not enough to understand this simply as Islamophobia, argues Marzouki, who is a research fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She believes Islam has become a cipher in Western societies for the tough questions of secular, liberal democracies: how much to champion liberty over equality, for example, and whether legal rights should entitle Muslims to fully express their faith in public. As much as Europe and the U.S. have different histories and legal traditions, she claims, anti-Muslim groups in both places share their discomfort with these challenges. [...]
One major difference between Europe and the U.S. is that anti-Muslim arguments in the U.S. haven’t been very prominent within the Democratic Party or the left. Maybe you can find a few exceptions here and there, but broadly speaking, it’s mostly people from the right wing of the Republican Party. In Europe, some of the arguments about the fear of Islam, etc., have been endorsed by the right, but also by the left. [...]
What’s at stake is not just a hate of Islam or a hate of Muslims. It’s an unease toward the capacity of abstract language to capture their sense of being disgruntled, or being perceived as losers, or as people who have been hurt or offended. Understanding the role of emotions and affect is important, because it helps us better understand why people consider certain things sacred, like the constitution, or some territory where a mosque should be constructed. Focusing just on law is not enough to address what’s really at stake.
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