Claiming Belonging: Muslim American Advocacy in an Era of Islamophobia

By Emily Cury

Claiming Belonging dives deep into the lives of Muslim American advocacy groups in the post-9/11 era, asking how they form and function within their broader community in a world marked by Islamophobia. Bias incidents against Muslim Americans reached unprecedented levels a few short years ago, and many groups responded through action—organizing on the national level to become increasingly visible, engaged, and assertive.

Emily Cury draws on more than four years of participant observation and interviews to examine how Muslim American organizations have sought to access and influence the public square and, in so doing, forge a political identity. The result is an engaging and unique study, showing that policy advocacy, both foreign and domestic, is best understood as a sphere where Muslim American identity is performed and negotiated.

Claiming Belonging offers ever-timely insight into the place of Muslims in American political life and, in the process, sheds light on one of the fastest-growing and most internally dynamic American minority groups.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501753602

Book preview

CLAIMING BELONGING

Muslim American Advocacy in an Era of Islamophobia

Emily Cury

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

For my father

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Discrimination, Advocacy, and Collective Identity

2. From Muslims in America to American Muslims

3. From the Patriot Act to the Muslim Ban

4. The Rise of the Muslim American Lobby

5. Domestic Advocacy

6. Advocating for the Muslim Ummah

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book went under contract when my firstborn daughter was two months old. Every major step in the writing process was intrinsically linked to her early milestones. She started crawling just as I finished writing a particularly challenging chapter. The day she uttered her first word was the same day I heard back from an interviewee, finally agreeing to speak with me. And so on. Writing a book while caring for a newborn was challenging at times, exasperating at others, and downright depressing on more than a few occasions. But it was also elucidating. A young child puts things in perspective like few things can. My daughter reminds me that change is intrinsic to life, and that so much of what makes us human is shared. I must have spoken to more strangers in the past year and a half than I have my entire adult life. In the first few months, people routinely stopped us with greetings of congratulations and welcome to the world. They genuinely wanted to see the baby, to say hello, to ask how I was feeling. Maybe I live around a lot of nice people, or maybe we are all just eager to connect. I don’t know. What I do know is that her presence has made me see everything and everyone around me with a keener set of eyes, and, for that, I am grateful.

I have a long list of people to thank, as anyone who has worked on a project for almost a decade might. First and foremost, I am forever indebted to the American Muslims whose voices are featured in these pages and who gave me so much of their time and energy, even when I knew they had little of either to spare. I hope I have done your work justice. Scholars at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center helped shape so much of my early thinking on the subject in these pages. I am deeply and tremendously grateful to my former mentor (and now dear friend) Dov Waxman, who, over the years, read and commented on multiple versions of what became this manuscript. No one has had more of an influence on my thinking, work habits, and writing than he has. I first met Dov in 2009, when I took his seminar on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has been a constant presence in my life since then. I am forever thankful for all the hours, the coffees, the e-mails checking in. And I am particularly thankful for the friendship we—along with our beautiful spouses and children—have built. Thanks to Susan Woodward for scaring the bejesus out of me in her class—surviving it gave me the confidence I needed to survive early academic life and taught me how much I was indeed capable of accomplishing. Thank you to Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr for the many hours we spent talking about Muslim and Arab American mobilization. Their support and kindness sustained me during those early years.

I have been fortunate enough to find friends and colleagues that, for one reason or another, believed in me and took it upon themselves to support me. When I joined Northeastern University in 2015, Valentine Moghadam took me under her wings, enveloping me with her intellect and graciousness. My office was right next door to hers, and we spent a lot of in-between time talking about our research, current events, and developments in the Middle East—the region we both hail from. Those conversations kindled my spirit. I thank my lucky stars that, even after I left Northeastern for a new job, our tête-à-têtes continue. Thank you to Denis Sullivan for teaching me so much about what being an academic entails, which we should be taught, but too often aren’t. I offer a very special thanks to my dear friend, Sarah A. Tobin, for her intellectual generosity, care, and guidance through the years. I have never met anyone more supportive than Sarah. She demystified what academic publishing entailed, gave me the confidence I desperately needed to pursue this undertaking, and was there for me every step of the process. I am thankful for her every day.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to my editor at Cornell University Press, Emily Andrew, for her stewardship and guidance. Emily understood what it meant to write this book while caring for a young child, and never once made me feel inadequate for it. She gave me the space I needed to focus on the work, provided constant support and advice, and was a true ally in this process. I would also like to recognize Alexis Siemon and the entire team at Cornell University Press who worked very hard to bring this book to fruition. Thank you to Jaime Jarvis for meticulously reading through the manuscript and providing me with her keen editorial eye. I am deeply appreciative to the anonymous readers for their exhaustive and excellent feedback and for investing their time to help me improve the manuscript.

