Service in a Time of Suspicion: Experiences of Muslims Serving in the U.S. Military Post-9/11
178
Service in a Time of Suspicion: Experiences of Muslims Serving in the U.S. Military Post-9/11
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Overview
In Service in a Time of Suspicion, fifteen such service members talk about what it means to be Muslim, American, and a uniformed member of the armed services in the twenty-first century. These honest accounts remind us of our shared humanity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609385361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 178 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BEING MUSLIM IN THE UNITED STATES
Fear and even hatred of Islam and Muslims is not a new phenomenon caused by 9/11, but rather the reinvigoration of prejudices and fears that likely traveled to American shores with the first European colonizers. The historian Denise Spellberg observed that "it is notable how much the anti-Islamic invective inflamed by 9/11 resembles the denigration of Islam in America as far back as the seventeenth century." Other scholars trace the roots of contemporary fears about Islam even further, arguing that today's stereotypes can be traced to the Middle Ages. Since its beginning in the seventh century AD, Islam was perceived as a threat to predominantly Christian Europe. Islam was seen as a false religion, and the military might of the Islamic Empire posed a very real threat to Europe. From their earliest encounters with each other, the West viewed Islam as an existential threat. Centuries of warfare honed these negative narratives and embedded them deep within Western thought. The historian Norman Daniel explored the development of Christian European approaches to Islam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, arguing that contemporary approaches to Islam are heirs to this legacy: "the style of the day changes, but the themes are perennial." The communications scholar Karim H. Karim argues that negative stereotypes about Muslims can be seen in the works of Beethoven, Dante, Mozart, Shakespeare, and Voltaire and that as these artists' classics are revisited in each generation, they "[sustain] a world view in which 'Mohammadens' are essentially gripped by violence, lust, greed, and barbarism."
During the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, Islam was commonly associated with the Antichrist. Martin Luther and John Calvin both argued that the Antichrist was a dual enemy composed of Catholicism and Islam. Catholics also held Islam in contempt, often negatively comparing Protestantism to Islam. This fear of Islam largely stemmed from concern over the military might of the Ottoman Empire, which conquered southeastern Europe and even besieged Vienna.
During the founding of the United States, Islam was used as a hypothetical test case for religious freedom precisely because it was viewed so negatively. Muslims, along with Catholics and Jews, were considered outsiders by the Protestant founders of the United States. At the time the Constitution was written, it was common for state officials to be required to undergo a "religious test," which was designed to exclude all but Protestants from holding public office. In debating whether such a test should be included in the Constitution (it was not), the founders referred frequently to the hypothetical example of Muslims, who were seen by many at the time as the epitome of theological and political corruption.
Although the Founding Fathers debated the role of Muslims as a hypothetical exercise, the first Muslims had already arrived in America. Among the slaves brought to the American Colonies and then the United States in the eighteenth century, as many as 10 percent were Muslim, and Muslim slaves were among those owned by the Founding Fathers. For example, Spellberg found evidence suggesting that Muslim slaves owned by George Washington lived and labored on the Mount Vernon plantation.
These early American Muslims faced many challenges in retaining a Muslim identity under the conditions of chattel slavery. The historian Michael Gomez explains that "Muslims would have had great difficulty in preserving Islam within their families." Practices such as prayer, dietary restrictions, and veiling have been documented among West African slaves and their descendants in Georgia and South Carolina. However, Muslim slaves did not have access to Islamic texts, and could not gather for communal prayer or other rituals. The conditions of slavery also meant that enslaved Muslims could be separated from their families at any time, making it difficult to pass on religious and cultural traditions to their children. Muslims were also a minority among the slave population (most slaves practiced other African religions and/or Christianity), meaning that often Muslims had little choice but to marry non-Muslims. During the nineteenth century there was also increased pressure to convert to Christianity.
Due to their race, the earliest American Muslims were excluded from the nation even as the founders determined that Muslims must, at least hypothetically, be granted freedom of religion and the opportunity to aspire to public office. When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, there were certainly practicing Muslims among the American-born former slaves who were granted citizenship.
Due to the invisibility and suppression of Muslim identity and practice among West African slaves, the first Americans to be publicly recognized as Muslims were immigrants from the Middle East. These immigrants, many of them fleeing the crumbling Ottoman Empire, came primarily from what is now Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. Due to conventions at the time, these immigrants were often identified as "Syrian" despite their varied origins. Most of these immigrants were Christian, but a minority were Muslim. By and large, these immigrants were uneducated, and they found work in various unskilled professions: homesteaders and farmers in the Midwest, traveling peddlers (and later shopkeepers and merchants) in the cities, and manual laborers in factories. For example, the draw of the automobile industry in Detroit led to the concentration of Arabs and Muslims in nearby Dearborn, Michigan. Similarly, Toledo and Chicago saw concentrations of Muslim immigrants, as did Quincy, Massachusetts, where Lebanese Muslim immigrants gathered in the nineteenth century to work in the shipyards. In Ross, North Dakota, immigrants from Syria began arriving in 1899. In 1929 the community was large enough to build what is believed to be the first purpose-built mosque in the United States.
