Sahar F. Aziz. The Racial Muslim. When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.7.2.0225
• Pages: 225-228
• Published date: 14 December 2022
• Date: 14 December 2022
• Author: Marta Panighel

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ReOrient 7.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

Sahar F. Aziz. The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious

Freedom. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2022.

Paperback ($29.95). 356 pp. ISBN 9780520382299.

By Marta Panighel, University of Genoa

For those who denounce the so-called cancel culture, Islamophobia would be only

a temporary trend because of which “you can’t say anything anymore”, a strategy

of the “Islamists” to be accepted in the heart of Western civilization. Sahar Aziz’s

new book, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, instead,

adds a step in the critical analysis of anti-Muslim racism, describing it as structur-

ally necessary to the perpetration of the “Capitalist/Patriarchal Western-Centric/

Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system” (Grosfoguel 2013: 81).

Grounding her analysis in the US context, Aziz interrogates the reasons why

“Muslims are being treated as … a suspect race, rather than as a religious minority

to be protected from persecution” (p. 3). From her law professor perspective with

an interdisciplinary approach, Aziz’s work recalls that of Kimberley Crenshaw, in

which juridical science is combined with social sciences to achieve change:

indeed, her work is not limited to the analysis of society, but seeks as an ultimate

goal, social justice.

When faced with the various laws protecting religious freedom in the United

States, including the First Amendment, Aziz points out that “immigrant Muslims”

suffer a form of racialization that criminalizes their identities, imposing “forms of

subordination not currently experienced by other religious minorities” (p. 169):

from hate crimes to the targeting by police forces, from the difficulty in finding a

job to the impossibility of building mosques, racialization is not only manifested

through discriminatory acts against individuals, but also in systematic and perva-

sive forms. Thanks to an extensive bibliography, very useful for those who want

to further investigate the elaborated themes, The Racial Muslim frames

Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism as expressions of structural racism (Bonilla-

Silva 1997): “an exaggerated fear of, hatred of, and hostility to Islam and Muslims

by the state and the public as a result of imputed inferior biological and cultural

traits based on a religious identity that produces systemic bias, discrimination,

marginalization, and exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life”

(p. 21).

That Islam is often portrayed as monolithic, irrational, primitive, aggressive,

violent, and much more is a well-known fact. Aziz, however, goes back to the root

of this phobia by examining “in detail the central role religion plays and how it

racializes diverse immigrants encompassed in the Racial Muslim construct …

showing how empire, American race/racism, xenophobia, and religion interact to

DOI:10.13169/reorient.7.2.0225