In 2016, I was invited to participate in a workshop on Muslim American politics organized by Melissa Michelson, Nazita Lajevardi, and Brian Calfano. The event, held at Menlo College, was nothing short of exhilarating—as was the follow-up workshop held at UCLA the following year. I am grateful to the organizers and to my fellow workshop participants for sharing so much of their knowledge and expertise. One of the many outcomes of our workshop includes a symposium on Muslim American politics, published in 2019 in the Journal of Politics and Religion. Portions of chapter 5 previously appeared in that symposium in an article titled Contesting Islamophobia and Securing Collective Rights: Muslim American Advocacy in the 2016 Elections. Portions of chapter 6 were published in the same journal in 2017 as Muslim American Policy Advocacy and the Palestinian Israeli Conflict: Claims-Making and the Pursuit of Group Rights. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in the Journal of Diaspora Studies in 2016 as Muslim American Integration and Interest Group Formation: A Historical Narrative. These articles were the seeds for this book.

Thank you to my students at Northeastern University and Pine Manor College, where I now teach, for being an unending source of inspiration. Anyone who complains about Millennials and Generation Z must not spend a lot of time around these age cohorts. Teaching them is the greatest honor of my life. Thank you to my family and friends for giving me so much. To my mother, whose love and struggles have made me a better person; to my dear aunt and uncle, Nadia and William, for bringing me to this country and giving me a new life; and to Roula, Hussam, and Lynne for being more than siblings.

My final and deepest gratitude goes to my husband, Ziad, for his patience, encouragement, and unwavering belief in me. Thank you for prioritizing my goals and tolerating years of missed dinners, nights out, and social commitments without complaining. Thank you for brainstorming with me, for always asking the right questions, and for never tiring of talking about the subject in these pages. Your care and love sustained me and made this project possible. When the task of writing another sentence seemed intolerable, your calm and steady presence propelled me forward. Your positivity and joyfulness make everything shine a little brighter. Thank you for being on this journey with me.

Introduction

MAKING MUSLIM CONSTITUENTS VISIBLE

It was an early spring morning in Washington, DC, and I had just arrived to attend the 2017 Annual Muslim American National Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill, an event that in recent years had become a political pilgrimage of sorts for hundreds of Muslims from across the United States. The city was in full bloom, bursting with life and color. It was even more beautiful than I remembered it from my visit a few years earlier. Feeling invigorated by my surroundings and the morning sunshine, and with plenty of time before the event started, I decided to walk. The scenery was familiar: tourists and tour buses lining the streets, young children trailing their parents, hurried young professionals tugging at their phones. But it felt different. After a short stroll from Union Station, I found myself outside the United States Supreme Court, that imposing neoclassical structure, with its wide staircase and tall Corinthian columns, where so much of who we are and what we are as a nation has been argued and decided. I paused to admire the two marble statues looming over me—Contemplation of Justice to my left, Authority of Law to my right. I thought of the past few months and of how much our national politics had changed since I last stood there. For someone who came of age in New York City in the late 1990s and knew Donald Trump primarily as the überwealthy owner of Trump Tower—an extravagant stop on the Fifth Avenue Tour I gave to family and friends visiting from overseas—the idea that he was president was still surreal.

