Casting Out: Exploring the Racialization of Muslims

“The West is understood as culturally committed to the values of the Enlightenment, while the non-West remains incompletely modern at best, or hostile to modernity at worst. Within this conceptual framework, one often described as a clash of civilizations, it is the duty of modern peoples to bring pre-modern peoples in line.”

She draws great historical parallels between camp mentality in other times and what’s going on now, giving excellent analysis on how Southern plantations, Japanese internment camps, the Spanish Inquisition, etc., were earlier forms of the “race thinking” that is being enacted now in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and the suspension of civil liberties of Muslims and South/West Asians in Western countries. Not only are her parallels apt, but they’re very educational: in her comparison between Guantanamo Bay and Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, refugee camps, etc., I learned the Guantanamo Bay had previously been used as a “holding center” for Haitians deemed an HIV threat under President Clinton. In her analysis of Abu Ghraib, she compared what happened there to Canadian peacekeeper violence against Somalians just a decade earlier—something I didn’t know about, either.

I had a difficulty with her focus on “Arabs and Muslims,” which I think is a bit reductive, given the heightened media attention on Iran and Pakistan, two non-Arab but predominately Muslim countries. Though I agree that Islam and Muslims have been racialized into being “brown” and perhaps even “Arab,” I still think it would be more beneficial to the argument if Razack had clarified that she was focusing on the treatment of North African and South/West Asian Muslims. Though she posits that all Muslims are racialized, I get caught up in her use of “Muslims” because most of her examples deal with North African and South/West Asian Muslims.

Also, the inclusion of John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla in her argument about the racialization of Islam and terrorism would be an interesting one; they have been convicted as terrorists, but neither are North African or South/West Asian. Both are American citizens. Lindh is white and Muslim; he was treated just as badly as North African and South/West Asian detainees because he is Muslim. Padilla is Latino and Muslim. He was detained and his habeaus corpus was suspended just like North African and South/West Asian Muslim detainees. They are presented has having their American citizenship and ethnicities taken over by “brown” Islam, which Razack notes is often compared to disease with panicked media allegations that Islam is “spreading.”

This book, though only 180 actual pages, is a wealth of colonial and race theory. It’s dense, and written a bit academically, but worth any struggle. This book taught me more about colonialism, race thinking, and Orientalism than three university courses on Muslims (specifically, Muslim women, but still), and it’s the first book that’s really galvanized my viewpoints in a long time.

*I am deliberately using the cumbersome but geographically accurate term North Africa and South/West Asia instead of “Middle East,” which is a colonial term because it locates this geographic terrain in respect to the West.

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