Among these early immigrants was Hajji Ali, or as he was known in the United States, Hi Jolly. Hi Jolly stands out as a colorful historical figure and an early example of a Muslim in the U.S. military. Hi Jolly emigrated from Syria in 1856 and served in the U.S. Army for over thirty years as part of the short-lived Camel Corps. The Camel Corps was an experiment in using camels for freight transport in the Southwest where horses and mules struggled. In 1855, 33 camels (and 5 camel drivers) were brought to Texas. Ali was the main driver, and became known to the locals as Hi Jolly. The early expeditions with the camels (and Jolly) proved successful, and set the stage for the establishment of Army outposts throughout the Southwest. The Camel Corps fell out of use with the Civil War and eventually the remaining camels were sold or wandered off into the desert. Hi Jolly naturalized in 1880, married and had children, and later abandoned his family to prospect. He was denied a military pension despite his years of service, and he died destitute in 1902 in Quartzsite, Arizona. In 1934 the Arizona Highway Department replaced his wooden grave marker with a permanent memorial; that same year, the last surviving camel of the corps died and was buried with Jolly.
The introduction of the "Asiatic Barred Zone" in 1917 and the subsequent introduction of national immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924 largely stopped the flow of Muslim immigrants into the United States. The Asiatic Barred Zone was legislation that prohibited immigration from Asia — an area defined to include South Asia and much of the Middle East. National quotas strongly favored immigrants from western Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany. With access to their homelands largely cut off, and as a religious minority both in the United States and among their fellow immigrants, those Muslim immigrants already in the United States largely assimilated into the surrounding culture or formed communities based on shared ethnicity, rather than religion.
During the period from the 1930s through the 1950s, white America was increasingly seeing Catholics and Jews as a part of the American mainstream, and the conceptualization of America as a Protestant nation needed to adapt. It is in this time period that the phrase Judeo-Christian gained popularity. While this idea was embraced as a way to combat anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic prejudices, it also continued to exclude Muslims, and "inadvertently became the basis for discrimination against Muslims in the twenty-first century."
In 1965 immigration from the Islamic world resumed under the Hart-Celler Act. The new immigration legislation replaced national quotas with a system that gives priority to immigrants with family in the United States and to immigrants who have needed education and skills. Contemporary Muslim immigrants tend to be highly educated professionals. Seeking opportunities for education, financial security, and safety from war and violence, when the gates to the United States reopened, Arabs, Iranians, and South Asians made up an unprecedented proportion of new immigrants. Unlike previous generations of Muslim immigrants who came with few resources,
the new arrivals had the financial resources and organizational skills they needed to pursue and perpetuate their faith. They opened mosques and Islamic centers, imported their prayer leaders and Koran readers from home, formed religious and Muslim professional associations, and generally set about recreating much of the life they had left behind.
Today it is estimated that Muslims comprise less than 1 percent of the total U.S. population. It is difficult to get an exact count of this population, but estimates range from about 3 million to 6 million. American Muslims are racially and ethnically diverse. In fact, the Muslim community in the United States is the most ethnically and racially diverse such community in the world. According to a 2011 publication by the Pew Research Center, of U.S. Muslims, 30 percent are white, 23 percent are black, 21 percent are Asian, 19 percent are other/mixed, and 6 percent are Hispanic. Pew also reported that 63 percent of the adult Muslim population in the United States is foreign-born, and 15 percent are the children of immigrants. Of foreign-born Muslims in the United States, 41 percent were born in the Middle East or North Africa, 26 percent in South Asia, 11 percent in Africa, 7 percent in Europe, 5 percent in Iran, and 10 percent elsewhere.
ANTI-MUSLIM SENTIMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
Through the centuries, negative ideas about Islam and Muslims began to form a coherent set of stereotypes that are clearly recognizable today. These themes developed great internal coherence in their representation of Muslims as an "other" in opposition to the West. Western images and understandings of Islam present it as monolithic, static, and antithetical to Western values. Other themes include Muslims as primitive and uncivilized and Islam as evil or satanic.
In the 1990s the political scientist Samuel Huntington introduced his controversial yet popular "clash of civilizations" theory, which has shaped the way these fears are articulated today. Huntington argued that current and future sources of conflict will largely be along the lines of competing "civilizations." In mapping these "civilizations" he categorized the world largely by religious tradition: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African (order by Huntington). Huntington argued that the differences between civilizations are real and fundamental, and are "less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones." He argued that civilization ("What are you?") cannot be changed, suggesting that a Muslim literally cannot belong in the "West." Most research on Muslim American identification since 9/11 refutes this claim of incompatibility. Huntington also saw Islamic "civilization" as particularly dangerous, famously writing that "Islam has bloody borders." Familiar themes of Islam as unchanging and threatening pervade his argument.