I checked my phone and, realizing time had flown faster than I’d thought, sped my pace toward the Capitol building. As I made my way to the Welcome Center, I surveyed my surroundings. I was looking forward to the next two days, but I was also checking to see whether any Islamophobic protesters had arrived before me, as I had been warned they might during a webinar earlier that week. (Thankfully, they had not.) I was eager to meet the Muslim leaders, activists, and community organizers who were already in the building, and to interact with the individuals who had come to lobby their members of Congress and make themselves seen and their demands known. I was less ready to confront the disgruntled hecklers who often showed up to these events. Just in case, I rehearsed what I had been told to say and do—or, rather, refrain from doing—in an encounter: Don’t engage them, don’t agree to any interviews, don’t touch them or their equipment. Simple enough. If anyone went as far as to approach and try to provoke an interaction, we had been advised to smile, give a thumbs-up, and say, Beautiful day to be on Capitol Hill¹—in other words, to deny them any opportunity for a confrontation. I was relieved to be left wondering whether this tactic would have worked.

Once inside the building, a group of young volunteers greeted me and guided me to the auditorium, where the opening session was about to begin. I was surprised to see so many people in the audience; I counted roughly three hundred individuals in the room. The crowd was ethnically diverse, reflecting the diversity of the American Muslim community. The majority were Southeast Asians and Arabs, and there were significant numbers of African Americans, as well as a few white and Latinx individuals, who, based on the recent demographic trends I was familiar with, I assumed were converts to Islam. My interactions with the attendees later that day would confirm these observations; indeed, I was thrilled to meet members from the IslamInSpanish mosque in Houston, the only Latino-led Islamic center in the United States. I was also heartened to find so many children and young adolescents in that auditorium, many volunteering at the event—the next generation of Muslim American activists in the making.

As participants studied the day’s agenda and prepared to meet with their elected officials, the speakers encouraged them to share personal stories of how specific bills would affect them and their loved ones, putting a human face on the legislative issues. The organizers also reminded participants to use social media, including the hashtag #MuslimHillDay, to document and amplify their advocacy efforts, and to take and share photos with members of Congress—but only after asking for permission. Many of the elected officials consented to being photographed that day, but not all. Some, particularly Republicans from conservative districts, were worried the photos would be taken out of context and used to score political points against them. No matter: delegates were advised to keep their spirits high and to remember that change happens incrementally. The day’s goal was to make their voices heard and begin cultivating lasting relationships with elected officials. These seemingly modest expectations, alongside the ambivalence of the officials, are largely reflective of the Muslim American political experience. In representing just 1 percent of the total US population, Muslim advocacy groups know that exerting enough pressure on elected officials to become an influential political force is unlikely, at least in the short term. Their primary goal, one that is reflected in events such as these, is not to effect policy change but to make Muslim constituents visible.

Nonetheless, there was a sense of excitement in the room, an air of anticipation. People were in good spirits, despite the fact that this was the first Muslim Hill Day, as the organizers dubbed the event, held since Donald J. Trump had become president. The Muslim community, along with other minority communities and communities of color across the country, was feeling targeted—and rightly so. Anti-Muslim rhetoric, which had been a feature of the 2016 campaign (although many pundits discounted it as campaign talk), did not abate after the elections. Instead, it intensified and was translated into specific policies, as Muslims and other targeted communities had feared all along. On January 27, 2017, a mere seven days after his inauguration, President Trump signed the first iteration of the executive order known as the Muslim ban, which barred people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.²

Faced with legal challenges and mass protests at airports all across the country, the administration then turned its attention to other ways of inhibiting Muslims from migrating to the United States. Along with continuing to adjust the Muslim ban to withstand legal scrutiny, the Trump administration implemented a policy of extreme vetting that, according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, significantly decreased the number of immigrants coming to the United States from Muslim-majority countries. According to a Cato Institute report published in December 2018, all the major categories of entries to the United States—refugees, immigrants, and visitors—[were] significantly down under the Trump administration for Muslims or applicants from Muslim majority countries. The number of Muslim refugees decreased by 91 percent from 2016 to 2018 and the number of Muslim immigrants saw a 30 percent decline during the same period.³ In this policy environment, anti-Muslim incidents increased to the highest point since the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and continued to rise in the coming years. Not surprisingly, these themes dominated the 2017 Muslim Hill Day, foreshadowing Muslim American policy engagement in the Trump era.

Muslim Americans Have Arrived!