Among those who write and teach about Islam there are, broadly speaking, two camps. One side, exemplified by Karen Armstrong, presents a generally positive view of Islam and considers Islam to be a religion equivalent in scope and effect to other religions. At the other extreme are authors such as Daniel Pipes, who preach a doomsday scenario of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy the West. The latter camp often begin their discussion in terms of Islamism (a political movement), but quickly devolve into an association of all Muslims with fundamentalism, violence, and terrorism. This perspective takes the stance that Islam poses an existential threat; in his book Militant Islam Reaches America, Pipes writes, "The preservation of our existing order can no longer be taken for granted; it needs to be fought for." The form of this threat is often proposed to be "creeping sharia," the idea that religious accommodation and multiculturalism will lead inexorably to a world in which "sharia law" (i.e., Islamic law) dictates the behavior of both Muslims and non-Muslims. This perspective is also marked by the belief that all Muslims are suspect, and that profiling is a justified and effective technique to combat terrorism. Pipes writes, "All Muslims, unfortunately are suspect." Perhaps most troubling is the assertion from this camp that Muslims regularly practice taqiyyah, a form of deception believed by this camp to be pervasive. This allows them to dismiss any Muslim who speaks against them on the assumption that they are lying.
The fear of Islam and Muslims is not new, nor are many of the forms it takes. The 9/11 attacks did not create these stereotypes, but they did reinvigorate a long-standing and often-latent sense of conflict and threat. 9/11 crystallized American fears of Islam and made many Americans feel vulnerable to an Islamic threat.
MUSLIM AMERICANS AND THE "WAR ON TERRORISM"
9/11 acted as a spark which reignited ancient stereotypes that claimed that Islam and the West were mutually exclusive and in perpetual conflict. Following the attacks, media coverage often relied on the familiar stereotypes. In this time of uncertainty, perhaps there was even some comfort in the familiarity of these stereotypes. Complex events were simplified into a story of "us-versus-them," and a dominant narrative emerged that explained the events as a result of "them" being fundamentally different from "us." Stereotypes of Muslims as backward, primitive, and tyrannical were used to explain how it was Muslims' incompatibility with "our" democracy and freedom that led to the attacks. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush summed up this narrative in his famed statement, "You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists."
In the same speech, President Bush did rhetorically draw a distinction between the religion of Islam and terrorism: "The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them." Although the official rhetoric framed the enemy in vague terms as "terrorists," the actions that were being taken by the government could be seen as targeting specific populations; populations that centuries of stereotypes had prepared Americans to see as dangerous. Policies requiring the registration of men from countries as diverse as Oman and Somalia, the detention of over a thousand Muslims, monitoring of mosques by the FBI, and watch lists full of Muslim names provided a clear picture of who the enemy was. Geographically, racially, and culturally different groups were all primarily identifiable by a shared label: Muslim. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, predominantly Muslim countries, meant that images of Muslim enemies pervaded the media. The writer Moustafa Bayoumi commented that "the actions of [the Bush] administration spoke louder than his words."
In 2011 and 2012 Representative Peter King, chair of the Committee on Homeland Security, held several investigative hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims and aimed "to examine the threat of violent radicalization emanating from within the Muslim-American community." The report on the fifth hearing (the topic of which was "The American Muslim Response to Hearings on Radicalization within Their Community") claims that the hearings offered "irrefutable proof of the extent of the radicalization threat." The narrative surrounding these hearings paralleled those used to justify the NYPD's surveillance program and federal registration policies. This narrative frames Muslims as inherently dangerous. Bayoumi describes this narrative as it relates to the NYPD surveillance program: "The reasoning behind their actions must be their belief that Muslims will almost necessarily become, it they aren't already, terrorists or supporters of terrorism."
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Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction One - Being Muslim in the United States Two - The Military Context Three - Introducing the Range of Experiences Four - The Importance of Leadership Five - The Role of Diversity Six - Being Muslim and American Seven - The Diversity of the Muslim Military Experience Notes IndexWhat People are Saying About This
“In a time when Islamophobia shapes political discourse in society, Sandhoff unveils the diverse experiences of Muslims in our most hallowed social institution—the military. Service in a Time of Suspicion delivers compelling narratives that help the reader connect with the unique space between being Muslim and military service.”
“Despite a re-emergence of American Islamophobia, thousands of Muslims have served in our armed forces since 9/11. Sandhoff’s interviews with service members demonstrate that one can be both American and Muslim, and that their personalities, motivations, and military experiences are as diverse as those of any other group of service members.”
“Sandhoff gives voice to an often caricatured group of military personnel. In so doing, she raises questions about what it means to be an American for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. A humanizing and urgent book about identity, inclusion, and the contemporary vitality of our nation’s founding ideals.”
“Sandhoff provides us a rare gift—an in-depth study of American military service members during a time of war—the more so because her subjects are all Muslim Americans. Her analysis reveals experiences that are nuanced and compelling; a diversity of experiences is the norm.”