Muslim organizations in the United States have been holding national advocacy days since the mid-2000s, when the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy group, began organizing these events. Despite their modest size and their being largely ineffectual in actually influencing decision makers, as Muslim leaders themselves are quick to point out, these lobbying days are far from insignificant. First, they make Muslim citizens more visible as constituents and raise awareness about issues important to Muslim American communities. They also encourage American Muslims to engage in politics—an important feat for a community whose political participation is still relatively anemic. And they confer a degree of national visibility and legitimacy to the organizations and leaders that claim to represent Muslims in America. In other words, events such as these provide Muslim organizations with an important national stage for communicating who Muslim Americans are and what they stand for—helping, in the process, to construct a sense of collective identity among Muslims in the United States.

Walking the halls of Congress and engaging policymakers also highlights U.S. Muslims’ commitment to American democracy and to an institutional, gradualist approach to change making; an approach not all U.S. Muslims agree with. Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at CAIR, explained it this way:

As a community under attack, we need to ask ourselves: how can we move the narrative forward? American Muslims didn’t ask to be thrust into the highlight of the election, especially with this hateful rhetoric. But we are using this as an opportunity to ensure that the values of America—freedom, equality—are respected. American Muslims are the most diverse ethnic and racial community in the U.S., so when you force politicians to respect the rights of American Muslims, you force them to respect the rights of everyone … We’re in it for the long haul. Change is not going to happen overnight. We know that. All we can do is try to move the needle forward, just like so many other discriminated against communities have done in the past. This way, other groups who come after us won’t have to start from scratch.⁴

CAIR and the other Muslim advocacy groups at the center of this book view themselves as the newest (and most vilified) members of a long lineage in the American movement for the civil rights of minority groups. Almost without exception, all the individuals I interviewed made some reference to this point. Some, like CAIR’s former communications director Corey Saylor, did so with confidence: We have been called to take the torch from those who have struggled and made gains before us, push it forward, and pass it on to the next group of Americans who will be targeted.⁵ Others were more self-reflective, judging that Muslim organizations still had much to learn from other groups about how to mobilize their communities for the long term.⁶ All, however, agreed that the struggles Muslims face are not unique but rather part of a broader history of structural discrimination and racism toward American minority groups. The specific group under attack might change, but the experiences they endure are similar, as are the ways they should go about responding, particularly after the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Islamophobia was the term most of the people I interviewed used to describe their experience with individual and structural, state-sanctioned discrimination. Indeed, it is the term the vast majority of Muslim leaders, activists, and victims of anti-Muslim bias use. National surveys by the Pew Research Center, Gallup, and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding commonly employ the term, and media coverage of Islamophobia has risen sharply, particularly since the 2016 presidential election. A simple Google Trends search shows that the number of people searching the term has increased since 2015, reflecting a growing familiarity with and interest in it. As ubiquitous as the term is, however, its meaning is still being conceptualized by scholars and activists alike. In fact, there is an important debate regarding whether Islamophobia is an accurate descriptor for anti-Muslim bias. After all, people have phobias to many things. Should the discrimination and targeting facing Muslims in the United States and around the world be seen as resulting from fear? According to Maha Hilal, a scholar-activist, community organizer, and steering committee member of the DC Justice for Muslims Coalition, the answer is a resounding no: People have phobias to spiders, or heights, or closed spaces. Not to other people. That is called discrimination. That is called racism. We should call anti-Muslim bigotry what it is. Not a ‘phobia,’ but deep seated, structurally based prejudice.⁷

Although I agree with Hilal’s critique, I employ the term intentionally, and for several reasons. First, it came up often, and forcefully, during my research. Many of the people I interviewed understood and described their individual and collective experiences as instances of Islamophobia. The term is also widely used by Muslim advocacy organizations and community leaders—a usage that both reflects and helps frame and interpret the Muslim American experience. To use any other term would diminish the voices of the people at the center of this story. Finally, scholarship on Islamophobia has grown and become more theoretically developed in recent years. As a result, many of the polling and research institutes from which I draw data have become increasingly rigorous in terms of operationalizing and measuring Islamophobia.

I use this term with the understanding that Islamophobia is not a fear but a structural system of oppression. It is pervasive and deeply rooted in American history, manifested through state laws and policies as well as individual acts of aggression and microaggression. Khaled Beydoun, one of the leading scholars of the American Muslim experience, explains Islamophobia as the presumption that Islam is inherently violent, alien, and inassimilable, a presumption driven by the belief that expressions of Muslim identity correlate with a propensity for terrorism. Islamophobia is the modern progeny of Orientalism. A worldview that casts Islam as the civilizational antithesis of the West and that is built upon the core stereotype and baseline distortions of Islam and Muslims embedded in American institutions and the popular imagination by Orientalist theory, narrative and law.⁸ What is crucial, in Beydoun’s analysis, is the dialectic between private and public expressions of Islamophobia. Individual acts of bias or aggression toward Muslims are made possible, sanctioned, and legitimized by state laws and policies that might seem impartial on the surface but disproportionally target Muslims. As Beydoun explains, If the law is laden with damaging stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, and American citizens are expected and instructed to obey the law, the dialectic between the state and the citizen—and the hostility the state authorizes—is made clear.⁹ This dialectic, he goes on to argue, is contingent on media representations that recycle Orientalist tropes, state policies and laws that criminalize an entire faith group, and political rhetoric that fuels hatred and suspicion toward millions of Americans.¹⁰ Thus, like all forms of discrimination, Islamophobia is legitimized and reproduced through the actions of the state, normalized through the rhetoric of our politicians, and reflected back into society for all to consume.

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After a long morning of back-to-back meetings, mostly with the staff of elected officials, we were ready for a break. As we made our way toward St. Mark’s Episcopal Church—the event headquarters—we felt uplifted. Most of our meetings that morning had been cordial encounters, and most of the representatives whose offices we had visited supported the legislative agenda we were advocating. In 2017, that agenda included three main issues. The first and most important was supporting legislation that protected the constitutional rights of American Muslims, including the Freedom of Religion Act of 2017, which sought to block the Muslim ban, and the No Religious Registry Act of 2017, which sought to preempt the rollout of a Muslim registry, which Trump had promised on the campaign trail.¹¹ Second on the agenda was supporting immigrant communities, particularly the undocumented and liminally documented.¹² Thus, we asked our representatives to support the BRIDGE Act, which would shelter Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients from deportation until Congress took up immigration reform.¹³ The third item focused on ending racial and religious profiling by law enforcement, an issue that had become a rallying cry for communities of color.

We arrived at St. Mark’s Baxter Hall just as the other delegations of Muslim advocates were beginning to trickle in for lunch. We soon found out that our uncontentious experience as the delegates from Massachusetts, meeting with a roster of predominantly Democratic officials, was far from representative. Delegates from more conservative states, such as Arizona, Kentucky, and Texas, had received a far cooler welcome. Some had received no welcome at all. To my delight, Sarwat Husain, the lively president of CAIR’s San Antonio chapter, made her way to the table where I had just settled and began telling me about her experience that morning, as others crowded our table to listen:

Ted Cruz refused to meet with us! We called his office so many times to try to set up an appointment for a meeting. We have been trying for months and have just been ignored. So we decided to just walk into his office and ask to speak with him. I wasn’t expecting much from it, but they told me that every Tuesday, he holds a constituency coffee hour on the second floor, and that he was on his way there now! They must have not known who we were. We rushed to the second floor and were waiting for him to arrive when his staffers asked to meet with us privately to hear about our concerns. They took us to another room and were very nice, but they were just trying to keep us there, to prevent us from meeting him, you know? Once we were done, we rushed to the next room, but he [Cruz] was already gone.

She was disappointed, she said, but still glad she had had the opportunity to meet with Cruz’s staff: I told them, ‘We are his constituents and he refuses to meet with us. He is running away from us! It’s unacceptable.’ Cruz’s staff had promised Husain they would bring her concerns to the senator’s attention and follow up with her, but, she said, I will most likely have to call them back myself.

Observers of American politics are unlikely to be surprised by this account of a US senator’s refusal to meet with his American Muslim constituents. As a presidential candidate the previous year, Cruz had called for law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods¹⁴ and for the United States to accept Christian refugees fleeing Syria but not Muslim